X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Storm had as little tolerance for being patronized as Logan did. “So,” she demanded curtly of the older man. “What is it, Eric? What do you want?”

  Magneto’s expression tightened so fractionally only Logan caught the change. He wasn’t used to being spoken to like this, and he didn’t like it. He knew his priorities, though. He’d leave any response for later.

  “When Stryker invaded your mansion, he stole an essential piece of its hardware.”

  “Cerebro?” Jean asked, shaking her head in denial. She didn’t want to believe that that was what had happened. “Stryker would need the professor to operate the system,” she said.

  “Precisely,” Magneto agreed. “Which is the only reason I believe Charles is still alive.”

  “What’s the deal?” Logan asked sharply. “Why are you all so scared?”

  Magneto answered him. “While Cerebro is working, Charles’ mind—amplified by its power—has the potential to connect with every living person on the planet. If he were to concentrate hard enough on a particular group of people—let’s say mutants, for example—he could kill us all.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding,” Logan said.

  “Charles and I built Cerebro as a tool,” Magneto continued, “one I believed, we both believed, would unite the world.”

  Flatly, a statement of fact, like announcing there are stars in the sky, Storm said, “Liar!”

  Magneto met her gaze and saw in her eyes the character of a woman who had faced down lions bare-handed.

  “You wanted to use Cerebro as a weapon against nonmutants,” she continued in that same calm, devastating reportorial tone. “Only the professor wouldn’t let you.”

  He didn’t try to defend himself. “Now, I fear, he has no more choice in the matter.”

  “Can you hear anything?” Bobby asked Rogue from the opposite end of the campsite.

  “Excuse me?” she asked him back, with a look that said she thought he was nuts.

  “I dunno, I thought, y’know, since you imprinted Wolverine—”

  “His name’s Logan,” she retorted in a fierce whisper. Even though she couldn’t hear what the adults were saying, she knew Logan could hear the kids just fine if he wanted, and suspected Jean could pick up their thoughts just as easily. “And I can’t, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said hurriedly in a placating tone. “Sorry I asked.”

  John, busy staring at their campfire, snorted.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Nightcrawler, his yellow eyes the only part of him that could readily be seen against the background shadows, “but I can get a closer look.”

  Bobby and Rogue nodded in tandem, and the yellow eyes vanished, leaving behind a faint bamf of imploding air and his distinctive scent of smoke and brimstone.

  “Nice,” Bobby said in admiration.

  John waved his hand in front of his face. “Oh, yeah. Mutant teleport farts. Real nice.”

  Nightcrawler didn’t catch the last remark, but if he had, he wouldn’t have thought anything of it. There wasn’t a joke or comment that could be made about the by-products of his power that he hadn’t heard already. Some of them actually made him laugh. Regardless, he always made it a point to smile. Grace in adversity was an article of faith with him.

  His destination was a fir tree just beyond the adults’ campfire. The challenge was getting close enough to reach a branch—without materializing impaled on one—and to avoid making so much noise when he grabbed hold that it would draw the attention of anyone down below.

  Using hands and feet and tail, he clambered silently down the trunk until he found a vantage point that kept him hidden but afforded a decent view of the others. Then he simply wrapped his tail around a branch, hung upside down, and listened.

  Storm was speaking to Magneto with an almost prosecutorial manner: “How would Stryker know what Cerebro is—or where to find it?”

  Magneto didn’t answer right away. He laid his right hand for a moment on the inside of his left forearm, where he’d received his identification tattoo from the SS guards at Auschwitz, rubbing his thumb absently back and forth across his sleeve as though he could feel the marks left in his skin through the thick, heavy cloth. Then, his expression strangely unreadable, he lifted his hand to the back of his neck, to the scar left by Stryker’s injections. He’d now been branded twice in his life. As a boy, there had been no way he could fight back. As a man, he’d thought there was no way he would allow such a thing to happen again.

