ISSUE #21: Unauthorized Mission
The fence line vanished beneath my fingers.
Three strands of razor wire peeled back like wet paper, their molecular bonds severing at precise points I'd mapped from fifty yards out. Behind me, Laura crouched in the treeline, utterly still except for the slow expansion of her ribcage as she scented the night air.
"Two patrols," she whispered. "Overlapping circuits. Twenty-three minute intervals."
I checked my watch. 2:17 AM. "Next gap in four minutes."
The World sat in a valley carved from upstate New York wilderness—all concrete brutalism disguised as a pharmaceutical research facility. Security cameras tracked predictable arcs across the compound. Motion sensors created a grid I'd already memorized. The building itself crouched low against the earth, trying to be forgettable.
It looked exactly like home.
Laura tensed beside me as voices carried on the wind. Two guards rounded the eastern corner, flashlight beams cutting through the dark. Their posture was sloppy—weight too far forward, weapons held loosely. Not expecting trouble.
Any other night they would've be right..
I let the strings shot out into the night, invisible filaments that caught moonlight like spider silk. Two guards. Two jugulars. I could make this quiet.
"Wait." Laura's hand touched my wrist. Her eyes tracked the patrol route, calculating. "Past the cameras. Between sweeps."
Smart. Bodies drew attention. Missing guards drew more.
The security room was buried in the facility's northeast corner—I'd identified it from the encrypted schematics on the stolen drive. Power junction, network hub, and surveillance nerve center all clustered in thirty square feet of reinforced concrete.
We moved when the patrols crossed on the western perimeter. Laura went low and fast, a shadow that didn't quite catch the light correctly. I followed, strings already reaching toward the security panel beside the service entrance.
The lock mechanism was more sophisticated than the Facility's—biometric scanner, keypad, and RFID reader operating in sequence. Government contract hardware with civilian oversight requirements.
I traced the causal threads backward from the lock assembly. Power supply. Logic board. Authentication sequence. The connections mapped themselves in my perception, cause flowing into effect in crystalline clarity.
Three strings. Three connections severed.
The lock clicked.
Inside smelled like every black site I'd ever been inside, disinfectant trying to mask something worse. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, their frequency just wrong enough to grate against the base of my skull. Laura's pupils contracted to slits as her night vision adjusted.
"Left corridor." I'd memorized the layout during the drive up. "Security room, then cell blocks."
We moved through halls that could've been copy-pasted from our childhoods. Same tile. Same paint. Same crushing emptiness between walls.
The first guard died before he registered movement.
Laura's claws punched through his throat—two quick strikes that severed carotid and windpipe simultaneously. She caught his body before it fell, lowering him silently while blood pooled across pristine white floors.
I was already past her, strings slicing through the security room door's hinges. The door fell inward with a soft thump of metal on concrete.
Two technicians inside. Young. Scared. Staring at computer screens that showed—
Empty cells. Row after row of vacant holding chambers, their doors hanging open like mouths screaming silently into fluorescent nothing.
"Where are they?" Laura's voice was barely human, claws still dripping.
The younger technician whimpered. The older one—maybe thirty, glasses, wedding ring—raised his hands slowly. "Terminated. Last week. Project shutdown orders from—"
A razor sharp string pierced his brain. Quick and painless. He crumpled without finishing the sentence. His partner followed half a heartbeat later.
"Check the feeds." Laura was already moving to the monitors, blood leaving prints on the keyboard.
I disabled the external alarms first—cutting their connection to whatever response team waited in cushioned chairs somewhere safer. Then surveillance, erasing the last twenty minutes of footage with prejudice.
The monitors cycled through empty cells. Ninety-seven total. Ninety-six vacant.
Cell 97 showed movement.
"There." I pointed.
Laura leaned closer, her breath fogging the screen. A girl—maybe sixteen, long blonde hair, slender build—sat in the corner of her cell with knees pulled tight to her chest. Her eyes were open but unfocused, staring at something that existed only in the space between her ears.
