Bobby was so confused he almost got angry. “What? I don’t understand, what’s going on?”

Was there any way to sugarcoat this? No, and even if there was, Logan knew he sucked at doing it. “The Organization got to Rogue and Saddiq. They attacked the Professor, put everyone to sleep, and took off. To Alkali Lake, apparently.”

His jaw dropped, and he seemed to pale, but it was hard to tell; he was already pretty pale. “What?  How did they get to her?“ After the briefest pause, he added, “This is all your fault, isn’t it?”

He had to give him points for cutting right to the chase.  Logan shot a harsh look at Piotr before admitting, “That seems to be the consensus.”

“Well, what are we sitting here for? We have to go save her! Them.”

“But it’s a trap,” Piotr pointed out. “You just said it was.”

“Yeah, so we'll have to work with what we've got.”

“And what does that mean?” Piotr demanded.

“It means we do our best to guess how they’ll attack us, and think up a counter strategy.”

For a long moment, the pair of them just stared at him vacantly.  Finally, Piotr asked, “And just how the hell do we do that?”

Well, on the bright side, he’d have no one arguing the game plan with him.

****

Ideally, he could fight the Organization himself, but he knew it was never going to happen, and besides that, they would be ready for him. If they were confident enough to have left such an obvious message for him, and in such a sensitive place, they were fucking confident they could take anything he threw at them. So Logan was left in a minor quandary. Not trying to save Rogue and Saddiq was out of the question - but how many people would he be willing to sacrifice to achieve that goal?  He just bet that was the secondary point of this whole thing: make him choose who got to die.

News of Xavier’s condition and Rogue and Saddiq's capture spread like wildfire. It seemed every friend Rogue had volunteered to help go find her; the Rajan kids volunteered to help with Saddiq, but the oldest of that group was twelve, and they were completely out of the question. In fact, everybody without some kind of battle experience was out of the question, meaning the team was, essentially, him, Bobby (his battle experience could be argued, but he had a projection power, and they needed that), Piotr (okay, no real battle experience, but he was a big metal guy), and Brendan (more battle experience than Bobby and Piotr combined). But, considering they would most likely be facing Rogue, Saddiq, and who knew what kind of soldiers and mutants with unknown abilities and weapons, it looked bad for them.  Honestly, it was the perfect no win scenario, in the perfect no win place.  It seemed to be their way of gloating: “Come to us and die yet again, Wolverine.”

But if he brought some surprise players into this scenario, maybe he could unbalance them enough to give his group an edge. He did have a nascent plan in mind, but he needed contingencies, in case everything went wrong. And that’s why he finally tracked Kitty down at the gym.

Bobby had told him she'd changed quite a bit since he was last here, and he assumed she’d gotten taller too, maybe gained some weight, but he was incorrect.  She was still a very small and slight girl, a perfect fit with her power (she already looked like she was barely tangible anyway); what she had changed was her hair. It was short, dyed raven black, and she had put some of that temporary color at the tips, an icy neon blue. Goth Kitty?  He'd really never pegged her as the type; she seemed relatively sedate, the good girl to Rogue’s bad girl.

She was still very interested in learning to be “useful”, and was currently working the heavy bag, throwing standard combinations and breaking it up with a kick or two, but pound away as she might, she wasn’t really moving the thing.  How many of her would it take to make one of those bags?  A dozen maybe?

“Keep your left up,” he advised her. “You keep droppin’ it.”

From the way she started and turned, she hadn’t heard him come in, and she seemed almost embarrassed. “Oh, hey,” she said, looking down and coloring slightly.  Her face reddened, but he couldn’t tell if it was from embarrassment or just from exertion. “Yeah, my left is kinda my weak side.”

“You need to work on it.  Having a strong side is no good if you’re completely vulnerable on the other.”

She nodded, oddly chastened, and he felt bad for her.  Even he knew Rogue had been her best friend, and he was never here long enough to get to know her.  He saw a pair of boxing gloves hanging from a peg on the wall, and retrieved them as he asked, “Wanna show me what you’ve got?  Saddiq’s been teaching you, right?”

She seemed surprised, and yet pleased.  Sometimes it was just easier to hit things than talk, and no one knew that better than him. “Yes, he took over the class, more or less, since you’ve been gone.  Mr. Summers monitored it pretty closely, though; he didn’t want him to teach us anything lethal.”

