They moved at a blistering speed that made entire continents shrink to irrelevant blurs beneath them.
The first thread in Jean's psychic map pointed northeast. It lurked across the Atlantic into continental Europe, somewhere in a country she could sense but not name from this distance. She kept the direction clear in her mind. When she signaled, Ethan moved. The thread soon settled into a location; they had not crossed the Atlantic long enough to need to speak.
The first base was clean in the truest, most clinical sense.
Ethan's assessment took eleven seconds. As they approached, his hearing mapped the interior. His vision picked up heat signatures through walls that weren't built to block this kind of scan. Three clones ran automated research equipment. There were no other heartbeats. Jean sensed no consciousness, only some feeling alive rather than mechanical.
He looked at her. She nodded once.
Ethan's heat vision traced clean, invisible lines as he moved through the structure, methodical as a surgeon, targeting just enough energy to finish the job without scorching a single wall. There was nothing living left to harm, so the facility remained pristine—not a scorched mark left behind. Jean swept her mind over the aftermath before pulling the next silvery thread free from her map. The entire sweep was surgical; it lasted thirty seconds.
They moved on to the next target.
By the third base, Ethan had found the rhythm, relief easing his earlier tension. By the fifth, it felt natural, his confidence quietly settling in. They approached. They assessed. They waited for Jean's confirmation. They did the work, checked it was done, pulled the next thread, and moved on. They worked like a machine, set to the right speed for the job.
The map in Jean's mind was a constellation slowly blinking out. With each base extinguished, the psychic threads faded, and the living network gathered inward, veins retreating to a heart. She watched the contraction closely, mapping its shrinking pattern with an attention sharpened by every new absence.
---
The sixth base had personnel.
Ethan sensed the heartbeats before he could see the building. There were four of them, their rhythms betraying that these people were not here by choice. Their bodies showed signs—people forced into their situation. His hearing became sharp enough to tell the difference between voluntary and involuntary presence, just by the sound of their stress response.
He told Jean with a look rather than words.
Jean's telepathy swept into those four hearts, skipping over the surface and then plunging into the deeper layers where Sinister's architecture protruded like wires stitched into the psyche—artificial, imposing, brutal. What she found beneath was raw, anxious humanity: stolen, not allied, caged within their own bodies by design.
The mood shifted—concern replaced efficiency as the approach changed accordingly.
Ethan handled the threats with the skill he had built over months of this work. He didn't kill or cause damage that needed explaining; he just made sure no one could resist until they finished. Jean moved quickly through the four minds, using the method she had refined since her first session with Madelyne. She found and removed each piece of embedded architecture with the growing precision of someone improving with every attempt.
The fourth one took her six minutes. Relief mixed with lingering anxiety at the realization—the first had taken twenty-eight.
She had improved. Repetition had honed her, just as practice refines any skill—especially one as exquisite and precarious as navigating the fragile landscapes of human minds, always with a precision and tenderness surpassing most.
Ethan crossed continents in the span of Jean's confirmation, reappearing at Xavier's gates. He delivered each freed, dazed soul into waiting hands—sometimes Logan's tough steadiness, Raven's silent competence, or once Madelyne's matter-of-fact calm, which fit Xavier's ethos more than Jean could have predicted.
Then he returned. Jean pulled the next thread.
They moved again, momentum building.
---
The thirteenth base was the first with willing participants.
Ethan could tell before they went in. These heartbeats were different. There was no stress response, nothing that showed they were there against their will. The pattern matched people doing work they had chosen. Jean checked with her telepathy from outside and found no embedded architecture, no signs of coercion.
For the first time, Jean felt an uneasy anger as she realized that these people understood what Sinister was doing and had decided it was acceptable.
His moral code had always been steady. Seeing proof of willing participation in this operation—in the thirteen bases, in Jean's findings from the clone's memory, and in Madelyne's architecture—was enough for him. He felt no doubt about what to do.
They went in, actions coordinated, purpose clear.
Through it all, Jean tracked the network's contraction.
Every cleared base snapped a luminous thread from Jean's mental map. With each node lost, the remaining links coalesced—constellations glimmering against a backdrop gone suddenly darker, their shapes sharpening as extraneous stars blinked out.
Around the fifteenth base, she noticed the signals had changed. Panic was coming through the remaining connections now—tangling with her own rising fear. It moved in a way that didn't match the usual order of a working network. Something at the far end was shifting—closing off, pulling back, making her feel both lost and urgently alert.
She told Ethan what she noticed. After that, they sped up, but it wasn't because they were being less careful. They could move faster now because she was better at the work than she had been four hours ago, and Ethan adjusted his approach to keep up.
---
The seventeenth base stopped them both.
What stopped them was not the threat but the glass room's cargo: rows of biological forms bearing Jean's face, features tranquil in inert slumber, pale as wax beneath the bluish light. The containers glinted, stark monuments to future plans—storage, not sanctuary, and nothing meant to comfort the viewer.
Jean looked at them, aware that she had been reading minds across seventeen locations tonight, and what she found confirmed the confirmation she needed before any action was taken.
