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

Interviewer: You say that this idea never occurred to you before?
Subject 184030: No.
Interviewer: But you didn't get along with your teammates, and Sinister scared
you -- you missed your "homeland" and you weren't happy. Why didn't you ever
just...leave?
Subject 184030: Look. You don't understand, you CAN'T understand. It
just plain wasn't possible for me to think like that. It's like...like a kid who gets
beaten by their parents and bullied by their big brothers. Just a little kid. They
might have vague fantasies about running away, but to really, seriously DO it?
No way. Now me...I'd never even HEARD that there was such a thing as
"running away." I didn't know that there was anything better. I'd never watched
TV, never read a newspaper. Hell, what was there to run away TO...? I didn't
even have a childhood. All I ever knew was my master, my teammates, and my
orders. First Brainchild, then Sinister. And now you. I had nothing else. I
WAS nothing else. Anyhow, it wasn't a living hell or anything, just uncomfortable
at times. The idea of leaving the team didn't even cross my mind until you guys
first suggested it.
Interviewer: Would you go back now?
Subject 184030: I can't. And you know it.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

That night, for the first time in what passed for her "life," she woke up screaming.

Actually, by the time the shriek was only halfway across her tongue Vertigo was already bolt upright and wide-awake. She clapped both hands over her mouth, biting the sound down to a short yelp, but the damage was done -- in the dim morning half-light the apartment came silently alive in a bristle of weapons and muscle.

For a moment she hoped that no one would have noticed that she--

Two low, clear words in the darkness. "Vertigo, report."

Shit. No such luck. Wide-eyed and flushed with embarrassment, she managed to force her hands back to her sides and pasted a battle-ready expression across her face. "Thought I heard something on the floor below," she lied gruffly back as she slipped out of her nest of mismatched blankets. There was a brief flurry of activity -- one of the shadows scoped out the window and another checked the hall. Nothing, of course.

"Could be a bum, maybe a cat," Scrambler murmured, stifling a yawn. He seemed quite unconcerned, not even bothering to throw off the sleeping bag he'd burrowed under. "Maybe even just a board settling. C'mon, guys, it's too early for this."

Vertigo could almost feel the temperature in the room drop a few degrees as Arclight and Scalphunter focused twin glares on their less military teammate. Harpoon was already out the door, presumably to check below. Hoping for something to kill. Vertigo momentarily wished that Scrambler had been right, because really, finding something to kill WOULD have put the whole group in a more amiable mood.

"No one was on watch. We didn't even SET one." Scalphunter sounded distinctly disgusted with himself. "We, ladies and gentlemen, are getting soft. Ript--Blockbuster, you're it."

The huge shadow on the sofa shifted indignantly. "Hey--! You're the one who wants a lookout, shouldn't YOU--"

"Can it, Baer. I'm not in the mood." Scalphunter was now up and fully dressed, oblivious to the bite of the pre-dawn chill. Across the room metal glinted -- Arclight was silently finishing her own suit-up, as if sharing his unspoken plan. They'd been doing that more and more often lately, acting in wordless tandem, a team within the team. It was...unnerving. "When Harpoon gets back, you can pass the buck to him if you like. I don't care, just so long as one'a you sorry carcasses stays awake at all times.

"And before you can ask the next stupid question that's about to cross your lips, yeah, I'm heading out for a few hours. Just plain 'out,' walking, checking the perimeter. I'm not in the mood to go back to sleep after this...but damned if I'm going to sit here cleaning my guns for the millionth time and listening to Sung snore. GodDAMN, I need to find a hobby. Stay put."

Without a backward glance he stalked out of the room. Arclight was gone on his heels a moment later.

Vertigo released a lungful of air and gratefully rolled back over into her bedding. She'd gone to sleep battle-ready, as she always did when Sinister ordered them to stay on alert status; unfortunately, her striped-and-swirled leotard wasn't much help against the cold which seeped into the ruined building from all sides.

