I had spent a few hours with the group before Jean shooed everyone away to go get some rest. Warren and Colossus helped me back to my room, even though I said I was fine to walk on my crutches. Piotr ended up picking up anyways and Jean couldn't stop laughing even as I struggled in his arms to be put down.
The next morning I had basically healed up, thank god. There was still traces of Lyncthium in my system that prevented them from healing up completely without the anti-serum but I could move around now as my healing factor had taken over through the night.
Jean had come down to clear me from bedrest and told me that Logan would come by to get me when they were ready to question the girl. I took that time to shower up after the mission and change into some clean clothes, mostly to get rid of the smell of blood but also just because I looked like absolute crap. I managed to barely brush out the knots in my hair when Logan stopped by.
He knocked his fist on the open door and I turned to face him. He looked at me for a second before shaking his head. "Remind me to either get you a hairbrush or a hair cut." He said when he noticed I was sat using my hand as a makeshift brush. My hair was almost to my shoulders at this point and never brushing it at this length was probably not a good thing.
I only smirked and pulled out another knot before just pushing the strands back, "Whatever, you're just jealous." I said and flicked my hair over my shoulder like some hair commercial advert. Logan only rolled his eyes and turned to walk off down the hall. "Come on, Charles wants to get some answers." I quickly followed after him, making sure to shut my door behind me even though there was nothing really valuable in there anyways, aside from my mother's necklace.
Logan lead me to a room I didn't recognise and I was pretty sure that the area we were in wasn't for casual use for the students. It looked different from the rest of the school, less wood and more metal and harsh edges. I felt a little on edge; it made me wonder what type of secrets this place and the Professor had.
We walked down a bright white corridor that reminded me of the vehicle bay and down to a room at the end. Logan headed down to the end, hands in his pockets as if this were the most uninteresting thing. Honestly, I wondered what type of things got the guy excited enough to crack a smile. Or any sort of human expression.
He opened the door, walking in first and I followed behind. The inside reminded me of a police interrogation room. All clean cut and bright. The area in front of us had a desk and chairs set in front of a window. On the other side, behind the glass, sat two chairs, one either side of the small table. The rest of the room was bare of any sort of colour or decoration and honestly, I pitied whoever was forced to sit behind there for more than a couple of hours. Speaking of...
Inside that room was the girl from before, her mask and hood pulled away to reveal her face. Her injuries had been treated but she was still currently knocked out, put under a sedative and a steady dose of Lyncthium to keep her under. Her head was down, long black hair hung around her face. It was longer than I had assumed. She was pale and her face even looked a little sunken. She didn't exactly look good. I closed the door behind me and turned to look at everyone else in the room. Jean was there, of course, and so was the Professor. I expected maybe Scott or Storm too but then I remembered it was a Monday and they were probably running classes. If that were the case then I don't know how Logan was here. The timetables here always confused me.
"The sedative will be wearing off soon," Jean spoke up. I looked up at her to see her staring through the glass, possibly looking for the signs of the sedative wearing off. I nodded a little and folded my arms, noticing the girl now shuffling a little. It was more like twitching really, but I assumed it meant she was coming to.
"So what's the plan?" I asked and looked over to the doctor. Jean turned, looking down at her tablet for a moment before speaking.
"The plan is we question her first, see what we can get out of her. If not then... We will be using brute force."
"You're gonna beat it out of her?" I stared at the two telepaths in mild shock. Jean rolled her eyes and I heard Logan snort behind me. I frowned in confusion, not understanding what else they could mean.
"Not quite," The Professor said, his eyes never leaving the glass. "I will be entering her mind to dig the information out. It is something I do not like doing, but lives are at risk and I know it'll be the only way to get information out of her." His voice sounded bland and I knew that he wasn't looking forward to this. He took the safety of the kids here very seriously and he knew that if the Weapon-X program was back then mutants everywhere would be in serious danger.
I grimaced a little before turning my attention back to the girl behind the glass. "Well, I guess you have to do it if it's the only option," I said softly. I didn't like the idea of Xavier forcefully pushing through her mind, the kid was probably brainwashed somehow but no one deserved that. Mind games were worse than any physical torture. Your mind is vulnerable, it takes longer to heal and in some cases it never does.
The girl stirred again, pulling at her hands which were cuffed to the table. She raised her head slowly, staring at her hands before then looking up. Her eyes were purple, but they were blank as if the lights were on but nobody was home. She looked all but dead apart from the rise and fall in her chest and I felt my body shiver, feeling as if her eyes were staring directly into the core of my being, even if she couldn't see us from behind the glass. She glanced around, her movements robot and I doubted it was just from the sedative.
"So..." I turned away from the glass, "Who's going in?" I asked and rose my brow. Jean didn't look up as she answered.
"Logan."
It was my turn to snort.
