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They needed time to process what was happening, that much was clear to X. He didn't mind; it gave him time to try matching faces to voices. He was prepared to guess that confident voice belonged to the taller of the middle-aged men, but it was the shorter one who took a step forward and thrust out his hand.

"It's an honor to finally meet you, X." His was the voice that had struck true. He'd already shed his shock and met X's gaze easily, as though being introduced at a party. His fingers were thin; his free hand closed around X's gently.

"Finally?"

"Well, not that I thought I'd find you, specifically, but I . . . I had a feeling."

"Hold on." The taller man regained himself, drew closer. "I know this situation is remarkable, but maybe we shouldn't get—"

"No, not just remarkable. This is it. Don't you see it yet?" Traces of heat in those dull eyes, campfire embers struggling against wind and night. "This is what we've been waiting for. Look him in the face, tell me that's not life."

They both scrutinized his face with a care he only knew from interrogations.

"I think . . ." The woman holding herself up on the young man's back winced, tried to adjust herself. The way she moved what remained of her legs instinctively meant a recent loss.

If they came here for me, then that's my fault, isn't it?

"I think he's confused," she said, trembling.

Both of the older men were pulled back to the moment abruptly.

"Well, what about introductions?" the shorter man said. "X, was it? I am Doctor Eusebio Cain. This imposing fellow here is Doctor Sigmund Doppler. The youngsters are Preston DeWitt and Marty Sy. We came here to have a look around this ruined lab and see what we could find."

The man he'd identified as Doppler arched a brow at Cain. "That's a benign way to put it."

"There were explosions," X said, turning to meet Marty's weary gaze. She looked ready to pass out at any moment.

Come to think of it, I'm starting to feel exhausted, too. What's going on?

Cain was speaking. "The short version is that this lab was staked out by—"

Diagnostics showed nothing wrong with his hardware, but his neural pathways were atrophied from years of sleep and brief promenades in the dark and stillness. He had taken in and processed more novel sensory input in the last several minutes than he had in all the years since the simulation ended; it was simply overwhelming, like when Otto had first thrust him into reality.

"X? Is everything all right?" Cain asked, putting a hand on X's shoulder. X shook his head, trying to clear it enough to formulate a response, but could only mutely raise his hands to his ears and close his eyes tightly. He had just enough bandwidth, as the sensation of his squeezing lids or of his palms over his ears rushed to fill the gap, to throttle his sense receptors.

"Too much," he said.

"Too much what?" Doppler asked.

"Data." His nervous system was able to clear its backlog after a few more milliseconds; a tremendous relief. And it made him feel more like Xavier, to struggle with seeing in the dark. "Okay, I'm here. I just needed to adjust my intake."

"If you don't mind me saying," Doppler said, "you just look a tall human to me."

"That was part of the point, I think," X said. "My creator wanted to bridge the gap between man and machine—or so I was told. I never spoke to him myself."

"Doctor L—" Cain froze, frowning hard, mouthing silently, harshly. "What was your creator's name?"

"Touma Javier Hikari."

Cain and Doppler exchanged skeptical looks. Preston seemed only half present in the conversation. Marty turned inward, trying to find something other than pain and exhaustion in her memories.

"Hikari," she said. "Japanese. 'Light' in English. Could be . . ."

"It very well could. Thomas Xavier, Touma Javier? It wouldn't be the first time names were muddied," Cain said. "Does Doctor Wily ring a bell?"

"Wily? No. Otto did mention an Albert Weil, though. Why?"

Both Cain and Doppler started to open their mouths, then thought better of it.

"I think it's clear at this point that we have plenty to discuss. I hope we'll have time to, but let me cut to the chase. I—we—would like to get you out of here and take you with us somewhere safer where we can learn more about you, and answer your questions," Cain said. "We can't get out the way we came in, though, and we may be in danger the moment we get back to the surface. The drones that dropped those bombs you heard are likely still around."