"Alive," Laura said it like a prayer.
We moved faster now. The layout pulled us deeper into the facility's gut—past examination rooms with restraint chairs still bolted to the floor, past laboratories where syringes lay scattered like fallen soldiers, past offices where paperwork documented horrors like it was temp work.
Guards tried to stop us.
They failed.
Laura painted the corridor in blood—throat, heart, spine, repeat. I handled the ones who got smart, using strings to collapse windpipes or sever the causal threads connecting brain to body. Clean. Surgical. Familiar.
Ten bodies between the security room and cell block C.
Cell 97 sat at the end.
Its door was closed. Containing some kind of power dampener that made sure who ever was inside could use their powers
I reached for the lock mechanism, but Laura caught my hand. "Let me."
She approached the door slowly, deliberately. Her claws retracted with that familiar snikt.
The lock and the power dampener disengaged.
The girl didn't move.
She sat in the corner exactly as she'd appeared on the monitors—knees to chest, arms wrapped tight, blonde hair hanging like a curtain between her and reality. Her eyes tracked toward us with the mechanical precision of surveillance equipment, but nothing behind them acknowledged what they saw.
"Hey." Laura's voice was wrong—too gentle, trying for something she'd never been taught. "We're not... we're here to help."
The girl blinked. Once. Twice.
Then she screamed.
Not with her voice—something else. Something that bypassed ears entirely and detonated in my thoughts. I felt Laura stagger beside me, her hands flying to her temples.
GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT
The words were pressure. Intent. Five separate voices screaming in perfect harmony, each one distinct but unified in absolute their rejection.
Five minds. One body. All of them terrified.
Laura dropped to one knee, blood trickling from her nose. Her healing factor would handle it—probably—but the psychic assault was relentless. The girl's eyes had gone completely white, glowing with the use of her power that was similar to Emma Frost.
I stepped forward into the teeth of it.
The psychic pressure intensified, trying to crush my consciousness like wet cardboard. Five voices demanded compliance, screamed for distance, begged me to disappear.
I found their threads instead.
Five separate causal chains, all tangled together in the girl's mind. Five consciousness pathways that should've been impossible but existed anyway—stitched together by necessity into something that functioned despite defying every law of individual identity.
I couldn't cut them. Wouldn't. That would be murder times five.
So I did something else.
I found the thread connected their terror to my presence and severed that instead.
The screaming stopped.
The girl collapsed like someone had cut her strings, which, technically, I had. Laura caught her before she hit the concrete, cradling the unconscious teenager against her chest with an awkwardness that would've been funny under different circumstances.
"What did you do?" Laura's voice was steady despite the blood drying on her upper lip.
"Stopped the panic reaction." I knelt beside them both, checking the girl's pulse. Elevated but stable. "She's still in there. All five of them. Just... less terrified."
"Five?" Laura looked down at the girl in her arms. "There are five people in here?"
I'd seen it in the data—thousands of identical clones. All terminated. "She's what's left."
The girl's eyes fluttered. Blue. Frost blue. When they focused on us, recognition sparked.
"Please." Her voice came out raw, unused. "Don't take me back."
Laura made a complicated expression. "We're not taking you anywhere you don't want to go."
I stayed back, keeping my voice gentle as I knew how.
"What's your name?" I asked.
The girl's face twisted with confusion. "Which one?"
"Any of them."
Five names tumbled out in sequence, each one delivered in a slightly different cadence. Sophie. Phoebe. Irma. Celeste. Esme. The Stepford Cuckoos, Project Weapon XIV, the perfect psychic weapon system designed to—
Laura helped her stand, supporting weight that barely registered. "Can you walk?"
"I think so. We think so." She swayed, caught between pronouns. "They killed the others. Consolidated us. We're supposed to be stronger this way but we're just—"
"Leaving." I cut through the explanation. "We're leaving. Now."
Alarms shrieked to life somewhere above us.
So much for stealth.