He was almost within the base’s outer perimeter when the power died. Sloane just turned on her power and their lights, radios, and equipment all suffered a sudden, catastrophic failure. He used a claw to quietly slice through the analog locking mechanism holding the gate closed, which was all they had now that the power was gone. They probably had multiple failsafes on it, but with Sloane around, it was a joke.

He was racing quietly across the ground, closing the distance, as the guard’s voices floated around him in the darkness. Their distress grew as they realized their flashlights weren’t working, which made no sense at all, and they figured out they were probably under mutant attack as he grabbed the nearest guard and punched him beneath his left ear, a sort of “soft spot” that generally put people down for a long time. He was trying to take them out quietly, so as not to alert the others, but by the time he elbowed the next guard in the face hard enough to break bones, the others heard, and started to panic.

Someone started firing randomly into the dark, hitting some of his fellow guards, and the bright muzzle flashes were kind of distracting. The scent of these men, now increased by their fear, were like neon tracers in the dark. He knew where each one was, what they were doing, how scared they were. He counted twenty, all probably local; none smelled familiar. Even their gun oil was different than the kind the Organization used. They were the lure of the trap, fish in a barrel waiting to be skewered. The real trap was inside, waiting for him.

There was no challenge at all for him here. By the time Sloane had joined him, the lights coming up slowly as she approached and eased up, the radios on the fallen men crackling to life, voices reporting there was a power interruption to the main gate and main doors, and asking if everything was all right up there. He picked up a radio off the unconscious man at his feet, and replied in Spanish that everything was okay up here, but who was fucking around down there? The guy had no answer for him, beyond an “unexpected glitch in the system”, but at least they were on the defensive, which meant it didn’t occur to them to ask who the fuck he was.

Sloane pulled a camouflage vest off one of the unconscious guys and put it on over her bullet proof vest, and also took his automatic weapon and khaki baseball cap, donning them as she looked down disparagingly at the guards laying in pools of blood. “Just think - if you made more noise, they could have all shot themselves.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” He found a key card on one of the dead guards and pulled it off him, ignoring the blood splatters as he headed to what looked like a bunker with a steel plated door. This was all routine, so common he could have done it in his sleep. He slid the card in the lock, and the light went from red to green as it unlocked and started to slide open. He stood to one side, while Sloane stood on the other, cradling the automatic rifle like it was a pet. As soon as the door was half way open, he nodded at her, and her eyes clouded over white as she turned the power off, freezing the door and plunging the interior into darkness. He slid inside, listening to confusion and smelling fear, a hunter who didn’t need eyes to see his prey.

Much like the outer compound, there was no challenge for him in here, and even less men. When Sloane brought the power up, they glanced around at their surroundings, which were depressingly pedestrian. A mostly empty bunker with a table and a few chairs, and five bodies scattered across the floor.

Across the way was a locked door with another one of those key card locks, and it was simple enough to get it to open, revealing a starkly utilitarian elevator. There were no buttons inside it, nothing to say how many floors were below, or where they'd be ending up, but he expected that too. No surprises here. Maybe it was to lull them into a false sense of security?

As the lift started its downward plunge, Sloane studied his profile with an intensity that was unnerving. "What's wrong, Logan? You usually get into this kinda thing more."

"Told you, I'm tired." And he was; he was tired of all of his, tired of his life. Was this really all he was good for, all he could do? Was he just muscle? If he was married once, maybe he used to be something more.

"Uh ... huh. We're perfectly certain you can't ever get sick, right?"

"Stop the elevator."

"What?"

"The power, kill it," he told her, crouching down to the floor and popping his claws.

She did, with great reluctance, the lights in the lift dying a slow and audible death as the lift ground to a halt. "Is something wrong?"

"Yeah. I don't want to announce our arrival." He jammed his claws through the metal floor, and started cutting. It was pretty thick, but not good enough to survive adamantium. "I'm goin' down the shaft, openin' the doors from the inside. Give me two minutes after I leave, then come on down."

"But ... if i'm not there to kill the power, they'll see you."

