5

When Nariko found herself back at her father’s sushi shack, she knew something was wrong.

Someone wanted to order, they were gesturing towards her, but she sat on an empty stool beside the counter and tried to think - where was she last? It wasn’t here; she knew for a fact that she had been away from home for a long time. She hadn’t been in Japan since she left home.

Which had been when? For some reason she couldn’t remember. Her head hurt a little, in a strange kind of way. She felt like she should know the feeling, what it meant, but right now her head felt like it was filled with fog. “Kyoko, what are you doing?” her father shouted from the kitchen. At the shack she used her middle name; it seemed less humiliating, although not by much.

She looked towards the door, wondering if this was the day that Wolverine and Cyclops had walked into the shack. When she first saw them, she was sure they looked familiar but couldn’t place them; the fact that Wolverine spoke fluent Japanese (and with a slight Tokyo accent! He must have lived in the city at some point …) threw her even more. It wasn’t her best day anyways. Only in retrospect did she realize those guys she’d seen on YouTube, the mutants, were in fact here to take her away. It was like a dream.

She’d never told Logan that he had scared her; that she had seen web footage of him slicing through people and it shook her to the core. That was a good guy? He was like a character in an American slasher film. She wondered if maybe he was half werewolf or something.

Which was why it was almost hilarious that she found him to be, on first (unknown) meeting, to be so kind. When he swore they were on the level, not perverts or mobster assholes, she believed him. He said they wouldn’t hurt her, and she believed him. She didn’t, as a rule, believe anyone, not since her father started getting into trouble with gangsters. But as rough and gaijin as he looked, she got the sense that he was being honest - he couldn’t hurt her, even if he wanted to. She knew that to be true now. Oh, he was still fucking scary, his anger remained one of the most frightening things you could witness, but she felt safer with him than her own father. Maybe because if the Yakuza ever did decide to come after her again to settle a debt, they’d be going back to Tokyo in a series of small cardboard boxes. There was something to be said for having a slasher film guy on your side. She never told him, but she kind of thought of Logan as her big brother, the sibling she never had.

It was a shame about Scott. Sure, he seemed uptight, but not a bad guy. He even attempted to learn some Japanese words. His pronunciation was hit and miss, but at least he tried. It might not be bad to see him again, especially since his death was so sudden and so senseless.

But she sat there, and the only thing that changed was the irritation of the customers. No one was coming through that door except the usual cheap salary men looking for a quick lunch. Damn it, this didn’t make sense.

Her head was aching more and more. This was key. The harder she thought, the more it hurt. There was no way that was a coincidence.

And there was no way she was going to be a waitress at her dad’s damn sushi shack ever again.

****

Shaheen got up from her lab table, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. Back at the mansion again? Yep, back at the mansion.

She walked out of the student medical lab and headed down the empty hall, sunlight bleeding through the skylights making the cherry wood glow. It was very nice; quiet even.

“Okay, so what’s the deal here?” she asked, as she headed to the kitchen. It was times like this she wished she drank. “I know you’re a telepath and this is some kind of illusion or something. I know mainly because I’m still unseasonably cold. Forgot about that part, didn’t you? The realities aren’t quite meshing up. Sloppy.”

She kind of expected something to happen due to her insolence, some kind of punishment, but it didn’t happen. She reached the kitchen without incident, and busied herself getting a bowl and a box of Corn Flakes down from the cupboard. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to bore you into submission. First, I’m going to have breakfast, and then I’m going to alphabetize my CD collection. If you’re still hanging in there, I’m going to do my laundry, and then go watch the fifteen hour version of Berlin-Alexanderplatz until I fall asleep. I can bore the shit out of you. Just try me.”

She poured a bowl of Corn Flakes, and retrieved the rice milk from the fridge. Did the telepath think she was joking? She wasn’t.

Boredom was the only weapon she had against a mind reader, and goddamn it, she was going to use it.

****

Zehra woke up in the snow, and sat up, incredibly pissed. “What the fuck -” she began, then looked around.

She was alone.

She got to her feet, looking around at the empty shacks that made up this frozen, abandoned town, and shouted, “Hey, did you leave me behind?! Fuckheads!”

This got no response, but she couldn’t say she was surprised. They had left her behind, hadn’t they? It figured. She knew she couldn’t trust them. You couldn’t trust anyone, not really. Especially when American teenagers were involved.

She wasn’t naïve or new to Western culture - she might have been Turkish, but she was raised in France. And she’d never met a larger group of shallow, self-obsessed idiots. She had thought they were bad in Lyon! Nothing like the American kids. Newsflash: she didn’t give a fuck about Britney Spears. Was it possible to move on now? Apparently not. Apparently that also made her a snob. Whatever.

