Between a Bear and a Hard Place(72)

Fury nodded. “So, you still haven’t told me what the plan is. And here we are, hovering above the place we’ve been hunting.”

“Right,” Claire said, peering through the binoculars and getting a good read of the place.

It was, hauntingly close to what Eighty-Three had said. A well-running factory. At one end of a massive conveyor, suits that looked just like his were rolling through her field of vision. Every four seconds – she counted – the belts would stop with a pneumatic hiss. Mechanical arms extended and pressed something into the front of the chest piece, and then on they went, down the line to the next station just out of eyeshot.

There weren’t any people in them – not yet anyway – and for that, Claire was infinitely thankful. Eckert wheeled up to one of the stations and with the help of two Eighty-Three lookalikes, stood up and took hold of the lapel of one of the suits. He inspected it for a moment, nodded and relaxed back into his chair with a creak that was audible even up as far as they were.

He wheeled off, rolled by one of his stewards. “I’m just glad there weren’t any Clods sitting around. I don’t think I could take the shock of seeing what those things are before they turn into... other things.”

“How do you know there weren’t?” Fury asked, cocking an eyebrow. He sounded flippant, but he wasn’t. There was just no way to know, no way to tell. “So... plan?”

“Oh, yeah,” Claire said. “Well, the first part of the plan was to poke through this stuff since I had a feeling there would be something under it. We got that taken care of.”

“Yeah, and then the next part would be...?”

“Well, we have two options. First would be that we just jump down there and go ape-shit.”

“Bear shit.”

“Right. Bear shit,” she smiled in such a way that the freckle on her left cheek disappeared into a dimple. Fury caught a glimpse of it, and for a moment just watched her face with the moonlight dancing a quicksilver pool over her eyes, her cheeks, her nose. “Option two,” she interrupted his fantasy, “would be to come up with a better plan.”

Suddenly, the phone started buzzing. Claire plucked it out of her back pocket and held it to her head, used to the strange method of operating it by now. She frowned a little, and then shook the receiver.

“Does that ever work?” Fury asked. “Shaking it, I mean. Doesn’t seem like that would—”

“H-hello? Hello? Is this thing on? I’m so tired of guard duty. I want to get out and blow up some labs or something.”

It was really hard for Claire not to at least have a snicker at Rogue’s expense. For all his world weariness and street smarts, sometimes he boned up incredibly funny things to bone up. But, he was also loaded on God knows what that Eighty-Three put in his veins to keep him from realizing just how bad his back still was, so that was a reason to let it slide.

“Hey Rogue,” she said with a smile. “I’m glad you finally got that thing away from Eighty-Three. You know you aren’t in any shape to be playing action hero just yet. You might be a fast-healing bear, but you were really messed up. Any word from Jill?”

He coughed, heavily, into the receiver. Claire jolted a little and then Fury snorted a laugh at both of them. “Yeah, er, sort of. I mean, she’s with Draven back in California. I heard from him, not her. Good timing for once.”

“Jacques?”

“Yeah, he’s with them.”

For the past three days, the gang had been trying to find the rest of their little clan. After the run-in they had in the forest, Draven called in a favor and got the two humans the hell out of there. He well knew that when bear business goes bad, it can get dangerous. Real, real dangerous.

Still, Claire missed her new friend. Hell, she missed all of them. But she knew it was for the best.

As her feet dangled two hundred feet above the factory where her former employer was making living, breathing people into robot slaves, she thought about how badly she missed all her friends. And then she remembered that two of them still worked at GlasCorp, and one friend that she really needed to call again.

Her thoughts turned to Nick and his cute ginger face and funny smile.

Without thinking about it, she rubbed the toe on her left foot into the arch of her right. A chunk of dried-on dirt about the size of a dime worked its way free, and before she could lunge and grab it, the tiny brown disc began a fluttering, heart-stopping, gut-wrenching descent.

“Uh,” Claire looked down at the dirt, wondering how long they had before it made landfall. “Hey, is Eighty-Three around?”

Rogue fumbled with the transceiver and then with a staticky huff, Eighty-Three took it from him. “Did you drop something into the hole?”