Chapter 19

Rogue could feel the sunrise sneaking up behind her. Flying west, she followed the long black shadows that even short obstacles were casting on the ground below. By her best guess, she was somewhere over Ohio. Fields stretched out below her as far as she could see, stripes of black earth and white snow, speckled with stands of trees and the occasional lake.

This was peaceful. Flying alone in the silence, her head bowed into the wind, the roar of the air muting her thoughts . . . it was blessed relief from the stress and the uncertainty. When she met up with Kurt again, she'd have to say it all out loud, explain what had happened and admit that she didn't know what to do. But there were days before she'd had to face that. And in the meantime, she had an errand to run.

I got a call I need to make, too. Old friend. Prob'ly well outta harm's way, but I won't sleep easy 'till I know for sure.

Rogue knew who he'd meant. Maybe he'd made that call, and maybe he hadn't, but she owed it to him to check. Because he, in turn, owed a lot to a woman in New Orleans. And until Rogue and Remy parted ways for good, his debts were still as sacred to her as her own.

A different roar, higher-pitched and far away, hit her ears. Rogue did a barrel roll to get a good look around herself and saw two streaks of white in the distance to the northeast. Contrails. There were two jets up here with her.

No problem. She'd probably strayed too close to an Air Force base, and the pilots were up here running drills. She veered south, giving them plenty of space.

The roar didn't fade. It got louder. She checked over her shoulder . . . a move she didn't like doing at high speed because it got her hair in her face. The contrails had changed direction, and were converging on her.

Aw, dang. They had to have picked her up as a bogey. Well, that was no problem; she knew how to disappear off radar. She let air spill upward around her body, dropping herself closer to the ground. Flying low made it more likely that she'd be spotted by someone on the ground, but this early in the morning there wouldn't be that many people awake anyway.

Just for good measure, she cut her speed down to almost nothing. Better just to let them pass her and go about their business. In seconds, the two planes . . . FA-18 Hornets . . . went screaming over her head and off into the distance. Rogue picked up speed again and angled herself back up to a good cruising height. Crisis averted.

For ten minutes. Until she heard the roar again. She did another over-the-shoulder check. Two planes.

"Dang it," Rogue snarled to herself, her words sucked away by the wind. They'd doubled back to see if she . . . whatever they thought she was . . . would break cover. Which she had. If they were that curious, she'd have to pull something a little fancier to shake them. Dang it. This wasn't going to be any fun.

She pressed forward into the wind, increasing her speed, and scanned the ground below her. The Hornets behind her were gaining ground, but she couldn't straight-line outrun them. Even if she did have the speed, breaking the sound barrier would draw the attention of every man, woman, and child for miles.

She twisted her body, letting the air stream catch under her left shoulder to turn her trajectory down and to the right. She couldn't run, but she could outmaneuver any fixed-wing craft in her sleep. She twisted harder: tighter turn, deeper dive, stress on her spine and her shoulders. On the ground below, she spotted what she was looking for: a decent-sized lake on which the ice had begun to break up.

She hit the water like a bullet, plowing straight down into the blackness and letting the density of it drag her to a stop. She could feel the cold, but abstractly, her invulnerability protecting her from the pain she knew was trying to press through her skin. No radar or visual sweep could possibly spot her down here.

Her body's natural buoyancy pulled her up towards the surface. She let her head break through into the air when she couldn't stay down anymore, and treaded water while she caught her breath and checked the sky. The two contrails sliced across it like tire tracks. She slicked her hair back off her face and brushed water from her eyes, waiting. Best to let them get well out of range; cat and mouse got old fast.

She gave them a good couple of minutes. When she was absolutely sure there was calm, pristine early-morning silence in every direction, she pulled herself up out of the lake and spun the water out of her clothes. Problem solved. Hair a mess, backpack soaked, but problem solved.

She veered south. The alternate route would leave her landmark-free for a while, but if worst came to worst she'd just hit the Gulf of Mexico and follow the coast. Probably easier that way, anyway . . . she was just favoring the west-to-the-Mississippi route because she'd done it before. She gained altitude and added speed, getting out of the Hornets' territory as fast as she reasonably could.

