7

When the wall suddenly collapsed, John figured the odds were good that Jean had just decided to wipe him out with no muss or fuss. He stood with his back against the wall, ready to light the match, wondering if he’d even get the opportunity to singe her eyebrows off before she vaporized him. Probably not.

But it was Logan who came through the hole in the wall, followed by Nariko, who had probably been the one who turned the wall to sand. “Holy crap man, get the fuck away from me!”

Logan stopped and frowned at him. “It’s me, Pyro.”

“I know that. Get the fuck away from me! Jean wants your head on a stick!”

Logan scowled. “It wasn’t Jean.”

“And if she was, it doesn’t matter anyways,” Nariko added, and drew her finger across her neck in the universal symbol of viciously dead.

John looked at Logan funny. “You cut her throat?”

“Cut off her head,” Nariko said, in a kind of hushed whisper.

“Holy fuck, man. You’re hardcore. If you do that to friends, what do you do to enemies?”

“Keep this up,” Logan growled. “Find out.”

“Okay, I’m convinced it you,”  he said, although it hadn’t actually been a test.  No, he was just reminded of why he never wanted to fight Logan if he absolutely didn’t have to. Most of the time he seemed sane, but in a fight, Logan went totally bugfuck nuts. There was no real way to fight crazy; you just hoped you didn’t catch it.

“You fight a telekinetic, you’re only gonna get one shot,” Logan said, almost defensively. “Gotta take it.”

John nodded in complete agreement. That was probably true. That’s why he left fighting telekinetics to the crazy people.

Nariko caught him up on what was going on that they knew, but it wasn’t much and didn’t take long. In a nutshell: fighting people with powers, some unknown, in weird building, can’t find anyone, Logan liked none of it. Check. Nothing was a great shock. He almost mentioned the thing with Tasha, but thought better of it. He’d have to explain a lot of it to them, and he really didn’t want to. He was starting to suspect that the hallucinations revealed something about them, and he’d give something of himself away. That was unacceptable, especially right now. They knew too much about him as it was.

John simply followed Nariko and Logan, glancing behind them much of the time, figuring Logan could take the front. Empty room after empty room. He started thinking about that movie he saw once on late night TV. What was it called, Cube or something? People trapped in this mysterious place full of booby trapped rooms, people dying off one by one. Was this what this was? In that case, he was happy to stay at the back. Let Logan and Nariko lead the way. Besides, Logan was half way unkillable, right?

In one room, like all the other rooms except maybe a bit colder, Logan paused and sniffed the air. “What?” Nariko asked.

Logan held up a hand, asking for quiet (you needed quiet to smell something?  He called shenanigans on that), and walked over to a parallel wall. He ran his hands over it a moment, as if searching for a hidden seam, and said, “Nariko, get us through here.”

Why didn’t he do it himself? His claws on a smoke break or something? But Nariko didn’t complain; she just went over and put her hands flat against the wall, and seconds afterwards the wall started to become sand and fell away, streaming to the floor. It looked darker through the hole, and John thought he smelled something a little different: cold and ozone and maybe a hint of something else. Something stale.

Logan went through first - again, great. If there was a bear trap in the room, it’d probably bust on his leg - but after no one shot him and he wasn’t exploded, Nariko looked through and tentatively followed. She shivered and sunk deeper into her shapeless Arctic coat as she looked around, but nothing happened to her, so John followed.

It was a hallway! Or something different than all those endless box like rooms. It was a rectangular box like room, longer than it was wide, the metal on the walls more of a stainless steel color. Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness (of course there were no lights here), John could see the angles shifted precipitously at one end of the corridor. New Age-y design? Was it that feng sway stuff, or whatever the fuck it was called? (Yeah, he’d been in L.A. long enough to know some people got rich enough off it, but he’d never gotten drunk enough to give a rat’s ass about it.) Logan headed down that way. “Piotr?” he asked, changing his walk to a sprint.

“Piotr’s down there?” John asked, and instantly felt like an idiot. No, it was Piotr Rabbit - who the fuck did he think it was?

Once they were close enough, John saw that the weird angles weren’t a structural point but the most visible part of a collapse: part of the ceiling had given way, and what he thought was an oddly sloping wall was some sort of steel beam that had broken through. The walls on either side had buckled but not broken. What the fuck was that about?

Logan finally used his claws to cut through one of the buckled walls - was that smart? - but it held as Logan ducked in.  Nariko stood by, looking up at the beam warily, and asked, “How is he?”

After a moment, where metal being cut and stuff being shifted could be heard, Logan replied, “Unconscious, but he’s not bleedin’.” There was a brief pause before he admitted, “I don’t think he did this. The collapse is inward, not outward.”