"You want to send Logan, my dad, in to interrogate her? He has the communication skills of a rock." I huffed incredulously. I turned to look at my dad, only to see him smirking before he pushed his way off of the wall. He strode over to the door that leads into the other room and walked inside without hesitation. I blinked, shaking my head to myself as I took a seat in one of the chairs to watch. Xavier pressed a button which I assumed allowed us to hear what was going on inside.
Logan walked over to the table but he didn't take a seat. The girl looked at him but didn't say anything. She knew she couldn't get out, but I knew she wasn't going to give up any information. Not if she was brainwashed has severely as I thought she was.
"So... You got a name, kid?" Not the question I thought he would ask first.
She didn't give a reply, she probably didn't even have a sense of identity anymore.
Logan nodded a little and leaned forward on the table. "Alright then, let's try a different question... What're are you?" He asked and I realised then that he was going to be treating her like a robot rather than a person.
"A weapon." I blinked at the reply and saw Logan glance towards the glass as if to try and see our reactions. The girl stared at him, blinking slowly. Logan rose a brow at her.
"What's your purpose?"
"To destroy or capture all failed projects of the Weapon X program."
Logan pulled back a little. It was a similar response to what we had last time.
"Why?"
She didn't respond. Logan tried again.
"Who are you working for?"
Again, no reply.
"Are there others like you?"
She only stared. Logan was getting visibly frustrated now and he had barely asked her anything.
"What do they call you?" He asked after a moment. The girl seemed to consider this question. A few seconds passed by and I thought she wasn't going to say anything again. Then she answered.
"Foxtrot."
I had no idea what Foxtrot even meant. Logan seemed just as confused for a moment before it seemed to click. He nodded and I wondered if Foxtrot was meant to mean something and I just didn't understand.
"So there are more." He said and pushed up from the table, folding his arms over his chest instead.
The girl stared at him, almost looking confused. She then looked away, refusing to give another answer or say anything further.
Logan smirked a little, "I'll take that silence as a yes. There are at least 5 others then, if not more. Are they all weapons like you?" He asked, leaning on the table to get into her field of vision. I couldn't see the girls face from this angle, my father's back now blocking the view we had of her. We didn't hear an answer, not that I was really expecting her to give. He pushed further. "How many are even still alive?" He pushed, "How many were killed off because they couldn't become what they needed to be, huh? Or how many escaped and had to be killed off so they didn't spill everything you're keeping hidden from?"
She screamed, pulling at the chains keeping her to the table as she tried to stand. Logan backed off and watched her struggling against her cuffs, trying to jump across the table. Her eyes were glowing bright, murderous intent obvious. It took her a few minutes to realise she wasn't getting out of the cuffs and she huffed, fists clenched tight.
Logan nodded to himself and turned to leave, apparently done with the questions. He shut the door behind him and I watched as the girl suddenly sat back down. She didn't even get that angry when we were fighting her and it was weird that she had suddenly flipped.
I turned to look over at my dad as he approached us again.
"How do you know there are more like her?" I asked, honestly that was the one thing that bugged me. It seemed like some Sherlock Holmes crap and I knew my dad wasn't that smart.
Logan rolled his eyes a little. "It's kinda obvious. Foxtrot is apart of the phonetic alphabet, it probably meant that whatever she's apart of uses those names as codes for each prisoner." He explained. I nodded slowly, not sure how he made that connection so fast but I wasn't going to complain when it had clearly gotten us somewhere.
Then I remembered...
"Echo," I said, blinking at the sudden memory as I stared at my father.
Logan stared at me in confusion so I explained further, "Echo, it was the name they used for me back when I was taken. I heard them use it all of the time but it just never made sense. You think she's apart of the whole Weapon X thing?" I asked. Logan considered it for a moment before he nodded.
"It would make sense. She mentioned something about the program when we first found her, too." He said and turned to look over at Jean and the Professor. "I just didn't think she was directly connected to it." He said. I sighed and shook my head, realising this program went a lot deeper than just me and my dad. How many other people had this bastard hurt? I didn't even want to think about the possible numbers. Logan then sat down in the chair next to me, scratching the back of his neck. "Well, either way, the kid is clearly brainwashed, I don't think we'll be getting anything from her like this. She's been trained not to say anything and it'll take to long to even consider trying to break it down. If there are more like her then we need to act fast." He said and leaned back in his seat, apparently exasperated with the whole situation. I could understand that he had probably put this shit behind him years ago and now this was going on, just bringing it all back.
The professor stared at the window for a few minutes and I knew he had realised he needed to get the information himself. There were lives at risk now, we all knew that, and we didn't have time to take the difficult route.
"Then brute force it shall be." He said after a moment, voice blank as he pushed his chair backwards, away from the desk, before then rolling towards the interrogation room. Jean opened the door for him and shut it behind it.
"Shouldn't someone go in with him?" I asked and glanced at my dad and the doctor. Jean shook her head and sat down, placing her tablet on the table in front of her.