He slipped on the gloves, and made sure he was faced away from her while he smirked.  That wasn’t going to do them any good now, was it?  Saddiq couldn’t be taken down with non-lethal means; he was a designed and trained killing machine.  As for Rogue, if she could touch your skin, you were fucked, and that didn’t even bring in the frustrating variable being that she would also take on the powers of the last mutant she happened to touch.

Logan assumed a neutral expression before turning around, holding his gloved hands up in a traditional stance. “Let’s see what he taught you.”

She looked up at him warily. “You’re not gonna hit back, are you?”

That was so touching it was hard not to laugh. “Hell, no.  I just want to see what you've got.”

“I’m … I’m not sure how much control I have …”

“You can’t hurt me, even if I don’t manage to block.  But don’t hit too hard, ‘cause I don’t want you to hurt yourself on me.”

This was the right tack to take. She glanced down at the mat and smiled slyly. “You know how arrogant that sounds, don’t you?”

“Hey!” But, after a moment, he admitted, “Yeah, I guess it does.  But this body contains about a hundred pounds of adamantium. A lot of people have broken bones on me by landing a bad punch. And thanks to all that extra strain on my body, I’m much more muscle than fat.  I’d make a lousy air bag.”

“Oh, the joke I could make there.”

“Shut up and hit me already.”

She threw a roundhouse right that he saw coming before she even raised her arm, and he moved his gloved hand (for her benefit, not his) easily to block. She tried a left jab, and again, it was an easy block. He went on auto-pilot, letting his reflexes take over, so even when she tried connecting with a lot more speed, a lot more variations, it didn't matter. Fighting was drilled into his brain, imprinted and branded like scars across his frontal lobe that just wouldn't heal. Staring at her, he could tell just by the shift of her weight, her stance, her body language, what was coming next, and his muscle memory was already responding in kind, moving to block, and all he had to do was squash the urge to fight back, to take advantage of the obvious opening and lay her out flat.

He and Saddiq, sadly, had a lot in common.

Kitty was growing more and more exasperated, throwing punches at him harder and harder, frustration making her eyes blaze. Why was this so important to her?  Why did she want to impress him?  She decided to throw in some kicks, but this was where her height worked against her, as her legs were too short to have much reach, and of course she hadn't had much martial arts training.  She telegraphed her intention to kick long before she actually did it.  Again, easy blocks, and while he was tempted to just grab her foot and yank her off her feet, hopefully teaching her a lesson, he didn't, because she seemed angry enough as it was.

Finally she went for a combination, right cross - left kick, and she was so inexperienced and weak on her left that as soon as she kicked after he blocked her right, she unbalanced herself and fell backwards, landing hard on her butt.

"Fuck!" She explained loudly, then looked horrified and slapped a hand over her mouth.

He chuckled, and reassured her, "Don't worry, I won't tell Summers."  He shucked his gloves off like a hockey player preparing to fight, and reached a hand down toward her. "Yer doing good, kid.  Just don't try somethin' you're not trained to do."

Her disbelief was obvious, shading toward rage.  He suspected she was mad at herself, but you can't yell at yourself without looking crazy. "Good?! Are you kidding me?  I suck!  I couldn't stick a single punch."

"You know what I did for several years, on and off?  Got in bare knuckle and ultimate fighting contests, most of them as illegal as hell. Fighting is second nature to me. You can train for years, darlin', and you'll probably never even be close to my level. Sounds arrogant, yeah, but when your next meal depends on being better than the other guy, you get good real fast."

Something bloomed in her dark eyes, a kind of understanding, and awe mitigated her anger. "So ... you're like a professional boxer?"

"Something like that."

She took his proffered hand, and he helped her to her feet. "You mean, like Mike Tyson?"

"No, he's a pussy."

That startled a laugh out of her, a kind of guilty schoolgirl titter that made him smile, if only because it was so damn cute. He was glad she still had enough innocence to do that.  He didn't want to be the one that took that away from her.

She turned away to take off her own sparring gloves, and he finally decided to ask, "Why'd you want to impress me so bad?"

Her spine stiffened, and she paused briefly, radiating guilt. When she replied, she spoke down at the floor. "I wanted ... I want to be a part of the team that goes after Marie. I mean, I know I can't do anything, but she's my friend, and -"

"That's why I came to find you, Kitty."

