Well, like it or not, she had to admit it:

She was lost.

Vertigo paused to catch her breath, leaning back against a cold damp wall with her hands on her knees. She cast a glare around the dark chamber; the only scraps of light for as far as she could see streamed in ribbons from a street grate some ten feet about her head. At least it wasn't a wet night up aboveground -- if it had been raining, she'd be running through oily waterfalls, on top of everything else.

She'd been fairly confident of her ability to get through the New York sub-sewer system on her own, as she'd been through them many times with the team. But there were miles of tunnels, and it was dark, and somewhere in her hurry to put enough distance behind her she'd made a crucial wrong turn.

Guess the only thing to do is to keep moving, she sighed to herself. She had no idea how much time had passed, but it had been more than enough time for her absence to be noticed...

Vertigo straightened up with a grunt but then paused, listening to some distant scratch of debris on concrete. The last three times had been false alarms, so she didn't tense up immediately. When the next sound she heard was the click of metal on stone, however...

Without hesitation she whirled and ran -- well, she couldn't exactly run in the near total darkness, not on damp concrete that could drop away into a channel at any moment, but she certainly MOVED. With only spandex and thin tough soles between her feet and the cold ground, she was able to feel her way along as quietly as a cat, and her eyes were now well adjusted to the echoing dimness. No more looking for a convenient way out -- she was out of time. ANY way out of the sewers would do now. When it came to being pursued by the Marauders, underground tunnels were a deathtrap.

There! A glimpse out of the corner of her eye, a flash of darkness to her right that wasn't quite the same texture as the darkness all around her. She leaped over the water channel down the center of the tunnel and thrust her hand forward and up, into the mismatched patch. She met no resistance until her fingertips touched a rusty bar. An access! Quickly (for she could swear that she'd just heard a whisper in the tunnels not far away) she jumped up, bracing herself against the sides of the pipe. It was a little slippery but before she lost her precarious grip she lunged forward and caught two of the bars. None of them were loose or missing (nnnnoooo, because that would be convenient! she grumbled to herself) but she was pretty sure that if she really wriggled, she could get through...

Not far away, Harpoon lifted his head and listened intently. For a moment he'd heard something...something like the rattle of loosely anchored iron. A grate, perhaps? Too far ahead to be a sound made any of his teammates; although they were currently all out of his line of sight, busy scouring the neighboring tunnels, he knew their patterns and habits as well as he knew his own heartbeat.

Confident but with the wary silent tread of a well-armed man on the trail of dangerous game, he changed direction, following that faint sound. Within moments he came across the obvious trail of scuff-marks in the dried scum which coated many of the tunnels. He crouched down for a better look, and he thoughtfully ran one calloused finger around the telltale outline of a small, practically bare foot.

The hunter allowed himself a grim smile then raised his hand to his lips and let out a barely audible series of whistles.

~~Harpoon~~ / ~~Target located~~ / ~~Meet here~~ / ~~Harpoon~~

It would only be a matter of moments before the spread-out team reconvened on his location.

Vertigo scrambled up the side of the concrete drainage ditch in one determined rush, using her momentum to practically throw herself up the steep incline. Only when she reached the top did she pause to catch her breath, wrapping her arms around herself and wincing ruefully. She'd squeezed through the bars, all right, but probably at the expense of a cup size or two. And her injured leg, which was now a fine angry yellow of fading taxi-induced bruises under her leotard, was throbbing unhappily all over again.

She allowed herself a moment to favor her scrapes and then firmly shoved the distraction away. Instead, she let her arms fall to her sides and spared a few precious moments to survey her prospects. The ditch seemed to mark the border of a vast expanse of grass, silent and unbroken save for the occasional scattered tree. Behind her were streetlights and the shifting concealing motion of humanity, but a high chain-link fence and a roaringly busy stream of traffic lay between her and that comparative safety...

Before she could decide properly, there was a clank of metal as someone tested one of the iron bars of the grate below.

Her heart thudded up into the back of her throat. Without wasting a moment longer, she whirled and took off sprinting across the damp grass...away from the lights of New York City and straight into the dark.

