Chapter 257
The knocking started soft.
Hesitant.
Tap tap tap.
Logan didn't move. Eyes closed, breathing steady, lying on his bunk in the Australian Outback base. The ceiling fan creaked overhead, circulating hot air that smelled like dust and regret.
Tap tap tap.
The knocking grew louder.
More insistent.
His enhanced hearing picked up the heartbeat on the other side of the door—fast, nervous, young.
Jubilee.
Of course.
He kept his eyes closed, willing her to go away.
The door creaked open anyway.
Damn kid didn't understand boundaries.
Footsteps shuffled across the floor—light, cautious, the kind that said she knew she shouldn't be there but couldn't help herself.
"Um... Mister... Patch? Logan? Sir?"
Her voice trembled slightly.
He didn't respond.
Maybe she'd give up.
"I know you're awake," she whispered. "Your breathing changed when I opened the door."
Smart kid.
Annoying smart kid.
"Everyone's... everyone's gone," she continued, voice cracking. "I woke up and checked all the rooms and they're just... gone. No note. No nothing. Just... vanished."
Logan's eyes snapped open.
He sat up in one fluid motion, muscles coiling, senses expanding outward like a radar pulse.
Jubilee jumped back, eyes wide.
"They're what?"
She clutched her yellow coat tighter around herself, fear bleeding through her teenage bravado like cracks in cheap paint.
"G-gone," she stuttered. "I checked Storm's room, Kitty's, Kurt's, everyone's. Empty. Like they were never there."
Logan was already moving.
He pushed past her, bare feet silent on the concrete floor, and stalked down the corridor with predatory focus.
Storm's room first.
He shoved the door open.
Empty bed. Clothes still hanging in the makeshift closet. Her scent lingered—rain, ozone, wind—but it stopped. Just... ended. Like she'd been standing in the middle of the room and then ceased to exist.
No struggle.
No blood.
No trail.
His stomach tightened.
Kitty's room next.
Same story. Bed unmade. Laptop closed on the desk. Her smell—vanilla shampoo, bubblegum, youth—hung in the air but went nowhere.
Kurt's room.
Piotr's.
Rogue's.
Alex's.
Betsy's.
Alison's.
All the same.
Everyone smell just vanished in their room.
Logan stood in the hallway, fists clenched, mind racing.
It's like right when we enter Gateway's portal.
The scent signatures didn't fade gradually. They didn't lead anywhere. They just... stopped. Clean. Instant. Like reality had opened its mouth and swallowed them whole.
Teleportation.
Had to be.
But why?
Logan walked to the window at the end of the hall, eyes narrowing, focusing outward.
His eagle-eye vision kicked in—the world sharpened, details crystalizing across impossible distances. He zoomed in on the hill three kilometers away where Gateway usually sat in his eternal meditation.
Empty.
The Aboriginal mutant who'd been their ticket to anywhere in the world—gone.
He's also vanished.
Logan's jaw tightened.
It seems like a portal just appeared in everyone's rooms and they disappeared.
But that didn't make sense.
Why the hassle? They could just gather in one place and leave through a single portal like we always do.
Gateway never worked that way. Too inefficient. Too showy.
And more importantly, they would have told me if they were leaving for a mission.
Storm wouldn't abandon him without a word. Neither would Kitty. Kurt would've left a note at minimum, probably something cheerful and apologetic.
Especially with this kid here.
They wouldn't leave Jubilee unattended. Not after just voting to let her stay.
Which meant—
Enemy.
Logan's claws itched beneath his skin.
Someone—or something—had taken his team. Plucked them out of their beds like chess pieces off a board.
But why leave him?
Why leave Jubilee?
No time to think about why the enemy only left me and the kid here.
Didn't matter.
What mattered was survival.
What mattered was getting out.
This place is not safe anymore.
Logan spun on his heel, stalking back down the corridor.
Jubilee stood where he'd left her, hugging herself, looking small and scared and trying desperately not to show it.
"We're leaving," Logan said flatly.
"What? Where—"
"Now."
He grabbed his leather jacket off the back of a chair, shrugged it on, and stuffed a handful of essentials into his pockets—cash, fake IDs, a knife that wasn't his claws.
"Grab what you need," he told Jubilee. "Two minutes. Don't bring anything you can't carry."
"But what about—"
"Two minutes, kid."
She ran.
Logan took one last look around the base—the place that had been home, hideout, sanctuary.
Compromised now.
Contaminated.
He walked out the door and didn't look back.
The ocean stretched endlessly in all directions.
Blue water. Blue sky. The line between them blurred where they met at the horizon.
Logan stood at the railing of a cargo ship cutting through the South Pacific, wind whipping his hair, salt spray stinging his face.
That old monk was such a convenience.
Gateway. Silent. Patient. Loyal.
One gesture and you were anywhere in the world.
I can just go to anywhere with his help.
But now I need to exert some effort.
The ship had cost him three hundred dollars in bribes and a promise to the captain not to ask questions.
Slower than Gateway.
Less elegant.
But functional.
And untraceable.
Logan pulled the black eyepatch from his pocket, stared at it for a moment, then secured it over his left eye.
The world narrowed.
Patch returned.
He turned to Jubilee, who stood a few feet away looking green around the edges, clearly not enjoying the rocking motion of the ship.
"Here." He tossed her something small and hairy.
She caught it reflexively, looked down, and recoiled.
"Ew! What is this? Is this a mustache?"
"Put it on," Logan said.
"Why would I—"
"Disguise."
She held the fake mustache between two fingers like it might be diseased.
"Really? A mustache? That's your idea of a disguise?"
Logan growled low in his throat.
Her eyes widened.
"I'll put it on! I'll put it on!" She slapped it above her upper lip, pressing the adhesive down. "Look! See? I look... cute. I mean—manly! Super manly!"
She puffed out her chest, trying to look tough.
Logan's lips twitched.
Almost a smile.
Almost.
He nodded in satisfaction and turned back to the ocean.
Jubilee grumbled something under her breath.
His acute hearing caught every word.
"Stupid mustache. Stupid boat. Stupid scary Wolverine guy..."
"Did you say something?" Logan asked without turning.
"Nope! Nothing! All good here!" Her voice pitched too high, too fast.
Logan said nothing.
The ship sailed on.
Madripoor rose from the ocean like a fever dream.
Neon lights. Crumbling buildings. The smell of salt water mixed with sweat, cooking meat, gasoline, and desperation.
Home away from home.
The ship docked in Lowtown, where questions cost more than bribes and nobody cared who you were as long as you paid.
Logan and Jubilee descended the gangplank, blending into the crowd.
One man with an eyepatch.
One girl with a ridiculous mustache.
Jubilee's eyes went wide, taking in everything—the street vendors selling mystery meat on sticks, the neon signs advertising services she was too young to understand, the hard-eyed men and women who moved through the streets like sharks.
"This place is..." she started.
"Madripoor," Logan finished.
"It's—"
"Don't stare. Don't make eye contact. Stay close."
She snapped her mouth shut and hurried to keep pace.
They moved through the streets with purpose—Logan's posture shifting into something more relaxed, more dangerous. Patch walked different than Wolverine. Looser. Easier. Like violence was a choice instead of a certainty.
