xp_logs | Lost and Found, prologue: Lights in the North

There are times when questions about the cost of action just fall away. Nathan, sitting on coms duty, gets an emergency call from MacInnis. The helicopter carrying him, his team, and six children they've just rescued from Mistra has crashed in northern Canada.

Sitting on coms duty was not his favorite part of this whole X-Man thing, Nathan reflected, slouching in his chair and covering a yawn as he reached out for the book he'd set down when he'd gotten up to get himself a cup of coffee. The monitors in front of him were set to various news channels and internet news sites, which really should have been enough in the way of distraction, but he'd noticed that his preference for multitasking was beginning to get a little out of hand. Maybe it was all the training he'd been doing with Charles, he wasn't sure, but he was starting to feel like he was slacking off if he wasn't doing five things at once.

The book was moderately engrossing, at least. It was a new history of the Balkans during World War II, much preferable to the previous standard work on the subject. Nathan picked up his coffee and took a sip, opening the book to the spot he had marked. As he read, he kept part of his attention on the monitors, and idly ran through a few of the shielding exercises he had been practicing with Charles as well. The psychic noise waxed and waned around him like waves lapping against the shore of his mind as he thinned and thickened his shields in a carefully measured cycle.

The sequence of tones that marked an incoming call came over his headset, breaking his concentration, and Nathan set his book and mug aside, straightening in his chair and turning back to the console. "Cable," he said briefly, opening the connection. "Go." Were there any students out? There wasn't anything ongoing with the team, he knew that much...

There seemed to be a lot of noise on the other end of the line, a howling that sounded like wind, and... sobbing? It sounded far enough from the phone that he couldn't be sure. He was about to repeat himself when there was a sudden burst of static and then a very familiar voice.

"Nathan?"

"MacInnis?" Nathan's hands froze over the keyboard for an instant in pure shock, before his brain kicked back in and he remembered that Alison, at the meeting, had given him the information he needed to be able to get through directly to them, in case of emergency. "What's your status?"

"Pretty much fucked, son." There was a catch in MacInnis' voice, and the part of Nathan that wanted to snap at him not to call him that fell abruptly silent at the sound of it. "I took a team in to grab a group of kids en route to a conditioning facility. We got them all out, but our helicopter took a hit. We went down..." He stopped, unintelligible voices battling with the sound of the wind in the background.

"MacInnis?" Nathan said sharply. "Still there?"

The voices went on for a few moments longer before MacInnis answered. "Yeah. Still here. We need some help pretty badly though... I've got people down." Nathan heard him take a deep, noticeably shaky breath. "Kids are mostly intact, thankfully. Six of them."

Six kids. On their way to a conditioning facility, not rescued from one. Which meant they could come out of this with a minimum of trauma, if they were gotten out of where they were before Mistra caught up with them. "Can you give me your coordinates?"

MacInnis rattled them off quickly enough that Nathan realized they had to have a still-intact GPS receiver. He fed the coordinates into the computer, which informed him that they were looking at a particularly remote portion of the southern Yukon. Bad area, terrain-wise, Nathan thought, his eyes narrowing. And the proximity to where Mistra's last home facility had been... but MacInnis had told him last week that they'd moved as soon as he'd been rescued, or recaptured, in August.

"I don't know what we're looking at in terms of pursuit," MacInnis went on, sounding every bit his age. It struck Nathan to ask him "I've got a weather-manipulator whipping up a preexisting blizzard, trying to give us some cover."

"Are you on a sat phone?" Nathan asked abruptly. MacInnis grunted something that might have been an affirmative, and Nathan gritted his teeth. "We need to end this call quickly." Mistra was more than capable of tracing it. "Anything else we need to know right now?"

"No... except that I've got a telepath with me. Elliot. He's not got the range to reach you from here, but once you get closer..."

"Have him keep an ear open for me," Nathan said. It didn't occur to him for an instant that Charles and the team leaders wouldn't agree to an evac mission. Or that he wouldn't be on it. "Hold tight, we'll be in touch."

"We'll be here," MacInnis replied, and the line went dead.

Nathan took a deep breath, staring at the map on the screen in front of him for an instant, the coordinates burning themselves into his brain. Then, stone-faced and outwardly calm, he turned to page Scott. And Alison.