Chapter 13

Nothing.

There's nothing here.

Just a derelict, abandoned industrial site without a soul in sight, ugly, concrete buildings decaying and rotting.

I stand outside the perimeter fence in the ashy morning light, and recheck the coordinates on my phone. Yup. This is the right place. This is where Logan planned our meet.

I heave out a breath and scratch my forehead with my thumbnail. I haven't slept for over 24 hours now, and I'm running on nothing more than adrenaline. My nerves are frayed, my senses twitching. Is this anxiety? Is the anxiety mine, or Jean Grey's?

Steady, girl, I think absently to myself. Just give into it. It'll be okay.

And so I do it. I give into Jean Grey. Immerse myself in her. It eases the symptoms of bleed effect, the lingering sense of disorientation. I am me. I am her. There's no difference.

There's a door in the fence that's been locked tight with chains and padlocks, and I walk up to it. There's a notice secured to the wire, warning me that the site's been marked for demolition in a week. They're clearing the space to put up some luxury apartments and condominiums. Huh. Well, some things never change.

I absently check the time on my watch, making sure I'm still within the deadline Logan's set. Wisdom had expedited my transport Stateside, but once I'd got on US soil, it had all been up to me. MI13 could no longer be seen to give me assistance, and once I'd cleared customs in JFK I'd commandeered a bike and sped all the way to this run-down little spot in Nowheresville, Delaware. He was further south than I'd expected, but… I'd made good time. If I'd driven down, I would've got caught in God knows how much commuter traffic, and that would've made things… difficult. But I'm here now. I'm not late.

I test the fence for any weaknesses, and, finding none, I scale it easily, vaulting the final metre or so and landing deftly on the asphalt on the other side. I check the sat nav and follow the route towards the planned meeting spot. It's lonely. Quiet. There's the sound of the wind and crows in the sky. The crunching of glass and rubble under my boots. There's a kind of peace here. The peace of emptiness, of decay.

Of imminent nothingness.

I shudder and draw the collar of my jacket closer.

Wisdom's standing beside his desk, looking pensively out the wall-length windows over the sparkling dove grey waters of the River Thames.

"This complicates things," he muses, half to himself. "You should've waited for MI13's input before contact, Ms. D'Ancanto."

I look up at him from my seat. There's a tremor in my left hand that feels self-consciously apparent, but he's showing no acknowledgement of it.

"The opportunity presented itself. I simply took it."

He needles a glance at me and smiles.

"So you're a risk-taker, Ms. D'Ancanto?"

I meet his gaze without flinching.

"Does that disturb you, Mr. Wisdom?" I ask.

"Professionally – a little. Personally – not at all." He regards me for what seems like a long time, that oblique little smile still on his face. At last he says: "The clock is ticking. We're already wasting time. I'm having my people expedite arrangements for a private flight to JFK. But once you land – I'm very much afraid you'll be on your own. We can't be seen to be… meddling in the affairs of a foreign sovereign state."

"Naturally," I say.

"I've spoken with Mr. Gavin. He's planted some software into this phone – a long distance tracker." He holds up a Trask Technologies device – the latest model, no less. "It's the only means we'll have of keeping tabs on you once you're out of reach," he adds. "So take care of it. Of course, contact with us or any of your partners is… discouraged. To do so would be to—"

"Jeopardise the mission," I finish for him. "Of course."

"And if we are implicated in your activities…"

"You'll deny any and all involvement."

"Yes."

He smiles again and moves to sit on the edge of the desk next to me.

"I hope," he says quietly, more confidentially, "that you've been giving some thought to my proposition."

I curl my left hand into a fist in order to stop the tremors.

"Yes," I say. "I have."

"And what are your thoughts?" he prompts me.

I hold his gaze, answer softly: "Working for MI13 would certainly have its advantages."

"But…"

I cock my head to one side slightly, knowing that he knows the source of my indecision.

"But there are other factors that… deserve my consideration."

