MX Sn4: Destiny Fulfilled

Fifty hours after Jamie had broken into the Dominion's encrypted files, Mutant X was almost ready to make their move.

It had been a frustrating two-day period, all of them wanting to rescue Adam as soon as possible, to stop the Dominion, to save Adam and themselves, but they knew they had to wait. The possibility of losing Adam a second time was too great if the team acted overly hastily. Owen had relayed Josh's warning that the Creator had hacked into their communications, that he had known where Josh at the least was, and therefore he probably knew about the rest of the team as well. Their enemy had too much of an upper hand; Mutant X couldn't afford to act until they had made all the preparations they could.

Eve had been annoyed at the need to reconfigure another set of cellphones to her unique communication technology yet again, but there was a bright side. She had only converted one of the six new phones she had purchased, to replace Jamie's, so she hadn't wasted time and effort on the other five. There were still five blank phones waiting for Eve to overhaul; she only ruined one of them discovering a new way to reconfigure her multi-band frequency modulating adaptive transmission technology. Once she had managed that, it had been a simple matter to re-modify the team's phones, and they still had four in reserve. The team was now relatively sure whatever scans the Dominion had made of their communication technology while in their enemy's deathtraps would not enable the Dominion to break into their new phones. Eve had also modified the transmission technology of the original team's commrings, ensuring they were secure from the Dominion as well.

Just a little more work, and they would be ready to go.

Adam had communications technology concerns of his own.

He had managed to successfully smuggle his stolen smartphone out of the Dominion's Nevada complex, bearing it with him during their hasty escape from whomever the guerrilla attackers were. The Creator's SUV had fled east, the bodyguards taking turns as driver and making the entire trip from northern Nevada to somewhere in North Dakota without ever stopping for longer than it took to refill the gastank.

The population density of North Dakota is ridiculously low, Adam thought to himself. Even if I managed to escape here, I could probably travel in a straight line for days without encountering civilization. And the Dominion would no doubt re-capture me long before I got that far, even presuming I could. He had kept his stolen Treo powered off while it was hidden in his quarters in Nevada, not wanting its signal or power supply to give away its presence. Adam had tried reactivating it in his new glorified cell, just to see if it would receive any signal at all here in the middle of nowhere, but the smartphone hadn't even turned on. Another avenue of opportunity denied to him.

Adam wondered if there had been some sort of anti-electronics field protecting the new Dominion installation, nullifying any unsecured devices that entered the premises. He hadn't missed the way the Creator had carefully shut down and then secured his laptop once the crazed old man had finished whatever he had been doing on it. The Creator had been intently studying it during the first half of the drive east, smirking slightly and only clicking on its touchpad once in a while, but he had never said anything about whatever he had been monitoring.

Eventually, the Creator had frowned and carefully put his laptop away, then stared off into the distance for most of the rest of the drive, lost in his own thoughts.

Adam found himself slightly worried about what those thoughts might have been.

Jesse was sprawled across the floor of the Double Helix's cockpit, squeezed in under its dash and fiddling with the wiring under the consoles. He had one leg between the pilot and co-pilot chairs, the other propped awkwardly up over and across the pilot's seat as he struggled to wriggle closer to the nose of the plane.

"Mmmf. . .ow, dammit!" Jesse muttered as he attempted to unhook something under the consoles and pinching his hands somewhere they didn't fit. "CRAP!" Jesse yelled when his flinch made him drop the wire cutter he was holding, which nearly hit him in the face before bouncing off the cockpit's floor and clattering into his flashlight. The flashlight fell over with a clatter of its own, rolling to point its beam uselessly down Jesse's side, leaving him basically blinded.

'You okay, Jess?' Jamie's voice asked over Jesse's commring, but he could tell his fellow Molecular wasn't actually worried; in fact, Jesse could hear the laughter hiding in Jamie's voice.

"Oh, peachy," Jesse muttered, contorting himself more to wriggle halfway out from under the pilot's console, until he could reach the flashlight, then slithered back in again to replace it. "Just another damn minute and I'll have everything connected, if any of these freaking tools decide to cooperate."

'Well, Chris is pretty much our Mr. Handyman, so they're basically all his tools,' Jamie replied in a voice that was still only barely restraining laughter. 'So they can be about as frustrating as he can,' Jamie finished, audibly grinning.

"Well, that would explain it," Jesse muttered as he got the light back where he wanted it and retrieved the wire cutters, reaching up to continue his work. After a few moments of snipping, reconnecting, and applying electrician's tape and wirenuts, Jesse heaved a sigh of satisfaction and raised his commring back up to his mouth.

"Okay, Jamie, everything's go here. Let me just power up the Helix's systems..." Jesse said as he writhed back out from under the consoles, getting up and sliding into the pilot's seat. He flicked a few switches and nodded as electronic systems came to life, then smiled when relay indicators blinked to show their connections had been established.

'We got it, Jess; the Helix is direct-connected to Haven!' Jamie's voice came back over Jesse's commring with excitement. 'Systems linked, we can perform full analysis from the Helix in the field; Haven can now use the Helix as a mobile laboratory, and the Helix can use all of Haven's resources to process whatever it finds!'

'Outstanding, guys,' Eve's voice broke in over their communications. 'Jesse, set the Helix to Standby in Test Mode, and I'll check virtual operations.'

"You got it, Eve," Jesse responded, flicking a few more switches and activating the relevant systems. "Helix is on Standby, in Test Mode," he confirmed, then smirked. "Have a party."

Eve grinned at Jesse's confirmation, then initiated the new program. She was seated in the programming chair in Haven's Dojo, and when the program activated, virtual screens appeared around Eve, duplicating the Double Helix's cockpit around the Dojo's programming chair.

Her grin spreading as the virtual telemetry being transmitted to Haven by the Double Helix displayed its readouts in real-time, Eve's fingers danced over the keyboard, confirming all readings. Checking a side monitor on the programming chair's display, Eve verified Jamie was receiving both sets of information on Haven's main computer.

Everything was working perfectly.

Eve hit a few commands and initiated the next stage of the program, the virtual cockpit vanishing from around her chair and recreating itself in the middle of the Dojo, along with the pilot and copilot seats and control yokes. The rest of the Helix's interior manifested behind it, meaning Even could walk through the simulation and access anything electronic on the real Helix. The live telemetry link between the Helix and Haven meant whatever adjustments to the systems Eve made in the facsimile in the Dojo would simultaneously occur on the real Helix. If everything functioned properly, it would practically be like having Eve in the field with the team, even while she was still capable of doing whatever was needed at Haven, as well.

"Okay, boys, watch your screens, I'm initiating virtual take off," Eve said with a smile as she sat down in the virtual pilot's chair, the Helix's hologram growing solid behind her once she had entered its cockpit. A few more switches thrown and careful application of pressure to the control yoke, and Eve had the Double Helix "flying".

Of course, the real Helix was only feeding back the static telemetry of its parking space on the roof of the Majestic's parking garage, but the Test Mode program allowed it to be flown virtually, to test the system's response times and functionality. Eve grinned at the thought that she was running a virtual program virtually, through the holographic representation of the Dojo. They knew the Helix was in perfectly good working order, but running the virtual test flight program was the most reasonable way to test the telemetry link between the Helix and Haven. If Eve could fly the Helix from the Dojo in virtual test mode, than she could fly it virtually in real life outside of the testing mode, a vastly superior arrangement than giving the Helix's ghost pilot program a flight plan.

'Looking good, Eve, all the Helix's systems are responding to your inputs, reacting normally for Test Mode,' Jesse voice came over the commlink in the Dojo's programming chair.

'I'm still tracking both sides with Haven's main system; everything is operating in perfect synchronicity,' Jamie confirmed.

"Fantastic!" Eve told them both, her grin stretching wide again as she deactivated the virtual test, then shut down the Dojo's Double Helix simulation. "Great work, guys. Get the team together and get on out there; I'll back you up here from base."

Lying on the couch in Haven's lounge area, Josh groaned in disappointment as Jamie whooped in excitement before paging the rest of the team to get to the Helix. Josh knew he wouldn't be joining the team; the Feral Fever virus had been eliminated from his system, but the extreme antibiotics and heavy-duty anti-viral toxins that had killed it had left Josh sick as a dog anyway. Not as sick as a lethal fever would have left him, of course, and his Feral system would recover soon, but in the meanwhile, he was still sick. He was running a fever, nauseous and congested as all get out, and his muscles were aching as he lay practically swaddled in a down comforter.

In short, he wasn't going anywhere, even if he had insisted on coming down to Haven to be with the rest of the team as they worked to prepare to rescue Adam. Kevin was also worn out, between his last instability attack and the lack of rest before it, not to mention how hard and long he had pushed himself immediately after it, caring for Josh. They were both recuperating, but Eve wasn't about to clear Kevin for field duty yet, much less Josh. Kevin was recovered enough to care for Josh easily enough, but he wasn't up to extended physical exertion, not yet.

" 'Snot fair," Josh pouted miserably as he slumped even farther down into the couch, practically burying himself under the comforter and blinking pathetically as his lower lip protruded. "I've never been this sick," he whined at Kevin, not even paying attention to whichever crazy Whoopi Goldberg comedy he had insisted Kevin put on the mega-screen TV for him. "I'm a Feral; I'm not s'posed to get sick!" he declared nasally, then sniffled, went on to cough like a barking seal, and finally spat a glob of phlegm into the formerly-empty soda can he was currently using as a spittoon.

"Bleh!" he declared as he set the open can back down in front of the couch and picked up a closed one, still cold from the refrigerator. "My head hurts, my throat hurts, they're both full of junk, even my fingertips hurt..." he complained, carefully holding the chilled soda can with only his fingertips, attempting to numb them. "God, and now I'm whining," Josh moaned, holding the cold can to his forehead and hiding his face behind his forearms but leaving his mouth uncovered, free to continue complaining. "I never whine, this is ridiculous!"

"I dunno about that..." Kevin smirked as he watched his couchflopped boyfriend with something like amusement. As much as Josh hated being weak, Kevin still thought it was nice to see Josh being physically needy for once, instead of just needing his Feral psyche pandered to. Kevin would never voice it aloud to Josh, but he was both glad and proud to be taking care of Josh for once, instead of the other way around. Sure, he'd prefer if Josh had never been sick in the first place, but since he was, Kevin was thankful for being able to help. But that didn't mean he wouldn't pick on Josh while the opportunity was knocking, though. Some things just couldn't be passed up.

"..You whine a lot whenever I touch your prostate but don't actually press or rub it," Kevin finished, his smirk pulling wider into a snarkily playful grin.

"Dude!" Josh protested in a voice far louder than he had meant it to be, his eyes flaring open wide in shock. "BEDROOM TALK IN THE BEDROOM, THANK YOU!!" he hissed in an affronted whisper. For as shameless as he could be in public, hinting at all sorts of things as well as being willing to engage in graphic Public Displays of Affection, Josh still had objections to actual details of his sex life being mentioned anywhere someone else might possibly hear them.

Kevin thought that was sort of hilarious, since the rooms next to theirs were occupied by a Sonic Elemental, and the rooms next to those were an Ursine Feral's, but Josh never saw it that way. He seemed to think Chris and Owen just slept through their early-morning trysts, or perhaps that Chris used his powers to mute the sounds of their passion if they weren't alone in the penthouse.

Actually, given that Josh was something of a moaner and Kevin was a screamer when he really let go, Chris probably did.

"We'll be back, Guys!" Jamie called cheerfully as he led the procession out of Haven to join Jesse in the Double Helix. He waved as he walked past the lounge area, and Josh gave Kevin a dirty look. Kevin smirked at Josh and flicked his glance back at the lounge area's entryway before meeting Josh's eyes again.

Josh turned back to look out at Haven's main causeway just in time to see Owen's face pass out of view; he was stoically and resolutely facing straight ahead, and blushing to the roots of his nearly-shaved scalp. Shalimar turned to face into the lounge area as she went by, grinning mirthfully as she gave Josh and Kevin a cheeky wave and an overly-exaggerated wink.

Kevin cracked up laughing as Josh groaned and draped an arm over his eyes, hiding with his nose tucked into his inner elbow.

The Creator was working busily, with the utmost of concentration and focus.

Time was running out.

He wasn't working desperately, haste made waste, and he wasn't desperate. . .he knew exactly what needed to be done and how to do it; he simply needed to perform the required tasks.

There might have been a hint of urgency to his actions because he did not know exactly how much time he had left to complete his preparations, but that didn't make him desperate.

Just focused.

The Creator had worked too hard and long, decades and generations –over a century, close to two!– for his plans to be foiled now. The actions of neither a disloyal clone nor his scientific progeny, of power hungry underlings nor even the whims of fate would deny the Creator his destiny, the goals he had worked all his long, long life for.

He would not allow it.

He had prepared his clone, shaped every aspect of his life, molded him to be the perfect replacement. . .then that ridiculous fool Eckhart's deranged crusade had driven him away. Over ten years wasted as the good Doctor Kane and his Mutant X dealt with the problems Genomex had spawned. . .and just when he had been ready to bring the clone home, the distractions able to be dealt with without him, the clone had disappeared. Taken it into his head to vanish, suspicious of his Dominion benefactors.

Frustrating, to say the least.

So, time had been wasted, and the clone was perhaps not as young as he had once been, but the learning process granted him by the creation of New Mutants had been invaluable. It had been a tremendous first step on the path of guiding human evolution in a controlled, logical manner. The Creator had extended his life by significantly more than a century, and he had greatly refined the process since he began it those long decades ago.

The clone's lifespan could easily be quadrupled past its current extent, putting the Creator's goals well within his grasp.

There were just a few small tasks to accomplish before that could happen.

With Brennan in the pilot's seat and Jesse next to him in the co-pilot's, the Double Helix lifted off the roof of the Majestic's parking garage and swung through the air, turning to point at North Dakota and surging east. Jamie's transcription of the Dominion's database had revealed a record of the Nevada installation initiating shutdown, including the forwarding of a great number of files. A fair amount of monotonous investigation had revealed most of those files to have been lab documents uploaded to some sort of secured network, but a few concealed files that had not been stored on the installation's mainframe had been transmitted to a specific location in the Badlands of North Dakota.

Those files had only been transmitted over the installation's mainframe network, not stored on it, meaning they were secured separately. They had to be something important, and therefore most likely something the Creator was directly involved with. Presuming the Creator was keeping Adam with him, Mutant X could assume the North Dakota Dominion installation was where they had gone from Nevada.

Not only that, but the last message transmitted from the Nevada installation, directly to the North Dakota one no less, was instructions to secure and lock down that base. The indication was that something sensitive would be arriving and occurring there, meaning the Dominion wanted as few potential witnesses or prying eyes present as possible. Given their paranoid nature and the fact that the Nevada installation had also apparently been low on staff, as well as the New York base Lexa and Jesse had been taken to originally, it seemed that the Dominion did not like too many underlings underfoot wherever the Creator was working.

Less minions to avoid should make infiltrating the Dominion's complex easier, presuming the lockdown didn't make infiltration completely impossible.

Also presuming that the Creator and Adam stayed there for more than two days, so that Mutant X could catch them there.

No one liked to think about the number of assumptions and presumptions their plan was relying on.

But they didn't have any other options, since the rest of the transmissions had been to a secured network that would take weeks of work for Jesse and Jamie to hack into, and there was every likelihood their electronic presence would be detected because it wasn't coming from another Dominion installation. Shalimar's rooftop realization while they were in Nevada that the Dominion knew Adam had sent a message to Mutant X meant that they couldn't count on his being able to reach them a second time, and even if he did, they would have to be prepared for it to only lead them into another trap.

"So, you worked for the Dominion, for a little while, at least," Owen said to Lexa as they flew, slightly hesitantly. "What do you think this place is going to be like?" he asked. "Not just a giant death trap like the last one, I hope."

"Well, the basement was the death trap," Lexa answered with an unamused smirk. "The rest of the place must have been a proper Dominion installation..." She shrugged. "The one they had me and Jesse in back in New York wasn't all that normal either. The Creator's lab was filled up with forcefields, too." Lexa shook her head sadly and gave Owen half a shrug. "Even the base we stole the Helix from in DC had a few surprises. We don't really know what we're walking into. Won't until we walk into it."

"And isn't that reassuring," Chris sighed, overly dramatically. "Wish Kevin could've come with, maybe let us know what's coming up ahead of time," he muttered under his breath. Sitting next to him, Jamie nodded in agreement. Kevin's abilities and Josh's stealth would have been handy on this mission, but such was life. He thought about joking that if they got themselves killed because Josh and Kevin hadn't been there, then Josh would never forgive them, but he decided not to. It wasn't that funny, and the truth was, Josh and Kevin would never forgive themselves if such a thing happened.

They would just have to make do with their own resources and whatever Eve could provide from Haven, dealing with whatever surprises the Dominion had in store for them this time as best they could. As much as having the whole team in action might help, they simply couldn't wait any longer, not when the enemy held almost every advantage and a clear opportunity was presenting itself. Tension was high on the Double Helix as it streaked over the country, but Mutant X had to take their own initiative to stand a chance of achieving their goals.

The risk of losing Adam a second time, quite possibly permanently, was otherwise too great.

Adam was working fervently in the new installation, finding its resources to be far more suited to his work than the Dominion facility in Nevada had been.

Of course, the problem was that although it was good for his work, the Dominion wanted him working on the Creator's projects, not his own.

The North Dakota facility seemed to be more medical in nature than the Nevada one had been; much of the information and equipment on hand was more applicable to Adam's efforts than he had previously had access to, or at least all the equipment in the labs Adam had been shown was. He was still trying to recreate whatever treatment he had performed on Jesse that had stabilized his genetic matrix, but without access to Jesse's records and/or current genetic code, it was even more of a shot in the dark than his initial guesses before the Dominion had attacked Sanctuary had been.

On the other hand, he had access to the genetic records of all the New Mutants the Dominion's scientists had experimented on. This included what was apparently all of Dominique's work, though Adam had little doubt that the woman had secrets she was hiding from the rest of the Dominion, particularly where her work was concerned. He had monitored enough of the original team's work in his absence to know they suspected her of creating the prion weapon that had nearly been auctioned to the underworld in New York, and that the Dominion had disposed of the weapon once the team had secured it. Although it was possible the entire scenario had been some bizarre ruse of the Dominion's, playing both sides with Mutant X in the middle, Adam thought such a thing rather unlikely. It was far more probable Dominique was part of the corruption within the Dominion, so it worked just as well for Adam to potentially be investigating her activities at the same time he was pursuing his own.

