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Checkmate
It was a typically quiet afternoon at New Mutant safehouse 9. A young man sat with one of the Underground assistants at a computer terminal, working out the details of a new life. What would his name be, where would he live, how would he get a job when he couldn’t use his former employer for a reference, how would he establish credit – there were so many details to work out. He commented to the assistant, “At least in the Witness Protection Program, the government is on your side. We don’t even have that!” The assistant tried to ease his concerns by reminding him that he would be able to stay at the safehouse until the details were worked out.
Elsewhere in the large room, a woman was reading a book and another assistant was working with a man and his young son on controlling their telepathic abilities so that they didn’t accidentally reveal their abilities. Suddenly the young boy looked over at the door and said, “Daddy, who’s that?”
The assistant standing next to him focused on the door and then shouted, “we’ve got a breach, follow the drill – Move!” as he ushered the three people near him to a secret panel door. They were part way through the door and down into the tunnel when the entry door exploded inward. The other assistant tried to get the young man to the emergency exit, but a large man dressed in black blocked the way. It was a tough decision, but they had to protect as many as they could. The two assistants made eye contact and nodded as the one at the exit hit the alarm button, which blocked the exit door with a solid, steal wall. The remaining assistant tried to protect the young man, but was hit from behind with a bolt of energy. The young man stood there, staring in terror at the feral agent in front of him who looked like he wanted to rip him to shreds with his bare hands.
A frail-looking young woman walked slowly through the door, followed by two large men who shadowed her every move, suspiciously eying every corner of the room, nostrils flared to pick up any hint of a threat to their vulnerable charge. She walked over to the main computer system along the wall and placed her hand on it. Closing her eyes, her hand glowed with a small electrical current and something within the computer crackled and sent out sparks. “Got it!” she exclaimed, and sat at the terminal.
***
In the Double Helix, the team sat, joking about the look on the waitress’s face when she had accidentally knocked a glass of water off their table and Shalimar had caught it in mid air, when an alarm went off. Jesse spun around to the computer as the rest of the team looked at him in anxious anticipation. “There’s been a breach at safehouse 9”, he reported.
Concern crossed Adam’s face as he spoke in a voice barely above a whisper, “Get us there!”
***
The assistant started to regain consciousness just in time to feel the cold metal against the back of his neck. A loud percussion sound and he felt the shooting pain of the sub-dermal governor as all of his New Mutant strength slipped away from his desperate grasp. He looked up and saw the woman at the computer withdrawing a disk and handing it to one of the men behind her. “Oh, God,” he thought, “they’ve bypassed the auto-destruct.” The other guard noticed him looking at the woman and snarled menacingly.
One of the other agents pulled out radio in response to its buzzing alarm and responded, “What?”
The woman’s voice from the other end reported, “We’ve got company, Adam and his people are here!”
“Damn,” the man answered, “they must have been in the area.” Turning to the trio at the computer, he shouted “Grab what you can from the computer and get her out of here, we’ll take care of the troublemakers!”
“Wrap it up, Giana!” ordered one of the guards standing behind the woman.
Giana hesitated; distracted by the thought that Adam was coming. She’d heard a lot about him, but had never seen him in person. A grinding sound from the program disk that she had inserted into the computer brought her back to reality. “What the…” she stammered as the screen went blank and she tried to force her program disk out of the dead terminal.
“Giana, NOW!” shouted the guard.
“I can’t leave the program disk, it took months to create!” she responded. The other guard reached over and tore the face off of the terminal, allowing Giana to retrieve the program disk just as the sound of a commotion was heard at the entrance. One of the guards picked Giana up and carried her to the side exit, but it was now blocked with another of the steal walls.
The guard put the woman down and ordered her to stay out of the way. Then the two guards joined the other agents in repelling the attack of the Mutant X team. She watched in horror as one of the team members appeared to turn into solid stone as he hit one of her guards, sending him flying up into the air and slamming against the wall. Even though the guards were controlling and occasionally rough with her, they did protect her and she hated to see anyone get hurt.
Her eyes moved from the stirring guard, crumpled at the bottom of the wall to a figure walking swiftly and calmly toward the two prisoners. She recognized Adam from the security alerts and watched with curiosity as he worked to free the bound men. She saw the assistant speaking and then Adam looked up and directly at her. He touched his ring and spoke into it and the remaining Mutant X team members each looked over at her for a moment.
