Jesse peered out from their cave/prison. Dusk had settled, and the beast mutants had stoked up their fire in order to cook an evening meal. The aroma of charred meat wafted toward the three. Jesse couldn't decide whether to be hungry at the smell or nauseated from the stench. None of their captors, it seemed, were particularly good cooks. From comments that he'd overheard, it appeared that their captors felt the same way. Most had been married with wives who did the cooking before their transformation at the hands of genetics. For that alone, Jesse pitied them.

Adam came up beside him. "You could escape," was all he said.

Jesse shook his head. "No. The moment I'm gone, they'll have no reason to keep you alive and plenty to want you dead. And, since they now think Brennan isn't a mutant, they'll kill him along with you. As long as I stay here, they'll use you as a hostage for my good behavior."

"I can't argue with that logic," Adam agreed, "but have you thought about what they'll do to you?"

Jesse looked uneasily out at the gathering crowd outside the cave. "Brennan lived through it."

"Right." Adam didn't have to mention picking the man up from where he had fallen to the ground outside of the cave last night, or holding him close until the trembling ceased. Without his equipment there was no way of telling what had gone on inside of the elemental, but Adam was grateful that Brennan now appeared to be sleeping it off. Whatever it was, it was a light dose, for the man had violently emptied his stomach of the green mess shortly after being dismissed by their captors. Adam doubted that much of the compound had actually been absorbed. Then Brennan had slept the entire night and day away, and the other two had declined to disturb him.

"Figure out where we are yet?"

Adam snorted. "Right." He pointed up at the sky. The stars were brilliant, clearer for the lack of light pollution that dimmed their beauty closer to sites of civilization. "The North Star, 46 degrees of elevation best I can figure. That means we're on the 46th parallel, give or take a degree or two."

"That's latitude. How about longitude?"

"I figured I could leave that to you."

"Hah. Adam, I'm a child of the new millennium. I use GPS."

"Not that it makes any difference," Adam added morosely. "Even knowing our position won't help. Not unless we knew where the nearest town was. And I don't carry a map in my head of this area."

"Me, neither. Uh-oh. Here they come, and they're not bringing dinner." Jesse looked again. "I take that back. It looks like it's dinner for one. Heavy on the salad." He glanced back at Brennan, still asleep—or passed out—on the hard cave rock floor. "Wish me luck."

Bartholomew and Clarence approached the cave entrance, Wilbur trailing behind with a steaming cup of something appalling.

"Going to give us a hard time?" Clarence looked as though he wished that they would. There was excitement on his face, anticipation mixed with fear, though it was hard to decipher the emotions through the fur, Jesse decided.

"Not this time." Maybe next, Jesse left hanging in the wind for both ferals to hear.

Bartholomew eyed Adam balefully, flicking his eyes to the sleeping figure in the gloom in the back of the cave. "You stay here."

"I want to come," Adam objected.

"You can watch from here." Bartholomew drew Jesse forth, careful not to insert his hawk talons into frail human skin. "We'll bring him back to you. Later."

"It's okay, Adam," Jesse said. "Don't rile the natives. Look after Brennan for me. I'll be back."

Adam turned on his captors. "You make sure he comes back. In one piece," he threatened.

The beast mutants were unimpressed, taking Jesse by the arms and guiding him to the main area of their encampment, leaving his teammates behind. What could a mere norm do, when you came right down to it? Especially one saddled with another with a broken arm? The ferals led the molecular away from Adam and Brennan, certain there would be no trouble that they couldn't handle easily.

This was it; the point of no return. Jesse didn't know exactly what was going to happen. Oh, he knew in theory: they would force him to drink some vile tasting potion that would supposedly enable one of the beast mutants to turn back into a human appearing person while retaining his feral mutant abilities. It hadn't worked on Brennan, another mutant, and Jesse saw no reason to suppose that this time would be any different. After all, this was not modern medicine that these poor mutilated mutants were trying, it was a haphazard rotgut of the backwoods. If he was extremely lucky, the potion wouldn't stay down any longer than it had for Brennan, and he too would get off with a light dose of nausea.

Of course, there was always the possibility that this time it contained something poisonous, maybe something he was allergic to, in which case he could look forward to a swift death. Gee, wonderful thought, Kilmartin.

Same cup, same horrid smell. Jesse idly wondered how much worse it was for the beast mutants, assuming that their collective sense of smell was as acute as Shalimar's. He couldn't see how it wouldn't be; they'd all displayed her other feral attributes. In fact, the only difference between the two was that Shalimar could pass for a normal human, and these couldn't. Well, that and also that these were all males. Seemed that the late and unlamented Dr. Van Duyn hadn't bothered to experiment on any women. Lucky them. Adam apparently hadn't thought much of Van Duyn as a researcher and Jesse saw nothing that would cause him to question Adam's judgment.