  Vanity, he thought, remembering the ancient Roman injunction to their Caesars: All is Vanity.

  “I told him,” he said at last, an admission dragged from the depths of his soul.

  He looked from Storm to Jean, both women in the eyes, not bothering to hide the rage and shame that roiled within him like magma beneath the caldera of a dormant volcano, and was impressed that neither flinched. “I helped design the system, remember? I helped Charles build it.

  “Stryker has undeniable methods of . . . persuasion. Effective against me. Effective even against a mutant as strong as Charles. Believe this, if Stryker has Charles, he will find a way to break him. And suborn him to his purposes. If he weren’t absolutely certain of that fact, he wouldn’t have acted.”

  “Who the hell is this Stryker?” Jean asked.

  “He’s a military scientist with considerable ties to the clandestine intelligence community. He has spent his professional life looking for a solution to what he considers the mutant problem. But if you require a more . . . intimate perspective, why don’t you ask the Wolverine?”

  “His name is Logan,” Jean said, coming too quickly, too sharply to Logan’s defense, in a way that made Magneto smile very thoughtfully as he turned his attention back and forth between them.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “But what’s in a name?

  “William Stryker,” he continued, “is the only other man I know who can manipulate adamantium. The metal laced through the Wolverine’s bones, it bears his signature.

  “Are you sure you don’t remember—Logan?” In return, he got a blank look. “What a pity.”

  “The professor—”

  “The professor trusted you were smart enough to discover this on your own. He gives you more credit than I do.” Logan’s eyes flashed, but beyond a subvocalized growl, he offered no other reaction to Magneto’s insult.

  “So Charley knew,” he said.

  “ ‘Charley’ has always known.”

  Jean looked sharply at Logan, but his face was as still as his thoughts.

  Logan didn’t react.

  “Charles has always known.”

  “Please understand,” Storm spoke calmly from the fireside, “if we don’t take this all purely on good faith. You went to some trouble to save us—for which we’re all quite appropriately grateful. The question is, why? What do you want, Magneto? Why do you need us?”

  “Mystique discovered plans of a base where Stryker’s had his operations for decades. Unfortunately,” he shrugged, “we don’t know where it is.

  “However, I suspect one of you might.”

  “The professor already tried,” said Logan.

  Magneto sighed. “Once again, you think it’s all about you.”

  Then his eyes lifted to the branches above.

  Nightcrawler’s first impulse was to flee, but he took strength and comfort from the smile of greeting that Storm gave him, the wave of invitation that followed to join her at her side. He came down as a circus acrobat, swinging lithely from branch to branch, ending with a triple somersault that landed him right where Storm had indicated. He held the pose for a moment, out of habit, before reminding himself that this wasn’t an occasion, nor this an audience, for applause, and he squatted close beside her.

  Her hand across his shoulders was reassuring.

  “I didn’t mean to snoop,” he apologized.

  Storm gave him a squeeze that told him it was all right, and Jean said, “Relax.”

  She rose to her feet,
with a smooth grace that almost matched Mystique, and took position in front of Nightcrawler.

  Jean spoke aloud again, but also with her thoughts, telling him again, “Relax.” He heard far more than the simple word, however. She used telepathy to enfold him in a great psychic quilt that left him all warm and snuggly and safe in ways he should be able to recall from childhood, if he had the happy memories for it. She gave him a window into her own soul to reassure him that these sensations were true, that she meant him no harm, that she genuinely liked him and cared for him. In turn, she found a soul that had weathered the tempests of life with remarkable success.

  Her mouth made a small O of astonishment. Strangely, Nightcrawler represented something she’d never considered, a purely physical mutation that manifested at birth. Herself, Scott, Storm, virtually all the mutants who’d been gathered at the mansion, they were outwardly indistinguishable from their nonpowered brethren. Their powers had manifested at puberty, that’s when their lives had changed; but before then everything had been wonderfully normal.