She had clear skies for half an hour. Then a Hornet cut so close across her flight path its wing tip practically clipped her nose.

Rogue pulled up hard, her feet frantically back-pedalling against nothing, letting out a word that she'd learned on one of Logan's bad days. "How the freak are you tracking me? Get off my tail!"

She did not want to smash up another U.S. plane or risk killing another U.S. pilot. But the hiss and roar of a missile, being launched from the second craft, convinced her that they didn't have the same compunctions about her.

She twisted like a fish, letting it roar past her, then grabbed the tail and shoved it downward. The missile shot up into the sky.

What now? Another lake? Or try to out-climb them? She'd run out of oxygen before they were too high to fly. And how, how, how did they keep finding her?

She glanced down. Below her was a cluster of buildings . . . a town. She was the only flying girl in the sky, but down there she was just one redhead among dozens. And unless they wanted to bomb a civilian target, or taxi all over the city looking for her, they'd have to break off and think of a new plan.

She cut her powers entirely and dropped like a stone.

She landed flat on her back, the ground knocking the wind clean out of her and leaving her gasping. Of course she could have slowed down before impact, but didn't feel inclined—the jolt of it felt very much like seeing Remy with vengeance in his eyes. She lay still in the field where she'd landed, letting the backpack dig uncomfortably into her spine, staring up into the sky. The breeze froze the tears the landing had jarred out of her eyes.

The Hornets flew away and were lost in the distance.

"Oh, no ya don't, boys," Rogue muttered—talking helped steady her breathing. "Ah got your number now. You kin circle 'till hell freezes over for all I care. You're not findin' me. Not when Ah gone to ground."

She stood up . . . he knees were wobbly and her balance was off. And her hair was wet. And she had only the vaguest idea of where she was. And she had no money and no phone. She hadn't expected this to matter. She hadn't counted on being forced out of the air and onto her feet. But now here she was, standing in a field in the frozen dirt, wet, lost, isolated, and with no Gambit coming to save her.

Well, it was no good standing here. Rogue shucked her backpack and fished out the jeans, sweater, and light jacket Warren had given her. They were all damp and cold, but it was better than walking around in public in her training uniform. She pulled them on and spun them dry . . . well, drier . . . then ducked down into the dirt as the Hornets swung overhead again. When they were out of sight, she pulled the pack over her shoulders again and started walking along the furrow for the nearest road.

It was only about twenty minutes' walk into town . . . a town that turned out to be Milwood, Kentucky, three states away from where she wanted to be. She stopped outside the Sinclair station, took a deep breath, and thought seriously about what to do.

Her first, deeply embarrassing and completely unacceptable impulse was to sit tight until Gambit came to rescue her. That was what had always happened before. She hadn't had to face the unknown by herself since the day he walked into her life. She was an X-Man, trained to function as a member of a team. Gambit knew how to get by on his own; she'd forgotten how to do it.

This impulse was immediately squashed. She had Gambit living in her head half the time; anything he knew, she knew. If he could survive, then so could she.

But, she admitted frankly to herself, what Gambit would do in this situation would probably be steal a car. She could do it; hot wiring wasn't that hard in older vehicles, of which there were plenty on this street alone. But she was Rogue . . . an X-Man. She did not steal cars. Or shoes. Or anything.

What, then, could she do? Who could she call for help? Warren . . . but his number was stored in the cell phone, and calling directory assistance wouldn't do any good. They didn't just hand out the private numbers of people like the Worthingtons. Everyone she knew in Bayville was either evacuated or had stopped speaking to her years ago, when she'd been outed as a mutant. Before Bayville, there'd been Mississippi, and Irene . . . she knew Irene's number . . . yeah, right. Irene, who'd raised her up to be a dupe and a weapon because Mystique had paid her to. Not in a million years would she call Irene ever again.

There was a pay phone outside the gas station. Rogue lifted the receiver and dialed the operator. "Hello? Yeah, Ah need to make a collect call."

