Chapter 22

Emma knelt down amongst her friends. She touched Shalimar's cheek and wiped away tears with her thumb. "What happened?" the Feral asked her.

"You caught a little of what I did to them," Emma responded. It was difficult for her to speak and her voice sounded strained. Shalimar looked around the hangar. "Marlowe?"

"Still alive, but that will change. I have him restrained in the Helix."

"What did you do to them?" Adam asked. "Will they recover?"

"Never fully," Emma said, "but they'll be more-or-less functional in a day or two."

Brennan was the first to stand up again. "Emma, I'm glad you were able to get us out of the mess we were in, but I don't mind saying, I'll be happy when you're back to your old self."

Emma didn't respond to his comment. She wasn't sure that would ever be possible. Even when these powers faded, she would be different. In the Helix, Marlowe was trying to escape. Emma winced in pain as she felt him crushing his own hand to try and pull it through the restraints. His New Mutant ability to heal was his undoing. Once he smashed and dislocated the bones in his hands, they repaired themselves faster than he could work his way out of the bindings. Emma returned her attention to her immediate surroundings. "Are you all right, Jess?" she asked. He was the only one who had not yet spoken. Her heart broke to see the pain on his face and feel it in his mind. He seemed more affected than the others.

"It's just that I've never really been faced with death before. As Brennan so often reminds everyone, I lived a sheltered life. Now that I've seen it, I think I'm glad I had that shelter."

"Let's go talk to Mr. Marlowe," Adam said. They all went to the far corner of the hangar and the wreckage of the Double Helix. Marlowe had given up his struggles and was sitting down calmly awaiting them.

"How do you plan to kill him?" Shalimar asked Emma when she saw the man.

"Come on, Shalimar. Will you listen to what you are saying," Adam chided her.

"No, Adam," Brennan said. "We have to find a way to put an end to him for good."

"That doesn't mean we have to kill him. I say we lock him up and throw away the key. He doesn't have any powers that will help him escape life in prison."

"Mason always said your compassion was your greatest weakness," Marlowe taunted him.

"I can't agree with you, Adam," Emma said. "There's always the risk he could get away. Maybe burn the prison to the ground. He would heal as quickly as the flames consumed him and then could walk away unscathed."

"I will make sure the proper precautions are in place," Adam assured her.

"I'm with Shalimar, Brennan and Emma," Jesse said. "Is one life worth risking six billion?"

"Even if I agreed with you, and I don't," Adam said, "how would you kill him?" Jesse didn't have an answer for that.

"This is all very touching," Marlowe said. "What if I just promised to be good?" They continued to ignore him.

"Maybe I agree with Adam after all, but there's a better way to imprison him, with less risk." Emma squatted down to look Marlowe in the eyes. "We dump him in a cement mixer, fill it with cement and let it dry." For the first time, the Psionic thought she sensed true fear in him.

"Would he eventually starve or suffocate?" Brennan asked.

"I don't know." Adam considered the possibilities. He thought Emma's suggestion was far too cruel, but there seemed little choice. The risks of Marlowe escaping were too great. "When Charles was at Genomex originally, many experiments were done to test his invulnerability. It wasn't realized that his true power was regeneration at the time. I was not involved directly with the test, but I read the reports later. One involved locking him up for a month without food, water or oxygen. When they released him, he was entirely unaffected."

Shalimar shook her head. "I don't like it. It seems like death would be more merciful," she said, echoing Adam's thoughts.

Emma stood up again and looked at the blond woman. "And he deserves mercy?" It wasn't a point Shalimar was willing to argue. He didn't deserve it.

"He can't heal that quickly. Could he survive lava or a vat of molten steel?" Jesse asked.

"Probably not, but then a few cells somewhere else begin regenerating and we are worse off, because we don't even know where he is." Adam looked down at their prisoner, hearing a disturbing noise.

Marlowe was laughing. All of Mutant X stared at him. "I'm sorry, but to listen to you mortals discuss my fate is truly amusing."

His snide remark struck a chord in Emma. She knelt back down in front of the man and linked with his mind. "What made you this way?" she asked.

Emma saw an immensely deep scar burned into Marlowe's psyche. It was associated with something that had happened after he left Genomex the first time to try and live a normal life, but before he returned as a hired gun for Mason Eckhart. The emotional damage caused by this incident had made him block off all sympathy, all love of life, all compassion and the very will to live. He did not see his immortality as a gift, but as a punishment he could never escape. If he could come to terms with what had happened, maybe even the hard-hearted Marlowe could be turned. Emma would make him relive that night and tear through the thick walls he had built up around it.

