The streets of Brighton in Quebec were already dark. The last city bus pulled out of the stop before she was close enough to read the sign on the back. Laura stopped where she was when she knew she wouldn't make it and leaned on a light pole to catch her breath.
She had to make it back by seven. Her mom had a date, and all she needed was to make sure mom got off alright, then she could be ready at 8 when Hugh would be over.
Hugh and his boys noticed her. Not only did one of them notice her, Hugh did. Tall and lanky, he made her forget everything they'd talked about before he pinned her to the wall and kissed her.
Her skin tingled as she thought about it, and it gave her a little spring to her vault over the brick wall into her neighbor's yard. Their dog was out and barked at her, but she growled back and it scurried inside its kennel.
In a moment she as through the gate, on her street, heading across the way, and –
A truck sat outside her mother's house, but it couldn't be her date. Debra only went in for the stiff, starched suit-wearing types, the ones with cash to burn and maybe a starter wife already at home. None of them would be driving something so… crunchy.
She couldn't be sure, though. She walked up past it, growing still more uneasy when the smell of cigar smoke wafted out of the cab. Still, she couldn't be sure.
Something scraped on the sidewalk behind her and she froze. She whipped around only to see no one, and nothing, on the street but her.
She stood there for a moment, her hair standing up on her arms, but when nothing happened or moved or scraped again, she let herself inside the house. She made it all the way in the kitchen before she found her mother… and worse, her father.
Logan looked her over with a glance and seemed to settle a bit. "Hey kid."
The sight of him always made her tense, and she wrinkled her nose. "What do you want?"
Debra shoved a bag into her hands. "Here. I packed everything I could find that was clean. There's some snacks in there, and a couple of your school books." She threw a glare at Logan. "You could have brought a list of classes or something."
"The regulars don't even have anything like that," he retorted as cigar smoke poured out of his nose and mouth. He looked up suddenly, stiff and with his head cocked slightly to one side. Laura heard a car pass and he shook his head, grabbing her arm. "Come on, kid, it's not safe here."
She looked from him to her mom and pulled to get out of his grip. "What are you talking about?! Nothing happens here, it's like the safest hole of hell!"
"Laura!" Debra hissed. "Have you even heard the news?"
"No! Someone cut off my internet!" Laura hissed back, yanking her hand free. "Since when do you do what he wants?" she asked, jerking her head at Logan. "He's gone for a decade and suddenly you're handing me off? That's not what the court decided!"
Debra didn't wilt like she usually did. Instead she looked angry and hurt and maybe a bit explosive. "The court can't promise someone won't blow you up! He" – she glared at Logan, her expression unchanging – "he at least can."
Laura wanted to be sure Debra knew she wasn't that ignorant. "Canadians don't blow people up, mom. That was all the US! And he lives down there!"
Logan growled. "We're trying to protect you. We agree on this, and if we agree on something, then your safe little hell has frozen over. Come on, kid, we've got to go. Now."
Once in the truck, the steel frame groaned under their combined weight. His came from artificial metal on his bones. Hers came from organic. Just her stupid luck her gene decided to make an already gross power even worse. She weighed nearly 300 pounds at barely 5 ft tall and looked less than half that. At least she could keep up with everyone her own age without having to lift weights or be in sports.
"So we are going to the US?" she asked, aware of the answer. "Why? They're the ones trying to blow us up."
"There were other attacks," he said, driving over the speed limit, but not enough to get pulled over. "The news doesn't cover everything. Neither does your high school gossip."
"This is kidnapping, y'know," she pressed, keeping an eye on the clock. She could still hitch a ride back in time to meet Hugh if she wore him down enough to let her out. Or if she bolted. "Mom could change her mind if I called her. This wouldn't be legal."
He threw her a look and she stared back, but then buckled her seatbelt. He looked back at the road. "We've worked it out. I've got friends taking care of it."
She scoffed, half wondering why he bothered about the belt when they were both heavy enough to snap it… and would likely survive any accident. "You've got friends?"
"The place I work," he said, emphasizing that he did, in fact, have a job, "is the safest place in the world for us. We're lucky to have somewhere to go. No one can touch you there."
She threw her head back. "Great. A convent too."
She saw him smirk out of the corner of her eye and she regretted making a joke. She didn't want to make friends. "I'll break out. Anywhere I don't want to be, I get out."
He exhaled smoke from the cigar. "Not from here, you won't."
Laura frowned, irritated he wasn't shaken. "It's that classy joint, right? Lot of breakables in there… sure you can afford locking me in…?" She rubbed her knuckles where the blades were hidden.