  Not so with Kurt. He’d never been able to hide. That was why he’d ultimately taken refuge in the circus, even though he’d spent his earliest days there as part of the freak show. Soon, though, with the natural exuberance of childhood, he’d discovered that he could climb faster and better than anyone else he knew, and that his tail provided opportunities for performance that left the others gasping. He was more at home in the air than on the ground, and he quickly became one of the arena’s chief attractions. Despite the evident skill, despite the tumultuous cheers from every audience that ever saw him, he was never invited to join the great world-class circuses. A scout from Ringling Bros. came once and quickly conceded that he’d never seen anything like Nightcrawler. He brought Kurt to the States for an audition. The bosses reacted the same as their scout: Nightcrawler was unique. Unfortunately, that was the point. No one at their level had ever knowingly hired a mutant, no one was willing to take the risk of a backlash. Better he should stay in a regional show.

  Truthfully, Kurt himself didn’t mind. He liked the smaller scale of his own shows, the more intimate relationship with his audience. In the far brighter lights of the big cities where the big shows toured, he wouldn’t be able to continue his own personal quest for meaning, for enlightenment. He found a measure of release, and comfort, on the trapeze, but no answers to the questions that had haunted him since he was old enough, aware enough, to frame them: Who am I? What am I? Why am I? What kind of God would create a creature like me? What purpose would it serve?

  Jean expected to find a person bludgeoned and tormented by his appearance. In stark contrast, she embraced one of the most gentle and secure and stable beings she had ever encountered, who was surprisingly at peace with himself—even if he was still working on his place in the scheme of things.

  He trusted her, wholly and unreservedly, and in the face of that innate nobility she felt humble. It was a faith she would cherish, and it made her absolutely determined to keep him safe as she stepped into the vaults of his memory.

  The images were broken and scattered: flashes from every direction, strobes without number as every camera in the circus tried to take his picture. He was used to it.

  The scout and his bosses gave him a ticket home, but he decided to stay a while, to visit in person this country he knew only from the movies.

  He found himself the abandoned church in Boston to use as his home. He did most of his sightseeing at night. He had no thought of danger. What would anyone want with a circus aerialist?

  Ambush. Bodies slamming into him from every direction, men in uniform, hitting him first with a shot of pepper spray, then mace, screwing with his concentration so he couldn’t teleport, covering his mouth so he couldn’t yell for help. . . .

  A spray hypo . . .

  Oblivion . . .

  Vague recollections of soaring high above the ground, wind in his face, a whuppawhuppa noise that he belatedly identified as a helicopter . . .

  He saw trees and a wall of gray concrete that filled his vision to the horizon on either side and up to the very top of the sky, which vanished as he was rolled on a gurney into a long tunnel, plunging as deep into the bowels of the earth as he’d been carried above it in the aircraft flying here. . . .

  An annoying itch on his neck, where he wore a sedative patch to keep him tractable, no energy to do anything about it, a room, a man holding a syringe . . .

  Soldiers held him down, and he felt acid fire at the base of his skull. He wanted to scream, to curse, to plead, to die, but he’d forgotten how. He was empty, and only the man’s voice could fill him. . . .

  He remembered the White House, the Oval Office, the gunshot, running for his life, teleporting until he couldn’t go any farther. . . .

  He found his church, claimed it now as his sanctuary. . . .

  And Jean found him. . . .

  She broke contact, cradling his upturned face in both her palms, wishing she could borrow some of the peace and tranquillity she saw within him for herself. She gave him a kiss of thanks. She’d never felt so drained, not even after the aerial dogfight aboard the Blackbird.

  “Stryker’s at Alkali Lake,” she told the others without looking at any of them.

  “I’ve been there,” Logan said. “That’s where Charley sent me. Nothing’s left.”

  “There’s nothing left on the surface, Logan. The base is underground.”

