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Rating: T for mild language, implied but never explicit sexual situations, super-power violence. Nothing worse than what's in this first chapter.

Disclaimer: I do not own X-men.

They told me I could help end the war, destroy the sentinels, save millions of people. They didn't tell me I'd have to work with the goddamn mutants to do it.

"Ana, you joined the mutant resistance movement. What part of that did you expect to not include mutants?" Payton was being patient with me, in that aggravating way of his that I'd long since gotten used to. The man standing with him, though… he flinched at little at my flattering description of mutant kind, and I thought he must be one of them. I shifted my body away from him to be a smaller target.

"The part that I'm doing now. Smuggling people, stealing food, espionage. That's what I'm good at, you know? I didn't sign up to work with freaks." Payton's guest was definitely a mutant; he kept sending Payton urgent looks. It didn't take much to read them: Is she really on our side? Is she safe? His eyes crawled over me, maybe looking for a sentinel alarm, maybe looking for vulnerabilities. I wasn't taking chances.

Payton finally deigned to notice the defensive tension growing between the mutant and me. "Ana, this is Cyber. He's one of the mutants you'll be working with."

"I didn't say I'd be working at all," I countered. At first, Payton had told me the job was simple, just another smuggling run, he said. I knew it wouldn't be simple—it never was when he showed up to debrief me in person—and then he'd dropped the mutant bomb on me. Now I wondered what else Payton wasn't telling me. "Why are you moving me out of Espionage?"

There was a secret there, in the way he twisted his shoulder back slightly, the way his eyes flicked sideways before looking at me. I hadn't survived being a traitor this long without learning to read people. Payton stepped closer to me, much closer, and spoke quietly. The action made me glance around instinctively; obviously nobody else was in this abandoned sewer, if only because we would all three already be dead if there had been.

"We're shutting everything down. Not just espionage. Something big is going down soon, something decisive. They're putting all the chips on just a few missions."

This was news. Were they preparing for a big sentinel attack? I hadn't heard anything in my circles, but congressmen weren't in the loop on everything… Or could this be something the mutants were initiating? Something about that idea caught at me. The X-men had focused entirely on defensive strategy my entire life. Were they finally going to fight back? "Are you guys going offensive?"

Payton's eyes flickered sideways again. Intrigued, I pressed the lead. "Chips. That sounds suspiciously like code for 'cannon fodder.' I'm no fighter, Payton."

Payton suddenly regained his equilibrium, standing up straighter. "No, but you're our best smuggler. We need you on this. This mission could win the war."

Winning the war was not something anyone ever talked about. Even during the impassioned pep talks I received from contacts here and there, the focus was always on standing true to the last man—to work for the greater good, even though the greater good was losing. My whole life, everywhere I turned, it was accepted fact that the mutants were all going to die. Later, it had become my personal opinion that everybody was going to die. This was a war that couldn't be won, by either side.

But Payton looked like he actually believed his own words. He'd been my contact for two years now, and I could tell the difference between his propaganda bull and his startlingly intact idealism. This was the latter. It seemed such a pleasant emotion that I almost wished I could share it.

I blew a long breath out through the corner of my mouth. "What would I have to do? Other than work with the freaks."

"Escort a high profile mutant to a secret rendezvous." Payton glanced at the mutant, who was now openly scowling at me. I had apparently not impressed him. "That's all I know," Payton continued. "I'm not cleared for the rest of the information, and neither are you until you accept the mission. But they wanted the best, and you're it."

"You mean I'd have to take the mission blind?" I didn't like this at all. How could Payton be so confident about this mission if he didn't know anything about it? Unless he was lying to me. I scanned his face for a shoulder twist or other clues to his motives. No, I decided. It was more likely that he simply trusted the mutants when they told him this was big—it was obvious that he trusted them, in fact. He was standing at ease with his back towards the mutant. Stupid.

I was looking for the proper words to convey how just how stupid Payton and his mission were when the mutant interrupted.

"I'm not sure I want to offer it to her anymore."

He'd been assessing me the whole time, I was sure, so I gave him one of my own good eye crawls: short and built to brick-like proportions, probably had a good tackle; well-fleshed out, meaning he managed to eat every day or so—or it had something to do with his mutation; a puffy M scarred over one eye, which meant he'd been caught, tortured and had escaped. A survivor.

Talking to Payton, I'd had a bad feeling about this mission. I still had a bad feeling, but the mutant's mistrust had somehow made me want to do it anyway. My offended pride egging me on, I asked, "Why not?"

"How about your blatantly anti-mutant prejudice?"

Suck it, I though sourly. Outwardly smiling, I spread my hands, "I'm on your side, aren't I?"

