Chapter 7: Assassination and Escape

It felt like déjà vu.

How often had he gone running at the sound of Jubilee's scream? Not often in recent years, but often enough in the past that this felt familiar.

Until he opened the door and found a very different scene than the one he had expected to find. "Jubilee?" he asked, staring at the man she was strangling, and at her, not a hair out of place, and her dress quite a bit shorter than it had been when he'd last seen it.

Jubilee rolled her eyes. "Damn it, Logan, I said I'd handle the assassination! What did you have to come up here for?"

"I heard you scream, so I came to find you."

"I'm not a helpless little girl, Logan. I came prepared for this." She reached under her skirt, came up with a hand blaster strapped to her upper thigh. She pointed it at Estillo as she took her hand away from his throat. "One sound, and I swear I'll blow your head off," she warned him. She turned her head aside as her shoulders started to heave.

"My compound has a shield around it that prevents anything but the most basic technology from working," Estillo snapped at them both. "My guards' weapons work, but any other weapon will not, and that includes the weapons you're carrying, you half-human monsters!"

"Watch yer mouth!" Logan roared, stepping forward and extending his middle claw, delicately nicking the fat man's rolling throat flesh folds. "Don't call us monsters! Look at what yer doin' ta yer own people. Yer the monster here, not us."

Estillo was shaking now, terrified, his eyes almost bulging out of his head as he stared at the razor-sharp metal blades threatening to take his head off. He was so pale he looked as though he could possibly faint at any moment. Logan snorted as he shoved the fat man into a chair beside a window, took the cord to one of the heavy red velvet curtains, and sliced a length of it off the window. Wrapping it around the thick throat and tying it off tightly behind the man, he went to Jubilee. "Are ya all right?"

Jubilee's shoulders were heaving.. "The nanites are working," she said, sounding for a moment so much like the Jubilee of old that Logan had to bite his lip. "They're pushing the toxin out. It's going to go into my stomach…" she spat out a pithy phrase as her stomach rebelled. Logan lunged for her, turning her over on her front as she vomited the contents of her stomach (and the neurotoxin) into the heavy velveteen coverlet on the bed.

She wiped her mouth on the corner of the covers, and turned toward Logan with a wry smile. And then before he could react, she brought her hand up and paffed him.

Or not him. He spun, and saw that she hadn't tried to hit him; she had aimed for, and hit, the dictator. The man had somehow untied the cord and was sneaking up behind Logan, intending to wrap the cord around Logan's neck. Stupid, but the man didn't know that.

Jubilee flew past Logan, slamming into Estillo. He reeled backwards. She collided with him again until he was pressed against the wall and her hand was buried in the bulldog-thick neck. "Stupid," she hissed at him, her eyes glowing blue. "Stupid stupid stupid. He's my friend. Did you think I wouldn't defend him like he defends me?" She leaned in close, and her hand tightened. "He's right about you being a monster. And I was sent here to kill a monster. Let's do it." She smiled, and it wasn't a pleasant one. "I know the room is soundproofed. In fact, if it hadn't been for Logan's enhanced hearing, he wouldn't even have heard me. So neither will your guards. They won't hear you scream." Her lips twisted in a cruel smile. "They won't hear your guts explode either. So I can execute you in peace. Now. Open up." She tapped his lower lip with her hand.

Estillo shook his head and clamped his lips closed. It was a futile gesture; she would do what she had set out to do. She was sure of that. But it was fun to watch him squirm.

"Open up now," she cooed, her fingers caressing his lip in a grotesque parody of a lover's caress. "Nice and wide…"

There was a sudden movement outside the door, and Logan cursed aloud. The guard he had knocked out must have woken up. Racing to the door, he barred it, then dragged a heavy long couch before the door. "Finish him off, Jubes," he said warningly. "We gotta find a way out of this rat hole."

A thud at the door convinced Jubilee. She turned to Estillo, her mock playfulness gone. "Open up," she said ruthlessly. Estillo looked at her, looked at the door, bulging on its hinges, then opened his mouth and shouted "Help!" Even soundproofed, that call would get through the door, albeit faintly.

Jubilee swore, a vicious curse that made Logan's eyes pop at those words coming out of her mouth, and jammed her fingers into his mouth. Estillo began to scream, a sound that was abruptly choked off by the sudden introduction into his maw of a spark of glittering energy. Jubilee forced it down, concentrating on stuffing it down into his stomach, and then stepped back. "Stand back, Wolvie," she said, staring levelly at the dictator. "He's going to weigh a lot less in a couple of moments."

