9

You didn't really know how small a room was until you tried to cram a bunch of people in it. Especially a room dominated by a futuristic metal coffin. It was like having a wake in a coat closet; they were all crammed around it, with little room to move, and from what Logan could tell by scent, almost no one was at ease around it.

Save for Shaheen, who remained more curious than concerned. Then again, if you were pretty sure you were immortal, how much would anything bug you? (Well, he had the potential to live for a fucking long time, and the idea made him slightly ill. But people accepted things differently, and Shaheen had an odd Spock-ish quality to her. In spite of the fact that she seemed like the world's most together person, he bet she had something surprisingly nasty in her past. A gay woman in Algeria? Yeah, there was no way her life was free of ugliness.) She wasn't just standing closest to the coffin, she had her hands on it as he came up to it, and he frowned at her curiously. “Got a spot for me to cut?”

“I don't know. I don't even know if it's wise. It's warm.”

He put a hand on the surface. She was right; it had a faint but obvious warmth, and he could also feel a subtle vibration.

“Yeah, well, the power's on,” John remarked. He was standing near the edge of the room, occasionally glancing at the machines around them as if he didn't trust them. “It's gonna be warm.”

“But why is it on?” Shaheen asked, in a patient teacher voice. “Why does this have its own power source? It's weird, isn't it?”

John shrugged, aggressively disinterested. “What isn't in this place?”

“This makes even less sense than the rest of this shit,” Logan pointed out. “If it has a separate power source, presumably that means it's important. It's a severed head in a tube. How in the fuck is that important?”

“Is it Walt Disney's head?” Nariko asked, attempting to make a joke. From the baffled look Piotr gave her, not everyone got it.

Shaheen was giving him a look though, one with a slightly raised eyebrow. She had already come to a conclusion about it, and was trying to will it into Logan's mind. Not that he needed her to – there was really only one conclusion to draw. It made no fucking sense and was batshit insane, but what wasn't around here? Nothing had made sense since they found the empty village.

“I think -” he began, but was cut off by the sound of an alert klaxon ripping through the base, followed by an automated voice saying, “Self-destruct has been activated. Destruction commencing within thirty seconds.”

“Whoa!” John shouted, looking more angry than startled. “What the fuck did you do?!”

Everyone looked slightly panicked, except for Shaheen, who had already been established as Vulcan. “What do we do?” Piotr asked.

“Nothing. It's a bluff.”

“How do you know that?” Kitty asked him desperately. She wanted to believe, but it wasn't clear if she actually did.

“'Cause it doesn't make sense. We touched nothing. We just freaked him out. Or her. Was it a him or a her? Could you tell?”

Kitty stared back at him, uncomprehending. “What?”

“Self-destruct in twenty five seconds,” Robo-voice announced.

“Self-destruct my ass,” Logan snapped down at the coffin. “We're not gonna hurt ya, so give it a rest, huh? We're the good guys.”

“In theory,” John muttered.

Nariko seemed to get it before Kitty did. “No way. No fucking way. You're saying that head's alive?”

“No,” Piotr said, looking slightly shell shocked. It wasn't that he was denying the possibility of it more than he simply didn't want it to be true. He seemed to forget he was still carrying Zehra, still slung over one muscular shoulder, but she didn't fall off. Pete was a big pile of muscle.

Shaheen was nodding. “It makes sense. You know what has their own back up generators in hospitals? Life support systems.”

“There's no way in hell that can be alive!” Kitty insisted. “It's a head on a ... well, a pad, or maybe a flattened pillow, I dunno, but nobody could live without a body.”

“In theory,” Shaheen said. “But we're mutants. In theory, no one should be able to turn intangible, or become metal, or survive a full body bone graft.” In case no one got that reference, she glanced at Logan. “The rulebook can be thrown out with us. Why couldn't someone have a healing factor so perverse that they could actually stay alive if only their brain was functioning?” He liked how she called it perverse, because that's exactly what it was. Little was more perverse than waking up and discovering you have a sucking chest wound so deep you can see your own ribcage. And worse yet, watching your muscles and skin actually grow back. “You told me it was hooked up to something, Kitty. Maybe that's all it needs to keep going.”

“But ... no! It wasn't stuff, it was like ... wires. Wires coming out of the scalp, and this ... ring on top. Or maybe it was a headband. Look, as soon as I saw it I was outta there, so maybe I didn't get a good look.”

“Look again.”

“Fuck you!” she replied reflexively, and as soon as she realized what she said and who she said it to, she slapped her hands over her mouth and looked as terror stricken as he had ever seen her. “Oh, no. Oh, Logan, I didn't mean -”

“I don't care. Let me have a look if you ain't gonna.” He held out his hand in invitation.

She didn't look reluctant more than she looked rooted to the spot – she didn't want to do this, even though she wouldn't be looking in. But finally she stepped up to him and grabbed his arm, and he turned towards the silver coffin.

He closed his eyes for a couple of seconds, trying to force accustomedness to the dark, then leaned forward, into the container.

It turned out he only needed to be accustomed to the dimness, as there were a couple of lights inside, no bigger than pinpricks and almost as dull. But they showed what Kitty had said: a severed head on a dark colored cushion. It was very pale, almost albino, the eyes closed and the veins like blue worms beneath thin skin. The planes of the face were sharp, cheekbones like straight razors and the chin almost pointed, the eyes sunken in pits that used to be sockets. The ghostly face was androgynous enough that telling the gender was impossible.

