Chapter 21

His name had been Logan then, too. Just Logan. No one could tell him if it was a first name, a last name, a nickname or a title. Everyone just called him Logan, and he didn't remember that it had bothered him much.

He was head of a four-man team. They were all four strangers to each other, but as skilled as anyone came. He couldn't remember how they'd been found, recruited, teamed up . . . they just were, the four of them. When mission assignments came to them, they were flown out . . . usually to Eastern Europe; he remembered a lot of cursing in German and in Russian . . . then picked up and flown back to the stark bare coastal base when they had completed whatever task they'd been given. There was no training—all four of them were self-motivated enough to stay in prime condition without additional instruction.

He didn't actually know who they were working for. In the vaguest way, he assumed they were on the side of the "good guys" . . . some U.S. or Canadian agency, or a division under the auspices of the U.N. or NATO. He didn't ask too many questions. Black ops was just like that. Even when you were up to your neck in it, it was still need-to-know, and there wasn't too much that the actual operatives really needed to know. They just did their jobs. And Logan was a good operative.

The others were, too. Logan didn't know much about where they came from or how they'd learned to do what they did, but he knew enough to appreciate that the other members of his team were up there with the best in the business. Maverick was a mutant, too, his body a battery and an energy converter. Anything that hit him, he absorbed and could re-direct. He was a decent marksman and good with hand-to-hand, but a genius with communications. If it sent or received, Maverick could play it like a violin. Beyond that, he was low-key. Non-confrontational, professional, friendly enough. Logan liked Maverick. Good guy.

Creed was a good operative, too, but he was problematic. Six foot six, tawny and toothed like a lion, Victor Creed somehow registered in Logan's brain as more animal than man. Like Logan, he was a self-healer, nearly impossible to kill. He, too, could track by scent. But while Logan liked to stay detached, killing only when he couldn't avoid it and then from a distance, Creed lived for the up-close-and-personal kill. Which was convenient, in a way. If there as a messy element in any job, Creed would take care of it and be in a good mood for days afterward. Useful, yes, but worrisome. If Creed someday decided he was done being a team player, Logan couldn't guarantee he'd be able to bring the other mutant down.

Silver Fox was the team's only woman, and only non-mutant. Though she couldn't be older than thirty-five, her long, thick hair was the color of moonlight on water. She wore it always in one braid straight down to the middle of her back. Silver Fox never smiled. She spoke only when it was necessary. She took her orders, did her job, and kept strictly to herself. In the beginning, Logan had been wary of having one woman stuck in the middle of a three-man team, but she'd made it clear from the outset that she was not to be an object of anyone's desire. She was here to work. And she was good. In marksmanship, munitions, and basic survival skills, she was far and away better than the rest of them. So Logan stopped worrying, and came to appreciate and rely on her professionalism. He'd all but stopped thinking of her as a woman by the time she came to him.

In characteristic fashion, she made no fuss about it. It was a warm, bright summer night. The team was in base—there hadn't been a mission for them in weeks. Logan was bored, but not discontented. He was settled in his room, passing the time by disassembling and cleaning the SIG P226 he carried in the field.

She walked into his room without troubling to knock. Logan looked up, half expecting that she'd come to bring him the news he'd sort of been anticipating for weeks now: that Creed had gotten drunk and tried to kill a teammate, or actually had killed one of the support staff. He stood up when she entered, ready to deal with whatever problem she'd brought him. But she said nothing. She just walked straight into his arms and kissed him, declaring her love and claiming his in one astonishingly simple gesture.

Before that instant, he could take her or leave her. But as soon as her scent filled his head, he needed her. And overnight, they became a team within the team. Logan didn't give her preferential treatment or try to keep her out of danger on missions . . . he knew she could handle herself. But when he counted heads, she was always first. When he checked the team for injury, she was the one he cleared before moving on to the others. And when she failed to make a rendezvous on time, instead of simply waiting for as long as he could, he went back to find her. All perfectly legitimate, all well within protocol. But it was enough of a change in his behavior that someone could notice, if they were watching carefully. And everyone was.

Maverick figured it out, just by being a canny and observant person. All he did was offer Logan one or two congratulatory, conspiratorial smiles and then leave the pair of them alone. But Creed was another matter. Of course he knew . . . the change in their scent was screamingly obvious. He started drinking harder, and more frequently, then abruptly stopped altogether. Logan found him pacing the halls at odd hours, crossed his scent trail winding around Silver Fox's room. On missions, he got increasingly harder to control, and the team's 'unnecessary kill' stats started to rise. He'd always wandered to and from the base at his own will, but now instead of coming back smelling of booze, he came back smelling of blood.