"Let 'em. It won't do 'em any good." They would be expecting Sloane killing the power to be their arrival signature. It was time to mix it up, throw them off their game. Maybe throw off their trap too, if he was right.

He cut a semi-circle in the floor, just wide enough for him to squeeze through, and bent back the rest of it, until he had opened a hatch in the floor. "Why are you changing our attack pattern?" Sloane sounded suspicious, the way she did when she guessed he wasn't telling her everything.

"'Cause sometimes you need to, and this has been too easy by far." It was just enough truth to let him skate by, and as it was, he took the opportunity to lower himself down the hole, grabbing the elevator cable before he could get a good grip on the wall of the shaft.

It was pitch black, of course, but he could still make out some details on the wall, changes in texture and pattern, and he knew he had her stop it just in time; it was about a floor down to the end of the road. If he was sure he wouldn't make too much noise on impact, he would have let himself drop.

But he climbed down like a good little boy, and listened hard, placing his ears to the still shut elevator doors, taking a deep breath and trying to parse the scents beyond it. If there were people waiting for them it wasn't apparent; maybe they intended to move just as soon as the power died, or the trap was actually deeper within the base. Either way, he didn't care to find out.

He crouched low, out of the range of traditional gunfire, and used a claw to break the seam of the door, wedging it open. He moved before his eyes even adjusted to the low light levels down here, and was surprised to find himself in an empty foyer, the walls a dark, dirty metal that seemed to be rusting as he watched.

The lights were odd; they smelled odd. They were ten inch strip lights placed about two feet apart, six feet high, and they smelled like phosphorus and burning carbon. He placed his hand on one, and suddenly knew why. The light, a marginal yellowish white, was cool to the touch. It wasn't an electric light, but a chemical one. They were all chemical ones.

Fuck. They were ready for Sloane. What did they have in store for him?

He didn't wait for her. He crept farther down the corridor, which conveniently only led in one direction, and something about this place made his stomach cramp up, tie itself in knots. He hadn't been here before, but ... this place was familiar. The layout, perhaps, the materials it was built with. He didn't like it at all.

He smelled a guard before he reached the bend in the corridor. He was clearly a smoker, even though he didn't have a cigarette going now. He may as well have, though, because he reeked like an ashtray.

He also smelled like Organization gun oil.

All in all, it was too easy. He grabbed him from behind, a hand over his mouth, and before he could even react, he punched a claw right through his spine. It wasn't necessarily fatal, although he would be effectively paralyzed until he could get reconstructive surgery.

The man sagged in his grasp, and he pulled him around the corner, propping him up against the wall like he'd just sat down for an impromptu nap. The guy had nicotine gum in his pocket, so Logan used that to jam the barrel of his automatic rifle. If someone picked it up and tried to use it, it would blow up in their face.

If the guy was conscious, he would have asked him for details on the trap, but he was already out. Maybe he severed more nerves than he meant to.

Not that it mattered. He went on, creeping down the hall, quiet enough to pass for a rat. They would expect him to come rushing to the attack, sweeping out of the Sloane created darkness like an unleashed wolf, so that's why he decided stealth was the better option. He wouldn't act like they expected him to; he wouldn't live up to their expectations. He just hoped Sloane, not being a target, would be okay.

He came to a door on the left side wall, solid metal with a viewing slit almost six feet up, and when he glanced inside, he saw nothing but a nine by nine dirt cell, with a lumpy mattress on the floor. Were they waiting to put someone in there? Surely not him; he was pretty sure he could cut through this door.

That's when he realized he smelled someone, someone ... familiar. The problem was, he couldn't recall the complete scent, couldn't slap a name on it.

"Hey," a voice said out of the nothingness, his tone rushed and whispered. Since he smelled someone it didn't totally surprise him, but when the guy seemed to materialize out of the emptiness of the cell and come walking right to the door, it was a little startling.

He was a Japanese man, young, maybe early twenties, black hair unkempt like he'd been fighting or sleeping - or both. Looking at him, Logan realized this was Jayson, a/k/a Specter, the invisible guy. "Get me out of here, will you?" Jayson asked, trying not to sound desperate. "I think they're gonna do somethin', and I really don't want to be here when it goes down."