Impatiently, Scalphunter motioned Harpoon aside and blasted two of the iron bars right out of their sockets. He didn't need Harpoon to confirm that their prey had used this accessway to escape to the upper world; now that they were in the right tunnel, the signs of her passage were as obvious to his trained eye as they were to the Inuit hunter. He could have kicked himself for not being the one to find the trail first.

I must be getting old, he chided himself, only half-seriously.

Arclight had already boosted Scrambler up through the grate and was jumping up after him, one hundred percent fixated upon their goal. This close to the end of the hunt, both she and Riptide were practically vibrating with ferocious energy. It was at times like this that Scalphunter was glad that he could count on cooler heads like Scrambler and Harpoon to prevail -- to keep matters quiet. The prey had led the chase far closer to the fringes of the human world than he liked...

Either the girl's running blind, he thought as he holstered his rifle and reached up for the smoking grate himself, or she's got a lot more guts than I gave her credit for.

The footing was uneven in an oddly regular way...and ahead she could now make out loose groupings of strangely-shaped protrusions. Tree stumps, maybe? But why?

Vertigo finally spared a moment to look down just as her right foot kicked straight through a withered bundle of flowers, scattering petals over the grass. The dim starlight glinted off of small metal plaques set every few feet. For a moment she frowned, wondering -- then she realized that what lay ahead were actually rows of gravestones.

Which meant that she was in a cemetery, and that the plaques under her flying feet marked more modern graves.

Vertigo snorted softly to herself as she ran, not wasting breath on words. Oh, lovely. How appropriate. She strained her eyes, trying to see the other side of the grassy expanse, but trees and distance foiled her attempt to gauge the distance to safety. As she passed the first of the knee-high stone markers at an alert jog, she was forced to admit that the place looked huge, and she had no guarantee that there was civilization on the far side.

She came across a driveway; the blacktop was still slightly warm underfoot as she paused thoughtfully in the middle of the miniature road. In one direction it wound away behind a stand of greenery, but in the other direction it led straight to a rather Gothic brick building of some kind. She fumbled for the right word and then she had it: "mortuary." That building was a mortuary.

It meant very little to her.

After a brief moment of consideration she shrugged and lit out in that direction. Either way, her trail would be much harder to pick up on the asphalt; hopefully the Marauders would assume that she'd set off in the other direction, towards civilization.

And it all else failed, the building would provide better cover than the gravestones and the scattered trees.

Vertigo had barely reached the mortuary when the hair on the back of her neck stood straight up. Without pausing to think, she threw herself aside just as a crackling energy harpoon sliced past close enough to sever a lock of her hair. The harpoon thudded into the ground several yards ahead of her but she had already changed course again, hugging the bushes at the side of the building and darting around the corner as a second spear thunked into the bricks themselves.

Now that the moment of truth was upon her, she was mildly surprised to find that she was no longer afraid. She was no longer thinking but, rather, acting on pure adrenaline. Every second seemed slow and crystal clear, and she suddenly knew exactly what they expected her to do: to keep running, or to use the bushes as cover. So she didn't. Three steps after she turned the corner she whirled and planted her feet and raised her hands and summoned up her own inner strength.

When Harpoon and Riptide rounded the back of the mortuary they ran straight into an invisible miasma of disorienting nausea.

Already spinning like a dervish in anticipation of the kill, Riptide instead found himself swerving wildly aside, choking and completely out of control. His tangled feet struck the steps of the mortuary's back "porch" and his incredible momentum threw him head-first to the stone landing with a sickeningly final crack.

However, Vertigo didn't have time to decide whether she felt elated or regretful. To her dismay, she found that after a brief moment of obvious dizziness Harpoon crouched low to regain his balance, shook his head, and then glared directly up at her. In one swift fluid movement he retrieved a harpoon haft from the quiver slung across his broad back.

...oh no immune to my power of course after all those missions he's built up a resistance to it oh my what now...? She only had seconds to act, and she certainly couldn't tackle him physically OR try to make a break for it -- either way she'd be impaled and gutted before she could take a step.

