"Did you know him?"

Vascha had been so cooped up inside of her own head that, for a moment, she did not realize that the question had been directed at her. She snapped her head around, suddenly concerned that the individual who approached her would think her rude.

The person who had spoken, a tall, tanned girl with features that Vascha thought were probably Italian, seemed to interpret the quick, abrupt movement as agitation, and took a half step back, opening her hands in a gesture intended to convey that she meant no intrusion.

"Sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to startle you."

Vascha looked down at the modest, crudely-fashioned headstone she had been standing over. It was a cross, hastily bent into shape from various bits of scrap metal she had managed to pilfer here and there from the facility. Hung across its front was a section of split wood, suspended by a piece of wire, into which she had carved a single word. It had been months since she'd erected the marker, and the Colorado sun and wind had faded it slightly, but it could still be read clearly enough: BEHEMOTH.

"No," Vascha answered finally, then, "I mean, yes. Sort of..."

She fell silent, not entirely sure if the girl would be interested in her morose tale. She did not press Vascha to continue, but did not give away any of the telltale signs of disinterest or discomfort either. She simply crossed her arms casually across her stomach, holding her elbows, and gazed at Vascha's feet.

"We were in a camp together," Vascha began again, "He tried to help me escape. Colossus got him out with a handful of other Omegas, but the inhibitor fields... His heart had gotten too weak, so with all the stress of the escape..."

Vascha felt her stomach suddenly turn sour, and she pressed her bottom lip tightly between her teeth to stop it from quivering.

"I never saw his face when he was alive. Never got to say thank you except through a foot of concrete."

She was surprised almost to the point of shuddering when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The girl hesitated, feeling Vascha tense under her touch, but did not draw away.

"I'm Ciara," she said, "You're Vascha, right?"

Vascha turned, only now really taking the taller girl in. She was Vascha's age, young, but with the grim coldness in her eyes that she had become accustomed to seeing in mutants. She was beautiful, but with an odd sadness about her, and very quickly Vascha was not all that eager for the girl to take her hand off of her shoulder.

"Do you want to be alone?" Ciara asked, "It's just that, I've been here for a couple of weeks and you and Hunter are the only other mutants here my age, but the only time I see you is out here."

Vascha laughed and gestured at her jet-black skin. "I'm harder to spot indoors."

"I like your accent," Ciara smiled. "You sound like a spy in the old vids."

Vascha felt a flare of heat start from her collar bone and creep up her neck and into her cheeks. She was grateful for the black matte of her skin tone, or else Ciara would have seen her face go bright pink for certain.

"How did you get here?" Vascha asked, deflecting the topic of conversation away from herself, "You don't have a ring."

Ciara seemed confused for a moment, then brought her fingers to her neck, which was smooth and devoid of the shiny divot of light scar tissue that often came from extended wearing of an inhibitor collar.

"No," she admitted, "I never got picked up. I probably should have been, but Logan found me before..." She trailed off for a moment before sighing. "He says everything is falling apart here. That the government is in shambles. It's only a matter of time before the States fall. My mom packed up and headed for Canada. I wanted to go with her, but she told me that she couldn't keep me safe. That I had a better chance here."

"It's true," Vascha conceded, "But it doesn't feel that way, does it?"

Ciara made a small grunt of affirmation. There was a mood of tension at X-Men's Colorado base, hidden deep in the Rocky Mountains. When she had first arrived, the taste of freedom had been enough to allow Vascha to ignore it, but the longer she stayed, the more it became clear that the X-Men, what few remained, we're no longer the formidable force they had once been, capable of deflecting nearly any threat. Mutants like Jubilee and Colossus were old, constantly battling lingering injuries and ailments, while others like the elusive and rarely-seen Nightcrawler seemed to have given up on the X-Men's peacekeeping and freedom-fighting agenda altogether. Young mutants like Vascha and Ciara and Hunter were treated gingerly, as though they were fragile, precious things. And in a way, Vascha supposed, they were.

"Hey," Vascha said, "Do you want to see something cool?"

Fifteen minutes later, Vascha had led Ciara back inside the deep, cavernous interior of the Colorado base. Most of the massive facility was kept dark to conserve energy and to give off as little indication as possible to prying satellites that anything existed there at all. The place was so big and operated by such a small number of X-Men and associated mutants that one could go long stretches of time without seeing another living soul. In a way, the dark and solitude made Vascha feel at ease. It was clearly not the case for Ciara, who seemed instantly on edge as the black-skinned Russian mutant led her down a narrow maintenance corridor.