  They talked a while longer, with Magneto leading the debriefing, delicately mining Jean’s memory for every possible nugget of information before turning his attention to Logan. He proved a surprisingly skilled and patient interrogator, turning the smallest nuance of dialogue or gesture into a means of extracting even more data than the subject, more often than not, was even aware he (or she) knew. Watching him, listening, Jean beheld the man that Charles Xavier had befriended, a vision of what might have been had Magneto not embraced the inner demons of his childhood. He was just as inspiring a leader, just as intuitive a teacher. He recognized her interest and her nascent insights and for a moment between them there were no barriers.

  The tragedy she saw then was that he knew it, too. All that could have been, perhaps even should have been. All that might yet be. Knew it, and rejected it. Charles Xavier was a man energized by humanity’s potential; his life, his purpose, had always been defined by hope. Magneto refused hope. His heart had been broken too many times. Long ago, his spirit had been pared down to its essence, brought to white heat in the most awful of crucibles and then pounded by adversity into the shape of a weapon. The metal of his being had been folded a thousand thousand times, as the classical sword smiths of ancient Japan forged their samurai blades. Thanks to that cruel tempering, he could bend without breaking. But regardless of what happened, he would never lose his edge, would never be anything other than what he was. There was a greatness in him, that was undeniable. He was the living embodiment of the primal forces that formed the foundation of the universe. And as a consequence, he was just as terrible as he was glorious.

  She found she couldn’t bear to be near him anymore. The bleak hollow at the center of his soul was like a whirlpool; to wander closer was to be dragged to a similar oblivion.

  She broke from the campfire and took refuge in the Blackbird, returning to the purely mechanical tasks that had filled the afternoon and evening,

  Watching her leave, Logan decided he was done with Magneto’s Q&A. Brusquely excusing himself, he strode after her through the campsite to find her standing underneath the wing of the Blackbird, with her head and shoulders hidden inside an open belly hatch. She was muttering to herself, in a tone and using words he didn’t expect from her. It made him suspect she’d been hanging around him too much; Xavier and Scott would accuse him of being a bad influence. Outstanding!

  “How bad is it?” he asked her.

  “I’m running fluid through the hydraulics. If the test passes, it’ll still take four to five hours to get off the ground. Like it
or not, we’re stuck here for the night. Fortunately,” she continued in a rush, “our stealth netting should hide the Blackbird pretty well from any casual reconnaissance. As for the rest, the passive scanning array says we’ve got clean sky to the horizon, and according to the infodump on the main computer, there shouldn’t be any surveillance satellites overhead, either. That means minimal risk of detection.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant, Logan. This is how I choose to answer. Okay?”

  He said nothing. He had a hankering for a beer, but he knew there was none aboard the Blackbird, and Magneto struck him as more of a wine guy. A case of five-star premier cru, not a problem; God forbid the man even consider a can of Molson’s.

  From Mystique he expected nothing less than poison. It didn’t matter to her that his healing factor made him immune. Quite the contrary. It struck him that the fun for her would be in seeing how much it would hurt him to recover and how long it would take.

  After a while, conceding to herself that Logan wasn’t going to go away, Jean allowed herself a sigh.

  “I’m worried,” she confessed. “About the professor. About . . . Scott.”

  “I know,” he said.

  He stepped under the shadow of the aircraft and reached out his arm to her. In flats, she was his height, but her uniform heels gave her an edge. It amused him to have to look a little bit up to her. At his touch, she folded against him to rest her head on his shoulder, allowing him to take the full weight of her body, which he did without any effort. There was no separation between them, physical or emotional, and his nostrils flared as he realized the implications.

  “I’m worried about you,” he told her softly. “That was some display of power up there.”

  She snorted dismissively. “It obviously wasn’t enough.”

  He turned his head to look her in the eyes. She kept hers downcast, using her lids to shroud them, to keep him at a distance. But he didn’t need eyes to see what was so obvious, or to sense the depth of the attraction between them. He’d known it from the start, that first moment when he’d awakened in the mansion infirmary to find himself staring up at a face that would haunt him forever.