"I'm running a tab for stuff like that," he said, coolly. He merged the truck onto the highway and was quickly in the fast lane. "You'll have one too. Kitchen always needs volunteers to scrub."
She stared at him, and at the street lights blurring past. They were eating up distance and she felt her gut tighten up thinking she'd now have to wait until they pulled off to get a ride back to meet Hugh. She sat back in her chair, her mind racing through a few minutes of quiet.
"I have to pee."
He grunted and made no move to change lanes. Another exit flashed into their rearview mirror.
"I'm serious," she said. "You didn't exactly let me go before we left."
"Didn't have dinner, did you?" he asked, more to himself than to her. He made it to the next exit, taking a couple of lanes at a time. He pulled in at a Denny's just off the highway and parked.
Laura went in first and barely glanced at the lanky teen behind the counter on her way toward the restroom sign.
"Two," she heard her father say before she turned the corner and ducked into the bathroom.
Laura took out her phone and checked the time. She still had half an hour to get back. Debra likely canceled her date – she would never want one of her new guys to even catch a whiff of her ex – but Laura figured she could cut Hugh off on his way to her house and find somewhere else to go.
She looked up and scowled at the lack of accessible windows. In the movies people could always get out windows in the bathroom. That was irresponsible of them. What if there were girls on bad dates? What were they supposed to do?
Laura remembered seeing a side exit and snuck out to look while still being shielded from the rest of the restaurant. She had a straight enough shot to it.
Gathering up her best look of confident indifference, she strode across the side dining room and let herself outside, the chill setting her face all prickly. Next up she needed a ride and she scanned the parking lot for –
"So you're not hungry?"
The hair stood up on her neck and she stood very still.
Logan, waiting by the side door with his cloud of cigar smoke, clamped a hand on the back of her arm and walked her down the ramp toward the truck. "What do you want to go back for, huh?" he asked, his tone far from angry. It made her furious to hear he sounded amused. "Thought that was hell?"
She yanked her arm back halfway across the lot and rubbed her arm, even though his grip hadn't hurt her. "Maybe I just don't want to go anywhere with you. Thought about that?"
"Just because I won't let you get your way," he said, "doesn't mean I don't like you." He was just starting to say something else when she saw his face change. He froze and looked up, slightly over her shoulder. When she turned to see what he was looking at, he held her shoulder so she couldn't turn and gave her a push toward the truck. "Get in, the sooner we get going the sooner we get there. You can sleep most of the way."
He stepped away from her to get to the driver's side door.
The moment he lost sight of her, Laura bolted for the road. Her father was a lot of things, but fast had never been one of them. She wasn't a sprinter either, but she was younger and could stand the burn in her lungs.
She was nearly to the road when she looked back to see if he'd started to follow her.
Something hit her. Something very large, very solid, and very hot.
Everything went into bright light and dark shadow with a deafening horn blast. Then suddenly she blinked. She blinked very long and when she opened her eyes her heart was pounding fiercely in her ears and she was kneeling on the ground… with her claws buried in the grill of a new model truck.
Fluid hissed and sputtered out onto the pavement, helped along by the holes she made and the large dent from the impact.
Everything was muted in her ears and she stared at her arm as ugly red and purple bruises blossomed briefly then disappeared again to healthy skin. By the time they'd cleared, she could hear shouting.
Laura pulled her claws out of the car and withdrew them, listening to her father and the driver of the truck.
"You hit her! You should have been more careful! It's you who'd better have some insurance here, bub!"
"Me?! What the hell is this? She's ruined my truck! She's a mutey, and one that outta be locked up somewhere she can't go ripping into private property just cuz she wants to!" The driver raised his voice to some onlookers Laura could barely hear. "Somebody call the police and get them to decide!"
"What'd you call her, bub?" Logan growled. Laura felt her skin prickle with fear and she looked up cautiously at her stout, short father getting up in the angry driver's face.
Laura glanced at the twisted metal that used to be the bumper and got a sickening twist to her gut. Several weathered stickers that read things like "proud homosapien", "pure human forever", "x on the x gene". The plate was Canadian, and the part of her brain still disconnected from the impact thought the stickers were not very neighborly of him.
While she'd been reading the stickers, something must have happened. Her ears were still ringing loud enough she likely wouldn't have heard more shouting or the sound of her father's claws if he used them.
Logan hooked an arm around her and walked her quickly to the truck. "Get in," he muttered, practically shoving her into her seat. He got in and floored it.
Laura hadn't done up her seatbelt so she fell hard against the door with the force of his turn back onto the highway. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the parking lot and a group of people surrounding the unconscious driver on the ground.
"Did you hit him?" she asked, yanking the belt on.