"You okay?" Vascha asked.

"Tight spaces," Ciara laughed a little unconvincingly. "Not my favorite."

"Well, be prepared to get over that in a hurry," Vascha smirked. She reached up, unclasped the fastening bolt on a vent fixture, and swung the door open.

"In there?" Ciara asked skeptically, peering inside the total darkness. "Looks tight."

"It is," Vascha admitted. "But it never gets any smaller. It's built for people to go inside. Forge goes in all the time to do maintenance." She hoisted herself up into the passage, her skin letting her practically disappear into the shadows. "Are you coming?"

Ciara looked to her left and right down the corridor. "What are you trying to show me, exactly?"

"Don't you ever wonder what Logan and the others get up to in the areas where we're not allowed?" Vascha asked with a grin that served no one but herself in the darkness. She reached a hand out. "Come on, it'll be fun."

Ciara might have been unenthusiastic about small spaces, but Vascha had been right in assuming that it was just mild discomfort, and not a full-blown phobia. She seemed to adapt quickly to the darkness and oppressive feeling of metal and wires and pipes on all sides, pressing against their bodies. They had to scoot their frames awkwardly, squatting and shuffling their feet simultaneously while being careful not to bump their heads or elbows.

"How did you find out about this?" Ciara whispered.

"I told you, I'm hard to see inside," Vascha replied. "I've spent awhile following Forge around. He gets around the facility the most, and knows the most about it. From what I can tell, this place used to be a missile silo before the X-Men converted it. It goes down almost fifty levels."

"Fifty?I've only seen three or four, tops. How long have you spent in these vents?"

"I got lost in one for three days." Vascha tried to say it casually, but she had a certain amount of pride in her own resilience. She was bragging, just a bit. She wanted Ciara to be impressed.

It seemed to do the trick, and Ciara whistled under her breath. Vascha felt a small swell of warmth in her chest.

"Logan isn't exactly a mindful caretaker, is he?" she joked.

"I think he wants us to fend for ourselves, as best we can," Vascha said. "I get the feeling he's always testing us, for some reason."

"Right?" Ciara said, "It's like he wants to see what we do with all this free time he gives us."

Suddenly, Vascha heard voices bounce off the metal interior of the shaft and made a quit shushing noise under her breath, putting a hand on Ciara's to signal her to slow down and move more quietly.

"This is the conference room where they usually meet," Vascha whispered, "It sounds like Logan and a few others."

As they drew nearer, they came upon a new vent entrance, bright lights piercing the darkness of the maintenance shaft in white beams. The two girls carefully positioned themselves in front of it and, careful not to get too close to the slits of the vent, peered into the room.

Logan, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Jubilee each sat around a high-tech circular table that had been designed to accommodate at least two dozen. As it was, they were spaced far apart, each having to raise their voices slightly to be heard over the distance, much to Ciara and Vascha's benefit.

"You cannot be serious, Logan," Jubilee snapped, obviously in the middle of a heated disagreement with the older man. "Rescuing children, taking them in, defending them, teaching them how to survive, that's one thing. Showing them how to kill? How to be soldiers? That is something completely different, and I'm not going to sit back and let you do it."

"By not teaching them to be soldiers, we're just hanging them out to dry, kid," Logan replied, his voice little more than a low growl. "It's time we stopped pretending that our mission today is the same as it was when Chuck was still alive."

"It is the same!" Colossus insisted. "We are here to defend the weak from the strong, to act as peacekeepers. To use force and violence only where no other options remain. We are not an army, and we do not go out picking fights, and we do not kill where it can be avoided." The big Russian stood, placing both of his massive hands down on the table. "Teaching children to be assassins? It's criminal, Logan. It's an assault on everything I joined the X-Men to uphold."

"Pick ze fight or no," Nightcrawler hissed, his spaded blue tail flicking like an angry cat, "We are at war, Piotr. We have all been denying it for years, some more than others. I have known what has been at stake ever since I watched my wife bleed to death in New York. Zis is an extermination, and all we have done in response is make it a little bit harder to find us. It is time we started fighting back, with every tool we have available."

"Not. With. Children!" Jubilee said, practically shouting and banging a fist on the metal table, a small chirp of her explosive sparks zapping out of her knuckles like an exclamation point. "Listen to both of you! Listen to what you're suggesting!"

