And she wasn't Jane, she wasn't Silver Fox, she wasn't any of the score of women that Logan had dared to love, even though he knew they could never return it. She didn't look even remotely human, not even if you managed to squint, but she was still beautiful all the same.

He mentally kicked himself for feeling too much once again, and busied himself with some of the soap plant, asking questions about these Others, and forming a bit of a plan.

He managed to glean from her that there were two so far. One was a mutant he hadn't heard of before; apparently a pyrokinetic, for she said that fires bloomed beneath his fingertips like flowers did beneath hers. He was clearing the space, and the other one, who Logan was sure was Sabretooth, had forced the few remnants of Arakawa Indians that dwelled in the area to mine gold for him. The Indians had lived in this area for centuries, their ancestors had been the feared cannibals that spanned from the Caribbean to lower Brazil, and had survived the invasions of the Portuguese, Dutch, and French. They still knew the forests better than anyone did, and sometimes they tried to escape, melting into the forest like shadows.

"But he always finds them," Guiana said, her eyes dark with anger and pain. "He can smell them out, and he brings them back to kill them in front of the others, so that they know what will happen if they try to leave. Also, most of them have families ... they do not want to lead him to their tribes. So they stay, and they die, and the others who hide from him in the forest tell stories of the Demon-cat that walks like a man, and wonder why I have brought him to punish them. I try to tell them ... I do try."

"I'll take care of him," Logan grunted. "I wonder what they want gold for. I don't get it."

"They always come for gold, the gringos," she said tersely, rinsing the soap off her limbs and face. "Sometimes, nothing changes. Nothing at all."

He had no retort for that, for he knew that in part, she was completely right. "Okay, Guiana, show me where they are, and I will take care of it, all right?"

She nodded, a bit subdued, and waited for him to dress, shaking the water off her body and out of her hair. As they prepared to get back into the treetops, he noticed that the plucked stems of the plants they had used were already beginning to form new shoots, and spread them slowly to the small amount of light the forest allowed.

"Nice trick," he said softly again, and followed her once more.

They kept to the trees as much as they could, travelling roughly west. She talked seldom, but managed to tell him that he had been holed up and ill for at least a week.

"I watched when you came here, and wondered if you were another of the Others, and when I smelled you, I thought you might be," she said as they stopped for a quick meal on more fruits and a stash of "offerings" from whoever lived in the forest. "I would have killed you then, and when I saw the plant at your feet, I talked with it and asked for it to grow strong and hurt you. You burned the trees and ground with your machine, and I was angry."

Logan winced. He had tried to maneuver his hovercraft into a tiny squeeze of a clearing, and the jets always fried the ground beneath them. He didn't like to think of the pain that must have caused, and didn't blame her too much for wanting to hurt him.

"What changed your mind?"

She smiled gently. "As I was talking with the plant and asking it to grow fast around you and hurt you with its juice, to wrap around you and your machine so that no-one would find it, you leaned down to smell its scent, and smiled because it was pretty." She looked away from him. "And then the plant scratched you before I could take it back, and I was sorry. You were different, a mu-tant as you say, but you were not one of the Others. I could see that. I am very sorry."

He shook his head. "S'okay, Guiana. I understand. I don't blame you for being pissed off."

She looked back at him, and gave him one of her sunrise smiles once more, and then they moved on again.

They kept going west, and Logan wondered about his plane and the radio therein. Should he call in the troops? As much as that grated, it maybe was a good idea. He knew Scott would be royally peeved, and probably would start to lord it up since Logan left without following the "rules" and all that crap. But he figured that if there was something really going on here, he better let them know that Magneto had something up his sleeve.

He shook his head. He wasn't even sure if Magneto had anything to do with this little vacation. Sabretooth was often freelance - sounded better than complete sadistic nutcase anyway - and if it was only a case of Sabretooth and some sprout that liked fire a little too much, than reinforcements were not going to be needed.

They stopped again, and Guiana was strangely quiet that afternoon. Logan kept his senses peeled, but he felt nothing other than her own sadness, which seems to dim the very light around them. After a while, she dropped down to the forest floor and looked back over her shoulder at Logan.

"Come, Lo-gan," she said, holding her three-fingered hand out to him. "Come see what greed has done, and is doing still."

He hesitated for a moment, then took her hand in his. It was cool to the touch, and a small shock seemed to pass through his entire body. She blinked once, and her nostrils flared, as if she felt something strange as well, then she led him through the fallen boughs and leafmould, weaving in an out of moss-coated shapes wreathed in vines, where things he couldn't see crawled and slithered about in the near-darkness.

The shapes around him nudged at the back of his mind, and he wasn't sure exactly why, but they seemed familiar. They were ascending now, scaling up a sort of hill, that appeared to be carved into steps, and as he looked to his right, a roundish column rose from the choking foliage around him, and a dark orb, made of stone, peered from beneath the leaves.

They reached a sort of clearing, and beneath their feet he saw stone that was a dark porous gray, with images carved into it, images so old they were almost worn away. Vines snaked and trailed over a half-formed wall, where half a face with a comb-like nose plug peered out across the ages, its eye a rough but large-sized diamond, so big it almost looked fake, until he shifted his position, and it caught enough light and glinted like a star. Suddenly, all the half-forms around him began to take shape. The columns were pillars, the strange lumps were statues. They had been climbing steps, and now stood on a flat plain, broken with tree trunks and brush, but too flat to be anything but handmade. Even with all the underbrush and leaves that littered the floor, he could tell that it was ruled flat, with walls here and there.