Only one thing left to try, she thought fleetingly, remembering then what her other two selves could do. Remembering how deadly they both could be. It was ironic, really; not only was she not a very good person, and not only was she not the best Marauder, but she wasn't even the best VERTIGO in existence! Pathetic. But if Misfire and Maelstrom could do it, then why not her? If she really, REALLY tried...? They were her, she was them -- triplets warped by their environments but intrinsically the same person. Maybe she just hadn't pushed herself hard enough before. Didn't many mutations manifest or mutate under stress? She was certainly desperate enough now!

Concentrate...focus...focus beyond the simple "strike," focus on the nerves themselves, summon up the strength, hurt him, STOP him, come ON, you can do it...

Nothing.

Her stomach sank like a stone.

She couldn't.

SHE COULDN'T DO IT.

Only a second or two had passed as these thoughts flickered across her frantic mind. In Harpoon's hand a deadly energy blade now hummed into life atop the metal butt of the lethal spear. Completely, hopelessly cornered, she clenched her fists, preparing to...

Suddenly the harpoon blade flared so bright that the bushes cast stark black shadows against the bricks and the nearest gravestones streamed darkness across the grass. Harpoon barked out an inarticulate shout of horror and desperately tried to drop his weapon, to hurl it away, but it was too late: the pulsing glare suddenly REVERSED FLOW, channeling back into his hand, up his arm--

Vertigo was forced to fling up one arm to shield her eyes from the writhing brilliance as the hunter blazed incandescent with his own deadly energy. There was a hoarse gurgling scream and then abrupt silence, completely dark except for the afterimages dancing upon Vertigo's retinas.

She blinked hard, edging back, struggling to regain her vision before the others arrived in response to the commotion. As her sight returned she found that she could see Harpoon's body lying twisted on the driveway, still steaming gently into the cold night air.

And standing over him, grinning sheepishly from ear to ear, was Scrambler.

Of course. Amplify and reverse, she thought wonderingly, staring at him in complete amazement. But...why? Does this mean...

She cleared her throat. Her mouth felt almost too dry to speak. "But...the hunt. I...I thought you said..."

He shrugged and looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Yeah, well, I, uh, changed my mind on the spur of the moment. I'll probably REALLY regret it later. Go on, get moving! I've only bought you a few moments. The others went the other way, towards the main street, but they'll be here any minute."

"Scr...Kim. Thank you." The team was down to almost nothing and off on a false trail. Once more, she had a chance! Her heart lifted for the first time in hours...

Then something moved behind Scrambler.

Soundlessly, Arclight stepped out of the night, moving right past the young man before he realized that she was even there. Without breaking stride or taking her eyes off of Vertigo, the tall woman lashed out with a brutally indifferent backhand, connecting with the side of Scrambler's head hard enough to fracture stone.

Bone crunched like eggshell. Lifted clean off of his feet by the force of the almost careless blow, Scrambler was flung back several feet in a spray of blood, landing in a limp heap half on the curb and half on the grass.

He didn't move again.

"That's what we do to traitors," Arclight growled. Her eyes were ablaze with hatred as she glared at Vertigo. "That's what we should have done to you days ago. That's what I'm going to do to you RIGHT NOW."

Vertigo resisted the urge to glance over at Scrambler's body in the irrational hope that he was still breathing. No time to think about it! her mind screamed at her. SAVE YOURSELF! Almost unconsciously she fell into a wary mirror of Arclight's battle-ready stance, and just in time -- the woman was already charging before her last words had faded from the air. Obviously, she was not about to give "Maelstrom" the moment of concentration she needed to trigger off her own deadly powers.

Vertigo flung herself forward and down at the last second, letting the lethal punch swish right over her head as she rolled and scrambled back to her feet. It was a move she'd been thinking about using for a while, and one that should have surprised Arclight.

To her horror, it didn't.

The hammer blow which fell across her shoulders wasn't quite enough to break anything but it did sent her stumbling forward over Harpoon's remains, driving the air out of her lungs and knocking her to her hands and knees. On pure instinct, she jerked aside as a fist smashed down where her head had been an instant before. Shards of concrete flew in every direction as Arclight's hand smashed the curb of the driveway into powder.