The Princess Bar appeared ahead, its faded sign flickering in the humid night.
Logan pushed through the door.
Smoke. Alcohol. Body odor. The familiar symphony of Lowtown's lowest.
He took his usual seat at the bar.
Jubilee scrambled onto the stool beside him, mustache slightly crooked now, eyes darting everywhere at once.
The bartender—a scarred man who'd seen everything and cared about none of it—slid a bottle toward Logan without being asked.
"Usual?"
"Yeah."
The bottle appeared.
Logan poured.
Drank.
Jubilee watched the other patrons nervously.
That's when she arrived.
Tyger Tiger materialized from the back room like she'd been waiting for exactly this moment.
Probably had been.
She wore a tailored suit that cost more than most people in Lowtown made in a year, her hair slicked back, eyes sharp enough to cut.
She slid onto the stool on Logan's other side, graceful and deliberate.
Her gaze flicked to Jubilee.
Paused.
"Who's that... girl—" She caught herself. "I mean, boy here? Your child?"
Logan lit a cigar, the flame briefly illuminating his scarred face.
"He's my sister's sister's husband's uncle's nephew," he said around the cigar. "Named Mustache."
Jubilee's eyes went wide.
What?
She opened her mouth.
Logan's glance shut it.
"Uh... yup!" Jubilee squeaked. "I'm that long formula! Call me Mustache!"
She tugged at the fake facial hair nervously, trying to deepen her voice.
Tyger Tiger's lips curved into an amused smile.
"Mustache," she repeated. "Charming."
Logan took another drink.
"You didn't come here for small talk," he said.
"No," Tyger agreed. "I have a mission for you."
"Not interested."
"A large drug supply chain is coming to Madripoor."
Logan's hand paused halfway to his mouth.
Tyger continued.
"High-grade product. Mexican origin. Enough volume to flood Lowtown for months. Coy's old partners are trying to reestablish their networks now that he's... indisposed."
"Source?" Logan asked.
"Mexico. Sinaloa Cartel connections. They're using Madripoor as a distribution hub for Southeast Asia."
"Base?"
Tyger produced a manila folder from inside her jacket, set it on the bar between them.
"Everything's in here. Routes. Contacts. Estimated arrival times."
Logan didn't open it.
"And tomorrow at dawn," Tyger continued, "the necessary tickets, passports, visas—everything you'll need—will be ready."
"I said I'm not—"
"I'll come too!" Jubilee interrupted.
Both Logan and Tyger turned to stare at her.
She shrank slightly under their combined attention but held her ground.
"No," Logan said flatly. "That's dangerous. You'll stay here."
"Stay here?" Jubilee leaned closer, lowering her voice to a harsh whisper. "No way! That's scary! Look at all these scary-looking guys!"
She gestured around the bar.
Logan followed her gaze.
Three men with facial scars comparing knife wounds.
A woman with a cybernetic eye cleaning a very illegal firearm.
Someone in the corner who might have been dead for the past hour and nobody had noticed yet.
He looked back at Jubilee.
Looked at Tyger.
Sighed.
"Fine," he growled. "But you follow orders. No questions. No arguments."
Jubilee's face lit up.
"Deal!"
Logan drained his drink.
This is a terrible idea.
Tyger smiled knowingly.
"Happy cooperation, Patch."
He didn't answer.
Just grabbed the folder and stood.
Jubilee scrambled after him.
As they left, Logan heard Tyger's quiet laughter following them into the Madripoor night.
######
The flight to Mexico City took fourteen hours.
Jubilee spent most of it plastered to the window, watching clouds drift by like cotton pulled apart by invisible hands, her fake mustache now stuffed in her coat pocket after Logan finally let her remove it.
"This is so cool," she whispered for the hundredth time. "I've never been out of the country before. Well, except accidentally ending up in Australia. But that doesn't count because I didn't have a passport or anything and—"
"Kid," Logan interrupted without opening his eyes. "Sleep."
"I'm not tired."
"You will be."
She fell silent for approximately forty-seven seconds.
Logan counted.
"So where exactly are we going?" she asked.
"Mexico."
"I *know* that. But where in Mexico?"
"Sinaloa."
"And we're meeting someone?"
"Yeah."
"Who?"
"Tyger's contact."
"What's their name?"
"Don't know."
"You don't *know*?"
Logan cracked one eye open, the uncovered one, and gave her a look that had made grown men reconsider their life choices.
Jubilee subsided.
For another minute.
"Are we gonna fight people?" she asked quietly.
Logan sighed.
Closed his eye again.
"Probably."
"Like... bad people?"
"Is there another kind?"
She fidgeted with her seatbelt.
"I've never really... I mean, I've blown up some stuff. Set off fireworks. Scared some people who were chasing me. But I've never actually *fought* fought someone."
Logan said nothing.
The plane's engines hummed.
"What if I mess up?" Jubilee's voice came smaller now. Younger. "What if I get in your way or do something stupid or—"
"You will," Logan said.
She blinked.
"...What?"
"Mess up. Get in the way. Do something stupid." He opened both eyes now, turning to look at her fully. "You're a kid. First mission. You're gonna screw up. Guaranteed."
Her face fell.
"But," Logan continued, "you're also a mutant. You got powers. Instincts. Survival skills or you wouldn't have made it this long alone."
She perked up slightly.
"So here's the deal," he said. "You follow my lead. You do exactly what I say, when I say it. You don't try to be a hero. You don't freeze up. And if I tell you to run—you *run*. Got it?"
Jubilee nodded slowly.
"Got it."
"Good." Logan settled back in his seat. "Now sleep. We land in four hours and after that, there won't be time."
This time, she actually listened.
Within minutes, her breathing evened out, head tilted against the window, young face relaxed in sleep.
Logan watched her for a moment.
*Too young for this.*
But then, they'd all been too young once.
Kitty had been thirteen.
He closed his eyes and tried not to think about where Kitty was now.
Where any of them were.
The plane carried them south, toward heat and violence and blood.
Same as always.
---
## Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico
The heat hit them like a physical wall when they stepped off the plane.
Humid. Oppressive. The kind that made your clothes stick to your skin within seconds.
Mexico City had been their entry point, but Culiacán was their destination—the heart of cartel country, where drugs flowed like water and life was cheap.
Logan had been here before.
Different decade. Different war.
Same corruption.
They took a bus from the airport into the city proper, sitting in the back while chickens squawked in cages and an old woman counted rosary beads with fingers worn smooth by decades of prayer.
Jubilee pressed close to Logan, eyes wide, taking in the armed men on street corners, the bullet holes in buildings nobody bothered repairing, the way people moved—fast, purposeful, eyes down.
"This place is..." she started.
"Dangerous," Logan finished. "Don't stare. Don't speak English unless I do first. And keep that mustache ready."
She patted her pocket.
"Got it."
The bus dropped them six blocks from their meeting point—a cantina called *El Alacrán Dorado*. The Golden Scorpion.
Logan's nose picked up the scents as they approached: tequila, sweat, gun oil, fear, blood (old, soaked into floorboards that had seen too much), and underneath it all—something chemical. Cocaine residue. Heroin. The particular stink of drugs cut with baby powder and rat poison.