"Yup." He glanced at her just briefly so he could keep up his rapid pace on the road. "You alright, kid?"
She nodded and leaned her chair back a notch or two. "Shook up."
The sigh he gave sounded more like a snort. "Serves you right. Go to sleep and let the heal factor do the rest. We'll be going to" –
Laura didn't hear. She didn't move again until the truck stopped and Logan shook her awake to walk nearly a mile down a dirt road in pitch darkness.
She felt much better physically, but everything felt new and not in a good way. She glanced at her phone and caught a glimpse of the clock before Logan shoved her phone back in her bag. It was just a few minutes past two in the morning.
"Any light out here just says come and get me," he said in a voice not quite a whisper, but not normal speech either.
Laura looked up at the sky and the moon, shivering now the temperature had dropped hard. She didn't pull out her coat though. The cold helped her remember this was really happening.
"Are we going to be arrested?" she asked. "Since we ran?"
"Yup. And we can't afford that. Can't afford getting caught by anything following us. We're on a schedule. Why'd you go running off like that?"
Laura didn't see the point in lying now. "I had a date," she said, hoping to make him squirm a little. "Thought I could still make it back."
He just grunted unhappily.
She heard an animal rustle around in the leaves alongside the road and listened until they passed by it. "I never ran into a mutant hater before," she said, quiet.
"They get a lot nastier," he replied in that same low voice. "On weekends he probably goes out with his buddies, watches the hockey game, gets drunk, and then beats up the one mutant they know in town until the family has to leave. Same group probably raises money for a 'cure' and acts all high and mighty about saving people who don't need a bit of their charity."
"Is that what they want? To 'cure' us?"
Logan stopped at a fork in the road and took her down to the left. "Can't generalize," he said simply. "Some want weapons, others want a cure, a few want us just to get the hell out of wherever we are. We're just different, that's all."
After a few minutes, he slowed his pace and held her arm so she slowed too.
"You and me, we've got a bit of the beast," he said, and when she looked at his face he looked a little cautious about what he had to say. "We don't show it on the outside, much as your mom gets mad about how I wear my whiskers, but inside we… A big chunk of mutations bring back animal things that people cut out."
Laura didn't like the uncertainty in his face. "I'm not going to go chasing Frisbees in the park any time soon, am I?"
He settled some and grinned. It was then she noticed he'd gotten rid of his cigar and hadn't lit a new one. "Not unless you're into that kind of thing. I can't judge."
He brought her off the road, then, winding through the trees. In a few steps, she saw a light. It wasn't piercing, like the LED flashlight her mom demanded Laura have on her house key. A woman met them, carrying what looked like some military surplus flashlight, and she kept the beam up near Laura's face.
Laura couldn't see much of anything while the woman talked in low whispers with Logan.
All she heard was her father say "she's my kid" and the light dropped. Laura saw spots and blinked rapidly, tripping over things while trying to follow them through the now pitch-black woods.
He caught her arm as she tripped again. "Easy." He held her arm so she was close enough to hear him explain. "Mubarak lives here, with his family. He's from Egypt. He's not here, but this is his wife Amisi. Second wife."
Laura didn't think she needed to know that, and did wonder a little why her dad would care about domestic stuff, but he clammed up when they arrived at a close complex of trailers in a clearing. Looming outside the limited glow of light from the windows were large trucks, minus their trailers, facing out into the dark behind.
Amisi took them to one of the trailers and opened the door for them. "Quickly, then. Come on."
Logan pushed Laura ahead first and she needed his hand on her back to stop her staring at Amisi's face.
She was a beast visual. Her eyes had a rounder shape and dark brown fur grew up over the bridge of her nose in select patches around her face, and the hand that held the light.
Laura sat down on the nearest place she could, a low bench near the door, while her father pushed past to talk to a 30-something man who came out from further inside.
Amisi came to look at her and their curiosity was mutual. "You look like your father," she said, smiling with teeth that struck Laura as more like a dogs'. "Don't worry, you're safe here. And we will help. What happened?"
"I wrecked a guy's truck," she said, suddenly realizing how cold she was. The warmth inside was making her finger tips turn red and painful.
Amisi saw Laura's hands and made a low sympathetic sound deep in her throat. "Oh, you're cold! How long did you walk?" She took Laura's hands and warmed them in her palms.
Before she could say more, the man from the back of the trailer came up. Looking up, Laura noticed he was normal in the face. No fur or odd eyes. "Momma," he said, "they'll be helping with a run tomorrow. Can you take care she gets changed enough?"
Amisi helped Laura to her feet and smiled. "Do you like short hair? Maybe black? Or a bit of color?" She wrapped Laura up in a blanket from the bench and helped her back outside to another trailer.
