"Who should withhold me?
Not fate, obedience, nor the hand of Mars
Beckoning with fiery truncheon my retire…"

Troilus and Cressida Act V Scene III


The girl was Jean's age – maybe slightly younger – and Jean did not question her arrival.

For one thing, she didn't have the chance; the girl opened the restraints with some sort of handheld computer, urged Jean off the steel table, and within seconds was half-dragging her out of the room and down a series of short corridors paneled in the same polished, gleaming metal.

For another, her brain was too busy trying to remember how to walk without falling down to worry about who, exactly, was helping her. The neural scrambler was apparently not limited to blocking her mutant powers; it was also disrupting her normal brain functions, including the ability to balance. That made for a problematic quick getaway, but the girl helped her stay upright as much as possible.

Finally they stopped in what seemed to be a storage room of some kind. Lining one wall were enormous glass tanks of yellow-green liquid, with slow, lazy spirals of bubbles working their way to the surface.

"Okay," the girl said, letting Jean lean against the wall while she went back to manipulating her handheld. "We can wait here for a minute, but we've gotta keep moving. Can you – can you walk, do you think?"

"I… don't know." It was getting worse; stringing the words together required Olympian effort. Jean felt along the curved metal band pinching her skull. "I have to get this off."

The girl looked appalled. "Don't touch it! I can't disarm it – I don't have the codes. Only he does."

Disarm it? Jean dropped her hand as if it had been burned – or detonated. "Who is he?"

The girl shook her head, panic vibrating from her every cell. "You don't want to know. You really really don't. You just want to get your friends and get out of here."

Jean accepted that as the truth. "So who are you?"

The girl was small and fine-boned, with dusky brown skin and masses of curly black hair. She was wearing a green-and-orange outfit that reminded Jean of surgical scrubs for some reason, although scrubs were never cut that tight.

The girl pushed her hair back. Little stubs of silver metal framed her face. "Threnody. I – work here."

Jean tried to put that together, and gave up. "Like a lab assistant?"

"I guess." Threnody checked the handheld. "Okay, we have to do this fast. Your friend, the one you came with, is up in the house. But Scott is in the lower lab, and I don't know how we're gonna get through the security, but I promised him I'd try –"

Jean came off the wall with delight and relief – and then grabbed for the support again. "You've talked to him? He's okay?"

"Yeah. He's okay. Just a little, um, worse for wear." Threnody stuck the handheld in the waistband of her green pants. "Are you okay to run?"

"Not really," Jean said. She took a deep breath and tried an experimental psychic push against the headband. Predictably, pain stabbed at the space behind her eyes, leaving the world hot and askew. She leaned over and braced her hands on her knees, trying to keep her breathing level.

You will not pass out, she told herself fiercely. You will save Scott. You will find Rogue. You will go home and have a good Christmas.

"We have to run," Threnody said, fretting again. "When he finds out you're gone – We have to run."

Jean forced herself upright, blinking hard. "Then we'll run."

Threnody nodded, although she looked far from convinced. For that matter, Jean wasn't so sure, either, and the first few steps nearly convinced her that it was impossible.

Threnody carefully checked the corridor before easing out. Jean echoed her.

"Here we go," the other girl whispered. Fear and excitement danced in her voice, and she got a firm grip on Jean's forearm. "Follow me!"

And she took off at a run.

Jean didn't have a choice; it was run or be dragged. So she ran. She stayed on her feet for all of three yards and then lost her balance, spilling across the floor and nearly taking Threnody with her.

"Sorry," she said as Threnody hauled her up again, feeling embarrassed. As if any of it was her fault.

"Come on," was the only thing Threnody said.

As they continued through the maze of corridors, Jean did her best not to humiliate herself any further. It was more difficult than might be expected, given that her brain was being constantly microwaved. She staggered, she stumbled, she put out her hands to regain her balance more than once – but she didn't fall any more, and in her current condition, that was, she thought grimly, an accomplishment.

Finally, they came to an elevator that looked much too big for a lab with only one scientist and one assistant. It looked like a heavy freight elevator, in fact. Something used to haul literal tons of equipment.

The elevator door slid open as soon as they approached. Jean leaned against one metal wall inside, breathing hard enough to steam the panels. Threnody plugged her handheld into a terminal and touched the screen. The doors closed, and then the elevator lurched and began to descend with a protesting grind.

"This'll take us right to the lower lab," Threnody said. "I might be able to hack the lab door controls, but like I said, security is super tight. He's real serious about keeping you guys here."

"Why are you doing this?" Jean asked, too exhausted to be more polite. "Helping us?"

