Chapter 23

Emma woke up in a hospital bed. She had no idea where she was. The last thing she remembered was dozing off in the truck next to Adam. She winced slightly as she tried to sit up. Her ribs and head were bandaged. Though her throat still hurt, it must not have been bad enough to require surgery. She could breath easily through her nose and mouth.

"Good morning, sleepy-head." She noticed Shalimar standing up from a nearby chair. "I was beginning to worry you might never wake up."

"How long has it been?" the redhead asked.

"Getting close to three days."

"No wonder I'm starving," Emma exclaimed.

"You look it," Shalimar said, meaning it as a joke.

Emma looked downcast, self-conscious about her frail state, especially in front of such a healthy, fit woman as the blond Feral.

"Oh, Emma, I'm so sorry." She sat on the bed put her arm around the younger woman's shoulders. "You'll be back in fighting shape in no time."

"Where are we?" Emma asked, consoled.

"We're at a private hospital in the country run by an old friend of Adam's." Shal told her.

"Why aren't we at Sanctuary?"

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Shalimar smiled at her.

Emma had no clue what she was talking about at first. So much had happened, but then she remembered. They didn't know where Sanctuary was. She reached into Shalimar's mind and removed the blocks she had placed there weeks ago. It seemed like so much more time had passed, but it had only been a little less than a month.

"Thank-you. I feel much better knowing how to get home. Do you feel strong enough to get up?" Emma did, though she needed a little help from the other woman at first to steady herself. She may have slept for nearly three days, but she still felt exhausted.

Brennan, Jesse and Adam were all gathered in a lounge area, not far from Emma's room. She smiled to see them all and immediately undid the blocks she had placed in their brains.

Adam smiled jovially and said, "Let's go home." After the formalities of checking Emma out of the hospital and saying goodbye to Adam's friend, Mutant X climbed into a van they had procured and at long last returned to Sanctuary.

Back home, Adam immediately had Emma report to the lab. He desperately wanted to give her a thorough checkup on his own equipment. There was no telling what side effects her experiences over the last few weeks might have had on her. She willingly lay back in the reclining medical chair as his scanners electromagnetically examined her.

"Are you still experiencing an extension of your New Mutant abilities, Emma?" Adam asked. In answer, a drawer opened on once side of room and a dozen scalpels leapt into the air and raced at Adam, stopping just short of his face and heart. "Not funny," he told her. The scalpels rotated one hundred eighty degrees and flew through the air again, embedding themselves in the far wall.

"Don't complain. You're the one who did this to me," Emma said.

"What I did to you, Emma, was an option of last resort and despite what you may think, I did not do it lightly." She didn't respond and he turned to the results of his scans. Most of the protein complexes Adam had injected Emma with had disappeared. They worked to amplify and extend her native powers. In performing this function, they would break down and be absorbed by the body. If he assumed the concentration in her blood of these proteins after he injected her as one hundred percent on a scale, she was currently down to ten percent.

"I want you to continue using your extended powers for the next few days so that I can monitor what effect they have on you," Adam instructed her.

"Now that my powers are enhanced, you suddenly think you can lie to me?" Emma challenged him.

"Get out of my mind, Emma." Adam was concerned.

"Don't worry. I'm not reading you, but right now I can feel every emotion and I hear every surface thought as if it was being yelled in my ear," she said. "I'll follow your instructions."

Adam compared a brainwave profile of Emma taken before their capture to the one he had just taken. It was difficult to reconcile the two. He then compared the two scans to ones taken of Emma's two selves when she had been split apart. The post-Marlowe Emma was much more like the reckless aggressive side than the passive compassionate side. She should have been an even mixture of the two.

"I used to fear that Emma. Now I think I admire her," the young woman said. Adam had to be careful. She was reading him indiscriminately. "No, it's you who are broadcasting indiscriminately." Emma swung her legs off the side of the chair and stood up. "Just out of curiosity, Adam, if I were to read you, would I like what I saw?" Adam tried to keep his mind a blank slate and said nothing. Emma left the lab.

For the next few days, Emma kept to herself while she explored and expended her powers. She telekinetically rearranged furniture and stacked stones. She experimented with astral projecting and traveling the information superhighway telecyberly. Now that she was safe and relaxed with sleep and a full belly, she found it to be much easier on her mind and body to use these abilities. On the third day after their return to Sanctuary, Emma was sitting on a rock by the water far below the camouflaged hangar door the Helix used to enter their headquarters. She had stacked eight large boulders on top of one another and was moving the ninth when it slipped from her mind's grip and fell into the water.

She knew she still had her powers. She was able to feel the emotions of her friends up above her, but something was definitely different. Quickly, she gathered her lunch basket and blanket and ran to see Adam in the lab. A thorough examination revealed that the protein complexes he had injected Emma with were now completely gone. A new brainwave profile showed her to be more centered, though the change from her experiences with deprivation, torture and death had left heavy marks on her psyche.