Two hours later, Amisi held up a mirror. Laura pushed a bit of her now black hair away from her face. "Wow."
"Do you like it?" Amisi moved the mirror so the back of Laura's head was visible in the tiny bathroom mirror. "The highlights are not too bright?"
She couldn't help but keep touching it. Her hair had never been so soft, or so dark. "No, not too bright. Doesn't look like coal, so that's good."
"You can wear something of Ati's, if you need it," she said. "That's my girl. She is your size, I think. Maybe taller by some. Her father is tall." She ran her fingers through Laura's hair, though now it was nearly dry.
The touch was soothing. Despite the smell of the hair dye, the warm musty smell of the trailer was soothing too. Amisi smelled good, even though Laura couldn't call it perfume, and she realized she was leaning into Amisi's touch a little.
"Do you feel safe here?" Laura asked.
Amisi sat back, thinking. "Yes. The country is good to us. We're far enough away not to feel the damages this week…" her expression darkened in the mirror. "All those innocent children… We left because of bombs in our homeland and now people set them off on children. Here. Here where we came to be safe."
"Are you going to leave?" Laura caught herself realizing she probably shouldn't ask something like that. "I mean, Dad's taking me away…"
Thankfully she didn't seem offended. "No, not now. But if we have to, I've heard of a place. Only for an emergency, but…" She reached over to a rack of tattered magazines, all over four years old, and pulled out a pristine pamphlet. She gave it to Laura to look at. "They say they're going to be a country for us. For people with the gene. The ones who can't hide, especially."
Laura read the name and glanced through the pictures. "Genosha, huh?" The pictures were the first she'd ever seen of visual mutants smiling. Most of them looked not only happy, but more beautiful than normal human movie stars.
"I don't know if they would take the family," she said quietly, pain in her voice, "but if something happened, I could take Ati there with me. Then we would come back when it gets safe again."
Someone knocked on the door and Amisi peeked out before opening it. She looked up at Laura. "Come, dear, it's time to go. Get your bag."
Her father was outside and she stopped short in surprise at the change to him. Logan was clean shaven, his hair combed (with what looked like some difficulty), and he wore a loose t-shirt and a brown sweatshirt rather than his leather jacket. Laura saw he carried an old backpack now and guessed his jacket was in there.
He looked her over too. "Nice hair. You didn't change?"
Laura looked down at her clothes. "Oh! Right. Hang on."
When she came back out, this time in her favorite jeans plus a tight tee and tattered hoodie from the bottom of Amisi's pile of clothes from her daughter's room, the trucks were rumbling to life and Logan waved her over to one.
"So we're truckers now?" she asked, scaling her way up to the passenger seat. There was a kind of cot behind the seats with a little storage and a case of water bottles within reach.
He was up in the drivers' seat with a couple quick steps up. "Just to the border. We're getting and giving a favor at the same time. Hop in back if you're tired, it'll be a few hours."
Laura checked the time. Almost 5am. The sun, that time of year, wouldn't be up for quite a while. Rather than buckle, she climbed in the back and found the cot – and the motion of the truck once it hit the road – surprisingly comfortable.
When she woke up, they were still driving. The radio was turned low, playing on a country station.
"You up, kid?"
She stretched, for once thankful she was so short. The cab was cramped even for her, so she wondered how the taller drivers could get comfortable in there. "Mostly," she yawned.
She spotted a copy of the pamphlet Amisi had in her trailer tucked between the seats, along with a couple of magazines and some fast food loyalty tickets. She pulled it out. "Hey, dad," she said, sitting up so she was leaning between the seats, "why are we going to New York instead of this place?"
He glanced at the pamphlet and his lip curled. "Don't you worry about it," he growled, looking back to the road. "The Institute is the best place for both of us. Trust me on that at least."
"But there were three schools blown up in New York," she said, climbing up to her seat. "Genosha" – she checked the pamphlet – "is an island. An island by Europe. Europe doesn't blow up its mutants."
He snatched the pamphlet from her. "Buckle," he chided, pointing to the seatbelt before crumpling up the pamphlet. He only spoke up again after she clicked in. "I happen to know the 'king' of that rock," he said. "Knew him before he'd given it a fancy name and got people to come live on it. He's just as bad as the people who blow up kids."
She stared at him. "What?"
She saw his face working subtly under his frown before he replied. "He's tried to kill me. A lot. Stands for the exact opposite of what the Institute stands for."
"So it's like a feud," Laura said.
