Author's note #1: Although SPIRIT QUEST is a sequel to SHADOW MAN in which Logan's trip to Alkali Lake pits him against Magneto, Mystique and Toad, it is an independent story in its own right.
Author's note #2: Hey, if Marvel first says Logan has blue eyes, then in Ultimate X they're black, I can have them green here for the purpose of the story to make them more unusual and distinctive.
Logan hadn't noticed what time they left the Pit Bull but his internal clock said it was well after midnight when the pickup finally stuttered to a stop in front of a little cabin in the woods. The girls and the baby were asleep in the storage space, jumbled all together like a heap of puppies. Connor was barely awake himself but gently drew Kevin up out of the tangle and carried him into the dark house. Kia roused the girls and Logan helped them climb over the seat and down from the truck. The woman headed toward the cabin where windows suddenly blazed forth as yellow rectangles on either side of the door. She glanced back when she realized Logan wasn't following.
"What's the matter?"
"You tell me. Why did you bring me here? Where did we meet? How can these kids be mine?"
"Logan, it's late. Can't these questions wait till tomorrow?"
"It is tomorrow." He saw her look at the ground, at the house, finally back at him.
"Alright." She gave a little resigned half-laugh. "But I've got to have some coffee if I'm going to stay awake. Come on in."
The cabin was a rectangular room occupied chiefly by a large wood-burning stove and a larger table flanked by a pair of benches. A lighted kerosene lamp on the table revealed an overflowing, wall-to-wall bookcase on the left, but the right side was curtained off into little sleeping cubicles for the kids. The twins and the baby were already settled in one with bunk beds and crib; Connor had his own. Kia went over to tuck in the little ones, kissed them good night, drew the curtain closed.
Connor stood waiting in his, staring at Logan with open hatred. Kia came up, ruffled his hair, stood on her tiptoes to give him a kiss but the kid pulled away. "How long is that jerk gonna be here?" he demanded clearly, loudly. The woman murmured something and Logan turned aside so as not to eavesdrop.
I ought to just leave, he thought. Sleep in the woods. That's what he'd planned to do anyway when he came up to Canada. Go back to the wilds. Then this stupid situation raised its ugly head. Sure, he'd probably fathered some bastards, whoring around as he had the last fifteen or so years, but that wasn't his lookout. It was up to the broads to take precautions. And if they were dumb enough to let kids happen, then good riddance! But laying four on one woman? Not bloody likely! He had his standards: convenience and variety. Screw 'em, lose 'em, screw a new one. Hanging around only led to complications, like now. What the hell did she want? Money? Lotsa luck getting it from the likes of him! His total accumulated wealth was the thin little wad in his back pocket, change from his bar tab. That, plus a couple of pairs of clean socks. Well, she was welcome to all of it! But the bitch better have some answers and damn quick!
Curtain rings rattled on the wire as the kid yanked the cloth across. Kia came over to him. "Connor's upset."
Logan grunted, unimpressed. "So am I!"
She sighed. "Yes. Alright."
A little propane camping stove served to make the coffee. "Faster than the behemoth." The woman nodded in the direction of the wood burner. But Logan wasn't put off by her attempts at conversation. He didn't want chit-chat. He wanted facts.
Scowling, he took the mug she handed him, not interested in the coffee, enticing and rich as it smelled. But if it made her feel more comfortable to pretend this was an ordinary social visit instead of something closer to blackmail, then, yeah, he'd down the stuff. Anything to get her tongue wagging.
She picked up the kerosene lamp and pulled open a door beside the wood stove revealing a small lean-to attached to the house, all but filled by double bed, wardrobe and old dresser. "We can talk in here."
Logan entered, hearing the angry clash of curtain rings from Connor's cubicle as she closed the door.
Kia placed the lamp on the dresser, its light reflecting off the panes of the single window, making them look like squares of silvery metal instead of glass. She sat down on the edge of the bed, warming her hands around her cup, and gazed doubtfully, almost shyly, up at her guest.
Logan wasn't moved by this sudden timidity. He'd seen her feisty confrontation with Hawk, her tranquil demeanor after Sabertooth's attack. With a long reach he set his mug on the dresser, leaned back against the door, arms folded. "Well?"
"I'm sorry . . . I've -- I've taken advantage of you, Logan. The children. They really are yours, ours, but . . . " She stopped, rubbed her forehead. "Let me start over."
