Despite the fact that she had been living on Muir Island for two months now, there were still large parts of the research centre which Rahne had never bothered to investigate. Now, with her newly recovered control over her powers lightening her mood, she had an urge to explore. And so she had come to be standing outside the door to Teresa's bedroom, wondering if her foster sister would mind if she interrupted her studies. She knocked hesitantly.
"Come in!" Teresa yelled from inside her room.
Rahne pushed open the door, and stepped inside to find Teresa sitting at her desk poring over what seemed to be a biology text book. "Hello," she said.
"Oh, hey Rahne. What's up? Is there some kind of meeting or something?"
"Uh… no. I was just exploring a bit..."
"Have you never seen this part of the centre before?" Teresa asked, looking a little surprised. "Well, as you may have guessed, this is my room: bed, wardrobe, floor – excuse the clothes – desk, books." She glared at the last set of items. "Stupid biology."
"You don't like it?" Rahne asked, glancing around. Somehow, she'd pictured Teresa as an organised sort of person. She'd been wrong.
"Oh, I don't know - just sick of it at the moment, I guess. Take a seat – just move some of that stuff off my bed."
Gingerly dislodging a set of trigonometry notes to clear herself a space, Rahne sat down on the edge of the bed. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure, as long as it doesn't involve anything to do with how viruses replicate, or what a bacterial chromosome looks like. I couldn't concentrate on this anymore, anyway."
"It's the middle of July – why are you studying so much? Shouldn't you be on summer holiday?"
Teresa paused before answering, staring fixedly at the wall with a thoughtful expression. "I suppose it is summer, isn't it?" she began finally. "It's hard to tell in this place sometimes. But I want to sit my GCSEs next year, and that means I've got about a year's worth of work to catch up on."
"A year's work?" Rahne was having trouble figuring out how the girl who seemed to spend all her time studying needed to catch up on that much schoolwork. "Why?"
"Have I never told you about this before, Rahne?" Teresa smelled surprised, and perhaps even a little uneasy, but she smiled wryly and continued. "I'd only been on Muir Island for a couple of months before you… came. Before that I spent the best part of a year on the streets in Dublin."
"Oh," said Rahne, trying very hard to keep her mouth from hanging open. Teresa just didn't seem the type to live rough. "But… why? What about your father, wasn't he…?"
"Da? Oh, I barely saw him when I was growing up – he and Ma split up around the time I was two, and then he was always busy on assignments and undercover and all. He visited sometimes, but after Ma died he wasn't around and they put me in foster care." Teresa looked away again, her eyes on the wall. "My powers manifested at the same time and I managed to burst every eardrum in the home one night. The parents were cool about it and all, but a couple of the other kids decided they'd use me to help them break into places so that they could steal stuff. I ran away after a month, and spent nine months squatting in abandoned buildings before Da found me and brought me back here." She looked back at Rahne, and shrugged noncommittally. "So there you have it – my own personal mutant sob story. I know it's hardly up to yours or Jonothan Starsmore's, but it's why I'm usually buried under these stupid books…"
Rahne flinched involuntarily at the reference to her experiences. Despite her recent good mood at the recovery of her powers, the memories were still raw. In fact having her powers again had also brought back all the pain and grief, as the though the barriers had not only blocked her powers but insulated her from the memories. The last two nights she'd cried herself to sleep. But despite Teresa's efforts to downplay her own story, Rahne felt a surge of empathy for her foster sister. Between Excalibur and the X-men, Rahne had had support through most of the period after her parents' deaths. Teresa had been completely on her own. "I'm sorry about your mother," she said, knowing only to well how pitifully hollow that sounded. She paused, unsure of what to say. "How…?"
"Car crash."
"Oh… I'm sorry." As though that would make it better, she thought bitterly.