And Estillo's gut exploded.

Logan flinched and covered his eyes, glad he'd retreated to the other side of the bed in his haste to block the door. Blood, undigested food, stomach bile, chunks of the man's ample belly flesh, and the contents of his intestines splattered the room. Before the gore stopped flying, the room was almost coated in a fine mist of blood.

Logan stared at the mess, then at Jubilee, for a long moment. The killer in him approved coolly of the act; the brutality of it matched the brutality of the dictator's own actions. But the coldness of the act, and the fact that it had come from a girl he still thought of as a sloppy, eternally bubbly teen on a sugar high, gave him pause.

Jubilee saw the change on his face, and sighed. The image of the Wolvie in her mind's eye was different from the Logan standing before her. She supposed if her mental picture was so wrong, his mental picture of her must be similarly wrong as well.

The shouting in Spanish from the other side of the door escalated, and another shudder from the door itself snapped her back into action. She quickly stripped off her bloody blue gown, momentarily regretting that she would have to leave it behind. She'd liked the dress.

Under the gown she had worn her skin-tight stealth suit and nothing else. The suit had been specially modified to work with the cut of her gown, via retractable fabric panels on the sleeves and back, and she hadn't worn the belt and padding that usually came with the suit. She'd thought something like this might happen and she would need to get away quickly; added weight would slow her down. Her nanites could repair almost any damage she suffered, short of dismemberment, so she wasn't really worried.

But now she had another responsibility. Logan. She had to get both of them out of there, and Logan, with his adamantium, would weigh more than she had expected she would have to handle. She grimly unfastened the leg straps that held her mini-blaster close to her thigh and in easy reach of her hand, palmed the blaster, then aimed high and shot out the skylight overhead. She dropped the gun and ran to Logan, wrapped her arms around his middle, and said cryptically, "Hang on."

Logan was about to ask her why he was supposed to hang on when suddenly they were airborne. He started at his feet in shock.

Jubilee had blasted off from the hard marble floor. Her paffs had been aimed toward the floor, the direction of the blasts focused below her.. The heat from the energy release scorched the floor, but they were moving up! In much the same way Sam used to fly, back in the day, by blasting with the lower half of his body, Jubilee was doing the same. She expended enough energy to get herself airborne and they flew through the skylight. "Jubilee!" he shouted to her as they soared out of the room and out into the crisp, cold air above the palace. And they were still climbing.

"Hold still!' Jubilee's voice sounded strained. "It's a lot of weight, Logan, and I can barely handle it! Hang on!" He wrapped his arms around her. Not that he was scared, exactly; but he was a long way off the ground, and he had never been airborne like this before. He'd never had a problem with Rogue, or 'Ro, or Warren…but Jubilee's mode of transportation left a lot to be desired.

They were over the stables now; the dictator maintained a stable of expensive horses for his collection of old carriages. Up ahead, Logan could see the wall of the palace, and beyond that, the city…

BAM! They slammed into something hard. Jubilee screamed in shock, surprise, and pain, and for a brief few minutes they lost altitude as she tried to recover. "They have a shield around the entire palace complex!" she shouted to him. "I can't get through!"

Carey sped along the corridors, cursing. None of the guards had spotted her yet; they were too busy worrying about the escaping Jubilee and Logan, and keeping the guests at the party from panicking and leaving. She, however, had something else to do.

According to the scans of the opulent palace, the control room that coordinated all the palace defenses should be right around the corner from where she was. Carey paused just once, a brief moment to consult the global positioning satellite receiver in her hand, then sped around the corner. Sure enough, the door was there, guarded by two men. She raced up to them, at the same time reaching out with her telepathy, and drove a psychic knife into their brains, knocking them out instantly. Then she turned the handle and slipped into the room.

She didn't have much time. The guards would be coming down here to find a way to keep Logan and Jubilee from escaping. She studied the controls in front of her, cursing as she tried to decipher the Spanish labels on the buttons. Finally she found one labeled 'shield', hit that button on the giant touch-screen controls, and watched in satisfaction as the SHIELD STATUS button went from green, which meant on, to red, which meant the shield was off. Smiling in satisfaction, she left the room at a dead run, just minutes before the guards entered it.

Jubilee was shaking with the strain. The energy she was putting into testing different areas of the shield was draining her, and she was getting frantic. She had to get herself an Logan out of there…how? She was on the edge of collapse, and they had lost altitude. She couldn't keep this up…but she couldn't let them capture her and Logan either. They were down there right now, shooting at her and Logan, still clinging to her. She could feel the burning pain of the lasers, quickly gone as her nanites took care of the injury.