Giana felt the knot in her stomach as it drained the strength from her knees. The only way out was through the main entrance. Her guards had told her to stay, but they appeared to be losing the battle and she was terrified of what Adam might do to someone who had cracked even the outer layers of his computer system. She started moving as fast as the metal exoskeleton network would allow her. The bands criss-crossed over her legs, arms and torso with only an opening over her stomach, which allowed her to bend and breathe more freely. She’d gotten used to the network as the bones that they protected had become more fragile. Halfway to the door, Shalimar stepped in front of her and asked sweetly, “Going somewhere?”
In panic, Giana focused on a large plant sitting on a nearby filing cabinet and telekinetically flung it at the woman standing between her and the door. As Shalimar spun to block the plant, Giana tried to dodge to the right to get around her. In a single fluid motion, the lithe feral knocked the plant to the ground and continued around, landing a roundhouse kick into the unprotected area of her stomach. Giana felt the kick driving up and into her ribcage, followed by the sound of brittle snapping and the stabbing pain that radiated out to the tips of her fingers and toes. Barely able to breathe, she dropped to her hands and knees. She could tell that Shalimar was still standing to her left and she cringed in anticipation of the follow-up blow that never came. As she drifted on the edge of unconsciousness, she noticed that someone was now standing to the right of her.
Adam looked across the crouching figure at Shalimar’s surprised expression. “I didn’t hit her that hard!” she argued. Adam nodded, reached into his pocket and, pulling out a small hand-held tool, he made a couple quick adjustments and reached down with his left hand.
Giana felt the touch of his fingertips at the base of her skull. The alterations that Genomex had performed on her had cursed her with telempathy, but only when there was direct, physical contact, which she was generally able to avoid. Now helpless, there was no way for her to avoiding the oppressive force that threatened to overwhelm her mind. She could feel his fingers as they ran up the back of her head, pulling her hair away from her neck and then closing into a secure, yet almost gentle fist around her hair.
Still fighting for each pain-wracked breath, she was barely aware of the tool sliding over the top of the sub-dermal governor until she felt a current run through it. She audibly sighed in relief as the constant pressure of the governor’s behavioral mandate and the terrifying strength assaulting her mind through Adam’s touch both faded into silence. Even the pain shooting from her crushed ribs no longer reached out to her fingertips. Deep in the back of her mind, she knew that this wasn’t a good thing: the cold numbness in her hands and feet meant that she was going into shock. As she tried to release her mind to the peace of unconsciousness, she was driven back to her current situation as she felt strong hands lock onto the network on her upper arms.
Brennan pulled the injured woman upright and leaned her back against his chest. He moved his grip down to her forearms, supporting her body as Adam continued to support her head with the grip he had on her hair. Giana felt her head being tilted up slightly and managed to force her eyes open. She wished that she had left them closed as she found herself staring into dark brown eyes that gave her the sensation of falling into an abyss. She tried to melt back into the solid chest that was supporting her and break her eyes away from Adam’s intense gaze – she failed at both.
As the grip on her hair tightened slightly, she realized that Adam had asked her a question, but she hadn’t heard what it was. He repeated, slowly and clearly “Where are the disks?” with an intensity that drew out the answer as surely as one of the GSA’s psionic interrogators.
“Spike and Rover have them”, she responded, indicating her two canine feral guards as she felt a twinge of embarrassment that she didn’t even know their real names. The effort of speaking brought a painful cough from deep in her lungs and she felt the frothy blood run from the corner of her mouth. She was aware that Adam had asked her another question, but the pain and shock finally claimed their victory and she felt the room fade away.
Adam looked with alarm at the bright red blood: one of the broken ribs had pierced her lung and she was in serious trouble. He asked Brennan to get her back to the Double Helix and Brennan responded by swinging one arm under her legs and pulling her up. Surprised, Brennan noted, “she weighs a lot less than I expected!”
Adam nodded and gently laid her head on Brennan’s chest, finally releasing his grip, “Be careful with her, Genomex wouldn’t have designed this elaborate exoskeleton unless it was necessary.” As Brennan headed out the door, Emma handed Adam the disks that she had retrieved from the unconscious guards.