Logan made sure he always had a reason, but when the team needed to split up two by two, he kept either Creed or Fox with him.

Simultaneously, the jobs got worse. Logan was no idealist; he knew that war was war and bad things happened. But even with this logic to soothe his conscience, he started having nightmares. Their espionage strikes moved from military targets to civilian ones. The information intercepts got harder to do, requiring more bloodletting. And assassinations got popular.

Everything came to a head on one particularly nasty job. It was in a private home, large, expensive, isolated, and well-guarded. Logan had been feeling good about it . . . the target was just some stupid file full of papers, nothing he had to care about. To bypass security, they split teams again, Fox and Maverick handling the electrical problems while Creed and Logan went inside. They found the target room without trouble. Logan had been briefed to expect an office. Instead, it was a child's bedroom.

Two children. Two boys, the one maybe eight, the other no older than five. Both were asleep. Logan stopped at the door, trying to figure out how he'd ended up in the wrong room, but Creed pushed past him and crossed straight to the older of the two.

"Leave 'em be," Logan hissed. "We're hitting the target and we're gone."

"They are the target." Creed rattled off a string of authorization codes . . . things that only Logan, as team head, was supposed to know.

"You went over my head?"

"They came to me."

"Why?"

"Because they needed it done, and didn't think you'd do it."

"Thought right. Come on, we're outta here. What good's a couple of snot-nosed kids?"

"Intimidation. People get attached to their kids, or so I hear. You step outside if you're squeamish." His massive paw reached for the older boy's head, long, dirty nails hooked like claws.

Logan shoved himself between Creed and the kid, hoping more than expecting that Creed would back down. And the next thing he knew it was full-pitched battle, hand-to-hand, feeling claws sink through his skin and tear his flesh, his own knife springing into his hand and finding purchase in muscle and matted hair. Furniture broke; little boys screamed and scrambled.

Silver Fox settled the matter by putting a .38 Special through Creed's head.

He dropped; Logan struggled to catch his breath as he forced himself onto his feet. "Nick of time," he told her.

"That's my job," she answered, activating the safety on her Glock and holstering the weapon. "Mav's got the father."

"Get him in here."

While Fox obeyed his order, he knelt and checked Creed's pulse. Still going. It would have been nice if killing the guy were that easy.

"Get 'em out of the country," Logan ordered the father as Maverick dragged him though the door. "We'll say we killed 'em. Mav, you and me've got Creed. Fox, cover us. We're gone."

Creed was comatose from the bullet; the medical team guessed he'd be unconscious for at least two weeks. And Logan was left in the silence of the base to go over and over what he'd just done, to wonder endlessly if it were heroism or treason.

When Fox came to him, all she offered was the crucial question. As bluntly and simply as she did everything, she asked, "Do you think we're fighting for the right thing?"

He looked at her, weighing his answer. Whatever he said was going to alter both their lives, and they both knew it.

"No," he admitted. "I think we started that way. I think we hoped so. But I think we're bein' used and lied to, and it's been that way for a long time."

"So what do we do?"

There was only one answer. "We go."

And they did. That night. They took nothing but their clothes and their weapons. They walked away and never came back . . . disappearing into the wild, where civilization and its atrocities could never hope to find them.

Creed would be incapacitated for at least two more weeks, by which time their scent trail would be long gone and they would be well out of range. But Logan still crossed water wherever they encountered it. He felt almost superstitious, but the memory of Creed's watching eyes wouldn't let him neglect the precaution. He refused to be traced.

The sense of freedom was breathtaking. Silver Fox was of the Siksikawa Indian tribe, and had grown up learning the oldest ways of her people; the wild lands of inland Canada held no terrors for her. What Logan did not already know, she taught him. They roamed free all summer, eating what they found or killed, sleeping where they pleased. Then as the sunsets started to come earlier and the nights grew cooler, they found the old cabin.

It had been abandoned long before they arrived. Together, they cleared out the detritus of years of isolation and restored what the previous residents had left behind: a table and a couple of stools, a rope-frame bed, a few shelves now creaking under the weight of warped and faded old books. With a border town only two days' hike away, they had access to cloth and metal and other things they couldn't make for themselves. And in the long days of work, Logan learned what Silver Fox's laugh sounded like, and rediscovered his own, and was happy.

