After a few false starts, the first people they looked for were their own. It hadn't really been an option for any of them before, not when they were each alone...but now that they were together, they could go anywhere they wanted to.
First they went to Arizona to look for Jean's grandparents. She hadn't been able to read them when the zombies first came, but she'd told herself they could have had to run, just like Jean herself had. She'd told herself that, but she hadn't really believed herself, and so she wasn't surprised when they got there to find a body in the kitchen with a hole in its head, and something else clawing at the other side of the basement door.
Scott glanced at the door, then at Jean's face, and at Peter's. "You can wait outside, if you want," he said.
Peter disappeared for a second or two. "Neighborhood's clear," he said when he came back.
Part of Jean wanted to argue. Three were better than two in a fight. It wasn't like she hadn't had to put down people she'd known before...
Except not like this. Her friends, classmates, teachers--not her family. Her parents had told her to run, so she had; she'd never had to face this, not like Peter or Scott had...and she could already see that if she tried to argue with them about it, all they would say was that she shouldn't have to, not unless she had to. They would both say the exact same thing, and in the end it would be just as true no matter which of them were actually saying the words. So in the end, she did the smart thing, and went outside, and shielded her mind enough so she wouldn't have to see it (but not enough that she would miss it, if they called out, if they needed her after all). She sat on the porch swing until she heard three gunshots from inside, one after the other.
Then she went back in, and they buried both bodies in the backyard, she and Peter and Scott together. Later, far away from there, the both of them comforted her, as they'd all comforted each other before, the way people have comforted other people since pretty much the dawn of time. It wasn't the first time she'd been glad to have them, nor the first time she'd been so grateful she hadn't had to choose...but it was maybe the time, out of all their times, that she was the most grateful.
*
Next, they went looking for some of Scott's cousins. This time, they got lucky, or unlucky; Scott couldn't remember where they'd all lived, or even what all their names were. So they were only able to locate a few of the houses that might have been theirs. Some of them had a body or two in them, and some had exactly the same situation they'd found at Jean's grandparents' house...but as awful as each scene was, Scott didn't recognize any of the bodies, or any of the decors in any of the houses they went to. Burying those bodies didn't mean the same thing to him. There wasn't the same kind of grief to deal with (though there was still that bone-deep sense of responsibility that he felt about everything, whether he was actually in charge of it or not; the sense that he should have some something more, never mind that he'd been really young when he and his brother had gone into foster care, and never mind, either, that none of those cousin's parents had apparently even thought about taking him and Alex in. If Scott had had to feel like he mattered to people to feel responsible for them, he probably wouldn't have felt as bad about his foster parents' deaths as he did).
Jean and Peter did their best to comfort him, the way Scott and Peter had comforted Jean...but it was harder, with Scott, because of all of them it was the hardest to convince him that he wasn't responsible for everything that happened. Still, in the end, they got through to him a little, at least enough for him to be glad, too, that he had them.
*
Peter was last, mostly because it hadn't occurred to Scott that Peter wouldn't have already looked for his family. Because it hadn't occurred to Scott, Jean didn't think she had the right to mention it, at least not out loud when all three of them were together. Instead, she was stuck trying to get the details out of Peter whenever they were alone together, and telling herself she had no business digging around in his mind to find more details about something he probably had a reason for shoving so far down.
After a few days, right when Peter was about to start avoiding ever being alone with her, Jean said, "Okay. If you don't want to, we don't have to. I'll let it go now."
She did exactly that, and so of course that was when Peter started thinking about it a little more. And then a little more than that. And then a little more than even that. Until one day he was gone for more than an hour, and when he got back, he said, "I can run on water."
"No, you can't," Scott said, frowning.
"Not fresh water," Peter said. "Salt water. It's denser, I think? Anyway, I could run across the ocean. If I wanted to. We could go to, like, Poland."
"Why would we want to go there?"
"My father's there," Peter said. "I mean, I think. Probably. Maybe. If he's still...you know."
Jean hadn't known that, or at least not really. She'd had the shape of it, which was that there was someone related to Peter who might be out there, and that he went back and forth on what he wanted to do about it. Other than that, she'd been in the dark, until now.