"They're not children," Logan said, his voice still low and cool.

"How can you say that?" Colossus asked, visibly shocked.

"Jubilee," Logan turned to face the asian woman, "When you first saw Vascha, thirty pounds underweight, a shiv in her hands, ready to kill or take her own life to be rid of her imprisonment, did you see a child there? Piotr, when you first met Ciara, a girl who had taken to beating men nearly to death just to make money to support herself, did you see an abundance of innocence in her eyes?"

Vascha gave a start when she heard their names spoken, when she realized that the topic of conversation was centered around herself and Ciara, around all the children that the X-Men had liberated or saved from the brutal existence they had been forced into. She turned her gaze and saw that Ciara was equally rapt in concentration, taking in every word now that they had context for what was being discussed. Logan intended to train them. To teach them to fight. But for what?

"Their past doesn't make it any more right, Logan," Jubilee huffed, though it was clear that her conviction had been shaken, if only the tiniest bit. "There's no justifying this train of thought."

"I don't know if you two have been asleep for ze past decade or so," Nightcrawler said, "But mutants, our entire race, is dying. If we don't teach these kids how to defend and protect themselves, with violent force if necessary, if and when a cure for Terminus is found, there won't be anyone to use it on. Zat is all ze justification I need. How many more times will we save a mutant child only to hear of their death weeks or months after they have left our protection? Because I want no part in zat any more than you want part in zis."

Piotr, the Colossus, stood abruptly.

"You're right," he said. "I want no part in this." He looked at Logan. "Train your disciples if you must. I sincerely hope that you can teach them to survive. But if you follow that path, you will do so on your own. You will be welcome here no longer."

With that, the big Russian turned to leave.

Jubilee stood as well, walked to where Logan sat, and knelt beside him. He did not turn to meet her gaze.

"I am begging you, Logan. Please reconsider this. These children have no basis on which to make such a choice. You will be damning them to a hollow life just as surely as the internment camps."

"I've made up my mind, Jubilee," Logan replied in his characteristic low growl.

There was a silence in the conference room that lasted nearly a minute. In that time, Vascha was dead certain that her heartbeat was growing louder by the second, beating viciously in the top of her chest, making her throat feel tight and constricted. At any moment, she was sure that one of the adults would her the thump thump of her pulse and realize that they had been eavesdropping.

Finally, Jubilee raised her hand. For a moment, it looked as though she meant to cradle Logan's head, but then she brought her palm around and slapped him hard across the cheek. It was not vicious. Not meant to injure or even really hurt him, but Vascha jumped at the sudden violent gesture. She did not know why, but it made her want to weep.

"Charles Xavier would be ashamed of you." Jubilee said simply, barely above a whisper, and walked out.

Vascha knew that Logan had barely even registered the strike. In her short time with the man, she had learned that he could endure almost any amount of pain with little cost to himself. Nevertheless, Logan grimaced as though he had been stabbed in the heart.

"It really is falling apart," Ciara whispered. "All of it. They can't protect us."

"No," Vascha replied. "But he can."

And she believed it.

"...Sinister..."

The voice seemed to emanate from nowhere, as though it had originated within Vascha's own head. It was a strange, unfamiliar female's voice, calling out as though from many miles away, barely a ghost of real, tangible speech. Vascha whipped her head around, searching for the source, but without reason or explanation, the world around her had become slow, foggy, as though she were suddenly being transplanted out of reality. Her grip on her own self, her own body, became suddenly hazy and loose, like her consciousness was being detached.

She wanted to ask Ciara if she had heard the voice too, but she quickly realized that Ciara was not there. Logan, Nightcrawler, the conference room, the maintenance vent, all of it was melting away, being deconstructed, as though the strange voice had begun to burn away the physical world.

"I see you've recovered nicely."

What was going on?

"...Essex!"


Laura Kinney flexed her fingers, watching the tendons of her wrist stretch taught beneath the skin as she worked the digits. It was the arm that had been hastily reattached after Vascha Aleksandrov had severed the limb with what could have only been an adamantium sword that the mutant called Rin carried. She vowed to one day wear those swords as trophies on her belt the same way she now wore Vascha's short blades. Blades that had at one time been Wolverines skeletal claws. It had been almost five days since the flesh and bone and nerves had mended themselves, and the only evidence that any injury had been sustained was a numbness that still persisted in the tips of her fingers, and even that was quickly fading.

