Fade and Shatter were more X-Men wannabes, although at least they weren't probably dead pointlessly heroic ones, and they weren't alone. There was a woman with them, Sage, who had apparently been hanging out in another of the warehouses. She looked them over with sceptical eyes. Her first words were: "So what can you do?"
Evaluation: Not the friendliest.
"Why?" he asked.
She raised her eyebrows. "Because I'd like to know."
They looked at each other.
"We destroy shit," she replied icily.
The three of them weren't like their makeshift family had been. They barely seemed to like each other, let along the two newcomers. They wondered sometimes what kept the three of them together.
"What remains of any sort of loyalty," Shatter said when they deemed to just ask him. "We were all part of the mutant Underground, and it's better to have numbers than be alone in this world."
So they were X-Men wannabes.
"We met some others from that Underground thing," he said without really thinking.
"Really? Who?"
He shrugged. "Four of them. Some chick with green hair, guy with glowing hands, telepath chick."
"Thunderbird. The tracker was Thunderbird," she filled in. Stupid name if you asked them. He scowled at her. She would remember that.
"You met them? When? What were they doing? Where were you?"
They shrugged. "We've been a lot of places."
It wasn't exactly true, but it wasn't exactly a lie either.
"When was that?"
"A while back now. It's kinda hard to keep track of time."
Especially in the eternal night they lived in for so long.
"Can't you think of anything more than that?"
She shrugged. "It was before we had to run again."
It was because of them they had to run again.
"Makes it what, a few weeks? A few months?"
"One of those is not like the other," muttered Shatter. "What were they doing?"
"Dunno. Hiding from the military I think."
Leading the military to them.
"Do you remember where you were?"
Home.
"No."
The conversation ended there.
It seemed safer to stay put with the planes being more active recently. Sage said there had been more of them overhead in the past few weeks than she had counted in months, and there was much more activity on the radio than normal.
They said nothing.
They had been there a few days when Sage told them she had contact with the people putting out all the radio activity.