I needed to sit in silence for a minute, work through the implications of this. None of it was good. And, to be honest, I was too emotionally shell-shocked to figure out much more than that.
Beatrice folded her arms. “I can see we’re not going to get much more out of you – hypnosis or not. For now. There will be plenty of time to change your mind. This is your new home, Neena. We’ll give you a chance to settle in.” My stomach clenched in revulsion.
I hated how much of myself I saw in Beatrice. Down to the hairstyle. I was going to have to change that soon, if I ever got out of this.
She reached her hand back across her desk, pressed a button next to an old-fashioned intercom speaker. It buzzed. The door opened, and I heard two sets of footsteps clomp in behind me. Beatrice told me, “You’re almost certainly harboring fantasies of breaking free as soon as you’re set loose from that chair.”
She looked to the kid, who was still hiding from me behind the back of his chair. “Would you like to make sure that she can’t hurt us?”
I couldn’t see much of Lazarus from this angle, but from the way Beatrice frowned, I guessed he had shaken his head. “All it’s going to take is a few words,” she said. “You’ve even got a post-hypnotic trigger phrase. You don’t have to exert yourself if you don’t want to.”
He let out a breath.
Eventually, he said, “Fortune makes a fool.”
The effect was like someone had jammed an electrified fork into my back and wiggled it around my spine. I jerked. The world went hazy, and then doubled as my eyes unfocused. However they’d programmed me as a child to get this kind of reaction out of me, it must have been intense.
But it wasn’t as bad as before. Last time, the feeling had been like someone had wired me up to a car battery. This time, the shock was more like a reflex reaction – like when a doctor taps your knee, but across my whole body.
You know those classes at Professor Xavier’s institute I mentioned, the ones that taught you how to recognize the signs of post-hypnotic suggestion? The ones that were useless for stopping the command the moment it registered? They weren’t so useless afterward. The whole time I’d been sitting in that chair, I’d been repeating the phrase “Fortune makes a fool” in the back of my head over and over again, trying to denature it. That was supposed to work like a vaccine: the more I repeated a defanged version of it to myself, the more my mind was ready to fight it.
The effort paid off. I didn’t lose myself to a trance state. My vision swam. When it came back, I was still seated in that chair. Two of Beatrice’s guards – acolytes, she’d called them – were undoing the restraints binding my arms to it. They levered me to my feet.
I played along, pretending to be in a pliable daze. It wasn’t all that far from the truth. So long as I kept at Professor Xavier’s exercises, every time they tried that on me it was going to get easier to fight off.
The acolytes twist-tied my wrists in front of me54 and marched me out of the office. I couldn’t see if Beatrice or Lazarus were following me. I hoped not.
The corridor outside had the same metal walls as those I’d traveled previously, though the lighting was better. The part of the facility I’d sneaked into before must have been one of their less-used wings. This felt like a place where people actually wanted to live.
Though it took me a while to see it, what with lolling my head and pretending I was still in a trance, this place was decorated. Crosses hung on the office doors. Someone had set a table with fake plants at the far end of the corridor. And there were even more paintings. These ones didn’t look to have been painted by the same brush as the ones in Beatrice’s office, but were unsettling all the same. One painting was of a dark, deserted, and lifeless cityscape, silhouetted by a comet passing far too close overhead. The next, far more amateurish, was of a church congregation with a red-robed Beatrice at the altar, arms spread wide and glowing. The Beatrice wasn’t as creepy as the audience. They were on fire. Flames licked through their hair, curling toward the ceiling – but no one acted as though anything was wrong. They all sat in rapt attention.
I’d had enough of this.
I moved at a slow, shuffling gait. One of my captors prodded me to move faster. I pretended to stumble. When he grabbed for my shoulder to force me upright, I drove my elbow into his face.
I didn’t give his companion – a woman with blonde hair tied back into a bun – time to react. Having luck on your side trains you to act first, measure later. I stomped hard on her foot. In one swift motion, I hooked my shin around her ankle and clubbed my bound hands into her chin.
She crashed into the wall. I whirled in the other direction just in time to see the other guard pull something snub and black out of a holster. It looked like a stun gun. I sidestepped just as he swung it in. I didn’t plan for what happened next, but that’s part of the joy of luck. The stun gun went wild. It connected with the woman struggling back to her feet, landing right in the small of her back. The impact jolted the other guard’s trigger finger. With a spark and a snap, she jerked and went down spasming.
I stepped around Mr Stun Gun, hooked my bound arms around his neck and under his chin. Then I slammed his head into the wall.
He flopped atop the twitching woman.