"Not moral ones, I hope," he says. I know what he's referring to. Should I take on his offer, Logan will need to be eliminated. Does he doubt me? It seems unusual of him to push on this point.

"Moral questions have rarely factored into my work before," I answer quietly.

"Then?" he questions me with raised eyebrow, feigning curiosity. I frown at him.

"You know as well as I do, Mr. Wisdom, how my current position with Gavin & Lord is… intertwined with my relationship with Mr. Lord."

I rise from the seat, grasping my clutch in my left hand, but refusing to move from his peripheral. I'm just a little taller than he is in his current position, and I look down on him, hoping to reinforce the point. His smile widens a little, and he looks away for a split second. When he looks back at me, his composure is intact.

"I'm sure Mr. Lord is more than man enough to see you in a position more suited to your talents," he observes, making no move to redress the physical balance of power between us. "Are you suggesting otherwise?"

His expression is so cocksure, so confident, all wrapped up in his pretty features, enough to incite the smartest of slaps… or the most passionate of kisses. I inwardly squirm.

"With respect, Mr. Wisdom," I say without any attempt at actual respect. "You have no idea how complicated both my professional and personal relationship with Mr. Lord is. And for the record – I think you underestimate his own talents. If you had any real ability for ferreting out talent yourself, it's him you'd be trying to recruit. Not me."

I'm about to leave when he suddenly rises to his full height. Maybe I'd misjudged the distance between us, because he suddenly seems very close – closer than I'd anticipated. I pause and try to breathe.

"On the contrary," he says seriously. "Mr. Lord's talent was self-evident to me from day one. The only difference between you and him is that it is obvious to me that he has no interest in joining MI13. You, on the other hand, are not quite as… well, shall we say content?... in your current position as he is."

I hate him, I admire him, for his astuteness.

"Mr. Wisdom," I say darkly. "When I've made my decision, you'll know."

I swing out of his body heat and head for the door.

"Where are you going?" he asks.

"Where do you think? Back home to pack. I'm assuming I'll be leaving within a couple of hours. Unless your 'people' don't work as fast as I assume."

"Ms. D'Ancanto," he interrupts me as I reach the door, his tone now entirely serious. "I'm afraid we can't let you leave the building. Everything you'll be needing for the assignment will be prepared here. We can't risk having the mission… compromised."

I swirl back round and stomp right back to him, this time unafraid of getting right up into his face.

"I don't appreciate this, Wisdom," I hiss.

"You know how this works, Ms. D'Ancanto. Every step must be monitored—"

"Then have someone accompany me back to the apartment," I order. "There's something I have to do, and I am not doing it here."

I sweep back towards the door, not waiting for him to say yay or nay. I need to leave Remy a message, and no one's about to stop me.

I'm there. Right at the coordinates pinpointed in my phone.

I stop and survey my surroundings.

I'm guessing this was once a warehouse for a nearby factory, but I could be wrong. Nestled in-between out-buildings, hidden well out of obvious sight. A metal awning, rusted and cracked, looms above me, looking like it could give out at any moment. There's a steel door in the structure, and I try it, out of interest, but it doesn't budge. Something's blocking it from the inside.

I lean against the door a moment. I'm tired. So tired. Until now I'd resisted thinking of Remy, but I do now. The way I left things… the way we left things… It feels wrong. Undone. I hope he understands my reasons, but… I'm not sure he ever will. And that hurts. It hurts bad.

The shape of the gun Wisdom gave me presses against my thigh. Small, economical. A Walther PPK .380. Every bullet taken careful inventory of. I know how it works. Death was my trade all through my teenage years. Today, it's like a noose round my neck. A sentence to be carried out. My own death, somehow. There are things I want from this life now. But if I kill Logan, it feels like I'll be dead myself.

I push myself away from the door and—

"Watch out, Anna!" I hear Jean's voice suddenly sound in my head, and before I can even register it I've been grabbed from behind, the wind sucked from me by the violence of the movement as a muscular arm hooks round my throat.