The cantina squatted between a closed bodega and a building that might have been condemned or might just be someone's home—hard to tell.
Logan pushed through the door.
Inside, the lighting was dim, yellow, failing. A dozen men occupied the space—some drinking, some playing cards, all of them armed.
Every eye turned to the entrance.
Assessed.
Calculated.
Dismissed.
Logan and Jubilee didn't look like threats.
One man with an eyepatch.
One teenage girl trying to look tough.
The bartender—a thick-necked man with prison tattoos crawling up his arms—gestured them over.
"¿Qué quieres?" he asked.
"Estoy buscando a Miguel," Logan replied, his Spanish rough but functional.
The bartender's eyes narrowed.
"No conozco a ningún Miguel."
"Tyger sent me."
Silence spread through the cantina like spilled blood.
Cards stopped shuffling.
Conversations died.
The bartender studied Logan for a long moment.
Then jerked his head toward a back room.
"Adelante."
Logan moved.
Jubilee stuck to his side like glue.
They pushed through a beaded curtain into a smaller room—concrete walls, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a single table with two chairs.
A man sat in one of them.
Miguel.
Fifties. Scarred face. Eyes that had seen everything and learned to laugh at death because the alternative was madness.
He smiled when Logan entered.
"Patch," he said in English. "Tyger said you were coming. Didn't mention the girl."
"She's with me," Logan said.
"I can see that." Miguel's gaze flicked to Jubilee. "She looks young."
"She is."
"This is not work for children."
"Wasn't planning to make it one," Logan said flatly. "You have the information?"
Miguel leaned back, pulling a cigarette from behind his ear and lighting it with a match struck against his thumbnail.
"The shipment arrives in three days," he said, exhaling smoke. "Container ship. Docking at a private facility twenty kilometers south of Mazatlán. The drugs are hidden in coffee shipments—forty kilos of pure cocaine, another sixty of heroin."
Logan's jaw tightened.
That much product would kill thousands.
"The facility?" he asked.
"Warehouse complex. Guarded. The cartel uses it as a staging point before moving product north or west across the Pacific." Miguel tapped ash onto the floor. "Security is heavy. Fifty men minimum. Automatic weapons. Guard dogs. Cameras."
"Layout?"
Miguel produced a folded paper from his jacket, spread it on the table.
A hand-drawn map. Crude but detailed.
"Main warehouse here," he pointed. "Two smaller buildings for processing. Guard stations at each entrance. Perimeter fence, twelve feet high, razor wire on top."
Logan memorized it.
"Patrols?"
"Every hour. Two-man teams. They're sloppy after midnight—drunk, high, careless."
"Best entry point?"
Miguel traced a finger along the eastern edge of the map.
"Here. Drainage culvert runs under the fence. Big enough for a man to crawl through if he doesn't mind getting dirty."
"I don't."
Miguel smiled grimly.
"I thought as much." He folded the map, handed it to Logan. "One more thing. The cartel boss running this operation—his name is Ramos. Eduardo Ramos. Ex-military. Smart. Paranoid. He doesn't trust anyone and he kills failures."
"Good to know."
"He also hates Americans."
"Most people do."
Miguel laughed—a sound like gravel in a blender.
"I like you, Patch. You're honest about what you are." He stood, extending his hand. "The warehouse operates at night. If you're going to hit it, do it between two and four in the morning. That's when they're weakest."
Logan shook his hand.
"Appreciate it."
"Don't thank me yet," Miguel said. "You might not survive to make the gratitude worth anything."
They left through the back exit.
---
Jubilee waited until they were two blocks away before exploding.
"Holy crap! Did you hear that guy? Fifty armed guards! Dogs! Cameras! And we're just gonna walk in there and—and what exactly? What's the *plan*?"
Logan kept walking.
"The plan is we wait until tomorrow night. Scout the location during the day. Hit it when they're weakest."
"That's not a plan! That's a... a death wish!"
"You wanted to come," Logan reminded her.
"I thought we'd be doing cool spy stuff! Not attacking a literal drug cartel fortress!"
Logan stopped.
Turned.
Looked down at her.
"You can stay at the hotel," he said quietly. "Lock the door. Wait for me to come back. No one would blame you."
Jubilee's jaw set stubbornly.
"I'm not a coward."
"Didn't say you were."
"But you think I can't handle it."
"I think you're fifteen."
"I'm *sixteen*," she corrected hotly. "And I'm a mutant. I can blow stuff up! That's gotta be useful, right?"
Logan studied her.
Saw the fear underneath the bravado.
Saw the desperate need to prove herself.
Maybe himself, decades ago, young and stupid and convinced he was invincible.
"Yeah," he said finally. "It's useful. But useful gets you killed if you're not careful. So tomorrow, you listen. You watch. You learn. And when the shooting starts—because it *will* start—you do exactly what I say. Understand?"
She nodded.
"Understand," she repeated.
"Good."
They walked on.
The sun set over Culiacán, painting the sky in shades of orange and red.
Like fire.
Like blood.
Logan's instincts whispered warnings.
Tomorrow would be bad.
He could feel it.
---
####
The hotel room smelled like mildew and broken promises.
Two beds. Cracked ceiling fan that wobbled on every rotation like it was contemplating suicide. A window with bars that faced an alley where stray dogs argued over garbage in the dark.
Home sweet home.
Logan sat at the small table, the map Miguel had given him spread flat, a single lamp throwing jaundiced light across the hand-drawn lines. He'd been staring at it for an hour. Maybe two. Time moved differently when you had a lifetime to burn.
Jubilee was asleep on the far bed, still in her jacket, shoes still on, one arm flung over her eyes like she'd simply fallen mid-sentence and surrendered to gravity. Her breathing was steady. Young. Untroubled by everything it should be troubling her with.
*She trusts too easily,* Logan thought.
Then corrected himself.
No. She trusts *me* too easily. That's a different problem.
He traced a finger along the eastern edge of the map. The drainage culvert. Miguel had said it was wide enough for a man to crawl through.
What he hadn't said — what Logan had been turning over in his mind ever since they'd walked out of El Alacrán Dorado — was the smell.
Miguel's smell.
Fear, yes. Old and habitual, the low-grade kind that came from living in cartel country long enough that it became your natural baseline. Tobacco so deep in his lungs it was part of his DNA. Tequila. The particular sour note of a man who hadn't slept well in years.
And underneath all of it—
*Guilt.*
Sharp. Acidic. The exact chemical signature of someone who had already sold you.
Logan's jaw tightened.
*He snitched.*
He turned it over methodically, the way he'd learned to think through ambushes after decades of being on both ends of them. Miguel had given him the information. Everything had checked out — no spike in pulse, no micro-tremors of deception, no sweat breaking fresh when he'd recited the guard numbers and patrol schedules.
The intelligence wasn't false.
Which meant Miguel hadn't lied.
He'd just also told someone else.
*Good,* Logan admitted, grudgingly. *Give the enemy true information and let them walk into it themselves. That way there's nothing to catch.*
He folded the map slowly.
So. They knew someone was coming.
