She searched for something kind to say but came up largely empty. So she encased the Box safely in its bubble, double checked on both of her charges to ensure their safety, and then made a quick circuit around the area to verify that there weren’t any stray killer robots lurking out there that they’d missed. It didn’t take long, and she didn’t dawdle. The skies had opened up again, releasing a spotty rain that chilled her to the bone and made her glad for the warmth of her overcoat. She clutched it tightly against her body and returned back to the tree, hoping that Christopher and Sabretooth would be back soon with good news and perhaps even reinforcements.
That didn’t happen, but Graydon perked up as she approached, which made her feel strangely flattered. He sat upright and called out, “All clear?”
“For now, at least. You doing OK?”
He actually seemed to consider the question. “Well enough. I’m proud of us. How many of those Sentinels do you think we destroyed?”
“Eight? Nine? I lost count. Whoever sent them is going to be ticked. Who do you think it was?”
He shrugged. “Someone else itching to get their hands on the Box. Could be S.H.I.E.L.D. Sabretooth said they wanted it, remember?”
“Yeah.” She sat down next to him, hugging her knees to her chest. “You warm enough?”
He eyed her, a brow arched. “You will not offer to share your coat with me, young lady. I forbid it. A man has to have some standards.”
She snorted. “So you’re determined to freeze just to prove that you’re macho?”
“So what if I am?” he demanded.
She couldn’t tell if he was kidding. She laughed anyway, and after a moment, the corner of his mouth quirked up despite his evident efforts to keep it under control.
“You know, you’re not so awful for a mutant-hating politician,” she said. “But you never did answer my question.”
“Why I hate you, you mean?” He sighed. “Mutants are unknowable. Full of limitless potential, which means that you could be staring a nuclear bomb in the face and not know it. We have rules to control access to weapons of mass destruction among the populace, and I believe that those laws are necessary to create a safe and civil society. But with mutants, we have weapons of mass destruction walking among us, wearing our skins. We cannot see them or identify them. We cannot know who they are until they identify themselves, and therefore, we must take action to protect ourselves.”
“Against criminals, sure. But I’m no criminal, Graydon. Christopher isn’t one either,” she said sadly. It felt futile to say it, but she had to try.
He offered her that faint smile again. “I notice you said nothing about Sabretooth.”
“I don’t know about him,” she admitted. “But he risked his life to help you, and I don’t get the idea that he sticks his neck out much. Why did he do that?”
Graydon fell silent, looking down at the ground. She wondered if maybe she’d pushed him too far. She’d finally gotten him talking, and instead of smoothing things over, she’d antagonized him. So much for her stellar interpersonal skills.
But then he spoke up, taking her by surprise. “I used to think that I was entirely justified in my hatred,” he said quietly. “I lost things – people – to mutants, and nothing anyone can do will ever get them back. So I used my connections and had them build me an armored suit, and I hunted your kind for a while. They called me Tribune. I was good at it. Then I became a politician, and I rallied the world around a platform of hatred. It worked all too well.”
He fell silent again. Eva didn’t want to ask, but she had to know. “What changed?” she asked.
“Everything is different now.” He lifted his tortured eyes to meet hers. She saw a world of pain and loss, one in which hope had fled and nothing remained but the determination to endure. “Eva, I think I died.”
She’d known it herself for a while, but hearing him say it in such a broken voice made her want it to be a lie. “Maybe not,” she urged. “There could be another explanation.”
“No. The Box sustains me. It brought back the dinosaur. Dead. The tigers. Dead. The hunters. All dead. It kills the living and brings back the dead. I have no need to eat or drink because I’m not alive. That assassination attempt was successful. I remember it. I remember every moment.”
He closed his eyes in remembered pain, hanging his head. Eva didn’t know what to do. She wished Christopher were here. He was good with this kind of thing. He empathized. But she would have to do. She shifted closer, putting her shoulder against his.
“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I believe you.”
“That’s kind of you.”
“So is it just a blank up until you showed up at the Exhibit?”