***
Back at Sanctuary’s lab, the scanning equipment pronounced its verdict: the bottom two ribs on the right side were broken and one had punctured her lung, causing the lower lobe to collapse. As Shalimar used a small stylus on one of Brennan’s “boo-boo’s”, Adam noted, “Her bone mass is less than half of what it should be. That explains why the bones broke so easily, as well as her lighter weight. I’ll have to take a look at what Genomex did to her genetic makeup, they may have created an unstable chemical balance.”
From the lab computer, Jesse reported, “Well, I found her file from our latest GSA computer raid. It looks like she was originally given lion DNA, but when they caught her and brought her in, she also had significant telekinetic ability. It looks like Eckhart found her feline abilities ‘disappointing’ but her unexplained TK ‘very interesting’.”
The woman lying motionless in the chair under the dancing light beams from the scanner faded back into consciousness for a moment. She mumbled a singsong, “Half-cat, teeker brat” as her canine feral guards occasionally called her.
Jesse continued, “it looks like they were trying to create a tele-cyber by overlaying elemental-electrical DNA and amping up her psionic abilities all over the place. Adam, you were right about the unstable chemical balance. According to this, she is no longer able to absorb calcium and they’ve tried all sorts of methods to try and reverse the damage to her bones.”
“I bet they never tried simply reversing the damage that they did to her basic genetic structure!” Adam said in disgust. To him, DNA was the unique signature that marked this as a human being. Few things annoyed him more that seeing that fragile strand treated like a bunch of Lego’s to be torn apart and rebuilt in total disregard of the effects to the person involved. “Jesse, have you had a chance to look at those disks, we need to know how far she got.”
Shalimar looked at Adam and Jesse, both happily absorbed in their respective computer screens, turned to Brennan and Emma and asked, “Anyone hungry?”
Brennan nodded and headed for the door. Emma answered, “I think I’ll stay here, she seemed pretty freaked out at the safehouse and I’m not sure how she’ll respond when she regains consciousness and finds herself in the ‘enemy’s’ lab. Bring me a sandwich?”
“Sure,” Shalimar replied, “Jesse?” Jesse nodded an affirmative. “Adam?” Adam didn’t stir from the screen flashing data at a rate that would make anyone else dizzy. Shalimar rolled her eyes, smiled at Emma and followed Brennan out the door.
Jesse finally looked up as he pulled out the last of the 4 disks they had retrieved from Giana’s guards. “Well, you want the good news or the bad news?” he asked as Adam looked up from his screen.
“Let’s start with the bad news,” he answered as he turned to face Jesse. He noticed a sandwich on a plate next to him and picked it up, sheepishly realizing that he had been too absorbed to notice someone placing the plate less than a foot away from him.
“Of course the worst news is that she was able to short circuit the auto-destruct mechanism. It will take a while to figure out how to block that level of attack. Most of the information on the disks is basic stuff like safehouse rules and information about the different types of New Mutants; we wouldn’t want it floating around the general public, but its nothing that the GSA doesn’t already know. She did manage to crack the safehouse system and pull out a whole disk full of safehouse locations, new identities and contact information using her program disk.”
Adam sighed, “Did you mention that there was good news?”
“Absolutely,” Jesse answered. “Fortunately, tele-cybers are pretty rare and Giana appears to be the only one that they have successfully altered into one. And I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to recover the program from the disk and devise a block. From their desperation to retrieve it, I suspect that it is a prototype, so I’m hopeful that we can close that loophole before they can prepare another disk. She also tried to use the safehouse computer to crack into the Sanctuary system.” Adam stopped eating the sandwich and locked his gaze on Jesse. “She didn’t make it past the nano technology and it successfully fried the disk and shut down the system.”
A mutter rose up from the chair in the middle of the lab, “Vicious little nano-monsters!” Adam and Jesse glanced at Giana and then looked back at each other and exchanged a smile.
Adam walked over to Giana, “Please remain still, most of the internal injuries have been repaired, but we’re still working on piecing together the bones themselves. How are you feeling?” Emma stood off to the side where she had a direct line of sight, but hopefully wouldn’t be noticeable. She had disagreed with Adam’s decision not to use restraints and was scanning her lightly, wary of any shift toward hostility. So far, she was mostly picking up a mixture of fear and curiosity, but there was also the telltale feel of deception – she was definitely hiding something!