"Yeah, you do that."
She heard his sarcasm, looked him in the eye. "Have you ever heard of Weapon X?"
He stiffened. To the best of his knowledge the words meant nothing, but his body reacted as if he'd touched a live electrical wire. "What about it?" he growled.
Kia rose to stare unseeing out the window. "I don't know how much you remember. If you remember anything. You weren't supposed to, none of you were."
She talked to the metal panes of glass, the cup forgotten in her hands. "Weapon X was a short-lived, secret project of the Canadian government intended to develop a team of super soldiers. Assassins. Spies. Mercenaries. Terrorists . . . You name it. All those selected were volunteers. You were, too." She glanced at him over her shoulder, gave a twisted smile and turned back to the window.
"What you didn't volunteer for, what they 'neglected' to tell you, was that team members, to make them more durable, formidable, were to have their skeletons reinforced with an indestructible metal alloy called adamantium. In charge of this bonding procedure, using a method he had developed for fusing metal to bone cells, was a Dr. Cornelius."
"Cornelius!" Logan lurched away from the wooden panel as if it had suddenly turned into a hot griddle. Cornelius. That was the name he'd come across up at Alkali Lake, the man whose work Magneto was following in order to add his own little embellishments to Logan's frame.
"You remember him?" Kia lifted an incredulous eyebrow.
"Heard of 'im." He took a deep breath, fell back against the door, laced his arms, swallowed.
"Cornelius is where I come in. At the time I was a post-doc student of his in molecular biology. I was eighteen."
"Post-doc at eighteen. Sure. Happens all the time." He gave a derisive snort.
Kia gazed at him with narrowed eyes. "In today's politically correct parlance I'm what's called 'gifted'," she said dryly. "Back then it was 'genius'. When I was five the government took me from my parents and put me in a boarding school. I wasn't alone. This happened to thousands of Indian children here in Canada. Kind of a force-fed adaptation to the white man's world. For most of us the experience was a disaster. Or should I say experiment? Ripped from our roots and dispassionately grafted on to an alien culture, today the majority of my schoolmates are misfits in both worlds."
Her lips quirked in a bitter smile. "I was one of the pitifully few successful lab rats. What the teachers offered whetted a hunger I didn't know I had. I lapped up everything they could give me, devoured the school library, begged for more. In short: high school diploma at twelve, bachelor's degree in biology at fourteen, master's in chemistry at fifteen, doctorate in molecular biology at seventeen, those last two years studying under Cornelius. So you see it was only natural I go to Alkali Lake with him to put our research into practice."
She suddenly noticed her coffee, took a sip, made a face. "Cold." Setting the cup on the dresser beside his, she sank down on the bed. "Alkali Lake is where we met, Logan. For security reasons everyone went by single names. There was already a 'Dubois' so I was just 'Kia.' I knew you only as 'Logan.' I’ve always wondered, is that your first name or your last?"
Beats me, he thought, and aloud growled. "Just get the hell on with it!"
The woman's outthrust jaw was the only sign of her irritation for the next moment Kia tossed her head like someone ridding herself of an annoying insect and calmly continued. "You don't remember me, I know. Probably you wouldn't remember me even if we'd met at some dump like the Pit Bull. I was just a one night stand. Love 'em and leave 'em. I realize that now."
Logan shifted his weight from foot to foot, thrown off balance by this unexpected, unpleasant turn of conversation. He took the offensive, snarled. "I remember you, alright! You and the rest of you ghouls are what haunt my nights! Cutting, burning, torturing! So you brought me here to gloat, or what?"
Her expression was scornful. "I was never one of your ghouls! But I saw what happened and I hated it. I couldn't do anything then but I've been atoning for it ever since. I'm now a certified M.D. After Alkali Lake I switched from research to general medicine. Healing people instead of hurting them. No, the only good thing that came from that part of my life was meeting you. That and Connor. And something else."
"What?" He wanted to steer her away from the touchy subject of his love life, but she wasn't so easily diverted.
"If you'd given me a book back then," she said, passing over his question, "I'd know it cover to cover in a couple of hours. Know what was insightful, what was true, what was fluff, what was false. But I couldn't read people. You -- You overwhelmed me. You were older, experienced, strong, sensual -- You called me all kinds of endearments which I'm too embarrassed to repeat. But I remember them all, remember your caresses, remember the hard, hot weight of your body -- "
He cleared his throat, made to interrupt. This was getting way too personal! She ignored his distress.