“So who did it?” John wondered. Was this place made out of tin foil? Was it going to start falling like a badly made soufflé?

“Who else?” Logan replied. He returned to the hallway, struggling under the weight of Piotr thrown over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and John would have offered to help, but, as had already been established, he was not insane. “Zehra’s around here somewhere.”

“Oh god, not Carrie,” John snapped. “Why the hell did she bring the ceiling down? Was she trying to kill him or something?”

“I don’t think it was intentional,” Logan said, although there was obvious doubt in his voice. “Maybe she was scared. Maybe she tried to fight Jean - or whoever she saw - on her own terms.”

“Breaking shit,” John translated.

“She doesn’t have the best control in the world,” Nariko said, making an excuse for her. “The bigger the object, the harder time she has with it.”

“Which is why I don’t get why you wanted the fucking suicide bomber on your team,” John said, aiming that square at Logan. Hey, he was carrying Piotr - he didn’t really have a free arm to hit him. Now was an ideal time to bring it up. “She ain’t learning control; she ain’t learning shit. She refuse to do anything but complain.”

“Sounds familiar,” Logan grumbled.

John glared at him. “At least I don’t set the curtains on fire and complain that no one puts them out fast enough.”

Nariko scratched her head. “Is that an apt analogy?”

“Kinda,” Logan admitted grudgingly.

“What do you mean kinda?” John protested. “It’s totally apt.”

Logan stopped and sniffed again - oh, how he’d love to make a dog joke, but he was emotionally attached to both his arms and didn’t want to lose either - and then pointed towards the right hand side, farther down the hall. “Over there. Open the wall, darlin’.”

Nariko dutifully went up to the wall and turned it to dirt (was it a motif?), and after it had splashed all over the floor, Logan looked in and said, “Fuck.”

Well, that was helpful. Very descriptive. He should have been a writer.

Logan crouched down and put Piotr on the floor, then went inside the room.  John didn’t bother to look; he just waited to see if Logan would be blown up. After a moment he came out, carrying the unconscious Zehra. “She musta had a seizure. The room walls are all bent away from here, like an explosion happened in there. There’s no rubble, though.”

“See, what did I say? She’s a suicide bomber.”

Logan scowled at him. “Don’t start. She’s probably the reason we’re out of our cells.”

Suddenly a head appeared through the wall, and John yelped in shock, jumping away and turning, matchbook ready to go. But it was just Kitty, looking around in surprise. “Here you guys are. Holy crap, what happened to Piotr and Zehra?”

“Carrie went boom,” John said, trying hard to pretend that he just hadn’t had the shit scared out of him. “And made the ceiling fall on Piotr when he wasn’t metalled out.”

“Oh shit,” Kitty said, stepping completely out of the wall. She’d probably phased back into solid form, but it was hard to tell. You kind of wanted and expected a certain opacity in a girl who went through stuff, but she always looked solid. It seemed unfair. “Is he badly hurt?”

Logan grunted a slight laugh. “Musclehead? Fuck no. He’ll probably have a few bruises and maybe a headache when he wakes up, but he’ll be fine.”

Kitty nodded at Zehra. “What about her?”

Logan grimaced and shrugged. “I dunno. Shaheen would -” Logan looked up. “Where’s Shaheen?”

Kitty got bug eyed, and said, “I’ll go find her.” And with that, she disappeared back into the wall at a run.

Logan looked down at Piotr, looked at Zehra, and ended up throwing the lighter, smaller girl over his shoulder. “Strong guy’s on his own,” he said. “It’s like trying to lug a buffalo around.”

“You lug a lot of buffalos?” John taunted.

Logan gave him a look that promised a grim, ugly death - he wasn’t expect any less, really - when he suddenly looked away. As far as John could tell, he was looking at nothing, or was looking for something somewhere behind a wall that was intact. “What? Kitty come back?”

But she hadn’t materialized through a wall yet, and Nariko suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that?”

John started feeling it now: a low thrum, a faint vibration coming through the floor and echoing off the walls, getting louder and louder, but still weirdly low level. You could almost feel it more than properly hear it. Like maybe someone in a lower level had a bass guitar, and had put their amp face down on the floor and was now tuning up.

“Get out of here,” Logan growled, sounding pained. “Get back to the jet. “

John looked at him incredulously as Nariko pointed out, “We don’t know where -”

“Go!” He shouted, and seemed to be crumpling with pain, bowing under the weight of it. It made no sense at all until Logan doubled over and grabbed his head, letting out a scream of agony before his legs gave way and he spilled to the floor convulsing briefly, twitching once or twice before coming to a dead stop.

“What the hell ..?” Nariko exclaimed, and quickly dropped to her knees beside him. “Logan?”