The real problem was that he was not supposed to be working on the problem of New Mutant genetic instability at all, but unlocking various secrets of the human genome for the Dominion. The Creator wanted to guide human evolution according to his designs, control it, transforming humanity into a "master race" of his own design. The creation of New Mutants had just been one step along the path of that process. The Creator had learned from that, seen the potential that human genetics had, but he no longer cared about New Mutants' existence unless it interfered with his current plans and goals. As far as the Creator was concerned, New Mutants were an experiment that had been completed, cast aside as he moved on to other things. Using the results their creation and existence had provided him with to further his agenda.

Neverminding the lives he had condemned to being freaks on the outside of society, yearning for a proper place in it and perhaps becoming threats in their frustration or because they felt their might gave them the right.

The Creator might not care about the lives that had been ruined through the creation of New Mutants, but Adam did. His work had been subverted to create New Mutants, even if that work had been covertly guided by the Creator's hand the whole time. Adam's entire life had been guided by the Creator, but Adam wasn't going to let that stop him from doing what he knew to be right. New Mutants didn't deserve to die young any more than they deserved to be thought of as freaks by the rest of the world should their genetic secrets be revealed. . .Adam might not be able to make them "normal", but he could stabilize them, keep them from expiring before their time. He had proved he could do it when Jesse had passed his expiry date; if he could save Jesse, then Adam could save the other Children of Genomex, as well.

He just had to figure out how, while keeping the Dominion in the dark.

Brennan piloted the cloaked Double Helix into position over the coordinates for the Dominion's North Dakota installation. . .which appeared to be an abandoned barn in the middle of nowhere. Still at an altitude of thousands of feet to avoid detection, Brennan circled over the supposedly unpopulated area, knowing that there had to be more to things than met the eye.

"Okay, Eve, we're in position," Brennan reported back to Haven, over the Helix's open commline.

'Alright, initiating first stage,' Eve responded, triggering the release on one of the Double Helix's storage tanks. A nozzle extended from the rear of Mutant X's stealth jet, releasing a stream of water. Brennan continued to circle the barn and its surrounding area, the water falling from the overcast sky as if a light rain had sprung up.

Jamie was monitoring the Helix's deployment on the rear screen, or more accurately, he was monitoring the Helix's responses to Eve's prompts. Everything was still operating in sync, but it didn't hurt to make sure. Jamie liked to be positive that the reality was working just as well as the simulation had indicated it would.

Watching the hydrotank's indicator displaying its dropping levels over Jamie's shoulder, Owen moved his head in enough to catch Jamie's attention, then smirked.

"We're totally pissing on the Dominion," Owen declared, grinning as Jamie quietly cracked up.

'Water released, deploying payload,' Eve announced when the hydrotank had emptied itself, opening the smallest drop bay to release the real reason for the Helix's circling passes, now that the plausible cover of a light rain had been established. A panel in the cloaked Helix's forward section withdrew, dropping a fist-sized bundle to fall towards the "barn" far below.

A timed, compressed-air charge exploded the bundle into tiny fragments as it fell, the lack of heat or chemicals giving the Dominion's detection systems nothing to register. The fragments rained down on the Dominion's empty barn and the surrounding area, pattering like a mildly heavy finish to the brief spat of "rain" the cloaked Helix had created. Each of the fragments contained the tiniest of transmitters, along with a few hundred of Eve's networking nanites.

After the pea-sized fragments had bounced and rolled to a stop, the nanites inside got to work. There were a number of different sorts of nanites in each individual piece of the payload; some were scanners, some were analyzers, and some were relays. Although each microscopic robot could do very little on its own, when each compared what little information they could process to that of their neighbors, and each cluster transmitted its mutual findings the relatively short distance to the Double Helix, a comprehensive scan of the entire area was possible, all performed on such a minute scale the Dominion would never notice. The Helix relayed this data back to Eve at Haven, and she used her adaptive frequency technologies to sync up with the Dominion's base, effectively giving herself an inside eye on their surface security.

"Okay, Brennan, I'm transmitting you a topical map with an overlay of the sensor grid," Eve said in Haven's Dojo as her fingers raced over the keyboard, activating programs to generate the images she wanted. She quickly created a 3-D map from the nanites' readings and highlighted the portions she wanted, then sent it to the Helix. Her fingers flew over the keys more as she analyzed the Dominion's sensor grid and figured out the best place for the Helix to land.

'Alright, the grain silo is northeast of the barn, which has the most sensors,' Eve's voice said over the Helix's commlink. 'It's metal surface blocks their scans, and I'm using my nanites to hack into the secondary sensors on its far side,' Eve explained, the rapid-fire clicking of her keyboard coming through in the background as the relevant blips of light on her map changed color. 'Brennan, approach the silo at a forty-five degree angle, keeping it between the Helix and the barn. Once you've landed, I can use my nanites' network and the Helix's cloak to divert the sensors' signals around the Helix; you'll be in the clear as long as the rear hatch remains facing away from the silo.'

"Okay, coming in now..." Brennan responded, tightening the Helix's circling path to come at the grain silo from the northeast. Jesse quickly tapped a few commands into the co-pilot's console, bringing up a side-on view indicator of their approach and the angle of their descent. "Can your scans tell if there's microphones near the silo?" Brennan asked Eve as they came in to land, giving Jesse a nod of thanks for the visual aid. "They'll hear our landing, if there is."

'You're clear,' Eve answered confidently, the hint of a proud smile audible in her otherwise completely professional voice. 'There were a few audio sensors, but I've already overridden them.'

Brennan spared a split second to smirk a cocky glance at Jesse before they touched down.

"Here we go," he said with a smirk as they landed, giving Jesse a nod as he jumped up from the co-pilot's seat.

A few moments later, the invisible and intangible forms of Jesse, Lexa, and Jamie passed through the doorway of the emergency stairs Eve's scans had found, entering the topmost floor of the Dominion's complex, beneath the barn. They hurried across the hallway and past the freight elevator platform that raised up into the barn above, Jesse phasing them once more to slip through the door of the security office that monitored the elevator and the barn.

The guard on duty attempted to gasp in alarm as something cinched tightly around his throat, but he couldn't make a sound past the restricting object. His hands flew up to his neck, trying to grasp and tear away the rubbery cylinder squeezing his airway shut. His fingertips only sank into it slightly, and it was stretchy; he was unable to pull whatever it was away, couldn't breathe, hadn't seen anything even from the corner of his eye...

Lexa dropped her light-cloak as the guard passed out, Jamie releasing his sleeper hold around the man's neck and relaxing the elasticity of his arm as he straightened up. He turned the man's chair around, then hauled the guard out of it, depositing him on the floor and peering intently at his face. Jesse took the guard's seat and began studying the security screens, carefully figuring out the systems' layouts. Lexa moved to stand guard at the door, keeping watch on the ordinary elevator that led down into the rest of the complex.

Face set in concentration as he stared, Jamie held deliberately still, then his features stretched and shifted to match those of the unconscious guard. Once his transformation was complete and Jamie was sure he could hold his new form without active concentration, he began stripping the unconscious guard's uniform off him. Moments later, Jamie had pulled the uniform on over his full-length bodysuit, complete with security card reading JOHNSON. Lexa tossed him a roll of tape, and Jamie taped the guard's mouth shut, then taped his knees together and his wrists behind his back.

"What do we do with Handsome, here?" Jamie asked, gesturing at the bound and unconscious guard. Even though Jamie's voice didn't currently sound anything like it normally did, the sarcasm dripping from it was still decidedly Jamie Gardoit. The guard's face he was currently wearing didn't exactly qualify as "handsome". Or anything remotely near it.

"Hey, he's got his own bathroom..." Lexa said, pointing at a narrow door labeled RESTROOM in the corner.

"That's. . .convenient..." Jesse said with a puzzled frown as he looked up from the security displays.

"Convenient for us," Lexa said as she opened the door and held it for Jamie as he picked the guard up. "The Dominion just didn't want the guardpost unattended for any longer than necessary. I'll bet the alerts are loud enough to still be heard in there."

"I'm surprised they don't just expect the guards to hold it until their shift's up," Jesse said with lingering surprise in his voice as he turned back to the screens.

"Like I said, convenient for us," Lexa smirked as Jamie put the guard in the bathroom. Once he stepped back out, she shut the door and began welding its catch to the frame with a laser from her fingertips. "You're right, they wouldn't provide that kind of luxury for a lowly employee, so that means it was a necessity. There's a mini fridge and a microwave in the other corner, so the guard shifts must be really long, probably ten or twelve hours, maybe more."

"Well, Hell," Jamie muttered, crossing his new arms in a huff. "What the heck good's it gonna do me to be Handsome if nobody's expecting to see him anywhere but here for the next who knows how many hours?"

"Good point," Jesse said, nodding as he began to type, working his way into the system now that he had studied it. "We need to know when this shift ends, when to expect another guard to show up," he explained as he began hunting for a schedule, as well as finding and freezing the security feeds for the stairwell doors.

"Okay, the doors we phased through to get in here are off-line," Jesse announced a moment later. "Lex, you can walk everybody else in under your cloak now, and I'll see what else I can find. If I can deactivate internal security, we'll all be able to go wherever we need to, or search, without hassle."

"Or even if we can only figure out how to turn some of it off, selectively, I can do that from here, keep up appearances as Johnson," Jamie said as Lexa nodded and left, vanishing in a flare of light. "I love when people have simple names. No struggle to remember what I'm supposed to answer to and keep from 'breaking character,' " he finished as he came up to watch over Jesse's shoulder as he hacked through the base's systems.

Cherise had the stupidest power ever.

Sure, being a Psionic New Mutant was better than having been born a Down's Syndrome baby or whatever genetic problem had prompted her parents to investigate pre-natal genetic treatment in the first place, but her power sucked.

She could swap people's minds.

So okay, that sounded awesome, and watching people freak out when they realized they were looking at their own body with someone else's eyes was always entertaining...

But it never lasted.

If she concentrated hard when she used her power, Cherise could make its effect last longer, but that was it. If she just swapped two people's minds for the fun of it, just a quick mental flex of her power, it only lasted a second. Just long enough for both people to realize something was seriously weird, and then they snapped back, more confused than ever. With some effort, she could make it last minutes, and once they had given her some weird drugs and had her rest up for, like, a week beforehand, and it had lasted just over an hour. But it had given her a migraine that had lasted days and the drugs had made her sick, so she wasn't going to do that again if she could help it.

Still, the Dominion made it worth her while. She had a great apartment, a fabulous car, and she could pretty much buy anything she wanted. All she had to do in return was get in a plane or a car every so often and go somewhere, then swap the minds of whoever her handlers told her to. Usually it was some corporate or governmental bigwig and someone who rode in the car with her to get there, so Cherise figured those fellow passengers were also Dominion agents. It made sense, she guessed, that if powerful people were going to make decisions the Dominion didn't like, they could just have an agent take the decision-maker's place and change it. Easier to do that than to expend lots of time and effort to change things after the fact, right?

And they couldn't be changing anything too much or anything seriously important, because those kinds of things were all planned out way ahead of time, right? Even if an agent took a bigwig's place and refused to sign something, the decision had already been made, right? They would just sign it later, when they got their body back, or whatever. Cherise wasn't too worried about it.

This time, though, she'd been driven out into the middle of freakin' nowhere, hours and hours from any kind of civilization, not even an agent to try to pass the time with during the ride. Most of the Dominion agents were real sticks in the mud, but Cherise usually found it entertaining to try to get them to chat, or even crack a freaking smile, at least. But this time there hadn't been anybody but the standard pair of bodyguard/driver agents.

Cherise was so bored this trip, she had strongly considered swapping the two agents' minds just for something to do, something to watch. But she figured they might not know what she could do, and that might go badly. The agents, after all, had to be prepped for their missions, whatever it was they did in someone else's body. The drivers and guards didn't need to know about it, so she bet they weren't told, which meant if the guy in the passenger seat suddenly found himself driving the car and they were doing at least 60 down a backroad highway, that might not turn out well.

So Cherise hadn't tried that, but God, she'd been tempted.

Once they'd finally arrived, Cherise had been "escorted" to this dull little office-lab, where she'd been waiting ever since. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting some more.

God, she was bored.

Her power was stupid, but at least it was entertaining. Cherise hated to be bored. The best was when she went to a wild party, where some people were getting drunk and others weren't, or where people were fooling around. It was absolutely hilarious to swap the mind of somebody who was truly wasted with somebody sober. The sober one was suddenly in a drunk body, with no idea whatthehell was going on whatsoever, and the drunk one was worried they were so drunk they were hallucinating watching themself freak out. It was awesome.

Or couples fooling around in a side room or a bedroom with the door left ajar or something, those were great. She would practice incremental durations on couples making out, swapping their minds for just a split second, so suddenly the guy was feeling stubble burn being applied to his jaw and the girl was feeling up a boob that happened to be her own. They would both break apart in surprise, but swapping back where they belonged at the same time. Sometimes, Cherise had to work really hard to stifle her laughter as they blinked in confusion. But then, if they shrugged and got to it again, she'd swap them for longer, just a few seconds more, and watch them wig out even harder when they broke apart to see their own faces drawing away. Priceless.

The absolute best, though, was at the really uninhibited parties where people were having sex. There was nothing funnier than managing to sneak somewhere she could see a guy getting a blowjob, wait for him to get close, then swap him with the girl sucking him off. He's having the time of his life, about to shoot his wad, and suddenly he's got cock in his mouth. And she's never felt anything even remotely like it, no frame of reference or experience to suppress the sensation, body already primed to come. . .so usually she wound up shooting his load into his mouth, which happened to be hers at the moment.

That was completely awesome, AND hilarious.
Or if she could catch sight of a couple doing it, swap them just when he started coming. It was natural instinct for the hips to keep thrusting, even as the girl was suddenly lost in orgasm, and the guy is suddenly just getting thrust into, looking at his own o-face. The look of shock and distress on "her" face when he realized what he was looking at was absolute gold.

Cherise didn't think anything that fun was going to be happening here in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere, in a Dominion installation, though. She'd been given a guard uniform, which meant they wanted her to swap people where at least one of the victims was expecting to see a guard, which meant this was some kind of internal assignment. She'd never had both of her targets be members of the Dominion before, and she wasn't sure what to think.

She was mildly concerned as she wondered if maybe they were going to try to make her take some new drugs or something, some genetic mad-scientist routine to see if they could make her swaps last longer or be permanent or something. Cherise slid a nervous eye to one side to check on the guard at the door, wondering if maybe she could get close enough to him and still be able to see the scientist nerd at his desk at the same time. Maybe if she leaned on the wall on the guard's other side, away from the door? She could pretend to be flirting with him, cock her head to see the nerd from the corner of her eye at the same time. . .they'd be confused when she swapped them, and she could punch out the science geek before he figured out the body he was in was armed, and make a run for it.

But where would she run to?

Frustrated, Cherise got up off the desk she had been lounging on and went to look over the scientist's shoulder at whatever he was working on. Maybe he was finishing a program for an agent to take somewhere sensitive, so they would need Cherise to swap the agent with someone who had access to that place, or something. But then why bring Cherise all the way out here, why not have her brought close to the sensitive area when the program was finished? It couldn't hurt to check. If they really didn't want her to see, they wouldn't have her waiting in the same room the work was being done in.

Looking at the screen, Cherise couldn't make too much sense out of what she was seeing, other than it was genetic. She started to get nervous again, worrying her mad-scientist theory might have been right after all. New Mutants were pretty much a result of mad science in the first place, weren't they? But just as she started to get well and truly worried, Cherise read enough of the information on the screens to realize it was something else. The science-nerd was completing some kind of report about genetics and personalities, inheritable traits and stuff like that.

Cherise thought that was pretty interesting; she'd never tried swapping relatives before, never thought about it. Would a parent and a child stay swapped longer, because they shared genetic material? Or what about siblings, they might stay swapped a long time because they came from the same gene pool, maybe? Ooooh, or what about identical twins? They had the same genetic code, right? Cherise wondered if that might even be permanent, until she swapped them back herself. That wouldn't be very entertaining though, if they already looked like each other. People were always confusing identical twins for one another anyway.

She'd have to wait and see.

"I don't like this," Shalimar muttered with a worried frown as she and the rest of the team waited for Lexa to rejoin them so they could all sneak into the complex. "I thought the Nevada base was bad, but at least it was above ground." She glanced apologetically at her teammates, realizing they had actually been underground for almost all of the Nevada mission, and it certainly hadn't been pleasant. "Just worries me; underground, it'll be a lot harder to get out, if push comes to shove," she finished with a mutter.

"Well, we escaped last time, and last time, they were waiting for us," Brennan replied with an undisturbed shrug. "This time, we've got the element of surprise. This is where they ran to, not where they set us up, so there won't be any giant surprises waiting for us, like last time," he said confidently.

"Okay, now I'm nervous," Owen frowned. "That's exactly the kind of thing Josh would say, right before the whole mission takes an abrupt plunge toward hell, y'know?" he finished worriedly, crossing his arms and fidgeting restlessly.

Chris laughed in response, but there was a nervous edge to his voice, because what Owen had said was true enough.

"Seriously?" Shalimar asked Owen and Chris, still frowning. "You guys all keep mentioning his luck, is it that bad?"

Owen shrugged and nodded; Chris smirked.

"It's not that his luck's bad, it's wacky," Chris clarified with a shrug of his own, still smirking. "Both good and bad, or, like, it's bad, but then he manages to get out of whatever trouble it causes through some other ridiculous coincidence. Frustrates the hell out of him, and drives both him and all of us nuts, 'cause we never know what's gonna happen next," he finished, shaking his head as he continued to smirk in amusement.

"Dude, Shal, you've met Josh, right?" Owen asked sarcastically, "Spent more than 30 seconds in his presence? He's a smartass. But nine times out of ten, he'll say something sarcastic, like in a 'wouldn't it be funny if...' kinda way, except irony-funny, not actually funny at all. And then it happens!" he finished with a roll of his eyes and disbelieving toss of his hands. "If it weren't for the cat-eyes, you'd think he was a Psionic, not a Feral. Except he only predicts sucky stuff through sarcasm, like a whacked-out Cassandra."

"You know the story of Cassandra?" Brennan asked with an amused frown.

"Right back atcha, Brennan," Owen smiled. "You read your poetry; I read epic hero stories from mythology."

"Yeah, 'cause that's good for your all-star complex," Chris laughed, then cut himself off when Shalimar spoke up.