True to Scalphunter's prediction, Kim "Scrambler" Sung was already once again blissfully rumbling away from somewhere within his woolen cocoon. For a lanky guy, he had a HELL of a rattle. Vertigo scowled and curled up on her side. Between that racket and the dream...

"Dream." A dream? But she didn't...

I've never seen anything in my sleep like that before. I'm not sick and I'm not hallucinating. Therefore, it MUST have been a dream. Huh! "Nightmare" is more like it. Her heart was still uneasily fluttering against her ribs.

She stared blankly at an inside fold of blanket, half trying to recall the details and half trying to shove them from her mind. The curious side won out. Only moments later, she regretted it. A low moan rose in her throat and she closed her eyes, hugging her knees to her chest. She hadn't been dreaming, not in the strictest of senses. No, she'd been...remembering. The writhing light streaming through her eyelids, her joints twisting and warping, her spine realigning with a creak and a pop that she could hear even over the sound of her own screams -- and overlaying it all, driving those screams down into a tearing silence in the back of her throat, the blinding molten sheeting agony as her skull and her brain itself e-x-p-a-n-d-e-d...

"...don't want to remember don't remember don't remember don't don't don't..." Vertigo caught herself whispering aloud like a mantra, rocking with her knees crushed painfully against her breasts. With a gasp she released her deathgrip from around her shins and just about bit her tongue off to shut herself up. Luckily, she'd been almost voiceless in her moment of weakness...and Scrambler was, if possible, snoring even louder than before. Incredible.

Suddenly angry at herself for her lapse, Vertigo quietly slid out of the blankets. Shivering in the grey light which was now streaming in through the broken window, she rooted through the mess until she found a servicable pair of sweatpants and a jacket two sizes too big for her. Good enough.

"Whatchup to?"

Blockbuster. She shrugged expressively, not turning to look at him. "I don't know. Maybe Scalphunter had the right idea. A walk sounds like a good idea." She hesitated, glancing out the window. The sun was almost up. "Maybe it'd be nice to see Paris in the daytime. Aboveground. Like...like a tourist or something."

"Vee..."

"I mean, I-I could put my hair under the hood of this jacket, and it's not as if I'd be the weirdest thing out there on the streets, and I'd be back in an hour or so, really..."

"Vee! C'mon! You don't have to get so defensive!"

"Um. Sorry."

"Sheesh! It's not like I'm gonna stop ya or anything. It's just not like you, to wanna go wanderin' around a strange city. Especially when ya dunno when The Big Guy's gonna want us on our toes."

"I won't go far," she promised. However, she only had one leg stuck awkwardly into the pants when the door banged open. Scalphunter and Arclight were inside an instant later, trailed closely by Harpoon. The Inuit looked sullen. The other two simply looked pointedly neutral.

"Up on your feet, guys," Arclight snapped. She dug a toe under Scrambler and kicked up hard enough to throw him sprawling from his warm "nest." The young man rolled onto the hard wood floor with a string of dire threats, but as he shook himself fully awake and realized who he was up against he quickly shut up and hurried to obey.

Blockbuster and Vertigo exchanged a glance. Blockbuster shrugged and looked away, clearing his throat. "Hmm. Sounds like ya talked to the boss. What's the word?"

"The trail's gone cold and he is MAJOR-pissed. We're heading back to the 'States. In tubes." Scalphunter grinned sadistically. "And oh yeah, I almost forgot," he drawled. "I hear there's going to be more thinning in the ranks, if you know what I mean." His gaze flicked impartially over the entire motley crew, but Arclight looked straight at Vertigo and flashed her a quick cruel smile.

Vertigo gulped, her stomach suddenly icing over again. The irrational little fear which had gnawed at her for so long had just become a certainty.

And right on the heels of this sudden cold knowledge a single brand-new thought chattered through her mind. A monstrous, impossible, ridiculous, unthinkable, unacceptable, traitorous, yet completely unavoidable thought.

I've got to get out.

INTERLUDE

"So that's how it was. Hmm." Sinister resisted the urge to thoughtfully tap his pen against his teeth, a bad habit he'd only acquired over the course of the last few decades. He briefly considered the messy remains of Riptide and decided that clean-up could come later.