She could still faintly detect the spot in her upper bicep where the blade had sliced clean through her muscle. It was certainly not the first time that she had experienced the lingering phantom sensation of grievous wounds that most humans could not hope to recover from, but the circumstances of this injury had made her reflect on the conflict more than she normally would have. She could remember the blinding anger that had consumed her during the attack on the Ark. The bloodthirsty rage that had fueled her actions, and allowed her to engage Logan's students with the same detached, predatory coldness that she had always felt when dispatching a target. It was a product of her training, of her conditioning, that allowed her to function with such a singular mode of thinking, and she had grown accustomed to it over the years. But as she tested the newly healed muscle of her arm and recalled the lifeless face of Vascha Aleksandrov, her body blown apart by her own explosives, she could not ignore the lingering, infuriating sensation of regret. It was not something that she was accustomed to feeling.

She again regarded the hand for a moment, which briefly and suddenly seemed a completely alien object to her mind, then thumbed a pad in the lift that would bring her down to the operation laboratory of the science wing of the Ark. She had learned from the airship's computer that Sinister had finally left the intensive care unit into which he had been sequestered until his body could fully recover from the burn damage he had sustained at the hands of Aleksandrov's bomb. Burn damage that had reduced him to little more than a shambling, shuddering pile of cracked, blackened flesh casing a scorched skeleton and organs.

She had never even considered that he might die, but his recovery time had nonetheless surprised her. His healing ability had been pilfered and distilled from the genes of many powerful mutants, including Wolverine, and should have handled the damage with relative ease. Instead, his recuperation had been agonizingly slow and painful, and had required nearly all of the Ark's capacity for intensive medical treatment.

In truth, Laura's interest in Sinister's recovery had less to do with the man and his designs and more with what his condition had afforded her. While he had been incapacitated, the ship's top level clearance had been passed on to her, and while she could not unlock the entirety of the ship's functions and the secrets that lay within, it had allowed her to exact the payment that Sinister had promised her years ago in exchange for her services, which she had only recently accepted would never be given to her willingly. The mere thought of it brought a wash of heat into her neck and cheeks, and she fought the urge to grin to herself. She could not be certain yet. It had not been long enough for the ship's computers to confirm it, but she was almost positive that it had worked. She could feel it. It was simply a matter of informing Sinister.

Which could mean that I'm about to walk into my own execution, she frowned. She did not think Sinister would have such a hasty, violent reaction to the news, but she could not be certain. Parts of his plans that he had believed flawless had unraveled entirely in the past week, and there was no telling how he would take her surreptitious insubordination. It was certainly possible, if very unlikely, that he would lash out at her in anger. That was okay, though. His usefulness to her was at an end now, and she would not mind the chance to finally go toe-to-toe with the man. She had never been oblivious to the idea that their constant, casual tension might one day escalate beyond their control.

You're going to walk in there and tell him you're done, she thought, He has the Ark, his empire has rooted itself, there's nothing more he needs you for. Just walk away. And if he can't accept that, well...

Guiding lights directed Laura through the corridors, and she was thankful that they did not lead her towards the hall of cryogenically frozen mutants in their hibernation pods. Sinister had often been fond of that room, but it made Laura feel nothing but discomfort. A fact that he was not ignorant to. What was more, the genome troopers had only just finished cleaning out the hundreds, maybe thousands of corpses that had been created when Vascha's bomb had shorted the power, and Laura was not enthusiastic to see firsthand the extent of the damage.

She was surprised when she was finally able to piece together where the ship's computers were leading her. She thumbed the pad that opened the sliding doors with a hiss of air, and found herself in the bay of the Ark's array of automated surgical suites; A collection of some of the most advanced medical machines on the planet. More than simple robotic arms with instruments attached that performed the finer tasks of surgery like those in the small infirmary near the Ark's bridge. In the care of these machines, a person could be rebuilt, brought back from the brink of death. It was in this room that Sinister had undergone the bulk of his intensive treatment.

But his treatment was long since completed, so what was he doing here?

The room had been kept dim, so that the observation windows that looked into the chambers where the operations were performed seemed to blaze with intense white light. Against one, she saw Sinister's looming silhouette and made her way toward him.

"Sinister."

He did not move, and made no indication that he had heard her.