Adrenaline and exhaustion pulse through my body. I appreciate now why he put me on such a tight deadline. It isn't only about giving me as little time as possible to formulate any backup plans or covert shenanigans. It's to keep me physically off-balance. Tired. Distracted. I have to hand it to him. He may've forgotten his past, but he's orchestrated this like a true soldier of Weapon X.

"Well," a voice growls breathlessly in my ear – a voice I've never heard before in my life, but which I know oh-so-well. "Didja do it, kid? Mission accomplished?"

I can hardly breathe. I struggle momentarily to remember the code phrase.

"I couldn't save the children," I rasp out the pre-arranged code; and that seems to satisfy him. He pats me down roughly and finds first my phone, and then the gun with ease. It's only then that he lets me go, pushing me stomach-first into the metal door. I cough and splutter a bit, letting it hold me upright for a second.

"Pretty shabby performance, for one of the 1%," he notes gruffly. There's disdainful humour in his voice, and for a split second there's a jumpstart in my mind – his own memory floods me, and I see my twelve-year-old self through his eyes, a half-dead creature with nothing left to live for.

"Y'won't be needin' this no more," he comments brusquely, and, out of the corner of my eye, I see him dash my phone against the floor. The plastic carapace cracks and splinters, spilling its metallic guts onto the floor. I have to visibly stop myself from crying out in dismay. That phone was my last lifeline to the outside world – and he knows it, but not the way he's thinking. MI13, Jake, Remy… they can't track me anymore. I'm on my own for real now. I swallow. Hard.

"Well?" he says. "You gonna say hello or what?"

I push myself away from the door, silently cursing him for taking away the only link I have to home. I turn slowly with defiance on my face.

He's shorter than Jean Grey's memories suggest – but damn, he's built. He looks like he could crush my windpipe with the slightest squeeze. I touch my neck gingerly, still feeling the pressure of his grip on me.

"Uh uh," he stops me – there's a gun in his hand, pointed at me – my own gun is in his other hand, well out of reach. "Hands up, kid. Put 'em where I can see 'em."

I obey – don't have a choice. For a few seconds we simply size one another up. He's older than he was in Dr. Grey's memories, of course – more gnarled, more grizzled, with streaks of white at his temples. But he's still a force to be reckoned with. Anyone could see it, right dead centre in the wild staring of his eyes.

"Nice piece you have here," he remarks casually of Wisdom's gun. "Kinda risky to take with ya, considerin' the nature of this here li'l rendezvous."

"Are you kidding me?" I reply defensively. "I can trust you just about as much as you can trust me. Think I'm gonna come here unarmed?"

He guffaws harshly at that, spits to one side.

"For all the good it did ya. Seems your reflexes are a li'l slow, 'Dr. Grey'."

"They're not what they were," I admit, opting for the truth. "I'm suffering from the bleed effect."

The words wipe the feral smile from his face. He observes me closely, then shoves my gun inside the waistband of his pants.

"Turn," he says in a more level tone. "Head right. We're goin' inside."

I stare at him uncomprehendingly a second, and he indicates to my right with a wave of his gun. "That way. Nice and slow now. Hands where I can see 'em."

I do as he says, obeying his curt directions round the back of the building. There's another door there, and he keeps the gun trained on me as he opens it up, kicks it open with his boot, and gestures inside.

"Go," he says.

Lights flicker on as I walk over the threshold, and there's the familiar hum of a neural scanner kicking into life.

"Stop," he says.

I halt, and look around briefly.

The scanner's been set up a few steps in front of me, and behind that, I see a mess of old computer hardware, engineering parts, scrap metal. The floor is partially littered with garbage. I'm guessing most of this is the detritus left behind when the former occupier left; and from vagrants who set up temporary shelter here afterwards.

Logan comes out from behind me, inching his way to my left, and when he enters my peripheral vision, I see that he still has the gun on me. He sidesteps up to a laptop placed on a pile of fibreglass boxes, and when he reaches it, he hits the enter key without once taking his eyes from me.