Nothing recognizable flickered inside—not even a whisper of sentience. No dreams, no spark, no identity stared out from the vessels with her genetic script. These were uncanny dolls: biological instruments carved for purpose, shells without soul.
"Nothing's home," she said quietly, the first words either of them had spoken aloud in the last three bases.
The work was done with the same precise efficiency as every other room in every other base.
They left, their task complete, already shifting direction.
---
The twenty-first base had X-Men clones.
These were not mere tissue samples. The X-Men clones—almost completed, lifelike in musculature and set jaw—were poised for deployment. Logan's wildness, Scott's rigid symmetry, and Jean's own softness are all frozen in uncanny anticipation. Their faces stared ahead, masks waiting for animation that would never come.
Jean's telepathy revealed only a familiar void: the same vacant echo as before, emptiness instead of voice or intention. Though more finished than the earlier genetic stores, these constructs were as hollow as empty shells beneath a storm.
No one home.
Ethan looked at her. She met his gaze for a moment, her expression open but expectant. She asked for nothing he couldn't give. For a brief second, uncertainty flickered between them before settling into the feeling they both shared—the strange wrongness of seeing Logan's and Scott's faces on things that had never been them, and never would be anyone else.
Then she nodded.
The work finished, they advanced without hesitation.
---
The thirtieth base was a fortress—buried behind labyrinthine corridors, layered electronic traps, and ranks of willing defenders. Ethan sliced through security with unyielding speed, vaporizing careful precautions into irrelevance as he carved a path through the heart of resistance.
Jean worked through the minds of the personnel with the skill she had gained from thirty years of practice. She was faster now than at the start of the night, not just moving quickly but being more accurate at that speed. She wasn't rushing; she was simply better at the work.
Twelve minutes. The base was the most defended, and the work still took twelve minutes.
They moved forward, pace steady.
---
---
Somewhere that had no location in any record, he had not destroyed himself:
The connections went dark in a particular sequence, something systematic rather than random, and Sinister watched each one go, with the attention of someone reading a situation they had not expected to find themselves in.
He wasn't panicking. He never did. Instead, he recalculated—quickly updating his models with new data that ruined several old predictions. He ran new scenarios. He compared the results with his usual clinical approach. The mathematics did not work in his favor. He was honest enough with himself to know this without requiring extended deliberation.
The variable he had underestimated—the one he hadn't planned for because it hadn't existed until about a couple of months ago—was not a threat he could deal with directly. The proof was in the forty connections that had gone dark while he made his decision.
He was very old. His patience came from years of experience, knowing that a single human life was too short for the kind of plans he made. The force taking apart his bases tonight wouldn't follow his timeline. Nothing ever did. He would wait it out, hiding in a place outside the network—a place that had never been part of it—and return to his plans in a century, or however long it took.
What he didn't realize was that the force he was planning for wasn't limited by a human timeline either. He felt a brief, unfamiliar flicker of uncertainty as he moved toward his fallback spot with the outward calm of someone whose plans had survived worse setbacks.
The forty-first connection went dark while he was still moving.
He adjusted his pace.
---
The forty-second base was a research outpost hidden in a maze of snow and iron. Jean strained to keep her focus, pushing hard against psychic shielding so dense and cold it scraped her senses. This place had been designed by someone who understood the weave of psychic networks, who built walls to bar her sight and demanded all her strength to thread through.
They cleared it with the same efficiency as the others.
Jean stood in the aftermath, holding the last thread in her awareness.
It was different.
This thread felt different from the first forty-two, something she had started to notice since the twenty-eighth base, when the shrinking network made it stand out. It was quieter and more consistent, like the difference between a building full of people and one designed to seem empty. The shielding was more advanced, and the presence at the other end was more controlled.
"This is the real one," she said. She was not guessing.
Ethan looked at her, reading her quickly and accurately after working together through forty-two bases. "How far?"
She followed the thread by its feeling, not its exact endpoint. "Not far. It's the shielding that makes it seem distant, not the real distance." She looked at him. "He's in there."
"What does it feel like on the other end?"
Jean was quiet for a moment, focused and precise. "It feels like someone who has made a decision they're comfortable with," she said. "Not panicking. Arranging things, like you would if you expected to return."
Ethan understood immediately what she was describing and why it meant what it meant.
"He thinks he can wait it out," Ethan said.
"That's what it feels like," she confirmed.
He looked in the direction the thread pointed, even though only she could see it. She had given him enough information. "Does he know we're coming for that one specifically?"
"Not yet," she said. "The shielding is strong enough that he hasn't noticed us following the thread. He knows the bases are going dark, but he doesn't know we have the map." She looked at Ethan, ready to say what needed to be said before it was too late. "If we go now, we can get there before he finishes whatever he's doing."
He looked at her.
The night had turned them into a team with their own language. A look meant 'I'm with you,' a small adjustment before speaking meant 'I know.' After doing something hard together for so long, their communication was down to the essentials.
She looked back.
Their opportunity wouldn't last forever.
"Let's go," he said.
They moved toward the last one.