His look exhibited serious doubts about that, but Payton intervened before I could start back on him. "Ana is one of our best agents, Cyber. She was the one who got us the blueprints from Stryker's lab. She got Andrew Bishop out of Tokyo last year. And she planted the explosives that took out Sentinel HQ 4."

"You told me all that already. I still don't like her. She could be a double agent."

I was quickly coming to the conclusion that Payton had not told the mutant about my charming personality, just like he hadn't told me that he was bringing a damn freak along. I considered walking away, but the thought of offering my retreating back as a target was too much for my already strained nerves. I snapped at the two of them instead. "If you two are going to keep arguing, do it back at your safe house, where it's less likely a sentinel is going to sense you and kill us all."

The mere mention of a sentinel shut them both up promptly. I addressed the mutant. "I don't care if you don't like me. I don't like you. Call me a prejudiced bastard, or whatever. But if this mission really will stop the war, if people and mutants finally can start leaving each other the hell alone—I want in."

The mutant gave me another hard look, and I met him squarely in the eye. Despite his obviously distaste for me, there was a touch of desperation in his eyes, and I suddenly wondered if I was the first choice for this mission, as Payton had said. There had to be other smugglers out there, even ones who liked mutants. Why not go to them?

The mutant still wasn't saying anything. It was as if he was trying to peek at my soul with his dark eyes. "Are you a telepath?" I asked sharply. If he was digging inside my head he'd be sorry.

He shook his head. "No."

I was not about to take that on face value. "Show me. Show me what you do." I had warned them when they recruited me that no one was ever to use their mutation on me. I would turn them all over to the sentinels in a heartbeat before I let someone read my mind.

The mutant glanced around and then shrugged. "I need an electrical grid. Unless you want me to demonstrate on your phone."

I immediately wanted to refuse, but I was the one who wanted a demonstration in the first place. If I backed down, he might figure out just how nervous he made me. I slipped off my smart watch and threw it to him, hoping he wouldn't break it. He caught it easily.

"Is there a password?" he asked. I nodded, but he held up a hand to stop me from telling it. Was he some sort of computer psychic?

Suddenly, the hand holding my watch shone bright gold. It seemed to dissolve into light—which my smart watch then sucked up. Moments later, the piece of technology spat the light back out, and I repressed a shudder as it reformed into a normal hand. I faltered as he tossed the watch back to me, almost loath to touch it again. Touch it I did, though, carefully inspecting it for damage or other changes, which immediately revealed that my password no longer worked. I gave the mutant a sharp look.

He smirked at me. "I changed the password. I could've read all your files, deleted them, done anything I wanted, but you seem to be a private sort of person, so I was polite."

I reappraised my smart watch, trying to adjust to the huge risk I had just inadvertently run. What if he'd planted a tracker on it? Copied the files anyway? Set the damn thing to self-destruct? If the watch hadn't had all my covers and mission files on it I might have thrown it away right then. Instead, I gritted my teeth and asked him for the new password.

"mutantsarecool. No caps." Again the smirk. I imagined replacing it with a split lip and managed to conjure up a smile from the resulting satisfaction. I put the watch back on.

"Okay, I asked for that. But don't ever use your powers on me again. Not you or anybody else. Period."

The mutant crossed his arms. "I still didn't say I wanted you."

"You want me, or you wouldn't be here." I launched into my bluff: "Payton must have told you I can't stand mutants, so you wouldn't be here asking me unless you were incredibly stupid or there was no one else left to do it. All your other smugglers are busy, or dead. Right?"

The mutant glanced at Payton, and I imagined him wondering if the man had tipped me off somehow. I would've appreciated it if he had, but unfortunately Payton was a pain in the neck. I was going chew his ears off later for this, definitely; it was too early in the morning to be dealing with freaks. Payton gave the smallest of shrugs; prompting the mutant to return his attention to me.

"Or I could just be stupid," he said, obviously unwilling to admit that I'd nailed it. "A stupid freak, right?"

"Nah, all the stupid ones died out a couple decades ago. Evolution, you know." The mutant's lip twitched at the joke—not quite a smile. I was tempted to press the momentary advantage and turn up my charm, but forced myself to keep things straightforward. I was going to be working with this freak, God help me. He'd needed to know what he was getting, and I needed to know he could deal with it. "You may be a freak, but I'm willing to bet that you're smart enough to know you have to trust me. Just like I'm smart enough to know that I have to trust you, if I want to help win this war. So I'm in."

The mutant sighed. "HQ's gonna be thrilled…" He stepped forward, offering his hand. "You're in."

I flinched away from his hand automatically, a fact obviously not lost on the mutant. He raised an eyebrow at me. "Trust, remember?"

