Stick's words set something turning in Maya's mind. "Hell's Kitchen looks like a big stretch of ground, but it can't be more than a kilometer (0.6 miles) in any direction. So you were scanning the area and just happened to stumble onto Liz? Shifu—can your brain really take in that much at once? A two-kilometer radius. Do you have any idea how many different sounds that is?"
Stick chuckled twice. "When you get Matt to help you find a crime scene, don't you tell him to search by keyword? I'm about the same as him—except he needs the exact keyword to lock on, and I don't. Close enough in meaning, and I hear it."
It clicked for Maya instantly. Basically a search engine. Back in the day, hardware was the bottleneck—Baidu, Google, take your pick, they were slow, and half the time if you didn't phrase things just right you got nothing. Later the hardware caught up, the software improved along with it, and as long as the gist was there in the search box, the results came back fast and clean.
Once she'd worked that out, Maya asked quickly, "Shifu, where's Liz?"
"Aldrich Psychiatric Hospital, in New York," Stick said.
"What? How did she end up in Aldrich Psychiatric Hospital? She was perfectly fine last time I saw her—I even brought her exam papers today." Maya's voice went sharp with alarm.
"Hehe. Who says you have to be crazy to get into a psych ward?"
Maya turned it over. "So the hospital's just a front. The real purpose is locking up and studying mutants. But—how did Liz get dragged in there?"
"That I don't know. You'll have to ask her yourself." Stick shrugged.
"And her condition right now?" Maya pressed.
Stick smacked his lips. "My hearing range isn't anywhere near as broad as Matt's. Ask him."
Feeling Maya's gaze swing his way, Matt concentrated a moment, then shook his head. "I can't hear anything. The whole hospital's soundproofed."
Maya nodded. Made sense—hospitals were usually soundproofed, psych wards especially. It was a psych ward, after all; patients climbing out of bed at midnight to scream their lungs out was par for the course.
Aldrich Psychiatric Hospital was in Queens. This time Maya left Matt behind—let him keep training under Stick—and set out alone.
Getting from Manhattan to Queens meant crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, the one that turns up in movies over and over; any time a camera pulls back for a wide shot of New York, it drifts across that bridge without meaning to.
Maya hadn't shown up as Spider-Man in days, and this trip was recon on Liz—naturally she had no interest in being spotted. So she flipped on Shadow Escape to hide her body and simply ran straight across the bridge into Queens. Well—across the bridge, technically. Not the top of it. The underside.
Lately, with the training under Stick, she'd been heading out earlier than usual. By the time she reached Aldrich Psychiatric Hospital, it was only nine-thirty.
Maya's Super Senses didn't reach as far as Stick's or Matt's, but soundproof walls couldn't stop them. She tucked herself into the shadow of the outer wall and swept the building room by room... and before long she found a strange girl.
Sixteen, maybe seventeen by the look of her. Slight build, shoulder-length green hair. Heavy eyeshadow, but you could still tell she was a pretty girl, features sharp and striking. And the reason Maya called her strange wasn't that she was doing anything abnormal—mentally, at least, she seemed fine. It was that her two hands were glowing a yellow-green, which was already well past normal—and on top of that, an iron bracelet was floating above her head.
A face like that, hair dyed green, a whole alternative-punk getup, the power to control magnetic fields—and most telling of all, Lorna Dane stitched across the chest of her patient's gown. So her name was Lorna, which meant she was almost certainly old Erik's daughter.
(Author's note: Lorna's hair is supposed to be green—she dyed it black to hide being a mutant. Maya forgot this and assumed the green was the dye job.)
Maya muttered to herself, then felt the timing was off. She'd seen The Gifted—it was blowing up on Douyin, impossible to ignore even if you tried. That show's timeline was clearly post-2010, and it was only '93 now—nearly twenty years early.
Then she thought of the X-Men timeline, the one convoluted enough to work Stan Lee into an early grave, and made her peace with it. If a Lorna storyline was going to happen at all, this was actually the more natural moment for it. This was the Marvel universe—not just mutants but Avengers, Asgard, Thanos. Twenty-some years down the line, the government wouldn't be this brazen about grinding mutants under its heel. Aliens tear down half of New York and you're still infighting? Forget how ordinary citizens would react—those powerhouse Avengers of Tony's, if they turned a blind eye to this, that'd be the real miracle.
Besides—old Erik was born in the '20s. It was '93 now; subtract Lorna's age, and that meant Erik knocked up her mother in his fifties. Fine, barely plausible. But twenty-some years later, Erik would be pushing ninety. He's not Wolverine—what young woman's going to give him a second look? Okay, say Erik's got charisma, a handsome old man. Don't forget there's still Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. A guy past eighty, fathering one kid after another—even for Erik, that's a stretch.
(Author's note: In the comics, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were deliberately set up as Erik's children; the Avengers films kept mutants out of it, but in the X-Men films Quicksilver's already been confirmed as Erik's son... anyway—it's a mess.)
Still, one thing Maya couldn't quite square: did the U.S. government really need to move this fast? A few days ago the TV was still saying they were only monitoring mutants who'd broken the law. Lorna she couldn't vouch for—but Liz, one hundred percent, had done nothing. Well, except the Andrew business, and that didn't count; Maya had taken the fall on that one for her.
Her real target today wasn't Lorna, it was Liz. But having stumbled onto a Lorna in the wild, Maya didn't mind checking what "little Erik" was made of.
Watching that thick iron bracelet wobble and spin in midair, something turned in Maya's mind. A near-invisible gray thread slid in through the window, crept along the wall, and—screened by the room's dim yellow light—reached the bracelet. A gentle tug...
THUD!
"Ow—that hurts—sss!"
Lorna looked down at the hand clamped over her nose and found it slick with blood. "That doesn't make sense," she mumbled. "My power didn't just glitch—so how did the bracelet fall?"
Muttering to herself, Lorna abruptly started screaming, her whole magnetic field erupting, every iron object in the room rattling along with it...
Right then a tall, burly nurse strode in, brisk. "Lorna Dane. Time for your meds."
The nurse acted as if she couldn't see a single thing wrong in the room—walked straight up, pried Lorna's jaw open, and shoved a few pills in. Then, paying no mind to Lorna choking and rolling her eyes back, she waited until the iron objects settled and walked right back out of the room.
Out beyond the wall, Maya was dumbstruck. She really had only given the thing the gentlest tug—a little tug-of-war test, to see how strong Lorna's magnetic control was. And who'd have guessed old Erik's own true successor would be this feeble—that half-pound bracelet had just dropped straight down from three meters (10 feet) up and bloodied her nose.
And no, Maya felt not a shred of guilt. Back in the day, old Erik had knocked a few of her front teeth out; now little Erik was paying the father's debt.