Xavier felt stupid, which made him feel angry. He couldn’t make the connections, couldn’t see the implications of what Stryker was saying, even though the other man was acting like they were blindingly obvious. He fastened on to the only one that came to mind.
“What have you done with Scott?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing him soon. I’m just giving the boy a little reeducation.” He paused. “But you know all about that, don’t you? Altering thoughts and perceptions must be as easy for you as rewriting codes of software.”
“There’s no need to involve anyone else!” Xavier protested desperately, with more vehemence than Stryker expected.
“No need to involve anyone else?” Stryker sounded genuinely incredulous. “You run a school for mutants, Professor! What on Earth do you teach those creatures?”
A question requiring a conceptual answer. That took effort, which brought him pain, but Xavier persevered nonetheless, calling on the same focus and discipline that had enabled him, self-taught, to master his burgeoning telepathy.
“To survive,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “To coexist peacefully in a world that fears them.”
“I’ve seen what’s buried beneath your house, Xavier. It doesn’t look very peaceful to me. I also know—firsthand—the kind of creatures you’ve gathered to live there. Some species can never coexist. I learned that from you,” he finished offhandedly, turning away.
“You wanted me to cure your son. But, William, mutation is not a disease.”
“Liar,” he snapped. When Stryker looked around, his mask of affability was gone. The pain was real, the grief, the rage, and he used his words on his prisoner like a lash.
“You’re lying, Xavier,” Stryker said more slowly, more forcefully. “You were more afraid of him than I was! He was too powerful, and you couldn’t control him.”
The Asian woman laced her fingers together, cracked her knuckles. Stryker noticed more than Xavier did. The gesture amused him, but only for a moment that quickly passed, the feeling subsumed as always by his relentless fury.
“You know, just a year after Jason returned from your school, my wife . . .” Stryker’s voice trailed off, and he stood up. His own right hand was clenched into so tight a fist the knuckles were white, and Xavier guessed from his posture that he wanted to use that fist, on Xavier himself. “He resented us, you see, he blamed us for his . . . condition. He was my son. I loved him more than my own life, we both did. How could he feel such things about us? How could he . . . do . . . such things?
“He would . . . toy with our minds, you see. He would project images and scenarios into our brains.”
As he spoke, the woman’s breathing became erratic. Her hands began to tremble enough to finally catch Xavier’s notice. There was a gradual but growing look of confusion to her features, a distinct change to the quality of the animation he’d seen in her gaze. She was no longer placid; she was waking up.
Stryker paid her no attention. His focus remained entirely on Xavier.
“Unfortunately,” he said, making an effort to hammer the emotion from his voice and thereby revealing the terrible, haunting depth of those feelings, “I had my work. I was overseas, serving my country.” His subtext was plain. He hadn’t been there to share his wife’s ordeal; he couldn’t do for her what he felt his job required him to do for the nation—save the day. He had survived and was glad and guilty of it.
“My wife couldn’t escape. She was around him all the time. We had to keep him at home, you see. After you sent him away, we didn’t dare risk allowing him to attend a school. Can you imagine what he’d have done to all those impressionable minds?”
“I . . . didn’t know.”
“How convenient for you. My wife, over time, she became easily influenced . . . unable to tell the difference between what was real and what was a part of his warped imagination. In the end . . .” he paused, confronting the memory like a warrior facing down an adversary. “She took a power drill to her left temple, in an attempt to bore the images out of her mind.”
The woman swayed, shaking her head once or twice to clear it, reaching up with one hand to steady herself. Absently, Stryker stopped the gesture and lowered the arm back to her side. He was aware of what was happening to her and wasn’t bothered in the slightest. Everything was under control.
“My . . . boy,” and in that one word were all the dreams and heartbreak of a father’s life. “The great illusionist.”
“For someone who hates mutants, William, you certainly keep strange company.”
“It has its uses,” Stryker replied. “It serves a purpose. As do you.”
In his hand he held an ampoule of yellow liquid. With the same gentle gesture, which reminded Xavier of the way a trainer might move a horse, he bent the woman forward from the waist until her head was on the same level as Xavier’s. He swept her hair aside to bare the back of her neck, revealing a scar identical to the one Xavier had seen on Magneto.
With practiced ease, Stryker applied two drops. The effect was instantaneous. Her breathing returned to normal, she stopped trembling, and when she straightened once more to her full height, Xavier saw no more sign in her eyes of an independent personality.
Stryker whispered something in her ear. She nodded and left the room.
“It was you,” Xavier said suddenly, in a burst of intuition that left him shocked. “You arranged the attack on the President!”
Stryker actually laughed out loud. “And you didn’t even have to read my mind,” he said approvingly.
“You know,” he continued, “I believe I’ve been working with mutants almost as long as you have, but the final solution to the problem continued to evade me. So I guess I’m in your debt. I have to thank you, Xavier, because you gave me Magneto. And Magneto gave me the answer.”
“You can’t eradicate us, William. New mutants are born every day.”
“And once I’m finished, they’ll be born into a very different world. What are you thinking, that I’ll end up like Rameses or Herod or poor old Heydrich? Nice try at genocide, but no cigar?