They just didn't know what that someone could do.
Logan's lips curved, humorless.
*That's gonna be an unpleasant surprise for them.*
He glanced at Jubilee.
The real question was what to do about the girl.
He could send her back. Put her on a bus, hand her enough cash to get to the airport, arrange for Tyger to collect her on the other end. She'd be furious. She'd feel abandoned. She might even follow him anyway out of sheer stubborn spite.
He looked at the map again.
Fifty guards.
Drugs enough to kill thousands.
And a betrayal already in motion.
Logan rolled his shoulders. Cracked his knuckles. The familiar ache of his claws pressed against the backs of his hands, patient as always.
*No,* he decided. *She's safer with me than alone in Culiacán.*
He'd just have to keep her alive.
The thought landed like a stone dropped into still water, ripples spreading out through his chest before he could stop them.
*Don't.*
He pushed it down.
Folded it away.
Later.
He turned off the lamp, leaned back in the chair, and closed his eyes — though sleep wasn't something he was particularly interested in pursuing. His hearing stretched outward in the dark, the sphere of perception extending through the thin walls, down the corridor, out into the street below.
Dogs. A drunk arguing with a fence post. Somewhere three floors up, a couple fighting about money. A car with a bad muffler. The distant sound of a radio playing norteño music, accordion and guitar wound together in something that sounded like defiance.
Nothing wrong.
Nothing hunting them.
*Yet.*
Logan settled in to wait for morning.
---
Dawn came in shades of copper and rust, the sun hauling itself over the horizon like it had somewhere better to be.
Logan was already gone when Jubilee woke up — back in the room before she finished rubbing her eyes, two paper cups of coffee and a paper bag of pan dulce on the table between them.
She blinked at him suspiciously.
"Did you sleep?"
"No."
"Did you even try?"
"No."
She opened her mouth.
"Eat," he said. "We move in twenty minutes."
She ate.
To her credit, she didn't ask questions while she chewed. She watched him instead — eyes moving over his face the way she was starting to do more often, reading something in it that she hadn't figured out how to name yet. Cataloging.
Smart kid.
Annoying smart kid.
"You look like something's wrong," she said finally, around a mouthful of sweet bread.
"Something's always wrong."
"More wrong than usual."
Logan looked at her.
She held the gaze steadily.
*Braver than she knows.*
"Miguel sold us," he said.
The bread stopped moving.
"...What?"
"He gave good information. True information. He just also told someone we were coming." Logan wrapped his hands around his coffee cup. "So tonight, when we hit that warehouse, they'll be ready for someone. Just not for us specifically."
Jubilee set the bread down carefully, like she was afraid of dropping something.
"Then... shouldn't we not go?"
"The shipment still arrives tomorrow. The drugs still move. Thousands of people still die." Logan shrugged. "And whoever's at that warehouse still thinks they know what's coming."
"That's what you're betting on?"
"I'm betting they expected a couple of hired guns. Maybe a small crew. Someone easy to ambush and bury in the desert."
He looked at her steadily.
"They didn't expect me."
Jubilee looked at him for a long moment.
Then, slowly, she nodded.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. What do we do?"
"We scout it during the day. I need eyes on that perimeter. Guard rotations, camera positions, where the dogs are kenneled." He tapped the map. "And I need to find the drainage culvert. Confirm it's still viable."
"And me?"
"You stay visible. Stay normal. Tourist girl in the city. If anyone asks, you're American, visiting family."
"And the mustache?"
Logan glanced at her coat pocket where the fake facial hair lived.
"Leave it."
"Thank god," Jubilee muttered.
---
They spent the day like ghosts.
Logan in the role of Patch — easy, loose, the kind of man who moved through dangerous places because dangerous places knew better than to bother him. He drank bad coffee in a roadside stall three hundred meters from the warehouse access road and watched through eyes that could count individual security cameras at distances that would require binoculars for anyone else.
The facility was exactly what Miguel had described.
Chain-link and razor wire. Guard posts at the corners. The glint of assault rifle barrels in the shadows of a watchtower that was trying to look like a water tank. Three cameras visible on the western face of the main warehouse — he clocked their sweep angles and timing in under four minutes.
Two-man patrol. They rotated lazy as Miguel had said, movements sloppy with the particular carelessness of people who hadn't been surprised in a long time.
*They're expecting the surprise tonight,* Logan noted. *They'll tighten up at dark.*
He watched for two more hours, cataloging everything — the guard who favored his left leg (old injury, maybe a break that healed wrong), the patrol team that stopped for five minutes on the eastern stretch to share a cigarette (position: directly above the drainage culvert), the single dog kennel tucked against the northern fence where three Rottweilers paced their small kingdom.
Then he walked back and found Jubilee eating tacos from a street vendor, apparently having made friends with the vendor's daughter, a girl about her own age who was teaching her words in Spanish.
"¡Eso es un taco de lengua!" the girl was saying, pointing at Jubilee's food with delight.
"What's lengua?" Jubilee asked.
"Tongue," Logan said, passing behind her.
Jubilee's face went green.
He kept walking.
She caught up half a block later, still looking vaguely betrayed by her lunch.
"Did you find what you needed?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"And?"
"And tonight's going to be interesting."
---
They moved at 1:47 AM.
The night had teeth — not cold, but with the particular weight of heat that refused to surrender even after sundown, pressing down on everything like a hand. Cicadas screamed from the scrubland around the facility. The stars burned hard and clear above, unsoftened by city light out here.
Logan moved through the dark like the dark was made for him.
Because it was.
His night vision and thermal one.
Now the world existed in layered heat signatures, every living thing burning its own private fire. The guards on the watchtower were two red smears above the fence line. The patrol team three hundred meters west were slower-cooling shapes, amber-orange, tracking their usual lazy circuit.
Beside him, Jubilee was a small, bright torch of nervous energy.
She moved quietly — better than he'd expected. She'd been paying attention on the ship, in Madripoor, on the bus. Watching how he walked, how he held himself, where his eyes went. Kids who'd survived on the streets had instincts that training could refine but never replicate from scratch.
She had instincts.
He could work with that.
He tapped her shoulder twice. Stop.
She froze instantly.
He pointed.
The patrol team on the eastern stretch had stopped at their usual spot above the culvert, sharing their cigarette with the dedicated comfort of a ritual. Two men. One with the bad leg, one young and bored and barely paying attention. The tip of the cigarette traced lazy arcs in the dark when the young one gesticulated at something he was saying.
Logan and Jubilee waited.
Three minutes.
The cigarette died. The guards moved on.
Logan pointed at the culvert opening in the base of the fence — a concrete pipe, two feet in diameter, half-submerged in shadow.
Jubilee looked at it.
Looked at him.
*Really?* her expression said.
He nodded.
She made a face that said she was reconsidering every choice that had led to this moment, then dropped to her hands and knees and crawled in.
Logan followed.
The pipe smelled like old water and rust and the chemical aftertaste of whatever runoff the facility had been generating. Twenty feet of darkness — Jubilee's shape ahead of him burning copper-warm in his heat-vision — then the opening on the other side, spitting them out into the shadow of the main warehouse.