"You were my first, you know." She smiled up at him. "It's only natural for a girl to remember her first time in detail. Besides, you said we'd get married. Innocent little moi, boarding school, then college -- books, books, books. Never real life. But books said that's how it happens. You fall in love -- and I was in love -- next logical step, you get married. We even selected the children's names that night. Or anyway you did. You wanted them to all sound like mine, you said. Like Kia."
Logan gulped, gave a choked laugh. "So that's how I named the kids."
"Yes."
"Okay, so maybe Connor's mine -- "
"No maybes. He's yours. So are the others."
"But . . . "
She dropped her eyes to the hands twisting in her lap. "The next day you'd forgotten all about me and were chasing after someone else. I was outraged. Although at the time, only eighteen, I didn't believe that I was entitled to be angry or insulted. You were wonderful, perfect, exciting. You had deigned to cast your eye on me, and then you left. So it must be my fault, something must be lacking in me. I must have done something to deserve feeling devastated, betrayed, victimized, unclean. A month later when I realized I was pregnant with your child I wanted to kill myself from shame. I went into the lab that night and started mixing a lethal cocktail like some kind of mad scientist from a B movie. It's funny when I think back on it." She laughed.
Logan didn't. He felt stunned, breathless, like he'd been hit in the gut about fifty times. Was Kia's reaction exaggerated or did all broads . . . women . . . feel like that when he left them? Worthless. Filthy. Used. Dumped. But . . . but he gave 'em a good time, didn't he? Wasn't that enough?
"I put the beaker to my lips," she was saying, "asking all the powers that be for you to suffer the pain I was feeling when suddenly . . . It was as if the wall disappeared. I saw you, the other volunteers, in vats -- being cut, burned, metal grafted on -- but this was long before the actual 'enhancements' began!"
She turned to him. "Did you read that scientists have recently decoded the human genome? That's what Cornelius and I were working on at Alkali Lake. At the time of my vision we were doing routine medical evaluations, blood pressure readings, samples of muscle tissue, body fluids, so on, examining the DNA, working with it, manipulating it in order to augment the healing factor, induce it in others. And, frankly, I was led to believe that the intensified healing was what the project was all about. Keep the super soldiers fit and healthy and they fight better. It made sense to me. I knew nothing about the adamantium and that night when the vision showed it being fused to bones, to your bones, I was shocked, revolted. Nothing you did to me deserved that."
"Thanks!" He all but spat the word. "So you saw this horror show and you didn't do anything about it? You didn't warn us? Me?"
"Would you have believed me if I had?" And at his silence, she continued. "I didn't believe me. I thought I was just being hysterical, distraught because I was on the point of killing myself. Anyway, I dropped the beaker and ran back to my room. Two months later they brought in the vats and you and the others were sent to a different building." She took a deep breath.
"But whatever triggered that first vision continued to work. One morning a second vision showed all of you being given drugs designed to obliterate your memories, make you into blank sheets, no personal feelings, no moral qualms, just indestructible machines ready to be programmed to carry out whatever course of mayhem your masters decided. I bluffed my way past the guard -- needed another blood sample, I said -- found you in a cell. I tried to tell you what was going to happen, tried to get you up, out, but you were half crazy from pain and didn't even recognize me. The next week they started administering the drugs, and one doctor, Ferro, I think, set about distorting those memories that resisted so that everything you knew or thought you knew would be suspect." She stopped, bit her lip as she looked at him. "Logan, I'm so terribly, terribly sorry . . . "
He found that at some point he had collapsed on the bed and was gripping his head in a steel-fingered vice, squeezing it harder and harder as if he intended to crush his skull like a coconut so he could probe the pieces, pick out the meat. There had to be something left!
All references to characters belonging to the X-Men Universe are (c) and TM the Marvel Comics Group, 20th Century Fox and all related entities. All rights reserved. Any reproduction, duplication or distribution of these materials in any form is expressly prohibited. No money is being made from this archive. All images are also (c) and TM the Marvel Comics Group, 20th Century Fox and all related entities; they are not mine. This website, its operators and any content used on this site relating to the X-Men are not authorized by Marvel, Fox, etc. I am not, nor do I claim to be affiliated with any of these entities in any way.