He shook his head. "Not a feud. A stand-off, I guess. Just don't trust the smiling faces and the pretty mutations. What the gene does isn't pretty all the time, and people get broken by it." He shook his head and took a breath, twisting his grip on the wheel a little. "I wouldn't trust any place run by a man that's done the things I've seen him do."
The radio clicked over to intercom and a voice from another of the convoy of trucks came through. "Refueling up ahead. Second exit coming up."
Logan responded to agree and started to merge toward the exit lanes. "Hey kid," he said, "we can get something to eat if you're hungry. Unless you just want the snacks your mom sent?"
Laura suddenly realized her stomach felt like a deflated balloon. "She packs dumb stuff like yogurt covered nuts. I'm starving."
He chuckled. "Me too. I'm sure the others are hungry too."
Once the trucks pulled in at the stop, Laura finally got a good look at their caravan. Three trucks, two other teams, but with two more men than necessary. She guessed it was their truck she and Logan were in.
Last out was a girl her age who she easily guessed was Ati. She looked like her mother. It made sense why Logan pointed out Amisi was the second wife. The boys all looked normal and alike, but clustered fairly close around their sister, with good feeling and slightly smothering affection.
Ati stole a glance at Laura and waved cheerfully.
Laura smiled back and Ati squished in to sit next to Laura at the diner table.
"I hope you like the jacket," she said, her voice comfortably Canadian instead of accented like her mother's. "It was my favorite for a long time. Where are you going?"
"New York," Laura said, more curious than comfortable with Ati's wide-eyed attention.
"We're going to Maine," she said. "They won't tell me what we're hauling, though. And that's okay. That's the boring part of trips like this. Want to see something cool?"
She took a plastic frog from her pocket and set it on the table. "It hops when you press the tab," she said, grinning. "I know it's just for little kids, but it's really fun!" She pushed it over to Laura. "Go on, try!"
Ati acted like an elementary school kid, Laura thought, but she was likely old enough to be just about out of middle school. Still, she was pleasant enough and Laura humored her, giving the frog a try.
It leapt clear over Ati's menu and hit one of her older brothers who promptly sent it hopping back.
While the toy made the rounds and orders were placed, the staff took notice of Ati. Laura saw it and wondered if she felt it.
That was the look Laura was used to getting. People looked at what things that stood out. Laura wasn't sure what made her stand out, but she imagined it was everything. Her shortness, her little nose, her big feet, her flat chest. Any one of those could make a girl an outcast from the other girls. Though, she thought, it was more likely the rumors. Whether word of what she'd done at her first school actually made that far that fast or not, she still always wondered if that was why she got looks.
Only Ati was surrounded by her brothers and her dad. They sat her close to them and didn't take any notice of the looks, so she didn't either. She smiled easily and wasn't prissy. She even laughed at a couple fart jokes from her brothers, which Laura typically took as a sign of good character.
Ati finally pushed at her youngest brother who sat between her and the end of the booth. "Get out, I have to go!"
He leaned against her shove, setting his feet hard so she couldn't budge him, much to the amusement of the others. "Go? Go where? Home? What, are you gonna hitch hike?"
She threw her weight against him playfully. "No I've gotta peeeee!"
Their father chuckled. "Go on, let her out."
Logan nudged Laura. "Do you need to go?"
Her face burned. "Dad."
He backed off, but she got up anyway and followed a few steps behind Ati to the restrooms.
The looks followed Ati, but the hairs stood up on Laura's arms as if they were looking at her.
She hurried in the bathroom, aware when Ati's stall door closed and when she washed her hands.
On her own, Laura struggled to figure out why she was on edge, or even why she didn't want Ati to go out into the restaurant without her.
When she did come out, she didn't see where Ati had gone. She hurried out the door to see a worker had stopped Ati just a few steps out.
"So where did you get all this?" they were asking and gesturing to their own face in the areas where Ati had her fur. No doubt after asking something as lame as "so you're a mutant, huh?"
"Family," Ati said briefly. "Excuse me, I really should" –
"So is that dog or cat or what?" they pressed.
Laura saw the fascination on the one hand and the rudeness on the other. She walked up behind Ati and cleared her throat. "Hey," she said, glad she butted in when she saw the grateful look Ati gave her, "you left me behind back there."
She grinned. "Sorry." She just barely glanced at the worker before taking Laura's lead and walking off back to the table.
They weren't followed and Laura only just realized her heart was pounding in her throat. "That happens a lot, I guess?" she asked.
Ati nodded. "Yeah. Usually the same questions. I don't think most of them mean to be rude. Visuals aren't too common."
Laura just nodded, but when they sat down again at their table, every now and then a joke was one they could glance up, grin, and silently share.