She took a deep breath and sank back into memories . . . her own and others'. So much easier to do this on a grassy hillside in the summer in Japan than outside a Kentucky gas station. But there were some things that people never forgot, memories that lingered and stuck long after they should have faded. Like a childhood home phone number.

She knew Remy's home number.

She rattled it off to the operator, then obediently intoned her name into the recorder. After what seemed an interminable wait, she heard a deep woman's voice. "'Allo?"

"Memere?" Rogue had never met the woman that had all but been Remy's second mother, but the voice was familiar to her. The trick was, of course, that this familiarity wouldn't work in the other direction. "Memere, it's me, it's . . . Ah'm Rogue."

"Rogue?" the voice repeated back. "Celle de notre Remy?"

"Remy. Yeah." She choked on the words, but forced them out. "Ah'm Remy's Rogue, Memere. Ah need help."

"Ah, bébé. Ça va aller. Ne t'inquiète pas. Dites-moi ce qu'il te faut."

Rogue was hardly in a state to translate her shaky second language, but she could understand easily enough the soothing tone of the older woman's voice. "Ah'm stranded in Kentucky, but Ah gotta get down to New Orleans. Ah got no money. Ah cain't fly."

"Kentucky. Bon. Ecoute. Peut-tu trouver un moyen pour aller jusqu'a l'aeroport? N'importe quel aeroport?"

"Aeroport. Airport. Yeah, Ah think Ah kin get to the airport."

"Bon. Ecris cela."

"Ecris. Right. Hang on a sec." Pen, pen, she needed a pen . . . She looked around futilely, then shrugged out of her backpack and clumsily pulled open the organizer pocket. Yes . . . there were a couple of ballpoint pens tucked into the pockets, thankfully uncrushed by her fall. She fished one out, uncapped it with her teeth, and grabbed the phone book that hung under the pay phone stand. Balancing the phone between her shoulder and her ear, she supported the book with one hand and poised the other to write. "Okay."

Memere started to intone a string of numbers. Rogue copied them down, repeating back each one in English. Sixteen digits . . . a credit card. Then the security code and expiration date. The card was in Jean-Luc's name, the address the P.O. box the family needed since the location of their house made mail delivery next to impossible.

"Achetes un billet d'avion. Quand tu arrives, j'enverrai notre Henri pour te chercher. Ca va? Tu comprends?"

"Yeah, je comprends. Thank you, Memere. You saved my life."

"On t'attends."

Rogue hung up the phone. She went inside and checked a road map, pinpointing where she was in relation to the nearest airport. This turned out to be Nashville, just over the state line. The attendant was eyeing her suspiciously, so she put the map back and went back outside without even thinking about trying to shoplift anything. She was hungry . . . breakfast with Warren had been almost twenty-four hours ago, and after that Kurt had been so nervous about Amanda that they hadn't eaten much of anything else. But she could wait. A day or so without food wasn't going to kill her.

She picked up the phone again, re-connected with the operator, and asked for Delta Airlines, this being the first company she could think of—it was what the Professor always used if he had to fly commercial. After navigating through a few voice menus, she finally got an agent who could book her a ticket to New Orleans on the first flight out tomorrow morning.

"Could I get the passenger's name?" asked the agent on the other end of the line.

"What?"

"Passenger's name, please."

Oh, dang. What was her name? She'd need i.d. to get into an airport . . . she had a passport; that would work. It was in her leg pocket, underneath the jeans. Checking to make sure no one was watching, she undid the button on her pants and fished one hand down her leg until she retrieved the wet and crumpled navy blue booklet.

"Are you still there?"

"Yeah, just a second." Holding up her jeans with one hand, she pried open the back page of the passport with her little finger.

And stopped dead.

"Miss? Hello?"

Rogue swallowed. When she spoke, her voice was strangled and a few notes too high. "Yeah."

"Passenger's name, please."

"Yeah, Ah got it right here. The name's Rogue . . . Azami . . . A-Z-A-M-I . . . LeBeau."

"L-E-B-E-A-U?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Any preference on window or aisle seat?"

"Ah really don't care."

"And could I get your credit card information?"