Jubilee stood, brushing grime from her jacket, and mouthed *gross* with genuine feeling.
Logan was already moving.
The layout matched Miguel's map almost perfectly. Main warehouse: a corrugated metal building the size of an aircraft hangar. Two smaller processing structures to the south. Guard post at the northern corner, currently occupied by a single man who was leaning against the wall and losing a war with sleep.
The drugs were in the warehouse.
The guards — the ones who'd been forewarned — would be reinforced and waiting.
That was the interesting part.
Logan pressed a hand flat against the warehouse wall and let his hearing expand.
Inside:
Twenty-three heartbeats. He counted them methodically, the way he'd once counted cards in Vegas back when he still found novelty in human games. Twenty-three. Miguel had said fifty men minimum for the normal guard complement.
*They'd moved more in.*
Forty-seven heartbeats total between the main building and the processing structures.
He felt a low hum move through his chest. Not fear.
Something older.
Anticipation.
He glanced at Jubilee and held up two fingers, then pointed at the eastern wall. She nodded — *your side*. He pointed to himself and the main door.
She moved.
Good.
---
The door wasn't locked. An unlocked door in a fortified cartel facility meant one of two things: carelessness, or invitation.
Logan was betting on invitation.
He pushed it open slowly, the hinges silent — he'd noted them on the way past and dragged two fingers through the motor oil he'd palmed off a guard's rifle sling during the walk across the compound.
*Details,* he thought. *The difference between an ambush and a visit.*
The interior was a cathedral of dim industrial light — yellow sodium lamps strung from the rafters, throwing pools of amber across a floor stacked with wooden pallets. The coffee shipments. Dozens of them, crate after crate, the smell of roasted beans layered thick over everything. Under it, if you knew what to smell for, was the sharper chemical bite of cocaine pressed into every available seam.
He stepped inside.
Twenty-three men.
They were arranged badly — he could see it immediately. Whoever had set the ambush had done it with the logic of someone expecting armed contractors. Shooters positioned high on the stacking platforms. Men behind the pallet rows. The tactically correct response to a frontal assault by a small armed team.
What they hadn't accounted for was a single man with no gun.
A single man who didn't need one.
Logan walked in like he owned the building.
For exactly three seconds, nobody moved — the collective brain of the ambush struggling to process the image of one man in a leather jacket stepping calmly into their kill zone.
Then someone yelled *¡Ahorita!* and the whole thing started.
---
Logan's body moved before his mind finished analyzing.
The first shooter on the left platform squeezed the trigger and the world went *slow* —
— not slow like time stopped. Slow like *everything* was exactly as fast as it always was, and he was simply faster.
The bullet time settled over his perception like oil on water. He watched the muzzle flash unfold in orange petals, watched the brass casing begin its lazy arc toward the floor, watched the bullet itself compress air in its passage—
He was already two steps left.
The round kissed the air where his skull had been and buried itself in a wooden crate.
One step. Drop shoulder. The second shooter had corrected — he'd already predicted the correction. He rolled under the burst, came up behind a pallet stack, and the sounds of combat restructured themselves around him: shouting in Spanish, the *crack-crack-crack* of rifles, the thump of boots on metal platforms overhead.
*Forty-seven heartbeats outside and in.*
*Twenty-three in here.*
*No claws,* he reminded himself. *Not yet. Patch doesn't have claws.*
He moved through the pallet rows like water finding its level — fast, flowing, taking the path of least resistance while always angling toward the violence. The first man who rounded a corner met Logan's elbow at full extension, catching him across the jaw with the combined force of the swing and the man's own forward momentum. The sound was not pleasant. The man sat down and didn't get back up.
The second came in from the right with a machete — which was either desperate or impressive, Logan wasn't sure which.
He caught the wrist at the apex of the swing, felt the bones flex, heard the man's sharp intake of breath, and redirected the arc into the shelving unit beside them. The machete rang against metal like a bell. Logan took the man by the collar and the belt and used him as a battering ram against the two men coming from the left.
Three down.
*Twenty in here. Twenty-four outside.*
Something exploded near the eastern wall — a sharp crack and a cascade of brilliant white-gold sparks fountaining upward toward the rafters. Logan's thermal vision picked up the heat signature instantly: controlled combustion, not explosive, directed upward—
*Jubilee.*
*Good girl.*
The distraction yanked every eye in the building toward the eastern wall for exactly 1.4 seconds.
Logan used all of it.
He covered twelve feet in the time it took a man to blink, got inside the guard cluster near the main pallet stack, and the next thirty seconds were close, methodical, and deeply unpleasant for everyone who wasn't Logan.
Fists. Elbows. Knees. The precise application of leverage against joints that weren't designed to bend that direction. He fought like a man who had a thousand years of bad decisions encoded in his muscle memory — not wild, not brutal for its own sake, but efficient in the way that only truly experienced violence can be.
Efficient, and completely devoid of mercy.
He was pulling his last punch — not out of gentleness but to avoid fracturing the man's skull rather than just concussing him — when he heard it.
A small, startled sound.
High. Young.
Wrong.
His head snapped around.
Jubilee had come in through a service door he hadn't identified on the map — good instinct, using the distraction she'd created. She'd taken down one man with a point-blank plasmoid burst that had left scorch marks on the floor and permanent ringing in the man's ears.
But she'd moved forward too far. Too eager. She'd left her back exposed, and there were two men between her and the door now, circling in the practiced way of people who'd done this before, and Jubilee was pivoting back and forth trying to track both of them and her hands were up and sparking but her footwork was wrong, weight too far forward, and Logan could see exactly how this was going to go in the next three seconds—
*I can't be willful here.*
The thought arrived clean and cold.
*Not with someone else's life on the line.*
He exhaled.
And let the claws come.
*Snikt.*
Three blades per hand, adamantium catching the sodium lamp light and throwing it back as three parallel lines of pure white-silver fire.
The two men circling Jubilee heard the sound.
They turned.
They had, Logan calculated, approximately four tenths of a second to process what they were seeing before the cognitive information *I should be elsewhere* became relevant.
They used it to run.
Wise.
Jubilee stood for a moment, hands still sparking, looking at where the two men had been and then at Logan's extended claws and then back at where the men had been.
"Jubilee."
"That's the coolest—"
*"Not the time."*
She snapped back into focus.
"Right. Right, yes. What do we do?"
Logan was already moving toward the main pallet stacks.
The drugs were in the coffee crates — all of them, layered in kilogram packages between the beans. He could smell it clearly now, the chemical signature rising sharp and acrid when he punctured the first crate with one extended blade.
"Cover the door," he told her. "I need ninety seconds."
She ran to the entrance.
He worked fast — systematically, methodically, opening crate after crate and slicing through the vacuum-sealed packages inside. The cocaine hit the air in small white clouds. The heroin packages split and wept brown powder. A hundred kilos of product, ruined.
Not destroyed. Not ideal.
But enough.
He was on the forty-third crate when the lights died.
Complete darkness.
And then — ssssssss — the sound of pressurized gas beginning to spray from nozzles in the ceiling, a dozen of them spaced evenly along the roofline, the smell hitting him like a fist—
*Sedative compound. Aerosolized. High concentration.*
Logan's throat tried to open reflexively and he *shut it*, shutting down his breathing with the total control the crocodile ability had given him, his blood already oxygenated, his body switching over to reserves with the smooth efficiency of a submarine sealing its hatches.
