The mansion was quiet at 2:47 AM when I powered on the laptop Xavier had provided. Standard issue, nothing special—but it would serve my purpose.
I pulled the encrypted drive from my pocket. The one I'd taken from the Facility's database during our escape, hidden in my jacket lining for the past month. Insurance, I'd told myself. Information was currency.
Time to spend some.
The drive clicked home. My fingers moved across the keyboard with practiced efficiency, bypassing the basic security protocols. Child's play compared to what the Facility had taught me.
Files bloomed across the screen. Personnel records. Training regimens. Kill orders. Everything I'd copied before we left that hell behind us.
But there—buried three folders deep—something else.
WEAPON PLUS NETWORK - SATELLITE PROGRAMS
My pulse didn't change. It never did. But my eyes narrowed as I opened the file.
Locations. Coordinates. Project designations scattered across the continent like a cancer that refused to die. Some terminated. Some active.
Some very, very active.
PROJECT: WEAPON XIV
STATUS: OPERATIONAL
LOCATION: The World - Sublevel 3
DIRECTOR: John Sublime
I scrolled further.
GENETIC SOURCE: Emma Grace Frost
MATERIAL ACQUIRED: 20## [REDACTED]
METHOD: Surgical extraction - ovarian tissue
The cursor hovered over the next line.
UNITS CREATED: 5,000+
UNITS ACTIVE: 5
PURPOSE: Phoenix Force entrapment/psychic amplification protocol
My fingers stopped moving.
Stolen genetic material. Five thousand attempts to create something viable. Five survivors—if you could call it that.
Emma Frost's name sat there in black and white. The same woman who'd called us "engineered killers" two days ago, who'd argued we were too dangerous for her precious students.
She had no idea someone had done to her what they'd done to Logan.
What they'd done to Laura.
I opened the attached file. Schematics for a facility called "The World"—some kind of self-contained research habitat. Coordinates placed it in upstate New York. Close. Too close.
More files. Training protocols. Psychic conditioning methods. Notes about "acceptable loss rates" and "optimal compliance percentages."
My jaw tightened.
The final document was a mission brief.
OBJECTIVE: Phoenix Force acquisition and containment
TIMELINE: Pending Force manifestation
CONTINGENCY: Total unit termination upon completion
Expendable. Just like we'd been.
I sat back, the laptop's glow washing my face in blue light. The Facility wasn't an isolated incident. It was a network, a hydra with heads scattered across the country. Cut off one, two more remained operational.
Five girls. Created to be weapons. Programmed to die when their usefulness expired.
No one else should suffer what we did.
The thought crystallized in my mind.
I saved the files to the laptop, ejected the drive, and stood. Laura had all but ditched her room. Favoring the company that mine provided.
I shook her awake gently.
"Adrian." Not a question. She could read the purpose in my stance.
"We need to talk."
She got up without hesitation. following me to the only light source in the room, my laptop. "What did you find?"
"Other programs." I opened the laptop, turned it toward her. "Weapon Plus didn't stop with us."
Her eyes tracked across the screen, absorbing the information. I watched her expression shift—subtle changes most wouldn't catch. The slight tightening around her eyes. The way her shoulders went rigid.
"Emma Frost," she said quietly. "They used her genetic material."
"Without consent. Stolen during surgery." I scrolled to the schematics. "Five active units. Held at a facility thirty miles from here."
Laura's hands clenched. "How many total?"
"Over five thousand created. Most didn't survive the process."
The silence stretched. When Laura spoke again, her voice was flat. Dead. The tone she used when discussing a mission.
She looked up from the screen. "We have to get them out."
No hesitation. No debate about whether we should help or if it was our responsibility. Just immediate, absolute certainty.
I felt a sense of, Pride? well up inside me.
"Agreed," I said. "But we need to be smart about this."
Laura moved to sit on the bed, gesturing for me to continue. I pulled up the facility layout.
"The World is a self-contained environment. Security will be tighter than our Facility—these are psychics being groomed for a specific purpose. They'll have countermeasures against telepathic intrusion, possibly psi-dampeners."
"Good for us," Laura noted. "We're not telepaths."
"But they are. Five of them, connected, trained to work in concert." I zoomed in on the sublevel schematics. "We'd be fighting a hive mind on their home territory."
"You're saying it's impossible."
"I'm saying it requires preparation." I met her eyes. "We're already on thin ice here. Xavier's monitoring us. Emma suspects we'll revert to violence. If we disappear for an unauthorized mission..."
Laura's expression hardened. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying we need to plan this carefully. Extraction route, timing, contingencies. And we need to consider what these girls have been through, what they'll be capable of."
She stood, paced to the window. Moonlight caught the sharp lines of her profile.
"When I was in the Facility," she said quietly, "I used to imagine someone coming. Breaking down the doors. Saving us." Her fingers traced the window frame. "It never happened."
"Until you saved yourself."
"With your help." She turned back. "Those girls, they deserve the same chance. To choose something other than what they were made for."
"They do."
"Then we find a way." Laura's jaw set with familiar determination. "We plan, we prepare, and we get them out. Even if it costs us our place here."
I should have argued. Maybe played devil's advocate.
Instead, I pulled up a new file and started mapping extraction routes.
"Tomorrow night," I said. "We'll need to move fast but stealthy. Once we're detected the situation becomes exponentially more complex."
Laura sat beside me, watching as I outlined approach vectors. "How do we keep Xavier from knowing?"
"I'll handle that." My fingers flew across the keyboard. "I can manipulate the causal connections between his monitoring and our actions. Create blind spots in his awareness."
"That'll take a lot of energy."
"Worth it." I marked three potential entry points. "The alternative is asking permission and being told no."
Laura was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice carried something I'd rarely heard from her—uncertainty.
"Are we doing the right thing?"
I stopped typing. Looked at her directly.
"Yes," I said, without hesitation. "Leaving someone to suffer when we can help makes us no better than our captors."
Her eyes searched mine. Whatever she found there seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded once.
"Okay." Simple. Final. "Then we do this together."
"Always."
We spent the next hour going over details. Laura asked questions about the facility layout, identified weak points I'd missed. I mapped probability threads, looking for the highest success rate. By 4:30 AM, we had the skeleton of a plan.
"Get some sleep," I told her, closing the laptop. "Tomorrow we'll need to maintain normal appearances. We dont have to attend classes yet, but during training, act like we're adjusting."
"While planning a rescue mission for the night." Laura's mouth curved. "Just another day at Xavier's."
I laid down. With Laura following close behind.
"Adrian?"
I turned.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
"No one else should suffer what we did," I repeated.
Laura nodded. Understanding passed between us—the same wordless communication we'd developed through fifteen years of forced combat.
I closed my eyes. Tomorrow night, we'd save five girls from a fate we understood too well.
And if the X-Men expelled us for it?
Then we'd deal with that too.