“Guess again. You see, in all my years of . . . research, the most frustrating thing I learned is that nobody really knows how many mutants exist in the world, or how to find them.”
He leaned close, putting his face directly in front of Xavier’s. “Except you.”
He held up the vial of yellow liquid and waggled it before Xavier’s eyes.
“Sadly, this little potion won’t work on you, will it?”
He straightened himself, backed up a step, and returned the drug to his jacket pocket.
“Nope, you’re far too powerful for that. Instead, we’ll go right to the source.”
With crisp, military moves that were almost a flourish in themselves, Stryker opened the door.
“Allow me to introduce Mutant 143.”
Beyond was a chair, and in that chair sat something that could only charitably be called human. At first glance, because the body was so shriveled and emaciated, the presumption was that it was someone extremely old. The limbs were arranged so neatly that Xavier knew at once they couldn’t move of their own volition; the way the head lolled to the side was further evidence of the lack of any effective musculature. There was a water tube close by his mouth, which he constantly licked, but that was just so he could keep tongue and lips from going dry. Fluids and nutrients flowed into him intravenously, through permanent junctions in the major blood vessels of the leg up close to his groin. The site was mercifully hidden beneath a blanket, but Xavier assumed that permanent catheters were likewise employed to deal with all his waste products.
The man’s head itself was macrocephalic, swollen to half again normal dimensions, and marked with a cruel scar across the temple as though the skull itself had cracked apart under the pressure of the growing mass within. A grotesque array of tubes and connections sprouted from implants in the back and base of the skull, draining a continuous volume of what had to be cerebr
ospinal fluid into clear containers mounted on the back of the chair. The fluid was an electric chrome yellow, and Xavier knew at once it was the substance Stryker used to control the woman, and Magneto, and Lord knows who else.
The man in the chair had one eye of a brilliant robin’s-egg blue, the other an equally rich shade of green, Xavier noted, as the Asian woman and another trooper wheeled the chair directly in front of him. It was what Xavier saw in those eyes that struck him like a body blow: a look of cruel and feral cunning, representing an intelligence worthy of respect. The man knew exactly what he was, and he hated it beyond all levels of sane comprehension.
Xavier, who thanks to his own gifts forgot nothing, knew the man at once, from the shape of the jaw and especially those unique eyes.
“Jason . . .” he breathed in a voice that barely registered as a whisper. And then, in that same hushed, horror-struck tone, to the father: “My God, William—what have you done to him? This is your son!”
“No, Charles. My son is dead.”
The look Xavier received from Stryker’s blue eyes was a match for the emotions that emanated from the young man.
“Just like the rest of you.”
Chapter
Nine
Past Hartford, Logan abandoned the back roads for the interstate, figuring a sports car in the middle of nowhere would draw a lot more curiosity than one more amid the many that cruised between Boston and New York. For him, the perfect place to hide now was in plain sight. He timed it perfectly, joining the morning rush-hour crowd as it crawled through Connecticut’s capital, thankful that Scott hadn’t indulged in a stand-out color like canary yellow or Ferrari scarlet. To the casual eye, this seemed like just another generic speedster. Stay with the flow of traffic, stay close to the speed limit, there shouldn’t be any trouble.
They made decent time and rolled into the Boston suburb of Quincy just past noon. Nice streets, respectable houses, the sidewalks shaded by trees that had been here since before the Revolution.
They’d left the mansion with a full tank of gas, and Logan hadn’t made a stop anywhere along the way. He was too much of a mess and the kids were all in pajamas, it was asking for trouble. The downside was, they were all pretty hungry and in desperate need of a bathroom and, being teenagers, weren’t at all shy about letting him know how cranky they were becoming
Bobby gave directions, and Logan eased the car up the drive of a lovely two-story home. The garage was locked, so they had to leave the car exposed in the driveway.
Same went for the house itself. They were on the porch only a moment before Bobby found the key and let them inside.
“Mom?” he called. “Dad? Ronny? Anybody home?”
Logan could have told him the house was empty, his senses had reported that while they were all still outside, but he decided it was better to let the boy establish it for himself. He was itching to move on, instinct telling him that staying put anywhere guaranteed trouble, but he shoved those feelings aside. By nature he was a loner, but also by nature he understood the concept of responsibility and obligation—although for the life of him he couldn’t have told anyone where he’d learned them. These kids had been placed in his care, and he wouldn’t abandon them.
“We’ve got the place to ourselves,” Bobby said. He looked to the phone and started to reach for it. “Maybe I should call—”
Logan covered the phone with his hand and shook his head.
“Leave it for now,” he said. “You never know who might be listening.”
“What, you saying those guys tapped my parents’ phones?”
“I’m saying we need to be careful. This isn’t a game, Bobby.” Logan swung his head around to allow his gaze to encompass them all. “Those troops were serious, and they were good. If we want to have a chance of coming out of this clean, we have to deal with ’em on that level, clear?”
Bobby nodded, his lower lip between his teeth a sure sign of how worried he was. Still, when he turned to the others, his voice was under control.
