...
"What a poor, poor child!"
By the time Goku finished his simple explanation, Gabriela's eyes were already rimmed with red. Her heart ached as she filled in the blanks of his story with her own tragic assumptions.
In her mind, it was a clear-cut tragedy: a boy born with a physical mutation—a tail—abandoned by his parents out of fear or shame.
He had been rescued by a kind old man and raised in the isolation of a place called Mount Paozu. Then, the old man passed away, leaving the boy a penniless orphan, forced to wander the world and scavenge for food.
To her, "training" was clearly just a child's coping mechanism for a life of homelessness. His clothes were tattered and stained, and his hair was a wild, gravity-defying mess that looked like it hadn't seen a pair of scissors in years. If he wasn't a street urchin, who was?
"Once we reach the west side of the city, I'm buying you a huge plate of barbecue," Gabriela promised, her voice thick with emotion.
In that moment, she made a silent vow. She would take Goku in. This boy had no parents, nowhere to go, and he had already made himself an enemy of the Institute by protecting them.
If she left him here, he was a dead man. His only hope was to join her and the other mutant children on their journey to the border. At least there, surrounded by children his own age who were also "different," he might find a sense of belonging.
"Mmhmm! Food!"
Goku's head bobbed up and down like a woodpecker. Back on the mountain, he frequently roasted tiger, wolf, or even dinosaur meat, but without any seasoning, the flavor couldn't compare to the delicacies found in human cities.
He still fondly remembered the feasts Master Roshi had treated them to in town during their training days.
Gabriela drove with white-knuckled focus, navigating through narrow side streets and back alleys to avoid the city's surveillance network. She was heading toward her boyfriend's apartment in the west. The shadows behind the Institute were long and reaching… she couldn't afford a single mistake.
"Oh, so you *are* a girl," Goku remarked from the back seat.
He had been studying the silent, brooding young girl sitting next to him. To confirm his theory, he reached over and gave Laura's lower body a series of quick, experimental pats.
Laura tilted her head, her expression blank. She didn't understand why he was tapping her, but since she sensed absolutely zero malice or aggression coming from him, she didn't retract her claws or retaliate. She simply sat there, letting him investigate.
Up front, Gabriela caught the movement in the rearview mirror and nearly slammed on the brakes in a panic.
"Son! You can't do that! You can't just… pat girls like that! It's incredibly rude!"
"Then how am I supposed to tell?" Goku asked, his expression one of pure, innocent confusion. "I know that if the butt is on the chest, it's definitely a girl, like you, ma'am. But some girls don't have butts on their chests. So, my Grandpa told me that if they don't have a willy or balls, they're a girl."
He gave the answer with total sincerity. This was the metric he had used his entire life, and it had never failed him once. He vaguely recalled Bulma yelling at him about this before, but he never understood why she was so upset.
It was just a quick check… it wasn't like he was hitting them hard. Usually, he'd use his foot to give a couple of light kicks to be sure, so he thought he was being polite by using his hands.
Gabriela's mouth twitched. She opened her mouth to suggest he look at hair length, but then stopped herself—plenty of men had long hair, and many women wore theirs short.
She thought about facial features, explaining that girls had softer lines while boys were more angular, but that wasn't a foolproof rule either. Between androgynous styles and modern fashion, visual cues were often misleading.
The more she thought about it, the more she realized that, technically speaking, Goku's "biological check" was the only 100% accurate method.
"Just… just don't do it anymore," she sighed, rubbing her temples. "You'll understand when you're older."
She realized then that this boy, this "wild mutant" named Son Goku, was fundamentally different from anyone she had ever met. He was pure—dangerously so.
Laura was silent and withdrawn because she had been raised as a weapon in a lab, robbed of a childhood. Goku, on the other hand, seemed to have been raised in a vacuum of social norms, possessing a heart as clear as mountain water.
"Son, how old are you?"
"Twelve," Goku answered after a brief pause for mental math. He used to think fourteen came after eleven, but since Master Roshi taught him how to count, he knew he was actually twelve.
"A year older than Laura," Gabriela noted with a nod.
Normally, a twelve-year-old boy would be starting to understand the complexities of the world. If she hadn't seen the utter lack of guile in his eyes, she would have pegged him as a little pervert. But with Goku, it was clear that he simply didn't know any better.
...
Shortly after Gabriela's car vanished from the district, the quiet street outside the alleyway was shattered by the screech of tires. Over a dozen black SUVs swerved to a halt.
Nearly a hundred heavily armed mercenaries, led by a grim-faced Commander, swarmed out of the vehicles. They carried tactical gear, breaching tools, and high-caliber weaponry.
"A pack of useless failures!" the Commander spat, looking down at his seven or eight men lying unconscious and bruised in the dirt.
"You! Take a squad and pull every piece of surveillance footage within a five-block radius," he barked. "You, take another team and tear Gabriela's apartment apart. And you—get a specialized unit to the border crossings. I want every exit to Mexico and the north locked down."
Despite being a step behind, he moved with the cold efficiency of a predator. In his mind, there was no way a nurse and two children could escape a dragnet this tight. It was only a matter of time.
Besides, he had already reached out to "persuade" Gabriela's potential contact, the man known as Logan, and had successfully bought off her boyfriend. The trap was already set.
...
"Stay here and eat breakfast," Gabriela told the children as they arrived at a small, familiar Mexican grill in the west side of the city. "I need to go upstairs to take care of something, then I'll be right back down."
She needed to get some emergency cash from her boyfriend. Her rendezvous point was "Eden," a location mentioned in old *X-Men* comics located near the northern border.
In this world, the "mutant era" had been systematically erased. Governments had spent decades suppressing the truth, leading the public to believe that the X-Men were nothing more than fictional characters from comic books. They had scrubbed the history books of both the "mutant menace" and the heroic sacrifices the X-Men had made.
But Gabriela knew better. Working at the Institute had shown her the truth. While "Eden" might be a fictional sanctuary, she used it as a cover for her true goal: crossing the border into Canada.
She had a secret agreement with Canadian authorities; if she could get the children across by Friday, they would be granted asylum and a chance at a normal life.
"Food! Food!" Goku's mouth watered at the savory scent of spiced meat wafting from the grill. He nodded enthusiastically.
Beside him, Laura nodded as well, sitting quietly and rolling a small toy ball across the table.
"Gene, these are my nephew and niece," Gabriela lied to the burly, bearded owner of the shop. "Give them as much roasted meat, rice, and milk as they want. I'll be down to settle the tab in a few minutes."
The owner gave a quick "okay" sign and set to work. Within minutes, two steaming plates of carne asada over rice and two large glasses of milk were placed in front of the kids.
However, Gene had barely turned his back to grab a towel when he heard a cheerful voice behind him.
"Another plate, please!"