"I see you've recovered nicely," she said, coming to a stop beside him, leaning forward and peering into the man's face. Again, he seemed not to hear her. His eyes were closed tightly, his brow furrowed in concentration.

Laura could not pinpoint it, but there was something that was different in the mutant's appearance, which seemed redundant, since his appearance was already "something different." Most obviously his long hair had been reduced to stubble on his scalp after the bomb's fire had burned it away, but it was more than that. His skin seemed tighter, pulled over his bones in a way that did not strike Laura as healthy. The white pallor of his head and face combined with his newly shorn locks made him look more like a living skull than a man. There was also a dryness to his complexion that had not been there before, as though his skin was scaly, as though it might flake off at the lightest touch. She reasoned that all of this was a byproduct of healing such massive burns in such a short period.

"Essex!" she snapped, practically in his ear.

Sinister opened his eyes with a start and turned to look at Laura. She had expected him to be visibly annoyed, as was his custom when he was interrupted from anything that occupied him. But this time he seemed only mildly surprised, as though she had woken him from a light sleep.

"Laura," he said, the corners of his dark lips turning upward in a small, enigmatic smile, "I'm glad you're here."

"Oh?" Laura raised an eyebrow. She found that hard to believe.

"Mmm," he hummed in affirmation, turning back to look through the window at the medical procedure in progress. There was something in his voice that was different as well, Laura realized. It was harsher, damaged-sounding. Even his breathing, undetectable as it was to normal human ears, sounded to Laura as though it came to Sinister as an effort, like a man with emphysema. The explosion, she realized, had taken more from Sinister than anyone had suspected. Perhaps even himself. He was still not fully recovered. He was weakened, even.

Laura felt a twitch in the muscles of her forearm. The muscles that triggered her claws.

She stared a moment longer at the side of the man's head before looking into the surgical suite. At first, her eyes could not make sense of it, but rapidly they adjusted to the strangeness of what they beheld, and Laura could not stop the sharp gasp of sucking air that escaped her clenching teeth.

"It was good of you to place her remains into stasis for me," Sinister said, "She is going to prove invaluable."

"I thought you were just going to sample her genetic data," Laura growled. "This is sick. Even for you."

"Oh, I did that. But I have further use for this one."

Vascha Aleksandrov's corpse, what was left of it, lay motionless on the operating table. Every conceivable medical instrument that the Ark employed was attached to her in some way or another, monitoring and measuring and calculating every aspect of the inert form. Parts of the body that had apparently been deemed too damaged to bother with had been carved away, leaving her with little more than a head, a torso, and her legs, all of which had, at various places, small chunks removed where burns or shrapnel had ruined the tissue. Her arms were nowhere to be seen, and at both shoulders there were only small, bandaged lumps.

Even those parts of her that remained were a morbid sight to behold. Almost every inch that had been preserved had also been covered in transparent, nano-infused bandages, holding her together despite broken, burned skin the color of fresh tar and bones that had been shattered into pieces. A huge syringe attached to a transparent hose had been sunk deep into her chest, while a viscous white fluid, artificial blood most likely, was manually pumped in and out of her body. Similarly, a mask had been securely affixed over her mouth, and a machine steadily pumped oxygen into her lifeless lungs, causing her chest cavity to rise and fall with a macabre, mechanical rhythm. Only one eye had been left undamaged and uncovered, and it stared, open and unblinking, towards the ceiling. Periodically, a small, delicate robotic arm would reach down from above and spritz the exposed eye with a puff of moisture, keeping it from drying out. The resulting droplets that ran down the mutant girl's lifeless cheek made it seem as though Vascha was silently weeping. Laura had to turn away.

"Is she conscious?" Laura said, her mouth contorting into a crooked snarl, the metallic taste of disgust rising up under her tongue.

"No. She's not yet even technically alive. I have put her back together just enough to jump-start areas of the cerebrum. I've been using her as a sort of test subject for my mental abilities, accessing parts of her long term memory. It's been difficult, like watching an uncatalogued, damaged collection of vids, with no real system for determining what they are until you've viewed and tagged them. Even then, the recollections are sometimes too fragmented to be useful. But there are sections that are beautifully intact."

"Why?" Laura asked. She could think of nothing else to say, and had to restrain herself from screaming it at him.

Sinister shrugged in such a lackadaisical way that Laura felt herself instantly infuriated. "A plethora of reasons. My coming empire has many unforeseen needs and difficulties, and Ms Aleksandrov's unfortunate attempt at martyrdom is no excuse for lack of participation."