He'd been right to move quickly, using technology and intuition instead of simply interrogating the unfortunate Marauder. Whoever had buried the psychic implant in Riptide's mind had set it to literally explode if the man gave even the slightest thought to the true events under the streets of Paris the night before -- the night when almost the entire team had been mysteriously decimated. Supposedly by Threnody. Sinister hadn't believed the flimsy cover story for a moment, and he'd been right; someone had tampered with Riptide's mind, planting false information to throw the assassins and their master off of the renegade's tracks.

Unfortunately, Sinister had had barely begun to pry out the truth before Riptide, never known for his sparkling intelligence, had been unable to resist trying to "see" the flashes of buried memory his master was painstakingly extracting...

The master geneticist brushed an overlooked chip of bone from his labcoat. [Come on, supervillain or not, would YOU wear armor in a laboratory? .-=K=-.] He regarded the mess smeared all down the previously white coat and then shrugged and removed the coat entirely, dumping it into the incinerator and consigning the broken-skulled body to the flames a moment later. A new Riptide drifted mindlessly in a tube on the other side of the lab, ready to be decanted, but Sinister wasn't really in the mood to deal with him right now. It disturbed him that Threnody was still on the loose, and with so powerful an ally -- for certainly this was a cover-up to mask the fact that she had survived.

More to the point, he was concerned about the fact that he had no idea who had come to her assistance. The few flashes of true images that he'd pried from the late Marauder's brain had been inconclusive. Her rescuer was male, young, and wearing a bulky jacket, a terribly sketchy description to begin with. Almost soon as the stranger had entered the tunnels the team had started to self-destruct, starting with Scrambler's foolhardy attempt to mess with the boy's powers. Scalphunter's artillery had gone haywire, destroying himself and several other Marauders...and then Riptide himself had been seized by some sort of external control, whipping into a deadly hail of shuriken which had brutally cut down both of his female teammates.

That last retrieved memory had been the most vivid, as if there was a genuine emotion woven through it -- Guilt? I didn't know Janos had that in him, Sinister mused idly as he meticulously washed his hands clean of any remaining blood and brain matter -- but the others had been a jumbled patchwork blurred by darkness and sloshing sewage. No clear images of their enemy's face. Useless. No way to tell if the boy had been a telekinetic, a magnetic, a mind-alterer, a reality-manipulator, or something even more exotic.

In addition to being a crude but powerful psi, apparently.

Sinister shook his head. He felt no anger or disappointment in the Marauders' poor performance, for they'd obviously been up against an unknown alpha-level mutant whom even he himself would have found difficult to subdue. What DID disappoint him was the fact that, once again, his chosen assassins had shown absolutely no capacity for teamwork under pressure. When the heat was on, they tended to panic and strike out at their foes as individuals, almost taking turns, with no thought to how they could combine forces to survive and perhaps actually succeed. They were brute force, a blunt weapon. Not Sinister's style at all. Whatever had possessed him to put together this unruly, haphazard pack of feral dogs in the first place? What had inspired him to reclone them after their first crushing defeat down in the Morlock Tunnels under Manhattan?

The same hidden streak of sloppiness that allowed me to hire the Nasty Boys, apparently, he chided himself, wincing at the memory. Sometimes he became so caught up in his intricate long-term plans that perhaps, he was forced to admit, just perhaps his short-term arrangements such as assassination, acquisition, and security became a little...hasty.

For a moment he briefly considered disbanding the Marauders completely. Let their next mission be their last. Let them cut loose on the X-Men for their final hurrah, as they'd long been champing at the bit to do so. Close down the tubes, toss out the samples, and jump up and down on the bubble-memory chips. It was tempting, all right.

But very, very wasteful.

And it there was one thing Nathaniel Essex was most certainly not, it was wasteful.