“It’s a sonic weapon of some kind,” John said. He was guessing, but he sounded authoritative. “He’s got better hearing than the rest of us, remember? It got him first. We’re next.” He could actually see a bit of blood trickling from one of Logan’s ears. Now that was disgusting. Also, fucking scary - was that going to happen to the rest of them as soon as they turned it up to eleven? Holy shit, they needed to be out of here. Logan could grow new eardrums, but they couldn‘t. “C’mon!”

“We can’t leave them!” Nariko protested, getting to her feet.

“Yeah we can! We come back with the fucking jet, Nari!” At least it sounded like a plan. How it would work precisely was a bit of a guess at this point.  But he could feel the noise in his legs now, rising up to his chest, and maybe it was just psychosomatic, but he thought he was getting dizzy.

Nariko must have been feeling it too, as she finally got moving, putting a hole through another wall and disappearing in a leftward direction.  Was this the way to the outside? Come to think of it, was there a way to the outside? They had no idea one way or another. But they had no choice but to keep running, and see if they could outrun the noise.

And if not, well, hey, wouldn’t be the first time they were totally fucked. It wouldn’t even be the first time today.

****

Kitty was vaguely aware of the shimmer of the air as she ran through wall after wall, hoping to find Doctor Khoury somewhere in this endless maze of empty rooms. She could kind of hear it, and kind of not. It was a low hum, a kind of grumble almost. She had no idea what it could have been - what made that kind of noise at that volume? - but she didn’t like it.  She almost expected to run into something making that noise: a huge robot, or maybe one of those walking tank things in The Empire Strikes Back. She had no idea what she would do if she encountered anything like that.

Momentarily she ran into a room, and a voice said, “Finally!” She stopped and saw Doctor Khoury, leaning against the wall in the corner, arms around herself as if she was cold. That was understandable. “I thought you’d forgotten about me.”

Kitty solidified, and then she could feel the hum. She’d went to see a band once, and they had their amps turned up so much she could feel the bass in her chest. It was a feeling like that, although minor now. If it got any louder, it would be really uncomfortable. “No, it’s just a mess. What’s that noise?”

She shrugged. “Either they’re moving the building on treads, starting a launch sequence, or it’s a weapon of some sort.”

She said it so calmly Kitty wasn’t sure if she was being facetious or not. The confusing thing about Doctor Khoury was nothing seemed to bother her, ever.  On the plus side, she was exactly who you wanted in a crisis: she didn’t panic.  On the negative side, that made you want to hit her. Goddamn it, would it kill her just to freak out for a second? “A weapon?”

“You haven’t heard of them?  There are a number of audio frequencies that are, admittedly, hard to generate, but can trigger unconsciousness or other forms of incapacitation. I know a number of militaries are working on it, although I’m sure all the precious funds squandered on developing “gay bombs” have put them years behind the Organization.”

“Huh?”

“Forget it. Now’s not the time for me to make snarky political comments. Give me your hand.”

Kitty was still deeply confused, and the rising noise - which seemed to be putting a great deal of fog in her brain - didn’t help. But she had to grab Khoury to take her through the walls, so she did give her her hand. Khoury took it, then said, “If you’re intangible, do you think you can avoid the worst of the sound waves?”

“I don’t know. It’s worth a shot, I guess.”

“Am I right in what I read in your file? You can sometimes disrupt machinery?”

Kitty nodded. Was the room spinning?

“Okay. I’m going to use my power to boost your intangibility.  We need to find what’s powering this base and shut it down.  When we find it - if we find it - you need to gut the fuck out of the machinery. You understand?”

She nodded. Khoury had powers? Oh, right, she did. It was getting really hard to think now. But Khoury looked fine, unflappable, and calm, and Kitty found that reassuring. If she wasn’t losing it, there was no reason for her to lose it, even if the room had become a Tilt-A-Whirl. “Yeah.”

“Let’s get going, sweetheart,” she said, and tightened her grip on her hand.

It was extraordinary. One second she was physical and miserable, and then suddenly, she wasn’t. She felt instantly freed from the heavy shackles of confusion, and while she could sense the continued vibration of noise, it was beyond her, outside of her.  She felt wonderful; she felt like a photon, a particle of light.

Kitty plunged through the floor, bringing Khoury with her, and Kitty felt like she could move at the speed of light, not even running but gliding, swimming through atoms with only the slightest momentum. It was like she could move through will alone.

She sank through another similar floor of metal boxes, and started moving through them, going so fast that they were little more than a blur. But if anything unusual came up, something where nothing usually was, she could stop.

So this was what a power boost was like, huh?  It was awesome.  Although Kitty was all for getting out of this mousetrap, she kind of hoped she could keep this feeling for a little while longer.