"Drink it." Clarence was growing more than eager. The wolf mutant moved in, baring his teeth instinctively. Jesse took an unwitting step back, imagining those teeth at his throat. It didn't take much imagination.

The others crowded in behind him, pushing him back toward the eagerly awaiting Clarence, all anxious to see if this time the potion would work. It had worked before, they'd told Jesse. One of them had left this merry band of furries and rejoined society. Right. Like Jesse would believe that this horrid mixture of vegetable juice, loaded with vitamins and poison, could do such a thing.

He could either swallow, or have them force it down his throat. Jesse chose to swallow.

All right, maybe not such a smart choice. Jesse instantly understood what Brennan had gone through just last evening and gained a great deal of sympathy for his fellow mutant in the process. Fire dripped down his esophagus to explode in his gut with all the delicacy of a nuclear melt-down. His brain did a poltergeist spin inside his head, somehow raking a sawblade around the inside of his skull. He wished that it were true: a saw would take off the top of his head and allow his aching insides to leak out and sink into the ground where he didn't have to admit ownership to it.

Clarence clutched him firmly under the arms, drawing him close, and the smell of unwashed wolf on top of the potion made him gag. Clarence didn't care; the wolf mutant tightened his hold.

Then it began. There were no words to describe what happened; Jesse could only beg for it to stop. He felt a pulling, a drain on something deep within him, something essential to life being dragged out drop by meager drop.

Then it was over. He was on the ground. The earth was cold, and Jesse could only be grateful for the coolness after the fire that had just moments ago been tearing at his insides. There was a blurry scene in front of him that he couldn't focus on, but from the jubilant sounds pounding on his ear drums he could tell that several someones were ecstatic.

The sound got very quiet, and very distant. No, it wasn't the sound. It was Jesse. It was Jesse himself who was becoming distant. Sight went first. Hearing went next. Then there was only the agony of feeling his nerves send his muscles into a top-spinning frenzy. And he couldn't do a damn thing about it.

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"Jesse!" Emma found him at once on the psychic plane. "Jesse, what's wrong?"

Jesse blinked dizzily. He could have sworn that he was lying on the ground in the middle of the beast mutants' camp. This cloud stuff didn't make sense. But, since all the pain and discomfort of a few moments ago had vanished, Jesse was willing to make the best of it. He looked around; all there was to see were clouds. And fog—lots of it. Ground was just a memory. "Cool. I'm floating in mid air. Forty six degrees of latitude, and high up in the mountains."

"Jesse, you're having an out of body experience," Emma told him. "This can be very dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. We have to get you back to your body before you're lost here forever. What's happening in real life?"

Jesse giggled drunkenly. "Beats me." He offered a lopsided grin. "Tell you what. You go there and find out. Come back when you feel like it, but not too soon. I'm having fun up here in the clouds."

Emma gritted her teeth and kept her calm. Little lightning sparks halo'ed around her head gave it away, but Jesse was in no condition to notice. "That sounds like a wonderful idea," she lied, knowing that Jesse could easily see through the lie if he chose to. She was betting that he wouldn't. "Where are you? Where's your body?"

"Down there," Jesse laughed. "On the ground." He looked around. "Where's the ground? Isn't there supposed to be a bunch of rocks and caves?"

"I can't see it, Jesse," Emma pointed out. "I can't see your body. Can you show me?"

"Nope. Don't want to. Hurts down there."

"Were you hurt in the crash?" Emma was puzzled. That wasn't consistent with the mind touch from yesterday. It was Brennan that she thought had been injured, not Jesse. Last night Jesse's thoughts had been crystal clear, even if unhelpful as to where the trio was located. What was going on?

"Nope," Jesse leaned over to say confidingly, "this just happened. Just now. Like an hour ago. Bunch of ferals. Gave me poison to drink, 'cause I'm a mutant. They got Brennan, too, but they think he's not a mutant. Stupid ferals. Idiots, every one of 'em." He giggled again.

"Poison!" It was starting to make sense. "Jesse, you have to get back to your body right away. You can't let yourself die! You have to fight!"

"Nah. Too much work. You do it. I'd rather play on the computer. Hey, look, there's one over there." Jesse started to drift off through the psychic clouds in search of his favorite toy.

"Jesse!" This was frightening Emma. The molecular couldn't be allowed to stay here, out of his body. If what he said was accurate, and no one could truly tell a lie here on the psychic plane, then he was dying right now. He had to get back and fight for life!

No time to waste. Emma aimed a careful psionic whammy at her teammate.

Jesse jerked in shock, looking back at Emma with an astonished and hurt expression before he sagged into the clouds and disappeared. Emma swiftly hurried to where she had last seen him, to satisfy herself that she had indeed saved his life by returning him to his body.