Although he moved his hand to where the lock was, he hesitated to pop his claws. "What do you mean do something?"

Jayson grimaced, clearly not wanting to discuss this right now. "Look, I'm not sure, pull the plug, something, but this Nova thing is really unstable. I mean, I know why the Org gave it up, okay? Even these guys can't control it, and I know they've been tryin'."

He stared at him for several seconds that felt like an eternity. “What? I thought these guys stole it from the American government.”

“Huh? Hell no, dude. From what I’ve overheard, they had an arrangement with the Org to try and stabilize the thing, in return for a piece of the action. But they can’t, and things have gotten worse, and you have got to get me the fuck outta here before everything blows up.”

Was Jayson meant to die here too? As Keogh had pointed out, he wasn’t the bravest man in the world. Spying he was good at, but he really didn’t like to fight.

He popped his claws and cut through the lock as he realized this all made a terrible kind of sense. It was why he hadn’t been swarmed by guards and mowed down with automatic weapons fire: there was no one here. Oh sure, guards on the surface to make it look good, but down here a mere skeleton crew of completely expendable people. Nova was the real trap; Nova would kill him.

He hardly had to give the door a nudge before Jayson scrambled out, just as Sloane turned the corner and joined them. “Where is everybody? What’s going on?”

He turned to face her, and told her honestly, “I’m sorry.”

Her brows furrowed in continued confusion. “Sorry about what?”

He gave her a quick, sharp punch to the temple, just hard enough to knock her out without giving her a concussion or a skull fracture (hopefully). He caught her falling body before it hit the ground, and Jayson gawped at him in abject shock. “What the fuck did you do that for?”

“Get her out of here.” Jayson probably wasn’t strong enough to carry her, so he propped her up against him, draping one of her arms across his shoulders. He looked equally startled and annoyed. “Go. We have a car parked on the other side of the hill. Get there if you can.”

“But what about you?” It was an automatic question. He was pretty sure Jayson didn’t really care.

“I’m gonna do what I’m supposed to do: take care of Nova.”

The kid scoffed disparagingly, struggling under Sloane’s meager weight. “Didn’t you hear me? It’s unstable; it’s probably gonna go off any second.”

“I know.” With that, he left the confused Jayson and unconscious Sloane behind as he ventured further into the dark complex. Jayson might have started to say something - Logan’s best guess was “Hey” - but Jayson didn’t try to say or do anything more. One of the few things he could count on in this life was Specter would leave a dangerous area at the first given opportunity. But that was cool - at least he knew his limitations. Sloane would have followed him, no matter how forcefully he ordered her to stay behind, so he hoped she forgave him for that punch. Or at least didn’t hate him.

Dark hallways curved down into darker places, making him feel like he was walking into Hell, and he began to smell something unusual but unsettlingly familiar. Chemicals and organic scents, drugs, that were familiar enough to make his skin crawl, but not quite something he could put a specific name to.

He finally came to a large steel door, but it had no lock on it, and as he approached it opened, releasing even more of that eerie chemical scent. As he came inside, he saw he was in a large laboratory that looked like it could have belonged to Doctor Frankenstein. The circular room was dominated by a huge vat of greenish fluid in which something - a person - floated, with thick cables like arteries trailing away from it, feeding into unknown pipes, while rather industrial looking monitors flush with the side walls tracked vital signs and what seemed to be energy levels; he could feel the power bouncing off the walls like microwaves.

There was a man he didn’t recognize in what looked to be a kind of doctor’s smock, checking the readouts from a terminal on the far side of the room, and when Logan came in, he turned to look at him. Surprise made hi s face blanch - what? Was he expecting a noisier warning? - and he pulled out a pistol and fired.

The bullet hit him in the chest, but it struck a rib and ricocheted off into one of the nearby panels. Logan just glowered at the man, stalking towards him. He fired again, and this time the bullet missed a bone, but passed harmlessly through a fleshy part of his forearm. The doctor seemed even more shocked that none of this was coming close to stopping him. “Run,” he snarled, figuring if the guy tried to take one more shot, he’d feed him the pistol and jam it in his duodenum.