She finally looked at him, hopefulness tempered with wariness. "You want me to come?"

"Yes, I do, but only under certain conditions."

Her shoulders sagged, and she made that noise that only women could, that sort of half-sigh that almost sounded like a tongue cluck, a kind of 'Oh, men' exhalation. "What conditions?  You don't want me to fight?"

"I wouldn't ask that of anyone. That's a personal choice, and I already know teenagers don't listen. No, what I want you to do is promise me you'll exercise the same common sense you've used before."

That really confused her, and he didn't blame her. She probably didn't think he was around enough to know anything about her. "What do you mean?"

"Out of all of us, when we were attacked, you did the most sensible, logical thing: you ran."

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Acted like a coward, you mean."

"No, not a coward. The odds were overwhelming, and you didn't know the players, so you ran.  That's common sense, honey, and that was the right thing to do. You followed your instinct, and you should always -let me repeat that, always - follow your instincts. We all have a little voice in our heads whose sole purpose is to keep us alive. We learn to ignore it 'cause we think it's foolish, or 'cause we got some goddamn macho bug up our butts, but the truth is it's there for a reason.  It's an evolutionary throwback, something in our reptile brain screaming at us, and most of us squash it. You haven't, and for god's sake, don't let the fear of looking like a coward make you. You are not a coward; you have instincts, and you should obey them. When it tells you to fight, do it. When it tells you to run, run. Okay?"

She grimaced, clearly doubtful, and still somewhat ashamed. But he was being honest, and he hoped that sincerity got through. "You don't run," she said.

He had been expecting that. "That's 'cause I'm an idiot.  A nearly unkillable, brain-fucked idiot. What's your excuse?"

Kitty looked away, probably so he didn't see her smile (too late), and when she was sure her voice wouldn't betray her amusement at his own personal assessment, she asked, "Is that all I have to do?"

"No, there's one more thing."

Just from the movement of her shoulders, he guessed she rolled her eyes. "I knew it."

"I need your agreement that if things get really bad, or if I tell you to, you will leave."

She groaned, disappointment clear in her posture. “You want me to run away again?  Why, ‘cause I’m good at it?”

“You know that’s not what I mean. If it all goes to hell - and odds look good it will - when I tell you to, I want you to go so you can get reinforcements and save all our asses. You’re gonna be my lieutenant, but only if you’re gonna obey my orders.”

She finally looked at him, mildly flattered but still skeptical. “Why me?”

“Because if they can’t touch you, they can’t hurt you.” He dug a scrap of paper out of his pocket and held it out to her. The only thing written on it was a phone number.  She raised an eyebrow at him, but she took it. “We get in deep shit, you get away, and you call this number.  Say I’m in trouble, and we need help now. Then you lead the cavalry back to us to save our asses.”

She looked it over, probably longer than she needed to, and finally nodded, but when she glanced up at him, her look was sly. “If I agree to do this … will you teach me some of the stuff that Mr. Summers doesn’t want you to teach us?”

“You’re sneaky. I like that. Sure I will, but that’s just between us, right?  And don’t show that number to anyone, okay?”

“Okay. Whose number is it?”

He shook his head. “I'd tell ya, but then I'd have to kill ya.”

She scoffed and folded it up, holding it between her fingers like a hidden razor blade in a fighter’s fist.  It reminded him that there was one tip he could give her. “Kitty, tell me, can you go incorporeal, but still have something remain partially corporeal in your hand?”

She raised her eyebrow again, as if it was a loaded question. (It probably was.) After weighing the option of lying or exaggerating, she seemed to decide she might as well be honest. “Yes, kinda … I’ve been practicing.”

“Good. If you’re ever in a tight spot, remember, anything you materialize inside someone and pull out will act like a reverse bullet.  Not only will it hurt like hell, but it will also unbalance your opponent severely. They won’t get it, and they’ll be freaked out. A pencil, a twig, a shoelace - anything you yank through a person is going to be disturbing.  Just keep it in mind.” He started to turn away, and then suddenly spun around and lunged at her.

She yelped in fear and he dove straight through her, hitting the mat face first.  She stepped aside, still incorporeal, although she looked a little more solid now.  Sunlight was bleeding in through a high window, and he could just about see it through her. “What the hell did you do that for?” She exclaimed, becoming solid once more.