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Bartholomew and a shaggy older man carried Jesse back into the cave, dumping him on the floor in front of Adam. The molecular was out cold, his color pale, his breathing harsh and rapid.

"What did you do to him?" Adam demanded, swiftly kneeling to examine the young mutant.

"Who are you?" Brennan added to the older man. There had been no 'normals' in camp except for Adam, and certainly no one who looked as human as this one did here in this crowd of misbegotten mutants. There was something about the way the older tilted his head, something familiar about his voice…

"You!"

The older man bowed. "Clarence Witherspoon, at your service, gentlemen. No, actually, I'm not really at your service, not under these circumstances, but it's a great line. I could never resist using clichés." He indicated the unconscious mutant at his feet. "Your friend there has been at my service. He was really quite useful, as you can see." Clarence preened, examining first one arm and then the other for the excessive shaggy fur that he had possessed just an hour previously. Muscles rippled beneath the pale flesh, evidence of frequent exercise in this wilderness environment. "Skin. I can actually see it. Wonderful. I had been wondering if this day would ever come." He beamed, his cold gray eyes finally seen clearly without wolf fur covering them. The process had left him with a five o'clock shadow moving on toward ten o'clock at night, but it was obvious that whatever the potion was, it had worked. The wolf man had finally turned back into a man. "A wonderful day."

"It may be your last," Brennan growled.

"It won't be," Bartholomew interrupted. Feathers still framed this mutant's face, and it was obvious that Bartholomew was eager for his own turn to morph. "Not today. Perhaps tomorrow. He's strong; he may last another day beyond that. We're all hoping for more."

"What do you mean?"

Bartholomew indicated the food that they had brought in with them. "Better see if you can wake him up, get him to eat. Build up his strength. There are twelve of us here—eleven, now that Clarence has been cured—and we all want the same cure. The last mutant that we tried this on only lasted for two of us. We're hoping for better results this go-around. We probably won't be able to fix all of us, but even three would be an improvement. Know any more mutants, Dr. Kane? Man like you, you have to know a lot of mutants that would be useful for us." His eyes narrowed. On the hawk-like features, it was truly scary. "We can get that information out of you."

"You're mad," Adam declared, rising back to his feet. "You're killing Jesse, just so that you can look better, so that you can pass in normal society without people talking about you. You're ready to kill as many mutants as it takes for your own desires."

"No, Dr. Kane, we are not animals," Bartholomew declared. "We live by the laws of nature, but we are not animals despite our appearance. We only take what we need. This is one life for three or more." Bartholomew nodded at the unconscious mutant. "He's giving us back our lives."

Adam wasn't done yet. "Look, I'm sorry that genetic science didn't live up to your expectations, but you were the ones who went to Dr. Van Duyn for help. You all had irreversible genetic illnesses that were going to kill you in a year or two if not sooner. He cured you of those illnesses. You're alive right now because of him!"

"This is not living!" Bartholomew snarled back. "This is death! And we're doing something about it!"

"Yes, by killing another man! This is not right!"

"You wouldn't say that so easily if it were you inside this fur coat," Bartholomew replied bitterly. He gestured one last time. "Help your man, Dr. Kane. Yours is an exact science, but ours is not. Maybe we'll be wrong. Maybe he'll live after helping all of us."

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"Well?" Shalimar demanded.

The only good thing about waking up inside this tent was that Shalimar was standing over her and blocking the early morning sun from beating up on her eyeballs. There was very little else to recommend wakefulness: last night's excursion had been a difficult one. After finding Jesse and forcing him back to his body, Emma had searched the Overworld for signs of her other missing teammates and had come up empty.

That didn't necessarily mean anything. When it came to psionics, no news was not automatically a bad thing. It simply meant that she wasn't able to touch their minds. It could mean that both Adam and Brennan weren't sleeping, or were sleeping so lightly that their spirits hadn't been released to the higher planes.

Or it could mean that they were dead.

Emma didn't think so. Jesse had been in trouble last night, but hadn't said anything about the other two. Knowing the molecular, if his teammates had been dead or in danger of dying, Jesse would have been more concerned about their welfare than his own. No, chances were that the other two were in the same spot as Jesse, and unable to extract themselves. Which meant that she and Shalimar had to keep looking.

"I'm not certain," Emma replied. "I found Jesse. He said that they had been found by some ferals."

Shalimar straightened. "That's good. They're mutants."

"They're mutants, but I don't think that's good. Jesse said that they had poisoned him." Emma quickly filled Shalimar in on the details of what she had discovered from Jesse.

"Not much to go on," Shalimar said thoughtfully. "Forty six degrees latitude. That rules out the edges of our search area. A degree is still a pretty big chunk of landscape, especially when you include the up and down parts, like mountains."

