As Lydecker took him down the starkly illuminated hallways, Logan felt a shiver pass through him. There was a row of fluorescent lights above his head that were mirrored onto the immaculate tile floor so that it appeared as if there was another set of lights on the floor as well. Heavy iron doors were pushed into the wall with identity numbers marked on them. God, he thought to himself, this is what Max had to see…and as a child. If she could do it, then you can too.

Logan was surprised that Lydecker was actually pushing his wheelchair. After all, Logan would've assumed that Lydecker probably would have pushed Logan down the stairs. Instead, the older man had willingly taken Logan into the elevator where they were taken downward.

Logan's hands were still tied to the arms of his wheelchair, but someone had found a pair of glasses for him to wear. These helped him to see much better, and he could examine his surroundings fully.

"Here we are," Lydecker said to Logan as they stopped in front of a cell. The numbers were faded so badly that they were unreadable.

"What is it?" Logan hesitantly asked. Lydecker merely shook his head and gestured to the cell. As if on command, the creature poked a hand out and reached to grab Lydecker. Then a looming face appeared.

Logan jerked back so violently in his wheelchair that the entire chair lurched backwards with his abrupt body movement. A scream formed in his throat, and it took all of the power he had to contain it.

The creature, in a word, was horrific, as if it had come from the bowels of Hell itself.

Its hands were caked in blood, which dripped onto perfectly clean floor, and shiny in saliva. The nails were long and jagged, some ripped back so far that it cut into the bleeding cuticle. And the skin that covering the body weeped from opened blisters and sores. The skin that wasn't covered in sores, was so severely scarred over that it was violently twisted as if someone had grabbed a piece of skin and it refused to form smoothly again.

But it was the face that terrified Logan the most.

The creature had patches of hair in some spots and scalp clawed raw in others. Black strands of hair trickled down hesitantly around the ears while the forehead was bleeding from being scratched so harshly. The nose only had one nostril; there simply wasn't another one that had formed. Its mouth was twisted into a bloody mess of toothless gums and opened sores.

And then there were the eyes. They seemed to be taken from a different puzzle altogether. Unlike the rest of the creature's miserable, beaten and bloody body, the eyes remained unharmed. Whereas the remainder of the monster's body had come from Hell, the deep brown eyes were almost heavenly.

"Who is this?" Logan asked, although he knew the answer upon first seeing such a devil.

"This," Lydecker said very dryly, "is X3-452. Max's clone."