The girl fidgeted with a curling strand of hair, pulling it forward to obscure her face, and stared hard at her feet. "I… I asked to come here. Begged him to take me. It doesn't matter why," she added in a rush. "But you didn't, and he can't –"

The elevator stopped with a jolt and a thud, but the doors didn't open; instead a little glyph lit up on the handheld's screen. It blinked patiently.

Threnody swiped at her eyes before looking up at Jean again. With tears still glinting, she said fiercely, "It's not right, what he wants to do with you guys! It's not fair! And I – I couldn't live with myself, if… if…"

Jean put a hand on the girl's shoulder, trying to be comforting, and nearly fell over instead. "It's okay, Threnody. Thank you."

Threnody gave her a crooked, half-hearted smile. Pressed the blinking door glyph on the handheld.

The elevator door hummed open –

- and everything erupted into chaos.

The sterile, impersonal lighting suddenly turned cherry red. At the same moment an alarm began blaring, loudly enough to make Jean put her hands over her ears. She had to let go almost immediately in order to keep her balance.

"What happened?" she yelled at Threnody.

"I don't know!" Threnody was frantically tapping and clicking on the handheld. "Security's been tripped – but it wasn't us! – I'm gonna pull up a video feed –"

Jean looked over Threnody's shoulder at the camera footage displayed on the tiny screen. Three – no, four - human figures were rampaging down the metal corridors. It was a testament to her mental blurriness that she didn't immediately recognize the ragged trenchcoat, claws, and long yellow hair.

Even when she did, the scene playing out made no sense. Was the neural scrambler making her hallucinate now, too? She squinted. "Are they… are they all Sabretooth?"

Threnody gasped and dropped the handheld as if it had bitten her. It hit the floor on one of its corners and shattered into a sparking mass of circuits and broken metal. Threnody gasped again, went down on her knees, and tried to pick it all up. "No, no no no! Oh, he's gonna kill me – oh this is bad –"

The noise and red lights were making it even harder for Jean to function. She wobbled and put one hand on the wall, squinting at the massive lab door and its impressive array of locks and scanners. Scott was behind that. Her heart leapt into her throat at the thought that she might never get any closer. "What's going on?"

"I was only supposed to activate one!" Threnody wailed, standing, clutching the handheld's pieces to her chest. She had gone pale in genuine fear. "To catch you guys – I don't know how four got out!"

"It was five," a familiar voice growled in a very unfamiliar way. "And they're still after me, so can we get a move on?"

"Rogue!" Jean turned to see her teammate – too quickly; the corridor spun and she lost her already-precarious balance. Rogue caught her one-handed and easily set her upright again. Belatedly, Jean understood what Rogue's hairy appearance meant. "Oh no – don't tell me –"

Rogue raised her lip in a silent snarl, but it relaxed into a more rueful grimace. "Desperate times and all." She gave Threnody a suspicious once-over. "Who're you?"

"Threnody," Jean said. "She, um, works here. She's helping us escape."

Rogue's eyes narrowed to feline slits, and a low growl set up. "I don't like it."

"I – I really am," Threnody said, swallowing, nervous. She was inching away from Rogue. "Helping. I really am."

Jean put a hand on Rogue's arm and said, "She is."

Rogue sniffed, then shook all over, rather like a dog flinging off water. "Okay, okay. We ain't got time to argue about it." She looked at the lab door. "Scott's in there, right?"

Threnody nodded jerkily, dripping fragments of electronics. "But I can't – well, I never could get it open, but I definitely can't now."

Rogue flexed her clawed fingers. " 'Sokay - I brought some keys. Hey, what's wrong with you, Jean?"

"Neural scrambler," Threnody said while Jean was still processing the question. "It's blocking her powers."

"I can try to get it off first," Rogue said, sounding worried.

Jean shook her head – and regretted it, but not enough to weaken her resolve. "We came here for Scott, and we're going to get him. Right now."

"You bet we are." Rogue turned and stalked to the door. She sniffed around the scanners for a moment, then dug her claws into one and ripped it out of the wall, tossing it heedlessly behind her. It joined the bits of handheld already on the floor. A bit more slashing and tearing, and the door made a defeated clunking sound. "I think I got it!"

"The automatic locks are disabled. Now you just have to get it open!" Threnody scrambled to her feet, shedding the last fragments of her ruined handheld, and helped Jean get closer to the door. Rogue put one shoulder against the edge of the door and strained to muscle it open.

She had it almost halfway – just wide enough for Jean to see into the secure lab and identify more of the enormous, bubble-laden glass tanks – when the Sabretooths arrived.

Rogue turned from the door, saying, "Aw, not again -!"

Clones. Clones of Sabretooth.

Jean finally put it together: the enormous tanks of fluid, Milbury's lecture on eugenics, the reason for Scott's abduction.