Then:
*Jubilee.*
She had no such ability.
He was across the warehouse floor in four seconds, moving by thermal vision through absolute dark, the gas swirling in visible clouds of relative cold against the warm air. He found her by her heartbeat and her heat signature, already coughing, hand pressed over her mouth, eyes streaming—
"Hold on," he said, low and close.
He crouched, pulled her weight onto his back, her arms going around his neck automatically, and turned for the door.
Retreat. Now.
The mission was compromised. The drugs were damaged but not destroyed. There were twenty-four guards outside who'd been watching the building start to rave with light shows and gunfire and were about to—
The door burst open as he hit it shoulder-first.
The first guard outside got a claw through the shoulder, carefully angled through muscle and away from bone, and fell back screaming. The second dove sideways and lived. Logan was already through the gap, Jubilee on his back, sprinting across the compound toward the eastern fence.
Behind them, shouts. Running feet. The unmistakable chamber-rack of a shotgun.
He hit the fence at a dead run and went over it — not through the culvert, no time — three meters of chain-link and razor wire that he took in one hand-over-hand surge, Jubilee making a sound against his neck that might have been a swear word in three languages simultaneously.
They hit the ground on the far side.
Logan absorbed the impact, rolled, came up running.
The compound erupted in lights behind them — floods coming on, the whole facility blazing to life in their wake.
Through the scrubland, into the dark.
Running.
Two hundred meters out, he stopped behind a concrete drainage structure that provided cover from the facility lights.
Jubilee slid off his back, stumbled, caught herself.
She was pale. Her hands were shaking with adrenaline, not sedative — she'd gotten some exposure but not enough to incapacitate, and the night air was already clearing it.
She stared at him.
She swallowed. "Okay. That's okay. I'm okay." She ran both hands through her hair, dislodging a small cloud of dust and cocaine residue. "Are we... did we do it? The drugs—"
"Damaged. Not destroyed." Logan's jaw was tight. "And they're going to move the shipment now that they know someone hit them. New route. New timetable."
"So we didn't win."
"We didn't lose." He scanned the facility. "And there are five caravan vehicles leaving through the southern gate in about three minutes."
Jubilee followed his gaze.
He could see it already — his thermal vision picking up the heat signatures of engines turning over, the distinctive warmth of headlights powering up inside the structure. Someone was pulling the product that was salvageable and running.
Ramos.
He'd been inside during the fight, Logan realized. Back room. The heartbeat that had stayed separate from the fight, the one that had spiked once and then become very still and controlled — the heartbeat of a soldier who was making calculations, not panicking.
Ex-military. Smart. Paranoid.
He'd have an exit protocol.
He was using it now.
Logan looked at the road leading south from the facility.
Then looked at the line of vehicles starting to pull out.
Then looked at Jubilee.
She met his eyes and he saw the moment she understood what he was thinking.
"We're not done, are we," she said.
"We're not done," Logan confirmed.
He turned toward the parked vehicle he'd clocked on his way in — an old pickup truck belonging to one of the outer patrol guards, keys still in the ignition because in cartel country you didn't walk in on someone touching their truck.
"Can you hit a moving target?" he asked.
Jubilee looked at her hands. Small sparks danced between her fingers — electric, controlled, oddly beautiful in the dark.
"I've been practicing," she said.
Something that wasn't quite a smile moved across Logan's face.
"Good." He pulled the truck door open. "Get in."
The truck had no air conditioning and a transmission that argued about every gear change like a stubborn old man, but the engine turned over with the reliable growl of something that had spent its whole life being useful and didn't intend to stop now.
Logan had it moving before the door finished closing.
Jubilee scrambled into the passenger seat, grabbing the handle above the window as the truck lurched onto the service road, headlights off, Logan navigating by thermal vision through absolute darkness like the night itself had handed him a map.
"Headlights," Jubilee said.
"No."
"They won't see us without—"
"That's the point."
She looked at his face. Whatever she read there, it made her turn and face forward without further comment.
The caravan was five vehicles — three pickup trucks and two vans, the vans running heavy by the way their suspensions sat. Product in the vans. Probably armed escort in the trucks. They were moving fast, already a kilometer down the road, dust rising behind them in a red-lit cloud where their brake lights caught it.
Logan pressed the accelerator down.
The old truck responded with something that sounded like enthusiasm or anger — hard to tell the difference — and launched them forward into the dark.
"Okay," Jubilee said, and her voice was different now. Quieter. The way voices went when the reality of a thing settled in around its edges. "Okay, what do I do?"
"Can you throw your blasts directionally?"
"Like... aimed?"
"Like at a specific part of a vehicle."
She considered this with the particular focused expression of someone doing rapid internal math.
"Tires," she said. "If I hit the sidewall of a tire at the right angle—"
"Can you do it from a moving vehicle at sixty kilometers per hour in the dark?"
A beat.
"...I've never tried."
"Tonight's a good night to start."
She looked at him sidelong. "You're a very strange guardian."
"Not your guardian."
"You're acting like it."
Logan said nothing.
The caravan had moved onto the main road now — a two-lane blacktop cutting through flat scrubland toward the highway that would take them north. Or to the coast. Or anywhere, really. Which was the problem.
He closed the distance.
Four hundred meters.
Three hundred.
The last truck in the caravan had a man sitting in the truck bed — he could see the heat signature, the shape of shoulders and a rifle, looking backward. Looking for exactly this kind of pursuit.
Don't give him a clean shot.
He cut the wheel hard, dropping the truck onto the unpaved shoulder, running parallel in the scrub brush, the rough ground hammering up through the chassis and into both of them. Jubilee grabbed the door handle and held on and didn't complain, which he noted.
The tail gunner's gaze swept the road.
Didn't find them in the dark off to the side.
Good.
"Window," Logan said.
Jubilee rolled it down. Humid air flooded in, carrying dust and the smell of sage and car exhaust.
"The last van," Logan said. "Left rear tire. I'm going to come up on it fast."
"And if I miss?"
"Try not to miss."
"Really helpful—"
The truck surged back onto the road and Logan floored it.
The tail gunner's head snapped around.
The rifle came up—
Crack.
Jubilee's hands thrust out the window, and what came out of them wasn't a firework or a bomb or anything that had a clean name in a physics textbook. It was plasmoid energy in a tight, focused arc — yellow-white and burning, shaped by practice and instinct and something the X-gene gave her that she was still learning the full dimensions of. It crossed the distance in less time than the gunner's finger took to tighten on the trigger.
The left rear tire of the last van disintegrated.
Not just deflated. Disintegrated — rubber fragmenting in every direction, the wheel rim sparking against blacktop, the van lurching violently right and the driver fighting it and losing, the whole vehicle spinning sideways across both lanes in a controlled disaster that took out a section of roadside fence and came to rest in a cloud of dust and steam.
The tail gunner had thrown himself flat.
Smart.
Alive.
Logan steered around the stopped van without slowing.