The story came out, the one Peter had been keeping to himself for all this time. That his father was Magneto. That they'd met when Peter had broken him out of prison as a teenager. That he had no idea Peter was his son. That Peter had occasionally thought about looking him up, but had never gotten further than figuring out where he'd (probably) gone after that thing that had happened in Washington, D.C. That he hadn't been sure, really, if he wanted Magneto to know, because he hadn't been that great to Peter's mother as far as he could tell, and he'd never been there, and he...wasn't sure.
But Jean had been inside Peter's mind, and even if she hadn't had all the details before now, she knew him well enough to know that if he'd finally come around to talking about this out loud, he'd finally made a decision. So what Jean said, instead of any of the other things she could have said, was: "Do you really think you can make it all the way across the ocean?"
When they'd met, he hadn't even been sure he could make it all the way across the country. He'd been working on his stamina since then, and several weeks of Peter working on something was like a couple hundred years of anyone else working on something, but still...
"I think so," Peter said. "I mean, I ran for a really long time when I was gone just now. A few days, at least." (He'd been working on the time thing, too, but he still didn't have the best grasp of how much time was passing for everyone else when he was running around at super speed.) "I must have made it at least halfway across before I turned back."
"Okay," Jean said.
The discussed the logistics for a little while longer, and left the next day.
*
Peter took Scott across first, partly because Scott always thought he should be the one to scout out a new area, and partly because the longer Peter ran, the more likely he was to get tired, and so whoever he was taking across last should be someone who was likely to be able to help keep his power working for long enough for them to get to dry land. (Neither Peter nor Jean let Scott in on the second reason.)
In the end, though, Jean didn't have to do that. All she had to do was wait on the beach for an hour and a half or so for Peter to get back. Once they were on their way, she didn't have to do anything other than watch the waves (and the occasional boat filled with zombies, or the even more occasional group of whales or dolphins) go by through Peter's eyes. By the time they stopped. she could feel how tired Peter was, more tired than he remembered ever being before...but he'd gotten her here, and he'd gotten Scott here before her, and they were together.
"Where to now?" Jean asked, when Peter finally stopped. They were at a crossroad in the woods. Scott had been sitting on the hood of an abandoned car, and stood up when he saw them.
"That way," Scott said, pointed to the left. Underneath his calm exterior, he was vibrating, not so much with eagerness as with impatience...though that wasn't really surprising, considering how long he'd been waiting for them by himself. Jean would have been pretty rattled if she'd had to stay her by herself for a couple hours, even knowing Peter had checked to make sure there were no zombies around before he left. "Let's get going."
They started walking. Peter didn't even try to take them any faster than a normal walk. Jean guessed that was because of the same reluctance that had made him not want to talk about his father before now. It didn't make that much of a difference, though, at least not to her and Scott; just ten minutes or so later, they came to a little driveway onto the main road. About two minutes after that, they came to a house with a green car parked in front of it.
Before either of the others could ask, Jean looked with her telepathy. "There's no one here," she said, and didn't add No one alive, anyway.
At this point, Peter usually ran inside for a second to take a look. This time, though, he just stood there, almost like he still wasn't sure, even though he'd gone all the way across the Atlantic Ocean four times to get them all here.
"Are you all right?" she asked, sharing a glance with Scott.
"Everything's too fast," Peter said, which made no sense until he added, "I can't make it slow down right now."
Jean had been trying to give him his privacy, or she would have noticed before. "You must have tired yourself out," she said.
"I'll go," Scott said, understanding in the same moment Jean did.
He would have walked right in the front door if Jean hadn't grabbed his arm to stop him.
"We'll go together," she said. "Or we can find somewhere else to rest, and come back tomorrow. Peter can decide. What do you want to do?"
"Let's get it over with," Peter said.
It wasn't really surprising. Peter was terrible at waiting for anything most of the time; there was no way he would ever have been able to wait all night at everyone else's speed.
