"'It'll be cool,' he said!" Jean sulked, comically imitating Scott's voice. "'An underground fight ring, just like in Fight Club. A bunch of drunk idiots flopping around trying to throw punches. How hard could it be?'" She turned to Peter, who was leaning against their cell wall.

"So, how hard could it be, Colossus?" she smirked.

Peter shrugged. "Well, we're locked up. No powers. No help. No hope. I'd say at this point we're right on schedule for a standard mission? And if that's the case, then I'd also say that any minute now it's bound to get worse."

Jean snorted at Peter's straight-faced joke. Leave it to her and Peter to screw up what should have been exceedingly simple. Cloud the minds of the guards, sneak around the back rooms of this stupid, illegal streetfighting organization while Scott and Logan snooped around the actual ring, unearth a little evidence of its "suspected" ties to Weapon X, and bam…back home with a good book. They hadn't really counted on the extra security measures they'd encountered in the belly of the club.

Really, Jean thought to herself, what kind of scum-of-the-earth underground organization can afford such advanced security technology?

In the end, it had been a simple weight detection system in the floor that had busted them and brought the guards running---nothing Peter and Jean couldn't have easily handled, except the guards happened to have itchy trigger fingers, and deadly aim with fast-acting tranquilizers.

I was more focused on the guards than the technological security, Jean thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

If things couldn't have gotten any worse, upon awakening in a bland tiled cell at the end of a sterile-looking corridor, Jean and Peter immediately discovered something was missing---their powers.

Jean had concentrated for a full twenty minutes, even to the point of breaking a sweat, but it was no use---her mental ability to call Scott and Logan, or even the Professor, had been thoroughly revoked.

"An obedience serum," the girl in a cell across the corridor had told them. She appeared to be about seventeen, gangly and awkward, with greasy, stick-straight hair and bulging amber eyes. "They tranq you right off so that they can administer an obedience serum, and then in your thoroughly inebriated state, they order you not to use your abilities. Like a truth serum, you know? And after that first shot of it…they can just order you to take as many more 'boosters' of it as you need to keep you under control." She giggled madly and unexpectedly.

"Slaves," Jean said bitterly.

She noticed another being in the cell across the corridor with the teen---a small being, who couldn't possibly have been older than twelve years. The child simply lay curled and unmoving on a cell cot, facing the wall.

I would have figured her for dead, Jean thought, eyeing the child.

"Hey," she addressed the chortling teen girl. "Your friend. What's the matter with her?"

"Most of us, we used for parlor tricks," the girl replied, "Like monkeys in a sideshow, you know? The kind only the lowest of the low pay to see." Her face darkened. "But not all of us…" she gently gestured with her head to the child on the cot, who still had not stirred. "We ain't all used for that."

"Then for what do they use her?" Peter asked slowly, and a heavy fear suddenly stabbed at Jean's gut.

"I…I don't know," the girl replied, dropping her eyes. Jean may not have been able to hear her thoughts at the moment, but she could still tell when someone was lying. The girl added quickly, "She don't talk about it. But…"

Here she trailed off.

"But….what?" Jean asked in spite of herself.

The girl merely shook her head, with a nervous glance backwards at the figure on the cot.

Her frustration mounting, Jean tried to concentrate. She tried to touch the young child's mind. She tried to reach across the corridor mentally. No success. Jean felt like a deaf woman trying to listen to what she could not hear. It was exhausting, impossible…

At that moment the girl on the cot turned her head and locked eyes with Jean. The child's expression was stoic, unreadable. But her eyes were the sharpest grey Jean had ever seen, and cold as death.