At night, Luke Ross ventured out of the comfort and safety of his family's penthouse. Down to the subway, but he wasn't looking for a train. As soon as he arrived at the station, he leapt off the platform and started to make his way down the track, taking care, at least to avoid the third rail. Not that it would hurt him. His mutation caused electricity to be a non-issue for him. He couldn't generate it quite yet, but it couldn't hurt him.

A lot of people know about the snaking network of trains underneath the city of New York. What many don't know is that a good chunk of it is abandoned. Empty stations and forgotten subway turnarounds. Luke knows about them, Luke had been reading up on them a lot over summer break. It wasn't that big of an issue. He was going out looking for a very particular group of people. A group of mutants called the Morlocks lived on the very fringes of mutant and human society. He thought it was important, to see how the other half lived. What he didn't know is that they weren't the only ones hiding in the darkness.

He certainly found out when something slammed into the back of his skull, sending him crashing to the ground. When he came to his head was throbbing and he felt as though he was going to vomit. After an attempt to vocalize, he quickly found out why that would be an issue. There was a strip of duct tape on his mouth and he was suspended upside down from a hook with his arms and legs tied together. Like a pig in an abattoir. There were dozens of people seated at long driftwood tables. Great fires and electric lights illuminated them. Some of them looked fairly normal, a few a bit scruffy, but a lot of them were wearing this strange kind of suits. They reminded him of scuba divers, but if they had metal plating. He saw a face that he recognized, sitting at a table closest to him. It took him a minute to put a name to her face, but the girl was for sure Connie Thompson. She had been his stalker, following him and making his life a living hell since they were both twelve. Last he heard she had vanished. Guess, he found her. She looked strikingly different from the last time he had seen her. She had once had long, messy blonde hair. now, it was shaved bald and where there was once was hair was now a mess of very intense tattoos that brought to mind pictures he had seen of white power prison gangs, but different in a way he couldn't place. What surprised him was the fact that Connie didn't even look at him.

He looked around and saw a few other people hanging with him. Definitely mutants from the look of some of them. Though, nobody he knew. At the back of this subway turnaround was built a makeshift stage with a podium. Out from the darkness emerged an older Hispanic woman, maybe late thirties if he had to guess. She had a crown of curly blonde hair that almost looked like a halo in the dim light of the fires and battery lights. She was wearing a sleeveless hoodie and the side of her face and neck were heavily scarred.

"You all know me, you know what I am. I'm 'Magic Hands' Dolores. you know what I did before we came to be here. Before all of you came to know my embrace."
She paused and ran a hand along the scarring on her face, "That shit doesn't matter now. I was betrayed by my man and in the end, I did what I needed to survive. That's what everything in this crazy world is about, right?"

The crowd murmured in agreement. Luke thought he recognized that. Magic Hands Dolores. There was something about it that rang familiar, something familiar that made his stomach churn.

"When I came down here. I was lost. I had lost everything for the third time. Then, I found this," She held up a weathered book with a blue cover and embossed in large, shiny letters were the words: "The Third Species."

She repeated those words aloud five, maybe six times. As though the three simple words were a kind of incantation. The whole show of it reminded Luke of a street preacher's spiel.

"But, what I discovered was that Sublime was wrong. That discovery hit me like a freight train. Now, you're asking, but, Dolores. How could the late, great John Sublime have been wrong?"

She stepped off of her podium and walked alongside the table, eventually selecting a random man in a weird scuba suit. She pressed her fingers underneath the sides of his helmet and the entire room was treated to the sound of a loud, pneumatic hiss as the helmet was lifted. The man beneath sported a five o'clock shadow in addition to his bright blond bowel cut.

"The air is clean, Brother Beetles. The air and our world isn't the problem. The problem is the new neighbours," she gestured to the trussed-up mutants. "The problem was he was incorrect. He was wrong about how we will eventually ascend. It won't be by attaching pieces of them to us. No...our ascension. Our claim on the earth will come by their flesh, that much is certain."

Magic Hands Dolores walked over and rested her hands on the shoulders of Connie and a chubby looking black boy who couldn't have been any older than twelve.

"For tonight's feast, we have initiates Connie Thompson and Lamilton Taeshawn to thank. Tonight, they will do us the honour of preparing the meat. They have done good by us and by humanity, unlike Brother Adrian who was murdered by those little bastards in their prep school."

The pair of them stood up, clean and sharp butcher's knives in hand and they walked over to the mutants. Luke looked up and into the blank stare of Creepy Connie for one final time as she dragged the knife across his throat.