Ati split off with her brothers after lunch and Laura waited for her dad in the cab of their truck while he talked with Mubarak Sr. and took a walk around to check the truck.
"So, can I drive?" she asked when he finally climbed in.
"Fat chance, half pint," he said, firing up the truck and following the first truck out onto the highway.
"What was the talk about?" She couldn't get used to him shaved. He didn't look like himself, but he was already starting to whisker up again.
He was quiet until she wondered if he was going to answer at all. "We're crossing the border on foot," he finally said. "We'll be handing the rig off to one of his boys at a stop a few miles from the border check. We'll meet up with a friend of his and then cross on foot."
She sat deep into the seat watching the back of the truck ahead of them. "We're not going through a checkpoint, are we?"
He was quiet again for a long time. "I don't like detectors."
She turned on the radio when she finally decided not to press the issue, and she wasn't about to change his station even if it was on a talk break.
- "that it's unlikely the bombings would happen again," a host was saying. "The international response has been so quick."
"Not so quick inside the US," the male host responded. "But we finally have a released statement by the US Department of Health inviting any mutants fearful for their safety to seek treatment and refuge at their local hospitals."
"This formal statement is awfully late, don't you think, Terry?" the female host returned. "Within an hour after the attack, Graiton Creed" –
- "That's the human rights activist, for anyone following at home," Terry said. "I'd have put my hockey money on his people for this kind of attack."
"That's the thing," the female host continued. "Within an hour of the attacks, he was on international news calling for the arrest of the bombers. Do we have a clip of that?"
A recording played then, a voice Laura had heard several times from her newsfeed before Debra took away her phone data.
"This is a tragic thing all around, and not the way proud human beings get their message across. The perpetrators should be apprehended and held accountable. I expect – and I make no bones about this – I expect there will be swift and violent retaliation from the mutants." There was a pause filled with sound of camera clicking from the press who were there in person. "It could be today," Creed said, his voice heavy with warning, "it could be a week, it could be as long as a month or more, but we will see a significant surge in anti-human activity. After the patterns we've seen, we need to protect ourselves where the police aren't equipped to do it for us."
The recording cut off as if that were mid-sentence and the hosts came back on.
"Gosh that's pretty scary to think about," Terry said. "If they can't handle some human-made bombs, what do they expect to do with a teenager with fire blasting out his hands?"
"Might be more concerned about offending a psychic," the female host replied. "Seems to me we all better be working on how to be good neighbors to the folks that could have that much power" –
Logan reached over and changed the station to one that was playing music and turned it down to a murmur.
"Sorry," Laura muttered, uncomfortable with the glowering look on his face.
He nodded at his bag at her feet. "Dig a cigar outta there, will ya?"
She did and handed it to him with his lighter. "Can we at least crack a window or something?"
He opened his own window a little before asking her to light for him. He settled with his first pull and took one of his long pauses. "Everybody's gotta decide about this stuff for themselves," he said. "I'm not going to tell you what to believe. Just saying something about what I think feels right at the moment." He thought and spoke again. "There's a whole lot less of us than they all wanna believe."
Laura wasn't sure she believed that. She'd lived in hope for years that there were at least half a dozen mutants at her school – whichever one she was at – that would suddenly manifest some power that made hers less strange.
"It seems like there's a lot," he said, "cuz we tend to find each other. That's part necessity, and part beast stuff like you and me have. We stick together." He glanced at her and Laura immediately thought of her concern for Ati even in the brief moments they spent going to and from the bathroom at the diner.
"But out there in the world," he went on, picking his words carefully, "Professor Xavier says less than half a percent of people have the gene. Only a slice of that bunch have powers that actually do anything." He gave a gruff little chuckle. "Imagine having the gene and the only thing you get is an extra knuckle in your finger?"
Laura got icked out thinking about it and it must have shown on her face.
He chuckled. "Yeah, well, you'll see a lot worse where we're going. Anyway, there aren't that many of us, and I'm real sure the government already knows the names of all the ones that can do any damage," he sobered a little and he said quietly, "even if they don't know they should worry about them."
"And what about the school?" she asked.
"Mutants only there," he said.
She felt her stomach turn a little, suddenly wondering if that was actually a place she would belong.
"The professor brings in the ones that need protecting, from others or from themselves. Now he's calling in all the ones he's been working with from a distance." He blew a cloud of smoke toward the window that sucked it out of the cab.
"And he called for me?" Laura asked, a twist of skepticism in her voice.
Logan kept his eyes on the road. "No. I did. And he'll take you in like the rest." He changed lanes with the rest of the convoy. "Who was your date with?"