When I turned, I saw the last thing I wanted to: Beatrice and Lazarus, just outside their door. Lazarus’s mouth hung open. My captors hadn’t gone down quietly, but I’d hoped to be able to at least reach the end of the corridor, out of earshot, before Beatrice had enough warning to come after me.
They were about twenty feet away. I didn’t think. I started to run toward them. I had to take Beatrice out, somehow. Maybe hold her hostage. I’d have to make my plans later.55 When I got there, I would figure out what to do with her.
“You need to use your power,” Beatrice told Lazarus. “No training wheels this time.”
My bound hands were disrupting my balance. I couldn’t sprint. But if I could reach Beatrice faster than she was expecting, I might seize the element of surprise back. She was, at her very youngest, in her fifties, and wasn’t very fit. Up close, she’d be no match for me, even if I hadn’t had luck on my side.
Lazarus shook his head. He looked like he wanted to shrink back, but Beatrice had her hands on his shoulders. She calmly, but firmly, kept him between me and her.
She said, “Use it or she’ll hurt you.”
Lazarus opened his mouth.
I didn’t hear him speak.
I couldn’t have described how I felt.56 The closest thing I could say was… a great lightness of spirit settled over me. It was the kind of feeling you get when you’re drunk at four in the morning, but the night isn’t over, and you have good friends to spend it with. The kind of feeling you get when you’ve been on your feet for three days and finally see a chance to rest. The kind of feeling people get when they say they have a personal relationship with God. The feeling I got when I realized I believed.
All of these things were contradictions, but they were all true at the same time. My neurons were fizzing, cross-circuiting, shorting out.
Human beings were not meant to feel like this. Something in my head was burning.
It made perfect sense that I would stop running. That, when I reached Lazarus and Beatrice, I would fall to my knees in front of him. I couldn’t show them how much it hurt. It did not occur to me.
This wasn’t a post-hypnotic trigger. I remembered everything. The beatific, burning, indescribable pain. Beatrice taking Lazarus’s hand and forcing him to set it on the top of my head, like a priest bestowing benedictions. Being led back toward the cell block, and then into an empty cell, right next to Lazarus’s. And then the burning fading, like red-hot iron gradually cooling to air temperature.
I felt like I had to fight to become myself again.
When I did, I was shaking.
And even when I was myself again, I wasn’t really. I’ve been pretty good about constructing emotional barriers between myself and the rest of the world. Survival habit. I needed them – first to survive the lab coats, then in the Church of the Sacred Heart, and as a mercenary. Whatever the kid had done to me had fried my brain. The barriers weren’t where they should have been.
I wasn’t shaking because I was cold. It wasn’t even because I was angry. Anger would have been easier.
It was like withdrawal. Adrenaline pounded through me. I wanted that feeling again.
I was so alone. I should have told Cable, Deadpool, anybody where I was going. My emotions clawed at the sides of my skull like a caged animal, desperate to get out. I threw myself at the walls. This cell was so much like the one I’d spent my childhood in, but it seemed so much smaller. I only just – just – managed to keep from clawing at the door, scrabbling to get out.57
Everything pressed in on me. The overhead lights seemed closer every time I looked. I was still sure we were somewhere far underground. I had no idea how far, or how big this place really was.
I hunched in the corner, pushing my legs against my chest like I had when I was ten. The worst part was that, during the shakes of withdrawal, a good part of me just wanted to feel the burnout again. An unconscious part of me, certainly, but it was there. Separation was a kind of grief.
I tried to focus on thinking about what had just happened to me. Twice now, I’d been taken out with words from that kid. The first time he’d taken me down, it had been more intense than it seemed like a post-hypnotic suggestion should have been. It had felt physical. Like someone had cracked my skull with an ice cream scoop and then cored out my brain. Nothing in any of Professor Xavier’s classes had mentioned that.
At the time, I’d let that go. I’d had more important things to worry about. Now that I was here, though, and with nothing left to do but think about it… the strangeness kept accumulating.
Every time it had happened, the kid, and the kid alone, had done it. Beatrice could have said the code phrase herself. But she had made the kid say it.
Maybe I’d been thinking about this all wrong. Maybe that phrase he’d uttered hadn’t been a post-hypnotic remnant of my childhood. The key hadn’t been what he’d said, but how he’d said it.
And who had said it.
No one disturbed me for hours. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. Not through all that adrenaline. And, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t rebuild those emotional barriers. Not for the rest of the night, or what I could only assume was night. I couldn’t help it. I even cried. I was shattered, and terrified.
Terrified for myself and, for the first time in a long while, terrified for the world.