"What...needs? What...difficulties?" Laura growled, "She was dead. She still is. Is there no line you won't cross?"

"Death," Sinister mused, "Is an oft over-estimated obstacle. It's nothing more than a dissipation or redirection of energy. If you can repair the right pathways, get the energy flowing properly again... Well, there's no limit to what one can do. Life is not special, Laura..." He paused, looked at her with a strange, contemplative gaze. "Anyone can create it, given the proper tools. It's right there for the taking."

Laura felt a sudden prickling on anxiety on the back of her neck, but otherwise maintained the same stoic, middle-distance gaze that she nearly always wore.

"But, more specifically," Sinister turned away from the viewing window and pressed something on a nearby touchscreen. Laura heard the familiar ping of a summoning chime. "I need her memories because, as uncomfortable as I am with admitting it, I was wrong about something."

A door different from the one through which Laura had entered slid open with a hiss, and a genome trooper marched in, the heels of his high-tech combat boots clicking in perfect time. The clone soldier walked to Sinister, halting three feet behind him, standing at rigid attention. Sinister turned to face him.

"Physically, they're perfect in every way," Sinister smiled, his voice still carrying the odd, strained tone that Laura had noticed before. "They never tire, never question, they execute orders to a level of perfection that can never be achieved naturally. They are absolutely loyal and will fight until their last breath if they are ordered to do so. And yet, not even a week ago, Logan's students mowed through them as though they were nothing more than common thugs."

Sinister stepped forward, held out a pale, wiry hand. "Your helmet."

The trooper immediately reached up and undid the snaps and seals that secured the insect-like mask to his face. There was a hiss of pressurized air escaping, and the faint smell of ozone and static as the sterile environment of the suit was broken. He pulled the apparatus away revealing the face that made Laura's stomach twist like a tortured snake. Logan's face, that was somehow not Logan's face, stared out, his features, his skin alike in every way to the man he had been clone from, and yet it was not at all alike. There was a newborn's softness there. Skin that had never seen daylight or injury, that would never know life's struggle or sadness that would bring with it the wrinkles of experience, seemed to distort a face that wanted to be familiar in her mind. His artificial smell filled her nostrils and made her curl her nose, she found it so offensive.

With no warning, Sinister's hand snapped forward like the stinger of a scorpion, his fingers latching onto the clone trooper's neck like an iron vice. Laura winced involuntarily as she herd the pop and crackle of a snapping trachea and ligaments that severed under the crushing pressure of the grip. Laura was secretly impressed. Even in what she perceived to be a weakened state, the man was superhumanly strong.

The trooper's face, besides immediately turning red, then a deep, unhealthy shade of purple, did not waver in the slightest as it was choked of oxygen.

"All the technology I could offer, all the modification, the purification," Sinister observed, as though he were watching an experiment conducted under a microscope, "And Vascha and her young comrades tore them apart. They made a mockery of my work. They spat in the face of perfection."

The clone trooper's hands went limp, his detached helmet clattering to the floor as he died. Even Logan's healing factor, as distilled and refined as it might have been, could not combat with oxygen deprivation for long. The only noise that came from him was a slight gurgling as Sinister released him and allowed him to fall to the floor in a crumpled pile. Laura was both surprised and relieved to find that the abomination's death made her feel absolutely nothing.

Sinister looked at Laura again. "Why do you think that is?"

Before she could stop herself, Laura rolled her eyes and shook her head. She had to try and remember that, unlike before, she no longer had nothing to lose in upsetting Sinister.

"You bred yourself a perfect tiger, then you cut its balls off," she offered. "Logan was more than a healing factor and great senses. He was experience. I told you this when you first set about making these...things. Logan was the warrior that he was because he fought in nearly every major theater of modern warfare, accumulating dozens of lifetimes worth of tactical thinking, military strategy, and special ops training. With each new age of technology, he was put through a new grinder, tearing away the parts of him that were superfluous or unnecessary. He wasn't a perfect warrior because of his claws or his body. He was a perfect warrior because of his mind. When you took the clones' ability to think for themselves away, you doomed them to fall at the hands of any decent warrior who could think adaptively."

The words came so naturally, from a place of such bizarre honesty, that Laura was surprised even as they came pouring out of her mouth. Sinister seemed to notice as well, and raised the flesh above his brow where his eyebrows had been singed off. He made no move to silence her, however, so she continued.

