Girl 2.
Angelo has her locked in the master bedroom. She can use the en suite, but otherwise she's a prisoner.
He takes her supper in on a tray.
'She'll try and get out in a couple of days.' He tells me when he comes back out. I'm not talking to him.
'Jubilee?' He tries. 'She's not going to die. Not of this.'
'If that dose had been the one that did kill her, though . . .' He goes on, and it's all I can do not to paff him for that.
'This is going to take a while.'
'When did you quit?' I ask him finally, and he starts at that. 'C'mon, Ange, I'm not blind. It's not like you ever tried to hide the marks.' It's not like I don't know what they look like.
'When I manifested. I had to; my skin doesn't show veins properly.'
'Huh. I figured Frosty must've put you in rehab or something.'
'You think . . . shit, of course she knows.'
'Because she's a telepath?' I ask him, and he nods. 'That's right, but not how you think.' He looks up at that. 'I did some reading. Pretty much all self-taught telepaths had to start off controlling with drugs. Frosty, Betts, the Professor – they're all ex-junkies. They're also all rich enough to buy a cure, Ange.'
'She doesn't need anything. A week, maybe less, she'll be clean.'
'And that's your opinion as a qualified medical practitioner, huh?'
'You want to explain who she is to a doctor?'
'We get on a plane, we go to New York, we talk to Cecilia Reyes. She'll be able to sort this out.'
'You want to walk a pair of identical twins, one of them with major withdrawal symptoms, straight through airport security?'
'Okay, so we give her one last dose just to get . . .' He's looking at me, and I can tell: bad idea. 'At least let me talk to Emma about it.'
''Kay' He agrees. Oh, boy. Am I not looking forward to that conversation.
Girl 1.
My third time waking up in this bed. Actually, make that my third morning in this bed. I must have woken up fifty times during the night.
Life right now is kinda shitty.
Angelo expects me to try something. Like I could right now. He's brought me my breakfast.
'You ever been to New York?' He asks me.
'City of opportunity and a thousand hiding places.' I croak at him. 'Never left LA. Why do you ask?'
'Jubilee's on the phone with a friend right now. It looks like we might just be able to arrange transportation East.'
'Transportation? Is that some kind of euphemism for smuggling my cold turkey-ing self onto a plane?'
'Private jet. Emma's arranging it.' Emma. The owner of this place. I've seen a lot of apartments and hotel rooms and none of them compare. But then, it's not like I was in great demand among the rich and beautiful of Southern California.
'Well, whoop-de-do-de-do. Colour me impressed. You people really do have it all, don't you?' He scowls at me.
'A year ago Jubilee was kidnapped.' He says, out of the blue. 'She spent a month being tortured, drugged and interrogated by a crazy bastard name of Bastion. I saw the condition she was in when they brought her back. It took about a week of the best medical care on the planet to get her as healthy as you are right now.'
'My sympathy to blue eyes.' I sneer at him. 'So, what? She's been where I've been and knowing her life has been shittier than mine is meant to suddenly dispel all my feelings of bitterness over the oh-so-easy life she has right now?'
'No.' He tells me coldly. 'Just consider this. She had far more than you to lose, and she lost all of it. The fucker convinced her that everyone she cared about was dead. He tortured her, drugged her, and tried to shred her mind from the inside out. And after all that she laughed in his face and got her friends out of there. You've both been to hell. Only difference is, she had the cojones to drag herself back out.'
Girl 2.
It doesn't take Emma long to grasp the situation – she's an X-Man, after all. She announces that she'll send her private jet to pick up all three of us first thing tomorrow.
She doesn't say anything nasty or sarcastic at all. It's seriously worrying.
She wants to get us to New York, set us up in one of her places there. Says she'll get a doctor in to look at the other me. Asks if she should tell Wolverine.
I almost say yes. If she'd been her usual bitchy self, I would have done, but she doesn't deserve that, not really. I'll be telling him myself, as soon as I work out how to put it.
Ange took a tray in to Junkie Jubes half way through the conversation. He comes back out of her room just as it ends.
'How is she?' I ask him.
'Trembling, vomiting, feeling like shit and acting shrewish.' He says. 'She's doing fine.'
''Kay.' I say.
'I told her about Bastion.' His skin is sagging, his shoulders are hunched – if I didn't know him like I do I'd think he was guilty about something.
So he should be.
'Me and Bastion?' I ask him. For a moment I consider calming down and acting rational, but quite frankly Bastion's name kinda makes that hard. He just nods. I have to get out of here.
'I guess you told her about Ev, too.' I throw over my shoulder. Then I'm gone.
I go to the gym, first – Emma's building has a private one, well fitted out. I spent a few minutes on a speed bag, then go through some forms and routines of martial arts and gymnastics, just to make sure. Then I walk over to the mirror that takes up one wall, and put on the face I learned from watching Scott. In a fight, Wolverine is savage, fast and brutal, but Cyclops is utterly cold, dispassionate. For this, I'm going to be cold.
After that, I go find the dealer.
