Excerpt from Review #184030-1282
Circa January 1995, classified deep-black:

Interviewer: What did "death" mean to a Marauder?
Subject 184030: Inconvenience. A loss of memory, 'cuz you'd only remember
up to your last brain-drain of course. A bad mark in the game.
Interviewer: Game?
Subject 184030: I've already told you about that. Ask something new.
Interviewer: All right then. How did YOU feel about it?
Subject 184030: Me? I don't know. It never happened to me.
Interviewer: Never, Vertigo...?
Subject 184030: Oh, for crying out loud...no, NEVER! And for the last
goddamn time, don't call me by that name ever again!

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Sight returned in a lifting fog. She blinked slowly, stupidly, and only then realized that her eyes had actually been open for some time. The world had a murky, greenish cast to it, and she felt...well, "strange" was an understatement. She seemed to be upright but she could feel no weight on the soles of her feet, no pressure at her back. Her scalp felt odd -- "light," almost -- and although her arms were crooked at the elbows her hands hung weightless like a kangaroo's paws, disenclined to obey gravity. There was a pressure around her mouth and nose, but when she sluggishly tried to reach up and touch it, her wrists encountered resistance. Yielding but abrasive...loose canvas tethers, perhaps?

The aborted movement sent a silvery cloud of hair swirling lazily forward to hover, undulating, about her cheeks. And it was then, as she stared incomprehendingly at this second flagrant dismissal of the law of gravity, that it came to her.

Liquid.

She was floating in a tank.

Then that means...oh, no. No.

She blinked but then something burned her opening eyes. Air! Distracted, she hastily squeezed her eyes shut once more as the clear greenish goop sank past her nose, past her chin, and continued to drop, draining away with a soupy gurgle. Her weight increased as the liquid disappeared, depositing her feet onto a coarse steel mesh. She staggered before she managed to lock her wobbling knees into place. Thankfully, the air was almost the same exact temperature as the fluid.

The loose wrist straps were easy to shake off now that she had a better sense of what was going on. And now that she had weight once more, she found that there was indeed something strange about her face... Almost without thinking, she reached up with both hands -- en route, her knuckles banged painfully into glass. She hastily pulled them in closer to her body and felt her way up a ribbed tube to the rubber-and-glass contraption attached to her face. A breathing mask. It peeled off easily once she found the catch under her chin. The moment she was free, she drew a deep breath -- the thick, organic scent of the draining gel promptly assaulted her nostrils and she gagged, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

Vertigo almost leapt into the air as something tugged sharply between her thighs but then it was gone, too, slithering away through the mesh beneath her. A catheter, she realized with a grimace. With one hand she scraped the sodden hair from her face and tried to see, but the air still stung her eyes after the soothing nutrient fluid. Therefore, she was forced to simply stand, quiet and blind, as the glass tube emptied and then retracted, rotating, into the groove around her feet.

Now she could hear sounds: grunts, the plop-splat of wet feet striking concrete, a shouted greeting, the meaty slap of a high-five, a rumbling chuckle. Scalphunter and Harpoon were already deep into their traditional heated betting match over who "took more of the bastards down with 'em."

She scrubbed repeatedly at her eyes until she could finally pry them open, and she let out a low whistle as she looked about the lab. Almost the entire motley crew was there, fresh out of the tubes. The only ones she couldn't spot were Riptide and Prism.

Just about the entire team got taken down! Christ! I wish I could remember...

That line of reason brought her mind slamming back down to the first coherent thought that had crossed it after she'd woken up...the thought she'd shied away from.

If I'm here...that means that *I died too.*

She found herself breathing in short pants, almost subconsciously shaking her head in denial. With a burst of sheer will she forced herself to stop. Only now did she notice the small details: the wrinkled skin at her fingertips, the fact that her knuckles felt too tight as she spasmodically clenched her hands. Her feet still smarted from the few seconds she'd spent standing on the steel mesh; the cold of the concrete floor was rapidly seeping through her soles into a bone-deep chill. This body was new, fresh...artificial. No calluses. No creases. No scars.

