That wouldn’t last, of course. Mutant 143 knew that, somewhere in the deepest recesses of his own twisted psyche. In short order, as the pulse built to its peak, the greater vessels would burst, and he would be consumed by a massive and all-encompassing cerebral hemorrhage. He would die from the ultimate stroke—but not before bearing witness to the brutal and merciless slaughter of every person on earth who Cerebro considered a mutant. This was Stryker’s revenge—not only would Xavier himself die, and all his precious students, but the future they represented. The murder of his dream would be the death of him, and before his own end Mutant 143 would make sure that Xavier realized the full import of what he had done.
And then, of course, 143 would die. Stryker appreciated the neatness and elegance of this resolution; it was ideal for a covert operation, one of his hallmarks. He didn’t like loose ends. In one stroke, this eliminated not only the threat to the world but the weapon used to deal with it. As for 143 himself, the realization of his fate didn’t bother him. Partly, he didn’t really believe it would happen to him. He still retained a child’s absolute faith in his own immortality. He couldn’t conceive of coming to an end. What mattered for him now, as always since the manifestation of his mutant powers, was playing with his toys. They were mortal, they were fragile. He was God. And He had work to do.
So 143’s eyes pulsed, casting their demented light into the core of Xavier’s being. Around them, what was normally heard as whispers, the background susurrus of all the myriad thoughts Cerebro allowed Xavier to perceive, rose to a chorus of screams.
Cyclops wrapped his hands as tight as he could across his eyes, but he was sick at heart at the realization that he couldn’t hold back his optic blasts much longer. Already they were reaching the containment capacity of his ruby quartz visor and little flashes of energy were beginning to pop through the spaces between his fingers, too small to do much damage but serving as eloquent harbingers for the devastation soon to follow.
Jean wasn’t doing any better as she clutched her hands to her ears in a vain attempt to block the same threnody of desolation that enveloped her teacher. She swung her broken leg against a stanchion, not caring about any lasting damage she might be doing, praying instead that the pain she caused herself might serve as a bulwark against the assault from outside.
And she succeeded, although not quite in the way she had planned. Her teke slugged into high gear, stealing a page from Logan’s book as her body remembered on a cellular level what it was like to be whole and set her power to work bringing that about. All the shards of bones, large or small, visible or microscopic, were plucked from where they’d landed in her leg and pressed back into their proper position.
She thought she’d experienced pain in her life, either directly or vicariously as an aspect of her power, when she synced into the minds of patients to ease their suffering, but she realized now that she’d never even come close as all those pieces of bone tore their way through her flesh to set themselves. She howled, thankful for the respite from Cerebro, struggling to find a way to reach Charles through this nigh-unbearable sleet storm of acid, to join her own strength to his and together find a way to neutralize the wave.
There was a fire within her, and she assumed that it had to do with her leg, that her power was somehow finding a way to fuse the bone back together, but as it grew, as her thoughts splintered and the fear blossomed that she wouldn’t be equal to the task before her, it became a radiance too astounding to be described, too powerful to be measured, as though she were witnessing within herself the primal moment of creation, the lighting of the first spark within the infinite firmament.
With a cry of joy and longing, Jean Grey spread wide the arms of imagination and reached out to embrace the stars.
She knew then she was mad, but she refused to yield, to the pain or the madness. If this fire represented power, then she would find a way to harness it, to use it to save those she loved. If she was truly dying, she would find a way back from the ashes. She would never go quietly into the dark night of eternity.
Aboard the Blackbird, Rogue was struggling to reach the controls, to do as Storm had told her, but she couldn’t make it. She couldn’t even rise from the deck where she’d collapsed. Tears on her face, she couldn’t stop Bobby from grasping her by the hand—in a grip that froze her to the shoulder, as he’d coated every visible surface on the plane with a sheet of glittering hoarfrost. His skin was transparent, she could see right through him, with him looking like a three-dimensional X ray—only this one was made entirely of ice. She could see his skeleton, and faint hints of what must be his heart and lungs and other organs. No sense of blood, no visible nerves, and he crackled faintly with every move, with every breath. His voice was arctic, biting and cold and nothing like he usually sounded.
Ice shattered as he wrenched her glove off her arm, she begged him to stop—at least in her mind—but nothing emerged from her mouth, there was this huge crowd crushing in around her, all the people she’d ever imprinted rising up inside her skull in rage at what she’d done, ignoring her apologies, her attempted explanations, demanding instead that she yield control to them. She knew he was trying to save her, offering his strength to give her a better chance of surviving, no matter the cost to himself. She didn’t want that, she couldn’t bear her own survival at the cost of his, and she knew as well that he didn’t care.
He held her bare hand in his, deliberately initiating contact—and imprinting—and her eyes bugged wide as it turned to ice the same as his, while his started to look more and more normally human.
“Bobby, stop it!” she shrieked, and from lips that tasted chill as the pole came a voice that was a match for his, cold and remote and unhuman as space itself.