The guy finally got the hint, dropped the gun, and ran for it, escaping out a side door. Part of Logan wanted to go after him; it would take less than a minute to catch up with him, even less time to smash his skull into paste. But he couldn’t leave someone like this.

He walked around the tank and started ripping out cables, cutting through thicker ones, making sparks vomit up in brief, violent bursts. He got angrier as he attacked them, and ended up slashing control panels, kicking them until consoles broke into a dozen jagged pieces. He didn’t know why he was so angry until he realized how he recognized that smell - that was the same stuff they put in his tank, whenever they slapped him in one.

He was so angry he wasn’t so much breathing as panting, gulping in air like a man going down for the third time, and he forced himself to stop, to try and calm down. It wasn’t easy; it felt like his body was fighting itself, his rage a beast all its own. But he forced himself to take deep breaths through his nose, calm his breathing, and by extension calm his rage. It worked a little, but just barely.

When he was sure he had control of himself, he approached the tank. “Can you hear me?”

He could see why Jayson kept referring to it as a thing, not a he or a she; it was impossible to tell. Floating naked in the ichor green water was what could be called a rough approximation of a general humanoid. It was perhaps five feet tall, with waxy looking skin that wasn’t pale so much as it was translucent - you could clearly see the dark striations of veins and capillaries running throughout their slight body, see the regular contraction of a dark object that could only be the heart deep inside its chest.

The person had no hair at all, on their strangely smooth, round head or anywhere on their body, and while the general lack of height and lack of external genitalia made him think it was probably a female, the lack of any secondary sexual characteristics, such as breasts or even nipples (none of those - the chest was perfectly featureless, and almost concave), seemed to suggest otherwise. Nova wasn’t a he or she, an adult or a child; Nova was a neutral, something dwelling in between the known and the unknown, one of those mutations so extreme they could never pass for normal, not in a million years.

As he looked down into the tank, it opened its eyes. They were large and colorless, the pupils as white as marble, little capillaries of blood visible at the edges, an irregular rim of red. For a second they just stared at each other, and finally Nova sat up, smooth translucent hands gripping the sides of the coffin like vat. “Why do you want to kill me?” It had a voice like ringing crystal, neither male nor female, almost not human.

The very question was shocking. “I don’t want to kill you.” Is that what the Organization had told it? He was a crazed killer, coming after them?

As much as he could read its oddly placid face, he thought he saw some surprise. Also, something was starting to glow beneath its skin, almost like phosphorescent lichen, and he could feel his skin prickle in response. The energy it was giving off was extraordinary and strange. Could it kill him? Quite likely, yes; it could burn him to dust. If he‘d come charging in here on the attack, it probably would have killed him without bothering to ask any questions. After all, he would have confirmed that he was a bloodthirsty maniac. “Then why are you here?”

“Because the Organization wants you to kill me.”

Now it jerked its head back as if he’d punched it. “What? I’m not a killer … not on purpose …”

Logan shook his head and walked away, putting some distance between himself and Nova, in case he was making it nervous. It was becoming so bright it was hard to look at it directly. The light didn’t seem to fade, though, and he suspected Jayson was right about the thing not being able to control itself. “I think I know what you are. You’re what the wags in the upper levels dub the “opies” - the overpowered mutants.” Lightning had been one of those, hadn’t he? That was what doomed him.

“Overpowered? Meaning what?”

“Meaning your power is too extreme for your body to handle. Either your powers eventually get beyond your control, they inadvertently kill you, or both. Every now and then, evolution fucks up. Look at the platypus.”

Nova made a noise that sounded like a chime. Logan could only look at it from the corner of his eye. It was now glowing as brightly as a mythical angel, and for the first time in this cool, dank underground pit, he was starting to sweat. “I see. I’m dying, I know I am. They told me they weren’t sure why, but they thought they could save me.”

“I’m sure they tried. But there’s limits to what can be done.”

“Yes.” He heard water splashing, saw it getting out of the tank, or at least the glow of it did. His eyes just couldn’t adjust to light, or it was going up in intensity every second. Either way, it wasn’t good. “I don’t understand what’s going on. They said you would kill me, and yet you say they said I would kill you?”