By the time winter set in, they were prepared and secure. The long, dark nights felt safe, calm. Logan's nightmares faded into memory and then were gone. There would never be any reason to leave this place. They would grow old here. And as the months passed by, Silver Fox's scent began to change, becoming darker and richer and sweeter, and he knew what it meant almost before she did. When he fell asleep with her wrapped in his arms, the scent infused his dreams, and instead of the old black visions of guns and blood he saw life, and sunrises, and black-haired children running free through the woods. Most mornings, he woke with his hand resting on her abdomen, and hers laid over his.

Then Creed found them.

Logan was gone for a couple of days on a supply run. It had been raining, on and off, for weeks, eroding the piles of old snow and raising the water level of the lake halfway to their door. Everything smelled clean and sweet and fresh—every breath was delicious. And it never occurred to Logan to worry that scents were being washed out, leaving him blind to what might be prowling through their territory. He knew every inch by now—there were no surprises here. And even if something unexpected did happen, Fox had the Glock, still fully loaded, gathering dust on a top shelf.

The ground was starting to dry by the time he made it back into their valley. Everything was quiet. The hatchet was still buried in the chopping block, exactly as he'd left it. But the house door was open.

He noticed it at the same instant that he caught the old, familiar, hackle-raising scent. His feet stopped moving, and his heart stopped beating. Testosterone, adrenaline, sweat, gunpowder, and blood.

"Fox!"

No answer.

He knew there wouldn't be. He knew it already. The whole story was wafting out the door in the spring breeze. Every round in the Glock had been fired, flesh had been torn open, hair had burned. He could follow every move that had been made as he approached the cabin . . . how Creed had entered, how he'd attacked, every move Fox had made . . . everything he had done to her before he'd finally allowed her to die . . .

Jean flinched back, and her sudden, convulsive, involuntary movement cut off the flow of Logan's words. Her hand strayed to her head again, feeling through her hair . . . oil and tangles and dirt, but no blood. Her eyes darted around the now-darkened space of the little cabin, picking out things she hadn't seen before . . . an abandoned shell casing in the corner; a ring of five gouges in the wood of the wall cut by a widespread hand with strong, sharp nails; discoloration patterns on the walls and floor that spattered up instead of drizzling down . . .

"Jean?"

Jean forced herself to breathe again. "I'm okay," she assured him, her eyes returning to the flames. "What happened after you found her?"

Logan scoffed at the loaded yet ordinary question. "Went half crazy. Just barely kept my head screwed on enough to remember I ought to bury her, so . . . there's a clearing up behind the cabin, away from the shoreline. She's there." He glanced up around himself, taking in the decay of the building, the dancing shadows that swirled around them. "I wanted to just . . . torch this place. But the rain. Everything was soaked. And the scent trail wouldn't last long in that kind of weather, so . . . I went after him."

"That's what he wanted you to do."

"Yeah."

"Did . . . did you ever catch him?"

"I guess not." He cast a glance skyward, indicating the Avalon station where the thing called Sabertooth was, decades later, still prowling. "Truth is, I don't know. It all kind of gets fuzzy again after that. Even most of what I just told you, I didn't remember two hours ago. It's the smell. Brings it back like a ton of bricks."

Jean involuntarily took a deeper breath of the musty air inside the cabin. Tapped out of Logan's thoughts, it was once again incomprehensible to her, like looking back on images from a dream that had been vivid at the time but that was reduced to gibberish when daylight broke. For once, she was glad to be so insensible; she didn't want to experience that again. But he was still there, still re-living it with every breath.

"And this is why I had to be evacuated from the Avalon station," she murmured, half to herself. "He called me vixen."

"That was just baiting me. He and I both knew exactly what was going on the second he made a grab for you." He lowered his gaze to look at her, and Jean turned away from the fire to meet his eyes. "When all this started, with you and me . . . when I realized what was happening . . . . the first thing I sat down and thought about was how I was going to deal with it without letting you get hurt. At the time, I was thinking 'hurt' like 'upset' and not like 'maimed,' but the principle's the same. I figured as long as it didn't interfere with your life, I could think and feel whatever I wanted." He shook his head. "I can't believe I talked myself into believing that."

"This isn't your fault."

"Really. How is it not my fault?"

"You didn't do anything wrong."

