(A/N: I've set this story in my hometown and thrown in some details about the setting, just in case anyone from here reads this.)

Nate wished he knew where Jack was.

If he could only locate his friend, he could establish a telepathic link and find out what was going on. But Jack was somewhere far away, and Nate couldn't reach someone unless he knew where they were, and that was somewhere nearby. He had only stumbled across Claudine because she, too, had emerging psionic powers. She could not initiate telepathic conversation, but her mental strength made her mind stand out so much in a sea of others that Nate could easily establish a link, and his feelings for her had grown so strong that he could find her almost instantly, despite the Atlantic Ocean. He had never actually seen Claudine, except in his mind's eye, but they had bonded because neither of them had anyone else in whom to confide their secrets.

But enough. His thoughts had wandered, as they always did, to Claudine. He needed to focus on Jack.

He had hoped that his friendship with Jack would allow a link between them to emerge, the way his feelings for Claudine had, but despite his constant mental searching he had found nothing. He hoped they would catch him, just so he would see it on the news and know where he was. He knew Jack's powers and was desperately hoping that they hadn't been involved in his father's death, although the descriptions he had heard of the corpse sounded as if Jack had had his way with it…

All he wanted was to find out what had happened.

He was walking down South Orange Avenue, his mind completely absorbed by the business with Jack, when suddenly he heard honking, yelling and the sound of cars whizzing past him. He looked up and realized that he had wandered off the sidewalk right into the busiest intersection in town. He yelled an apology, although he knew none of the drivers could hear it, and ran across the crosswalk, dodging cars as he went. When he reached the stoplight he leaned against the wall of the diner and cursed his stupidity.

He thought for a minute of asking Claudine to combine her psionic abilities with his, but he decided against it. He wasn't really sure exactly what Claudine's powers were—she had never told him, and he had never seen reason to ask—but he was pretty sure she wasn't a telepath.

"Oh well," sighed Nate as he entered the comic shop. "I guess I'll just have to wait until he shows up on the news."

Jack was glad Nate didn't know where he was.

Nate thought that nobody knew he was a mutant, but Jack could tell. For one thing, he was always bringing things up that he shouldn't have known about, starting conversations about things that had happened to Jack before Jack got the chance to tell him about them. After Jack had noticed this, it wasn't long before he realized the strange feeling he got around Nate. A feeling...in his mind. A feeling of being invaded.

If Nate knew where Jack was, he would enter his mind and learn about what had happened the other night. That was the last thing Jack needed. Luckily for him, even he didn't seem to know how far he had gone.

All night long he had run. He couldn't remember what he passed or what direction he was going, only that he was running, extremely fast and literally nonstop. Looking back on the previous night, he felt as though his mind had been in a haze, a berserk fury that come on after he had killed his father.

He did have one clear memory f that night, though.

On his way out of town he had pass a large tree. Four years ago, he had been the one who had found Brian miller, hanging from an overhead branch. The scent of death still surrounded it. Jack had stopped and slashed the tree with is bloody hand. Four slash marks and a bloodstain had been left on the bark of the tree

He realized now that that was a dead giveaway. A mutant-hater was dead, his son was missing, and claw marks with his blood were left at the scene of a crime he was widely believed to have been a part of. But last night, Jack hadn't had the capacity to think about that.

Now he did. He stared at his right arm. The razor-sharp nails at the end of his hand looked just like ordinary fingernails that hadn't been cut in a while, but they were caked in blood, blood that soaked his arm up to the elbow. With his left hand he brushed his short, brown hair out of his green eyes, which were widened with horror at the continuing realization of what had happened.

He was in the woods somewhere, sitting against a tall tree, just staring at his arm. He started to hyperventilate. He felt his heart beating faster as he realized what a horrific sight his right arm was. He closed his eyes and tried to calm down. He managed to slow his breathing somewhat, and he felt his heartbeat returning to normal, but he still couldn't shake this terror that had come over him. What was he going to do now/ Where could he go? How long before they caught him?

He heard mechanical whirring sounds and crashing noises coming from deeper in the woods. He couldn't see what the noise was through the convenient fog, but he didn't like the sound of it. He stood up and hid behind the tree. Peaking around, he saw two pairs of what looked like headlights floating high in the air. He heard the crashing and thw whirring getting closer, and saw the headlights sweeping across the ground. He could smell something…something metallic…

Oh God.

He took off running, taking cover in the trees, trying to move through the woods as silently as he could. He felt like the animal that he was becoming, running through the shadows covered in blood and sensing his enemy by smell. How apropos that it was a bear trap that brought him down.

Jack screamed louder than he thought he could. He fell down. The whirring stopped, then started again. It was coming closer now. He screamed and struggled to get out of the trap. The big tree he was behind came crashing down.

The Sentinels loomed above him.

Jack managed to pull the trap off of his leg and ran as fast as he could with this wound. His only hope was that his healing powers would kick in before the Sentinels incinerated him….

The remains were found in the woods, approximately 250 miles South of the scene of the James Knox murder, which the mutant is suspected to have been involved in.

Oh no, thought Nate. He had just turned on the local news channel.

Authorities said the remains were mangled and destroyed, as if the Sentinels and the mutant had struggled for a long time.

Nate couldn't believe his ears. Had the Sentinels really finished Jack off?

He decided to hear the full story. He grabbed the Tivo remote and rewound back to the beginning.

Then he heard something that sent a smile creeping across his face.

The smashed remains of two Sentinels were found in a New Jersey woods last night…