Vertigo yelped as one sharp chip of cement bulleted right into her calf, but she was already back up on her feet as Arclight straightened up and lunged for her with both hands, obviously intent upon wringing her out like a rag. Vertigo threw herself back frantically along the curve of the curb, windmilling for balance -- she barely managed to stumble to a halt in time to avoid tripping over Scrambler's body.

She knew that she couldn't hold out much longer. She shouldn't have lasted this long! If her luck held out, she gave herself three more seconds, tops...

To her amazement, though, Arclight had stopped. Stopped dead, just out of arms' reach. Just...staring at her. And there was something dawning in her expression, around the expressionless shades which hid her eyes even at night. Something which was not pleasant at all.

"You're not Maelstrom," she said flatly.

Vertigo didn't reply; she couldn't, not really, for she was too busy gasping for air and seizing this brief unexpected respite to brace herself for one last hurrah.

I'd rather die here, quickly, than go back under Sinister's machines, she realized then, and she was amazed to find that it was absolutely true. So she merely raised her chin defiantly, as if daring the woman to finish her off.

Arclight was nodding slowly, as if to herself. "Of course...of course, why didn't I see it before? You're Vertigo. And you've been under my nose, RIGHT under all of our noses, for hours now. Do you have any idea how badly I've been wanting to kill you? And now...now I have that pleasure all to myself."

She broke into a sadistic grin and cracked all of her knuckles deliberately, practically in Vertigo's face. "Go ahead, try your little tricks on me. I'm too close now. You can't outrun me, and you can't stop me." And she began to move forward...

Well, what ELSE am I supposed to do? Vertigo fumed inwardly, gritting her teeth. It was hopeless, but she didn't plan to let Arclight take her out without a fight. There wasn't much she could do; the woman wouldn't feel even her strongest blow and would shrug off anything else she could fling at her. So at a loss for anything else, Vertigo sighed and drew herself up and one last time focused her pitiful power...

Which suddenly blasted through her every nerve like rushing water, taking her breath away with a sheer singing surge of strength. It washed away her surroundings and sluiced away her emotions, leaving her completely calm. Time seemed to hover in place for a long moment. Wonderingly, without any real thought, she closed her eyes to better "see"; almost dreamily, she raised a hand. In her mind's eye she grabbed and twisted...something. Hard.

When she jerked back to herself a moment (?) later and snapped her eyes open in a near panic, Arclight was no longer standing in front of her. Without stopping to wonder why, she looked down and was stunned then exhilarated to find that she was staring at Arclight's contorted body.

...it worked it worked I don't believe it oh it WORKED...

The woman's face was drawn with agony and her hands were locked claw-like at her chest and throat, and although her eyes were open she was quite clearly dead.

She was also quite clearly NOT touching Vertigo's ankle.

But something was.

Vertigo almost bit her tongue in alarm as she whipped her gaze around. Belatedly she recalled that she'd been backed up against the curb, right smack against Scrambler's corpse...only perhaps he hadn't been quite as dead as she'd thought. Although the entire right side of his face -- the side that gleamed wetly up at her in the starlight -- was now a terrible crushed ruin of bone and brain, somehow he'd managed to move one last time.

The fingers of his right hand was loosely curled around the back of her heel.

It was then that she finally understood where her sudden timely surge of incredibly amplified power had come from.

Even as she whirled and dropped to her knees beside her dying teammate, however, he let out one last small bubbling breath and was still. He hadn't opened his eyes or said a single word. A pity...she would never know if he'd made that final heroic effort to help her or simply to avenge himself on the woman who'd killed him. Vertigo wasn't sure whether she should be sorry for him or proud of him.

Either way, she'd won. She was in the clear now. She'd done it!

Almost wobbly with relief, Vertigo stood reluctantly up, dusting off her hands and wincing at the spreading ache across her upper back from Arclight's last blow. That chip of cement embedded in her lower leg wasn't unbearable, but she really would have to dig it out as soon as possible. She wondered if...

It was then that the ruby-red laser beam silently punched right through her right shoulder from behind, instantly cauterizing the hole with a hiss of vaporized blood.

NEXT: At long last, the startling (well, *I* sure hope so) conclusion. Heh. You'll have to read it and find out, won't you?