He raised his head. Now the heavy secret was off his shoulders, he looked better. Still exhausted. Still sick – or like the walking dead, to be more accurate. But he met her eyes without smirking or scowling.
“No. I’ve come back a few times since then. I don’t really understand it. There are big blank spots where I’m fairly sure that I’m just dead, and then random points where I’m up and moving with no idea of what’s going on. The last time, a sorceress raised me and made me into her slave.” He shuddered. “This one hasn’t been a walk in the park, but I’ll take it over that any day.”
Eva pressed a hand to her open mouth, horror curdling her insides. “I have nightmares about this sorcerer,” she admitted. “Dormammu. He pulled us into Limbo and trapped us there, and it was the most awful experience of my life. I’ve never felt despair like that before.”
“So you do get it,” he said. “I can’t go through that again, Eva.”
She nodded. “I wish I could help.”
“It’s funny you should say that,” he said. “I was going to ask you for a favor.”
“Name it.”
She meant it, too. How could she turn down a request from a dead man? His story had tugged at her heart. Something told her that every word was true. He wasn’t alive. Graydon had been right; Christopher had all but said it aloud. But he was too tenderhearted to hit Graydon with the truth before he was ready to admit it.
Graydon’s stormy blue eyes met hers. “Let me leave with the Box. Please. Before it’s too late.”
Eva stared at him, shock freezing her in place. She didn’t know what to say. Sabretooth would kill her. Christopher would kill her. Cyclops would kill her. She couldn’t think of a single person who would think this was a good idea. Could Graydon be joking? When she finally did find words, they tumbled out in a confused heap.
“Wait, what?” she said. “Take the… what?”
“I’ve changed my mind. Let me take the Box and leave.”
He stared her down intently while she wondered what she’d gotten herself into, and what on earth she should do about it.
Chapter 24
Christopher paced the length of the dock, twisting the strap of his goggles between his hands. He didn’t know what to do. They’d expected this excursion to be so easy: land the X-Copter, pick up Sabretooth, and take off again. He hadn’t anticipated all of these complications.
He didn’t know how to deactivate a force field. Eva wouldn’t know either, and what was Sabretooth going to do, growl at it until it decided to turn itself off? Or maybe Graydon could insult it until it decided to go away. That would work out just great. All they could do was sit here and wait until Cyclops decided to pick them up. If he ever did. He might decide that they didn’t deserve to be students any more since they couldn’t follow basic directions.
Wait. Would he really do that? Christopher didn’t think he’d just abandon the X-Copter like that, but would he boot them over this? Cyclops seemed like a fairly nice guy, but he’d made it clear that he was fighting a war. When Fabio had wanted to go home, Cyclops had taken him there to prove a point, and it hadn’t gone well, putting Fabio’s family at risk an
d bringing S.H.I.E.L.D. agents into their house. He might just decide to make an example of them too. Maybe the instructors hadn’t come to the rescue yet because they were watching right now. Letting him squirm a little before they came to the rescue. His head whipped around as he searched the shore for them, but he saw only Sabretooth.
“You’re gonna break those goggles,” he said.
“Huh?”
“The goggles. That strap will give if you keep twisting it like that.”
“Oh.” Christopher forced his hands to relax. “Yeah. Thanks.”
He returned to the dock, where Sabretooth sat on a bench under a convenient overhang, and sat down. The goggles thumped to the ground. He let his head fall into his hands.
“This is hopeless,” he moaned.
Sabretooth snorted.
“You give up too easy, kid,” he said.
Just like that, Christopher had had enough. He felt like he’d done more than his fair share. He’d been a team player, even when the other players on the team had treated it like a summer camp. He’d taken care of his part of the work and done a damned fine job of it too. He’d been supportive and positive, and what had it gotten him? Zero respect. Sabretooth called him “kid” all the time despite the fact that he could go to a bar and order a drink. He might be new to the X-Men, but that didn’t make him a baby, and it didn’t give Sabretooth the right to treat him like one. He had just about had it.