He jumped back up to his feet, and grinned at her. “Just testing.  See? You've got some good instincts.”

She just shook her head and eyed him warily as he turned and left the gym.  But her final statement made him laugh: “You’re a very strange person.”

She didn’t know the half of it.

Once that was done, he returned to his room, and found the book he had taped to the back of his headboard, out of the reach of any questing hands that didn’t bother to pull the bed away from the wall.  It was just a mass market paperback of Richard K. Morgan’s “Altered Carbon”, a good, hard-boiled SciFi novel, but probably nothing someone would ever steal from his room.  And if they did, and rifled through it in hopes of a piece of paper falling out, they’d be disappointed, as nothing fell out.  It was a slightly worn but otherwise sound book, without a single thing in it.

Until you turned it upside down, and looked at the bottom of page two eighteen.

There was a series of numbers written in the small blank space at the bottom of the page, a phone number, one he knew he’d never remember and one he hoped he’d never have to use.  But now was the time to utilize every wild card he had, and Scott and Xavier were in no position to give him shit about it.

He’d tried to call Marcus earlier, but got his machine. He was off on a job, and wouldn’t be back ‘til who knew when, so he was out of the picture. But ,in a way, that was okay because Marc probably wouldn’t feel too good about this either.

He locked himself in Xavier’s office, and made sure all recording devices were disconnected before he punched in the number. After the fourth ring, it was picked up. “Speak,” the man said, his voice gravelly and thick.

“Wing,” Logan said quietly, watching dust motes dance in the ray of sun spilling onto the desk. “I’m calling in my chit.”

There was a dramatic silence, but since Wing liked his dramatic silences, he wasn’t surprised. “Mr. Yashida,” he finally said, in a voice as smooth as velvet and cold as steel. “I was wondering if you’d ever call it in.”

“I was hopin’ not to, but the shit piles up too deep after a while.”

“I know what you mean.” He paused to cough, and it was a deep, painful wet hack, something that sounded like it was scraping the lining off the insides of his lungs.  His cancer was advancing at a good clip; he probably only had a couple of months left. “Pardon me.  So what is it you need?”

“An army, basically. Got one I can use?”

‘’You’re being funny.”

“No, though I wish like hell I was.  I’m dead serious.”

“All right, then. What do you need this army for?”

“There’s a deep black-ops government agency that’s going to attack me and some of my people at a place in the Canadian Rockies called Alkali Lake.  I’d like to throw a little surprise party for them.”

“A government agency? Well, I must admit my men would probably line up two deep for that.”

“No love for government in the Triad? What, not even the Chinese one?”

“Ah, but that’s different. Even a mangy dog knows better than to attack the old man who abides its presence, and sometimes throws it scraps over the fence.”

“You got that from a fortune cookie.”

That started a laugh from him, which soon morphed into another hacking wet cough. He held the phone away from his ear, and it sounded like Wing spit something out.  Jesus, he was bad.  How was he still functioning as the head of the West Coast Triad?  Then again, he knew how deceptively dangerous Wing was, no matter how frail he appeared on the outside. He was a master manipulator, fearless and hard, and a man who knew where the bodies were buried, mainly because he'd buried most of them himself.

Once he had composed himself again, he came back on the line. “I do miss your brazen irreverence.  No one in my organization would dare to voice such a thing around me.”

“I ain’t scared of you.”

“I know, that’s what makes you so refreshing. Although, to a degree. I imagine I’d get sick of you if I had to deal with you on a daily basis.”

Logan chuckled, and idly held his hand up in the shaft of light, trying to see the outline of the metal beneath his skin. “You’d be surprised how much I hear that.”

“I doubt it.  Now, about this army … I’m afraid I will need a bit more information.  I’m aware I owe you, and I do live up to my word, unlike many sad excuses for Humans nowadays, but something of this scale requires a few details.”

“It’s a group called the Organization. I assume they’ll have body armor and state of the art weaponry, some designed to take out specific mutant threats.  They also have adamantium bullets, hypersonic weapons, the whole bit.”