Rogue leaned against the edge of the phone booth as she read back the numbers. A flush of heat ran under her skin, making her wish she had a free hand to pull off the light jacket she wore. It was so hard to keep her focus through the end of the conversation that she needed the agent to repeat her confirmation code back to her twice. She scribbled the number on the phone book page, then tore it out and stuffed it into her backpack as she hung up the phone.

Rogue Azami LeBeau. The name given to her by Professor Xavier, the name given to her by Logan, and a name given to her by Remy. He'd put this together months ago, and left it for her to find. Got her again.

It would be so much nicer if this were an annoying, flattering, and embarrassing inside joke and not a knife-twist in her gut.

Do you know how much I hate you right this very second, Remy LeBeau?

She took a deep breath. Then she put the passport in her backpack, snaked her arms through the straps, and started walking. One foot in front of the other. It was a long way to Nashville.

"So how's the new cell?"

Scott was liking Jeremy Royal more all the time. It was comforting to have someone around who wasn't taking this situation too seriously . . . at least to his face.

'It's good," Scott answered, feeling with his toe for the chair. He heard it grate across the floor, and the leg of it bumped his shoe. "Smaller."

"And more expensive. Welcome to Manhattan."

"That's why I live in the boonies." Scott sat down, twisting his head sideways and down so he could scratch his eye against his shoulder. The bandage itched. "So what's going on in the outside world?"

"Big stuff, actually. First off, a lot of people disappeared last night."

"Government round-up?"

"Not looking like it. A lot of them left notes for friends and family, saying that they were going somewhere safe. At least a handful of them were known mutants . . . a few had even registered."

Scott grinned. That was Rogue and Kurt's handiwork. You go, guys.

"You know where they went?"

"Yep."

"Not going to tell me?"

"Nope."

"Okay, then. Here's the other surprise. I got an e-mail last night. The sender's information was encrypted. But it had a file attached . . . monster of a thing."

He was pausing for dramatic effect. Scott waited, then caved. "And what was the file?"

"Your house's security feeds."

Scott nearly jumped out of his chair. "The video?"

"Audio, too. Very decent quality."

"And they back up what I told you?"

"Every word. And there's some beautiful footage of your friend Drake leaving a snail's trail of blood down the hallway while a federal sniper just watches him die. Incidentally, he is okay, right?"

"Yeah, he's fine. Good mutant ability and a good night's sleep."

"That's reassuring. That shot's gonna be solid gold with a jury, though. We've got every resource checking the validity of the recording, and so far it's looking great. We may actually have a case here."

"Fantastic." And that was the handiwork of Gambit and Kitty. Long live the X-Men. "I might just be home in time for dinner."

"Well, maybe not dinner, but possibly a late breakfast. At least tell your girlfriend not to give up on you."

Scott laughed. "I'll be sure to let her know next time she calls."

"Oh, my gosh. That's it, isn't it?" Jean, gasping from the effort of reaching the ridge on which she now stood, pointed down into the basin of the next valley. An irregularly shaped lake filled the bottom of it, and on the far shore, peeking through the trees, was the corner of a gray roof.

"Yeah," Logan confirmed. "That's it."

"Well, let's go, then!" She started off, slightly too fast for the steep incline; she had to skip to keep her balance. After a few yards, she skittered to a stop and turned around. "Hurry up. Why am I the one setting the pace when you're the one whose legs aren't killing him?"

"Because I'm the one who has the sense not to run full-tilt at a scared girl with claws." He started down the hill after her, his pace more sedate, never letting the ground slip out from under his feet. "Take it easy. She needs the time to figure out what to do with us."

Jean's eyes darted involuntarily up into the trees. "You think she's watching us?"

"I think she's gonna know we're here long before she lets us see her."

"I'll keep watch." She touched a finger to her temple.

Logan nodded. Let me know what you hear.

Will do.

Jean kept silent the rest of the way down the mountain, listening hard. Logan could be hard to spot telepathically; anyone with similar training would probably be just as invisible.

She's definitely been hiding out down here. Her scent is cris-crossing all over the place.

You think she's going to try to hurt us?

No.

Then why are you so jumpy? You're giving me goosebumps.

You're reading me without permission again, aren't you?

