Conversation framed by * means telepathy.:)

The X-men's mad dash for the garage was interupted by the intercom exploding with Robert Drake's (or Iceman as he'd been dubbed) cheerful voice.

"Hey guys, we're back!"

By the time Psylock, Archangel, Bobby, Cyclops, Rogue and Professor Charles Xavier (founder of the schools for the gifted) had disembarked from the Blackbird, gone to the war room, and been fully briefed on the situation, Logan was practically frothing at the mouth.

"Hey people, we have to go -before- their trail is cold!"

"Agreed. Logan, you, Jean and Gambit track the children. Beast, Bobby and Storm will accompany you and try to obtain one of the Cyborg wreckages from the scene. The rest of us will remain here and monitor local newstapes incase there is another such incident. These children are not exactly helping the mutant image with these incidents. We need to get them out of the public eye as fast as possible before the situation becomes too volatile." The professor was always so damn calm and rational.

*Perhaps you should try to calm yourself, Logan. You might find and improvement in your thinking as well.*

*Mind your own business, Chaz.*

*That girl means a great deal to you, doesn't she?*

*I don't know what you're talking about.*

The professor's gaze lingered after his friend for a long time after Logan's team had departed.

Darcy accelerated the van Frizz had 'borrowed' for them. The entire crew was tired; not having had that much sleep the previous night and fighting two Cyborg battles in as many days had taken its toll. Most were stretched out as comfortably as possible in the back. Maggs was across from him in the passenger seat.

Darcy had to admire the woman. Not much older than his twenty years herself, she'd taken them all with her when she'd escaped the lab. They been pursued since then and she'd repeatedly been the one to lead them to safety. She never seemed comfortable in the role they'd assigned her however; possibly because she'd been 'designed for another purpose entirely.

Darcy and Chuck, mutants at birth, hadn't been too much of a problem for their captors, save for the fact that their mutations had altered the course of their 'redesign' slightly. The effect was that while Darcy had been 'designed' to throw ice, he threw flame. Where Chuck was 'designed' to possess psionic blades, she had psionic disks as well as telepathy. They were not exacty copies of the intended imitatees.

Still, they'd been the lucky ones. Frizz and Joel had been flatscans. They'd taken the mutagens better but the transformations had been so much more painful; he couldn't imagine what it had been like to have pea green eyes turn to ruby on onyx as had happened to Frizz. Joel had a low pain threshold to begin with and all agreed that it had been a blessing he had the transformation he had. The higher his invunerablity had crept, the less pain he'd felt. If it hadn't been for that, he surely would have died of shock.

Maggs had been another story entirely. Darcy could still see it. She'd been brought to the lab in a wire dog cage, her back already criss-crossed with half-healed scars as if she'd been whipped, and a single thread of sanity tauntly connecting her to the real world. She'd been bought like a slave by their captors. Not even her own brother could break down her barriers erected around the year previous to their rejoining in a laboratory.

After being admitted to their hell, the lab assisstants had striped her, strapped her to a wall where they proceeded to hose her down. At least he and the others had been allowed the decency of a hospital bed and restraints. She'd gone completely feral. Snarling and snapping, tubes were connected to her and I.V.'s pumped strange chemicals into her veins despite her best efforts and her tormentors waited. Even her own blood brother's voice couldn't penetrate her madness.

After an eternity (time somehow ceased to have meaning to him somewhere along the line) the head of the entire project of the master as he later insisted on being called, had come to check on her. He started coming regularly after that, apparently pleased by what he saw. He was constantly adjusting this or that; Darcy's fists tighten on the steering wheel as he deliberately forced himself to see her strapped to a wall going through hell and back.

The others at this point, were allowed a few hours a day of supervised exercise (collared, to ensure no premature usage of their powers). They left her each morning only to return each afternoon with no visable signs of change. Joel's voice tried to sooth her each night and must have penetrated the animal rage because eventually, slowly, bit by bit, she began to heal. After what must have been a month, the master was apparently satified with Magg's progress and she was gingerly lifted off the wall onto a bed between her brother and himself.

"Sis," Joel had whispered "we're gonna get through this. We're all here with you." She'd turned weary eyes but had said nothing. Darcy's first thought was she'd given up. He'd hoped not.

A lab assisstant had come in with the master then. They each carried a scapel in their hands. They casual had walked over to the restrained girl and plunged their blades in running them down whatever limb they'd struck. She hadn't even whimpered but her eyes blazed a spirited hatred that hadn't been there before. To Darcy's amazment, the wounds healed themselves in a matter of seconds.

"Excellent." were the only words that Darcy had ever heard from the 'beloved Master' in his entire imprisonment, "On to phase two."

They'd moved her to another room in the complex. For months after, her screams reverbrated through every hallway, gym, laboratory, nook and crany in that building.

"Hey, want me to drive?" Maggs voice interupted his thoughts. He shook his head, noticing how tightly he was gripping the wheel.

"I'm fine. We should stop soon anyway, and come up with some sort of stragem as to where to go from here."

"You're driving, where ever." She casually began to pick her teeth with a claw. He had no idea what exactly they'd done to graft those claws onto her bone structure. As the echoes of her screams still reverberated his nightmares, he suddenly realized he had no desire to discover how.

Maggs slammed the car door shut. She was in the parking lot of a Mickey D's and had retrieved the information they needed. She returned to their table, noticing Joel was, as usual, managing to consume his entire portion of the food money in one sitting. She plopped the laptop on the empty tray.

"You know, something's not right."

"Tell me about it. We could be..."

"SHUT UP FRIZZ!" their collective voices managed to stop the girl (and all conversation in the crowded restaurant) before she'd gotten too far in her rampage. She'd never forgive them for making her leave the lap of luxury without her taking a sample. Conversation eventually resumed around them.

"Not that, either Frizz. I mean the Cyborgs. That mall attack, it was almost as if we ..."

"...weren't their primary objective." Darcy finished for her.

"What you mean they weren't after us?!" Joel mumbled around his burgers.

"So, if it wasn't us, who -were- they after?"

They huddled around the laptop trying to find the answer to Chuck's very good question.

"Trevor Turner." the professor's voice rang out. All of the x-men were gathered around the conference table in the war room. They were gazing at a piece of the retreived memory of a Cyborg. Logan's team were disappointed with their lack of success and were hoping this would give them some concrete leads, "He was an assisstant at the lab that had orchestrated their...transformations. Apparently he could not continue with the project for personal reasons."

"So? Why da Cyborgies after 'im?"

"Because, Gambit, their programmer must feel that this man is some sort of threat to his retreval of the children."

"So you're bettin' if we get to the guy first, the kids'll eventually show."

"Precisely."

"I only hope that the Cyborgs and their programmer do not reach the same conclusion."

All of the x-men nodded assent to Beast's statement as half of them filed out of the War Room to go to the Blackbird.

end of chapter five