"Claws of the Night"

The night air on the rooftop was heavy with electric promise, and Laura Kinney—better known to the world as X-23, and to herself as simply Laura—let herself blend into the darkness. She squatted at the building’s edge, arms loose on her knees, staring down at the city that sprawled beneath her like a living beast pulsing with neon veins and distant music. The club lights flashed, the sounds carried upward: laughter, engines revving, the bark of a doorman. Even safe above, Laura heard it all.

She closed her eyes, tuning in and out of the city’s music. But her mind was far from restful.

Just half an hour before, Laura had been curled on the creaky hideout mattress—a lumpy, secondhand thing set up in an attic above an abandoned print shop. The city’s everlasting hum was smothered under the drowsy breathing of Remy LeBeau—Gambit—who was sprawled beneath a tattered blanket, boots tossed at an odd angle, one hand loosely clasped round a bent playing card. He’d needed rest; the mess they’d escaped had made sure of that.

Laura, on the other hand, rarely slept easy. She’d spent decades running on sleepless adrenaline, haunted by sharp memories and sharper instincts. Her body healed from almost anything, but her mind? Not so easily.

She’d spent the hour going through newspapers she’d found in a dusty closet, each dated within the last two weeks—a barometer of the city’s sins. At first, it was habit: she always scoured for the scent of trouble, government raids, mutant sightings, missing persons. And there—a headline that leaped at her from the grainy ink:

**“Human Trafficking Ring Suspected at Club Zephyr—Police Baffled”**

She read the article once, then again, frowning. Something curled cold and sick in her stomach. The scars on her hands prickled. It was always the same: children and women disappearing, rumors that went nowhere, leads that dried up.

She went to put the newspapers away, folding them neatly and slipping them behind faded shirts and patterned jackets far too bright for stealth. Absently, she rifled through the clothes, searching for something that wouldn’t make her look like a circus performer. Gambit’s style suited him—loud color, long coats—but it would get her noticed.

Finally, beneath a stack of shirts advertising past jazz festivals, she found a pair of combat pants, legs baggy and patched at the knee, and a simple gray tank, soft and faded. Good enough. She tossed aside the scarlet hoodie she wore—splattered with grit from their last narrow escape through a sewer grate.

She glanced back once at Gambit, still snoring softly. She’d cleaned his wound, stitched up his arm with thread scavenged from an old sewing kit. When he’d drifted off, she let herself drop her guard—long enough for her body to sag from exhaustion. But only briefly.

The shower—a luxury after days on the run—was a cold, rattling pipe with a cracked basin and one bar of soap. Laura scrubbed off the blood, sweat, and memory of the fight, until her skin stung and the water swirling at her feet was clear. As the droplets caught the light, she glimpsed faded bruises—new atop old—like shadows that would never completely fade.

When she emerged, Gambit was still somewhere in the world of dreams, his chest rising and falling, the card now balanced on his brow. The sight almost coaxed a smile from her. Gambit always said he slept easiest when she was around—not that he trusted her, not quite, but because he trusted her to hear trouble coming before he did.

She pulled on the pants—the legs long, bunching at her ankles—and cinched them tight with a scavenged cord. The top was snug and let her move as she liked. She relocated her belt to the side, double-checked the line of claws sheathed and hidden beneath her knuckles. Her bare feet made no sound as she moved to the window.

Before she left, she cut the single bulb in the room, darkening everything. If Gambit woke, he’d know she was out and that she’d locked the window behind her.

The rooftop was a step into another world. Laura launched herself upward, finding the brickwork’s hidden holds. She crouched on the edge to watch, to learn.

Below, city nightlife unfolded: drunken laughter, a couple arguing, a group of girls teetering on high heels in line outside a nightclub—one of them, Laura noted, looked nervous, glancing behind her at every sound. Across the street, a cluster of men in expensive coats watched the bouncer with predatory eyes, exchanging money. She noted memorized faces, voices, scents.

Fifty yards down, a van idled behind Club Zephyr, tail lights throwing red out into the night. She saw a shadow slip out the fire-door and gesture at the van’s driver. Human trafficking, exploited lives, pain not so different than what she’d known at the hands of people who thought they could own others.

Laura waited. Below, police cruisers drifted by, never slowing. Someone out there had convenient blindness.

She knelt, scanned, repeated to herself: **Deal with Gambit’s problem first. Then this.** But it burned in her—the feeling that she could do something, that she should. Her claws itched beneath the skin.

She perched, half-invisible to the city below, muscles coiled and alert. Ready for the next trouble, the next rescue, the next shadow to slip from the world’s indifferent gaze. She watched it all, heart steady, mind racing, silent queen of the city’s roofline.

Because mutant or not, hunted or not—there was no way Laura Kinney could look away from those in need of help. Not anymore.

Within the darkness, watching everything and readying herself for the trouble to come, Laura smiled—a small, fierce thing. Night was her element, and the city, for now, belonged to her.

This story was generated by user ziggo.zane with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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