"Lexa's back!" Shalimar said as she turned to face the rear hatch of the Helix. Just as everyone else turned to look as well, Lexa appeared in a flare of light as she stepped onto the Helix's cargo ramp.

"Oh, come on, how'd you know I was there?" Lexa asked with a frown. "I know you can see my cloak, but you weren't even looking! I saw you turn your head," she insisted.

"Heard you coming," Shalimar and Owen both said in sync, then smirked at each other.

"You might have sounded silent to yourself, but not to a Feral's ears," Shalimar told Lexa with a grin, then schooled her expression to greater seriousness. "What's it look like in there?"

"Don't really know yet," Lexa answered with a shrug. "We only saw the top-most floor, more a receiving area than anything else. It looks like it's probably a small facility, though, minimally staffed. The security station was designed for extended shifts, meaning they don't rotate often, so hopefully that will make it easier to work around what security they do have," she reported.

"Well, good," Brennan said with a small nod, his eyes distant as he considered possibilities, then blinked his attention back to the rest of the team. "Less staff means less people we'll have to avoid while we search, and the fewer people there are, the more likely the next one we find is Adam," he finished. "Let's go get him."

The rest of the team joined Lexa at the rear hatch of the Double Helix, Chris and Shalimar taking her hands and Owen and Brennan using their longer arms to grasp her shoulders while standing behind Shalimar and Chris. In a flare of light, the five New Mutants vanished from sight, and Lexa led their way to the concealed emergency stairwell exit.

"Good, you made it," Jesse said with relief when Lexa and the others reappeared in the security office. "I'm afraid I've only got bad news, not much good," Jesse said apologetically.

"Oh, come on, it's not all bad," Jamie said, still wearing Johnson's guard uniform. He'd had Jesse take a good picture of Johnson's face with his cellphone before he relaxed his power, so he could study the screen and recreate his disguise if needed.

"Well, it's still mostly bad," Jesse replied with a frown. "The problem is, even though this base is smaller, its security is tighter," he explained. "There's less space they have to cover, and their security measures are more intense than what we've seen before."

Jesse turned and cued up a number of images on the security screens, pointing out relevant details as he explained.

"On the plus side, like Jamie said, there's not a lot of staff here. As best as I can determine, this seems to be a staging facility, holding things in reserve until the Dominion needs them elsewhere or acting as a relay point between other installations, if they don't want to transport something directly to another secured location."

"Okay, so we're gonna have to be sneaky. This is new how?" Brennan asked, raising a perplexed eyebrow and quirking his lips into a frowning pout.

"Well, the problem is, even though this is a staging facility, it seems to be empty at the moment," Jesse answered, giving Brennan a look that said he ought to be cautious.

Raising an eyebrow as well as one hand like he was still in grade school, Chris gave Jesse his own confused look.

"I think I speak for the whole group when I say: 'Huh?' " Chris deadpanned.

Owen snickered and nodded in agreement, looking at Jesse and waiting for him to explain.

"There's nothing here," Jesse said, gesturing at the screens with an upturned palm. "According to the records I've accessed and the layout of the place, not to mention the giant freight elevator hiding under the barn, there should be things in storage here. Secret technology, warheads, cloned soldiers, who knows, but Important Dominion Stuff, anyway. But look at the screens. The whole place is practically empty."

"Well, there's people," Shalimar said, her eyes flicking from one screen to another, cataloging faces and body language and hoping to spot Adam.

"Yep. And we haven't seen one yet who hasn't been wearing a guard uniform and a sidearm, have we Jamie," Jesse muttered resignedly, Jamie nodding glumly in agreement. "But there's more to it than that. The security system is under some kind of lockdown. Not all of the cameras are on, not all of the complex is under watch," he explained, calling up a map of the facility on the main screen, with most of its walls displayed in green, but some in bright blue.

"So the places you can't see, Adam and the Creator must be in one of them," Owen said, frowning at the screen as he tried to figure out which of the blue areas was nearest to where they were, closest to the surface.

"If they're still here," Jesse cautioned, sighing unhappily. "I can't unlock the security system, even with Eve and her nanites' help, but I did manage to find the logs for the past few days."

Jesse looked up at the rest of the team sadly.

"They've been shipping everything out over the past two or three days. For all we know, Adam and the Creator left with whatever important piece of technology he came here to pick up. The records show all kinds of inventory being shipped out in the last few days, but it doesn't say what any of them were, and the destinations aren't specified either," Jesse sighed. "Well, they are, but everything's listed as a numeric code, and I can't find any lists of what those codes mean."

"Eve?" Shalimar asked her commring hopefully.

'Sorry, Shal,' Eve's voice replied over the ring. 'It'll take some time for the nanites Jesse released to fully infiltrate the system, and they haven't found anything so far. I'll let you all know the moment they do.'

"If they do," Jamie said glumly. "So, what do we do in the meanwhile? Try to hack into their system manually from here? See if we can sneak deeper into the complex and find more direct access, maybe the central computer? Or should we just split up and check out the off-camera spots?" he asked, looking from one of his teammates to the next, particularly from Brennan to Jesse.

Jesse shared a glance with Brennan, who simply shrugged.

"Well, as long as we're all careful to not get caught, splitting up and checking out the blindspots makes sense," Jesse agreed with a considering nod.

"And if somebody does get noticed, one of the rest of us could always provide a distraction," Chris said with an anticipatory smirk.

"You always want to do the distraction plan," Jamie told Chris with a roll of his eyes.

"It plays to my strengths," Chris nodded back earnestly.

"Okay, well, there's three off-camera areas..." Jesse said, turning back to the screens and typing rapidly, splitting the main screen into three views, one of the blue areas centered in each. "One is the central engineering station, environmental controls, power system relays, that sort of thing, deepest down in the complex," he explained, pointing at the first third of the screen. "Next is the largest storage area; according to the map, it's going to have racks and multiple staging areas, sort of like its own mini-warehouse," Jesse went on, pointing out the nearly maze-like second image. "And last is the biggest section, looks like data processing labs, but they could have who knows what equipment in them, so we don't know for sure. That one will probably be the toughest, so whichever group has three people in it should take it," Jesse finished, looking at each of his friends' faces.

"We'll take that one," Brennan said firmly. "You, me, and Shal."

Chris glanced at Lexa and smirked again.

"Remaining Elementals to the Power Core," he said in a monotonous Science Fiction Computer Voice, with a grin. "We can sneak silently and invisibly to get all the way down there, and if that distraction ends up being necessary, taking out Engineering should do it."

Lexa nodded her agreement with a smirk of her own.

"Jamie and I'll take the warehouse, then," Owen finished with his own nod. "I can move any big equipment in there, and I've got the senses to investigate the bigger spaces. Jamie's photographic memory can guide us through it and make sure we don't miss anything, and his guard disguise might buy us some time if run into anybody."

"More likely to happen in a workspace like that, open areas to be spotted in," Jamie agreed as he studied the last third of the map, committing the storage area's layout to memory.

'Guys, good news and bad news,' Eve's voice announced over the original team's commrings. 'The nanites Jesse released have worked into the system there, but it's only the security office,' she apologized. 'I haven't been able to find a list of what the numeric codes mean; I think Security just documents everything; the codes aren't stored there. But on the plus side, they've hacked their way into the security systems themselves. If you guys trip any alarms while you're poking around, I can keep them from actually going off. Any guards see you, you're on your own, but I can keep the electronics off your backs.'

"Outstanding, Thanks, Eve," Brennan answered, then turned to the rest of the team. "Okay, our comms still work in here; everybody keep in touch, let the rest of us know if anything comes up," he advised everyone, then gave a firm nod.

"Let's go."

Adam had been working steadily, utilizing several of the computers in the lab he had been shown to that morning, running a minimum of two programs on each. The computer that was only running two programs was simply crunching numbers to test which portion of the human genome governed factual recall, but two of the other computers were running extra programs above and beyond the Dominion's work.

They were both doing work for Adam specifically, one comparing the genetic scans of Dominique's New Mutants to test them for stability, and the other comparing her techniques to Lexa's genetic scan, testing to see if any of them would stabilize her. Adam was thankful the Dominion had done a scan of Lexa's genetic code while she was their prisoner, since it gave him something concrete to work with, something he could be sure was his own work and not something that had been tampered with by Dominique or any of the rest of the Dominion's minions.

He had been working for at least half the day when the breakthrough occurred.

Adam blinked at the results of the most recently completed comparison of one of Dominique's techniques to Lexa's genetic scan, wondering what was bothering him about it. The calculations looked accurate, and there were no outlandish results, nothing that suggested it would either immediately prompt nor permanently cure her instability...

He frowned, trying to discern what it was about the test results that had caught his attention, that had made some part of his brain think they were more significant than they at first appeared.

Pausing, Adam stopped to consider. Was that result. . .familiar? Adam turned back to the computer, calling up the comparison program and clicking to load the report on what that particular technique had consisted of. Eyes flicking from left to right as he skimmed the report, the corners of Adam's mouth began to quirk upward the slightest bit. He remembered this. He had tried the exact same technique, on Jesse. . .and later realized it was only a stop-gap measure, that the instability of a New Mutant's genetic sequences meant the technique would only last a short time. It would hold the genetic matrix stable, but only until a portion of the genetic sequences changed again; then the stabilizers would no longer fully apply, and that failure would cause the rest to collapse in turn.

He remembered being disappointed when he discovered that on his next analysis of Jesse's genetics, and he remembered thinking he needed to find a way to make the same technique adaptable, so that it could continue to stabilize the genetic sequences even after they changed. If the matrix could be kept stable while it changed, it wouldn't collapse, would not cause the New Mutant to expire.

Adam's eyes widened as he realized what must have happened.

Something else he had done to Jesse must have accomplished exactly that.

It wasn't a certain technique he had used that had saved Jesse; it was the combination.

Nearly giddy with excitement, Adam nevertheless kept his emotions internal, his concentration still focused and his hands moving smoothly and efficiently as he attempted to verify his hypothesis. He quickly reprogrammed the second computer to maintain the results of the latest technique in comparison to Lexa's scan, then programmed it to compare all the other techniques again, to see if one might be the key that had saved Jesse.

To see if it might be the key that could save all New Mutants.

Adam had just finished hiding the program once more when the door to his lab was thrust open, not by a pair of security guards, but by an entire squad.

"Doctor Kane," the foremost guard sneered, making the form of address Adam had insisted upon into a mocking insult. "You're coming with us."

"But, my work here, I'm expected to finish..." Adam protested, more for form's sake than anything else, because he knew it would do him no good. He just hoped he would be able to recover any results it produced later, after whatever meeting he was being forced away to. Or that he'd be able to recreate those results later, if he was not able to return.

The guards hustled Adam out of the room.

Owen and Jamie prowled through the main storage area, discovering nothing.

"This blows," Owen hissed in a whisper, hoping he was loud enough for Jamie to hear him. It still sounded far too noticeably loud to his own Feral hearing, but he figured it would be okay. Owen was just too damned frustrated not to complain, and he knew what was too loud to him when he was trying to be silent wasn't necessarily even audible to anyone who wasn't a Feral.

They had managed to sneak into the off-screen storage area without any difficulty, since it was only a level below the top floor. They'd had to duck out of sight from patrolling guards once or twice to get from the stairwell to the off-camera section, but it hadn't been far. Unfortunately, once they were in that area, it had turned out to be sprawling, enormous, and mostly filled with nothing. The area was as maze-like as it had looked on the security screen, full of turns and cul-de-sacs to either keep like materials segregated from other materials or just to drive people trying to find anything in it crazy, but most of the twists and turns and dead ends didn't actually have anything in them. Owen and Jamie were just trying to find their way through the storage area; there wasn't actually anything for them to search.

"Yeah, yeah, it's as empty as the rest of the place," Jamie muttered back almost silently, knowing that Owen could hear him. "But that's just this outer section; there were storerooms on the far side," he said for the third or fourth time, trying to get it through Owen's stubborn Bear head that they still had a purpose being there. "We just gotta get across here, then we can check those rooms. For all we know, they set them up as secret labs and that's where they're keeping Adam. There has to be a reason they took this area off camera view, something the Creator didn't want the minions to see, so we're being nosey."

"Ha, ha, nosey," Owen muttered back. "That was a bear joke, wasn't it?"

"Now, would I do that, Bear Ears?" Jamie whispered with a smile, glancing back at Owen over his shoulder. Owen rolled his eyes, but he smiled back.

"Whoa," Jamie breathed in a louder voice when they reached the individual storeroom area a few minutes later. "Uh, that wall wasn't on the map," he whispered to Owen in worried confusion. In front of them was a large steel bulkhead, with a single security door set into it. "It's a little closer than the storeroom walls were on the map, I think," Jamie explained, still frowning. "But this doesn't make any sense, they couldn't store much of anything in the storerooms if it has to fit through a normal door and down a narrow hallway..." Jamie broke off as Owen stepped forward and crouched to examine the door and bulkhead. "..Unless they did convert the storerooms to labs or something, added this as additional security—that'd be why they took it off-camera!"

"Maybe..." Owen answered, frowning as he leaned forward onto one hand, lowering his face to sniff at the base of the bulkhead, a short way away from the door. His nostrils twitched as he checked the air, feeling its passage as well as detecting its scents, his eyes already in Feral mode and greenish-brown all the way from pupil to lid.

"..But maybe not," he finished as he straightened up again, looking at the far edge of the bulkhead where it met the storage area's wall before glancing over his shoulder to meet Jamie's eyes. "This is a security bulkhead, like a blast door, flush with the floor. I can feel the air moving under it and smell the grease. And look at the wall, you can see the track it goes up and down in."

"Huh," Jamie muttered under his breath, frowning in disappointment. "So they could raise this wall to fit bigger items into the storerooms. Still, they've got it secured now, and off-camera. . .I'd say that's reason enough to check it out."

"Sure," Owen answered. "You could be right, they could have stuff for the Creator's secret work in there, Adam could be in there. . .I can't tell from here; I could only barely feel the air flowing under the door, can't smell anything past the metal. It's just about flush, a good seal."

"Well that's silly," Jamie muttered with another frown. "A simple rubber gasket would seal the bulkhead whether the floor and door are perfectly level or not."

Owen chuckled softly.

"Dude, don't go giving the badguys ideas. I think they were more worried about the door's security than weatherproofing an interior wall. If they had sealed it, I couldn't have felt or smelled anything, and we'd still be wondering."

"Hmm, true enough," Jamie replied with an absent nod as he hit a speed-dial on his cellphone with one hand and turned its volume almost all the way down with the other.

'Talk to me, Jamie,' Eve answered before the phone had completed a single ring.

"Eve, we've hit a security bulkhead that wasn't on the security office's electronic map," Jamie whispered into his phone. "I'm going to try Johnson's ID card on it, but if he doesn't have clearance..."

'The alarm might go up, gotcha,' Eve answered, her keyboard clicking away in the background as she made sure her nanites were ready to intercept the signal. 'I'm not positive I'll be able to stop an alarm, if it's not on the grid, so be ready to get out of there anyway,' she warned him, Owen nodding that he had heard her response.

"Got it," Jamie replied. "Here goes," he whispered almost soundlessly to Owen as he offered his phone with one hand and unclipped Johnson's security ID card with the other. Owen wordlessly took the phone, maintaining an open commline with Eve so that she could warn them if a silent alarm went off that she couldn't stop as Jamie swiped Johnson's card through the reader.

Nothing happened.

Owen was about to ask Eve if her nanites were detecting anything when the door slid open, retracting to the left almost silently as it slid into the wall.

Owen and Jamie shared a worried glance.

"Did your nanites register that?" Owen whispered into Jamie's phone. "The door opened, but it took a second."

'No, my readings haven't changed at all,' Eve answered, worry clear in her voice.

Owen shook his head slightly at Jamie, silently passing on Eve's answer to his question. Jamie raised an eyebrow in return and gestured at the door with one upturned palm, shrugging his shoulder in a "What else can we do?" gesture at the same time.

"Let's do this," Owen said as he handed back Jamie's phone, Jamie grinning and mouthing the words in sync with him. Owen rolled his eyes as Jamie smirked at his predictability, Owen stepping through the door as Jamie put his phone and the ID card back.

Owen glanced from side to side as he stepped into the narrow corridor formed by the security bulkhead and the front walls of the side-by-side storerooms. There were four storerooms, probably each twenty feet wide, since the corridor was eighty feet long, with the roll-up doors of the storerooms evenly spaced along its length. Jamie stepped through the door behind Owen, ready to try Johnson's card on the first storeroom door if needed...

..When the bulkhead door snapped shut just under Jamie's knee, slamming across the doorway in the blink of an eye, nearly fast enough to have severed Jamie's leg if he hadn't instinctively rendered himself elastic.

Quietly, Chris and Lexa had snuck down the emergency stairwell, Chris keeping his power attuned to the landing ahead of them with every flight, ready to grab Lexa's hand the instant he detected sound of any sort on the other side of a landing's door. Lexa's cloak would hide them from sight as Chris muted the sounds of their footsteps, breathing, and heartbeats, and they would be able to sneak past anyone who might enter the stairs. Well, anyone but a Psionic who could sense their minds or a Feral who could detect the heat of their bodies, but they would jump off that bridge when they got to it.

They made their way all the way to the bottom of the stairs, Chris cautiously magnifying all the sounds coming through the door at its base to make sure there was no one in the hallway beyond. If there was, they were being absolutely silent, so Lexa activated her cloak and cracked the door open. Seeing nothing, she crouched to poke her head through at less than chest height, peering around the door to make sure the coast was clear. Seeing it was, she released her cloak and opened the door, stepping through with Chris just behind her.

Chris and Lexa stole quietly through the engineering level, looking for signs of recent activity or anything amiss, wondering why it would have been removed from Security's sight. The first section they moved through was the environmental controls, enormous electric furnaces and blowers, central air conditioning units with hermetically segregated heat exchange exhaust vents, humidifiers and dehumidifiers working in sequence with the seasons.

"This all looks normal enough," Chris said to Lexa quietly. "What would the bigwigs want to keep the security office from seeing down here?" he asked.

"Who knows?" Lexa muttered back with a frown. "Could be some big piece of equipment they originally hid down here with the other ones, industrial-sized everything down here. Maybe the Creator started using it when he got here, cut Security out of the loop," she theorized as they circled around the the self-contained power plant.