Giana replied with her eyes still closed, “I feel like I got hit by a little blond freight train. Other than that, and being a bit cold; not bad.”
“I’m not surprised that you feel a little cold, you’re body’s still in shock.” Adam walked over to adjust one of the controls, “Is this any better?” Suddenly Giana felt warmth flowing over her body and into her very bones. She let out an unintentional moan and felt all of her muscles relax. Watching her reaction, Adam smiled and added, “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.” Returning to her side he explained, “I’ve reviewed the scans, and I can reverse the DNA overlays, but it will need to be done over several days, in a series of small steps in order to keep you from going back into shock. Once the process has begun, I will also be able to start strengthening your skeletal structure. But that will mean losing the electrical, as well as the amped up psionic abilities.”
“I would appreciate that.” Giana replied. Adam looked surprised, almost a little disappointed. He had worked out a complete, logical argument for why this needed to be done; calculating counters to all possible objections with the same efficiency he applied to chess. Emma saw the near-pout cross Adam’s face and snickered silently, it was the same look that Shalimar got when someone actually accepted the offer to surrender, just when she was looking forward to kicking some ass.
Adam went back to the computer and entered some commands. The scanner lights shifted from a random dance-like pattern to a solid sheet of light that started at Giana’s head and slowly worked its way down to her toes. With the first treatment complete, Adam and Emma helped to re-connect the exoskeleton and assisted Giana to a quiet room with a bed. She collapsed on the bed, both physically and emotionally exhausted and was sound asleep when Emma brought her some food a couple hours later.
***
The next morning, she awoke and looked around. Anxiety filled her as she realized where she was and what she had done. She had essentially quit her job, abandoned her home and friends at Genomex and recklessly cast her fate into the hands of a man that she had never met. She responded to a tap at the door and Emma came in with some clean clothes. “I was wondering when you might wake up – good morning.” Giana reviewed the GSA alerts in her mind; Emma was a telempath, which would explain why she knew that she was awake. She felt vulnerable and exposed; telempaths usually weren’t hard to block, but she was defenseless since Adam had activated the block on her sub-dermal governor.
Giana changed and then followed Emma out into the main Sanctuary area. She was amazed at the balance of functionality and beauty. After breakfast, she joined Emma at the fountain for some meditation. In this peaceful place, Giana heard small voices coming from the back of her mind. Memories of her life before being captured 4 years ago mingled with the sound of the fountain waterfall. The fresh smell of the plants reminded her of walking in the mountains on strong legs that could easily propel her over the rocky streams that crossed the trails throughout the Cascade Mountains. She stretched out her arms to embrace the freedom of that memory and felt the cold confinement of her exoskeleton. She looked down at the body that now needed support just to walk on a flat surface and fought back tears. She glanced up and saw Emma looking at her, “If anyone can repair the damage, Adam can”.
***
After lunch and another round of treatment, Giana again slept the afternoon and evening away as her body adjusted to the genetic alterations. She felt as if each individual cell had run a marathon and collapsed in exhaustion and her skin was simply a limp bag, holding them all together. She awoke early the next morning, when all was still quiet. She did feel stronger, less frail, and tried to walk around her room without the exoskeleton. After almost falling, she realized that the bones in her legs still weren’t strong enough to safely support her. She put on the bottom part of the network, but left her arms and upper body free. She would have to be careful, but the feeling of air moving freely across her arms was too exhilarating to resist.
Giana sat meditating at the fountain as the early dawn light drifted through windows in the ceiling. She could feel the echo of her telekinetic ability and followed it to a small remnant that still responded to her thoughts. Focusing her energy on that small flicker, she urged it into a weak but steady force and then aimed it at the sub-dermal governor that stood like a dam, walling off the abilities that she had, until recently, taken for granted. She used the small remnant force to drill one small hole in that dam, and then another. Then she used the power flowing through those small holes to punch bigger holes in the dam until it finally crumbled under her attack. Her mind leapt outward like an animal released from a cage and then she reigned it back in. She would have to be very careful to avoid detection. She wouldn’t put it past Adam to have a control devise stronger than the GSA governor.