He heard him light up a cigarette - he was still smoking?! Well, it didn’t matter now, did it? - and after coughing somewhat more elegantly this time, he spoke. “Ah yes, we’ve had some of their weaponry wash up in our coffers. We’ve never known who they work for or what their agenda was, though.  Still, no matter, this will probably end in heavy casualties on our side, and I’m not sure I can allow that willingly, Mr. Yashida.”

He felt like correcting him, but there was no point. He wouldn’t call him Logan; it was either a curious respect thing, or a curious affectation. “They kidnapped two kids, Wing. Two mutant kids, and they intend to use them as weapons. I’m leading a rescue mission to get them back, but I know it’s a trap. They … I worked for them once, against my will, and I escaped.  They’ve never forgiven me.”

Another of his trademark long pauses, but he knew he’d gotten him. Crime lord or not, he didn’t abide the hurting of children; as far as he was concerned, they were off limits.  That made him, in this day and age, a dinosaur. “You’re taking care of the kids, I trust?”

“Yeah. But they’re gonna have an army there -”

“That we will take care of,” he interrupted, his voice even colder than before.  Yeah, he'd made the right call - children involved in adult battles was still something he could not tolerate. “They may have their state-of-the-art weaponry, but so have we; anything money can buy, and that’s a large list.  Do you know how many men we should be expecting?”

He smiled, but quickly tamped it down, so he didn’t hear it in his voice. “No, but I doubt it will be under twenty five.”

“They expect a fight.” It wasn’t a question.

“We’re all mutants; they anticipate ugliness. And they know I don’t go quietly.”

“I’d be disappointed in you if you did.” He exhaled noisily, with just a slight wheeze at the end. “Any other special requests?”

“Just that your team doesn’t attack any of my team. We’ll be down there and in action.”

“How do we identify them?  I mean, you’re pretty identifiable, with that hair.”

“Ha. We’ll be dressed up like leather boys.”

“A help indeed.”

“And if you’ve got mutants in your Canadian branches, now’s the time to deploy them.”

“Mutants are a decadent Western thing,” he replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We don’t have any.”

“Right. Also, one more thing: got anything that can discharge an almost lethal Human dose of electricity?”

Again the pause of doom, where he inhaled smoke and choked on it, while Logan watched the dust motes in Xavier's office swirl almost in rhythm with Wing’s labored breathing.  He did have time to wonder if he knew what he was doing, if this could be an even bigger disaster than if he just went in with everybody else alone, but he supposed it was just time to bite the fucking bullet and find out.  If it was a bigger disaster, would it really matter that much?  Alone it would be a slaughter.  At least, with the Triad involved, it might be a massacre on both sides. “Dare I ask why you might need something capable of discharging that much energy?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“It’s a decadent Western thing; you wouldn’t understand.”

At least he made him laugh. It just might distract Wing long enough for him to make up a plausible lie, because if he told him the truth, he’d never agree to help him.

And, at the end of the day, Logan wasn’t sure he would blame him.

5

The wait was interminable.

Oh, he waited just outside the skin of reality, so time would pass more quickly, but it was exhausting to keep it up, and hard to judge exactly when it was ideal to drop the protective bubble and slide back into reality and its time stream once more. Still, Meldane did it until the night came on, hard and fast, and finally he let it slide away, coming back to the world. In spite of the streetlights, he could see the faint glimmers of stars above him in the indigo sky, the moon a thick crescent like the blade of a shrunken sickle, and he watched people stagger to their cars or stagger down the street after nights of drinking or partying. The funny thing was, they were generally young or generally old, with people in the middle being rare indeed. When you were young, a night out was a treat; when you were old, it was a necessity.

Finally the man who called himself Liam started closing up his enchanted pub, and Meldane put up the slightest cloaking spell, so he blended in with the brick wall of the curio shop he was sitting against, only giving him time to wonder if anyone ever bought a snow globe with little shamrocks in it when the man came out, locking the exterior door with his small ring of keys. He was a big man, tall, well over six foot, broad shouldered, who carried himself in such a way that said he had nothing to fear. Probably true; few people around here were probably big enough to take him on, no matter how drunk they were. But there was something else in his attitude that bled through his posture, the way he carried himself - was he aware of the enchantments? Did he give himself a couple as well? Something was clearly not right about this man, and it nagged at the back of his brain like an itch far too awkward to scratch. There was a puzzle here, a riddle, and he would solve it, even ! if he had to strip the enchantments down one by one.

