AN: In this chapter, I have decided to show a bit more of the darker side for Jen I created when she stomped out of the hospital in "Let Me Sleep". This may be quite a shock, but it'll be ok.

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Chapter 9

"Jen, wait a second," Lucas called angrily after her. Jen stopped, but didn't turn. "What did you do to her?" he asked.

"What I had to," Jen said simply, her voice still toneless. Her attitude reminded the three officers of the one she had shown when she left the hospital months ago, leaving a mess behind her, including the first black- out the city had had in twenty-five years.

"What was that? Why did you do it?" he pressed.

"I took all of her memories. Because I needed the information she has," Jen said.

"Why did you kill her?" Lucas asked then, his voice sounded shaky and broken.

"For revenge," was the flat and toneless answer he got. Jen kept walking.

"Revenge against whom?"

"Against the woman who killed my husband," Jen said, as she mounted her vector cycle.

"Why didn't you kill Ransik then?!" Lucas asked, standing in front of her cycle defiantly.

"Because he wasn't handy," she snapped. "She was there, Ransik was already frozen."

"You killed her randomly?"

"Yes," Jen admitted. Lucas approached her and before she could stop him, he had crossed her face with a slap.

"WOULD YOU COME BACK TO YOUR SENSES?!" he bellowed.

"If I do, will you come back to yours?" She asked, not even remotely shaken by his anger.

"You are a murderer," he told her, looking her in the eye. "You killed her in cold blood, while she begged for mercy," he reminded her.

Jen was returning Lucas' gaze. Allow me to remind you of something, Lucas, she told him telepathically, as she sent to his mind the memory of all of them lying on the floor, and Nadira shooting a blast of energy at them, aiming to kill. In cold blood. Then another one, something Lucas hadn't seen, but she had. Nadira, burying her long, sword-like nails into one of the Time Force officer's abdomen. Then, sliding them across the throat of another.

Nadira was a damned mutant, Lucas. She was no sweet girl. She came here, and started killing all these people mercilessly, just as much in cold blood as I killed her, Jen told him.

"You said yourself she was under someone else's control," Lucas told her.

"Yes, she was under her true self's control. This Nadira, the one who murdered innocent officers, many of who graduated with us, is the REAL Nadira, the Nadira The Mistress promised to set free ten months ago. Nadira was, in her real, true self, ten times worse than her father. I wasn't going to freeze her because she is as guilty of Alex's death as her mother is and her father once was!" Jen explained, the first tears finally finding their way out of her eyes. She dried them off quickly and angrily. "I didn't want to freeze her! I didn't want, and I still don't want to give her, or any of her parents, the right to a trial or the right to live! Her mother and her father both killed, in turn, the man I love! And I wanted to hurt them both, it was MY turn to do the hurting, and the law entitled me to do it!!" She was crying even more tears now.

"You had to know how I felt about her," Lucas whispered.

"I do," Jen said. "And I don't care. I don't see any of you crying because my husband is dead. I don't see any of you crying because Wes's wife is dead. I see you all crying for a MUTANT!!"

"So now you're a racist?" Lucas asked her. Katie and Trip remained away from the discussion, mounted on their vector cycles.

"I have always been a racist," Jen admitted. "I, like everyone who has been through Time Force training, hate mutants for what they are, not for what they do. And some mutants don't deserve my hate, I admit that much. But Nadira or Ransik or any of the mutants I killed that night ten months ago, they didn't belong to that group, Lucas. They deserved what they got, and there is no way to correct what I did to Nadira, Lucas, because you can't correct what isn't wrong."

Lucas just looked at her face, his own eyes tearful. "If that's how you plan to conduct this mission, Jen, with hate and desire for revenge, then I'm not going," he said.

"I can force you to come. But I won't," she told him. "I will just ask you to get out of my way."

Lucas stood where he was. "I have to put you under arrest for murder."

"I committed no crime, Lucas; we are operating in protocol fifteen. Mutant deaths are collateral damage, and they aren't considered crimes," Jen explained, her voice was calm and peaceful again.

"That is inhuman."

"It has to be, because mutants are not human, Lucas. They are monsters, most of them on both the inside and the outside, some of them only on the inside, like Nadira." Jen looked deeply into Lucas' eyes. Get out of my way. I don't have much time and I have to set everything back to normal, she ordered.

Lucas felt himself moving to one side and saw her cycle speed towards the hangars. He turned to Katie and Trip. "Are you two going with her?" he asked.

"We have to, she needs us," Katie told him.

"Not anymore. This isn't like the last time. Jen is no longer a new officer, she is no longer naïve. She is experienced, and powerful. You can't mix experience and power with anger, it turns out wrong," Lucas told them both.

"That's what she needs us for. If she is going to save Wes's wife, we have to give her a bit of sanity to hang on to, or she will do this more and more often, and end up being a mutant slayer. We have to be there to create a line of security, to guard that line she can't cross," Trip said sadly.

"There is no line she can't cross anymore. She just killed a mutant."

"She still had a reason," Katie told him. "Not a very good one," she added when Lucas glared at her and opened his mouth. "But she had a reason. There is one more line we have to keep her from."

"What is that line?" Lucas asked.

"We have to keep her from doing it for pleasure," Katie explained to him and started her cycle, speeding after Jen.

"Jen was right when she let you choose if you are coming or not, Lucas," Trip said. "But as you think about this, I recommend you remember Ransik killed Alex four years ago. And yet Alex was very much alive when he married Jen eight months ago."

With that, Trip also sped after the women. Lucas stood there and turned towards his cycle, parked nearby. It had been parked next to the black one that had belonged to Alex, but with him gone, so were his new powers and everything they brought with them.

Changing history, Lucas thought.

That's what we are up to, my friend. He heard Jen's voice answer him, in his mind.

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Samantha Drake walked out of the hospital fighting the sea of doctors hurrying to get to the room she had just left. She had turned only for a moment to look at Wesley and had seen him crying desperately as the nurse got him out of the room. He had knelt in the middle of the corridor and was crying hard.

She wondered for a second if that was what Alexander was going through in the future. She tried to shake the thought out of her head, but she couldn't.

She kept walking and when she was getting on the elevator, lost as she was in her musings about having done the right thing or not.

To be continued.