I am not. You're projecting.

I'm not projecting.

You are. In fact, I've never heard you project so loudly in your life. Are you tired, or freaked out, or mad at me, or what?

Gonna be pretty mad at you in a minute.

Jean snorted, but left him alone.

The cabin was built of interlocking whole logs, like Lincoln Logs . . . a single square room about twenty feet by twenty. The wood shingles had darkened with age, and broken branches and old leaves were scattered across them. A stone chimney projected from the back wall. There were two small windows, grimy and glazed with old, warped glass. The door was heavy wooden planks, the hinges iron. Between the cabin and the lake was a cleared space, where a ring of stones marked a fire pit. A well-beaten dirt path wound down to the edge of the lake.

Whoever had cleared the trees away had left one stump as a chopping block. The surface was thoroughly gouged from lots and lots of use. As Jean walked past it, she stooped and ran her fingers across the cuts. The freshest ones were in pairs. But many of them cut across older marks, worn with weather and age—wide, single cuts, from a hatchet blade. There were none of the familiar triple marks her eye had expected to find.

Logan was no longer right behind her, but for the moment Jean didn't care enough to notice. Her feet drew her onward, towards the building.

There had been a handle on the door once, but it lay half-buried in the dirt. Indentations marked the spots where it had been fastened to the wood. Jean dug her gloved fingers in between the door and the frame and pulled it open.

The smell of must and rot and mold hit her hard in the face. But what hit her harder was the images.

Silver hair matted with dried blood . . . pointed yellow teeth flecked with foam . . . long, hard, dirty fingernails . . . the salty, acrid scent of gunpowder . . . a maddening, nauseating mix of adrenalin, testosterone, serotonin, dopamine . . . the roar of rain and silence pressing in around her head . . .

Jean jumped backwards, missed her footing, and fell hard on the frozen earth. Her heels dug into the ground as she crab-scrambled gracelessly away from the door. What the . . .? Was the place haunted? It wasn't enough for her to be a telepath, now she'd blossomed into some kind of clairvoyant, too?

Her back hit something, and she tried to scramble away from it, but it turned out to be Logan's knees. He grabbed her by the shoulders and held her still until she stopped throwing herself all over in panic. "Jean? Jean, what happened?" He crouched next to her, taking her head in his hands to keep her from trying to thrash the images out of it. "What did you see?"

"It's in the house . . ." she choked, then caught herself. Houses didn't have minds or memories; only people did. And the only other person here was Logan. Once she remembered these simple things, everything made a lot more sense.

She forced her eyes open and looked into his face. His dark eyes were a little too wide with worry, and the palms of his hands were a few degrees warmer than she remembered his skin being.

It wasn't in the house. It was in him.

She reached up and put a hand to his face—an old, bad habit, a crutch. Physical contact didn't enhance telepathy like proximity did, but when first she'd learned to use her powers she'd reflexively touched those she was trying to read. The sudden need to do it now only told them both how shaken up she was.

"What happened here, Logan?" she asked, her voice cracking like she was about to cry. "You saw a memory. What happened in that house?"

"Nothing you gotta worry about," he assured her, covering her hand with his and gently drawing it away from his cheek. "Just breathe deep. This'll pass."

"Who's the woman with the silver hair?"

He paused. "You saw her?"

Jean's other hand strayed up to fret at the side of her head. "She had blood in her hair, right here . . ."

He took her by the wrist and gently pulled her hand away. "Don't."

"Who was she?" When Logan didn't answer, she begged. "Please, Logan!" She felt a convulsive shudder run through her entire body.

Logan slipped out of his backpack, stripped his coat, and wrapped it around her shoulders. "You're going into shock. We'd better get you warm."

"I need to know."

Unless she could give a name to that woman, establish her history and her relationships, make her a real person instead of a daylight nightmare, Jean doubted she'd ever be able to sleep again. She grabbed Logan by his uniform sleeve, her other hand still holding the coat closed around her shivering frame, and stared straight into his bottomless eyes.

He must have seen the desperation in her gaze; he relented. "You need to get warm first," he insisted gently, prying her fingers from his arm. They clamped around his hand, and he held them for a minute, squeezing back to reassure her. Only when she let go of her own free will did he stand up and head into the cabin.