She used the newly freed ability to run a self-diagnostic on her ever-changing body. Although she enjoyed the strength that was slowly returning to her bones, she couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling of dread that crept up behind her. Every cell within her seemed to be warning her not to go farther, not to allow the next treatment. As she sat staring at the rippling water, Adam came up and sat beside her. “How are you doing?” he asked and then patiently waited as she hesitated, trying to put her response into words. She searched for the words that would convey her appreciation for what he had done and still hold to the conviction that she felt about not continuing the treatments at this time.
“Adam, I’m sorry,” she said hesitantly. “I want to stop the treatment, it all feels like its happening too fast, I need to slow down. I appreciate what your doing, but I’m afraid. Every fiber of my being is telling me to wait.”
Adam tried to hide the disappointment that threatened to flash across his face. He wondered to himself, why now? Why would she want to stop now that she was starting to make progress? He had noticed that she had shed part of the protective network. If she quit now, would she be willing to start up again? Was there something that he could say to restore her confidence? He shut off the endless stream of questions and drove his mind back to his core ideals and answered. “Giana, this isn’t Genomex, it’s your body and your decision. I always try to encourage New Mutants, anyone actually, to listen to their body. If it’s telling you to wait, then let’s wait. A short delay isn’t going to cause you any problems at this point.”
Giana was again reminded of hiking in the mountains, only this time her mind went to the feeling after removing her heavy backpack. How, with the sudden lifting of the weight from her shoulders, she felt as if she could jump 10 feet into the air. She couldn’t help but smile inwardly as she remembered doing just that. She had released herself to her feline instincts and jumped 15 feet into a tree and back down, just for the pure joy of it. “Thanks for being so understanding.” was all that she said.
“Not a problem,” Adam replied, noting mentally that he really didn’t understand. “Shall we go put Shalimar through her paces in the simulator? She didn’t want to disturb you while you were meditating”. The two went up to the consol overlooking the dojo as Shalimar stood ready, a wide grin on her face. After a work out that had Giana exhausted just watching it, Shalimar took a shower and then went and sat in the garden doing slow, deep stretches.
As Brennan and Emma debated the appropriateness of using hot sauce on scrambled eggs and Adam sat in the Netsurfer chair compiling the latest news from the underground, Jesse stood leaning against the rail, looking down into the garden. He said to nobody in particular, “I saw this nature show once. There was a female lion that had been separated from her pride and was trying to be accepted into a neighboring pride. She was finally allowed to live within the territory after she took a totally submissive stance, approached the Alpha female and engaged in extensive grooming behavior.” Curious, the rest of the team came over to the rail to see what had sparked the impromptu nature lesson.
Looking down into the garden, they saw Giana, kneeling behind Shalimar, brushing her still-damp hair. Shalimar sat cross-legged with her eyes closed and a look of pure bliss on her face. As Giana ran the brush from her forehead back and down the length of her hair as it lay on her back, they could see Shalimar arch against the brush. Then Giana started with the soft brush under her chin and pulled it slowly up her jaw line, under her ear and up to the middle of the back of her head. Brennan looked over at Jesse, “activate her comlink, I want to hear if she’s purring!”
“Guys,” Adam warned, setting aside the tempting idea in an effort to be chivalrous.
He was too late and Emma announced, “Oh, she’s purring alright!”
***
That afternoon, Giana came into the lounge area and noticed Emma re-setting the chessboard. Giana sat down on one side of the board and smiled at Emma. Emma grimaced a little and sat down on the other side. As the game progressed, it was clear to Emma that she was losing, badly. She reached out with her mind, hoping to gain just enough of an advantage that she didn’t look like a total fool. Her mind hit a solid wall – Giana was blocking her, which she shouldn’t be able to do with governor activated! Giana announced, “check, and I believe, checkmate” just as Adam walked in.
Emma smiled at Giana and said, “Hmm, I think I know just the person to knock you down a few notches.” She looked up at Adam and said, “next”, then vacated her seat. As Adam set up the pieces, Emma asked, plainly for all to hear, “So, how did you get the sub-dermal governor deactivated?” Adam quickly looked up at Giana who was giving Emma a look that could have melted a glacier.