"Go on," he says softly. "Walk through the scanner."

This is it. The test I've been waiting for. I switch off everything but the sliver of my brain that is Jean Grey, and… I walk on through.

The green static bathes me, and this feels so comforting somehow, so familiar.

I stop when I'm out the other side, and he glances quickly at the laptop. What he reads there is enough to get him to loosen up his stance. He lets out a long, heavy breath, his body seeming to deflate a little as he does so. He leans slightly against the pile of boxes and looks back at me – but the gun doesn't quite lower in his grasp.

"You're supposed to be dead," he says quietly.

"I didn't die," I reply simply, and a smile twitches on his lips, wry, almost pained.

"I… 'faced with the memory of your death," he tells me gruffly, like the memory is still fresh in his mind.

A spasm visibly takes me then. He sees it, but he doesn't dare come close. He's still suspicious. Of course he is.

"I went into a coma," I answer.

"And when you came back out, I suppose they were impressed."

"Yes."

"And they turned you into a good little soldier."

I pause. I stare at the ground. It isn't praise. It was once. Not now.

"Yes," I say.

I lift my eyes to his. He's quiet, considering me.

"What do you want from me?" he finally asks.

"I want your help," I murmur.

He gives a mirthless laugh.

"What makes you think I can help you?"

"Because what they did to you is what they did to me," I reply in an undertone. "And I want back what you want back."

He looks at me keenly, unsympathetically.

"They put you through the Machine too, eh?"

"Yes."

He thinks about it. This time the gun lowers slightly in his hand. When he raises his eyes back to mine, his expression is solemn.

"How did you find out about me?" he asks, mistrust only slightly edging into his voice. I eye my pistol, still in the waistband of his pants, my mind absently taking inventory of my surroundings.

"I found out that MI13 had some of my memories in their possession. When I went there to retrieve them… They'd been stolen. By you." The lies roll off my tongue so glibly, so easily. This is the story I've constructed for Jean Grey, woven out of the DNA of her memories, the threads of her neurones. It's as real to me as my own self. But how real is that, I wonder? "So I bided my time. Let MI13 do the work for me. They managed to retrieve what was mine… and I took the opportunity to move in and take it back. But not before I'd realised there was someone else like me in their employment. You."

He's unmoved.

"And I'm supposed t' believe that you coulda broken into MI13's vaults all by yourself? That ain't possible."

"Not by myself," I reply. "I had help. From someone else who's like us. A thief."

He raises an eyebrow.

"And where is this person now?" he queries, almost as if he expects them to turn up suddenly out of the blue.

"Back in England," I say. "He… didn't want any part of this. And… this is my thing."

Again, he weighs up the statement, sensing something more behind the words, something he knows I don't want to elaborate on – not for now anyway. After a moment, he sets his gun aside, pushes off his perch, and comes to me.

"Show me the mark," he says.

I know instinctively what he's talking about. I tuck my hair back behind my ear and show him the brand there, the mark that singled me out as Weapon X property. He leans over, pushing my hair back further with a rough touch. He runs his thumb over the inked lines, the raised grooves of skin proof enough that the tattoo is legit, at least. When he finally steps back, there's a wry smirk on his face.

"Guess we really are two of a kind, kid," he quips. "I got one o' those m'self."

He pushes the greying hair from his temple and shows me his own tattoo. It's older than mine, more faded – simpler. Like Raven's. But I don't tell him that.

"You look beat, kid," he observes, dropping his hand. "Bet you could take a rest."

There's empathy in his voice now – not a lot, but it's there. I nod silently.

"There's a room back there," he gestures over my shoulder. "Nothin' comfy, mind you, but good enough for the likes of us. You rest, and when you're up again, we'll talk more." He pats the pistol at his side. "I'll be keepin' this, if you don't mind. No hard feelin's – you know how it is. Gotta protect myself."