"What's that got to do with it? All this happened some thirty, maybe thirty-five years ago, and I've got more memories of tanglin' with Sabertooth than I can ever hope to sort out, and he is still walkin' around up there. I haven't killed him. I should've when Fox plugged him—should've just had his head off . . ."

"If you had," Jean cut him off, reaching over to grasp his arm, "Fox wouldn't have gone with you. It would have been arbitrary and inhuman, and beneath you."

"It would have been smart."

"You didn't know that then. You did what was necessary and what was right, right in that moment. That's what you've always done. That's why she loved you."

"Ghost whispering now? Your powers're gettin' a little out of hand."

"It's why I love you, too, Logan."

He shot her a glare that could freeze blood. Jean sighed and rolled her eyes. "That came out wrong, but you know what I mean."

He closed his eyes and held his breath for a second. "Do me a favor, Red. Just . . . don't ever say that again."

Jean already wished that she hadn't said it to begin with. That was way too complicated a problem to get into right now. She looked away from him, suddenly registering that it was dark outside.

"Where is she?" she asked, grateful for the excuse to abruptly change the subject. "It's got to be freezing out there."

"She might not even be in the valley." Logan dropped the awkward moment as though it had never happened. It still had, of course; he was just good at pretending. "Food's got to be hard to come by this late in the season. She might have to range out pretty far to find anything to hunt."

"Or she could be hanging around outside the door, trying to decide if she's going to kill us or what."

"It's a possibility."

Jean glanced at the doorway, then around the sparse little cabin again. Her eye fell on the clump of fabric near the fireplace, more nest than bed. "That's where she's been sleeping?"

"Yep."

"What happened to the bed? There was a lot of furniture in here when you left . . . where did it all go?"

"She probably burned it. Convenient pre-chopped firewood. The books, too. Dry tinder's pretty valuable when it's been raining for a week."

"Not all the books, though."

She leaned across to the stack of gray volumes, which were carefully placed outside the range of where any sparks from the fireplace might hit them. The top one crackled in protest as she tried to flip through the pages; they were frozen in rigid waves, the result of water damage. She tipped it to the light to read the cover: Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

"I read this when I was a little girl," she observed, turning the volume over in her hands. "How appropriate."

She gingerly eased the book open to a random page. It was too dark to read more than a smudge's worth of text. She pressed her finger along the length of the gutter, trying to loosen the cracked binding a little so she could open it further, and the side of her hand felt something scratch against the skin.

She ran her fingers over the page to find and examine the scratchy-things. They were cuts in the paper. Not irregular tears with ragged edges—small, precise horizontal cuts less than a quarter of an inch long. She turned the page and felt the next one. The same cuts repeated, in different spots.

"What are these?"

"Books, Red. They're the latest thing."

"No . . . she's been cutting the pages."

"Burning them after all?"

"No. Look." Jean set the book on the floor and pressed it open where orange light still spilled across the floorboards. "Just cutting."

Logan leaned closer to her and brushed his fingers over one of the pages. "Has she been using these for ransom notes, or what?"

"Nothing's been cut out. It's just . . ."

"Like underlining," Logan finished for her. He took the volume and flipped to another spot in the text. "Never through the words, just under 'em." He compared the recto and verso of one particular sheet, then flipped to the next and did the same with it. "Same word."

"No. This one's 'the'."

"Other side."

She flipped the page. "Oh. 'Laura'." She checked down the page, tipped the book towards the fire to catch some more light. "Laura here, too. Laura." Next page. "Laura, Laura, Laura. She's done the whole book like that."

"Laura."She saw a smile, or a shadow of one, flicker across his face. "Well, she needed a name. Looks like she found herself one."

"Laura?" Jean thought about it, remembering the few brief glimpses she'd had of the fierce, lonely little girl with the straight brown hair, trying to match the borrowed name to the half-forgotten face. "Laura. I think I like it."

"We're glad you approve. Let's see if it works."

He climbed to his feet and walked straight out the door. "LAURA!"

Silence answered.

Jean followed him to the door of the cabin and waited there, straining every sense. Logan was waiting outside, standing still in the middle of the clearing. Nothing moved, but the tension radiating off him, the intense, breathless sense of expectation, was keeping her where she was. Something was going to happen, any second. Logan was sure.

She heard something—a whisper, too soft for her to tell if it had been auditory or telepathic. Her head snapped towards it, but Logan rebuked her. Don't move.