“I’ll try to find you some clothes,” he said to Rogue, and then, to John: “And you, don’t burn anything.”
Being guys, they immediately traded gestures—a finger from John, a retorting smirk from Bobby.
Upstairs, Bobby gave Rogue use of his own room and first crack at the shower. She turned the water as hot as she could bear and let the spray pound her like a monsoon, standing with her eyes closed in the vain hope that when she opened them once more this would all turn out to be some dream or another bogus training scenario.
Wrapped in a bath towel, she swept her hair back from her face and tied it in a loose ponytail. The decor here echoed his room at school—emphasis on snowboarding posters and the obligatory Red Sox pennant. One surprise, an autographed football that made her eyes widen when she realized that it was from the 2001 Super Bowl that the New England Patriots had won.
She was flipping through his CDs, singularly unimpressed by his choice in music—was she the only person in the school with any taste?—when he backed in carrying some clothes. He must have thought she was still in the shower, because he went as pale as the blouse in his arms when he saw her. Suddenly she was conscious of how small the towel felt, of how much skin was showing. At the same time, though, she found herself wondering what he thought: Did he like her legs? Her figure wasn’t much compared to some of the other girls, especially Siryn, but his eyes kept coming back to her, so there had to be something in the package that he liked.
Was his mouth as dry as hers? Was his heart pounding the same fandango? Usually he was easy to read. Now he looked as cool as the ice he generated.
“Hey,” he said in greeting.
“Hey,” she responded in kind.
“I hope these fit.”
“Thanks.”
“They’re my mom’s. From before I was born. But I think they’ll fit.”
“Groovy,” she replied lightly, grabbing at a similarly ancient word.
He handed her the clothes but made no other move until she motioned for him to do a U-turn and scoot. All at once, his composure vanished, so much so that he collided twice with the door trying to make his exit. He didn’t close it all the way, though, and took up station just outside while she got dressed.
Downside was, the blouse he found was short-sleeved. He had a solution.
“These were my grandmother’s,” he explained, holding out a pair of pristine opera gloves. The cloth would cover her almost all the way to the sleeves. Not a perfect answer, but one that touched her.
But when she reached for them, he tried to catch her hand, almost making contact before she snatched hers back as though she’d been scalded. She stepped back, a gasp rising in her throat, her other hand held defensively, palm toward him.
“You know I’d never hurt you,” he said, inching closer.
“I know,” so quietly she was just mouthing the words. She ached to take him in her arms, it had been so long since she’d felt anything as simple, as basic, as the stroke of someone else’s skin on hers. She’d told him about her power right from the start—everyone knew the prohibition about touching her, that came from Xavier himself—but she suspected nobody really believed it.
Right now, she didn’t want to.
He moved his hand close to her face, and tears sprang from her eyes as static electricity made the fine hairs of her cheek stir. She clenched her fists, feeling her body tighten from head to toe as though she were being stretched on a medieval rack. His breath touched her mouth—first warm and tempting, then chill enough for her own breath to leave a cloud of condensation in the air between them, then warm again, so inviting that she couldn’t hold back any longer.
She pressed her lips to his, arms around his neck as his went around her body, and felt a sweet spark of contact as their tongues touched, and she giggled as a burst of frost rolled across her.
For a moment, it was bliss.
Then she imprinted.
The warmth between them became
fire, a torrent of raw lava coursing along her nervous system, agony for him, ecstasy for her. The shock of contact made the veins bulge and pulse on his forehead, across his chest, eyes going cloudy and rolling up in their sockets. He spasmed once, twice, pinned on the verge of a grand mal seizure as she pushed against him with all her might to separate them before it got any worse. The initial stage of imprinting was physical, the equivalent of giving a car a jump-start or throwing a jet engine into afterburners. It delivered a jolt of energy to her system that would keep her going at peak levels for days. Break contact then, that was it.
Hold longer, the second stage kicked in, where she absorbed the parahuman abilities of the person she was touching. Months earlier, on Liberty Island, Magneto had used her as the power source for his great machine, even though he’d known the process would kill her. He’d considered it a necessary sacrifice. Logan had destroyed the machine, but not before its infernal energies had inflicted mortal injuries on her. He’d initiated contact himself, trusting her power to kick in automatically and do the rest. She’d imprinted him completely, and his healing factor had literally brought her back from the dead. That was where she’d gotten the skunk-stripe forelock on her hair. That was also why she never tried to hide it. It was her personal badge of honor—acknowledging what he’d done for her and reminding her of what she’d done to him in turn.
Because there was a third component to her power, one that wasn’t temporary. The energy boost faded with time, and so did the powers she absorbed—but if contact lasted long enough, she took into herself the mind and memories of her imprintee. A residue of the other’s personality moved into her own psyche and, she thought, she feared, maybe she gave up a portion of herself to the other as well.
They’d made jokes about it after the fact, about how she’d taken on some of the more salty aspects of Logan’s personality while she was healing. In time, as she got a handle on this new part of herself, it seemingly went away. She returned to what passed for her as normal. Only she knew the truth, that Logan would be a part of her forever.
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