He's a tough-looking guy, a few years older than me. He's Hispanic, and for all I know he could have been a friend of Angelo's, once. He's got a couple of bruisers hanging around, and even before lunch he's sitting in a bar – one of those shitty dives that never asks for ID and never closes – drinking whisky and selling smack to all comers. He sees me coming, and gives me a wave and a leer.
'Hola, chica. Back for more already?'
I don't say a word. I just walk up to him and break his nose with the heel of my hand. His two goons start to get up, and, leaping up, I manage to kick one in the balls and the other in the throat while they're still reaching for weapons. Then I land on the table and smash a beer bottle in their boss's face.
No powers, here, just them and me. They're bigger than me, stronger than me. They're carrying knives and guns, and I'm outnumbered three to one. It takes me twenty seconds to disarm all three of them. They stop fighting back two minutes after that.
I carry on hitting them.
Eventually someone – the bartender – fires a gun in the air, and yells at me to back down, and I come down enough to realise what's going on.
I've wrecked the place. There weren't many patrons when I came in, and pretty much all of them look to have cleared out. Half the furniture is smashed, and I threw one of the guys into the row of bottles behind the bar. Luckily, I'm carrying cash.
I walk to the bar – at the far end to the 'tender, who's still holding his gun on me. Then I drop five hundred dollars, where he can see them. I still don't speak, just head over to where the dealer was sitting. There's a shoulder bag left in his place. Yesterday he took drugs out of there and put money in. Today I tip it out on the top of the pool table.
Banknotes, crumpled and battered. Small pieces of jewellery. A dozen foil-wrapped condoms, which makes me think of the other me once more. And a couple of dozen little plastic bags, holding white or brown powder. I take a good long look.
The bartender is still watching me.
'Put the gun down.' I say, without looking round. He pauses a moment, and then I hear it hitting the counter top, gently. He's still holding it.
'I don't kill people.' I tell him, and look up. He's nervous, and instinctively jerks the gun up towards me. 'Sometimes I really wish I did.' I reach out with my mind and stroke the molecules in the air over the pool table just so, and the dealer's horde explodes in a burst of brightly coloured plasma. The bartender yells in shock and fires on reflex, but I've already moved, and now I shape the newly-generated plasmoid into a bright orange fireball. 'After all,' I go on, reaching out and touching it, 'it would be so easy.' I pull the energy back into myself, and smile at him. He drops the gun.
'Tell them.' I say, gesturing to the three men lying, unconscious and bloody, on the floor.
Then I walk out of there.
Angelo has her locked in the master bedroom. She can use the en suite, but otherwise she's a prisoner.
He takes her supper in on a tray.
'She'll try and get out in a couple of days.' He tells me when he comes back out. I'm not talking to him.
'Jubilee?' He tries. 'She's not going to die. Not of this.'
'If that dose had been the one that did kill her, though . . .' He goes on, and it's all I can do not to paff him for that.
'This is going to take a while.'
'When did you quit?' I ask him finally, and he starts at that. 'C'mon, Ange, I'm not blind. It's not like you ever tried to hide the marks.' It's not like I don't know what they look like.
'When I manifested. I had to; my skin doesn't show veins properly.'
'Huh. I figured Frosty must've put you in rehab or something.'
'You think . . . shit, of course she knows.'
'Because she's a telepath?' I ask him, and he nods. 'That's right, but not how you think.' He looks up at that. 'I did some reading. Pretty much all self-taught telepaths had to start off controlling with drugs. Frosty, Betts, the Professor – they're all ex-junkies. They're also all rich enough to buy a cure, Ange.'
'She doesn't need anything. A week, maybe less, she'll be clean.'
'And that's your opinion as a qualified medical practitioner, huh?'
'You want to explain who she is to a doctor?'
'We get on a plane, we go to New York, we talk to Cecilia Reyes. She'll be able to sort this out.'
'You want to walk a pair of identical twins, one of them with major withdrawal symptoms, straight through airport security?'
'Okay, so we give her one last dose just to get . . .' He's looking at me, and I can tell: bad idea. 'At least let me talk to Emma about it.'
''Kay' He agrees. Oh, boy. Am I not looking forward to that conversation.
Girl 1.
My third time waking up in this bed. Actually, make that my third morning in this bed. I must have woken up fifty times during the night.
Life right now is kinda shitty.
Angelo expects me to try something. Like I could right now. He's brought me my breakfast.
'You ever been to New York?' He asks me.
'City of opportunity and a thousand hiding places.' I croak at him. 'Never left LA. Why do you ask?'
'Jubilee's on the phone with a friend right now. It looks like we might just be able to arrange transportation East.'
'Transportation? Is that some kind of euphemism for smuggling my cold turkey-ing self onto a plane?'
'Private jet. Emma's arranging it.' Emma. The owner of this place. I've seen a lot of apartments and hotel rooms and none of them compare. But then, it's not like I was in great demand among the rich and beautiful of Southern California.