Chris examined the power couplings and transmission and relay stations, still finding everything to be normal-looking enough. He was no expert on large-scale power systems, but he could identify the generators and follow their leads to more ordinary power transformers and their relays to individual load centers. Chris might not have known all the ins and outs of power generation, but he knew enough to be sure there weren't any "extra" pieces of equipment present.

"We haven't even seen a third of this level yet," Chris murmured to Lexa after he finished examining the power center. "Power and climate control, what else could they have down here?"

"Anything they chose?" Lexa muttered back, rolling her eyes. "Probably long-term data storage and records, separate back-ups to the central computer, directly connected to main power for security. Probably a giant room full of batteries for back-up power, to those records at the least, if not the whole complex."

"Ooo, good point," Chris said happily. "Let's follow the biggest set of cables from the main power; it's gotta lead somewhere good. Either the main computers or their backups, like you said."

The largest set of power cables led them deeper into the level, then split off and headed up to the floor above, much to Chris' disappointment. However, more of the same bundle split off at that point and continued on. They followed it only to find it went through another wall, supplying power to something on the other side of a locked door.

Chris and Lexa frowned at the wall's door in confusion when they found it; it had an ordinary doorknob and a mechanical key lock. . .and that was it, no electronic card-reader or security of any kind.

"The hell?" Chris muttered. "Not that I'm complaining, really, but..."

"Huh. Well, I could probably melt the latch..." Lexa said, bending to examine the edge of the door by its lock and holding up a glowing pair of fingers to see if she could spot exactly where the latch was entering the doorframe.

"Don't bother, but leave that light there..." Chris said, nudging Lexa out of the way with one hand as he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket with the other. "I'll just pick it," he explained as he crouched in front of the lock, taking a set of lockpicks out from an internal pocket of his wallet.

Lexa watched, impressed, as Chris picked the lock in almost no time at all, opening the door and stepping to one side, holding it and bowing to Lexa with one hand held before him in an "after you" gesture. Lexa rolled her eyes and activated her cloak, vanishing from sight in a flare of light. She cautiously entered the room, figuring anyone who had seen the door open would be waiting for any sign of someone passing through it, but she didn't see anyone. It appeared to be the back-up data storage she had expected to find, bank after bank of digital storage devices and racks and racks of hard copy files.

Reappearing as she dropped her cloak, Lexa rejoined Chris in the doorway.

"Back-up data storage, all right," she told him. "Looks like they must have that whole network Jesse and Jamie were wondering about in there, hard copies too. You don't have any of Eve's nanites to turn loose in here, copy it all, do you?"

" 'Fraid not," Chris answered with a frown. "That's Nerd Wonder department; Jamie's got 'em. We should let them know we've found this, though," he finished, taking out his cellphone and thumbing a speed-dial as Lexa examined the room's equipment.

Chris looked up a moment later, his expression worried.

"Jamie's not answering..." he told Lexa in a mildly concerned voice.

"That's not the only problem..." Lexa said, not even looking up at Chris. Chris hurried over to see what Lexa was looking at...

..It was a complicated-looking device, wired into both the end of the databanks and connected to the wall, with something that looked like a timer counting on its top.

The preparations were completed.

Things were in place, procedures ready to execute. . .the time had come.

With the necessary work finished, all that was left was to initiate the process. Having completed his preparations, the Creator relaxed, his confidence supreme. His relaxation stabilized his failing form somewhat, far more than his brief respite from work that the medics had advised had done. Of course, watching Mutant X escape his favorite New Mutant analyses had done little to provide the Creator with the distraction his medics had desired, or at least little stress relief, whether it was distracting or not.

But now, now things were ready, and the Creator breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction, his withered heart pumping steadily for once. Smiling, his wrinkled face creased into a grim countenance of smug superiority, he waved off the pair of medics who approached with his daily restorative injection. He had formerly taken it weekly, applying it himself lest the secrets of his extended lifespan fall into the hands of others. His failing health in the excitement of recovering the clone and fleeing to Nevada had required more frequent treatments, however. . .so the Creator had his medics watched closely, and killed when they had seen too much.

The approaching pair of medics frowned at the Creator's dismissal, apparently worried he had lost some more important piece of his mind and was mistakenly refusing his treatment. With a frown of irritation and another gesture, his bodyguards eliminated the medics. Smiling once more, the Creator returned his attention to his screens, continuing to smile as he contemplated the perfect arrangement of all the pieces of the metaphorical chessboard, his grand plan coming together.

Deep below the surface, the device was set, ready to remove every trace of his activities.

In the converted rooms, the procedure to begin extending the clone's life just as the Creator had extended his own was ready. Or not just as, no, he had made many improvements on the process over the decades he had been using it. The clone's body would live much longer.

The Creator's smile spread into a grin of triumphant anticipation.

And here, in the lab right next door, the girl waited. So young, so beautiful. So unknowing, yet so useful. A genius find and a perfect creation.

All that was needed was the clone, and they would proceed.

The Creator's grin grew wider.

Shalimar, Brennan, and Jesse proceeded down the emergency stairway a short while after Chris and Lexa did. They had all entered the stairway together, and Owen and Jamie had gone ahead, as had Chris and Lexa. The core members of the first Mutant X team waited, Shalimar listening to the quiet sounds of Chris and Lexa's footsteps descending flights below.

Once Chris and Lexa were half a dozen or so flights of stairs below and had yet to encounter any problems, Shalimar led the way down to their own target floor, three levels below the surface, two beneath Jamie and Owen. She paused once more when she reached that floor's emergency exit, listening, but Chris and Lexa were continuing downward without incident, and she heard nothing on the other side of the door.

Jesse phased through the door and double checked that the corridor was clear, then un-phased himself and opened the door for Shalimar and Brennan. Brennan was still stepping through the doorway when Shalimar tensed, her eyes flashing into their golden Feral mode even as her nostrils flared.

"Shal, what is it—" Jesse began to ask, cutting himself off as Shalimar whirled around to face both him and Brennan.

"Adam's been here!" she cried in a stage whisper, her golden Feral eyes wide with delight that they were on the right track.

"You've got his scent?" Brennan asked as he quietly closed the emergency door. "Can you track it?"

Shalimar turned slowly, sniffing at the air, then her shoulders slumped in disappointment.

"No," she answered frustratedly, painful disappointment in her voice. "He's been here, all over this level. His scent's everywhere; I can't narrow it down to one direction or the other!"

"Well, let's look around," Jesse said. "Maybe we'll find more, evidence of where he's been specifically, or maybe you'll find a current trail, follow him from there." Jesse smiled at Shalimar encouragingly. "Hey, maybe we'll get lucky and stumble across him!"

"We can hope..." Brennan muttered as they headed down the left side of the corridor, hoping Adam wasn't behind them to the right.

"OW!" Jamie gasped as the door snapped shut on his leg, its elastic mass squished more than twice its normal breadth between the edge of the door and its frame. "Oh, shit, ow, dammit –Owen—!" Jamie choked out as he dropped to his hands and his free knee, his left leg stretching out behind him as he fell.

"Jamie!" Owen barked as he whirled around to face his fallen partner, his irises expanding into their green-brown Feral mode at his pack-mate's cry of alarm, of pain. Neither of them noticed Jamie's phone start vibrating silently, Owen not in contact with it and Jamie too distraught over his smashed leg.

"Ohgod, open the door, openthedoor, O, I–I can't feel my foot, my lower leg, I'm smashed paper-thin here..." Jamie babbled, pawing at the floor and shaking his head, unable to focus through the pain. Admittedly, Jamie wasn't all that used to even feeling much physical pain. . .anything that hit him hard enough to cause serious injury triggered his elasticity, like flinching from a hot stove before you even felt it. Jamie's form could only stretch so far, however, and being crushed so thin surpassed his limits.

Owen dropped to one knee at Jamie's side, snatching Johnson's security ID card from where it was clipped to Jamie's lapel, then jumped back up to his feet again. He swiped Johnson's card through the reader as quickly as he could while still taking care to make the movement steady so that the magnetic reader could function properly.

As on the first side, nothing happened. . .but the door didn't open after a moment on the second side like it had on the first, because the card-reader was powered off.

Frowning, Owen grunted a wordless protest when he realized the reader's keypad was dark, the device inactive.

"Shit!" he muttered, trying to get his fingernails into the fractional crack between the door's edge and its jamb, trying to claw it open, to find a grip so he could exert his immense Ursine Feral strength. . .but the barest tips of his fingernails didn't provide sufficient purchase.

"SHIT!" Owen said again, shouted while dropping his panicked gaze to Jamie's pain-contorted face as he tried to claw at the door. "Jamie, I can't open it! I can't get a grip; I gotta find a crowbar or something, a screwdriver even, I just need a little more purchase..."

Jamie whimpered, rendering his entire lower body elastic and curling back on himself to reach the door, pawing uselessly at it like a wild animal caught in a trap. Owen wasn't sure if Jamie had even heard him or not, wasn't sure if Jamie hadn't whited out in pain and was maybe just reacting instinctively.

Mewling piteously, Jamie laid his hands flat, one against the door and one to one side of the jamb, his forehead coming forward to rest on the crack of the door's edge, just a short ways above his trapped leg. Jamie's inarticulate cry of despair, the sound of him giving up hope, made Owen flex his hands harder, wishing he could just dig them into the door, sink his fingers into it so he could tear it away from Jamie...

Owen blinked in shock as his fingers did exactly that, his desperately crushing grip slowly sinking into the suddenly elastic substance of the door's mass.

"Jamie!" Owen cried joyously as he realized what was happening. "Jamie, keep your hand on the door! Pull your leg in here!" Owen urged his younger friend as he did his best to pull the door out of its frame, stretching it out of its normal shape as he hauled against it.

Owen's strength stretched the elastic door away from its jamb, opening a space for Jamie's leg. It was a small space, only a few inches across, because the door was an inch of solid steel that was still dense even if it was elastic, but it was more than enough space for Jamie's elastic form to pass through. His flattened leg expanded to fill the space as Owen widened it, and Jamie grabbed his purple-bruised leg with his other hand and hauled it through the gap with a gasp of relief.

Once Jamie had dragged his foot through the mangled doorway he let go of the door and uncurled himself, relaxing his elasticity and clamping both hands around his injured leg. The instant he stopped touching the door it snapped back to its normal shape, jerking itself out of Owen's grasp and returning to steel solidity.

"You okay!?" Owen asked urgently as he dropped to one knee at Jamie's feet. Jamie was wincing and hissing his breath between his clenched teeth as he tugged the pants-leg of Johnson's uniform up over his knee. Owen wordlessly slid his hands over Jamie's ankle, slipping his fingers under the stretchy fabric of the bodysuit Jamie was wearing under his stolen uniform. Splaying his fingers, Owen held the fabric away from Jamie's bruised flesh as he slid it up past Jamie's knee before releasing it around his lower thigh. Owen hissed at the severity of the bruising that neatly ringed the top of Jamie's lower leg, nearly solid purple and looking worse than Owen's own ribs had when he'd dropped nearly a ton of weight on them the week before.

"That. . .looks pretty bad..." Owen told Jamie with a wince as he grasped Jamie's calf, massaging it with both hands and trying to restore proper bloodflow. Jamie gasped in pained response, making Owen freeze, but then he motioned for Owen to continue, easing back onto his elbows and closing his eyes.

"Okay, I'm feeling that. . .like pins and needles, but on fire like hitting your funnybone, too..." Jamie murmured as he kept his eyes shut tight, tensing his face as he tried to get the muscles in his leg to relax.

"But you're feeling it, said you couldn't when your leg was shut in the door..." Owen questioned, watching Jamie's face as he pulled Johnson's boot off Jamie's foot and began rubbing it as well.

"Yeah..." Jamie answered, then cut himself off with a giggle, his foot twitching in Owen's grasp. Owen raised an eyebrow and frowned in confusion, then grinned gleefully as he figured it out. Circling Jamie's ankle with one large hand, Owen briskly rubbed Jamie's shinbone with the other, avoiding the bruising at its top. . .then skittered his fingertips lightly across the sole of Jamie's foot.

Jamie shrieked and giggled at the same time, caught off guard by Owen's momentary switch back to purposeful massaging touch before deliberately tickling his foot. He fell back onto the floor as his arms involuntarily flailed out from under him and kicked wildly with his other leg.

"AH-HAHAHAAHAOWHAHAAASTOP!" Jamie protested, writhing on the floor as Owen tickled his foot and trying to kick Owen with his free leg. Owen merely snickered and leaned back, evading Jamie's flailing foot. Owen's face was red from suppressing his own laughter when he finally stopped, Jamie lying on the floor panting.

"Oh, God," Jamie gasped, eyes shut and tears of laughter leaking from beneath their lids. "You're an asshole and I hate you!" Jamie declared as he blindly pointed at Owen without opening his eyes, then snickered again.

"Uh-huh," Owen replied in a voice that would have been deadpan if it weren't for the amusement hiding in it. "Say it again, maybe you'll convince yourself this time," he told Jamie with a smirk. "But you're gonna have to try a lot harder than that to convince me you don't love me."

"Bite me," Jamie declared with a put-upon smirk of his own. "And help me up, let's see if I can stand on it."

Still grinning, Owen slung Jamie's arm across his shoulders, slowly standing and taking almost all of Jamie's weight from his bad side. Jamie grunted in pain as he stood, the muscles of his lower leg flexing through the bruised area as he straightened up, but once he was upright it wasn't too bad. He shifted his weight from side to side experimentally, grimacing when he put weight on his bad leg, but it could hold him.

"Well, I'm not gonna be dancing anytime soon, or sprinting, but I can walk..." Jamie muttered as he shifted his grip from Owen's far shoulder to his hand, taking a tentative step or two. He was limping, badly, and wincing with every step, but he could indeed walk, if not too smoothly or well.

"Okay, let's look around," Owen said with a nod as he reluctantly let go of Jamie's hand. His bad leg was apparently not going to collapse under Jamie at any second, but Owen's Feral instincts couldn't help being worried and staying ready to snatch Jamie up if he should start to fall.

"There must be something back here, if they put in an extra wall and security door, right?" Owen theorized as he kept pace with Jamie's limping form, staying next to his bad side so Jamie could catch himself against Owen's enormous frame if he needed to. "Besides, I think I smell something. . .I'd swear it's familiar, but I can't quite place it. We both just had adrenal rushes; now I can't smell anything past us, pheromone releases."

"Oops," Jamie snickered. "But you're right, familiar scents or not, they've got this area off-camera and behind extra security. There must be a reason for that, so let's go find out what it is," he declared, heading for the first storeroom.

Shalimar, Jesse, and Brennan crept around the corner from the smaller hallway that led to the emergency stairs, entering a main corridor with multiple doors. Shalimar sidled along the wall cautiously, her eyes still in their golden Feral mode, and bent lower to sniff at the handle of the first door. Glancing back over her shoulder at the boys, she shook her head to silently indicate Adam's scent wasn't on that door and continued on. At the second door she paused, frowning in thought after checking for Adam's scent on the door's handle.

"What is it, Shal?" Jesse asked in a whisper. "Is Adam in there?"

"I don't think so," she whispered back. "He was, but he's not now. The scent's too old. Like I said, he's been all over this floor; I can smell him everywhere. But this isn't the fresh trail we were hoping for."

"Well, you said these are the data labs, right Jess?" Brennan asked. "Where else would Adam spend his time, if the Creator wants him to contribute to his work?" he continued. "And why are we whispering?"

" 'Cause Adam's isn't the only scent all over the place here," Shalimar answered, frowning back at Brennan over her shoulder as she crept across the hallway to the opposite door. "And some of the other scents I'm picking up are a lot fresher than Adam's. They could still be nearby."

Shalimar started to bend down to sniff at that door's handle, then her head snapped back up, looking down the corridor at the next intersection.

"Shal, what is it–" Jesse started to ask, cutting himself off at Shalimar's violent gesture, made with one arm as she jerked the door open with the other.

"Shhhh!" she hissed as she dashed into the room, frantically motioning for Jesse and Brennan to follow her. "Somebody's coming!"

Jesse and Brennan dashed into the room after Shalimar and she nearly slammed the door closed, slowing at the last possible second to shut it quietly. She held one hand up to warn Jesse and Brennan to be silent, her head cocked to one side as she listened.

"I don't think they saw us..." Shalimar said quietly after a moment, her eyes still the golden color of her Feral mode as she continued to listen. "I don't hear anyone coming closer, at least..." She turned to meet Jesse and Brennan's eyes as her own returned to normal. "Adam's scent was getting stronger though!" she told them happily. "We're going the right way!"

Just as they were relaxing, relieved smiles spreading across Jesse and Brennan's faces to match the hopeful grin on Shalimar's, a bullet-hole was smashed through the lab door. Brennan gave a clipped cry of alarm as he threw himself to the floor, and Jesse instinctively massed himself, stepping forward to intercept any more shots that might be fired through the door. He jumped over Shalimar as she hit the floor, moving into position in front of the door, but Jesse froze in mid-step as he landed, motionless with horror.

Shalimar had not dove to the floor after the attack; she had collapsed to the floor after being hit, blood spreading scarlet through blonde locks at the back of her head.

"Welcome, m'boy!" the Creator declared with a grin as the guards escorted Adam into his presence. "Getting work done, are you?" the old mad scientist asked with a maliciously gleeful leer.

"Well, I certainly was, until I was forcibly escorted here," Adam replied coolly, giving the captain of the guards that had retrieved him an arch look. Although Adam appeared to be giving the man a displeased glare, he was actually focused on the Creator, tracking the mad scientist's body language with his peripheral vision and wondering what was really going on.

"Indeed you were!" the Creator said with a raspy cackle, grinning as he laughed. "Indeed you were, I'm certain, m'boy!" the frail lunatic laughed, continuing until his face was flushed and he was wheezing for breath.

Adam turned his head fractionally from one side to the other, glancing behind himself and to his sides to check the guards' responses. No one seemed to be reacting to the Creator's condition in the slightest, and none of the black labcoated medics were present.

"Are you. . .well?" Adam asked the Creator with a confused frown. He looked like he could expire at any moment, and no one was doing anything. Had he summoned Adam because he knew he was passing? Were the guards to execute Adam the moment their master drew his last breath? What had been the point of everything, then?

The Creator lifted his head slightly, his rheumy eyes opened to slits so that he could meet Adam's gaze. Adam's breath caught short at the look in the Creator's eyes. . .it was a knowing look, one that said Adam had somehow gone too far, and that the Creator was about to bring him to task for it.

