X-MEN
DARK MIRROR
a novel by Marjorie m. Liu
based on the Marvel Comic Book
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ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-1063-5
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To Kielle, who is missed by so many— and to Amaranth, who will smile when she sees this
1
In her first moment of consciousness, before opening her eyes to the world and discovering such things as floors and walls and straitjackets, Jean Grey imagined she had died; that for all she had suffered in her life, all her terrible sacrifices, the final end would offer nothing but an eternity of suffocation, an unending crushing darkness spent in utter isolation.
Her mind was blind. She felt nothing. Heard nothing. Not even Scott. Cut off, like a blade had been dropped on her neck, separating life from thought, life from sensation, life from—Scott?—life.
The remembrance of flesh came to her slowly. She became aware of her legs, curled on a flat hard surface; her hands, tucked close and warm against a hard body. Her body, though it felt odd, unfamiliar. Not right
Jean opened her eyes. She saw a cracked white wall decorated by the shadows of chicken wire. She smelled bleach, and beneath that scent, urine. She felt something sticky beneath her cheek. Her head was strange—not just her mind, but her actual head—and her hair rasped against her cheek. No silken strands, but rough, like stubble. Her mouth felt different, too; her teeth grated unevenly. Her jaw popped.
Jean could not move her arms. This concerned her until she realized she was not paralyzed. Her arms were simply restrained against her chest, bound tight within white sleeves that crisscrossed her body like an arcane corset. Again, she tried to reach out with her mind beyond the isolation of silent mental darkness—Scott, where are you, what has happened—to find some trace of that living golden thread that was a thought, a presence, a—I am not alone—
As a child, alone was all Jean wanted to be. Alone in her head, alone in her heart, alone with no voices whispering incessantly of their fears and dreams and sins. Funny, how things could change. Her wishes had grown up.
Jean tried to roll into a sitting position. Slow, so slow— her head throbbed, a wicked pain like she had been struck—and she fought down nausea, swallowing hard. She had to get her feet back, get free and away, away to find the others. It did not matter where she was or who had done this—results, results are all that matter—only that it could not be allowed to continue.
Scott will be looking for me.
Yes, if he could. Jean's last memory of her husband was his strong profile as he gazed up at the dilapidated brick facade of an old mental hospital, sagging on its foundations in a quiet neighborhood located beside the industrial hinterland between Tacoma and Seattle. Disturbing reports of rising mutant and human tensions had trickled in from the Northwest for weeks, but without anything specific enough to warrant a full investigation— or interference—from the X-Men.
Until two days ago. Logan had learned through an old contact that mutants were being arrested on false charges and incarcerated in state mental hospitals. Serious accusations, with no real hard evidence—except a name.
Belldonne. An institute for the mentally ill, and a place—according to Logan's contact—where the X-Men would find incontrovertible evidence that mutants were being held against their will.
"And if it's true, then it ain't no holiday they're having," Logan had said. Because prison was bad enough—but add doctors, the ominous specter of science, experimentation, and the scenario became much worse. Mutants, despite the law protecting them, were still easy fodder for overeager scientists who wanted nothing more than to see, in the flesh, the why and how of extreme mutation. Jean understood the fascination. She simply did not think it was an excuse for unscrupulous behavior.
The room was small. One window, covered in fine mesh. No furniture or cameras or anything at all that revealed the identity of her captors. The door had a .small glass observation window set too high for Jean to see much but a snatch of ceiling.
She heard voices in the hall, soft, and then footsteps. Closer and closer until the doorknob rattled. Jean closed her eyes. She heard someone enter.
"He still out?" said a man. He had a rough voice, gritty like a hard smoker.
"Probably pretending," said another. Jean heard shoes scuff the floor. She peered through her lashes and saw black shoes and dark blue pants. Cologne tickled her nostrils.
"Hey," said the first man, nudging her ribs with his toe. "Hey, Jeff. You out?"
Quiet laughter. "Idiot. You actually expect him to say
yes?"
The two men stood close together, relaxed and unafraid. Perfect. Jean shot out her legs and slammed her socked heels into a knee. She heard a very satisfying crunch, a sharp howl, and then she rolled left as the second man tried to subdue her. He was slow—but then, so was Jean. Her body felt clumsy, unfamiliar; she barely managed to gather enough momentum to stand, and by that point, the man—large, muscular, with a flat square face—was too close for her to maneuver. She saw his fist speed toward her face—was able to turn just slightly— and got clipped hard enough to slam her into the wall. A low whuff of air escaped her throat, and the sound of that partial cry made her forget pain, capture—everything but her voice.