Charles Marlowe was driving late at night. For the first time since their child was born several years ago, they had time and money for a vacation on the coast. Charles had been eager to get out of the house before rush hour traffic, but his daughter's temper tantrum and the resulting fight he had with his wife over how to deal with the child meant they spent hours in gridlock. He was determined to make up the time and drove recklessly, weaving in and out of traffic well above the speed limit whenever possible, even after the rain started falling. His wife was nervous and kept telling him to be careful. He was too fast and too reckless. She wanted to take the wheel. They had been driving for hours and their daughter had cried most of the time, sensing the tension between her parents. Charles was only interested in making time. He felt they must understand what he was trying to do for them and considered them to be unreasoningly upset. He turned up the radio, insisting everything would be okay if they would just calm down and let him drive.

A few miles more and he found himself on a section of highway with only two lanes, both of which were blocked by cars driving fifteen miles below the speed limit due to the torrential downpour. Marlowe accelerated and pulled onto the shoulder, trying to pass the slow moving vehicles on the right. Unseen in the in the rain and darkness, their car hit a retread that had come off of a tractor-trailer. The speed of the impact and hardness of the retread actually dented the steel belts in the front right tire. He began losing control of the car and could dimly see through the torrents of water that they were on the outside of a curve. The shoulder was covered with mud and gravel. His tire was no longer round and the steering alignment was thrown off. The car barreled into the guardrail, which held for a moment, changing the trajectory of the car, but then broke off. The Marlowe family vehicle rolled and tumbled down a sharp incline, finally coming to rest out of view of the highway.

Charles looked over to see the dashboard crushing his wife's chest. A sheared off tree branch impaled her chest. Not one window was intact and glass was everywhere. In the back seat, his daughter leaned forward, supported by a safety belt. The neck was bent at an unnatural angle and a slight flutter of the eyelashes was the only sign of life. With difficulty, he pulled himself from the wreckage, tearing his own flesh, which instantly healed. A twisted guardrail, pieces of a shattered tree, and debris from the car surrounded him as he stood watching his wife and child take their last breaths. He climbed over the car to the other side so that he could reach through the broken passenger side windows and touch the two people that were his whole life. He held their hands and gently stroked their cheeks as life faded. His child died first, never making a sound. His wife recovered briefly from the shock of her injuries. Her eyes focused on his.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." He cried and grasped her hand tightly.

"I..." she began, but never finished. Her eyes lost focus again and in a few minutes, she was dead. Marlowe held their hands for a long time as their bodies slowly cooled. He knew that he would never see them again, not in heaven and not in hell. He walked away from the crash site, knowing that he was doomed to roam the Earth forevermore alone.

"We can try to send you to them, Charles," Emma said. Despite her hatred of the man, she found that her eyes were tearing.

"No you can't. No one can." Marlowe was crying as well. He let Emma see through his eyes to another time, years later. His life was slipping away along with the blood gushing forth from a gunshot wound. Adam Kane and Shalimar Fox were standing over him. He was happy; he was dying. Their faces blurred and his vision blacked out. There Marlowe's conscious memories ended, but Emma was able to access cellular memories that he could not—perceptions, sounds and sensations the waking brain did not remember. The transfusion of DNA that saved the lives of hundreds of New Mutants had left Charles Marlowe apparently vulnerable to death. Mason Eckhart wasted no time, ordering the body immediately cremated. He considered the Molecular a threat, because he was immune to retribution or discipline. This might be the only opportunity to destroy him once and for all. She felt the flames consume the once untouchable body.

Emma could see thousands of long silver filaments, similar to those anchoring an astral form to its physical body, leading from Marlowe. These tendrils connected his consciousness with all of his detached living cells, which she could see as dim lights. Blood samples, the root of a hair, anything that lived that had once been part of him was attached and aware of the main body. As the primary light went out, another flared up. It was not the largest group of living cells, but it was in the most auspicious place, surrounded by unlimited biological mass that could be used to reconstruct and regenerate. One single blood cell that was splattered by the gunshot wound Marlowe had received was swept up with the garbage and thrown in the trash. The New Mutant ability of that one cell was triggered and it began to grow. Months later, sentience returned to Charles Marlowe, but he was not in Heaven or Hell, but rather someplace worse. He was alive. "You see," he said. "You can't kill me."

"But I can," Emma told him. She believed that what she just saw held the key. Part of her wished him the pain of being contained immobile in isolation for all eternity, but another part had grown some sympathy for Marlowe. What he had suffered did not excuse his subsequent actions, but the tragedy, paired with the emotional instability inherent in his mutation made her understand him to some extent. "I offer you death." She sensed the slightest beginnings of hope.