"Yes, working hard, I have no doubt," the Creator wheezed as he straightened up again once his mirth passed. "But working so hard at what, I wonder?" the Creator asked, smirking in superiority at Adam despite the fact he appeared to be ready to drop dead of a heart attack at any moment.

"Our work..." Adam began with a frown, hoping the Creator would accept his confusion being a mistaken sincerity. In fact, Adam's confusion was sincere, because he had no idea what was going on.

"Or the portions of it that interest you, certainly," the Creator sniffed, flapping a dismissive hand in Adam's direction. "My boy, I'm so disappointed in you!" he declared, but Adam only frowned in deeper confusion, because the Creator looked more like a parent amused by their toddler's first attempt at deceit than anything else.

Adam froze, his eyes widening slightly as he wondered if perhaps that analogy was far more accurate than he at first realized.

"Tell me, m'boy, how has Natalie's Treo worked out for you?" the Creator suddenly asked, his wizened grin spreading wide at Adam's flinch. "No, no, really, I'm not disappointed at all, truly," the Creator muttered, still smiling and only making Adam's confusion grow. "I was most impressed at your smuggling the stolen phone past the security detail when you weren't even aware that we were aware of your actions."

The Creator grinned again as Adam's frown of confusion shifted to one of tight-lipped irritation, of frustration that his efforts had apparently been for nothing.

"I must admit, I'm still not entirely certain how you managed that particular trick," the Creator said with a grudging nod of appreciation. "But it's irrelevant. I'll know soon enough, and I suppose it's just proof that your years evading Genomex and the GSA have molded you well to follow in my footsteps. Evading the Dominion's many enemies is surely a similar matter." The Creator grinned at Adam again, once more amused. "We should have compared notes!

"But honestly, dear boy, did you think the theft would not have been noticed? That Natalie and every other employee who had even limited contact with you had not been instructed to immediately report if any of their possessions went missing? That we would not be aware of any unscheduled transmissions? Or are you just surprised that I know the name of the lab tech whose phone you commandeered that day?" the Creator asked with a smirk, his eyes narrowing in a superior frown when Adam's brow twitched at his statement. Adam had indeed been wondering why the Creator knew the girl's name, why such a severely self-focused obvious megalomaniac would care about some random employee's name.

"Tell me, how many names of people you ever worked with have you ever forgotten?" he asked, frowning sternly at Adam, and Adam blinked when he realized the answer was indeed 'none'. "Exactly, m'boy," the Creator continued with a nod, glaring angrily. "And you are a clone of me, so what makes you think I would be any less likely to know the names of those in my employ? My very existence is a closely kept secret; I certainly know the identities of all those who know of it. Though obviously a loose end or two exist somewhere, if you were suspicious of me before you knew the truth."

The Creator paused for a moment, his stooped frame rising up and down with each heaving breath as he stared at Adam, hard, his aged gaze unflinching as he considered his successor.

"Perhaps you were right to be so," the Creator declared softly as Adam hesitantly but determinedly met his eyes.

Chris frowned at the digital readout on top of the device, watching its numbers change. They seemed to be randomly fluctuating, but each readout was a slightly smaller number than the one before it had been...

"Is this thing. . .counting down by prime numbers?" Chris asked with a frown, boggling down at the timer in front of him. "Call me paranoid, but that makes me even more nervous than if we had just found a big lump of plastique with a stopwatch running in reverse, y'know?"

"No, I like your paranoia," Lexa answered with a frown of her own. "In fact, I'll see your paranoid and raise you an outright worried," she finished, still eying the device warily. "I'm not sure about the prime number part, but I'm betting when this thing counts down far enough, it's going to do something nasty. It's wired into the data storage here, so I'm guessing it'll wipe all this clean. . .but what about all the hard copy here?" she said, waving one hand at the wall of filing cabinets. "It has to destroy those, too, or else what's the point of wiping the data? And who knows how much of this base it'll blow up at the same time."

"Okay, I think my Full Blown Panic just shot right past your Outright Worried," Chris said with a concerned frown. His eyes traced the timing device's wires, noting where they were jacked into the last data device at the end of the line. The other set of wires coming from it disappeared into the wall. "More wire following? Or do you wanna just cut those wires with your laser and we'll hope for the best?" he asked, still frowning.

Lexa blew her breath out in an amused snort, the kind of laugh that was generally used in a "laugh or scream" sort of situation.

"Yeah, is your Full Blown Panic okay with that plan?" she asked with a roll of her eyes. "Because my Outright Worried sure isn't."

"So, more wire following," Chris answered with a nod, turning to lead the way back out of the data storage room.

Chris and Lexa trekked back through the power center, circling around the section that held the data storage room until they figured out how to come at it from the other side. A few moments later, Chris held up a hand in silent warning as they reached the approach that led toward the data storage room from the other direction.

"Wha–" Lexa started to ask, cutting herself off when Chris instantly pressed the fingertips of his raised hand to her lips and gave her a warning look. He moved his hand to take hers, and Lexa realized he was concentrating on his power and that he might want her to use hers to cloak them. She cocked her head to give him an obviously questioning look, waiting for Chris to confirm before she triggered the noticeable flare of her cloak's activation.

They merely stood there for a moment, but Lexa's eyes widened as she realized the various hums and whirs of the machinery in the background were growing louder. Chris was amplifying the sounds reaching their immediate vicinity, hoping to hear anyone approaching or discussing that they had spotted Chris and Lexa from what they thought was out of earshot. After a moment, he relaxed his power.

"Thought I heard something," he said quietly as he led the way to the new approach. "Guess not," he finished as they reached the area's other side, another featureless wall with nothing more than a mechanically-sealed door in it. "Okay, weirdo timers and no alarm systems, this is all just a ploy to make us paranoid and drop dead of a heart attack when somebody squeezes a squeak toy behind us or something, right?" Chris asked in frustration.

"I think I've decided I don't actually want to know what the Dominion's motivations are," Lexa answered with a frown of her own. "You want to pick this one, too?" she asked, holding her glowing fingers forward to light up the lock just as she had done before.

"Sure," Chris answered, crouching down on one knee as he pulled out his wallet and retrieved his lockpicks once more. Lexa carefully held her light in position and Chris quickly picked the lock, both of them focused on it and not the complex behind them.

"Got it," Chris said a moment later as he opened the door. He had just stood, stepping into the room beyond at the same time, when a bullet ricocheted off the doorway. A small piece of concrete was chipped out of the doorway immediately behind where Chris' head had just been.

Lexa gasped and threw a strobing flare behind herself with a flick of her fingers, even as she dove into the room. She tackled Chris around the waist and cloaked them both as they fell into the room and out of the doorway. Chris gasped in surprise as the wind was knocked out of him, then swore breathlessly and rolled with Lexa as a hail of fully automatic gunfire streamed through the doorway behind them, spattering off the concrete walls.

"Dammit, knew I heard something!" Chris gasped as they scrambled to their hands and knees, crawling from the doorway to get out of the line of fire.

"Jamie and Owen!" Lexa gasped into her commring as she put her back to the wall, neither of them having had a chance to even look at the room's contents yet. "Jess, Bren, Shal, we've got company down here! Heavily armed company; we could use a hand, guys!"

'Us too!' Brennan's voice said half a moment later. Lexa could tell by the clipped way his shout had finished that Brennan had whipped his hand away from his mouth even as he was speaking, probably to throw a tesla coil at his own attackers.

"Damn," Chris muttered. "Cloak us, then I'll stick my head in the doorway, down at the bottom, and see if I can shout the ceiling down on them."

"That. . .sounds risky?" Lexa replied with a frown, but she held her hand out for Chris to take anyway, since she didn't have any better ideas to offer.

"Less risky than letting them get close where they'll really be able to pin us down..." Chris answered, nodding as Lexa's cloak flared and hid them from sight. Chris got his feet under himself in a crouch and shuffled over to the doorway, leaning down on one hand before putting his head past the door's frame.

Peering out into the dim recesses of the engineering level, Chris couldn't see any specific sign of their attackers, just any number of shadowy corners and hallways they might be concealed in. He cautiously repositioned himself, tugging on Lexa's hand to get her to move closer. Once she had done so, he could lean and reach across the doorway to grab the edge of the open door. He carefully grasped it, then lowered himself back down as close to the floor as he could get.

Turning his head to watch the concealing shadows of the engineering level, Chris took a deep breath, filling his lungs. Concrete was a bitch to match the harmonics of.

Chris shoved the door away from himself, flinging it wide open to bang against the left wall of the room. At the door's sudden movement, several bursts of gunfire spat from the shadowed hallways, the muzzle flares easily drawing Chris' eye.

His face stretching in an invisible grin, Chris SHOUTED.

Chris' bellow slammed down the hallway most of Lexa and his attackers were hidden in, catching them completely by surprise and stunning most of them with the sudden cacophony. The sonic energy of Chris' shout echoed off the concrete walls and ceiling of the hallway, deafening the gunmen thrice over and knocking the foremost of them off their feet. Chris poured on the noise, shouting for all he was worth and demonstrating his impressive lung capacity and breath control as he continued to yell for nearly half a minute.

Long before that, the rebounding echoes of Chris' power set up a counter-harmonic with the concrete structure of the hallway, the reverberations building until the tensile strength of the walls and ceiling was insufficient to contain them. First vibrating, then humming, and finally cracking, the hallway the gunmen were scrambling to retreat down suddenly exploded in stone fragments and concrete dust-chips, filling it with choking dust and sharp-edged shrapnel.

"Did you get all of them?" Lexa asked as Chris withdrew from the doorway, dropping her cloak when she felt him move close.

"No, but most of 'em," Chris answered as they reappeared in another flare of light. "Why?"

"Because I really don't think we want them shooting any more bullets in here," Lexa answered, pointing with a glowing hand at the contents of the room.

Dozens and dozens of plastic barrels, all wired together and connected to the wires emerging from the back wall, a bundle that couldn't be anything other than the other ends of the wires disappearing into the wall in the data-storage room. At least, Chris was pretty sure that's what they were. He couldn't be positive, because it was actually a very big room, so he couldn't see the details of the wires all that clearly. . .but the barrels they were connected to were quite obviously carefully placed around what appeared to be structural support columns throughout the large room.

"Oh, that's not good!" Chris said with an unhappy frown as he saw the extent of Lexa's bad news, then reached for his phone.

Jamie and Owen investigated the first storeroom, discovering it had been converted into some sort of lab. Jamie limped his way over to the computer and dropped into its chair, then booted it up, attempting to check its logs and hoping to discover what the lab was being used for. Owen thought the room looked a little like a genetics lab, or at least some kind of medical lab, because it had an examination chair similar to Sanctuary's or Haven's "hot-seats" in one corner.

Opening a few cabinets along the wall, Owen discovered chemicals and solutions that he was pretty sure were biological, -iamines and something-carbons. They all had a minimum of six syllables in their names, so he just assumed they were and moved on. Kevin would've known, but he wasn't there; Owen shook his head. Kevin probably would have known what most of the room was for on sight, but the team was going to have to make do without him and Josh on this one. Jamie could probably confirm the whatsits were for biology stuff; his photographic memory would let him know that much, remembering anything he'd seen Eve or Kevin use in the med-lab at Haven.

Owen's nose wrinkled as he approached the end of the counter and the examination chair next to it; he could smell rubbing alcohol and blood. Whatever medical purpose the storeroom had been converted for, it had been used for it recently.

Jamie looked up from the computer when Owen gasped.

"What is it?" Jamie asked quickly, turning in the chair to look at Owen, pausing when Owen jerked a splayed hand up, silently bidding Jamie to hold his peace for a moment. Owen's hand slowly lowered back to his side as his green-brown Ursine eyes narrowed, sniffing at the air, trying to scent something past the pungent alcohol. He leaned in toward the examination chair, sniffing at the ends of its armrests and the pad at its top where the patient's head would rest.

Jamie blinked in surprise as Owen voiced a terrible growl, his shoulders heaving as he panted in rage.

"Owen?" Jamie asked cautiously, then tried to jump out of the chair to go to his best friend when Owen roared, to reassure him, but the flare of pain in his bad leg nearly made Jamie fall. He caught himself with one hand on the desk and the other on the armrest of the chair, keeping his feet, but it slowed him down.

Owen roared in outrage, a primal shout of fury as he reared back, then punched his right arm directly through the examination chair, padding exploding out its steel back along with Owen's fist.

"Shit, OWEN!" Jamie cried out, throwing himself across the makeshift lab at Owen and collapsing across him with his elasticized body, hoping to keep Owen from hurting himself in animalistic rage. "Owen, STOP!" Jamie yelled as he landed on Owen's back. He was pretty sure the initial punch hadn't hurt Owen too badly, the thick padding of the chair would have reduced the impact of Owen's fist against its steel back, but Owen had still punched through it. . .and if he tried to yank or tear his way free, against the edges of stress-rendered metal...

Owen reached behind himself with his left arm, grabbing Jamie by simply sinking his fingers into Jamie's elasticized form and flinging him away. Jamie let himself be flung to the ground since it wouldn't hurt him in the slightest, and flung a hand at the examination chair. Owen was still snarling savagely, and he had grabbed the armrest of the examination chair with his free hand while Jamie landed. It looked to Jamie like the only reason Owen hadn't torn his right arm to shreds yet was indecision between wanting to tear the armrest off the chair and bracing against it so he could pull his other arm free of the chair's back.

Jamie's hand grabbed onto the back of the examination chair close to its base just as Owen's rage shifted from being directed at the chair itself to the fact that it was entrapping his right forearm and preventing him from smashing the offensive chair all the more. Jamie held on and tried force his elasticity into the chair, to do whatever he had done to the security door to free himself earlier.

As Owen twisted his forearm in the sundered steel of the chair's back and tried to pull his fist back through it, the steel of the examination chair went as flexible and elastic as Jamie was, letting Owen's arm slide free with no more than a tug of effort. Jamie breathed a sigh of relief as he saw Owen's arm emerge from the depths of the chair unbloodied; it was like he could transform any blade into an imitation rubber one, thank goodness. If he could develop this new ability to the point where he could elasticize badguys' weapons just as fast as he could himself, it would prove handy.

"Owen, man, calm down, talk to me, what is it?!" Jamie urged his friend as he scrambled awkwardly and painfully to his feet, trying to interpose himself between Owen and the examination chair. Owen curled his hands into angry fists, rotating his wrists to point his knuckles at the floor and his thumbs at the ceiling as he gasped for breath, trying to regain control. Owen's entire gigantic frame was heaving up and down with his effort to restrain himself, his face knotted up in a rictus of rage and anguish, but gradually the anguish won out. Owen's frame didn't exactly relax, but he had backed away from the edge of enraged violence he had been teetering on.

"It's Adam," Owen choked out through his gritting teeth as his furious Feral-mode eyes met Jamie's, tears trickling from their corners as Owen tried to compose himself enough to explain. "Blood, his blood, rubbing alcohol, drugs. . .whatever they did in here, they did it to Adam," Owen growled deep in his chest as he squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to think about the Dominion putting Adam through the sorts of things the GSA had put Owen through when he had been a similar prisoner.

"Hey! Hey, Owen, easy," Jamie urged, realizing why Owen was so upset and trying to allay his fears. "Take it easy, man, shhhhh..." Jamie shushed Owen as he stepped close and wrapped his arms across Owen's broad back, hugging him to reassure his Feral responses that things were okay. "Just think about it..." Jamie started to explain, then cut himself off when Owen hugged him back, clamping his arms around Jamie so suddenly and tightly Jamie's power nearly kicked in and rendered him elastic. If he let that happen, Owen's crushing strength would squish Jamie into some contorted shape it would be impossible to talk in.

"Think, man," Jamie said softly, running the flat of one hand up and down Owen's trembling back. "They told us Adam is a clone of this Creator guy, right? He's the big prize the Dominion was searching almost a year for, right? They wouldn't hurt him. . .Jesse said the Creator's, like, super ancient, falling-apart-like-an-old-yellowed-book old; they probably used Adam as a blood donor or something because he's a literally perfect match, right?" Jamie asked.

"Okay—" Owen gasped, the heaving of his shoulders slowing as he considered Jamie's point. "–Okay, yeah, you're right. The Creator would smell just like Adam, just older, right? So with all the weird medical smells in here, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference."

"So maybe this is just where they patch up the creepy old guy, it might not even be Adam's blood you're smelling?" Jamie asked.

"No," Owen replied instantly, with an angry frown. "No, Adam was here, it's his blood, I'm sure of it," Owen insisted. "But I wouldn't be able to tell if the Creator was here too, or how involved they both were in whatever was done here." Owen's expression cleared as he looked up to meet Jamie's eyes. "But that means Adam was here, right here, in this room, and not long ago!" he said with excitement as realization dawned on him. "We can find him!"

Jamie had just opened his mouth to respond when both their phones rang. Jamie snatched his off Johnson's belt and glanced at it, then thumbed it on.

"Chris? We know Adam's here, somewhere!" Jamie said excitedly.

'Peachy!' Chris snapped back with only slightly sarcastic enthusiasm. 'But Lexa and I are pinned down by a couple of machine-gun wielding maniacs down here, and her guys are having their own problems!' he blurted as fast as he could. 'And even more fun, we found a bomb down here; think you guys might come bail us out before these guards' enthusiasm blows the whole place to kingdom come?!'

"Oh, Crap!" Jamie replied, his eyes wide as he looked up and met Owen's, who nodded to show he had heard Chris' side of the conversation. "Hang in there, we'll be right down!"

Jamie scrambled for the door, gasping as his bad leg buckled under him; Owen simply threw Jamie's arm around his own shoulders and grabbed Jamie's far hip with his other hand, picking Jamie up off the ground entirely as he sprinted back the way they had come.

"So, you were aware of the transmission I made using Natalie's phone," Adam said cautiously, trying to feel out just how much the Creator knew about what he had done. He had already admitted to not knowing how Adam had smuggled the Treo past his bodyguards, so Adam knew he still had some secrets.

"Indeed," the Creator nodded, his piercingly dark eyes never leaving Adam's own. "As I am aware of the efforts you put into overcoming the stumbling blocks I myself encountered in my efforts to understand the human genome."

The Creator paused, giving Adam a hard look, his wrinkled face creased all the more into a frown.

"I am also aware of the lack of those efforts, of the fact that you have been holding back, m'boy," the Creator told Adam, turning his body away from Adam as he began to slowly pace around his clone. The Creator's decrepit hands were clasped behind his back, his face still turned toward Adam as he circled. "Of the fact that you very carefully accomplished only so much in Nevada. Of the fact that you made sure we accomplished progress, but never too much of it. That you worked harder at figuring out how not to solve our problems than at solving them in the first place."

The Creator met Adam's eyes again as he returned to standing directly before him, giving him another glare. Adam returned it impassively, knowing that being circled was a predatory action, a psychological ploy to increase tension in the victim as the antagonist moved out of sight behind them. Adam had never had any doubts that he was at the mercy of his captors, so the tactic was essentially wasted on him.

He had, however, thought that he had been maintaining his personal safety by remaining within the Creator's good graces, by appearing to advance his goals. To be told that was not the case did in fact increase Adam's unease, but that had nothing to do with a transparent psychological ploy. Perhaps the Creator simply enjoyed flaunting his position of superiority.

"In other words, m'boy," the Creator told Adam, straightening up as best his wizened frame could and attempting to look down his nose at Adam. Adam managed to restrain himself from smirking, because the two of them were of course the same height, and Adam's own spine wasn't as withered. It was perhaps childishly impudent, but the Creator was treating him as a child anyway, so Adam straightened his own spine entirely, putting his fists on his hips as he stood to his full height.

The Creator's eyes flashed with irritation, and his lips pressed together tightly in frustration.

"In other words, I know that you have actually not been doing as much as you could to finish our work," the Creator finished with a glare.

"You can't make me cooperate," Adam pointed out. "You can't physically force my cooperation, and I don't think you have the means to compel me against my personal desires, either," he continued, folding his arms across his chest and relaxing a bit, because he had already considered that aspect.

"You're right, we share the same work, attempting to solve the mysteries of the human genome. But it's the purposes that knowledge would be put to that concern me," Adam declared, silently daring the Creator to try to convince him otherwise. "I want to ease human suffering and give mankind longer, healthier lives with this research. You want to control lives, all life, with it! No..." Adam finished, slowly shaking his head as he continued to meet the Creator's eyes.

"..No, I won't be helping you accomplish that. And you can't force me to. If you know me as well as you insist you do, then you know my will is strong enough that my mind would snap before you could torture me into cooperating. Physical duress is not conducive to intellectual pursuits, and we all know it. You might be able to threaten enough of the population that my morals would compel me to assist you, but you'd have to prove such a threat. I don't think you're willing to risk your anonymity by revealing yourself as a global threat. Sure, you have the power to lay waste to nations. . .but that would attract attention, attention you don't want.

"You can't physically force me, and you won't expose your Dominion to compel me. The only way you could quietly compel me to assist you is to threaten my loved ones, and I think you already blew that chance. Our emergency departure from Nevada, that occurred only a short while after I had sent my message. There were no guerrilla terrorists attacking; you simply wanted us out of there before Mutant X arrived. I've no doubt you had some unpleasant surprise left behind for them, but you were very quiet for the last portion of the drive here. Like something had disappointed you."

Adam gave the Creator a piercing look of his own. They had the same eyes, after all, and Adam's were not dimmed by age.

"Something like my team escaping whatever surprise you left them, maybe?" Adam asked with a knowing smirk. He didn't know, not for certain, but he was confident in his educated guess. "And I note that you don't have them here, dangling on a string to compel my cooperation now, either.

"You can't make me help you, and I refuse to do so. You can kill me if you want, end the life you spent so much time, effort, and resources shaping, but you can't force my cooperation."

The Creator smiled ever so slightly.

"You're very right, my boy," the Creator told Adam with a slow nod. "It's true, I cannot force you to cooperate. But there's something you hadn't counted on, 'Adam'," he finished, his slight smile spreading into a superior smirk.

Adam realized in that moment that the Creator had never before addressed him by name.

"I don't need to."

Lexa yelped as another bullet ricocheted off the wall next to the doorway and hummed past her nose.

"CHRIS!" she hissed at him, "They're getting closer! We need to stop them, or sooner or later they're going to set something off!!"

Chris nodded reluctantly, knowing Lexa was right. There were too many barrels of explosive in the room for the two of them to do much about, but maybe they could get one and shove it through the doorway, topple it over and Chris' shout could roll it away from them. . .as long as the shout didn't set it off, assuming they could cut one loose without it going off and get it through the doorway without being shot. . .crap. But if they could, it'd sure get the crazy trigger-happy guards' attention...

"That's it!" Chris said. "We don't need to stop them, we just need them to stop shooting!" he said happily as skulked up to the edge of the door. Lexa lifted one palm up in a 'Well, DUH' gesture with confusion clear on her face as she stared at Chris.

"ATTENTION, YOU TRIGGER-HAPPY MANIACS!!!" Chris yelled at the doorway. He was staying out of the guards' sight and line of fire, but his power-enhanced voice was more than loud enough to be heard throughout the engineering level beyond, especially since it was mostly concrete. "THERE'S A LOT OF EXPLOSIVES IN HERE, AND YOUR BULLETS MIGHT SET THEM OFF!!"

Chris paused for a moment, waiting to see if the sporadic covering fire that was keeping them pinned in the room would recommence or if the guards believed him.

"I'M ONLY BRINGING IT TO YOUR ATTENTION 'CAUSE I DON'T WANNA BLOW UP!!!" Chris continued. "SURE, I COULD JUST BE BLUFFING, BUT DO YOU REALLY WANT TO TAKE THAT CHANCE?" he asked. Chris gestured at Lexa as he yelled to the guards, holding one hand over his eyes as if shading them from the sun and panning his gaze around the room, miming the action of looking around.

Lexa frowned in confusion for a moment, then realized Chris wanted to see more of the room, so that he could recite details to the guards and convince them he wasn't bluffing. She raised a hand and beamed light from her palm like a floodlamp, shining it into the room to light it up clearly for Chris.

"I MEAN, SURE, WHERE WOULD WE GET A BUNCH OF EXPLOSIVES, YOU GUYS STARTED SHOOTING AT US AS SOON AS WE OPENED THE DOOR," Chris called out to the guards, rolling his eyes. "BUT THEN AGAIN, WHERE WOULD BE BETTER TO HAVE A BUNCH OF EXPLOSIVES, THAN THE ROOM WITH HALF A DOZEN SUPPORT COLUMNS IN IT?" he yelled angrily. "YOU KNOW, HOLDING UP THE ENTIRE REST OF THE FREAKIN' BASE! I DUNNO WHY YOUR CRAZY BOSSES WOULD SET SOMETHING LIKE THAT UP IN HERE, BUT HEY, THEY'RE THE ONES WHO GAVE YOU THE ORDERS TO KEEP US OUT OF HERE, RIGHT?" Chris asked. "SO I DUNNO, THIS BIGWIG CREATOR GUY, BOSS OF THE WHOLE DAMN DOMINION, APPARENTLY, WOULD HE WANT TO BLOW THE PLACE UP? YOU KNOW, SINCE ALL THE STUFF THAT WAS BEING STORED HERE WAS SHIPPED OUT IN THE PAST FEW DAYS AND EVERYTHING, MAKES A GUY WONDER..."

Chris glanced at Lexa, who shrugged as she let her hand and power drop, then mouthed something at him. Chris frowned, feeling sheepish that he hadn't adjusted his power to let them have a covert conversation after projecting to the guards. He concentrated to magnify the sounds in the areas of Lexa's and his own ears, twirling one hand with an extended finger at Lexa in a "do what you just did, again" gesture.

"I SAID, DO YOU THINK THEY BOUGHT IT?" she repeated.

"I HOPE SO, SINCE WE'RE NOT ACTUALLY SELLING ANY B.S. HERE..." Chris whispered back, magnifying the sound of his voice only in the vicinity of Lexa's head. "YOU'RE THE ONE WHO'S WORKED WITH THESE PEOPLE IN THE PAST. . .WHAT DO YOU THINK THE CHANCES ARE THEY'LL BELIEVE THEIR BOSS'D BLOW THEM UP?"

"DEPENDS ON IF THEY'RE IGNORANT RUN-OF-THE-MILL GRUNTS, OR ACTUAL IN-THE-KNOW SECURITY GUARDS," Lexa answered with a noncommittal shrug of one shoulder. "COULD BE EITHER WAY. YOU THINK YOU COULD SHOUT DOWN THE BACK WALL, OR THE SIDE WALL THEY'RE NOT BEHIND? GIVE US ANOTHER WAY OUT?"

Chris' face scrunched up in thought as he considered it, apparently not liking the options but contemplating them because he couldn't come up with any others. He gave a one-shouldered shrug of his own to Lexa and stated the blunt answer:

"MAYBE, BUT YOU'D MOST LIKELY END UP DEAF; IT'S ALL HARD SURFACES IN HERE."

Lexa turned away with a scowl, mouthing the word 'Crap!' vehemently. Scowling in frustration, she waved Chris back from the doorway's edge, taking his place once he moved away. Still frowning angrily, Lexa slapped her palms together at the door, flinging off the biggest strobe she could through it.

There were a few cries of surprise and alarm from outside in the engineering area proper. . .cries that escalated in intensity and continued after the backwash of radiance from Lexa's strobe had died away. Chris and Lexa exchanged a confused glance, then a resounding crash echoed from outside their room. Chris grabbed Lexa's wrist as she turned back toward the doorway and began leaning toward it, activating her cloak even as Chris grabbed her. They both vanished from sight and carefully peered around the doorway's edge, wondering what was going on but ready to duck back behind its cover.

Poking their cloaked heads past the doorway's edge, Lexa and Chris saw a number of guards staggering through the open area leading up to the room they had been pinned down in, obviously still blinded by Lexa's strobe. They must have been the closest to the door, but something had happened to the guards further back, a number of whom were pinned under a large piece of relay equipment that had apparently hurtled into them.

The guards who were not pinned were being swatted down by the tag-team combo of Jamie and Owen. Owen was physically wielding Jamie as a weapon, holding him by one leg and throwing the rest of Jamie's curled-up body into the guards. Jamie's leg stretched out behind him as he flew through the air, smashing into a guard before snapping back to Owen like a giant paddleball. Owen caught Jamie's upper body with his free arm, rearing him back overhead before hurling Jamie at the next guard.

One guard had gotten his feet back under himself and was fumbling his gun up into position as Jamie rebounded back into Owen's grasp. Lexa dropped her cloak and thrust her arm forward, her first and second fingers pointed at the man's gun and slicing a hole in it with her laser. Owen had caught Jamie but paused in surprise at Lexa's sudden appearance in the doorway, and more of the well-trained guards scrambled to bring their weapons to bear, even from where they were sprawled after Jamie bowled them over. Owen's Feral eyes snapped back to his opponents, realizing several of them were about to open fire.

"CHRIS, GET 'EM!" Owen shouted as he juggled Jamie in mid-air, letting go of his leg and turning him right-side up. Even as Chris drew in a hasty breath, Jamie was landing on one leg to stand in front of Owen. Jamie left himself completely elasticized, reaching forward to grab Owen by the sides of his head, squeezing to ooze an elastic finger from each hand into both of Owen's ears. This sealed Owen's sensitive Feral hearing against Chris' power, and Owen grabbed the sides of Jamie's head as well, simply crushing Jamie's elastic ears shut in his enormous, Feral-strengthed hands.

Lexa stumbled back into the room, hands clamped over her ears as Chris bellowed out into the engineering level, his concussive shout bowling over the few guards still on their feet. The air was visibly rippling with the reverberating shockwaves shrieking through it, slamming into the guards and echoing off the walls, causing them all to drop their guns and clamp their hands over their ears. Most of them were slammed flat onto their backs by the concussive impact of Chris' shout, and all of them were thoroughly disoriented by the echoes from all around them.

Jamie and Owen alone remained standing, Owen's strength keeping them upright and Jamie's elastic form able to withstand the vibrations and protect their hearing. Chris scythed his head back and forth as he stood in the doorway, making sure to overwhelm all of the guards before his breath ran out. The last thing they needed was for one of the guards to recover both his wits and his weapon while they were still tying up his friends. It was too bad Brennan was elsewhere; tasering enemies unconscious would certainly be easier than individually restraining them.

"Okay, Big Guy and I'll take care of these mooks," Chris said as he stepped out of the doorway, heading for the nearest fallen guard and ready to screech him deaf and unconscious if he should try anything. "Jamie, there's some kinda bomb set up back in the data storage room; you and Lexa should go work on that, or on copying as much of that data as you can before the bomb goes off."

Jamie turned around and started limping back the way he and Owen had come as they followed the scent of Lexa and Chris' trail. Lexa gave Owen a nod as she exited the explosives-filled room and hurried to catch up with Jamie.

"Do you know the way to the data storage room, or were you assuming I would catch up and show you?" Lexa asked as she reached Jamie's side, confusion and curiosity warring for her expression. "And how'd you get hurt? I thought that was pretty hard, except for radiant energy attacks?"

"Well, I was assuming I'd be able to find it," Jamie said with a smirk. "Owen and I followed your trail, and then the sounds of the guards shooting; we were about to call you guys, let you know we had your backs, then you blinded the guards. Owen decided there was no time like the present at that point. My photographic memory can lead me back the way we came to where Owen said 'They went this way, first', no problem. And as for my leg, it's just bruised. Badly, I guess, but it's only bruising, not a burn or anything."

"How'd you get bruised?" Lexa asked with a frown of confusion, noting that Jamie was effortlessly retracing the route she and Chris had previously taken. "I thought you were pretty much made of rubber?"

"I pretty much am," Jamie said with a shrug and a wince as his weight came down on his bad leg at the same time. "But even my soft, stretchy-rubber self only smashes so thin." He gave Lexa a sidelong look, wondering what she thought of him getting hurt. He knew consciously that it hadn't been his fault, just poor luck, but his emotional dependency on his friends' opinions of him left Jamie feeling curiously vulnerable to Lexa's judgment. She was a new friend, one Jamie didn't really even know all that well yet, but that only made him all the more desperate to impress favorably upon her.

Jamie knew consciously that it was a problem, that he couldn't let other peoples' opinions define him as a person, that it wasn't a healthy form of dependency. Emma had told him as much when he had first come to Mutant X back in New York, and Anne had continued his therapy when she joined the California Mutant Underground. Jamie had only recently learned of Emma's death at that point and been backsliding, clinging to Owen and Josh and taking advantage of their Feral proclivity towards easy affection. Anne had helped him grow from that point in the past year, and Jamie knew he was more emotionally self-sufficient than he had ever been before in his life, but just because he was aware of his being impressionable to Lexa's opinion didn't make him any less so, just conscious of it.

Being conscious of that feeling of vulnerability made Jamie subconsciously try to address it, shifting to her female form. Anne had rolled her eyes and told Jamie that men and women were actually not emotionally different, they were just taught to express and repress different emotions according to societal gender roles. Jamie had laughed and said that she liked expressing her emotions, so she'd take whichever shape allowed her to express them instead of repress them, societally or otherwise. Anne had sighed and pointed out that doing so was a perfect example of Jamie allowing other people to emotionally define him. Her. Whatever. Jamie had grinned back and said sure, but it was society at large's expectations she was responding to, just like everybody else, instead of letting personal friends define Jamie's identity.

But it was okay. Lexa wouldn't hate Jamie or be disappointed in her, and even if she was, it didn't mean Jamie had to change herself, who she was. It had all been a random occurrence in the first place; Jamie just had to remember that.

"Jamie?" Lexa asked, her frown having deepened into concern, wondering about Jamie's extended silence and shift to female. "I'm sorry, should I not have asked how you got hurt?" she asked hesitantly. "I just thought it was unusual, couldn't really happen too much. . .you are okay, right?"

Jamie blinked in surprise at Lexa, then laughed.

"Oh, yeah, I'll be fine. You know how protective Ferals are; Owen'd still be stuck to my side like glue if he was worried I wasn't okay. No, I just got caught in a security door that wasn't on the blueprints, some kind of extra security bulkhead they installed later. This Johnson guy's security badge opened the door, but it was weird, it took an extra second," Jamie explained. "We went in, and it snapped shut on my leg as I was going through it," she finished with a shrug, watching Lexa carefully from the corner of her eye.

Lexa swore softly, naming the Dominion and the Creator and rattling off a number of expressively colorful terms.

"Sorry," she said after finishing her sotto voce rant. "Dominion protocols, I should have thought to warn you guys, especially you, since you were impersonating a security guard," Lexa said apologetically, pausing and putting a hand on Jamie's shoulder to express her sincere sorrow. "On the high-security doors, each person going through has to swipe a security pass, or have one swiped for them. If Owen went in before you, the system assumed you were an intruder, because only one card had been swiped. If the door paused before opening, it was waiting to see if any more cards were going to be swiped, meaning more than one person was entering," she explained, wincing that Jamie had to pay the price for her thoughtlessness. "The card slot on the other side was deactivated, wasn't it?" Lexa asked, then cocked her head in curiosity when Jamie nodded. "How'd you get it open again?"

Jamie grinned.

"I'm stretchy, and Owen's really damn strong. We probably would've sent up a bunch of red flags in Security, forcing the door open. . .except Eve said her nanites weren't registering that wall or door at all. Whatever the Dominion's hiding in their off-camera areas, they don't want Security monitoring it, so that door's not hooked into the system."

"Well, lucky break," Lexa said with a rueful nod. "Still, sorry you got beat up over it," she continued, putting Jamie's arm over her own shoulder to take some of Jamie's weight off her bad leg. "Owen's not gonna pound me for forgetting to tell you, is he?"

"Naaah," Jamie said with a grin. "I'm not gonna tell him," she finished as they pressed on toward the data storage room awkwardly but more smoothly than Jamie would have limping the whole way.

"SHAL!" Brennan cried in alarm when he saw the blood soaking the back of her head. Jesse turned to put himself between his teammates and the door as Brennan scrambled up onto his hands and knees, diving to Shalimar's side as fast as he could.

"Shal, ohgod, Shal, talk to me!" Brennan urged her as he searched the back of her head for the wound, hoping the bullet hadn't cracked her skull, that she wasn't already dead, but no, thank goodness, she was still breathing...

Jesse couldn't help flinching when another hole appeared in the wall next to the door. He didn't mind taking bullets for the team, it was what his massing power was good for, but there was a difference between seeing the bad guys pointing guns at him and just standing there blindly waiting for another unseen attack. The blind waiting could also be a problem, if the next attack came when Jesse had to release his mass to take another breath...

Deciding he didn't want to take that risk, and not knowing how long he might have to provide a shield, Jesse quickly released his mass and took a breath. He held it and re-massed, then stepped in front of the other side of the door. Their attacker had obviously figured they wouldn't put their backs to the thinner door when there were solid walls on either side of it, but on the other hand, whatever they were shooting was punching through the walls just as easily as it had the door, so Jesse figured it didn't really matter.

Another shot pierced the wall on the door's other side, right in front of Jesse's chest. He almost smiled, proud to have accurately predicted the shooter's next move, but then he frowned. His massed body hadn't had to deflect anything more than the chunk of wall that had been blown away by the impact. . .there hadn't been any bullet.

"She'll be okay, thank God," Brennan called up to Jesse, having found the small wound at the top of Shalimar's head. "She was just clipped by shrapnel, scalp wounds bleed like a bitch, even on Ferals. . .but I think it's clotting already..."

Brennan glanced up to make sure of Jesse's position, then moved to sit Shalimar up in his lap with Jesse between them and the wall. He patted at her face and whispered her name, frowning in concern when she didn't react in the slightest.

"She's totally out..." Brennan said with confused worry. "If she was only clipped, she should come right out of it. . .it's like she was hit, but there's no bullet wound..."

Jesse was worried that Brennan was right on both counts, that Shalimar had not been hit by a bullet, but by an impact powerful enough to punch through the solid walls. The last attack had sent a chunk of the wall flying into Jesse's massed chest. . .he was worried that it was some kind of air attack, focused so tight the results just looked like bullet holes...

Glancing over his shoulder to make sure Brennan and Shalimar were safe, Jesse crouched slightly, lowering himself so that he could peek through the hole the last attack had punched in the wall. His eyes widened in surprise to see two people in the hallway outside, a stocky man with the pink eyes of an Amphibious Feral approaching their room and a willowy blonde woman with wind coruscating around her hands so intensely it was causing visible distortion.

"Brennan!" Jesse called out in warning after de-massing his head and torso, holding his still-massed arms in front of his face, throat, and abdomen in case the woman fired another shot. He re-massed himself entirely as the the man kicked in the door, obviously possessing the enhanced leg strength of a frog or toad. 'Jess, Bren, Shal, we've got company down here!' Lexa's voice said over their commrings at the same time. 'Heavily armed company; we could use a hand, guys!'

"Us too!" Brennan answered her, then thrust his hand forward to blast the Amphibious Feral with an electrical bolt before he could charge into the room. Blinking in surprise, the man attempted to hop into the air, hoping to insulate himself by not being grounded to anything, but it was too late. He was less than eight feet from Brennan, Brennan's electrical bolt struck the man even as his eyes were registering it. His Feral reflexes managed to propel him up off the ground, but he had already been hit, being blasted back through the door now that he was airborne.

Jesse decided to change tactics; it looked like the woman was planning something nasty since her partner was breaking down the door. He released his mass and exhaled, phasing himself, hoping she was going to try to blow the wall down now that it had been weakened by her prior attacks, catching them in its debris. Brennan had already taken care of her partner, hopefully that had caught her by surprise, made her hesitate for a just a second...

Dashing right through the wall, Jesse grinned to see the blonde woman's surprised face turned to her right, looking at where her Feral partner had collapsed on his back, unconscious. Her hands were upraised, pointed at Jesse's chest with wind still visibly swirling around them, but she was off her guard. Jesse released his phase and inhaled at the same time, massing again as the woman's shocked face snapped back to face him, surprised anew at his sudden appearance. The wind surged off her fingers and slammed into Jesse, nearly blowing him back into the wall he had just passed through, but it couldn't quite move and certainly couldn't harm his ultra-dense massed form.

Grinning harder, Jesse quickly took the three steps to close the distance between himself and the blonde mutant, his grin twisting into a smirk at her look of surprised panic when her power couldn't stop him. She turned to run, but Jesse was already on top of her, flicking the base of her skull with one massed finger and sending her to the floor like a ton of bricks.

"We're clear out here, Bren, unless these two have backup coming around the corner," Jesse reported as he turned back and re-entered the room through its shattered door. "Is Shal okay?" he asked as he stepped back inside, smiling with relief to see her eyelids fluttering.

"Owww..." she groaned, squeezing her eyes back shut and gingerly raising a hand to the back of her head. "What the heck hit me?"

"A small chunk of wall, and a whole lot of wind," Jesse answered, smirking at the look of confusion Brennan gave him. "It wasn't a silenced gun, it was a Molecular with air control powers," he explained. "She and the Feral are both out cold. He was an Amphibious, water-based, so your electricity probably has him down for a while."

"Okay," Brennan answered, nodding. He stood and gave Shalimar a hand, pulling her up to her feet and holding her steady until she regained her footing before releasing her hand. "You said this was the right way, you found Adam's trail?"

"Yeah," Shalimar answered with a nod, then stopped nodding when her head felt like it wanted to fall off. "Ick, scalp wounds bleed like stuck pigs," she muttered in irritation when she put a hand to her sore head and discovered the blood in her hair. "His scent was stronger on this door handle than the last one, relatively fresh, so he was this way recently. I should be able to find his actual trail somewhere in the hallway ahead," she declared firmly, deciding to worry about her hair later. Brennan nodded and gestured to the door; Jesse turned around and went back out again, ready to shield Shalimar with his massed body while she scouted for Adam.

Shalimar shook her head briskly to clear it, nearly losing both her footing and her lunch, and she held on to Brennan tightly when he steadied her again. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes, held it for a moment, then released it slowly.

"Okay," she said, nodding to Jesse where he had paused in concern, to reassure him she was fine. "Let's go."

Jesse cautiously led the way down the hall, ready to mass the instant he saw anything suspicious or Shalimar gave the word that she heard any sign of danger. Her eyes were once more in their vertical-pupiled golden Feral mode as she kept an ear out, sniffing at the air as they went to check for stronger amounts of Adam's scent.

Shalimar passed a few doors whose handles did not smell of Adam's scent, or at least not from recently, then grinned fiercely at the next intersection of the hallway. She turned to the right, sniffing slightly just to make sure, then turned to the left and inhaled deeply.

"Yep," she said with the anticipatory grin of a predator spotting prey. "Adam definitely went this way, down this hall. There's a lot of other scents, including gun oil, so I'm pretty sure he was under guard. Keep ready, guys," she cautioned, then motioned Jesse forward. He nodded back and continued leading the way.

They followed the scent, Shalimar getting excited as it grew increasingly stronger, with no deviations toward any of the doors they were passing. Wherever Adam's guarding captors had escorted him, they had done it directly, and the original members of Mutant X couldn't be far behind him, now.

"This way," Shalimar said at the next intersection, turning and proceeding down it herself in her excitement as Jesse kept going straight, leaving him to catch up with Brennan behind her. She wasn't worried about running into trouble; the scents were recent but not immediately fresh, and she didn't hear anyone in the halls ahead of her.

The trio continued on, slowing when Shalimar held up a cautioning hand, her golden eyes narrowing as she stared into the hallway ahead, listening.

"There's a humming..." she explained over her shoulder to Jesse and Brennan. "I'm not sure what's causing it, but it's intense, going to be hard to hear anything else past it."

"You want me to go first again, just in case?" Jesse asked, frowning slightly with concern, worried about their group being surprised if Shalimar's senses were being foiled.

"No, it doesn't affect scents any, and if we hit some kind of booby trap, my reflexes are better than yours," Shalimar answered. "If I jump, you mass, just to be on the safe side." Jesse nodded his understanding, and they continued.

The hallway turned a short distance later, and Shalimar frowned when she got close. . .the material the walls were constructed of had changed, shifting from whitewashed concrete to a glossy black plastic.

"This looks like..." Shalimar trailed off, glancing back over her shoulder to see if Brennan recognized it.

"..The same stuff the Dominion's shock troops wore, their power-proof armor," Brennan answered, nodding, remembering how it had absorbed his bolts and Lexa's lasers when the Dominion had caught her, just before they had found Adam again. Jesse frowned, curious because he had been at Sanctuary during that fight and caught by the Dominion himself when they had invaded Sanctuary. . .Jesse had never seen the armor in use.

He stepped up to where the hallway turned, where the walls shifted from white to black, and exhaled, phasing himself. He reached out and phased his hand into the wall, then slid his arm through it, up to the edge of the black, space-age plastic. Brennan and Shalimar saw Jesse's blurred shoulders shift as he tried to force his arm to continue, but he couldn't do so. He withdrew his arm from the concrete wall and released his phase, turning back to face his companions.

"Well, it's sort of like the forcefields they had under the Nevada base," Jesse said quietly, frowning. "I could reach my hand past the black, behind it, but I couldn't phase through it. I won't be able to phase us through these walls to escape if we get overwhelmed."

"Terrific..." Brennan sighed, rolling his eyes. "Shal?" he asked, knowing what her answer would be already but asking anyway.

"Yeah, they went this way," she nodded apologetically. "What, were you maybe hoping there was a secret door they took Adam through instead?" she asked with a small, teasing smile.

"I know, I know, not hardly likely," Brennan sighed, rolling his eyes. "But you have to admit, not impossible, with these people, either."

"True enough," she nodded back. "C'mon, let's go find Adam. His scent's still getting stronger; he can't be too far ahead..." she declared, leading the way around the corner.

Brennan followed Shalimar around the corner and into the new section, with Jesse only a pace behind them. Shalimar froze after making the turn, discovering that the far end of the new hallway was not just dark, but pitch black. Even as Shalimar was holding up a hand in warning to Brennan and Jesse, a wall of the power-proof material shot across the hallway, nearly slamming into Jesse and cutting off the path they had just come from. Jesse stumbled into Brennan with a yelp, Brennan scrambling to keep both of them from falling while Shalimar dropped into a combat stance.

"Trouble!" she declared, because she could see the infrared beams coming from the helmets of the Dominion shock troops at the far end of the hallway. Frowning, Brennan held Jesse steady with one hand while Jesse regained his feet, throwing a bolt of electricity down the hallway with his other. The bright blue light of his blast revealed the troops to Jesse and Brennan's eyes before it was absorbed by the first trooper's armor, and it gave Shalimar a clear view of their positioning.

Jesse exhaled, phasing himself, and stepped through Shalimar, taking position in the front of their group. He inhaled as he released his phase and held his breath, massing as the troopers raised their guns. Shalimar and Brennan crouched behind Jesse as he spread his arms wide, trying to provide them with as much cover as possible as the troopers began firing. Their bullets slammed into Jesse's massed form and smashed themselves flat, dropping off to clatter against the floor.

"Go, Jess!" Shalimar urged, pressing him forward. "They can keep firing longer than you can hold your breath! Brennan, their armor's blast proof, but what do you bet their guns aren't?"

Jesse grinned at Shalimar's suggestion and began walking forward, still holding his arms out at his sides to provide cover. The shock troopers' bullets continued to harmlessly strike him as the troopers hoped to clip Shalimar or Brennan behind him. Brennan crouched behind Jesse and Shalimar's moving forms, rolling his hands over each other to build a larger tesla charge.

"NOW!" Brennan cried when he was ready, and Shalimar and Jesse leaped into action. Jesse took a jogging stride or two forward and released his breath and his mass, exhaling into a phase as Shalimar leaped over him. The shock troopers had no time to react to Shalimar's sudden appearance over Jesse and hurtling toward them, because Brennan cut loose with his blast at the same time. The electrical charge leaped from his fingertips, streaking down the hallway's length and through Jesse's immaterial form, striking the shock troops. Their armor was indeed immune to Brennan's power, but it was also made of various plastics, while their guns were still ordinary metal. The barrels of their weapons acted like lightning rods, attracting Brennan's blast and conducting it into the weapons. Springs were melted, mechanisms overheated, and even charges triggered inside the guns' magazines, causing them to explode in the troopers' hands. The troopers cried out in shock and pain as their weapons were destroyed, crying out all the more as Shalimar slammed into them.

Shalimar tackled the first few troopers while they were still distracted by Brennan's destruction of their guns, her feet kicking the two foremost troopers in the faceplates of their helmets and her hands clenching around the necks of the next two as the first pair toppled backward. Jesse strode in behind Shalimar, massing himself and kicking at the troopers to the sides before they could close in and surround Shalimar. It was true that they were all wearing armor, but that armor was designed first and foremost to resist Elemental blasts; it could only reduce physical impacts by so much, the human beings under the armor still vulnerable to being slammed against walls and floors. When the blows being applied to their armor were coming from an extremely strong Feral or the massed arm or leg of a Molecular that weighed dozens and dozens of pounds, moving as fast as a fit young man could punch or kick. . .the troopers were taking blows they could not stand up to.

The Dominion's shock troops were highly trained and experienced however, and responded quickly. The troopers farther back spread out, forcing Shalimar to come to them and expose her back to the troopers nearest whichever one she chose to attack. The other troopers moved in to surround Jesse, grabbing his massed limbs and dog-piling him to keep him from being able to strike them. Shalimar was an experienced fighter as well, and with her reflexes and senses she managed to keep ahead of the shock troops she was fighting, punching or kicking one and managing to acrobatically evade the others who tried to attack her at the same time. Jesse had a bad moment when he ran out of breath; he exhaled into a phase once more, running right through the knot of troopers that had surrounded him, but he had to drop the phase almost immediately to refresh his lungs, because he had gone too long without a full breath. Jesse managed to block the first few blows the nearest troopers threw at him as he heaved for breath, but he was quickly surrounded again and took a few shots to the ribs.

That could have proved to be a problem; if Jesse's breath control was ruined by blows to the torso he would be unable to use his powers and at the shock troops' mercy, but his rescue came in the form of Brennan Mulwray. Brennan's blasts could no longer do anything other than provide lighting, so he stopped wasting them, merely leaving tesla coils arcing around his fists to continue their light. The slight illumination of his power did Jesse and Shalimar little good when Brennan was at the other end of the hallway though, so he had naturally been moving to join them. When Jesse's opponents turned the tide against him, Brennan waded into their backs, using his martial arts experience to kick knees and joint-lock elbows, putting the shock troops out of commission quickly. When the troopers paused to re-assess the situation, Jesse took a deep breath and held it, massing again and ramming bodily into the troopers with all the weight of his ultra-dense form, smashing them into the walls.

In mere moments, the three original members of Mutant X had disabled the Dominion's shock troops and pounded them into unconsciousness. Brennan held one electrically crackling hand overhead, giving them light to examine the end of the hallway by.

The shock troops had been guarding a heavy door, obviously highly-secured with interlocking struts connecting it to both the ceiling and the floor as well as barring it horizontally. There would be no way to force the door open even with a powerful telekinetic, but they were without Kevin's aid regardless. On the other hand, although the door was highly reinforced and secured, and the security card-reader was actually built into the door itself, not to mention powered off, the door itself was made of reinforced steel. . .not the mutation-proof plastic the rest of the hallway was lined with. It was possible there was a forcefield built into the door, but they didn't hear anything...

"Okay, Chris said you've got more of Eve's nanites?" Lexa asked as she and Jamie entered the data storage room. " 'Cause I'm pretty sure this is that whole private network you and Jesse were wondering about, after the last time."

"Whoa, Really?" Jamie asked, her eyes widening as she stared at the relayed data towers strung across the room. "Holy crap..." she muttered, then yanked her cellphone off Johnson's belt and speed-dialed Eve again.

"Talk to me, Jamie," Eve answered immediately.

"Eve, we've found the Dominion's data-storage archive, looks like it's probably the contents of their entire secured network. I'm turning your nanites loose on it, hopefully they'll be able to hack into this easier than Jesse and I could've gotten onto their network," Jamie explained as she fumbled with Johnson's uniform to reach the nanite container in the pocket of her bodysuit under it.

"Got it," Eve answered, her keyboard clicking in the background as she prepared her systems to receive new telemetry from the next generation of nanites. "Go ahead and turn them loose; I'll have everything ready here by the time they're up and running," she instructed. "Leave your phone on; they'll use it as a booster relay to the Helix, get the results that much quicker."

"You got it, Eve. I'll call again if anything changes," Jamie answered, then ended the call and re-clipped the phone to her stolen belt without turning it off. Moving to the first tower in the line of data storage banks, Jamie aimed one end of the small device she had taken from her bodysuit at an exposed serial port. Jamie pressed a button on the device and it emitted a tiny puff air, paused for a moment, then flashed a green indicator light. Jamie nodded once and took a limping step over to the next tower in the relay.

"That's it?" Lexa asked, her mouth quirked in a disbelieving look of surprise as Jamie repeated the process. "You just point that at it and push a button?"

"Yup," Jamie replied without looking up from her work, side-limping from the second tower to the third. "They're nanites, microscopic and weighing less than a milligram; the compressed air puffs a thousand or so of them into the system, and they start networking," she explained as she continued down the line. "They start scanning, figure out what they're connected to, and transmit that data back to Eve at Haven as they start following their programming. Most times, that's either monitoring or scanning whatever system they've been inserted into and transmitting the data off that system to Haven."

"Well, Hell, if it's that easy, give me that," Lexa said as she moved up to Jamie, holding her hand out for the nanite device. "The counter is at the far end, up against the wall in the back corner, at the end of the relay. You see if you can make heads or tails out of it, and I'll do this part." Lexa looked over the device as Jamie handed it over, noting that the dispenser button was large and set apart from the other controls, and the dispenser was obvious. "Just point this at the ports?" she asked, confirming what Jamie had been doing.

"Yeah, just hold it still when you push the button, until the green light comes on. That means the discharge compartment is fully emptied," Jamie explained, then limped toward the back corner. Lexa nodded her comprehension and proceeded to continue introducing Eve's nanites into the data storage systems.

Jamie whistled in surprise at the sight of the timer performing its strange countdown, the sound of the whistle changing slightly in mid-note as Jamie reverted to his normal male shape, surprised by the device's set up.

"This. . .might be bad," Jamie called out to Lexa hesitantly. "It's not just counting down, it's running some kind of algorithm at the same time... It's probably monitoring the data servers at the same time, programmed to go off when they've done something specific. . .either transmitted enough or certain portions of their files, or scrambled them all so they can't be reconstructed from the remains after the explosion..."

"Isn't that great..." Lexa muttered sarcastically as she stepped quickly to the next line of data towers. "Can you shut it off? Or tell how long it's going to take, at least, how much time we have left?"

"Well, I can try, but I'm not sure..." Jamie said uncomfortably, carefully removing the cover from the counter device and hoping he could access its processor. "It depends, on what it's doing, how it's set up to do it. . .and how much security they put on it. I mean, this is computer system security crossed with an electronic explosives detonator. I'm just a hacker, worst that can happen there is I have to crash my system to keep the GSA from tracking Haven's location, y'know?" Jamie said nervously as he started connecting leads from his phone to the timer's motherboard. "If I screw this up, well. . .nobody'll be saying 'I told you so,' y'know?"

"Crap," Lexa muttered, realizing that with the Dominion and the Creator being as twisted and Machiavellian as they were, there was every chance the detonator was overly-sensitive. "Okay, hold off on that if you're the slightest bit unsure; we know the Dominion doesn't kid around. I'll try to get Jesse down here; he's dealt with high-tech explosives before, and his powers can deal with them better. –Jesse?" she finished, speaking into her commring. "Jamie and Owen bailed us out, you guys get clear yet?"

'Yeah, we're okay,' Jesse answered. 'A little battered, but good. Shal says we're on Adam's trail, and we're looking at an extra-secured door, we might have him!'

"Okay, well, I hope you do. . .but Jamie and I are looking at a high-tech timer connected to both the Dominion's data archives and a few hundred gallons of high explosive attached to the place's structural supports," Lexa told him.

'Uh-oh. . .crap, we need my phasing to check this room–' Jesse sighed in frustration. '–I'll be right down, as soon as I can. Don't touch anything if you're not sure it's absolutely safe; I'll be there as quick as I can.'

"That was totally our plan. Make it quick, Nerd Wonder. Your junior version says the timer's running an algorithm on this thing; we have no idea what it's processing or how long we have left," Lexa warned him.

'Well, shit,' Jesse muttered back. 'Soon as I can!' he repeated, then signed off. Lexa shrugged to Jamie, then went back to unleashing the nanites. Jamie grimaced back at her, then started monitoring the counter's computations, hoping he could figure out the parameters its algorithm was computing, maybe figure out what it was calculating.

"Well, you heard her," Jesse said to Shalimar and Brennan. "We've gotta hurry, or it may not matter what we find here."

"Let's do it," Shalimar answered with a nod. "I don't hear anything at all on the other side of this door, so it should be safe enough for you to phase through. Be careful, though," she cautioned, thinking about how the shock troops had been waiting silently, poised in position and just waiting for the wall to trap Mutant X in the power-proof section with them. It was possible there were more troops silently waiting on the other side of the door, and it was a thick door, Shalimar wouldn't hear the sounds of regular breathing through it, even if there were a number of guards. As long as any people on the other side kept quiet, she couldn't be sure.

"Phase the door itself, Jesse," Brennan suggested. "We'll all go through it at once; if there's security waiting on the other side, we'll face them together."

"We should catch them off guard," Shalimar said, her eyes in their Feral mode and her head tipped slightly to one side. "This whole area is off the security cameras, and I don't hear anything here in the hallway with us. That card-reader is powered off, and I don't hear the hum of any other electronics, cameras or motion sensors to tell them we're incoming. . .those guards must have been stationed here to wait, just in case, not here because of us specifically."

"Okay," Jesse nodded, laying one palm flat on the steel door's surface. "Let's do it," he finished, exhaling and rendering the door intangible. Shalimar and Brennan jumped through the door into the room beyond, Jesse right behind them, phasing himself to pass through the door once he released it.

All three of them stopped short, staring at the sight that met them on the other side of the door.

A young woman wearing a guard uniform was sprawled on the floor of an advanced laboratory, her eyes wide and her mouth open in a small 'o' of surprise, a neat bullet hole in the middle of her forehead.

Across the room, near one of the control consoles, was the Creator's withered body. He appeared to have died a natural death, or as natural as his death would be after having extended his lifespan so far, his body contorted awkwardly where he had fallen, his eyes staring sightlessly up at the ceiling, his jaw slack with shock.

"What. . .happened?" Brennan asked no one in particular, staring at the scene. Shalimar stepped forward, still in Feral mode, her golden eyes snapping from point to point in the room, sniffing as she checked its scents.

"It was Adam, Adam was here with them, I'm sure of it..." she said, still sniffing at the air and following Adam's scent to a chair at the end of one console. She crouched next to the chair, frowning as she sniffed at it, then ducked under it for a moment, sniffing at its underside.

"Shal?" Jesse asked, frowning in confusion at Shalimar's behavior. "What is it?"

"Adam fired the gun," Shalimar said worriedly, blinking her eyes back to normal but still frowning in her own confusion. "The scent of cordite is in the upholstery of the chair, and I can smell gun oil in the hollow of the back adjuster under the seat. The gun was hidden there, Adam sitting in the chair, then he pulled the gun and shot the guard. She wasn't even armed, why would he do that?" she asked, unable to rectify her knowledge of Adam's character with the facts her senses were providing her with.

"She. . .was turned to look at him, and she died surprised..." Jesse said with a wince, standing behind where the girl had fallen and studying her positioning relative to the chair Shalimar was at.

"Well, c'mon, guys, we still don't know what actually happened..." Brennan said, holding one hand up to ward off their protests. "We don't know the circumstances, I mean. You two've known Adam longer than I have, lots longer, but I have no problem believing he would shoot someone. . .if he felt he had to. You know what Adam's done in the past; he developed the pods and subdermal governors to restrain Ashlocke. . .I don't think there's much Adam wouldn't do, if he really thought he had to. And who knows what was happening when he fired?" Brennan gestured at Shalimar's suspicious chair, trying to illustrate his point.

"This is the Dominion we're talking about; I doubt a girl in the Creator's secret, high-security lab is an innocent, unarmed or not. She was obviously a guard, probably the Creator's personal bodyguard. She could've been a New Mutant, maybe that's why she wasn't armed, maybe Adam had to shoot her. And it's not like they'd give Adam a gun; he's their captive. Maybe. . .maybe some security guard got bored watching the Creator, tucked his gun in the chair, and forgot about it, didn't take it with him when he left. Maybe Adam saw it there and took that seat on purpose, knowing it was his only chance.

"Shal, you said the Dominion must be on to him, knew he'd sent you that message. If Adam found out they were on to him, he'd know he had to get away. This was his chance, and he took it. He shot the girl and escaped, and the shock did the old guy in. Hell, maybe Adam told the Creator off before he left, I could see him doing that. Crazy old freak probably had a heart attack watching his precious clone tell him he was full of it."

Shalimar and Jesse exchanged a glance, Jesse shrugging to silently say he could see Brennan's point. Shalimar scowled briefly and decided to move on.

"His scent goes this way..." she said, following the trail from the chair to a shelving unit in one corner. Shalimar frowned at the unit. "It disappears here; the scent trail ends..." she said, glancing up at Brennan and Jesse. "..Like he went through the wall. Jesse?" she said, backing away from the corner. Jesse nodded and trotted over, then phased and walked through both the shelving unit and the wall behind it.

Shalimar and Brennan waited, and a moment later there was a click, and the shelving unit swung out to face the other wall of the corner, revealing Jesse and a passageway behind it.

"We're on the other side of the complex, at this point," Jesse said. "I think these are the other emergency stairs, Adam could have taken them right to the surface, gotten away."

"With all the security still on? We had to have Eve hack her way in first before we could approach undetected," Brennan said with a frown of his own.

"Well, this was obviously the Creator's personal lab..." Shalimar said, frowning with revulsion at his corpse. It wasn't the fact it was a dead body that revolted her, but whose dead body it was. "Giant control freak that he was, cloning himself and shaping Adam's whole life, I wouldn't be surprised if his lab could temporarily override security. And if anybody could figure that out at a moment's notice, it's Adam."

"You're right," Jesse nodded. "I'm going to go help Jamie with that bomb; you guys should see if you can follow Adam's trail. Shal, if you can track him to the surface and figure out which way he went, Brennan might be able to use his propulsion blasts to catch up. Adam would be sure to see Brennan coming that way, at least, know that we're in the area looking for him. The scent isn't old, right?"

"You're right, it's not more than an hour or two old," Shalimar said with a nod. "If Adam had to sneak out the emergency exit and leave on foot, he might still be relatively close!"

"Okay, let's go!" Brennan agreed, following them into the emergency stairwell.

Lexa had finished applying Eve's nanites to each of the data towers and was impatiently waiting for Jesse to arrive.

Jamie had finished connecting his phone to the timer's circuitry and had scrolled through a few of the display screens on the phone, testing the capabilities of the circuitry he had connected it to. The results had been encouraging, at least in the sense that the timer was a relatively simple device, set up to perform its functions regarding the database it was connected to but not so sophisticated as to notice Jamie's phone monitoring it and triggering the explosion early.

Or at least, it hadn't yet, so Jamie didn't think it was going to and started trying to assess exactly what the timer's algorithm was analyzing and how much time they actually had left.

Switching his phone's display to another setting, Jamie connected the miniature keyboard from the other pocket of his bodysuit. Being the California team's resident computer hacker, Eve had installed a few more programs onto his phone than she did on the others, also giving it a serial port Jamie could use to connect to computers he might encounter in the field, or to connect a tiny keyboard she designed for him, letting him hack with the phone if its other connections could link it to another computer or mainframe. Elastically shaping his fingertips into points that could more easily type on the tiny keys, Jamie quickly linked his phone to the timer's motherboard, displaying its computations on his phone's screen. A few moments more traced the timer's input from the relay towers, establishing what data the timer was processing.

Jamie's jaw dropped as he gasped in surprise.

"Oh, shit!" he nearly yelled, typing frantically to get his phone disconnected from the timer so he could unhook it without disturbing the timer's computations. "Lexa, your commring!" Jamie yelled at her, not even looking up from his frantic work of disconnecting his phone. "We're out of time; we've got minutes before this thing blows, single digit! Maybe less than five!" Jamie cried across the room to her, glancing up just once to make sure she realized how serious the situation was. "Dial Owen and Chris, and tell your crew to scoot! We're gonna be toast if we don't leave now!"

"System: dial Chris and Owen!" Lexa barked into her commring, dashing across the room to offer Jamie her support once he was done with his phone. "Jess, Bren, Shal, we're in trouble!" Lexa said as her ring chirped twice, informing her Chris and Owen had answered their ringing phones. "We're ALL in trouble; Jamie says the bomb is going off in less than ten minutes, maybe less than five! Get to the Helix; Owen, Jamie needs a lift, still limping!"

Jamie nearly dropped his phone when it started ringing the instant he unclipped it from the timer and it returned to normal operations.

"Owen?" he asked as he opened the phone, having recognized the pre-programmed ringtone.

'Jamie, do your thing, elasticize the back wall, Chris and I are on the other side!' Owen told him. 'We can't waste time running all the way around the floor to get back to you guys! I can stretch the wall once you rubber-fy it, and Lexa's laser can slice it open!'

"Right!" Jamie said into his phone, realizing the sense of Owen's plan. "Uh, as long as I can do it to a bunch of concrete, just doing it to the chair earlier made me feel weird. . .I'm doing it right next to the cables going through the wall, my right side, your left!" Jamie told Owen, cocking his head to pin his phone between his shoulder and his ear as he moved, laying both hands flat against the wall. He concentrated on his power, trying to push it out of his hands, like he was just making his palms and the front of his fingers elastic, and extending it from there. . .he felt the texture of the concrete wall grow softer under his hands, then grinned when the wall began distending toward him, pressing into the room, two spots the size of Owen's broad hands pushing the stretchy wall in.

"The Hell?" Lexa asked with a perplexed frown, wondering what in the world was going on.

"Slice it open, use your laser!" Jamie told her. "Concrete's soft as rubber while I'm stretching it; don't hit Owen!" he warned, Lexa blinking and nodding as she realized what was going on, even if she didn't understand how it had happened. Pointing with her first two fingers, Lexa aimed high and fired her laser, its bright yellow-orange beam slicing into the elasticized concrete near the ceiling, where the wall was still flat and solid.

The strain proved too much for the wall to take, stretching under the immense force of Owen's Ursine strength and ripping when Lexa's laser created a weak point. The wall split open with a bizarre tearing sound, Owen stumbling through it as the rubbery concrete parted around his arms.

"Don't let go!" Owen yelled as his upper body fell into the room, remembering how the security door had snapped back to its ordinary shape when Jamie released it. Owen was pinned in the wall, his hips caught between the two edges of elastic concrete. He forced one knee through and kicked with his foot until it popped through as well, then planted that foot against the wall's lower edge and leaned forward, shoving with his arms and one leg to pull his other leg through the compressed opening.

Owen turned around once he was free, shoving his right arm back through the slit in the elasticized wall. Jamie held his position, both hands still flat against the wall, concentrating on rendering it elastic. He could feel his power working, and he could feel the process draining him. He was glad Owen was there to carry him, because besides his injured leg, Jamie was sweating like a racehorse and could feel his pulse thundering in his temples. . .he wasn't going to be running anytime soon.

"Jamie?" Lexa asked, frowning with concern at the way Jamie was holding himself up by leaning against his hands' position on the wall. "You okay?" she asked as she moved up to him, taking his phone from where he was awkwardly trying to keep it pinned against his shoulder while his head wanted to sag forward.

Owen's eyes shifted from staring into the middle distance to looking at Jamie's face, frowning himself when he saw the way Jamie was sweating and breathing. Then he blinked and straightened up, leaning away from the wall and pulling against the arm he had pushed through it, dragging Chris through the slit in the wall. Chris had taken Owen's hand and wrapped his other hand around Owen's wrist, bending over double to put his head between his upper arms, trying to make himself as streamlined as he could to pass through the pinning opening. Owen took two steps away from the wall as he pulled, dragging Chris into the room bodily, then let go when Chris' second foot popped free and he was still hopping on the first one.

"Okay, that?" Chris said, staring at the wall with its hairline crack where it had elastically snapped back into its normal position, "Was seriously weird. But kinda cool," he finished with a grin. His smile faded when Jamie gasped and let go of the wall, nearly falling against it before Owen snatched Jamie up in his arms as he collapsed.

"Jamie! You okay?!" Owen cried out, shifting Jamie to cradle him with one arm and semi-gently slapping at his face with the other. "Hey, hey, stay with us!" Owen urged him. "We need your photographic head to tell us the quickest way outta here!"

"Hmkay," Jamie grunted blearily, frowning up at Owen. "But I'm not squishing any more walls. That was hard, concrete's a lot tougher than steel. I'm wiped."

"You've been rubberifying steel?" Chris asked, frowning in thought as they dashed from the room. "Metal has tensile strength, that's sorta like the long-chain molecules of elastic, right?" he asked rhetorically. "But concrete's just, y'know, stone. Solid. Way less flexible, take more juice to make it so, I'd guess."

Lexa blinked at Chris in surprise as they ran for the emergency stairwell.

"Since when do you know about tensile strengths and long-chain molecules?" she asked, having never seen Chris display any scientific leanings. He was a handyman jack-of-all trades, knew the power systems of the engineering level, but that was hardly the same thing as molecular sciences.

"Since I studied how my powers work, to know what substances my voice can shatter," Chris answered with a grin as they charged into the stairwell, Owen bounding up each flight of steps in only two strides. Jamie simply held on for the ride, knowing his weight wasn't anything even remotely like near enough to slow Owen down.

The Creator nodded to someone behind Adam, and Adam quickly turned to see who it was, trying to understand what was happening. He knew something was wrong; the Creator had claimed he did not need to force or compel Adam's cooperation with every confidence he was correct in doing so. He had addressed Adam by name, something he had never done before, and he had done so mockingly, dismissively.

Like Adam's name wasn't important, was of no consequence.

Like Adam's identity was inconsequential.

Adam turned to see one of the guards stepping forward, smirking at him. She was a woman, the only female guard in the room, and Adam's eyes narrowed when he realized she wasn't armed.

He gasped in surprise when she grinned, her eyes flashing a bright neon blue.

Adam saw nothing but the bright blue light for an instant, then he was blinking, in confusion. . .and looking at his own body? What in the world? And he was weak, trembling, his chest hurt...

Glancing down to see if the girl's mutation had a visible effect on his pained chest, Adam gasped to see he was wearing the Creator's suit. And the Creator's long gray curls were hanging over Adam's pained chest. And the hand he raised in surprise was ancient, wrinkled and possessed thick, yellowed fingernails, almost like claws, chipped and uncared for just like the Creator's hair, like he had things he was more concerned with than personal grooming...

Adam was in the Creator's body. The Creator's failing body.

"Yes, 'my boy', we've traded places," the Creator said, said with Adam's mouth, in Adam's body, nonchalantly walking to a chair and dropping into it with a grin. He sprawled carelessly, allowing Adam's body to drop down to the chair without concern, Adam's comparatively young bones in no danger of snapping from such a sudden impact. He crossed one of Adam's ankles over the opposite knee and smiled even more broadly, enjoying flexibility he had not experienced in decades.

"Ohhh...." the Creator gasped with a small, surprised smile. "Oh, oh, oh. . .oh my, all the traitorous little surprises I was planning as you." The Creator grinned with Adam's face as Adam collapsed to the floor in the Creator's body, his left arm going numb, his left side tingling on pins and needles...

"Well. We'll see about that," the Creator said to Adam with his own face, his mocking smirk the last thing Adam saw as his vision went dark.

Cherise hadn't realized her targets had access to the other person's memories; she thought the memories stayed with the original mind. After all, how would the agents know what their instructions were if they only had the memories of the mission's target? They must have both sets of memories, or their own recent memories but access to the target's long-term memories or something. . .wow, that meant the agents could do a lot more while driving the target's body than she had thought they could... That was pretty cool actually, if...

The Creator pulled the gun from the back of the chair he had chosen and shot Cherise in the forehead, smirking as the surprise just began to register on her face while he squeezed the trigger. This particular transfer would not be reversed.

That taken care of, the Creator turned to leave. The makeshift lab on the second floor had been prepared; he could begin the treatments that would extend this body's lifespan just as he had long ago begun extending his original body's duration. Not just as, though, he had made many improvements to the process over the long decades of his life. Starting the treatments at a much more advanced state than he had the first time, this body would last much, much longer.

And furthermore, he had an additional security team waiting in the elevator. Every guard currently with him, who had witnessed the transfer, would be eliminated. This body was relatively young and fit, he would be able to apply all the needed injections himself. There would be no more medics seeing the secrets of how he maintained his existence, and none of these guards would pass along that tale, either.

The Creator grinned with his new face. He hated loose ends, and was quite happy to be eliminating a large number of them. The bomb would take care of the rest.

The Double Helix flew away from the Dominion's installation moments before it exploded, searching the surrounding area but finding no trace of Adam. Eventually the team headed back to Los Angeles with nothing but more questions, hoping that somehow Adam was free, that he might be contacting them soon.