“Yeah?” he demanded. “Well, please enlighten me, O great and powerful Sabretooth. If you have some secret force field busting abilities that you’ve kept up your sleeve for some reason, by all means, let’s see them. I’m prepared to be impressed.”
“I don’t like your tone. You better watch it,” Sabretooth warned, his eyes beginning to glow.
“Or what? You’ll claw me up? Ooooh, I’m scared.” Christopher waggled his fingers in Sabretooth’s face. “But I’ll heal, and you’ll still be a grown man with all this skill and power who can’t control himself to save his own life.” He shook his head sadly. “You know who you remind me of? My pops. He couldn’t control himself either, and sometimes I hated him for it.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, he regretted them, and not just because he expected Sabretooth to explode into a violent rage. Things would be broken. He would be lucky not to be hit. But what made him feel worse was that he liked Sabretooth despite the man’s many faults. He didn’t know what had made him say such an awful thing, and he instantly wanted to take it back, but once it was said, he couldn’t undo it. Too bad Eva couldn’t rewind time as well as freeze it. That would have been a handy skill to have right about now.
But Sabretooth didn’t fly off the handle, and somehow that made it worse. Instead, he hunched into himself, his muscles balling into tense knots. His fists became tight balls of tension. His head disappeared into humped shoulders as his body curled.
“You’re not the only one,” he growled, his voice shaking and distorted with anger.
“What?” Christopher asked, reaching toward him. “Look, I’m sorry, but–”
“Don’t touch me!”
Christopher snatched his hand back.
Sabretooth stood up and stalked to the end of the dock without another word, and as much as Christopher wanted to follow him, he felt like that would be a bad idea. So he waited as the wind whipped at his face and rain pattered down in fitful spurts for the umpteenth time that day. Worry nagged at him, gnawing at his stomach. He would have given anything to start this day over again. There were so many things he would have done differently if given the chance, but he would just have to muddle through and hope it would be enough. He put the goggles back on his forehead and hoped for the best.
After a few minutes, Sabretooth returned. He sat back down on the bench and said, “I could swipe someone’s phone, and you could call Summers for help.”
“Beg pardon?” Christopher asked, confused by the abrupt change of subject.
“I could steal a phone,” Sabretooth repeated with infinite patience. He was acting as if nothing had happened, as casual as you please.
“No good. The Institute is in the middle of a frozen wasteland. There’s no reception.”
Sabretooth’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t complain. “OK, what about a car? We’ll drive you back.”
“Would we make it over the border?”
Christopher didn’t love the idea, but at this point, he was a beggar. He couldn’t afford to be a chooser too. But the school sat in the wilds of Canada, and his mind immediately began to run through the difficulties. There would be checkpoints. Customs. He didn’t have his ID, and they’d be driving a stolen car and transporting an illegal artifact. It didn’t sound like the best idea he’d ever heard.
“There are ways,” Sabretooth answered evasively. “If you have connections. I could get you there, but we’d have to go the long way around. The crossings around here are too heavily monitored. There’s no way we’d get across.”
“I’m just not sure if they’ll let us back in if we come back without the X-Copter.” Christopher frowned. “I think they would, but…”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Sabretooth admitted. “OK, scrap that idea. You’d probably spend most of the trip puking your guts out, anyway, and I’d rather not have to deal with the smell. We could try to radio the school, but finding a system that will transmit that far will take time, and then we’ve got to luck onto a channel they’re listening to. I think that puts us back to Plan A.”
“I’m afraid to ask, but what’s Plan A?”
“We steal a boat, go out there, and I try to break through that force field. If I fall apart, do me a favor and put me back together?” Sabretooth stood up and began walking as if the whole thing was a done deal. His voice carried back to Christopher on the wind. “Maybe you hate me sometimes, and I don’t blame you for that, but I don’t think you want me dead.”
“I don’t hate you,” Christopher called, hurrying to catch up with him, but Sabretooth didn’t answer.