"It's okay," Teresa replied, smiling with a resigned tilt of her head. "I've still got Da, at least." Her eyes widened in alarm as she noticed Rahne's instinctive cringe, and realised what she had said. "Oh, I'm sorry… I didn't mean to say… Oh my god, I am so sorry…"
This time it was Rahne's turn to give a tight smile and look away. "It's okay," she said quietly, focusing intently on the pile of notes beside her to try and gain control of the bubble of sadness that had suddenly appeared from nowhere and lodged in her stomach. "I understand."
An awkward silence followed, with both girls staring at the floor, neither sure of what to say. It was only broken when Betsy's 'voice' spoke in their heads.
Oi, where is everyone? You need to get to a TV screen.
"Did you hear that? Isn't Betsy supposed to be in London today?" asked Teresa. Rahne nodded, wondering what was so important. "Well, I suppose we should do what she says," her sister continued. "Come on, there's a TV just down the hall."
Rahne followed her out of the room and along the corridor to yet another plainly furnished room which looked as though it might have been intended as a classroom. "What channel do you think she was meaning?" she asked as Teresa picked up the remote.
"I'm not sure, I suppose we'll have to flick through them…" the screen flickered into life, bringing up an image of a reporter standing in front of an official grey building. A building which was distressingly familiar. "Wait, that's the courthouse! But that means…" Teresa trailed of as the reporter began to speak.
"I'm standing here at the steps of the High Court in London, where just fifteen minutes ago a jury found Jonothan Starsmore guilty of the murder of Gayle Edgarton. The jury took only two and a half hours to reach its verdict in the case which has divided the nation and is tipped to be a precedent-setting decision in the issue of mutant responsibility for their actions. And here comes the successful Crown Prosecutor, QC Edward Carson, to say a few words to the public…"
As the reporter joined the crowd of media gathering around the lawyer, he began to speak, his voice ringing above the clamour of questions. "Justice has been done today," he began, looking directly into the camera. "With this ground-breaking verdict, we are sending a message to mutants, telling them that they will not be allowed to run free while the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of their powers. If the case of Jonothan Starsmore shows us anything, it is that the same laws apply to mutants as to the rest of us. Mutants should not be above the law – they must not be allowed to believe that they can avoid punishment because of their so-called 'gifts'."
As he paused, the clamour of the reporters began again. One raised his hand, and called out "What are your thoughts on sentencing Mr Carson?"
"I'm sure it's too early to comment on such things," Carson replied, smiling his snake-like smile. "But I will say this. My brother Francis and his dedicated team of researchers at Oxford University have just perfected a cure for the mutant gene. As we speak, a Bill is being fast-tracked through Parliament which will legalise the inactivation of mutant powers as a sentence. This Bill will make it legal for a mutant convicted of a capital crime to have their powers bound and inactivated in a simple non-invasive medical procedure."
"So, do you think that this procedure should be used on Jonothan Starsmore?" one of the reporters asked.
"Of course I'm not at liberty to comment about this," he answered. "But I will say that we hope that Jonothan Starsmore will be the first person to undertake this treatment, for both the benefit society at large, and his own good."
If there was more, neither Rahne nor Teresa wanted to hear it. They'd already had more than enough to process in the little that they'd heard. "That was…" Teresa looked dumbfounded. "I don't even know what that was – maybe we should ask Moira?"
Rahne nodded. She wanted to say something, but the use of her tongue seemed to have left her for the moment. What had just happened? What was Carson talking about? The two girls walked out of the room in silence, and neither said a word in the time it took to find Moira and Sean in one of the other conference rooms.
"So I suppose y' both saw it too," Sean remarked.
"Yeah, we did," Teresa replied. "What was it? What was he talking about?"
"I'm not sure." Moira seemed to have been taking notes, and she was now gazing at them speculatively. "Edward's up to something, and it looks like his brother is a part of it too. I just wish we knew what this 'cure' that Francis has created was… I mean, I know that he's been working on the activation and signalling pathways of the x-factor gene, but there are just so many possibilities in the practical execution… We really need to know exactly what we're dealing with here."
Sean's expression took on a scheming air. "Y' know my dear," he said with a sudden smile, "I think that we might just be able t' arrange that."