Two knives flashed.
Rowan Mercer cut down the guards silently and reached a fork in the corridor. He knew this junction well. To the left lay the outer exit. Past a few checkpoints and a stolen vehicle, freedom waited. With the chaos spreading through the facility, he had a real chance to vanish into the city before anyone regrouped.
To the right was the cafeteria—and beyond it, the holding area for the mutant children.
Left was survival.
Right was trouble.
He lifted his foot to turn left.
A scream tore through the corridor.
It was high-pitched. Young. Terrified.
Rowan froze, then let his foot fall back to the floor.
"So much for being perfectly rational," he muttered.
He turned right.
There were fifty children in this facility. If the situation followed the same pattern he remembered, fewer than twenty would make it out alive. Logic told him the smart move was to let the children draw fire while he escaped alone. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't a saint.
But he wasn't a machine either.
If those screams had belonged to armed adults, he could have walked away. Children were different. He saw them every day. Silent. Watched. Broken in quiet ways.
"I'll help if I can," he decided. "If I can't—I run."
In the cafeteria, Gabriela knelt beside three small bodies, her hands shaking.
"I'm sorry… I'm so sorry…"
She and a few colleagues had planned to smuggle the children out after learning the truth about the facility. It wasn't curing cancer. It was manufacturing killers. But the decision to execute the children had come first.
They were running too late.
By the time they reached the cafeteria, several staff members were dead, and more than a dozen children lay still. The rest were panicking, their abilities useless against trained guards with automatic weapons.
"Laura!" Gabriela shouted.
X-23 fought like something feral. She had already killed six men, but now her limbs were restrained, her small body suspended midair. Gabriela ripped a submachine gun from a fallen guard.
"You kids—go!" she shouted. "Isabel will be waiting at the gate!"
Isabel was the last driver left alive, the only one with a truck ready.
"What about you and Laura?" a boy asked. He was the oldest—Ricktor.
"You're in charge now," Gabriela said gently. "Take them. I'll catch up. I promise."
She opened fire. Her aim was rough, but the barrage forced the guards to shift. Laura ripped free one leg and drove an adamantium claw straight through a guard's eye, dropping him instantly.
More boots thundered down the corridor.
Ricktor swallowed his fear and ran, leading his brothers and sisters away from the cafeteria.
They made it only a short distance before four guards stepped into the hall, rifles raised.
"Together!" Ricktor shouted.
Before anyone could act, two guards collapsed, throats opened by spinning blades. The other two barely turned before gunshots punched them off their feet.
Rowan stepped forward, breathing hard.
"You all okay?" he asked.
Thirty-four children stared at him in shock.
"Seven-Five-Seven?" Ricktor blurted. "Gabriela and Laura are still back there!"
"I cleared the way behind you," Rowan said. "Keep running. I'll get them."
He dropped the empty weapon, grabbed two more from the floor, and sprinted back toward the cafeteria.
He arrived just in time to see Laura leap onto a guard's shoulders and tear into his skull with savage precision. Even the other guards hesitated at the sight.
But bullets forced her back. Her healing kept her alive, not unhurt.
Gabriela was pinned behind cover, out of ammunition.
Rowan swore.
Knives alone wouldn't cut it. He couldn't out-heal a firing squad.
He raised both submachine guns and focused—not on the weapons, but on the bullets themselves.
The guns roared.
Rounds curved midair, bending unnaturally as magnetic force twisted their paths. Each shot arced toward throats, spines, skulls. Automatic fire with sniper precision.
This was why he'd come back.
Within seconds, the cafeteria fell silent.