Repressing a powerful urge to swear under my breath, I berated myself for flinching—for showing my emotions so easily, for deserving the skeptical look he was giving me, for being afraid of him in the first place. I took his hand and shook it, wondering momentarily if his hand might turn gold again and flash freeze my own, or something equally frightening. It didn't.

"How soon can you be ready to leave?" he asked.

This I raised an eyebrow. It was an amateurish question. I needed to know the details of the operation: who I was smuggling, from what location, to where, what route we'd have to take… If we needed to sneak through a city I'd have to plant some cover stories ahead of time. Smuggling was a science, a very dangerous science. "That depends on what I'm actually doing. Let's hear the details."

"Here?" The mutant cast a significant look at our surroundings. Again, totally unnecessary—if this spot wasn't secure we'd have known it a lot sooner than this. But his look included Payton, too. Didn't he trust the man?

"Yes, here," I said a little impatiently. "Right now."

Payton seemed to take a cue from the mutant here. He swelled proudly, "I guess I got to go then. Good luck, Ana. Maybe when I see you next we'll have won the war."

He turned back the way he and the mutant had come, and suddenly I realized that Payton was going to leave me alone with the mutant. "Wait!"

Both men looked at me, and the stern part of my mind whispered that I was being stupid again, but the words were already tumbling out: "Why do you have to go? I mean, you've got higher clearance than I do, anyway."

Payton shook his head. "Not anymore. The fewer people in on this, the better. I can't tell what I don't know."

I knew that old mantra. It was the reason I didn't know where my food deliveries went, or who picked them up; it was the reason Payton didn't know the names of any of my covers; it was reason I had just been promoted above Payton's clearance level. The government was very good at finding out what it wanted to know. Payton's reasoning was logical, prudent—but a small part of me still did not want to be left alone in a dark subway with a mutant who could possess my swart watch. Even though, when it came right down to it, Payton would probably be on the mutant's side if it were decided by the powers that be that I was no longer an asset to the cause.

"I might need another head on this one. You could help," I said.

"Might need help?" The mutant interrupted. "I thought you were the best."

The affront to my professional pride automatically turned on my defenses; anxiety took a step back as I let a little venom into my voice: "I am."

I didn't say anything after that; I didn't know what to say. Both men were watching me closely, watching me stand there like an idiot. The cold, calculating side of me, the side that wasn't frightened of anything, let alone mutants, furiously demanded I pull myself together, and I quickly forced down my anxiety. Emotions got you killed; control kept you alive. Stay in control.

I looked to Payton. "Go. It's fine."

His smile returned, albeit laced with a touch of reproof. No doubt it was meant to remind me to play nice with the dangerous mutant. Well, I would play nice if the mutant played nice. That's all I ever asked of anyone: either play nice or leave me alone. Payton gave a small wave, a kind of hesitant, half-exuberant gesture that makes me think Payton might have been a candy store owner or a clown if not for the war, and then he retreats into the dark recesses of the subway tunnel. His flashlight bobs like a willow the wisp for a few moments after he disappears, and then it, too, is gone. It suddenly seems like Payton's departure has sucked half of the air out of the tunnel.

I glue my eyes to the mutant, watching his every move. He looks equally uneasy.

I take a deep long breath to forestall my next words. "So."

Okay, one word. I was warming up. I'd never talked to a mutant without some sort of intermediary before. For all I knew, one wrong word could get me killed. "Do I have to take some oath of secrecy or do a naked voodoo dance? To move up in clearance, I mean."

The mutant raised an eyebrow. "Would you even do a naked voodoo dance?"

"I've done worse. Much worse." Memories of state dinners and lap dances with senators wafted up from the cellar where I kept them. I pushed them back down. "I have a lot of different covers. They all require a different side of me. So not much bothers me."
The mutant crossed his arms. "Except mutants."

"Mutants don't bother me. It's the possibility that you might use your damn freaky unnatural tricks on me. Which, as I mentioned earlier, will not happen. Correct?" It was less of a question than a demand, but I still needed to hear him say yes. Even if I planned on not believing him.

"That might complicate things. Humans are fragile. Without help you might not be able to keep up."

"I'll keep up."

"Fine then."

Silence again. I really needed to move this conversation along. We'd been down here too long. There might be sentinels out. "Details? Where are the pick-up and drop-off points? Who am I smuggling? Does he look human? Will the government have a DNA track on him? Face recognition? Can he handle a gun?"

That last one earned an uncharacteristic snicker from the mutant. "Oh, he's pretty good with guns. He can take care of himself. So can everyone else on the team."

Alarm bells went off immediately. Smuggling was not a team thing. Not a team thing at all. It was almost like a scientific law. There was even an equation: one smuggler + one package = not dead. The more packages, the less likely the equation balanced. I could manage two packages in a pinch. I thought that's what this operation was going to be, when Payton mentioned I'd be working with this mutant. Package and guest. Not a team. "Team?" I asked, voice a tad higher than the well-practiced growl I'd had on tonight.