Almost in a panic, she sought back, trying to remember, but no matter how hard she tried the last thing she could recall was the brain-drain: the helmet and the lab. For a dizzy moment she thought that perhaps she'd blocked out some terrible trauma...but then the truth became obvious. Of COURSE that was the last thing she'd remember. Her mind was now the sum of what had been stored in Sinister's databanks. The memory of anything which had happened after that final recording session -- how long? hours? days? weeks? months?! -- was now gone forever.

Dead...someone killed me...I DIED...

Dammit, stop being such a CHILD! This is S.O.P. for a Marauder!

But the fact remained that alone of the Marauders, she'd never been "killed" before. Knocked unconscious, half-drowned, concussed, shot, blasted, singed, yes, but killed...? No... Wait. There HAD just been that one time, way back right after she'd entered Sinister's service...yes, of course. The Morlock hunt -- that time down in the tunnels under New York when she'd been too young, too blindly obedient, too "new" to really understand what had happened to her...

"They got you too, huh honey?" Scrambler clapped her on the arm with a wet smack, incidentally shattering her chain of thought, and favored her with that lopsided grin of his. Thanks to the regenerative goo, the handsome young Korean's normally "fashionably ruffled" haircut was slicked close to his skull with the exception of one rooster-like cowlick.

At this oddly ludicrious sight, Vertigo couldn't help grinning back. She briefly wondered if Arclight had ever caught him for that threatened beating or if it still lay ahead in his future. She shook her head to clear it of the lingering sluggishness and rediscovered how to use her vocal cords. "Um...yeah. Yeah, I guess so. D'you know what happened to us?"

He gave her a condescending look which made her ears burn. "Duh! Naaah, no more than you do. I guess the survivor'll fill us in." He jerked his chin to her left; she glanced over and only then spotted Riptide lounging against a door on the far wall. He was wearing battered civvies rather than his "business" bodysuit; his haphazard lavender hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and there was a definite smugness to his half-smile.

Vertigo knew that look; she'd worn it herself. He and several of the others kept an ongoing tally of who'd survived the most missions. Vertigo had of course never been invited to join the contest -- either because she wasn't really part of the cameraderie or because she would have won by a huge margin, she wasn't sure which -- but she could hardly NOT know the current score. This point in Riptide's favor would cancel out the time Colossus had broken his neck down in the Morlock tunnels, putting him once again even with Scalphunter...and knocking Arclight out of the tie.

Arclight.

As Scrambler ambled off, Vertigo snapped her gaze back across the room. Sure enough, Arclight was drawing her metal bodysuit back on with a thunderous expression, refusing to look at or speak to her teammates. She took matters of pride seriously. Absolutely seriously.

After all, it's not like she has any other hobbies, Vertigo thought snidely. She cast around until she found something resembling a towel and began to rub the drying gel out of her hair and off of her skin, still a little mentally off-balance. Still trying to see how she felt about the fact that this wasn't her body. That this wasn't technically HER. She'd practically forgotten the first time Sinister had been forced to clone her anew, because at the time she hadn't truly comprehended what had occurred.

This time, however, it was a staggering thought.

Almost masochistically, she probed for her feelings on the subject the way a child pokes at the socket of a missing tooth. The initial stab of irrational emotion had already died down. She felt a little numb.

Should that bother me? Should I care that I don't care as much as I should? she wondered as she absently fished an over-sized T-shirt out of the nearest equipment locker and tugged it over her head. I mean, it's not like I was a real person to begin with.

Now THAT hurt. She hadn't allowed herself that thought for a long time now...

She shook herself out of that mental rut and stepped back just in time to avoid being run down by Blockbuster and Scalphunter. Most of the rest of the team had already congregated by the laboratory door, exchanging taunts and gibes with Riptide. The "survivor," as Scrambler had casually dubbed him, was heartily enjoying himself at the expense of his teammates.

"Pity I couldn't bring her in," he was now cheerfully informing Scalphunter, "but hell, when someone's in that many pieces..."

"You're saying that she took us ALL out? HER?! You've got to be kidding."

"Hey hey, you're the ones who came home in doggie bags. Not me. Like I said--"

"I don't believe a word of it."