Since none of them was fast enough to be totally sure a zombie couldn't get them if they just went inside, they stood in the front yard and yelled for a while to try to lure any zombies that might be inside to the front windows. Jean and Peter faced the house, while Scott faced away from them, scanning the woods the whole time, just in case.
When ten or fifteen minutes had gone by and they still hadn't drawn anything to them, either from inside or outside the house, they went around to the back. They'd have stood there and yelled, too, except that what they found there made is pretty clear there wasn't likely to be anything inside the house after all. The back door was closed tight, just like the front door had been; and a few feet away from it were two mounds of dirt.
Maybe in their lives before, they would have all had to think for a minute before realizing they were graves; now, all three of them knew right away, even though some flowers had grown in the dirt, showing they must have been dug some time ago.
"Maybe neither of them is him," Scott said, even though all of them knew what this looked like. Closed up house, bodies buried behind it: A neighbor or someone must have come by and buried the bodies (or shot the things they'd become and then buried them). Most likely, the bodies they'd buried had been the people who'd been living here before the zombies came. To think anything else would have been wishful thinking.
"Let's go home," Peter said.
"We need some rest first," Jean pointed out, since it wasn't like they could go home right this second anyway. "Let's check out the inside."
With the house closed up, and the bodies buried, it was pretty unlikely they'd find anything dangerous inside. Still, they went through the house carefully, because you never knew...and because all three of them had decided a long time ago that if they got killed, it wasn't going to be because they'd been too careless to stay alive. They didn't find anything moving inside, except for a family of squirrels that had gotten in through a hole in a front window. What they did find was a couple weapons caches in the living room and kitchen, and crates and crates full of canned goods in the pantry.
"That's kind of weird," Scott muttered to Jean.
"Because they didn't take the food?"
"Because too much of it's gone."
Jean looked again, and saw that Scott had a point. The mounds outside had been covered in grass and flowers, so they must have been buried some time ago, not too long after the zombies had come. But about two-thirds of the crates of food held empty cans, not full ones. Two people couldn't have eaten that much food within a few weeks. Not unless they'd been totally gorging themselves...and whoever'd been smart enough to stock up on that many weapons had probably also figured out they needed to ration their food.
"You think someone lives here?" she asked.
"I think someone's been here, anyway. Maybe we should find somewhere else to sleep tonight."
"Okay. We'll get Peter and go."
But when they were on their way out of the kitchen, Peter appeared in the doorway. He was holding something in his hands. He had turned white, and his mind was totally blank with shock.
"What happened?" Scott asked, hand jerking like he wanted to reach for his visor, or a gun.
Jean knew what he was assuming, what anyone would have assumed. But it took more than the ten minutes they'd been separated from Peter for anyone die and come back again, and so even though her heart felt as frozen as Peter's face looked, she raised her hand to stop Scott from doing anything stupid, and said, "Peter? Are you okay?"
"I think," Peter said. "I think I might have a...a..."
"A what?" Scott asked.
Peter shoved the thing in his hand at them. Jean, who was a little closer, was the one to take it. It was a picture in a wood frame. In it were a man, a woman, and a little girl. The man looked sort of like Peter, and a lot like the footage Jean had seen of Magneto on the news, back before the end of the world. The little girl looked just like the woman...except for her smile, which looked a little like Peter's.
"A sister," Jean said. "You think you might have a sister."
"Yeah. If she's not...if she's not..."
Jean thought about the empty cans in the pantry. The man and the woman in the picture weren't too far apart in height; more importantly, the mounds in the back yard had both been adult-sized.
"I think there's a decent chance," she said. "But it's getting dark, and you need to rest so your powers can come back. We should probably wait until tomorrow to start looking for her."
In the end, that was what they did.
*
Once Peter's mind stopped being a blank, he spent most of the rest of the night thinking too much for Jean to get much sleep, either. Instead, she lay next to him in the nest of blankets they'd made on the floor by the fireplace while Scott took his watch, then took her watch while the two of them lay together.