And from her eyes, as she saw from his, fell tears that froze to both their cheeks.
Thunder rocked the tunnel around Storm, wind howled, rain fell, and lightning continued to strike. She wasn’t moving, sprawled on her face as bolt after bolt crashed against her body. Nightcrawler, by contrast, couldn’t stop as he teleported in place again and again and again, faster and faster and faster, until he flickered like a strobe image.
John Allardyce hadn’t made it to the entrance of the complex, hadn’t even come close, before the wave dropped him. He hadn’t moved from where he fell as breath kept coming in an ever-greater rush. He was hyperventilating, gulping huge amounts of air to fuel the raging conflagration within him, so much so that his skin was glowing—and the snow around him quickly melting away.
Henry McCoy was in his lab, measuring coffee grounds into a beaker while a nearby Bunsen burner had the water merrily boiling. Using gloves, he added the water to the grounds and savored the heady smell. This was what made every morning worthwhile, because a superb cup of coffee was for him the precursor to a successful day of research.
Without warning, his hand twitched so violently that the beaker went flying, shattering glass and steaming hot water across the worktable. McCoy convulsively threw himself back from the table with such force that his stool upended and he crashed head over heels against the wall. His body spasmed as though he’d plugged himself directly into an electrical outlet, and he cried out in horror and disbelief, and no little pain, as nails bulged from the tips of his fingers into cruelly hooked claws. His arms doubled in width, splitting the seams of shirt and lab coat, the pigmentation of his skin turning a deep blue as he sprouted hairs of the same color all over his body.
He tried to call for help, but what emerged from his mouth was a roar, like a lion’s.
What he saw reflected in the polished steel of his refrigerator was no longer anything that resembled a man. Hank McCoy was now a beast.
Kitty and Siryn were shopping for food, as much as two kids could buy with the handful of bucks they had between them. In the blink of an eye, Kitty found herself at the far end of the aisle from her friend. Another blink, she was through a wall and across the street. Another blink, she was inside a tree and partially sunk into
the ground. She tried to move, but hands and feet could find no purchase, and with a wail of horror she realized that she wasn’t the one who was moving. She’d suddenly become so intangible that gravity itself had no more effect on her. The Earth was spinning on its axis and leaving her behind. Worse, it was also revolving in its orbit around the Sun. How long before she found herself floating in space, while the world that was her home went on its merry celestial way?
Siryn didn’t know quite what had happened to her friend. She heard a yelp of surprise, caught a glimpse of Kitty disappearing ghostlike through the back wall of the store, and then she was shrieking across the full range of her accessible frequencies, calling forth a lunatic choir of howls from every dog within earshot as, at the same time, she managed to shatter every piece of glass in the store.
In a back room at Delamain’s on the Rue Rogue in New Orleans’ Vieux Carre—the French Quarter—the usual high-stakes game of poker was well under way, in defiance of the paddle-wheel casinos moored along the Riverwalk at the foot of Canal Street. The casinos had the flash, this game had substance, not so much because of the size of the bets but because of the quality of the players.
Remy LeBeau was a regular and one of the best. The cards, it was said, loved him the way he loved the women who invariably went out of their way to mix with his life, which could be a wild and risky thing. He was a thief by trade, and better at it than at cards, which was saying quite a lot. Stealing hearts was for him far more interesting and a whole lot more fun than stealing jewels or whatever, especially since the trick was always to make sure the stolen heart was never broken. In that regard, he had no equal. When the affair was over, his ladies loved him more than when they met.
This had been a fair night thus far in terms of winnings, but only because he’d been taking his measure of his fellow players. Now was the time to get down to business and make a killing.
Alas, this time, no joy. It was not to be.
He was dealer and from the deck came the joker, the jack of hearts, to complete his full house. But as he flicked it from his hands a spark popped between his fingertips, igniting the card not with fire but with some kind of energy that made it blaze brighter than a maritime searchlight and strike the table with force enough to split the thick wood right across the middle. At the same time, as the other players reeled back in shock and alarm, the other cards he held likewise ignited.
He had a split second to look at the others, his face marked with confusion, his free hand reaching out for help—but all they saw were his eyes blazing red as fresh blood, and so none of them reached back. Then his cards exploded, shattering the remains of the table to kindling and scattering everyone to the walls.
Mystique wasn’t moving anymore. That wasn’t a good thing. Like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz after Dorothy splashed her with water, she was melting. Flesh was liquefying, puddling beneath her, the shape of her skeleton starting to stand out in sharp relief. Soon, very soon, the bones would be exposed. Would she be aware of that? Would she be conscious to the end? She didn’t believe that Stryker had an ounce of mercy in him, only that he was thorough. Whatever it felt like, the process would be final.
Magneto was still on his feet, glaring hawklike at the sealed door before him. He wasn’t interested in the door any longer; he could breach it at his pleasure, with hardly any effort. His focus was on the configuration of the energy patterns that made up the Cerebro wave. Manipulating energy was what he did best. All he had to do was nail down the frequencies and signal characteristics of the wave. . . .