"And how do I protect myself?" I ask him quietly. He grins.

"That's up t'you, kid. But seein' as you're on my turf now, don't cause no trouble and you should be good. Now – get some rest. It'll ease the symptoms of bleed effect at least – give you a clearer head. We'll talk tomorrow."

He's not giving me a chance to negotiate – and besides, I'm too exhausted to fight. Sleep is licking at the edges of my conscience – questions seem insignificant. I let him lead me to the side room – a tiny, musty room that was probably once nothing more than a storeroom, a closet. A makeshift bed's been made up in the far corner, the comforter draped over it dirty and crumpled. Less than inviting… but it calls to my sluggish mind and aching limbs like nothing else. Without so much as a look back, I slump onto the mattress, and as sleep welcomes me with open arms, the last thing I'm aware of is the key turning in the lock.

-oOo-

I'm engulfed in a memory. Jean's memory. My memory.

I'm sitting in the observation room, clipboard in hand, looking out the one-way window. It's lunchtime, but I'm not hungry. I remember what Logan has told me to do. Go help those kids.

"What are you still doing here?" a voice behind me asks.

It's Dr. Haller, busying herself picking up some papers she must've left this morning.

"Oh – nothing," I say vaguely. "Just... taking some notes."

"Haven't you had lunch yet?"

I shake my head.

"Not hungry."

There's a silence and, having finally found her papers, she comes to stand beside me at the window.

Subject Zero is hooked up to the Machine again, running a test on yet another nameless boy.

"Quite a remarkable child," Dr. Haller murmurs half to herself.

"Yes," I say grimly. There's a pause and I feel Dr. Haller's gaze on my cheek.

"Has Dr. Frost gotten you to work with Subject Zero yet, Dr. Grey?" she asks.

"No," I reply. I'm far too insignificant for that.

"If you want to help run a test with her, I'm sure Dr. Frost would agree, if you asked."

I frown.

"I don't know," I say doubtfully. "To be honest, I find Subject Zero a little... frightening."

Dr. Haller laughs.

"I suppose she is, in a way – some might certainly find what she can do frightening. Otherwise – she's just a little girl."

The experiment's finished, and the subjects are being unstrapped from the Machine. The boy leaves, helped by an assistant, a little unsteady on his feet. Subject Zero sits on the chair, impassive, swinging her feet slightly, just like any other kid.

"She looks sad," I can't help but say.

"Does she?" Dr. Haller cocks her head to one side as if considering. "Well – she is an orphan."

"She is?" I ask.

"Well, that's what I heard anyway."

"When did she lose her parents?"

"Oh." Dr. Haller screws up her nose and shrugs. "I don't know. Somebody said she lost them in the Afghan war, but... She doesn't look Afghani to me. It's probably all just rumour."

Another assistant has helped Subject Zero out of the seat and is leading her to the exit.

"Well, I'd better get back to work," Dr. Haller is saying, already heading towards the door. "Don't forget to eat lunch!"

I make a non-committal hum of assent, but she's already gone. Subject Zero is being led past the window, and as she walks by she looks straight at me.

For a moment I'm stunned.

She isn't really looking at me, I know that... There's no way she could see me through the one-way window... But the look she gives me… From penetrating green eyes that are not the eyes of a child. She senses a presence behind the window. She knows what she is – a thing, an object – something to be looked at, prodded at, analysed. I'm just one of many who have stood here and stared at her; and she knows it. She stares right back... the same empty sadness in her eyes. And something more. Defiance.

I hold my breath and watch her watch me as she leaves.

What is she?

The orphan child of a war-torn country? It seems so fitting. Only eyes that have seen death can look like that at such a tender age.

God – she's not that much younger than me.

The assistant notices her looking at me and nudges her slightly, breaking the moment. He pushes her towards the door, and suddenly they're gone.

But for a long while after, all I see are those empty, angry eyes.

Her eyes.

My eyes.

-oOo-