"How do you feel, Emma?" Adam asked her.

"Good. I'm not hearing thoughts anymore, just the normal emotional clutter," she answered.

"Excellent," Adam said. "I already had planned for a celebration today. Now we have two reasons." He led Emma into the common room where Jesse, Shalimar and Brennan were lounging around. Adam made sure he had everyone's attention. "I'm proud to announce that Emma is now out of danger. She has her first clean bill of health." Everyone clapped and hooted.

"You're still looking a little scrawny there, girl," Shalimar said.

"I'm up to a hundred fifteen. As long as I don't have to eat any of Jesse's cooking, I'll be back to my normal size in no time."

"Hey, what did I do?" Jesse exclaimed, mock indignant.

"You said something about a celebration?" Emma prodded, lest Adam forget.

"Yes, everyone, follow me." Adam led his team to the hangar. When they entered, they all gasped in surprise. There was the Double Helix, looking shiny and new. "I picked her up this morning. It's amazing how quickly repairs get done if you know the right people. And it didn't hurt to have three other planes to strip parts from."

"She looks great, Adam," Brennan said. Everyone agreed. "Any upgrades?"

"A few, but now, let's pick somewhere for dinner. The whole world is at our disposal." Adam almost considered the Helix the sixth member of his team. He was glad to have everyone together again.

A few days later, Adam called Emma into the lab for another checkup. She could immediately tell that he was disturbed by the results. "What's wrong, Adam?"

"Maybe I need to recalibrate my equipment. There seems to be a problem." He checked and rechecked every way he could think of, but could find nothing wrong. I'll run a complete systems diagnostic, but it appears that your extended powers are returning. Somehow your brain must have learned to synthesize the proteins I injected you with. Only small amounts are being produced, but they could build up and have the same effects on you that they had before."

"Don't bother with the diagnostic," Emma said. "You are right."

"You know?" Adam was truly surprised. How could she hide something like this from him?

"Yes. How could I not know? I feel the power surging through me."

"You should have told me immediately so I could start working on a treatment." He was concerned for the girl. One of the side effects of the protein complexes he had introduced into her system seemed to be an emotional and psychological instability. The higher the concentration, the more unpredictable and even maniacal she became.

"I don't want to be cured. These abilities helped me once. They may again. I know you are hiding things from us, Adam. You think you are doing it to protect us. I respect you and love you enough not to rip the secrets out of your mind, but if your secrets ever threaten me or Brennan, Shalimar and Jesse, I won't hesitate to force you to talk."

"Emma, what you are dealing with is dangerous. It's unstudied. I do know that the buildup of these chemicals has a detrimental effect on your emotional well-being." Adam could not believe her recklessness. He could only attribute it to a side effect of the changes in her brain chemistry.

"It's a risk I will have to take. I need to have something you don't know about in case you ever endanger us." Adam wasn't sure if he was more disturbed by what she said or by the cold, calculating, matter-of-fact way she said it.

He was beginning to think she was even more unstable than he had feared. "But I do know about it," Adam said.

"No, you don't." Emma's eyes fully dilated into twin pools of abysmal black. "Whenever you examine me in the future, you will not notice any abnormalities in my mutation unless they are life-threatening." Her irises returned to blue.

Adam reexamined his screen, which displayed the results of her checkup. "Well, Emma, I have to say, everything still looks perfectly normal, at least for a New Mutant."

Emma showed Adam her infectious smile and he smiled at her, glad to have his Psionic back to her old self. The tall young woman left the lab and Adam returned to his project of cataloguing all of the information they had extracted from Fasergen.

Late that night, Shalimar came across Adam sitting by himself, alone in the dark. "Something bothering you?" she asked.

"Maybe it's nothing," he said, " but then again…" he trailed off.

"Usually your suspicions are correct. What is it?" Shalimar asked him.

"I think Emma did something to me. I've been trying to figure out what, but it's probably futile."

"A month ago, I would have said that was impossible. Now, I worry about her. She's not the Emma who left on the mission to Fasergen."

"If she did do something to me, it's my own fault. She's a young girl, hardly twenty. What right do I have to send her into danger like that?"

"She's always free to walk away from this." Shalimar would miss Emma if she left them, but she believed in the cause of Mutant X and that came first.

"There's every possibility she could one day walk away from here and we could find her opposing us. Psionics tend to be unstable to begin with. Such a powerful empath, bombarded with so many emotions every day of her life and now with what happened to her at Fasergen. What if she became another Eckhart or Ashlocke or Marlowe?"

"Someone once told me you can't force right or wrong on anyone. All you can do is lead by example and hope they lean toward the light." Shalimar put her arm around Adam. He only wished he could be sure in which direction Emma would lean.

THE END