"It's a city," Logan said softly, and Guiana nodded once, and walked through a city that, he was sure, no European eyes had ever seen, or that diamond pupil would not still be in that carved face.

"There are things in this forest, Logan, which only forest-born know of," she said quietly, as she walked the worn stones that had been cut by hands long forgotten. "Vast peoples who lived and left long before the Spanishmen came, with their guns and their greed. Even I smell things in the forest that are better unseen, more dangerous than I am.

"There are places in the forest that even now, men can enter, but do not return from. In cities long forgotten, with languages that no one remembers, their stories have been lost. And ground people come, and dig, and write in books, and speak of these Great Discovered things, these things that many have known about for hundreds of years, but the Learned Ones do not learn; they see, they hear, but they do not listen."

She ran a hand over a wall, her two fingers and thumb trailing across the vines almost absently, but the vines felt her touch, and broke, parting their grasping tendrils from the rock that they were slowly breaking apart over time, exposing the rock to their eyes. Logan wondered how long it had been since anyone had looked upon this city in the jungle. Three hundred years? Six hundred? Longer? Good grief, longer even than that? (as old as me? Is she like me?)

"They forget." She continued softly. "Even with their new learning, they forget. The ancestors of this place do not even remember it. They cannot read the writing, cannot remember the names. And so they hurt the forest, and kill things merely because they are not useful." She nearly snarled the word, and the forest about them because silent again. No birds sang, no monkeys called, no snake slithered as she spoke in the silence, and the vines feel away from her hands.

"And we die. A little more each day. Even I am getting weak. But I know where the secret places are, and soon I will go there, with all other secret, dangerous things that these ground people would kill if they knew where they were. And perhaps, for a little while more I will be safe, but only as long as I am not useful."

She stood back and looked at the stone she had exposed, and Logan looked at a bas-relief so well carved in the stone that he expected the people to move and speak at any moment. He gaped at the crowd of people dressed in feathered and jeweled capes, sculpted so intricately that he could see the quills of the feathers in the stone. Small flecks of gold leaf and bright pigment still clung in crevasses of the worn rock in places, hinting at the richness of what it used to look like centuries ago. The people, with their high foreheads and proud faces, bowed at the waist with their arms crossed strangely over their chests, almost in an Egyptian sort of relief. Gifts of gold and pelts were at the feet a figure seated on a throne, a figure, dressed in leaves and feathers, but holding its head up with a proud but benevolent smile. Its hair was in braided ropes that fell about its bare shoulders, and forearms that seemed much too long rested on the arms of the throne. A faint nimbus of green paint on its carved limbs, and emeralds that gleamed with a green-gold light were mounted in the stone of its face for eyes.

He looked at Guiana, and back at the relief, and realized he had underestimated her in a lot of ways. And that maybe they had a bit more in common than he thought. (so many memories .it bugs you that you don't remember yours, but tell me this, bub; do ya think she actually likes to be able to remember?)

She listened a moment to the silence, and to something else. Memories perhaps, the memories of the trees and animals around her. Remembering across the span of time that ground people couldn't possibly understand. Humans only thought as far as their own lives. Only as far as what was useful to them.

Her face hadn't lost the pride, it was still in her eyes, and the tilt of her head - but there was exhaustion there as well, a drained look that he sometimes felt himself, even when he denied it. That feeling he got sometimes when he felt that he had just seen too much, and even though he always survived, he always came out on top, there were times when he would wonder just how long he could keep it up. Yeah, they were a lot alike.

"I am a mutant, Logan," she said softly, and he realized that, by now, her English was almost flawless. "I understand what the word means. It doesn't matter how old I am. It only matters that the ground people that come here think that I am a mutant. At one point, they thought me a god, and I was safe. Now, as you can see, things have changed. And if I am not useful, they will try and destroy me for being in their way, yes?"

Logan merely nodded. He didn't trust his voice just yet, he wasn't sure why.

She waved a hand at the wall, and the vines began to slither back into place as she took her hand from his and turned away.

"Guiana," Logan spoke softly, and took her hand again. "I will stop them. I swear to you, I will find a way." Even after he had said it, he knew how foolish it sounded.

She looked down at his hand, and then back up, her green-gold eyes gleaming dimly. "There will be more, Logan. If not soon, then later. There will be more, will there not?"

He shook his head in frustration, feeling his anger building in him. "I don't know." But he was lying, and she could feel it. The forest was a rich resource; it was useful. And as long as it was useful, it would be drained dry, until nothing was left.

She stepped toward him, and studied her hand in his, her three fingers to his five. "There will be more. There always has been, and will be. There will be few places to hide, soon, but I must try and hide if I can, for as long as I am able. As long as I can do so, the forest will be safe for a little while. Not even I can stop time." She looked into his face, a bitter smile on her lips. "You know that as well as I, forest-born."

"Guiana-"

She dropped his hand suddenly, and turned away from the ruins. "Time to leave. This place saddens me, and we have a while to go yet."

She leapt up onto a wall, and stepped forward onto a bough that obligingly bent her way and began to move west again.

Logan looked back once, catching the last glimpse of an emerald eye in stone, one that would never have to film over with pain or tears, before it was encased in leaves once more. He felt hollow. Not even the familiar rage was there to goad him into action. Just loss, and being alone, the last of a people who didn't exist anymore.

He followed after her, and they traveled the rest of the day in silence. What was there to say?