A man's voice, slipped free from her throat. Deep, hoarse, and horrifying. It had to be wrong, her imagination: The man with the broken kneecap howled, screaming so loud her own voice must have been drowned out, swallowed up, and yes, that was right, that had to be it—
A strong hand grabbed her hair and crashed her forehead against the wall. Her skull rattled; sound passed her lips, and still it was the same, an impossible rumbling baritone that was not her voice, not feminine in the slightest.
"Hold still," muttered the man, pinning her against the wall. "Jesus, Jeff."
"Who are you?" she asked, listening to herself speak. Chills rushed through her arms and she glanced down, seeing
what she had taken for granted upon waking, never noticing, never paying any serious attention to the changes she felt in her body.
Not my body. Not my body.
No breasts, a thick waist, strong broad legs. The ends of black dreadlocks, hanging over her left shoulder.
Her captor did not answer. He was breathing too hard. His companion lay on the floor, muffled screams puffing from between his clenched teeth. Jean heard footsteps outside the room: people running, drawn by the sounds of violence.
"Please," Jean said, listening to herself speak in a stranger's voice. She wanted to vomit. "Where am I?"
The man shook his head. "I thought you were getting better. No wonder Maguire wanted you restrained."
The door banged open. Three men entered; one of them held a nightstick, another had a syringe. She recognized their uniforms.
"Don't," Jean said, staring at the syringe. "I'm calm now. I'm better."
"Sorry." The man pushed her harder against the wall. "No one's going to take a risk on you now."
Jean struggled. Without her powers, she lived in a state of semi-unconsciousness. To take that one step fur- ther—again—without knowing where the others were— Scott— or what had happened to put her in another person's body, was more than she could bear.
She was outnumbered and in a straitjacket. Perhaps the men showed surprise that the person they were accustomed to dealing with displayed sophisticated tricks in fighting them off, but they were tough and used to unruly patients. They subdued Jean. They subdued the man they called Jeff. And as Jean felt the sharp prick of the syringe in the side of her neck, she silently called out to her husband, to her friends, to anyone who might be listening, and then, still fighting, felt herself borne down to the hard floor like a slippery fish, slipping swiftly through the curtain of darkness into a deeper unconscious.
2
Scott Summers was accustomed to darkness. Voluntarily blind, he had long ago learned to curb any and all desire to open his eyes without the protection of his ruby quartz glasses. His was a killing strength—that fire, that sun-fed light in his eyes. People got hurt when he looked at them. People died.
A bad way to live for a man with a conscience. Easier to live life through ruby-quartz glasses and accept the darkness when required. Like now. He was not wearing his visor. Nothing at all covered his eyes. Bad. Very bad.
Scott touched his face, pressing fingertips against his eyelids, afraid to trust himself without that lingering pressure. He listened to the world around him. At first, silence. An unfamiliar quiet, without the kinds of noises one grew accustomed to in certain situations and locales. At home in Westchester, the insects sang like bells all through the dry summer, a constant clipped symphony outside his window through the day and night. Somewhere, too, there was always a familiar voice talking; laughter, maybe, or the distant rumble of a movie. Comfortable sounds, like family. Like Jean, breathing quietly beside him, her body warm.
Not here, though. Not now. He was cold and alone.
Scott mentally reached for his wife. She did not reach back. There was no golden thread flaring bright hot, no soft touch upon his heart. A complete disconnect, as though all those years spent linked together were nothing but fantasy, a fairy tale for a lonely man. It felt like Jean was dead.
Scott sat up. His head hurt. His heart hurt worse. As he moved, he noticed something strange about his body, something very disturbing. Something that he should have noticed right away, because such was the nature of his loss.
He was missing certain . . . parts. He also had some new ones. He touched them. His hands moved lower, still probing.
"Oh, God," Scott said, and his voice was high and sweet. He took a chance and opened his eyes. Nothing happened. He could see like a normal man, with normal colors, without explosions and beams of cutting light. He looked down and saw small white hands resting in a cotton pajama lap, hands that were attached to slender arms that rose, rose to a body that had ...