Arclight's voice cut right through the macho chatter like a sluice of ice water. Vertigo faded back as the tall woman stalked past, her muscles tiger-lithe under her liquid-metal bodysuit, her gaze focused upon her "lucky" teammate. The others gave ground, almost instinctively leaving a clear space around Riptide. Their eyes glittered with anticipation as they looked from one opponent to the other.

Like wolves again, Vertigo reflected absently as she cautiously brought up the rear, skirting around Arclight at a good two yards distance to find a sidelong vantage point. This could get interesting.

Riptide stood his ground, his stance light and easy on the balls of his feet, his manic smile unwavering under Arclight's level glare. "Look, I wasn't THERE for most of the fight -- we split up. She took the rest of you guys out, I dunno how, but Sinister's gonna be PISSED. I mean, we're talking about Threnody here! The chick wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders, and she's no fighter..."

Arclight merely eyed him as she would regard a cockroach. "And--?"

He hesitated. "Well...it gets a bit murky there. Confused, like. With Prism out of commish and the tunnels dark -- I had to take her down. Hard." He slashed the air with his hands, grinning bloodthirstily. "Chopped to bits."

Arclight smiled. It wasn't a pretty smile. "And," she pointed out softly but clearly, "you neglected to bring any of those 'pieces' back as proof? If nothing else, you know that HE would have wanted the genetic material for the banks."

Riptide reddened. He pushed himself off of the wall and advanced a threatening step, fists at his sides. "Are you accusing me of--"

"The reason he didn't bring back any pieces," a cool satin voice cut through, "is because oddly enough, there weren't any."

Vertigo went cold. She gulped and edged aside. Her master stood towering behind her, arms folded loosely over his armored chest. His face was utterly devoid of expression but for the sardonic lift of one eyebrow.

To his credit, Riptide held his ground. "S-sir, I told you the truth--"

"I know you did, Janos. I know you did. Unfortunately, it was an over-simplified truth shot full of gaping holes that a child could see through." Sinister's gaze did not waver from the unfortunate Marauder. "I have conducted certain -- investigations -- through a confidential Parisien contact, and I have come to the conclusion that our little escapee received assistance in the form of another mutant. It would be my assumption that whoever this person was, he or she has psionically tampered with Riptide's mind, submerging the true memories of what happened under Paris that evening."

His piercing gaze now lifted to travel unhurriedly from Marauder to Marauder. All of the assassins were forced to drop their eyes except for Arclight, who practically blazed with pride as she met her master's scrutiny head-on. Sinister paused but then smiled ever-so-slightly and nodded to her -- the only praise he would bestow upon her for her flash of cleverness. He then returned his attention to Riptide, pinning the man like a bug with a single sharp look.

"Whoever Threnody's rescuer may be," he continued with glacial aplomb, "they are admirably thorough. It is likely that the only reason you were allowed to live, Janos Quested, was to bear this false message to me...to fool me into believing that Threnody is dead. To throw me off of her scent, so to speak. I am insulted that our mystery psi believed me so foolish as to fall for such a sloppy memory patch. I will, however, require you to remain here in order to suitably extract the truth. It may be...messy."

Riptide was now pale and shaking, though with anger or fear Vertigo couldn't tell.

Still thoughtfully holding the "surviving" Marauder trapped with a gimlet look, Sinister gestured dismissively to the man's teammates. "The rest of you are free to return to your 'lair' for the time being, as I believe that I may have further need for you in this affair."

"What about Prism?" Scalphunter spoke up, his voice a rasp of coarse sandpaper after Sinister's cultured elocution. "If Rip was the only survivor, then where's..."

Sinister cut him off with a slight but sharp gesture. "Prism has proven one too many times to be utterly useless in combat. He will not be rejoining the team at any point in the foreseeable future. I'm afraid that if you wish to have light on your underground strikes, you will have to carry flashlights."

The master geneticist sounded amused at his own rare flash of dry wit, but only for a moment. He was dead serious once more as he added coldly, "I will no longer tolerate dead wood. See that you all remain...useful. Dismissed."

Sinister's masked threat was addressed to the entire team, but a sudden rush of fear twisted painfully in Vertigo's stomach. Suddenly Prism's paranoid gibberish that other night out on the streets of Paris clicked into perfect focus.

She could swear that Sinister was now speaking solely to her.