'Well, whoop-de-do-de-do. Colour me impressed. You people really do have it all, don't you?' He scowls at me.
'A year ago Jubilee was kidnapped.' He says, out of the blue. 'She spent a month being tortured, drugged and interrogated by a crazy bastard name of Bastion. I saw the condition she was in when they brought her back. It took about a week of the best medical care on the planet to get her as healthy as you are right now.'
'My sympathy to blue eyes.' I sneer at him. 'So, what? She's been where I've been and knowing her life has been shittier than mine is meant to suddenly dispel all my feelings of bitterness over the oh-so-easy life she has right now?'
'No.' He tells me coldly. 'Just consider this. She had far more than you to lose, and she lost all of it. The fucker convinced her that everyone she cared about was dead. He tortured her, drugged her, and tried to shred her mind from the inside out. And after all that she laughed in his face and got her friends out of there. You've both been to hell. Only difference is, she had the cojones to drag herself back out.'
Girl 2.
It doesn't take Emma long to grasp the situation – she's an X-Man, after all. She announces that she'll send her private jet to pick up all three of us first thing tomorrow.
She doesn't say anything nasty or sarcastic at all. It's seriously worrying.
She wants to get us to New York, set us up in one of her places there. Says she'll get a doctor in to look at the other me. Asks if she should tell Wolverine.
I almost say yes. If she'd been her usual bitchy self, I would have done, but she doesn't deserve that, not really. I'll be telling him myself, as soon as I work out how to put it.
Ange took a tray in to Junkie Jubes half way through the conversation. He comes back out of her room just as it ends.
'How is she?' I ask him.
'Trembling, vomiting, feeling like shit and acting shrewish.' He says. 'She's doing fine.'
''Kay.' I say.
'I told her about Bastion.' His skin is sagging, his shoulders are hunched – if I didn't know him like I do I'd think he was guilty about something.
So he should be.
'Me and Bastion?' I ask him. For a moment I consider calming down and acting rational, but quite frankly Bastion's name kinda makes that hard. He just nods. I have to get out of here.
'I guess you told her about Ev, too.' I throw over my shoulder. Then I'm gone.
I go to the gym, first – Emma's building has a private one, well fitted out. I spent a few minutes on a speed bag, then go through some forms and routines of martial arts and gymnastics, just to make sure. Then I walk over to the mirror that takes up one wall, and put on the face I learned from watching Scott. In a fight, Wolverine is savage, fast and brutal, but Cyclops is utterly cold, dispassionate. For this, I'm going to be cold.
After that, I go find the dealer.
He's a tough-looking guy, a few years older than me. He's Hispanic, and for all I know he could have been a friend of Angelo's, once. He's got a couple of bruisers hanging around, and even before lunch he's sitting in a bar – one of those shitty dives that never asks for ID and never closes – drinking whisky and selling smack to all comers. He sees me coming, and gives me a wave and a leer.
'Hola, chica. Back for more already?'
I don't say a word. I just walk up to him and break his nose with the heel of my hand. His two goons start to get up, and, leaping up, I manage to kick one in the balls and the other in the throat while they're still reaching for weapons. Then I land on the table and smash a beer bottle in their boss's face.
No powers, here, just them and me. They're bigger than me, stronger than me. They're carrying knives and guns, and I'm outnumbered three to one. It takes me twenty seconds to disarm all three of them. They stop fighting back two minutes after that.
I carry on hitting them.
Eventually someone – the bartender – fires a gun in the air, and yells at me to back down, and I come down enough to realise what's going on.
I've wrecked the place. There weren't many patrons when I came in, and pretty much all of them look to have cleared out. Half the furniture is smashed, and I threw one of the guys into the row of bottles behind the bar. Luckily, I'm carrying cash.
I walk to the bar – at the far end to the 'tender, who's still holding his gun on me. Then I drop five hundred dollars, where he can see them. I still don't speak, just head over to where the dealer was sitting. There's a shoulder bag left in his place. Yesterday he took drugs out of there and put money in. Today I tip it out on the top of the pool table.
Banknotes, crumpled and battered. Small pieces of jewellery. A dozen foil-wrapped condoms, which makes me think of the other me once more. And a couple of dozen little plastic bags, holding white or brown powder. I take a good long look.
The bartender is still watching me.
'Put the gun down.' I say, without looking round. He pauses a moment, and then I hear it hitting the counter top, gently. He's still holding it.
'I don't kill people.' I tell him, and look up. He's nervous, and instinctively jerks the gun up towards me. 'Sometimes I really wish I did.' I reach out with my mind and stroke the molecules in the air over the pool table just so, and the dealer's horde explodes in a burst of brightly coloured plasma. The bartender yells in shock and fires on reflex, but I've already moved, and now I shape the newly-generated plasmoid into a bright orange fireball. 'After all,' I go on, reaching out and touching it, 'it would be so easy.' I pull the energy back into myself, and smile at him. He drops the gun.
'Tell them.' I say, gesturing to the three men lying, unconscious and bloody, on the floor.
Then I walk out of there.