•••
It turned out that Sabretooth knew how to hotwire a lot of things. He led Christopher onto a motorboat with a fishing charter logo on the side and showed him how to pry the cover off the electrical compartment and find the correct wires to start the motor. He explained everything in simple and easy-to-understand language, covering safety concerns first, then the basics, and then extra details and nuances about different types of motors that Christopher might encounter later. By this time, the motor hummed quietly, and Sabretooth popped the cover back into place and patted it gently.
“So there you go,” he said, teasing. “Next time you come across some gangsters, you’ll fit right in.”
“You’re a good teacher,” said Christopher.
“Thanks, Chris.”
Christopher considered protesting the nickname but decided not to bother. Sabretooth hadn’t called him “kid,” so his point had been made. He’d better stop while he was ahead.
“So what’s the plan here?” he asked.
Sabretooth put the boat into gear and deftly steered them out of the mazelike harbor. Christopher remained tense, waiting for some random sailor to emerge from a nearby boat and immediately recognize them as thieves. Then there would be a boat chase, if the movies were right about these things. But no one appeared, and the only noise was the insistent cawing of the gulls as they huddled together against the wind. To be honest, he was a bit disappointed. He would have enjoyed a little boat chase, at least in theory.
“I’ll get us right up near the chopper,” said Sabretooth. “We’ll anchor ourselves nearby, and I’ll try to batter through the force field. It’ll get rocky, but I picked us a nice, steady boat. Not one of those narrow buggers that’ll tip over at the slightest nudge. We’ll be fine.”
Somehow, that reassurance failed to have its desired effect. Christopher eyed
the water and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. He took one of the life vests off the rank beside him and began to adjust the straps.
“Didn’t you hear me? I said we’d be fine.”
“Oh, I heard you loud and clear.” Christopher tried on his vest. “I’d offer you one, but I know you’re too manly to wear safety equipment, and I don’t think they have one that would fit you anyway.”
“You calling me fat?!” Sabretooth demanded, grinning.
“Nah. Just big boned.”
Christopher grinned back, and just like that, everything was OK between them again. Sabretooth steered the boat out toward the X-Copter. The choppy water quickly set them to rocking. Christopher had been raised as a city boy, and as a result, he hadn’t been on many boats, but to his surprise he found that his stomach tolerated the tilt and roll of the craft without much trouble. It was quite a relief. He’d had enough of puking for one day. Heck, he felt like he’d reached his quota for the next year.
It only took them a couple of minutes to cross the open expanse of water. Christopher was sorry the trip was over so quickly. He found that he enjoyed the white noise hiss of the water against the hull and the rhythmic splash of the waves as they crested and fell. His cheeks began to go numb with the cold, and the wind blasted tears from his eyes, but he could have stayed there forever. When they bumped up against the invisible bulk of the force field, he felt a pang of disappointment, although he tried to hide it.
Sabretooth didn’t seem to notice. He pointed toward a device in the stern of the craft.
“Push that red button there to release the anchor,” he said.
“You seem to know your way around boats,” Christopher observed.
“When you do mercenary work, you learn a lot of things. I can teach you to survive in the wilderness with nothing but a canteen and a book of matches, if it comes down to it.”
“That sounds like fun.”
“Trust me; it isn’t.”
Christopher chortled, warming to the conversation. It reminded him of the rare evenings when his dad had been stable and talkative. He’d invite Christopher out to the garage to work on one of their old, broken-down cars. He’d promised to fix one of them up for Christopher when he turned sixteen, but none of them ever saw the road. Most of the time, his dad didn’t even touch them. He was too busy battling monsters that Christopher couldn’t see, couldn’t touch, couldn’t fight for him. Pain and PTSD sent him deep inside himself where his son couldn’t follow. But on rare occasions the monsters would recede, and his pops would invite him to the garage, and they’d both crack open a drink in a glass bottle glistening with sweat, and his pops would show him the parts of an engine or teach him how to replace spark plugs. Nothing huge or melodramatic ever happened on those nights. They just talked. Pops taught him about cars, and they chatted while they worked. It was nice. The way things should have been.
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