There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female.

An eye like Mars, to threaten and command.

You were next on the list.

Charles Xavier is not the only one with a dream for the future.

Milbury was making clones. More than that – he was trying to build a master race of sorts, an improved strain of mutant. And he was going to use Scott as the starting point.

But she didn't have time to puzzle through all of the implications. The pack rapidly closed the distance, and the lead Sabretooth gave a nasty, triumphant roar and leapt for their throats, claws out.

Jean put a hand to her forehead – touched cold metal – remembered she couldn't use to TK to bat him out of the air -

A high-pitched, eerie sound suddenly cut through the blaring security alarm. It was accompanied by a crackling blast of white light that intercepted the Sabretooth in mid-leap and slammed him into the opposite wall.

He dropped to the floor and didn't move.

Jean looked around, astonished, at the small, high-strung girl who had appeared, until this moment, to be largely inept at almost everything.

Obviously that wasn't quite the truth.

Threnody, her fuzzy brain finally remembered, meant death song.

"There's another elevator inside the lab," Threnody said. White light was shimmering around her hands, and her words had a peculiar echo to them that made Jean's skin crawl. The other Sabretooths hung back, suddenly leery of fighting. "It'll take you up to the cellar. I'll hold them off. Run, and don't look back!"

Jean ducked through the door, followed by Rogue. They saw Scott immediately: he was inside one of the tanks, a breathing filter over his face and IV lines running from his arms. His eyes were covered by the mask. His sunglasses were lying on a computer console nearby.

And he was alive.

Rogue dragged the door into a more closed position, although she couldn't get it all the way. Jean picked up the ruby quartz glasses.

"How do we get him out?" Rogue asked, glancing uncertainly at the sleek, futuristic equipment and then at Jean.

Jean looked back at Rogue. She didn't need telepathy for this one.

"Right," the other girl said, grinning, and jump-kicked the curving glass wall of the tank. It cracked and then ruptured into a cascade of shards and yellow-green fluid. The decompression pulled Scott free, too, and he landed on the floor, coughing and sputtering and blind.

"What –" he said. The rest was lost in a choking hack.

In the corridor, a keening shriek rose to ear-splitting levels, and a burst of white light flashed so bright that it momentarily left the lab stamped in negative on Jean's eyes.

"Scott," Jean said. She knelt beside him (almost falling over in the process) and slid the glasses onto his face. His skin was cold, and the yellow-green fluid had left some kind of viscous, oily residue behind. "It's okay, we're here, you're safe, but we've got to leave right now. Okay?"

He nodded, said, "Yeah, good plan," and got to his feet, and the three of them made agonizingly slow progress towards the lab's elevator. Scott was just as unsteady as Jean, and soaking wet besides; his feet kept slipping on the metal floor.

"Both of y'all need to – ungh! – lose some weight," Rogue grumbled, manhandling Jean and Scott into the small elevator. There weren't any buttons here, either; as soon as they were inside, the doors began to close automatically.

Just before they clicked and sealed shut, Jean heard a howl of triumph from one of the Sabretooth clones – followed by a scream of pain from Threnody.

"Threnody!" Jean called, belatedly putting out a hand. She met with nothing but the cold, curving metal surface of the door. There was no alarm blaring, no alerts flashing, only the faintest of hums as the elevator rose.

The silence was terrible and deafening.

"She'll be okay," Rogue said, but she sounded unsure, and when Jean turned to her, her face was bleak.

"Who?" Scott asked. "Who's Threnody?"

"No," Jean said. Her voice sounded shrill and unreasonable to her own ears, but she didn't stop: "We have to go back! We have to help her!"

"Jean, we can't!" Rogue said. "We have to get out of here, and you know that!"

"She was only trying to help," Jean said. "She saved me! She saved us! We owe her!"

"Calm down, Jean," Scott said, putting a hand on her arm. "You're right. We can –"

The elevator shuddered to an abrupt and unexpected stop. Everyone was thrown off-balance, including Rogue. Scott caught himself on the wall, and then caught Jean, who had hardly needed any help in being wobbly in the first place.

The elevator door slid open, revealing a large, rectangular room. It was well-lit, spotlessly clean, and composed of the same polished metal as the rest of the complex, although there was a large archway at the opposite end that looked decidedly rough and low-tech compared to the rest. The cellar steps were just beyond the archway; the cellar doors were still thrown open, and Jean could see snow falling in the night.

The room was empty except for the figure of a man standing a few yards away. He was wearing a dark gray suit with a blood-red tie. Even here, under good light, his eyes were no more than a suggestion – diamonds glinting among shadows.

He was smiling, and he was applauding, slow and measured.