He set up a countervailing pulse and watched the two collide. Close, but not quite there.
He made the necessary modifications and repeated the process, creating in effect a wall of white noise around the entire chamber, a resonance field that utterly neutralized the Cerebro wave at its source.
Just like that, all around him, there was silence.
Blessed silence.
Chapter
Sixteen
Inside Stryker’s Cerebro chamber, Charles Xavier sat straighter in his wheelchair as the globe around him stopped spinning and the entire system progressed through its shutdown cycle.
“That’s strange,” he muttered, and paused a moment to consider why that simple phrase seemed to have two meanings for him. The obvious related to what was happening around him and to why Cerebro suddenly seemed to acquire a mind of its own. The other, disturbingly, also seemed to relate to that nagging, persistent sense of wrongness that had plagued him ever since his escape from Alkali Lake.
He looked suddenly and sharply at the little girl, as though to catch her by surprise. She looked apprehensive, indicating that the shutdown wasn’t what she’d expected, either. Xavier made a comforting gesture, spoke some comforting words, to reassure her that he was still in control, that everything would be all right. That appeared to help, although her mismatched eyes of green and blue still glowed disconcertingly bright.
To work, he decided. Identify the problem and resolve it, that was the ticket.
Still, as he reached for Cerebro’s controls, he found himself hesitating, he found his eyes returning to the girl, his thoughts reaching out to her through the veil that surrounded him. Something about her . . . felt . . .
He shook his head, dazzled by the afterimage of her eyes like blinkers in his mind. He knew what had to be done, and his hands moved with practiced skill over the controls. Someone was jamming the scanning wave. He had his suspicions who was responsible and, from there, what was necessary to break free.
Seeing him hard at work, the girl looked away, toward the massive door at the end of the gallery. This wasn’t part of the program, and she didn’t like it.
Magneto needed a little time to gather his strength. The battle against the Cerebro wave had been as hard for him as for the others and, in its way, had taken as great a toll.
At last he turned, and because she couldn’t see him, wasn’t aware of anything beyond herself, he allowed his face to show the sorrow Mystique’s pitiful condition brought forth in him. Over their time together, he’d grown used to having her by his side, strong and utterly fearless, indomitable in will and surprisingly indestructible in form. He hated to think of her being vulnerable, and hurt.
He knelt beside her, unsure of what he’d find. Her eyes were opaque, as blank and lifeless as a doll’s. She looked like a wax figure who’d been exposed to raw flame, so much of her lay in congealed folds beneath her body.
Then an aspect of her eyes changed. Still opaque, but no longer blank or lifeless, they took on the otherworldly depths of a shark’s eyes.
She blinked, and color returned to those eyes, as it did to the whole of her body.
She flexed her muscles and stretched, to remind herself of how the parts of her all properly fit together, and flowed upward to a sitting position to look her companion in the eye.
He didn’t say a word, nor did she. There was no need.
He stepped over the threshold and along the gallery to the scanning platform, roving his gaze until he’d taken stock of every part of the huge, circular space, impressed at the degree of accuracy that Stryker had achieved.
Xavier sat on his dais, facing a creature that made Magneto’s lip curl in reflexive disgust. It had nothing to do with outward appearance. In his time, Magneto had seen more than his share of mutants who did not conform to baseline norms of human physiognomy. In his time, Magneto had also come face-to-face with living embodiments of what he chose to call evil, and that was what he was responding to here. The creature in the other chair, whatever his origins or upbringing, would have been right at home working by the side of Josef Mengele.
Under the circumstances, given what he had in mind, Magneto thought that quite appropriate.
“Hello, Charles,” he said companionably.
The celestial song had ended. Jean was herself once more. She was whole, she was alive, more fulfilled than she could ever remember, and yet hollow and aching wi
th a need more keen and primal than she had ever known, without the slightest clue how to answer it.
Instead, she woke up.
She looked toward Cyclops, who was lying nearby, telepathy revealing instantly that he was fine—battered but fundamentally unbroken—and she welcomed him awake with a radiant smile. As he gathered himself, she continued taking stock. The substance of the walls within the complex had been designed to inhibit telepathic communication, so she found herself pretty much isolated, with only a vague sense that the others were all right and a growing disquiet whenever her thoughts turned to Xavier. Whatever had happened, they weren’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.
She shifted her broken leg and winced, the lance of pain up the length of that limb making her breath hiss through her teeth. Her subconscious had done a superb job, every piece had been placed precisely where it was supposed to be—but the task wasn’t quite finished. The bone bits still had to knit themselves together, and with a doctor’s inherent caution, she didn’t want to rush the process, even though she suspected she could.
That automatic realization gave her pause. She hadn’t magically acquired Logan’s healing factor, but somehow she’d tapped into a part of his psyche that allowed her to mimic it on her own terms. She had done consciously what he did as an autonomic function of his own body, and that—disturbingly—implied a measure of rapport between them she didn’t care to think about.
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