She looked around for footprints, any sign of what direction they may have left in - or come in, for that matter - but there were none. The snow was undisturbed, pristine; even when she walked in a circle, she left no prints. Was the snow’s crust that hard? You’d think Logan would have broken it, but obviously not. Shit! This village looked pretty much the same from all angles; she couldn’t tell which hill they’d come down. She could just randomly pick a direction, but she didn’t want to be lost in Siberia. Fucking Siberia. The only thing she knew about it was that there was this Russian book she had to read in school that was set here, and that was it. Boring book; too much fucking whining.

“Hey!” Her voice echoed off the shacks and the hills, came back to her weak and pathetic. She got so angry that she ripped a branch off a tree, using her powers in a way that was remarkably casual; she didn’t even need to focus at all.

In fact, they never really understood that about her. They thought to be a telekinetic was to focus on things. Maybe it was that way for some, but never for her; sometimes it seemed like her powers worked independent of her, and she needed to focus to rein them in, to keep them from doing something she didn’t want. (Or didn’t really want; it seemed to be manifesting her subconscious sometimes, which she really didn’t like.) It got worse when her emotional state wasn’t the best.

Like now. After breaking off the branch, she threw it into the nearest shack, and with just the slightest bit of mental pressure the entire thing collapsed like it was a gingerbread house. The snow began to crack, widening fissures that appeared to be snaking off towards the horizon, her control slipping as she tried to remember what was said before everyone else disappeared. Something about a psychic, right?

She really didn’t know about that. She didn’t pick up psychic energy. She only broke shit.

Like she was breaking shit now. The shacks started to tear apart, an invisible hurricane of machetes tearing them down to their foundations, and even she could feel the force like a warm wind as it went past her, from her. Snow, ice, and fragile branches rained down from the trees, and the little building made of ice fractured, exploding into dust. She knew she was using too much, exerting herself, but it seemed impossible to pull back.

She closed her eyes and concentrated, grabbing her head (as if that would help), and yelled, “Stop! Stop it!” But she could hear the cracking and crumbling going on around her, beside her and beneath her, the ground shaking like it wanted her gone, and it wasn’t stopping. She was a train rolling downhill, with no brakes and nothing but speed. She was an avalanche, a tsunami, a hurricane; there was no stopping, only petering out. “Stop!”

When the darkness - the only precursor to a seizure she ever had - slammed down, she was almost kind of relieved.

****

Piotr woke up strapped down to a table in a small, empty metal room, and knew one of his worst fears had just been realized: it was the Russian government. They had some kind of mutation experiment lab set up here, and now they were caught in it.

From how cold he was, he knew he had reverted back to his flesh form. He tried to will the change back to metal, but nothing happened. He tried to sit up, move his arms, but he was effectively strapped down from high on his chest all the way down to his ankles. “Hey, what have you done to me?! Let me out!” Even as he shouted it, he wondered why he bothered - had that ever worked? Had anyone ever held captive against their will simply shouted, “Let me go!” and had it happen? Stupid.

He had left Russia because of these people. He’d heard that the government was hunting for mutants. He originally heard they were imprisoning them, killing them, but the truth was actually worse: they were using them as weapons. It was essentially Weapon X, but went by another name. He’d heard that the reason the Russian invasion of Afghanistan went to shit was because a “Western” mutant military team had decimated the Russian one, and all over some other conflict that had nothing to do with the invasion. (Weapon X? Piotr had meant to ask Logan if he was ever in Afghanistan killing Russian mutants, but then he heard about Logan’s amnesia and knew it was pointless. But he bet it was Weapon X, what other mutant military team was there, and if so, that meant Logan had been there. It wouldn’t have surprised him. And he’d have been rooting for him, actually, as he never really saw the point of invading people and taking anything by force.)

Piotr kept his mutation quiet, the only people in his family who knew knew purely by accident - but he knew his days were numbered when his Uncle Boris found out somehow. Boris was a drunk and a black marketeer who would have sold his own daughter if he thought he could get a good price for her. Selling a nephew would be no skin off his nose. Xavier probably showed up in his life at just the right time.

But now here he was, back with them. He could only hope that they still weren’t prepared to deal with Logan. Or at least Zehra - could anybody deal with Zehra? She couldn’t seem to even deal with herself, so the answer was most likely no.

He tested his restrains, which felt like some kind of slick steel. Almost his skin, actually, but not. He assumed they’d strengthened them so even if he got his powers back (how were they blocking his powers?) he couldn’t muscle out of them, but what about slip out of them? They were prepared for brute force, but maybe not evasion. He had a little room to move around his shoulders, but how much good that was going to do was hard to determine. If he could turn his feet enough, maybe he could push up, get out from under. That might work. Of course, he might snap his own ankle trying it. But he had to do something. He could just wait here for them to … well, do whatever they were going to do to him. It couldn’t be good.

But just as he was trying to figure out how he could contort that much, the lights flickered, and there was this deep, sick groaning noise, like metal somewhere sagging under weight it was never meant to hold. “What’s that noise?” he asked, hoping for an answer.

There was none. The lights died, and the entire ceiling caved in.