For the duration of the flight, all of my teammates just kept chatting amongst themselves and their instructor Dani Moonstar about what had happened to Jay, and where he'd gone. She simply speculated like the rest of them, but something about her demeanor seemed tense. Jay's brother, Sam Guthrie just remained silent, trying not to interject.
The two of them must have known already what I did. Everything I knew went into a an after-action report after the attack. It was likely that Cyclops had smartened the two of them up very soon after the attack.
It was good that I was manning the controls. I could just avoid speaking to anyone about Jay under the guise of focusing on flying the Blackbird.
The coordinates Cyclops gave us sent us to a summer camp in eastern Tennesee. Given that it was winter, there was no one around for miles. As we landed and got out, the place gave off a real haunted kind of vibe. Lots of trees with no leaves, wind blowing, no sounds of life around. Eerie.
I was by far the only one concerned with such things. Everyone else was by far more set on finding Jay, which was fair, seeing as how it was the mission. My mission, in fact. And as my mission, when we set foot on solid ground and got a bit of a look around, I started working.
"Seeing as how we don't have any trackers, what say we pair off and search?" I asked the group. Given that there were two adults there, I shouldn't have been giving them hard orders, "We'll probably cover more ground faster that way."
Dani didn't seem to have a problem with it, "Works for me. How about you guys?"
No one else seemed to have any issues with splitting up, and that was how it went. I went with Prodigy, sent Wind Dancer off with Wall Flower, Mirage off with Surge, and Cannonball off with Elixir. Seeing as how Surge had super speed, and Wind Dancer and Cannonball could fly, they had the best chance of finding Jay before anyone else.
All of them were better suited for talking him back into the fold than I was.
We all spread out and went our separate ways. With David and I being the slowest group, we stuck to checking the immediate area first - cabins and other camp facilities, to see if we could at least see if Jay was keeping belongings anywhere.
As we moved between buildings, David spoke to me for the first time since we'd landed.
"I know," He said out of the blue. I gave him an odd look, only to receive a knowing one from him in return, "I know why Jay left school without telling anyone."
Of course he knew. He knew what anyone around him knew, without even intending to. Even if he didn't get it from me, there were two other potential sources for the information.
"You'd be a scary dude if you could retain the stuff you picked up," I muttered, as a way of confirming things. There was no point in lying to someone who automatically knew the truth just by standing within six feet of you, "So, you know. Does that change anything about this for you?"
-It sure did for me. Normally, I'd have been all for finding a wayward student. But knowing what I knew, I couldn't muster up the fire to go above and beyond. Maybe it was different for David because he'd actually been friends with Jay.
My question caused David to hesitate for a moment before we continued to search cabins, "Jay... was a New Mutant, but he never seemed to want to be," He started to say, "We saw him as a friend, but he just... never seemed interested. Did you know he was on the Hellions first?"
I scoffed in return, "No. That's a weird wrinkle."
David nodded absently in agreement, "We used to have Kevin on our team, but he felt like the Hellions had his back more than we did in one situation, and that along with his fight with Josh over Laurie..." He trailed off, shrugging his shoulders, "Jay had no problems with switching. I guess it didn't matter one way or the other to him."
Jeez. Every time something about the old squads came up, it became clearer just how much of a mess my team combining them had the potential to be.
David continued, "He kind of always stayed at arm's length. Whenever the team had problems, he always seemed to be on the outside," He chuckled and adjusted the visor over his eyes, "I think we all kind of came to him with our problems. He has a way of making what's bothering you seem trivial."
I listened as well as I could, but couldn't help but note that he was stalling, "You never answered my question though."
"I didn't," David said, knowing that I wasn't going to be satisfied until I got some kind of answer, "...How would you feel if he was your teammate?"
Wow. What a stinger of a way to turn my own question around on me, "I don't know. I'd like to think that if Jay had been on my team, none of this would have ever happened," I liked to think that I'd kept a close enough watch on the Paladins that things like that wouldn't have occurred. Clearly though, David didn't want a cop-out like that as a reply, so I dug a bit deeper, "And if it did... I'd probably be madder at myself than I would have been at him."
David smiled grimly, "There you go, then. It's why I didn't tell anyone else when I picked it up from you. They would have all felt like shit, just like I feel now."
No matter how all of the student squads interacted with each other, internally, they had all been very tightly knit. Almost like family in some cases. It was the one thing we'd all had in common. From the Paladins, to the Hellions, to the New Mutants, to the Paragons, to the Corsairs, to whatever other squads there were... if anything like this would have happened to a member of any of those teams, the rest of them would have taken it hard.
"They're still going to feel like shit when they find out," I pointed out, just for the sake of conversation.
David grunted in agreement, "Hopefully by then, we'll have found him and made it back to the school."
I rapped my knuckles off of the nearest log cabin wall, "Knock on wood," I said, for luck.