Jean held her breath.

A mind faded out of the darkness, then a silhouette. The figure was crouched low, almost hunched against the ground, and Jean could taste red-hot panic and raging curiosity all twisted up together.

"Laura," said Logan, his voice hardly more than a breath. "Laura. Laura. Laura." He lowered himself down to crouch over his heels, then eased onto his knees. It was a vulnerable, hard-to-defend position, and it brought his head down to a level with hers.

The figure shifted, moving neither towards Logan or away from him, but sideways, seeing if he would move after her. He let his head pivot to follow, but didn't shift his weight. "Laura. You picked it, didn't you? It's a good choice, Kid. I like it."

She shifted again, her head leading and her body following, like a snake. Jean heard a quick intake of breath, double-count, and a snort of air being expelled from the nose.

"That's it," Logan encouraged gently. "Smell me. You know me. You know me, Kid. You know I wouldn't hurt you. I'm a wuss compared to you. You can take me, if you need to. You've circled the place a dozen times by now, so you know there's no one here but Jean and me."

Jean and I, Jean corrected to herself.

Jean and me, Logan corrected back.

Jean thought about it for a second. Drat, you're right.

"There are people out there," Logan continued, as if the exchange hadn't happened. "Back down in the States. They're trying to make our kind disappear into the dark. Take away our lives, and our names. But I am not gonna let that happen to you, Kiddo. You hear me?"

The silhouette moved forward. The moon had risen, and the sky was clear, so it was surprisingly bright in the clearing even without the flickering red light of the fire in the house, and visibility was good.

The girl who'd claimed the name of Laura was so absolutely filthy that it was hard to find the resemblance to the intruder Jean had seen a few times in stills taken from the house's security cameras. That girl had been immaculate in every way: dead-straight hair, fierce blank eyes, posture that was almost painfully, aggressively straight. This one was a wreck by comparison. Her dark gray uniform was mottled with old stains and torn in several places, leaving her bare skin exposed to the freezing air. Her hair looked longer, but it had matted into dreadlocks and was entangled with sticks and old leaves, and the skin of her face was covered with dirt and blood. She looked more like an animal than a girl.

Jean shifted down to squat on her heels, but didn't go to her knees as Logan had done. This child had once taken out her entire team; Jean had good reason to be just a little bit afraid of her.

The girl feinted, dodging forward in a quick, sudden jerk. Jean jumped, but Logan didn't. He just kept talking, without a waver in his deep, steady voice. "You've been out here way longer than you were equipped for, weren't you? They taught you to spy and fight and kill, but nobody taught you what you needed to survive out here. But you're smarter than they made you. You showed 'em. You're still alive, and you're still free. But it's taken a lot out of you. Out here for months and months with nothing but the silence. A name and no one to call you it. Laura."

There was a high, sweet note as metal slid against metal, and the girl shrieked on a note barely half an octave lower. She was in the air before the sound hit Jean's ears, all four claws out. Logan rose to meet her, and his claws crashed into hers, threes and twos interlaced, knuckle to knuckle.

"You're still fast, though," said Logan, and though his back was to Jean she could hear him smiling. He loved a good fight, and this girl could give him a run for his money. "With all the vitamin deficiencies you've got going on, that's pretty impressive."

She shrieked and squirmed, and he pushed her a little bit away, not unlocking their claws but gaining some distance with his superior reach. "Don't even think about kickin' me. I've come a long way to find you, and I don't want a hole in my leg as payback. Okay?"

The girl gave another shriek, but it was half-hearted, and as she ran out of air her breathing devolved into chokes, then moans. It was the sound of a little girl who was in deep, inescapable pain and yet was forbidden to cry. Jean's heart twisted inside her in sympathy.

Logan swung his hands out away from himself, letting her stumble closer to him and fall against his chest. He unlaced his claws from hers and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. She grabbed him around the back held on, choking and gasping and groaning with months of pent-up loneliness and misery and fear.

"It's okay," he told her. "It's okay. I'm right here. I've got you. I've got you, Kid. You're not alone. Laura. Laura, Laura, Laura. That's you, and no one's gonna take that away from you. Laura. I got you."

Jean stood up; her legs ached from holding the crouched position for so long. Her arms wrapped involuntarily around her torso. As she watched the pair of them, wrapped up in metal and shared sorrow, she suddenly felt with startling, unsettling, and starkly unfamiliar acuteness that nobody, right now, had got her.