Moving across the lab to a computer terminal, Sinister called up a composite file on his pet assassins and glanced through it perfunctorily, this time not bothering to stop himself from picking up the nearest pen and tapping it against one razor-sharp canine. He was too stubborn to let the project go down the drain so easily. Perhaps he was looking at it the wrong way. Culling Prism had seemed rash at the time, almost a childish flash of temper, but in retrospect it was a good start.

"Perhaps...yes," he murmured aloud, pausing one screen and reading it again, more slowly. With an adjustment here and a complete restructuring there, the right training here here and there...yes, it could work.

And it's not as if I have anything else to do besides conducting dozens of genetic tests, keeping my two-century planner on track, beginning some serious research into Legacy, and perfecting...her, he thought dryly, half-turning to regard the second tube next to Riptide's. The tube which held something which had merely been an idle project before, but now looked as if it would fit perfectly into his new plan.

Yes, I do think this will work out after all.

END INTERLUDE

She'd done it a hundred times, it seemed. They all had. The "uniforms" and equipment stowed away in a compartment under the tube; the bodies went in the tubes themselves. The tube slid shut, the wires and catheters snaked into place, the sedative feed activated, and the lights went out until they were needed again. Actually, Vertigo really didn't mind it at all, especially when Sinister used the method to smuggle them overseas. She hated airline food, and she always got seasick. Chalk up another mark in the "irony" column.

This time, though, she was scared to death. This time, she was positive that she would never wake up. And in the clarity of that fear she'd come up with a plan. It wasn't a great plan, but it was the best option she had if she wanted to get a headstart on her teammates...because they'd be sent after her, certain as the sun rising. No one left the Marauders. No one.

She waited until the tube closed, until the crate cut off the light. Sinister was wasting no time shipping his assassins home -- even as the breathing mask dropped into place and the tubes began to coil around her wrists, the entire contraption swayed underfoot and then tilted sharply back, swinging her in the canvas harness and banging her into the glass. It was cold against her bare skin and she winced.

A sharp prick at her wrist alerted her as her distraction almost ruined her plan. She nearly bit her tongue as she fumbled in the dark for the IV, yanking it out of her vein before the sedative could pump into her system. Then she tried to relax, counting the seconds. She had no idea what to expect. That sting of the needle was usually the last thing that registered before she woke up lying on an uncomfortable examination couch with a new mission briefing echoing in her ears...

Vertigo glanced down at a gurgling sound, and moaned as something swirled warm and wet around her feet. The preserving gel. Of course.

By the time the crate was set upright again long minutes later, the liquid was up to her knees. By the time she decided that enough time had passed for her to safely make her move, it was rising around her thighs. An ominous numbness was creeping up her legs along with the gel. Anesthetic? Oh NO! Don't want to spend the whole trip conscious but paralyzed. Can't go back now. It's now or never...

With new determination, she reached up and shoved at the metal cap just above her head. At first it wouldn't budge and she almost panicked, but then she remembered how the glass had spiralled slightly as it rose into place. She twisted her entire body, almost wrenching her back, trying to unscrew the "lid" of the tube. To her relief it popped free and fell to the side, taking the breathing mask and a tangle of electrodes with it--

There was a tremendous jerk and suddenly she was choking! The mask! It was anchored to the cap of the tube by a mass of wiring! She clawed frantically at the catch under her chin and freed herself, cursing her stupidity and rubbing her wrenched neck as the cap clunked to the bottom of the crate outside the tube.

The anesthetic gel was lapping around her waist now and her knees felt like water. She hurriedly pulled herself up in the harness, and managed to jam one bare foot into the strap which had previously run between her thighs. Straightening up on that one wobbly leg, she promptly bumped into the plastic ceiling of the shipping crate. There wasn't enough clearance to climb out of the tube, and when she heaved her shoulders up at the crate it didn't budge an inch.

Of course. Like it WOULDN'T be securely fastened. Shit.

She leaned her chin on her folded arms on the edge of the tube and brooded for a moment as the gel begun to rise above her ankles again. Then, with a sigh, she did the only thing she could do.

She began to bang methodically on the inside of the crate with one fist.