Scott stood up. He was in a small white room. No lights on, just nighttime shadows. There was a cot behind him, a spindly table on his right. No other furniture. One tall window, chicken wire hugging the glass. Very industrial. It reminded him of the orphanage where he had spent much of his youth.
Again, he forced himself to look down at his body.
No. This is not my body at all
Not unless he had developed the ability to shape-shift into a woman. Which, considering everything he knew about himself, was highly unlikely.
So. Someone had done this to him, a separation of his physical and mental identities. And if him, then what about the others? The last thing he remembered was standing in front of the Belldonne mental hospital with his team—Jean, Logan, Rogue, and Kurt—all of them looking to him for the final word on their approach, their handling of intelligence that said mutants were being unfairly imprisoned in the building in front of them.
Yes, well.
Scott walked to the door. He had to stand on his toes to peer through the observation window. He could see only a small portion of the hall, which was empty, devoid of any decoration or color. Dimly lit, white and sterile. He tried the doorknob but it would not turn. Scott glanced around the room, looking for something he could turn into a lock pick. He came up empty, until he realized what he was wearing.
Scott took off his bra. He tried not to look at his breasts—or rather, the breasts of the strange woman he seemed to be inhabiting—because that was wrong and impolite and ... God. So bizarre.
The bra had wires. He pried them both out, tucking one in the waistband of his underwear—no looking, no looking, you will get your own body back—twisting the other into something resembling an actual tool. Scott was suddenly very grateful for all those long training sessions with Gambit, in which learning to pick a lock, to survive on nothing but a piece of wire and will, was essential to winning.
The lock was easy. Scott cracked open the door and held his breath, listening. Nothing but quiet. He slipped from the room into the empty hall, devoid of anything but doors. White floors, white cracked walls, cold and easy to clean. No security cameras. For a moment, the flickering fluorescent lighting hurt Scott's eyes. He rubbed at them, trying to cope with his new ability to see in color. What little there was, anyway.
Scott did not know where to go, only that he had to move, had to learn why he was here, how, what had happened to the rest of his team—Jean—then get out, run, make things right. Scott was good at making things right. You had to be, when you led the X-Men.
Somewhere distant, a man screamed. Startled, a cry of pain. Scott heard shouting. Careful, his feet small and covered only in thin white socks, he loped down the hall after those sounds—and oh, it was strange moving in that body, that unfamiliar shell with its foreign muscles and rhythms and parts. He could not reconcile his mind to the loss of its physical home, had trouble staying focused on the now, when everything about him was strange and new.
Despite the turmoil ahead of him, the hall remained empty. It was a familiar emptiness, one he associated with his youth. In places where the inhabitants lacked control over their own lives, nighttime meant lockdown, enforced rest. Easier for the graveyard shift, few in number and too underpaid to care about bathroom trips or nightmares.
You are not a child anymore. You are not in the orphanage.
No. He was in a mental hospital. Belldonne, if he was not mistaken. He had studied the blueprints of the place during the short flight to Seattle and it was easy for his mind to translate the two-dimensional lines, the pictures of halls and rooms and stairs, into something concrete, physical. When one had a power like his—creating light that could ricochet, bounce, reflect—one learned very quickly how to visualize the reality of things.
And the reality of this institution was exactly how he had envisioned the physical promise of the blueprint design. Which meant, except for not knowing what floor he was on, that he could easily get in and out of Belldonne. The bigger problem was that he did not know
if the rest of his team was in here with him. Until he found out more, he could not afford to take the chance of leaving them behind.
And if you are the only one here? What if there is another person—this woman—looking out through your eyes? Using your powers? Interacting with the others?
That would be bad. He wondered where his body was. He wondered where Jean was, if she was still herself and had noticed the change in his mind. If anyone could fix this, it would be her.
The hospital was not very big. Scott, still following the rumble of concerned voices, those cries of pain, finally drew near enough to hear actual words, like: "careful," and "get ready." A doorknob rattled and Scott peered around a corner in the hall to watch as three men entered a room.
He heard sounds of a struggle—more shouting—and then, after several minutes, a deep quiet broken only by the sobs of a hurting man. Scott remained very still.
The door opened. Two men emerged, carrying another between them. Scott thought his leg might be broken: The injured man could not stop whimpering. Scott got ready to run, but the hospital employees moved down the hall in the opposite direction. The door opened again. Two more men emerged, one of them saying, "He's never been this violent. I thought Maguire was kidding us when he said to straitjacket him."
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