"Me and three others. We're his protection detail."

Five people! I repress the urge to swear loudly. Too dangerous. Instead, I run my hands through my hair desperately, ruining the meticulous braid. "Have you ever done any smuggling? No, you haven't. You want to know why I know that? Because only an idiot would try to smuggle five people at once. One is hard enough."

The mutant was a block of granite to my volcano. "It can't be avoided. He needs a protection detail."

"Protection! Every extra person I bring along doubles the chances he'll be caught. You call that protection? You said he could take care of himself."

"He can. But we have to guard against the unthinkable."

The mutant's grim expression was beginning to bother me. It was like the opposite Payton's near fanatic idealism—still fanatic, but pragmatic instead of optimistic. "The unthinkable being…?"

"Sentinels. They'll be tracking him from the minute we start." My neck tensed, and the mutant continued. "We don't think the government knows about this mission yet. We want to keep it that way as long as possible. That's why Espionage—and everything else—is being closed down. Everyone on our side is headed toward the Grand Canyon safe house for a huge diversionary attack. Everyone except this team."

The words sank in with physical weight. This mission was not just a desperate bid to win the war, then. It was the only bid. I wondered how many of the people being transferred to the Grand Canyon knew they were about to participate in a suicide attack. I had almost been one of those people, I realized, thinking about how close I had come to turning down the mission.

The mutant read my silence as comprehension and went on. "The problem is that the person we're transporting is a very high-profile target. Whether or not the government knows about the mission, whether or not they fall for the diversion, they're going to do everything they can to catch him. They're going to be throwing Sentinels at him." His look tightened. "And we're going to be standing between him and them."

I took a step away from the mutant. Up until now he had made me nervous simply because he was a mutant. Now I was well past nervous and coming up fast on the panic threshold. Why did everyone in the whole resistance have to be some sort of fanatic? Payton I could manage; he was just disgustingly faithful. This freak, though, was ready to throw himself at a Sentinel to protect someone who might be able to win the war—and I knew he would throw me at one just as quickly. I wasn't interested in a suicide mission. Not if it would win the war forty times over.

"Does that we include me?" I asked tightly.

His expression twisted and I could see that he was seeing me as a stupid human. "This mission is our last chance to win this war," he said, as if that explained and excused everything.

I stood firm. "I'm a smuggler, not a bodyguard."

The stupid-human look intensified. "It's this or the Grand Canyon."

"I'll walk. Right now. You can do without a smuggler at all."

That got him. His eyes flashed and he approached me for the first time that evening, purposefully encroaching on my personal space. "Don't you understand how important this is?"

For the first time that night, I didn't flinch at the unexpected action. "Clearly not. Here's what you need to understand. I'll do this mission. I'll get your precious mutant moron from Point A to Point B in one piece, and then I'll walk away. If the job goes south, I'll walk away. If people start telling me how to do my job, I'll walk away. If you try to turn me into Sentinel bait, I'll walk away. I could turn you in, but I won't, because I do want to win this war, whatever the hell you think. But if that freak so much as thinks about reading my mind, I'll call the sentinels on you myself. And then? I'll walk away. Got it?"

I couldn't tell during my lecture whether the mutant was intimidated into silence or so apoplectic with anger that he couldn't speak. Either reaction would have been unsurprising, so the sudden change in his expression at the end was perplexing. He looked confused.

"Read your mind?" he asked.

"Charles Xavier. That's the mutant I'm smuggling, right?" Professor X was the only person I knew who might inspire this kind of fanatical concern in the mutants. Usually they were a fairly pragmatic lot. I'd been suspecting my package would be Xavier for a few minutes now, with a kind of hopeful dread. On one hand, he was going to be freaking hard to hide. On the other hand, his telepathy—as long as he didn't use it on me—might make any close encounters a lot easier. Especially with four extra people along. I had just resigned myself to this idea, laid down my ground rules in the most absolute terms for the mutant, quelled any hopes for my participation in noble self-sacrifice—and then he cocked his head, and I realized something was wrong.

"It's not the professor," the mutant said.

My confidence deflated instantly. I was screwed. I could not be more screwed if I called the president and turned myself in. It didn't matter if the mutant wanted to turn me into sentinel bait, because I was already a dead man walking. If my package wasn't Charles Xavier, there was only one other person it could be. And that person hated humans more than anything else in the world. I didn't need the mutant to tell me who it was; certainly he could've seen that from the look on my face, but he told me anyway, the name ringing like a nail in my coffin.

"It's Magneto."