Emma nodded. "And if there's two inches around here that doesn't have boulders, than I haven't seen it."

A thought struck Shalimar. "But you said that Jesse talked about caves." She pulled out her purloined topographic maps. "Let's concentrate on the areas where there are caves."

Emma nodded, starting to get excited. "We can eliminate the caves where the tourist traps are. I can't see a bunch of mutants holing up where everyone can come and gawk. Not the type of mutants that Jesse described."

Shalimar agreed. "If they're ferals, then they live in the forest somewhere. That means away from towns and cities. Let's rule out any area ten miles around sites of civilization."

The two women bent over the map, new clues firing their enthusiasm. And their determination.

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"Am I dead yet?"

Adam knelt by the molecular lying on the ground. He'd cadged a couple of tattered blankets to make the man more comfortable, one serving as a makeshift pillow against the hard and cold ground of the cave doing double duty as a prison. It seemed to have worked. Sometime during the night Jesse had passed from unconsciousness directly to a much needed and peaceful sleep, much as Brennan had the night before. At least this poison of theirs follows a pattern. "Welcome back to the land of the living. How do you feel?"

Jesse did a swift internal perusal of his body. At least, he thought it was swift. Adam, used to the brilliance of the young man beside him, knew that it was taking far longer than usual. "Thoroughly wiped. Like someone had grabbed my insides and yanked them all out."

"That's a pretty good description of what happened." If this had been Sanctuary, a safe place to cope with advanced treatment right at hand, the comment would have been accompanied by a chuckle. "I can't be certain, but from what I've been able to gather from talking to these mutants, their potion works by using your mutant genes to re-align their own. You feel 'empty' because they really did pull at your genes. Somehow the concoction that they fed you searched your genetic structure and then transferred the appropriate parts to Clarence's own body. The resultant reaction caused an acute adjustment in his genetic attributes and turned his skin back to human." Adam paused. "This could be a whole new advance in genetic science. Assuming I can get a sample of that potion."

"Assuming we get out of here alive," Brennan added sourly. "I'd settle for that."

Adam nodded. "I'll be satisfied with getting my sample from Jesse's bloodstream. And grateful for it." He looked around for what seemed like the hundredth time, searching for an escape from this situation. It didn't look good. He knew without asking that Brennan's arm was hurting him but that the elemental would rather die than complain. Not in a situation like this.

Not good. And so frustrating. Here he had two of the world's most powerful mutants as well as his own vaunted mind power, and they couldn't get themselves away from a group of untrained ferals. C'mon, Dr. Kane. It's time to start using those brains of yours. What else do you have to offer Mutant X? What's going to happen when they find out that you need them more than they need you?

He couldn't help it. He was only human. He slammed his fist against the back wall of the cave in frustration, welcoming the spots of blood that sprang to the skin of his knuckles. The cave wall echoed hollowly in sympathy.

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"Nothing!" Shalimar slapped the boulder beside her in frustration. "Nothing! No sign of any of them, no sign of the Helix! How can you hide an entire jet?"

Emma yawned. She'd slept through the day, recovering from the night's psychic hunting and preparing for the next, but she never truly felt rested when sleeping during daylight hours. "It's a big country, Shal. We'll find them."

"Yes, we will!" Shalimar snarled. "We'll find them if I have to turn over every rock in this state!"

"How far did you get?"

"I covered this side of the mountain." Shalimar settled back down. Her anger vented, she was ready to get back to work. She pulled over the map. "Here. I searched from here to here, looking in all the crevices. No sign of the guys, no sign of the Helix. I couldn't tell if there were any nasty little ferals lurking in the brush; I wasn't low enough in the hang glider to tell that. I'm going to assume that any feral has a basic understanding of how to hide under a tree."

"That's probably a good assumption." This time Emma stifled her yawn. Time to wake up, girl! She stretched, forcing ground-stiffened muscles to loosen and relax. She looked over the map. "We need to change our base camp, move on to another area. Any suggestions?"

"That's your department," Shalimar told her. "Me, I'm the hunting version. You're the one to come up with lucky guesses. What strikes your fancy? The other side of this mountain? Another mountain all together?"

Emma stared at the map, hoping a hunch would make itself known. "We know that the guys are being held in a cave. Are there any caves on the other side of this mountain?"

"None known," Shalimar replied, "but that doesn't mean much. The other side of the mountain is pretty wild, not well mapped." She cocked her head. "In fact, it would be a wonderful spot for a bunch of ferals who didn't want to be found."

Emma looked serious. "Then I think we ought to check it out before we give up on this mountain. I'll pack up the tent. Once we set up a new base, I'll go out in the Overworld for a little of my own hunting."