Giana finally sighed and explained, “It’s the piece of the puzzle that Eckhart never did figure out. He was always trying to determine how the genetic alterations that Genomex performed had created both the expected feral and the unexpected psionic abilities. I may be a New Mutant, but I’m also a plain old-fashioned natural mutant! I remember spending the night at my grandma’s house and she would tuck me into bed and then look over at the light and ‘poof’, the light would turn off. That and she’d always joke about her old TV that didn’t have a remote and how that wasn’t a problem, because she’d taught it to respond to voice commands. My mom was always a lot more careful, but even she slipped a couple times. Like when her hands were full of groceries and the front door would mysteriously unlock and open itself. But the only major thing that I ever saw was when I was almost hit by a car. She screamed ‘no’ and I felt, I don’t know, a shock force go past me and the car moved about 5 feet sideways and missed me.”
Adam nodded as the pieces started to fall into place and Giana continued, “The governor just knocks the TK down to what it would have been if it hadn’t been amped up by the New Mutant DNA. I’ve always had access to that little core of power, but the behavioral mandate prevented me from using it to reach outside the governor to disable it. Of course,” she look at Emma, “you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t been trying to cheat at chess!” Emma cringed, knowing that she and Adam would soon be having a casual conversation on ethics.
As the game began, Giana could feel Adam watching not just every move, but following her eyes, noting what she looked at, analyzing her strategies – it was unnerving. She had taken one of his Rooks early in the game and now went after the second Rook. She noticed that Adam maneuvered the pieces so that she would loose her Knight if she took the Rook, but she could take his Bishop without losing any pieces. She put on her best poker face and took the Rook anyway. Adam looked puzzled and a bit annoyed.
Opportunity allowed her to take one of his Knights and she immediately set an attack plan against the second Knight. She finally won her prize, but Adam had made it a very costly piece to secure. She watched as Adam moved from annoyed to almost agitated as the rest of the team had, one by one, surrounded the table to watch. With few pieces left, Adam finally trapped her King with his Bishops and checkmated her with his Queen. Giana conceded and laid her King down as Jesse noted, “you must have figured out something to have gotten that far. Let us in on the secret!”
The other team members urged her on and Adam added, “Yes, please do.”
She smiled and, as she placed Adam’s King on the table in front of him, noted, “his chess game mirrors his Mutant X team. Although he never treats any piece lightly, he has a core ‘team’ of one Knight, one Bishop, one Rook and the Queen - balance and variety. In his team he has one Psionic”, and she placed one of Adam’s Knights on the table in front of Emma; “one Elemental”, and she placed a Bishop in front of Brennan; “one Molecular”, she said placing a Rook in front of Jesse; “and finally, one Feral”. Everyone smiled as she placed the Queen in front of Shalimar, knowing well that a female cat is called a queen. “Although Adam doesn’t hesitate to use the talents of his core team, he is very protective of them and was even willing to allow me to take his ‘spare’ Bishop without cost in an effort to save his core Rook. Robbing him of one, let alone two of his core pieces, threw off his game a bit”.
Jesse asked, “then why did he still win?”
Giana laughed and replied, “because taking out any member of his core team, at best, comes at a very high price and that brain of his is too good at re-formulating and executing a plan based on whatever remaining resources are available.”
Adam, who had been quietly listening, looked up and Giana, smiled, and asked, “Would you care to try another game?”
“Uh, no, I think I’ll quit while I’m behind”, she answered to snickers from the team.
Jesse smiled as she got up and noted, “That’s still as close as I’ve seen anyone but a computer come to beating him!”
Giana threw back a careless, “It’s genetic” and left the room.
Emma’s head snapped up as she looked at Adam, “That’s it, I’m not sure what she means, but that’s the key to what she was hiding.”
***
Adam sat looking at the DNA strand for the 10th time. Accessing the Genomex information, he noted that there was a record of her mother’s DNA, but no information on her father. Simple enough, he thought, and his fingers flew across the keyboard. By backing out her mother’s DNA and the New Mutant DNA, he was left with a strand that could be compared to a database to determine the paternal donor. He sat, staring at the strand for minutes that seemed like hours, he didn’t need the database – he recognized the pattern that he had seen countless times.
Suddenly he remembered: the day that he started at Genomex, Dr. Breedlove had taken a tissue sample from him. He shook off the feeling that he had been violated by reminding himself that Genomex wasn’t exactly a hot bed of bio-ethics. His mind started analyzing everything in light of this new information and a lot more of the seemingly loose pieces started to fall into place.
***
That evening, Adam approached Giana as she rested by the fountain after completing a short, non-contact exercise routine that he had programmed for her. “How did it go?” he asked as he sat beside her.