"Yes!" Jubilee yanked herself back inside, both fists pumping. "Did you see that? Did you—I hit it! First try!"
"Four more," Logan said.
She blinked.
Looked at the remaining vehicles pulling ahead.
"Right," she said. "Right, yes. Okay. Four more." She stretched her fingers, cracking her knuckles, and thrust her hands back out into the rushing air with the particular focused expression of someone who had just discovered that they were, in fact, exactly as capable as they'd been hoping.
The pursuit burned south through the Sinaloa dark, and behind them the lights of the ruined warehouse flickered on the horizon like a dying star.
The second truck was faster than the first.
Or maybe it just felt that way because the driver knew someone was back there now.
Logan watched the brake lights flare — a decision being made in real time inside that cab — and then the truck swerved hard, cutting between the two vans, using them as a shield. Tactical thinking. Someone in that caravan had military training or something close enough to matter.
*Ramos's people.*
*Of course.*
"They're blocking," Jubilee said.
"I see it."
"So how do we—"
"Working on it."
The road had started to climb slightly — gentle inclines through scrubland that was giving way to low hills, the kind of terrain that made overtaking harder and ambush easier. To the left, a dry riverbed. To the right, a concrete retaining wall where someone had cut the road through a hillside twenty years ago and never come back to finish it properly.
Logan's thermal vision swept the caravan.
*Five vehicles — one down. Four remaining: two trucks, two vans. The lead truck was pulling further ahead, separating from the pack. Ramos. Had to be. Man with military instincts didn't stay with the convoy when the convoy became a target.*
He'd be in that lead truck.
Getting further away with every second.
"Jubilee."
"Yeah?"
"How big can you go?"
She turned to look at him.
"What do you mean, big?"
"Your blasts. You've been throwing tight focused shots. Controlled. Precision work." He kept his eyes on the road. "Can you go the other direction? Wide? Loud? Something that fills the whole road?"
She looked at her hands.
Something moved through her expression — not doubt, exactly. More like someone opening a door they'd been keeping closed and checking what was on the other side.
"I don't usually," she said slowly. "When I go big I lose the control. It's like the difference between throwing a punch and just swinging your whole arm."
"Tonight I don't need control. I need the road blocked."
"If I go big in this truck we'll—"
"Not in the truck. Out the window. Forward arc, covering the road from retaining wall to riverbed."
Her eyes tracked the terrain.
He could see her doing the geometry.
"How long do you need?" she asked.
"Three seconds."
"I can give you three seconds." She unclipped her seatbelt. "But Logan—if I go that big, I'm going to be empty for a while after. Like—really empty. I won't have anything left."
Logan looked at her.
"I know."
"You'll be on your own after."
"I'm usually on my own."
Something crossed her face. Brief. Complicated.
She nodded.
"Okay," she said. "Tell me when."
Logan dropped two gears, the truck engine howling in protest, and veered hard left toward the riverbed side of the road. The two vans and the remaining escort truck were in a tight cluster now, fifty meters ahead, the drivers presumably coordinating by radio, trying to maintain the screen between Logan and the lead truck.
The lead truck was two hundred meters further and pulling away.
He had maybe ninety seconds before it hit the highway interchange and disappeared into the network of roads that would scatter it to any compass point.
*Now or never.*
"Jubilee," Logan said.
"Ready."
"Light it up."
She turned, both arms thrust forward out the window, and *let go.*
What came out of Jubilee Jubilation Lee's hands in the next three seconds was not fireworks.
It wasn't a weapon, exactly.
It was something that existed at the intersection of light and force and the particular raw energy of a sixteen-year-old girl who had survived on the streets of Los Angeles and in the Outback and in Madripoor and was *done* being small and scared and careful.
It was *massive.*
The plasmoid burst expanded outward from her hands in a fan that went white-gold and climbing — not a focused beam but a wall of cascading light that hit the road surface and bounced in every direction, a sun going off at street level, heat and concussive pressure rolling forward in a wave that—
Both vans swerved.
One went left, hit the edge of the riverbed, and dropped a meter into the dry basin below, chassis ringing like a struck bell.
The escort truck went right, hit the retaining wall at a non-lethal but enthusiastic angle, and stopped.
The road opened.
Logan was already through the gap before the dust finished rising, the truck screaming forward, headlights still dark, Jubilee collapsed back into her seat with both hands in her lap and her breathing ragged.
"Three seconds," she managed.
"You did it."
"Yeah." A pause. "I think I also slightly blinded myself."
"The spots go away."
"That's—that's good to know." She pressed both palms against her eyes. "Tell me when something important happens."
"Something important is about to happen," Logan said. "Hold on."
He closed the last hundred meters to the lead truck at a speed that the pickup's chassis was not designed for, the whole vehicle vibrating like something considering structural protest, and then they were alongside it — the lead truck running bigger, newer, better-maintained, two men visible in the cab, one driving and one already rolling down the passenger window with something that—
*RPG.*
Not the truck-mounted kind. Handheld. Compact.
The man had it on his shoulder before Logan finished processing the threat, and at this range, at this speed, if he fired—
Jubilee, eyes still half-blinded, said "oh no" in a very small voice.
Logan agreed with the sentiment.
His brain ran the calculation in the time it took the gunner to settle his aim.
*Can't brake — at this speed, braking puts us inside the blast radius.*
*Can't accelerate past — the truck is faster on the straight.*
*Can't go right — retaining wall.*
*Can't go left—*
Actually.
He looked at the riverbed.
Dry. Flat. About a meter and a half drop from the road edge.
At this speed, hitting that drop would almost certainly destroy the front suspension.
Almost certainly.
Logan wrenched the wheel left.
"*HOLD ON—*"
The truck left the road.
For a half-second they were simply airborne — the particular weightless silence of a vehicle that had committed to a decision it couldn't take back — and then they hit the riverbed floor with a crash that went through every bone in Logan's body like a tuning fork, and the windshield cracked from corner to corner, and something under the hood made a sound like a mechanical death rattle, and Jubilee made a sound that was probably all the swear words she knew in every language simultaneously.
Above them, on the road, the RPG round went off.
The blast was not small.
A column of fire and pressure that turned the air orange and sent shockwave rolling outward in all directions, the road surface cratering, shrapnel singing off the retaining wall and the concrete edges of the riverbed.
Logan felt the pressure wave like a punch.
Absorbed it.
Healed the small shrapnel cuts in the time it took to get the truck moving again — the engine, miraculously, still running, though the suspension was listing badly to the left and something in the steering fought him with every meter.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
Jubilee, pressed flat against the passenger door, slowly straightened.
She looked at herself.
"No," she said. Like she was surprised by this.
"Good." He ground the transmission into something approaching first gear. "Because we still have one truck."
She looked up through the cracked windshield.
The lead truck was still on the road above them, no longer accelerating — the explosion had stopped it. Two figures getting out. One of them running toward the riverbed edge to look down, rifle up.
And the driver's door opening on the other side.
Logan felt it.
The certainty of it.
*Ramos.*
The ex-military man who didn't trust anyone and killed failures was standing on a road in the Sinaloa scrubland at two in the morning, looking at a destroyed crater where his RPG round had landed, and he had not yet found a body.
