Tracker sprang up from his seat where he’d obviously been waiting for her in the lobby. “Miss Duval!”
Her face lit up as she saw him. “M’sieur Tracker,” she said as he stopped in front of her. She flushed slightly and dropped her gaze, unsure of herself after her experiences with Blacksnake’s personnel. “Ah, I am glad to see you, m’sieur,” she added.
”Just call me Tracker.”
She smiled at him. “Then you must call me Antoinette, Tracker.”
”Antoinette,” he nodded. “As you wish. Have you had supper yet?”
”Non, I have not. I was trying to remember where the dining room was when I saw you.”
”It’s down below. May I join you?”
”Oui, please. I would like that.”
A few minutes later, as they chose a quiet table, Tracker asked, “How have your examinations been going?”
He moved the dishes from his tray to the table while he waited for her answer. He’d selected meat loaf from the buffet, along with some greens, a glass of milk and a large piece of cheddar cheese. Her own tray held baked chicken with mashed potatoes, green beans, corn bread, milk, and chocolate pie.
”They sent a man down early this morning to get me. They checked things I did not even know I had! I’d never been examined so … completely, before. Everything was cold and white. The examining tables, the chairs, the floor. The people were cold, too. I did not like any of it. Only Doctor Carter seemed to care and even he asked me things I didn’t even know I knew!”
Tracker nodded in sympathy. “I know. I went through it, myself when I arrived. They’re measuring you and trying to keep themselves out of the picture. Even so, it can be frightening. I was.”
”I am sure you are right,” she said, but the doubt in her eyes belied her words.
They ate silently for the rest of the meal, lost in their own thoughts. When they finished and Tracker signaled for their table to be bussed, he turned back to Antoinette. “Let’s see if we can find any of the others,” he said. “You haven’t met most of the staff and I can introduce you around. Not all of them are like Red and Jay.”
He led her straight to one of the lounges. Inside, several people sat in a variety of overstuffed chairs and sofas watching TV at one end of the room while Scott sat at the other end, playing cards with a huge, baby-faced, blond-haired youth and a slim, sharp-featured woman with chocolate-brown skin. Tracker led her over to the card-players first.
”Marsha, Jerry,” he began, “I’d, umm, like you to meet Antoinette Duval.”
Scott smiled. “Hi. Getting settled in?”
She nodded.
”Marsha Jones,” the woman filled in, rising to shake Antoinette’s hand. Also known as Victoria Killmartin in public.” She smiled, “Enjoying yourself?”
”Non, not yet.”
Marsha raised one eyebrow.
”She spent the day in Med,” Tracker explained.
The black Defender snorted. “Oh. They made me feel like a side of beef, or maybe an experiment that had gone wrong.”
”And why do you have the two names, Marsha?” Antoinette asked.
Marsha looked puzzled. Scott said, with a grin, “Your alias, Marsha.”
Marsha laughed. “Because I’m also Victoria Killmartin, anchor for Network News. If it were known that I’m a mutant and a Defender, I’d be compromised as a news anchor. As it is now, I can help sway public opinion in favor of the mutants.”
”So, you do two jobs for us, n’est-ce pas?” Antoinette said.
Marsha nodded.
Scott said, “We call her Marsha in casual conversation so we won’t slip up and call her Victoria in public. She wears a helmet with the blast shield down in combat, just like Magnum does. And we call him Magnum for the same reason.”
Antoinette nodded understanding.
”This is Jerry Beringger.” Tracker turned to the huge youth.
The young man glanced at her. “Uh, hi,” he mumbled, and blushed.
Antoinette smiled at him. “‘allo, Jerry.” His blush deepened and she turned away slightly to take him out of the center of attention.
“I’m introducing Antoinette around,” Tracker explained to the group. “I see Louis and Sasha over there with Jay and Red. I want her to meet them, too.”
Leading her over to the other end of the lounge, they saw that the four were watching a documentary about military aircraft from the old, pre-Bloody Years era. Red and Jay were carrying on a heated argument about which plane was better and why, while what Antoinette first took as a large Siamese cat sat on the lap of an unbelievably large, though well-formed man. As he led her around the end of the sofa the stranger and cat occupied, she realized the cat was a person too.
“Sasha, meet Antoinette. We just brought her in yesterday and she’s going to be staying with us a while,” he said. “Antoinette, this is Sasha, an offworlder who crash-landed on Earth about two years ago. Locating and rescuing her was my first mission with the Defenders.”
“Greetingssss, Ahn-toinette. I hear of you. You big cat like me, no?”
“Not really,” Tracker corrected. “She becomes a tiger like you’ve seen on some of the wildlife programs. We don’t know yet if Antoinette can actually control the tiger yet.”
“The beast, it is emotion and instinct,” Antoinette added. “I can sometimes get her to do what I want, but her will is strong.”
“The man Sasha is sitting on is Louis Stone. Most of us call him Tank because of his size and strength.”
Louis stood up, cupping one hand and holding Sasha easily as he rose and offered his right hand to the slender girl.
“Greetings, little lady. Hope we get a chance to work together. Little ol’ tiger couldn’t hurt me if it tried, but I could use some more muscle out there on some of my jobs.”
Antoinette looked up at the big man. He stood taller than she could reach and his torso was an almost perfect wedge from wide shoulders through his relatively narrow hips. His thighs were each as thick as an average man’s waist.
“But you are so strong,” Antoinette exclaimed. “How can you wish more muscle when you look like you could wrestle a rhinoceros?”