She gathered herself, made a wide turn (small turns were impossible because of the sheer amount of energy she was using to keep both her and Logan airborne) and headed straight for the shield, marked by the wall around the dictator's compound. And just before she reached it, she saw a faint shimmer in the air, and the shield was down.

She screamed in sheer exhilaration, her exhaustion momentarily forgotten as she soared up into the air, leaving the shouting guards and the swarming compound behind. She didn't know where she was going, didn't care; she just wanted to get them out of there. She could hear Logan speaking to her, telling her something about pursuit. She looked behind her, and moaned. They were being pursued. She sped up, using the last of her strength to climb, and they disappeared into a low-hanging cloudbank. The thick fog obscured her sight and muffled her vision, but she forced herself to keep going blind through the clouds.

She tried to go as long as she could, but Logan was a dead weight at her back (they had shifted to a piggy-back position, he piggybacking on her) and she was exhausted. They lost altitude steadily, no matter how desperately Jubilee tried to keep herself aloft.

Logan could feel her straining, tiring. As they broke out of the cloud cover, he took a quick glance behind them. Their pursuers were nowhere to be seen, and before them was a slightly rocky shoreline. It looked deserted, and there was a stand of palm trees only a few feet back from the waterline. It would be an ideal place for them to land, and hide. And they needed to get out of the air; Jubilee's skin was ice-cold.

He'd been shocked as hell when they'd taken off. He had never realized Jubilee's power could be used to fly, and as they disappeared into the clouds he realized that a long distance flight would drain her too much. And he also realized that landing was going to be a problem. So, now that they were over the water, he silently mentally apologized to her and quickly shifted his weight on her back. She gave a weak cry of surprise as the abrupt weight shift threw her off balance, as Logan meant it to. Her plasmoids stopped, and they began a long dive down to the ocean below.

He wrapped his arms around her and aimed for the water feet-first. They broke the water's surface still going fairly fast, and Logan started kicking frantically. At least, this close to the tropics, the water was warm. But he hated water, hated swimming; his adamantium made it so difficult to swim he usually didn't even try it.

This was different. This was Jubilee's life.

The impact of the water and the sudden submersion had taken her by surprise and shaken her out of her exhausted daze. She struggled, thrashing, and Logan briefly lost hold of her as he tried to accustom himself to the water. Finally getting his bearings, he looked around for her. It was still night, and the darkness in the middle of the sea was unnerving. Not that he was worried about himself, but Jubilee would be a prime target in her current exhausted state…

Her head broke surface a few feet away from him, and he started to stroke toward her. She was dazed, and struck out at him weakly, thinking he was a predator; but he calmed her quickly. "Jubes, it's me. Hang on. Yer exhausted. Let me take ya inta shore." She stopped struggling, surrendering to him, trusting him. He wrapped one arm around her waist, then started kicking for shore.

They reached the tiny strip of rocky beach, finally. He dragged her up on it, panting and out of breath himself. She was unconscious, breathing shallowly and evenly. Logan dropped to his knees beside her, leaning over and checking her breathing. She was just sleeping.

Picking her up, he walked into the treeline and found some dense, low-growing green shrubbery to hide her in. Returning to the beach with a palm frond, he swept it over their footprints up to the waterline, trusting the incoming tide to wipe out the last few traces of their landfall. Returning to the dense brush, he sat down against the tree with a sigh and looked at the sleeping girl.

He wasn't sure what he'd expected when they finally met again…if they ever met again…but this wasn't it. He'd been obsessed with memories of the girl he'd known; despite what he'd learned of her life and her life choices since he'd last seen her, he still hadn't expected her to be so…different. She had a dark side now, a side that didn't mind killing. The light in her eyes when she had throttled Estillo and forced him to swallow her paff; the coldly calculated way she'd regarded the dying dictator writhing on the floor with his blood splattered all over her gown only emphasized the difference in her attitude. He wasn't sure he liked it. "Ah, Jubilee. Still tryin' ta make my heart stop, ain't ya? Even after a hundred years." He grinned suddenly, and stripped off his dinner jacket to drape over her shoulders in an attempt to warm her.

A small metal disk caught in the coat's lining caught his eye. And when he picked it up, he realized it was a tracking device. The tiny winking green light confirmed his guess, and just as he was wondering how it had gotten there he remembered Carey's quick caress, her hand slipping stealthily under his jacket. "Why, that little…" he grinned suddenly, widely, and settled down into the sand and the bush to wait. They weren't lost. Carey would come and get them.