None of them had ever had to keep a watch at night before. Usually, Peter was able to make sure the surrounding area was clear, so they would know for sure there were no zombies close enough to get to them while they were sleeping; but Peter was burned out, and although he'd done a quick scan of the area when he'd dropped Scott off, none of them had any idea what might be out there by now. Before that, when they'd each been alone...you couldn't keep a night watch, when it was only you. All you could do was barricade yourself in somewhere, and hope sleeping in fits and starts would let you wake up before anything happened, but still let you get enough sleep that you would be alert the next day.
Still probably not a problem Peter had had...but Jean and Scott both had, and so it was something of a relief to be able to swap out who was watching and who was lying down, even while it also made both of them worry more than they had since they'd had Peter.
That was one of the things Jean was thinking about, over and over, when it was her turn to sit in the corner of the room that let her see all the windows, with a gun in her lap. That, and all the guilt and grief and hope in Peter's mind, everything he probably wouldn't have been able to name even if he'd tried to talk about it; all those things, and imagining all the worst things every little sound from outside could be. There were a lot of sounds at night anywhere, but even moreso in the middle of the woods. There was an owl somewhere out there; and there were all sorts of thumps and scratching sounds, coming from both inside and outside the house. Maybe some of it was the pipes, or the house settling around them...and every time Jean got up to go look at anything, at least one floorboard always squeaked underneath her feet. It put her on edge, all of it, the whole time.
There was a lot to think about, and a lot to look out for, and one of the things Jean had discovered a long time ago was that she didn't really need to use her telepathy when she was waiting to see if zombies would come for her. Her telepathy was a barrier at times like these, muffling her other senses even when she knew for a fact that nothing with a mind was going to be showing up. Even though Peter's sister might still be alive, there was no way she'd come home in the dark, when she couldn't see whether or not any zombies were after her; there was no way she'd come during Jean's watch, and so Jean did what she'd always done when she needed to be alert, and shielded her mind from everything except Scott and Peter (and maybe she should have blocked their minds off, too, but even thinking about that brought the same bolt of panic that had come when she'd thought, for a split second, that something might have happened to Peter, or thought about any of the things that could still happen to either of them).
Not too long before dawn, scratching sounds came from the kitchen. Before Jean could get up for the fourteenth or fifteenth time to go look, the squirrels they'd seen in there before came skittering out.
...No. Not squirrels. This time, it was rats, five of them. Three of them dodged past Jean's feet, heading toward where Peter and Scott slept on on the floor. Two of them stopped at Jean's feet, sniffing her sneakers; then one of them ran up her jeans, then her shirt, sharp little nails pricking her the whole way up, until it was sitting on her shoulder, its whiskers twitching as it sniffed her neck.
Then, just as soon as they'd showed up in the first place, the rats on Peter and Scott ran back over, and the rat on Jean's shoulder went back down to the floor, and then all five of them dashed back into the kitchen together. More confused than anything--whether or not she would have been scared of rats Before, she didn't have the time to be scared of anything that wasn't actively trying to eat her now--Jean followed them, just in time to see person to hop through the now-open kitchen window and land with a thump on the floor.
"Stay back," Jean said, raising her gun. A zombie would lunge for her, while a person would do what she told them; that was the one thing that would determine whether or not she would shoot.
"You stay back," said the girl, a little slowly and with an accent. She didn't look as worried about a gun as a person should, but she also didn't move toward Jean. "What are you doing in my house?"
...Her house. Suddenly, Jean remembered her telepathy, and when she unshielded her mind, all the girl's thoughts and memories slid into her mind. There were so many of them so close to the surface that Jean could hardly make sense of anything but the strongest one--a memory of a confrontation in the woods, the men from the village telling Nina to step away from her parents, so they could do what they'd come to do; Nina refusing, and sending her friends swooping into the men's faces, or hitting them in the legs or the sides or the smalls of their backs until they fell in the mud; they way she'd fought and fought to keep them away from her parents...right up until they'd both gotten up off the ground and come for her. Nina might have died right then and there, if it hadn't been for her animal friends, screaming at her to run...and so she had, and tried not to listen when the screaming started.