Two impulses fought in X's mind; Xavier had been a man of action, well-versed in these life-and-death situations. Already those instincts were formulating plans based on every scrap of information available to him. Yet, those instincts were false, or at the very least attuned to a world that was false. Query: would his creator have ever allowed him to fail lethally in the simulation? What certainty did he have that he wouldn't end up getting the four of them killed? Surely they knew reality better than he?

The same Doctor Cain who woke him with the conviction in his voice was putting himself into X's hands.

"There are access tunnels," he said. "In case of emergencies, they each stretch a few kilometers away from here before they reach the surface. I can take you. Do you want to go North, Southeast, or West?"

"North," Preston said. He gave the impression of being a little disappointed.

X didn't wait for more; he led them through the doorway back into the central corridor, going by memory. The splash of white light against the walls to his sides told that Preston and the others followed. He quickly realized from their pace that they were exhausted. Their adrenaline had petered out; they plodded awkwardly, slowly behind him. He paused.

"If you are both okay with it, I can carry Miss Sy," he said. Preston mulled it over, then cocked his head at the yawning darkness ahead of them.

"How much further?"

"We're still one-hundred-and-thirty meters away from the tunnel, then it will be another six kilometers until the surface."

"Marty, what do you think?"

"If it's all right," she said. X sidled over and offered her his back and folded hands; she was light, but grabbing onto him took the last of her strength so that most of her weight fell onto his palms. She lay her head on his shoulder; her cheek clammy with sweat, her breath without rhythm.

Remarkable that she's still conscious.

"Sorry."

"It's no trouble."

They passed through a circular doorway into the access tunnel and carried on; X had time to ponder a great many things walking as slowly as he needed to for the others. Why had one group of people gotten a short way into the lab and then sealed it up? Why, decades later, had others risked life and limb to break all the way in?

But that's not what you truly want to ask, he thought. What you really want is to ask for proof that any of this is real. You don't want to be fooled again.

That thought was echoing in his head when they finally reached the end of the access tunnel and were looking at the barred hatch beyond which lay . . . 'the world,' if he could believe that.

"Miss Sy, I need to pass you back to Mister DeWitt,"

"Oh God," Preston snorted. "Call me Dynamo. Or even just Preston." When he had Marty in hand, X drew back the thick titanium bar and put his hand to the hatch.

"I will go through first to make sure it is safe." The metal began to lift free as he pushed, and a thin seam of light formed.

"You make it sound like you're not coming with," Preston said. "That's going to be a problem."

X felt a hand rest against his mid-back. Cain was stood next to him, glaring at Preston with tight-knit brows. That glare gave way to a satisfied smile as he turned to X.

The daylight—the first he had seen since the simulation's end—washed his vision white for an instant until his receptors adjusted and revealed the variations of yellow, brown, red. Desert stretching to the horizon. One small town off east, blending into its surroundings. Sun high. Crackles of electricity, too small and too brief for human eyes, traced Brownian paths in the air hundreds of meters up. There was nothing like that in the simulations, nor in the references his creator had left him.

More familiar were the sleek black drones wheeling over a pillar of smoke. They would have been cutting-edge models at the time he was created; slender, nimble, carrying only their ordinance, a small computer, and remote control relay. Whoever his finders were afraid of, they were right to be.

His mind reached inward and touched systems he had only the faintest awareness of, but which responded like instinct. There was a faint hum and crackle in the air about his left arm as the process began; a cyan glow followed. Internal reporting flooded his memory; he filtered it and focused only on raising the glowing arm. It was suddenly encased in azure alloy and drinking deep from his body's power supply. Without pause he pointed the arm to one drone, then the other, loosing orbs of heat and light. They raced to their targets with a roar, as though he had been restraining hungry beasts.

The drones disappeared in flame seconds later. Spent, he dropped to one knee, letting his arm revert to normal. Cain and Doppler rushed to his side; Preston whistled admiringly.

"You just dusted two HKs like it was nothing. You've made a believer out of me," he said. Cain scowled at him and waved him away. X felt the thin hands firm on his shoulders.

"X, are you okay?"

"I just need to . . . rest."

One by one he throttled and silenced streams of input, but his mind and body were already overflowing. Sleep, unplanned for the first time since he'd been Xavier, came.