She responded, “I thought you said you were going to start me off with something ‘easy’? Maybe we ought to reach an agreement on a definition for that word!”
Adam smiled, but moved straight to his point, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Giana thought about playing dumb and pretending that she didn’t understand the question, but she knew that it would just make the conversation more difficult and there was little chance of deflecting his focus from the question. “I just thought it would be too awkward, I mean, its not like you really had anything to do with my existence. When my folks went to Genomex, it was determined that my father’s DNA had been damaged as a result of his work in the pharmaceutical industry, so Dr. Breedlove decided to use your DNA instead. I figured out that something was odd when I took a basic biology class and learned that my blue-eyed parents should not have had a brown-eyed child, even if one of my grandparents had brown eyes. Mr. Eckhart told me that they hunted me down in the hopes that they had created someone with your intellect who might be easier to control. They were wrong on both accounts,” she said with a smile.
“I don’t know if I’d say that, you did successfully analyze my chess game and you did crack one of the layers of my computer security, but I still wish you would have allowed me to share that burden.” Adam and Giana continued talking late into the evening.
***
The next morning after breakfast, Giana approached Adam as he sat at the computer in the lab. “I think that I’m ready to move on to the next step”. Adam looked up at her and noticed how much stronger and healthier she looked, but didn’t want to delay and allow time for her to get cold feet again. He motioned to the chair, and she sat down, relaxed and closed her eyes. At the end of the treatment, she went to get up, but fell to the floor, gasping for breath as every cell in her body felt like it was on fire.
Adam rushed to her as he called Brennan on the comlink. Brennan came running into the lab and helped get the Giana back into the chair, holding her down against the spasms that curled her up into a ball. Adam ran back to the consol and began scanning her in a desperate attempt to learn what had gone wrong. As Emma and Shalimar ran into the lab in response to the commotion, Adam announced, “Its an allergic reaction. With this last treatment, her original New Mutant DNA is now dominant enough that it is actively rejecting the remaining overlays!”
As the scanner started to force her body to stabilize, the convulsions stopped and Giana lay in the chair, sweat streaming down her face as she grimaced in pain. Adam came over and took her head in his hands so that he could be sure that she understood him, “Giana, the only way to stop the reaction is to remove the rest of the overlays all at once, its going to be rough, but, because you listened to your body and
Without opening her eyes, Giana nodded and begged in a whisper, “Just get it over with, please!” A moment later, the sheet of light again passed over her. It was amazing that such a simple, quick process could be responsible for such dramatic physical changes. She felt the fever start to drop and her breathing became easier as her body stopped trying to reject itself, but it was replaced with searing pain throughout every inch of her being as her brain tried to process the mixed signals that the re-formatted cells were sending.
Adam looked up at Emma without a word and she came and stood by Giana’s side. “Please, let me help.” Giana nodded and Emma stared at a point in space and formulated a calm image of a peaceful mountain meadow, complete with wildflowers and a gentle fawn quietly grazing. Then she looked at Giana and projected the image into her mind. To Emma’s surprise, the image brought a quiet laugh from the woman in the chair. “Emma, darling”, she whispered, “let’s not forget that I’m part lion! That vulnerable little herbivore of yours is making me hungry.” Adam looked up in time to see the look of horror cross Emma’s face as she realized what a lion would do to a defenseless baby deer.
Adam allowed himself a moment to smile as he said, “I would suggest quiet, pastoral scenes without any prey species!” Emma deleted the fawn and resent the image. This time she achieved the expected result as Giana allowed herself to escape into that image, leaving her body far away in another universe. She lost all track of time until she heard Adam’s voice calling her back. As she opened her eyes, she noticed that the lights in the lab were dimmer and that the others had left. She also noticed that, although she was still shaky and weak, most of the pain was gone.
Adam smiled at her, “You’re going to be fine. Tomorrow we’ll see about finding you a nice safe place where you can climb trees and change your TV channels without the remote.”
“And chase the neighborhood dogs?” she added with an almost evil grin. “I think I remember seeing something about a safehouse in Florida, near the beach?” As Adam went to leave, he reached for the light switch, which turned itself off before he had the chance. Giana smiled and drifted back to sleep.
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The Sun Never Sets on PureMX.net
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