“They didn’t say it, but that was their intention. This is a type of operation known as a “nex” - no exit. We kill each other, mutually assured destruction, and they can sleep at night, not worrying about you accidentally making a town disappear, and not worrying about me breaking down and trying to escape again.”

“I didn’t mean to … the town, I didn’t …”

“It’s okay, kid. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter now.”

“So what happens next?”

Logan sighed, and rubbed his dry eyes. They felt like he’d been staring at the sun for hours without blinking. Nova wouldn’t just kill him, it would obliterate this entire complex. No wonder Jayson was so scared. “I don’t know. Do you think you can control it?”

“Control what? My powers?”

“Yes. Long enough to leave?”

There was another one of those pauses that was thick, but filled with a faint but audible hum. Did it have a body made of glass? It seemed to have a low harmonic frequency, or at least its powers did. It was almost oddly beautiful, like alien music. “I don’t understand.”

It said that a lot, didn’t it? “I’m letting you go. If you can leave, do it now. If you’re going to die, at least enjoy your freedom while you have it. There’s no reason to die cooped up in this fucking cellar.”

The humming continued, a comforting oscillation of sound. “And what happens to you?”

He shrugged, and almost scoffed at the idea. “Leaving sounds like a grand idea to me too. I can go to ground, see how long I last this time. If I can make it to the Amazon, I can get lost there real easily. I know forest environments, I can survive there like they can’t.” And how did he come to that conclusion? It just felt like something truthful.

“They’ll kill you.”

“They’ll try. I don’t give them that much credit.”

Another pause. Logan noted that something was starting to drip down on the far side of the room, and from the smell alone he realized that plastic was melting, insulation turning liquid over the place where Nova currently stood. “Aren’t you scared?”

Maybe he was wrong about Nova. Maybe it was a child. “They can’t hurt me any more than they’ve already hurt me. I’m dead. I can hardly get deader.”

“But you’re not dead.”

“As good as. I have nothing to lose; they made sure of that.”

“You talk like they’re the enemy.”

He shook his head and started walking towards the door. “Friends don’t do this to you, Nova.”

He had reached the door when it said in its haunting, ethereal voice, “I used to be able to transport myself from place to place just by thinking about it. I could think of the space station, and I would be there; I could think of the Grand Canyon, and I would be there. Anywhere in the world, or above it; I had no limitations, and distance was irrelevant. I felt no strain. But then things started to go … wrong. I’m not even sure when I noticed it and really paid attention to it; I figured it was just a spasm of some kind, a hiccup. When the Organization approached me about helping my country, I was happy to, but I couldn’t conceal my problems for long. They gave me something that they thought would help me, an implant, and we were testing the limits one day. Do you know what happened?”

Was there a point to this story? Maybe it just wanted to talk. God knew how long it had been in that tank, waiting for him to show up and kill it. “Let me guess - this test was in Merrill City, wasn’t it?”

The humming briefly rose a pitch, then fell. “Yes. I intended to wish myself elsewhere, and instead, I wished the town away. They said it wasn’t an accident … but I wonder. All I can do is hurt other things now. I never wanted that.”

He nodded in understanding. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

“I wish I could go, but I can’t. So you’ll have to do it for me.”

“What?” he reflexively turned back, but had to shield his eyes. Even then, it didn’t help much. This was why its code name was Nova. It was a sun in the middle of the room, too intense to be looked upon by Human eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I hope you live long enough to set this right. Someone has to. This can’t be all there is to life, can it?”

The humming grew louder, a crystal vibrating so violently it was about to break, reaching a pitch so high he grabbed his ears and winced, the light punching through his eyelids like wet rice paper, showing him the bloody lines of his own veins and capillaries inside his eyelids. The light seemed to stab through his optic nerves, punch into his brain, and burn through the soft tissue like lasers.

He was roughly sure he was screaming even though he couldn‘t hear himself over the hum; the pain was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, acid poured on raw nerves and festering skin, the light an abrasive thing that was burning him away from the atoms down. He didn’t know how he was still cognizant of anything anymore.