Jean wormed one arm at a time out of her own backpack, keeping the extra coat as tight around her as she could manage. She felt too shaky to handle the extra weight or the change in her balance. Knees quivering, she struggled to her feet and staggered back towards the door.

It was the smell that did it, really. The instant the musty, abandoned smell registered in her nose, the panic hit again. She wobbled and caught the door frame, her will warring with her body's desire to turn and run.

"It's okay," said Logan's voice from somewhere in the shadowy depths of the room. "You can come in. There's nothing here that'll hurt you."

Gradually, her eyes adjusted to the gloom. The room was bare of furniture. The roof had collapsed in one corner, letting in a weak shaft of sunlight that illuminated the pile of leaves and pine needles that had fallen through the hole. In another corner, she could make out the lumpy gray form of a wasp's nest affixed to the joint where the roof met the wall. The wood of the walls was irregularly stained light and dark from water damage.

The area just around the fireplace was free of leaves and debris. The scent of woodsmoke underneath the terrifying smell of decay told her that there had been a fire in it recently. In the middle of the clear space was a pile of what looked like old, rotting pieces of fabric, possibly bedsheets, and stacked next to it was a pile of rectangular, yellow-brown objects that, when Jean squinted at them, turned out to be weather-worn books.

She made it to the fireplace and sat down. Red-brown blood and silver hair danced behind her eyelids when she blinked.

As Logan crossed in and out of the cabin, finding and bringing in wood dry enough to be burned, Jean started feeling a little more like herself and a little less like a child who'd just woken up from a traumatizing nightmare. After perhaps fifteen minutes, she felt up to going outside and bringing in the backpacks. She downed half a bottle of water while Logan coaxed fire from the branches he'd assembled.

The fire brightened the room, but also made the shadows darker and more mobile. Jean huddled as close to it as she could manage, shedding his coat when she got too hot. She could hear him outside, slicing firewood into manageable sizes. When he'd brought in five or six armfuls—enough to keep the blaze going all night—he finally sat down on the floor and started to talk to her.

Jean hardly registered his voice. Her telepathy still felt oversensitive, and without quite meaning to she saw flickers of images as he described them. She remembered scents she'd never smelled, felt the tug of familiarity drawing her to people she'd never met. She was sure she was experiencing more than he intended her to . . . but that had always been the way with them, as she struggled to grow up and he tried to shield her from all the hardships of her expanding world. She sat huddled on the floor and stared at the fire, and saw Logan's memories rise up out of the flames.

Author's Notes:

Justification for two-week upload wait: GRE! On the plus side, it's done, and on the plusser side, I think I kicked its trash. So that's nice.

And we finally have some French . . . and Remy's not even in this chapter! Weird. Next one, I promise.

'Allo? This is how most French-speakers answer the telephone.

Celle de notre Remy? The one that belongs to our Remy?

Ah, bébé. Ça va aller. Ne t'inquiète pas. Dites-moi ce qu'il te faut. Oh, babe. It'll be okay. Don't worry. Tell me what you need.

Bon. Ecoute. Peut-tu trouver un moyen pour aller jusqu'a l'aeroport? N'importe quel aeroport? Good. Listen. Can you find a way to get to an airport? Any airport?

Bon. Ecris cela. Good. Write this down.

Achetes un billet d'avion. Quand tu arrives, j'enverrais notre Henri pour te chercher. Ca va? Tu comprends? Buy a plane ticket. When you get here, I'll send our Henri to get you. Is that all right? Do you understand?

(A note on Henri's name: in the original comics, Remy's adopted brother was named Henri, but in the old animated series (which was what I was raised on) he was called Bobby. As a compromise, I decided that his name is Henri Robert LeBeau, and he answers to whatever. People tend to call him Bobby if they're speaking in English or Henri if they're speaking in French. So there you go.)

On t'attends. We're waiting for you.

So now that the Goshawful Repugnant Exam is over, my brain is feeling much happier and is eager to keep writing! Dang, we all have a great hobby.