*Paranoid*, Miguel had said.
A paranoid, smart man was going to put the rifle shooter back in the truck and drive away rather than spend more time on a road that had already produced too many surprises.
Logan hit the riverbed incline going faster than was sane, the ruined truck grinding up the rocky slope, and came back over the road edge in a shower of dirt and gravel and the mechanical anguish of a vehicle giving its last.
He came up twenty meters behind the lead truck.
Which was, indeed, beginning to move.
The shooter at the road edge was still standing there with the rifle.
Jubilee raised her hands.
Nothing came.
She looked at them.
"I told you," she said quietly. "Empty."
Logan looked at the truck.
Getting away.
Then at the shooter.
Then at the distance.
He opened the door.
"Keep driving," he told Jubilee.
She blinked.
"What?"
He was already standing on the running board.
"It's an automatic transmission," he said. "Keep the wheel straight. Keep going forward. When I'm back, I'll get back in."
"You're going to—Logan you're not going to—"
He pushed off the running board and ran.
---
*Snikt.*
The claws came out between one stride and the next, and the night air caught the three parallel lines of adamantium light and turned them silver.
The shooter heard the footsteps too late — Logan's stealth ability had collapsed his presence to nothing, a walking blind spot in the dark, the body's radiations turned inward. The man had been looking at where the explosion had come from. Looking at the road. Looking everywhere except for the man-shaped absence that was covering fifteen meters per second toward him.
He turned with the instincts of someone who'd been in enough firefights to know when something was wrong without being able to name it.
Logan was already in close, inside the rifle's useful range, and the stock came around as a club.
He caught it.
One claw through the barrel of the rifle — *crack* of metal splitting — and the gun became two separate pieces of useless hardware.
The shooter had backup training that kicked in and he went for a sidearm and Logan respected the instinct while removing the opportunity, one hand to the wrist, a controlled twist, and the man sat down abruptly, gun gone, future decisions substantially affected.
He wasn't dead.
Intentionally.
Logan was already moving.
The lead truck was fifty meters ahead, accelerating.
He ran.
The crocodile ability had his lungs locked, his blood full of stored oxygen, his body running clean and without fatigue, each stride carrying him further than the physical mechanics should have allowed.
Thirty meters.
Twenty.
The truck hit the highway interchange, the driver clearly having decided distance was the priority—
Logan hit the rear bumper at a dead sprint and went up.
One claw into the cargo bed for purchase, legs swinging, and then he was on the roof of the cab, the vehicle moving at sixty kilometers per hour beneath him, the wind trying to rip him off with genuine enthusiasm.
He felt the claw sink into the roof plating and his weight settle.
Inside the cab, two muffled voices — the driver's heartbeat spiking, and then the calm, controlled one that had to be Ramos, saying something short and decisive.
The truck swerved.
Hard right. Then left. A deliberate slalom at speed, trying to dislodge the thing on the roof the way a horse tried to throw a rider.
Logan rode it.
Claws in the roof. Body flat. The centrifugal forces trying to swing him clear on every turn and the adamantium holding him through all of it with the patient permanence of something that had never learned how to let go.
The driver gave up on the swerving after four attempts.
Logan worked his way forward.
The rear window of the cab was a single piece of glass.
He looked down through it.
Ramos looked up at him.
Their eyes met through the cracked safety glass, and Logan took the measure of the man in the space of a second — fifties, lean, grey at the temples, a face that had been hard for a long time and stopped apologizing for it. He wore no expression Logan could name. Not fear. Not rage.
Just assessment.
*He's deciding if I can be killed,* Logan thought.
*And coming to the wrong conclusion.*
Logan drove one claw through the roof.
Downward, at an angle, the blade punching through metal and emerging between the two seats — not at either man, but between them. A declaration.
A demonstration.
The message was clear enough.
The truck stopped.
---
Ramos stepped out with his hands partially raised — not the surrender position of a beaten man, but the careful, calculating gesture of someone buying time.
The driver stayed in the cab, hands on the wheel, very still.
Logan dropped off the roof and landed in front of Ramos.
Looked at him.
Ramos looked back.
"You're not Sinaloa," Ramos said in accented English.
"No."
"DEA?"
"No."
Ramos's eyes tracked the claws.
"What are you?"
Logan retracted them.
"The person who's done with this convoy."
Ramos studied him for a long moment.
"The product—"
"Is ruined. The warehouse is compromised. Your operation is finished." Logan held the man's gaze. "You can be finished with it, or you can be finished. Your choice."
A silence stretched between them, filled with the ticking of the hot engine and the distant sound of sirens — *faint, but building, coming from the north.*
Ramos heard them too.
Something moved through his face. Pragmatism, maybe. Or the survivor's calculus Logan recognized from looking in mirrors.
"Miguel," Ramos said quietly.
"He told you we were coming," Logan said. "He told me you'd be ready. We both used what he gave us."
Ramos made a sound that might have been a laugh in a different context.
"Clever," he said.
"Walk away," Logan said. "Tonight. This operation, this route, these contacts. Walk away from all of it."
"And if I don't?"
Logan looked at him steadily.
"Then I stop being the person who's done."
The sirens were louder now.
Ramos looked at the road behind Logan — the carnage they'd left, the burning crater, the stopped vans, the chaos — and then back at the single man standing in front of him with his hands empty and a leather jacket and the particular quality of stillness that came from being the most dangerous thing in any given location.
He nodded once.
Sharp. Military. A decision made.
"Get in or don't," he said to his driver. "We're leaving."
The truck made a U-turn and headed south.
Logan watched it go.
He turned north just as headlights appeared — not police, but the ruined pickup truck grinding toward him with the mechanical suffering of a vehicle that had done far more than any reasonable engineering spec had accounted for, Jubilee behind the wheel, the cracked windshield giving her a fragmented view of the road that she was apparently navigating on instinct and stubbornness alone.
The truck groaned to a stop beside him.
Jubilee leaned out the window.
Her hair was everywhere. She had concrete dust on her face and rifle-shot ringing in her ears and the expression of someone who had spent the last six minutes alone in a broken vehicle in a war zone and had decided to find it clarifying rather than terrifying.
"Did you get him?" she asked.
"Let him go."
She blinked.
"Why?"
"Because he made the right choice." Logan walked around to the passenger side and opened what remained of the door. "Move over."
She slid to the passenger seat.
He got in.
The transmission shrieked.
The truck moved.
Behind them, the sirens reached the carnage and found no one to answer for it — just craters and stopped vehicles and forty kilos of ruined cocaine soaking into the Sinaloa dust.
"So," Jubilee said, after a kilometer of grinding silence.
"So."
"We won?"
Logan considered the question with the care it deserved.
"We won enough," he said.
Jubilee thought about this.
Then, slowly, she nodded — not the automatic agreement of someone following a lead, but the genuine nod of a person who had lived through something and come out the other side and was beginning to understand that *won enough* was often the best the world offered, and that it was worth taking.
"Okay," she said quietly.
The truck carried them north, away from the sirens and the smoke and the ruins of the Golden Scorpion's supply chain.
The stars burned overhead, indifferent and permanent.
Logan drove.