The snow fell heavier now, accumulating on the bodies scattered around Dr. Kinney's grave. Nine more corpses. Ten if I counted the one buried beneath the frozen earth.
I stared at Kimura's body—eyes still wide with the shock of mortality catching someone who'd believed themselves untouchable. The strings I'd used to suffocate her dissolved into nothing, reclaimed by whatever part of my biology generated them.
"You were holding back."
Laura's voice cut through the wind. Not a question, but a statement.
I turned. She stood ten feet away, blood freezing in her hair, green eyes fixed on me with an intensity I recognized from our sparring matches. Calculating. Analyzing.
"In our fights," she continued. "You could have won. Multiple times."
No point denying it. She'd seen what I could do against trained soldiers. Against Kimura.
"Yes."
"Why?"
The wind howled between us. As I contemplated how to answer.
In the end I chose honesty.
"They punished you when you lost." I watched her face for a reaction. "Figured if you won, maybe they'd go easier."
Something flickered in her expression. Not quite disbelief. Closer to incomprehension.
"You took beatings. Confinement. Omega Red's punishment." Her hands clenched at her sides. "For me?"
"Illogical I know." Tactical justification, though we both knew it wasn't the whole truth. "Maybe I just wanted to make a choice that didn't cause someone else harm for once."
"That's not—" She stopped, jaw tight. "You didn't have to do that."
"I know."
The silence stretched. Laura turned away, looking at the helicopter behind us, then back at the facility's entrance, the structure sticking out in the white landscape.
"Where should we go now?" I asked.
She was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice carried something I'd never heard before. Determination, I guessed.
"Wolverine."
I waited.
"He's... my genetic template. The DNA they used to create me." Laura's fingers brushed the claws between her knuckles, not quite extending them. "Dr. Kinney—my mother—she mentioned him. Said he was with a team. The X-Men. In New York."
"You want to find him."
"I don't know what I want." Flat honesty. "But it's the only thread I have to pull."
I understood that. The need for something to anchor to in a world suddenly too large and too open.
"What about you?" She turned back to me. "Family? Anyone?"
The question should have hurt. Maybe it did, somewhere beneath the clinical detachment.
"No memories before the facility." I scanned the horizon—endless white in every direction. "Don't know if they're alive. Dead. If they're looking." I paused. "If they exist at all."
The wind filled the space between us again.
"Come with me."
I met her eyes.
"To find Wolverine," Laura clarified. "You don't have anywhere else to go. Neither do I. We're—" She struggled with the words. "We're all each other have."
I could see the paths even without my power—acceptance leading to unknown futures, refusal leading to... what? Wandering alone in a world I didn't understand? Falling back into doing the I only thing I knew how to do. Killing?
But more than tactical calculation, there was something else. Something I didn't have words for.
"Okay."
Laura nodded once, crisp and professional, but I caught the subtle relaxation in her shoulders.
"The helicopter," I said. "Need to gather supplies first. Intel if there's any. Then I still need time to learn the controls."
"How long?"
"Twenty more minutes. Maybe less." I started toward the facility entrance. "Longer if you want us to survive the flight."
The corner of her mouth twitched. Almost forming a smile.
We found the facility's armory grabbing tactical gear that fit, winter clothing that wasn't blood-soaked, and weapons. Laura moved efficiently, her training evident in every economical motion.
I found a secured terminal still functioning on emergency power. My fingers moved across the keyboard—muscle memory from countless hours of technical training.
"What are you looking for?" Laura appeared at my shoulder, silent as death.
"Everything, anything. They have info on Wolverine. The X-Men. New York." Files populated the screen. "Location data. Threat assessments. Any intelligence that helps us not walk into a trap."
She leaned closer, reading. I could smell the blood still coating her, mixed with snow and the sterile facility air we'd breathed for fifteen years.
"They have extensive files on him," she observed.
"They were obsessed." I downloaded everything to a portable drive. "Probably the same with your mother's research. We should take whatever we can carry."
Laura disappeared. I heard her moving through adjacent rooms, the soft sound of drawers opening, papers rustling.
I found Dr. Kinney's personal files. Research notes. DNA sequences. Letters she'd written but never sent—to Laura, to people on the outside, to herself. Evidence of a conscience slowly drowning in institutional horror.
"Adrian."
Laura stood in the doorway holding something wrapped in brown paper, carefully preserved. She approached, extending it toward me.
"It was in her personal effects. Your designation's was on it."
I took the package. Light, but with substance. The brown paper crinkled under my fingers, brittle from years of storage.
"She made things for us," Laura said quietly. "In her spare time. Things we'd never be allowed to have."
I unwrapped it carefully.
I stared at it. A gift. Something given freely, not as reward for performance or compliance.
Grey fabric unfolded—long, flowing, familiar in a way that made my breath catch. I ran my fingers across the material. The texture registered instantly against my skin.
"It's—"
"The same composition as your strings," Laura finished.
Understand dawned in me. "She must have made it using samples they gave her to analyze."
A scarf. Practical in its length, wrapping around my hand with the same weight and flexibility as the strings I generated.
I tested it, sending the slightest pulse of my power through the fabric. It responded like an extension of my body, coiling around my forearm before unwinding smoothly.
"There was a note." Laura held out a small card, weathered at the edges.
I read Dr. Kinney's handwriting:
For Weapon 0—
Everyone deserves something that's theirs.
—S.K.
Before she died she told me, 'You are more than what they made you.'"
I looked at her. She stared at the floor, jaw clenched against emotion.
"She made it for you," Laura said quietly. "She... she tried. In small ways."
My fingers traced the stitching. Each loop evidence of time spent, of thought given to someone who'd been told he was a weapon and nothing more.
"She did," I agreed.
Laura watched me with that intense focus. "Are you—"
"I'm fine." I wrapped the scarf around my neck. It was soft. Warm.
"Thank you," I said. "For bringing this."
Laura nodded once.
The terminal beeped. Download complete.
"We should go," I said, pocketing the drive. "Storm's getting worse."
The helicopter was military-grade, well-maintained. I sat in the pilot's seat, Laura in the co-pilot position, both of us studying the controls with the same analytical intensity we'd applied to tactical lessons.
"This is different from the simulations," Laura observed.
"Everything's different from simulations." I tested the cyclic stick, checking the response. "That's the point."
Outside, snow continued to fall. The bodies around Dr. Kinney's grave were white mounds now. Soon they'd disappear completely, like we'd never been here at all.
I activated the engine. The rotor blades began their rotation, slowly at first, then building speed and sound.
"Ready?" I asked.
Laura's hand gripped the edge of her seat. Not fear—just unfamiliarity.
"Yes."
I lifted us off the ground.
The facility fell away beneath us—that windowless prison that had contained us since before memory. The grave. The bodies. The only world we'd ever known.
The sky opened above us, vast and dark and full of falling snow.
Laura stared out the window, face pressed close to the glass like a child flying for the first time.
"New York?" I asked, setting our heading.
"New York," she confirmed.
The helicopter cut through the winter night, carrying two weapons toward something that might be called freedom. Or might be another kind of cage.
But we had each other. All either of us really had now.
The scarf around my neck was warm against my skin—a reminder that even in the darkest places, someone had tried to see us as more than what we'd been made to be.
I adjusted our trajectory and flew on into the unknown.