Laura was watching a car just ahead of them with a bumper sticker like the one she'd seen on the pickup she'd wrecked. Her knuckles ached remembering, and she reached up to touch her hair, only then remembering it was not brown anymore. "What?" she asked, pulled back to the present.
"Your date," he said again. "The date you had when I showed up. Who was it with?"
Laura sat back into her seat to where she couldn't see most of the regular cars. "Nobody," she said, realizing she meant it. Hugh was a wannabe at best, she realized. For all she knew, he had hate stickers on his junker car or on the bottom of his skateboard. "Nobody important."
Her dad grunted and tapped ashes out the window. "You sure?"
She looked at him and pulled a face, crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out until he saw her and grinned. She grinned too, surprised she wasn't really all that sad. "Just a dumb boy. Probably would have dumped me the second he found out I'm a mutey."
"Hey. Mutant. And that wasn't your choice," he replied. "Good to be cautious, but there are normal people out there who aren't terrible. They're hard to find, but lately I've been betting there are enough of them to matter." He glanced at her so she knew he wasn't joking. "And you know what? Even just betting that, things don't look so bad."
"What about the bombing, then? How do you figure that with your bet?"
He thought a minute, but Laura wasn't sure if that was thinking or just taking another draw of his cigar before putting it out for later. "People, human or not, attack for their own reasons. Thing about the institute… it pays to let the thinking people do the thinking, and the fighting people do the fighting. I've been wrong enough to know I'm not a thinker."
Laura grinned a little at that, and he went on.
"But I do know this. If I was gonna blow someone up," he said, "I'd make it look like someone else did it. And I'd probably stand in the middle of it just to be sure no one would think it was me."
She thought a bit, confused. "So you think other mutants did it?"
He shrugged. "I think we're not all on the same side, so there's no telling. I just doubt the first view of things."
Laura didn't say much for the rest of the ride. She imagined, suddenly, a whole lot of angry people standing on opposite sides of a line, but that this wasn't a clear view of things. The news she'd heard, the articles she'd read, the gossip of the kids at school all said attackers vs. victims where one group could be either or, depending on who told the story. Now things felt a bit more like a yelling match inside a mosh pit of people, mutant and human, still crushed together as people, no matter if they believed in each other's humanity.
She wasn't used to thinking that deeply about it. It gave her a headache.
A few miles from the border, they pulled off at a stop, handed the truck back to one of the brothers, and met up with a young man with a truck like the one they'd started out in.
"Brandon," her father grunted in greeting, lobbing their bags into the truck bed. He climbed in the back too, jerking his thumb at the cab for Laura's benefit.
She climbed in and cringed when she saw the young man in the driver's seat had a right arm of metal and cables.
He turned to flash her a handsome, friendly grin. "Hey. You can call me Forge." He offered his metal hand, which she was relieved to see was shaped and moved just like a real one.
She shook it and relaxed. "Laura."
Logan shoved open the back window of the cab. "We're not here to socialize," he growled.
"I'm driving, okay? Geez, no need to get all pissy back there." He revved the engine, one that clearly didn't belong to the vintage chassis. "Keep your hands and arms inside the ride at all times! Away we go!"
They drove the highway for a short stretch, then exited and in less than five minutes were winding down roads with no lights or paving. Laura didn't have a clue where they were when Forge pulled off the road completely and shut off the lights.
"Open the glove compartment, would you, Laura?" he said brightly. She did and handed him the only thing she found in there. "That's a good girl! Thanks."
There was no moon, so she didn't know what they were, but by his driving she guessed he'd packed something to help him see in the dark.
Neither of the men said anything. They didn't make a single sound and, oddly, the engine barely did either. When he'd shut off the lights, Forge had apparently set the motor to a nearly silent hum.
Their silence more than any command told her to keep as quiet as possible during their stop-and-go off-road drive.
She heard her father gasp first, then he was pounding on the cab of the truck. Laura couldn't see anything, but Forge looked out the driver side window and swore loudly, waking up the truck to roar around and away just as a dark shape came charging at them from the trees.
Someone, as difficult as it was to believe, hit the side of the truck with shattering force, but the angle deflected it toward the front. Laura saw a solid outline of a hand grabbing the driver side mirror and caught a glimpse of impossibly long nails like claws scraping long furrows in the metal before losing grip.
If the ground weren't already uneven, and if her adrenaline wasn't revved up too, Laura might have guessed they'd run them over.
The truck lurched and ground over bushes and plowed through small trees at full volume. Laura saw flashlights and off to the side there were some bright enough to be headlights. "Lookout!" she yelled and Forge tore off the night goggles, slamming the gear shift around to the sound of the border guards' shouts and megaphone sirens.