Eventually, she'd gone back, and found both of their bodies lying in the woods. Some of the soldiers had been there, too...but most of them had gotten up and walked away, after. Some of them might still be in the woods, somewhere, looking for her or any other person.
"We've been looking for you," Jean said--and it was true, even if they hadn't come here expecting her, even if they hadn't had a chance to actually do any looking yet. "We came a really long way to find you."
"Who are you?" the girl--Nina, Jean saw, underneath the rest, a name that hadn't been used since the last time someone had said it--and whether that person had been her father or her mother or one of the men was something she no longer remembered herself--demanded. Now, Jean saw that she had a crossbow, not a gun. That made sense, if her mutation was what it seemed like; she'd have to be quieter, if she wanted to live in the woods without scaring the animals she was friends with. Maybe she'd had to be quieter, just in order to hear them. Jean would have to ask, sometime.
At some point, Peter and Scott had come to stand behind Jean. Now it was Peter who answered Nina's question, by saying, "I think I'm...I think I'm your...um. I met your dad this one time."
"Oh. Well, he's not here."
"I know."
"He's dead"
"Yeah. I kind of figured."
"Okay." A few things went through Nina's mind then. Jean could follow the thread easily, now that she had had a second to adjust to a third mind in her immediate vicinity. First, Nina's dad's voice flashed through her head, telling her not to trust anyone; then there was her mom's voice, telling her to always be polite to visitors; finally, there was Nina's own voice, a foundation beneath the rest, that reminded her how lonely she'd been, even with her friends to talk to. She hadn't ever thought she could be this lonely for people, but there was no way she could deny it, because the strongest sense of anything in her mind was the idea of how nice it would be to just sit and talk with another person for a while. "Are you guys hungry? I have a lot of food." Another thought, fleeting: maybe they'd try to take it. "I mean, I have a little food. I'll go get it."
And so she went. Instead of following, her rat friends stayed behind, making themselves at home on the counter.
"I can't believe you didn't tell her," Scott said when Nina was out of earshot (except maybe she wasn't; eyeing the rats, Jean thought that maybe Peter's little sister was never out of earshot of anything).
"I'll tell her," Peter said, though it didn't sound very convincing to Jean, who was still picking up on his five million conflicting feelings about it. "At some point."
After a couple minutes, Nina came back with four cans of food, one for each of them. Considering how low the pantry was getting, Jean thought that was pretty generous. They all opened their cans and ate, sitting around the little table in the kitchen...and they talked while they ate, the three of them telling Nina about their abilities, and her telling them about hers. Eventually, Nina asked about how Peter had known her dad, and he told that story, leaving out all the worst parts, everything that had made him question whether or not he wanted to track Magneto down in the first place. Nina listened carefully, and tucked the story away in the back of her mind, where everything that wasn't survival had to stay most of the time. Jean knew the feeling. They all did. There wasn't any getting away from it, not in this strange and terrible new world they all had to live in.
Finally, when the sun had long since come up, and the four of them had been talking about anything and everything for hours, Nina said, "When are you going back?"
It couldn't have been clearer what she was asking: When were they leaving, probably forever? How long did she have to talk with them, before there'd be only her friends to converse with?
"Never," Peter said, and then, when Jean and Scott looked at him: "Or, like. Tomorrow, maybe? You could come with us."
"I don't know," Nina said. "I can't leave my friends."
"You could come back sometimes," Peter said. "I would take you whenever you wanted. Anyway, there are animals over there, too."
Before he could say anything else, press any harder, Jean slid into his mind, long enough to tell him: I think she will, after she has the time to think about it...but there's no way she's going to decide today. Don't push her.
Okay, Peter said. "Can we meet your friends, maybe?"
"Sure," Nina said.
And so they all loaded up with their weapons, just in case, and went out into the woods. It wasn't even close to what they'd expected when they'd come here, or even when they'd gone to bed last night...but whatever happened next, Jean knew their little family had just become that much bigger. And whatever happened next, she was glad she and Scott didn't have to comfort Peter the way they'd had to be comforted...because Peter's family was a little bigger now that it had been before, and that meant theirs was, too.