That’s when Meldane noticed how the shadows moved.

They seemed to coalesce, become figures, lithe, dark, and deadly. Five vampires, two females and three males, dressed like modern youth out on the town, enjoying the unseasonable warmth and crystal clear night. They were a whisper, a stray fog, and they had surrounded him before he turned away from the door and saw the first of them.

They didn’t have their vamp faces on, so clearly he thought they were just potential customers, and didn’t seem at all surprised to see them. “Oh, sorry, we’re closed. Come back tomorrow.” He then looked around, and noticed that they had him circled.

One of the women, a brunette in a t-shirt with “Brat” written across the front in red rhinestones, leaned in and looked at him closely. “Jesus, Angelus,” she said, although with her brogue it sounded kind of like “Jay-sus Ayngelus”. “What the fuck’s happened to you?”

Angelus?

The man looked confused. “Angelus? Umm, look, you have me confused for someone else -”

But before he could go any further, two of the vampires behind him, an Indian male and a blonde female, each grabbed one of his arms and held them behind his back while the other three diverged on him. “You think I can be confused?” The brunette continued, sounding enraged. “I damn well know the man who killed me, you gobshite.” She morphed into vamp face then, all teeth and glowing yellow eyes, and Meldane had a millisecond to decide whether he should get involved or not.

It was quickly a moot point.

Liam kicked the vampiress flush in the chest, with enough force to send her flying back into one of her friends, and they both hit the pavement in a tangle of limbs. He then spun around, somehow getting one arm loose, and threw the blonde face first into the door of his pub using the momentum of his spin. The bartender then punched the Indian vampire square in the jaw, actually making him reel, and then followed up with a kick to the stomach that doubled him over and dropped him to his knees. Liam then pivoted with almost super-human speed, turning into a spinning kick that caught the only standing vampire right in the side of the head, sending him sprawling in the center of the street. So Liam was some kind of black belt, was he? A black belt strong enough to stagger a vampire?

The brunette jumped back up to her feet growling, and lunged for him, but he must have seen it in his peripheral vision, as he spun away just enough to avoid her, but kept in close enough to give her a little mid-air push and send her flying straight through the windshield of a parked car. She crashed through the glass and plopped into the front seat, setting off a car alarm that whooped through the empty streets, echoing off the walls of the buildings. While he found the noise irritating, it was even worse for the vamps with their more sensitive hearing, and while they cringed, they didn’t seem to notice that Liam had broken an empty crate sitting at the mouth of the alley they had come through, and using a broken board he pulled from the ruins, he staked them all with a surgical precision that was worthy of a Slayer. The fact that they exploded into dust didn’t seem to phase him.

The brunette vamp wasn’t so dazed she didn’t realize what was happening. She kicked open the passenger side door, the one facing the street, and slid out, glass still sticking in her face and arms like the weirdest pieces of body jewelry in existence. She kept the car between them as she hastily backed down the street, and she pointed at Liam and said, “I’m comin’ back for ya, fucker! Yer a dead man! Again!”

He kept advancing, and that’s when Meldane noticed a sort of hard vacancy in his eyes, like he was more android than Human at the moment. She must have noticed too, because she took off running down the street, getting lost in the shadows as soon as possible.

As soon as she was gone, Liam just stood there for a moment in the middle of the street, impromptu stake clutched tightly in his hand, and then it snapped. Whatever caused that hardness to come to the surface disappeared, and even though his eyes remained open the whole time, it was like watching a man wake up. The stake fell from his hand, and he looked around, confused and obviously dismayed. After a moment, he exclaimed, to no one in particular, “What the fuck..?!”

Meldane was glad the car alarm drowned out his snicker. So someone enchanted his bar to make it a happy place, and someone gave him some kind of unconscious “failsafe” to protect him from big bad baddies? Curious enough.

But to say he was Angeleus, the legendary vampiric scourge of Europe? The supposedly dead scourge of Europe? Curiouser and curiouser.

It confirmed the suspicion he had when he first saw him. He thought he was Angelus, but it didn’t make sense. Who would be sick enough to turn Angelus into a Human? The fact that he could still defend himself - even without his own knowledge - suggested it wasn’t a punishment. So who did this, and why?

And would they show themselves if he tried to put that bastard back in the ground where he belonged?

Meldane wondered if he was strong enough to find out.