"Hold on to something!" he said, spurring the beast of a truck through what looked like a solid stand of trees.
Laura, for all her weight, was being flung around the cab. She grabbed hold of what she could, gripping the useless belt and handle on the door, but after they vaulted a boulder on her side, she scrunched down low, gripping the seat and bracing against the dashboard.
She'd never been to any of the big amusement parks in her life. She imagined this might be what a totally broken rollercoaster felt like, especially just after Forge told her to keep down. All four wheels left the ground for a moment, and during that moment that felt like a dozen the truck tilted nose-down. The engine went to its silent hum again and all the lights there were shut off.
They hit the ground, but Laura didn't hear a crunch, just the hiss and squeak of the machine taking the impact and the momentary weightlessness of a truck bouncing to a landing.
By now Laura had folded herself up and was bracing under the glove box. The truck stopped motion completely and she heard a soft thud. It was solid dark, not even a moon, and it took a moment to realize Forge's face was very close to hers. He'd flattened himself down across the front seats to keep out of sight and was breathing hard, his eyes wide and his grin both nervous and crazed with the car chase.
He covered his own mouth to further muffle his breathing and Laura did too, especially when she heard the guards and their car milling around above them. Their lights threw odd shadows and Laura held as still as possible, well after things went dark again and the voices faded off in opposite directions.
After both of them were breathing calmly again, Forge pulled out a phone and checked a map. "We're not too far off base, but we're gonna be late." He darkened the screen again and sat up, looking at her. "You alright?"
Laura climbed back to her seat. "Banged up, but nothing serious. This thing still going to run after all that?"
Forge grinned proudly. "Are you for real? This may look like a rust bucket, but this is" – A hand slammed heavily against Forge's window and he screamed, lurching away and backing Laura into the passenger window.
Logan's face appeared then and he pounded on the window, his angry voice plenty audible through the glass. "What kinda driving was that, bub? You dumped me back there with everything else in the back!"
Forge eased off Laura and back to his seat. "He's alive!" Forge grinned at Laura and gave a half-hearted, "Yaaaaaay."
Logan had recovered their bags from where they'd fallen out, then had a rough time getting the truck back up the other side of the ditch. Laura got to sit at the wheel while her dad and Forge got behind to push until there was some traction for the beast truck in disguise to get on even ground again.
After a few minutes of careful, silent driving through the woods, she saw a light off to the right grow brighter and brighter before flashing in front of them and a glare of red disappear off to the left.
They'd found a road.
There were no lights in front or behind them so Forge pulled out into the lanes, leaving their lights off to take advantage of the dark. They kept the law of silence in force, for a while.
Finally, Forge flipped the lights back on and the engine rumbled back to a regular pitch that made it hard for Laura to hear what he said after that. "What?"
"I said the heat's off now," Forge smiled. He rapped on the window. "You alright back there?"
"I'm still mad at you," Logan grunted.
She smiled, unclenching from the fear of crossing an international border illegally. "Hey, dad?"
"Yeah?" he answered through the window.
"Why couldn't we just take the truck over? I mean… I've got papers, right?"
"Oh you've got em," he said, firmly. "Only we'd attract attention from customs if the truck we were in weighed a few hundred pounds over what it's registered for."
She settled, then, and at the next rest stop, Logan climbed in the large cab with them for the rest of the drive.
They stuck to the highways, making it into Westchester and winding through the roads to Bayville, back out the other side.
Forge turned off the road and stopped at the corner of a large fence. "What the hell," he muttered, pointing at where a plaque used to be. Laura saw where the screws went, but were gone now. "They took down the sign?"
Logan looked and frowned too. "Damn. Professor's really trying to get off the grid, isn't he?"
They buzzed in at a large gate and then stopped at another gate, passing through immaculately kept lawns and gardens. They could see construction equipment and piles of building materials around.
A man waited at the inner gate and opened it for them. Laura, at least, thought it was a man, but when they got close enough and stopped so he could greet them, she realized this was just a very tall very muscular boy a few years older than her.
"Piotr!" Forge grinned and clasped his hand through the window. "Long time, no see! I'm here to stay now, not just for a visit. What do you think of that?"
The boy smiled, a wide genuine grin that immediately made him a lot less scary. "I am happy to see you, Mr. Forge. Yes. It is good."
"I've got a new kid and an old nuisance here on the old man's orders," he went on cheerfully. "Is he around?"
Piotr looked through the cab at Logan and then at Laura, and he had more of a smile for her than she expected. "Yes, the Professor. He is inside." He kept his gaze on Laura. "Welcome."
She just nodded as the truck rumbled forward again, toward the large gothic building whose plaque had not been removed. "Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters"