Discovery 1.5

Images flashed before Anna's eyes too quickly for her mind to follow, but she felt as if a stabbing mantle laced with pure anguish, anger, and frustration had been laid upon her shoulders. She saw bright orange nonsensical symbols, flashes of bright lights, massive artillery guns, pools of blood, tubes, the pale face of a woman, and the scowl of a grizzly-looking man with long crooked yellow teeth.

Eventually, she found herself in a massive room unlike she had ever seen before. The walls, instead of being made out of drywall or plaster, were made out of glistening, seamless metal. They all gathered in a sphere around her, while she sat on a platform suspended in the middle. To her right was a bank of monitors and just beyond them was what appeared to be a computer the size of a car. A man of unremarkable shape and size sat before the monitors. He shed something like a helmet fitted with tubes and electrodes revealing a bald head. He placed the helmet on a mount and turned around to face her from his wheelchair.

"I've tracked her down." The man said, his tone even-handed and crisp. He clicked a button on a keyboard and a map appeared on one of the monitors. "She's just left Caldecott County and has stopped at the discount suites off of route twenty."

"Great." She heard herself boom in Logan's voice. "They went East. Couldn't have gone a little North, say - out of hillbilly country?"

"It would seem not." The bald man clicked a couple of more buttons on the wide black keyboard. "You remember the briefing?"

"Yeah. Powers of absorption through skin-to-skin contact. She can take memories and replicate abilities, or in our case, powers temporally."

"There's been more developments. This one is far from standard. Mystique has a hold of her."

Anna felt the corners of her eyes tighten. "How the hell is that?" She pointed Logan's beefy arm at the computer. "Isn't this giant gizmo supposed to give us the edge?"

"In this particular case, we were a few years too late. The girl is Mystique's adopted daughter."

"What? That thing has it in her to raise a kid?"

"It was a surprising development to me as well. I was aware that Destiny was involved -"

"The Brotherhood's soothsayer?"

"I suppose you could call her that." An image of Irene appeared where the map was, but in the photo, she was younger. Her hair was longer and she stood a little taller. It appeared the photo had been cropped out from some larger image. "She's still acting as their primary mutant locater."

"No wonder they'd kill to get Cerebro. Leaving all that up to some crack-pot -"

"I wouldn't discount the woman's ability, Logan. Her predictions are never wrong. They just may not always line up with our current timeline."

"Whatever. I'm not worried about the old blind woman."

"You should be." The man straightened up in his chair. "Between her and Mystique, I worry how close you'll be able to get. Especially considering they are her adoptive mothers. And even if you manage to reach her, I wonder if she will even want to hear what you have to say."

"Want me to bag her then?

The man blinked. "What?"

Anna watched her hands raise. "I'm kidding, Charles." She leaned back in her chair, stared at the monitors, and stroked her rough chin. "Though I honestly don't know how else we would be able to do this."

"We will do it like we've done it every other time. Level with her. Tell her what's going on. Give her a choice. We may normally get the jump on fledgling mutants but we don't get that edge this time. The approach doesn't change… we just need to be smarter about it."

There was a pause. "Do you really want to risk it this time? I admire your nobility, I do, but this girl - she sounds dangerous in the wrong hands. And by the sounds of it, she's most of the way there already. Think about it, she can take on any mutant ability. Those possibilities are endless."

Another silence hung in the air that was only disrupted by the whine of the bald man's electric wheelchair as he spun to face the monitors. He clicked a few buttons and a photo of Anna's yearbook photo from the year before appeared next to Irene's photo. The man rested his elbows on the edges of the keyboard and he tented his fingers. "I hear what you're saying." He said after a while. "But who would we be if we started abducting teenagers, Logan? Even if we had a justification. What would make us different from what he does then?"

Anna felt Logan's stomach drop like a lead weight. She curled her fist and flexed her jaw. "Standard procedure then?"

***

Returning to reality was like falling backward out of a pool of water. She felt out of touch and completely out of her senses. She creaked open her eyes and found herself staring upward into a cloudless bright blue sky. Her fingers probed around her immediate surroundings and they skipped along boiling asphalt. She bent at her waist and found the ground again beneath her. The burnt sienna car was immediately to her left and in front of her was Logan, who was completely laid out and baking in the sun. As soon as the world stopped spinning around her, she rose to her knees and crawled over to him. She watched and waited for his chest to rise and fall, and when it did, she let out the breath she had clutched in her chest. She spotted a watch on his wrist and craned her neck to check its face. It was fifteen minutes to five in the afternoon.

A surge of panic jumped from the tip of her head down to her toes. She had only fifteen minutes till her mothers were back to pick her up. She clutched onto the side of the car to help herself up, but when she looked at her hand after she rose, she spotted three long bony spikes sticking out from the back of her fist. Looking at them made her head spin and it took all she had not to faint a second time. Averting her eyes from her hands, she turned to race up the stairs, when she paused and looked back at Logan who laid helpless on the ground. She gritted her teeth, continued up the stairs, swiped one of the bedspreads from her room, and ran back down to the parking lot. Using the sheet as a barrier between his skin and hers, she drug the - surprisingly dense - man by the underarms up the stairs and to his room. When she reached the front door, she found it unlocked and threw it open.

Inside the dark room, she could practically taste the cigarette ash in the air. Propping him up on one of the beds, she turned to leave, when her eye caught the glint of something on the dresser leaned against their shared wall. When she got closer and looked at it in the crack of light from the door, it looked to be some sort of listening device. A cup-like microphone had roughly a yard's length of black cable wrapped around its base, and on its end was a set of heavy-duty-looking headphones. Next to it on the dresser was a pair of funky-looking goggles. She picked them up and looked through them. There was nothing but blackness on the inside. She fumbled around with them some more, found a switch, and flipped it. Upon a second glance, she saw a thermal imaging readout. She dropped it back on the dresser and kicked in one of the drawers with a swift knee. She turned and faced the sleeping man. "You've been watching me this whole time!" She growled in a voice that didn't quite sound like her own. Without thinking, she threw her fist into the closest wall, where it stuck like an arrow into a target. She pulled at her curled fist, and it wasn't till she had both feet planted on the wall was she finally able to free herself with a sudden give then sent her flying back on her rear.

She looked up at the man on the bed from her seat on the ground. "Of course you were." She hissed. "Seems like everyone has." She slowly rose and made to walk out the door, when her foot caught on something. She looked down and saw his duffel bag wrapped around her ankle. She knelt and pulled its open edges apart. She saw an oddly shaped mask with long protruding tips and an orange and black suit folded neatly just beneath it. "What in the hell?" Underneath the outfit was a little leather pouch pouring over with slick black pens with two red stripes. The same kind Logan had given her in the parking lot. She picked one up and looked it over.

"Wait, what am I doing?" She stood like someone had kicked her and ran out the door, slamming it behind her. Running back into her room she jumped into the shower, vaguely rubbed some soap over herself, ran back out, and started to dress when she heard a knock at the door.

"Honey? Can we come in?" It was her mother, Raven, speaking.

Anna clenched her teeth and threw a random top over her head and a pair of pants she hoped matched. She turned to open the door when she caught sight of her hand again. The spikes were still jutting out like individual bony sabers.

"Uh - just a sec!" She shouted through the door and ran for the bathroom. Closing and locking the door behind her, she looked over her hands. "What the hell? How did he make them go back?"

"Honey? We need to get going!" She could just hear her mother call.

"Fuck-Fuck-Fuck" Anna cursed. She clenched her fingers into fists the unclenched them, but her bone spikes didn't change. She could hear the front door open and feet tread inside the motel room.

"Anna -" Her Mah, Irene, called for her. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine! Just - hang on!" Anna shook her hands, but the only thing that helped was shaving a layer of wallpaper off the wall.

"Well, whatever it is that you're doing in there, please hurry. We need to get going!"

"Shit" Anna said under her breath and leaned against the bathroom door. "Five minutes. I just need five minutes and I'll be ready. Five minutes - alone."

She heard the shuffling of feet. "Okay -" Raven muttered. "Fine, we will be down in the car. But please, honey, be ready." There was more shuffling feet than the gently closing of a door.

Anna sat down on the toilet and stared at her hands. The spikes looked longer than ever and their vaguely brown hue made her stomach turn. She closed her eyes and tried to steady her breath. "You're okay, Anna - You'll make it through this." As her heart began to steady, she felt a tingle in her forearms and looked back at her hands. The spikes were slowly starting to retract back into the back of her hand. She sucked in another deep breath, held it, and let it go. The spikes continued on their journey till they had retracted back into her flesh with nothing so much as a scratch to show for it. She grasped her knees with both hands and sucked in a lung full of air. "Oh thank god." She mumbled and wiped the sweat from her face with her hands.

She stood, left the bathroom, and made to walk out the front door when she paused a second time to look at her hands and found that they were bare. She sucked in a breath through her nose and sighed before turning around and walking back to the chest of drawers holding her clothes. Sifting through a drawer she drew out a pair of black leather gloves. She took her time putting them on and securing the tiny metal fastenings in the back. She held her open palms up before her as if waiting for something to happen. The gloves weren't a new feature by any means, but now they weren't optional. Now they sheathed weapons that some would even consider deadly. She couldn't help but wonder if this was how it would be forever. Would she never get to touch another person again without hurting them? Without possibly killing them? She looked past her gloves and notices the black pen with two red stripes laying atop the chest of drawers before her.

A knock at the door stirred her from her thoughts. Before she had the chance to reply, the door swung in and she saw Raven standing in the doorway. "Honey, what are you doing? We need to go." She paused. "And what is that you are wearing?" Anna looked down for the first time and saw she was wearing a purple sweater, highlighter pink leggings, and rainbow socks.

"Sorry. I was getting dressed in kinda a ru-"

The door slammed behind her mother and she rushed in, pushed Anna out of the way, and fished out a set of clothes out of the chest of drawers. "Put this on. Now."

"Okay, I-"

"Now! We are already late."

Anna stripped and got redressed in the outfit prepared for her faster than she had ever gotten dressed in her life. While her mother was turning and walking for the door, she slipped the black pen into her sleeve, the clip latched at the hem. The second she had slipped on her boots, her mother took her by the hand and was dragging her outside. By the time Anna had blinked they were down the stairs and both in the car. Their old Toyota pulled out of the spot and peeled out of the parking lot. Anna peeked over the back of her seat and looked back at the rapidly shrinking burnt sienna gremlin still sitting in front of the motel. 'Oh, man.' She thought.