What appeared to be wiry hair at first was simply wire, embedded in the flesh and emerging to connect to the interior of the coffin in ways that weren't clear. There was a thin (copper?) band surrounding the scalp, and Logan would have bet money that there were electrodes or some other type of sensor in there. But the way it was thickly wired to the side, it also functioned as a restraining device, although it was hardly going anywhere. The severing, as far as he could tell, was clean, so clean it was surgical. He wished he could take a sense perception, stay around longer, but he couldn't. So he pulled out and Kitty let go of his arm, allowing him to breathe again. “That is messed up.”

“What did I tell you?” Kitty replied.

“So it really is a head in a box?” John asked.

“It is.”

“Any signs of life?” Shaheen asked.

He had to think about that a moment. “Yeah. It wasn't decomposed. The veins looked good.”

“I think she meant like breathing, dude,” John interjected.

Shaheen gave him that wry half-smile of hers. “No, I didn't. Now we have to figure out if they can communicate with us or not.”

“Could it be the telepath?”

She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Yeah, this was fucked, and there were no easy answers. They could crack the coffin open, but if it was an intricate life support system, they could kill it. If it was an enemy, fine – attempting to kill them meant all bets were off. But how deadly could a head in a box be? There was no way this guy – and he was just going to think of it as a gender neutral Guy – could have arranged all of this. This was a piece of the puzzle, but not all of it. “Can you talk to us?” Logan said in Russian. “We can help you get out of here, just communicate with us. We don't want to hurt you.”

“Oh god, there he goes with the languages again,” John bitched.

“We don't,” Piotr – the only other Russian speaker in the room – agreed. “Who did this to you? Who built this place?”

“You don't speak French, do you?” Shaheen said wryly, looking down at the coffin. “I'm really good with French.”

The klaxon and self-destruct warnings stopped dead. Silence filled its absence, but after several seconds, Kitty asked nervously, “Is this a good sign or a bad one?”

Logan shrugged. It could have gone either way. “We'll see.”

Suddenly Jean appeared in the far corner, which wasn't really that far away. Kitty jumped, but no one else really reacted. “What kind of trick is this? Do you think I'm an idiot?”

“I think you're dead,” John replied.

“This isn't a trick,” Shaheen said. “We're not that organized.”

“What do you think is going on here?” Logan wondered. “Why did you bring us here?”

Jean scowled angrily. “I didn't bring you here.”

“Who did?” he asked.

She glared at them, eyes scudding from face to face. He had no idea what she was searching for. “What is the point of this test?”

Shaheen shook her head. “Sweetheart, you're not getting us. This isn't test. We're real people, and we're trying to figure out what the hell is going on.”

“Is that what this is?” Logan asked the Jean projection. “Is this some kind of proving ground? Do you run mutants through their paces?”

“Are you working with the government?” Piotr asked.

Her eyes narrowed, and Logan noticed that her eyes were reddish-brown. An error, or a clue? “I've been doing my job. There's no reason for this.”

John made a noise of disgust. “It's like talking to a doorknob.”

“What is your job?” Shaheen asked. She wasn't getting impatient, but then again, Logan already knew she could answer a question with a question ad infinitum; she seemed to think it was funny. “Assume we're idiots.”

“Not a big assumption,” John cracked.

The Jean thing looked genuinely confused, enough that Logan almost felt bad for it. “Who's your leader?”

“Storm, I guess,” John said. “But I'm not sure why. 'Ooh, I can make it rain.' I mean, whatever. Maybe that's impressive during a drought, but otherwise it just seems like fucking around with the greenhouse effect.”

Logan sighed impatiently and gave him an evil glance, but turned his attention back to the Jean clone. “Of this group? I am, I guess. Who's your boss?”

Her expression remained skeptical. “You're a killer.”

“Well, duh,” John said.

“Will you please shut the hell up?” Nariko snapped at him. “We get it, you're bitter and jaded. Guess what? No one cares! So shut up!”

John stared at her in slack jawed surprise, along with Kitty and Piotr. Shaheen said, “It's always the quiet ones who snap first.”

“Actually, it's usually me,” Logan pointed out, and then returned his gaze to Jean. “And you're a killer too, aren't you? Where are the missing people? You know, don't you?”

She scowled, her lips becoming a razor thin line. Ironically, she looked more like Jean than she ever had. “I don't understand this test.”

John threw his hands in the air and let them slap down at his sides, but that was the bulk of his comments. Shaheen said, “This isn't a test. How do we prove that to you?”

Jean considered that a moment, and then said, “I need to talk to the leader.”

Logan thought it meant his/her leader, but as soon as he felt a sudden, sharp pain deep in his head, he realized he'd just volunteered for something. Damn it.

Logan's head jerked back, as if he'd just been punched by an invisible man, and Piotr caught him barely before he hit the floor. “What the hell just happened?” Kitty asked.

Shaheen looked to the corner to ask Jean, but she was gone. Of course she was gone. She had no idea how much energy it took to cause a mass illusion, but it was probably a strain on the system. She knelt beside Logan as Piotr lowered him the rest of the way to the floor, and checked his pulse by touching his neck. Felt good; Logan had a frighteningly powerful heartbeat, like his heart honestly wanted to burst out of his chest and kick your ass on its own. If any organ could actually do that, it would be Logan's. Oh, and maybe one belonging to whoever it was in the torpedo tube.

“I think it just stole him away for a telepathic tete-a-tete. See, I do speak French.” Nobody seemed to appreciate that joke. Logan would have appreciated it.

“Since when do telepaths communicate like this?” Piotr asked, looking like he wasn't sure if he should start punching things or not.

She could only shrug. “Since when do you find living heads in a tube?”

Not even John had a smart ass answer to that one. Or if he did, he was sufficiently scared of Nariko to keep it to himself.

She decided to give him five minutes. Either Logan fought his way back or the head let him go. If neither happened, she'd have Nariko open the tube.

She didn't relish having to kill anyone. But if they didn't get Logan back, they weren't going anywhere.