"No, the Professor can take care of himself. He'll be fine." She sighed, leaning forward to watch Xavier roll over to the girl. The mic had been turned off now, I didn't know why, so we couldn't hear anything that was being said. The girl only stared as he approached her, studying him. It wasn't like she could do much else, cuffed as she was.
Xavier approached slowly, I could only see the back of his head so I had no idea if he was talking to her. He was soon barely a foot away from her and after a short moment, he lifted his hands, placing two fingers to each of the girl's temples. She stared, wide-eyed and looking as if she wanted to pull back but couldn't. Her eyes screwed shut as I assumed the Professor entered her mind and we waited.
It took barely a minute for the Professor to finish but it felt longer. We had waited months for this mission and I just wanted to figure out what the hell was going on and stop it before things got any worse.
The girl gasped as he pulled away from her and she almost instantly tried to attack him, pulling at her cuffs as she practically snarled at the professor. Xavier pulled back quickly out of harm's way, the girl thrashing in the chair as she tried to break free. She knew what had happened, knew that she had lost the information she had been made to keep and she would kill to make sure it didn't get out any further.
I stood, ready to head inside and protect the Professor when Jean suddenly set her hand on my shoulder and I turned to look at her, noticing Logan already at the door and waiting to leave. I frowned in confusion and looked at the redhead telepath.
"The Professor wants us to leave him, he's handed over the information to me for us to look over but he would like us to leave him alone with the girl." She says softly, glancing back to the window with a clear worried sheen to her eyes.
"What why? We can't leave him alone with her!" I complained, not sure why. I had never actually gotten that close to the Professor, in fact, he usually just annoyed me but that didn't mean I was going to leave him with a highly trained assassin who was also brainwashed.
Jean only pushed me towards the door and began to gently guide me from the room, "It's what he's asked. He'll be okay, I trust him enough and he knows what he's doing." She said as she shut the door behind us as I heard the lock click into place. I frowned but figured it was better not to argue and push away the worry swirling in the back of my mind.
Jean walked side by side with Logan as I stayed a couple of feet behind, following them back to the same elevator that we had come down earlier that lead us back upstairs to the main area of the building. They talked quietly and I didn't bother trying to listen to what they were saying.
We ended up in one of the smaller conference rooms that the school had set up with only a small round table set in the centre with about 5 chairs around it. Jean grabbed a laptop and set down her notepad, writing down notes and using the computer.
Logan and I sat around the table next to Jean to see the computer screen as she began to look up information and brought up different profiles.
"According to the professor, there are at least 5 others we know of on the program that are alive. There could be more, it's possible the girl doesn't know everything." She said as she typed away, searching in names. "This is the one we have here, her name is Adalie Kendry." She said, pulling up a profile of the girl, her eyes were a pale blue in the picture but her hair was the same colour. She looked a little younger in the picture and I assumed it was taken before she got involved in the programme. "She's currently 20 years old, she hasn't been seen since she was 16. She was diagnosed with cancer and it was decided she just ran away from home." She said, scrolling through the profile to try and find out any more information that could be useful but everything stopped after she went missing.
I frowned, folding my arms over my chest as I skimmed through the words before we were moving on to the next profile. "This is Clover Moore, aged to be around 19 now. She disappeared at the age of 13... It says she was kicked out of her home and put into foster care due to her mutation, there's nothing in her medical records but that's not unusual with mutants." Jean explained as I stared at the picture of a girl with stunning curly white hair and greeny-yellow eyes. She had curly horns that reminded me of a ram or sheep and ears the match.
Jean moved to another, "Leonelle Green, aged 28. He disappeared at the age of 16 but there have been sightings of him recorded from about 3 years ago. There's not much here, he had a tough life and left to join the military but I don't think he ever made it." The pictured showed a teen with messy black hair and bright green eyes, it looked like a mug shot and then there were a few underneath of the so-called sightings.
We moved on, "August Emerson, 24, gifted with pyrokinesis. They were charged with arson on multiple accounts but the charges were dropped just before they too disappeared at the age of 17. They had lost their parents in a house fire and everyone assumed they had burnt with the house and their body wasn't recovered. Camille Everfree, 17, disappeared at the age of 14, she was recorded to have some sort of ability with smoke but there's nothing detailed. Blu Gard, currently 16, disappeared at the age of 10, they developed their mutation young, invisibility. There was a car crash and the body wasn't recovered." She said, reading through each profile and letting me and my father look at the pictures.
They were all kids, innocent children that had done nothing wrong, that had been through terrifying things. And that... that bastard hurt them, he tortured them, they hadn't even got to experience life yet and he had just ripped it away from them. Jean was busy talking about these mutants, explaining their story but I felt myself losing it. They were so young, they didn't deserve this just for being born with a gift, for being born different.
My body moved before I knew it and I stood, the chair toppling over as I headed out of the room as quickly as I could. I refused to let what happened last time happen again.