"Logan trained the Sons to be fighters, of course, but if I knew him at all, his primary concern would have been in their mental conditioning. Making sure they they could endure, could adapt to, and could get past any obstacle, any mental challenge, any mode of torture or handicap that could be implemented against them. The Sons of Logan tore through your precious genome troopers not because they were lucky, or because they were better warriors than the clones. They won because you presented them with an awful, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking scenario, and they flat-out didn't give a shit. There's a world of difference between a soldier who is ignorant of the hopelessness of his situation, and one that knows the odds are stacked against him and just keeps fighting anyway."

"Like yourself," Sinister offered, with the slightest hint of mocking to his tone.

"With the significant difference that I didn't choose any of this," she retorted.

Sinister pursed his lips and looked back into the operating room where Vascha's lifeless body was kept in a perpetual state of artificial vitality. "You admire them."

Laura turned and looked into the operating suite as well. "More than anything, I think I feel sorry for them. We live in a world where warfare is a valuable skill set for children."

"Not under my empire," Sinister intoned. "I mean that seriously, Laura. And it's all the more reason why I need Vascha's memories. I need access to her training, her life, what made her as good as she was."

"So you can put it into your troopers."

"Exactly. They are physical perfection, but they are only a vessel. I can see that now. Their minds must be refined as well as their bodies have been."

Suddenly, with an intense, heavy, metallic dread, Laura knew that her involvement with Sinister was not over. Not by a long shot. She had always suspected, always assumed, that he was too blinded by his own ego to ever adapt, to see errors in his own plan. She had always counted on the fact that, eventually, he would fail, and that she would be far away from him by the time he did. But his brush with death at the hands of Vascha and her team had apparently woken something in him. He had had his eyes opened to doubts, to the holes and kinks in his design. And he was already working to expunge them. If he continued down this path, there would soon be nowhere on earth where Laura could go to get away from him and his influence.

She had to stay. She had to stay in his employ. Even if just for a little while longer. She had to know what the world was about to face. The knowledge manifested itself in a knot in her throat.

Laura looked again at Vascha's inert form, her exposed eye still leaking the saline solution, artificial tears flowing down an artificially alive cheek. That was Logan's legacy, laying there on that table, mutilated and bandaged together, and soon Sinister would dive in and tear her apart, find what he needed, and twist her into something even more broken and dead than she already was. It was no way to treat an honorable warrior.

"Now," Sinister said, "What can I do for you, Laura?"

She could still do it. She could still turn away from this man, this would-be emperor. All she needed to do was say it to him: I'm done working for you. I've given you my services, and I gave myself the compensation you promised. Our transaction is complete.

"I..." Laura began before pausing to lick her lips, her mouth suddenly feeling dry and chalky, "I just wanted to know how you'd like the boys and I to start handling the local gangs. The Duke's of New York have sent what I suppose is their version of a formal envoy asking you to meet with them."

"Ah yes," Sinister smiled, "The rats seek passage on a greater ship. Tell them we will meet them in good time."

"There's also the question of the refugees that are already arriving. They're coming in large numbers, and there is great confusion as to how to properly house and protect them, as per your promise."

"Mmm," Sinister said, "I'd like you to handle that as you see fit. Have the troopers assist in setting up some form of camp in the area surrounding the Ark. I'd like you to begin to put together a system of registering every mutant who has come to join us. Use the Ark's supplies to provide for their needs. We have more than enough to go around. Tell them to be patient, and their cure will be forthcoming."

Laura nodded and turned to leave.

"This is a special day for you," he called after her.

She stopped, looked over her shoulder. Did he know? Had he somehow guessed? She was still more than confident in the mental barriers that had been erected in her mind, but if he was going to be spending most of his time practicing his telepathy, it might not be long before he could catch the errant strands of her thoughts. That was a dangerous prospect to consider.

"In what way?"

He flashed her a thin, shark-like grin of pointed, pearlescent teeth. "It's the day you really, truly join the Empire."


A/N: Hey guys. Hope you've enjoyed the story so far, but as you can probably tell from my lack of updates, I've lost a little bit of steam on this one. If you would really like me to continue, please review or send me a message telling me so. I'm more than happy to keep going, and I don't want to seem like I'm doing this just for recognition by you, the readers, but if the interest in this saga has truly waned, there are other threads I can devote my time to. Let me know, okay?

Hori out.