He turned around and scuttled along the right hand wall, because it was as easy as walking on the floor and it might just allow him to avoid a trap or take a foe by surprise.
He paused as he drew level with the first opening. He found himself looking down another long passageway, with more junctions at irregular intervals along it.
A maze, then.
Despite the possible perils of the situation, Nightcrawler found himself grinning. He enjoyed this sort of challenge.
He took the right turn, and the first right after it. He came to a crossroads, at which he headed right again. This took him up a blind alley. He checked the wall at the end of it, just in case it was an illusion or it concealed a secret door. There was nothing.
He tried taking every first left turn instead, but soon became convinced that he was walking in circles. He considered pulling a thread off his costume, to mark his path. Perhaps later, he thought, if things became desperate.
He felt a surge of triumph as he sighted something in the distance: a narrow flight of metal steps, twisted around a pole. He teleported towards it in his eagerness. It led both up and down. He climbed up first, and was dismayed to find himself in a corridor identical to the one he had come from. Climbing down, he found the same. He returned to the highest level, guessing that his objective was more likely to be above than below. When he found another, identical ladder a few minutes later, he climbed that too. And another. And another.
Nightcrawler lost track of the time he had spent wandering the dark corridors. He tried to keep walking in broadly the same direction, and to move up through the levels of the labyrinth whenever he was able. But he never reached its outside edge, nor its roof. Finally, to confirm his suspicions, he dropped a white handkerchief onto the metal floor in the center of a corridor. He found it again, half an hour later, three floors and almost two miles away.
He had only one option. He had realized this some time ago, but he had wanted to be absolutely sure before he committed himself to taking such a risk.
Somehow, this labyrinth was confounding his senses, clouding his thoughts, sending him around in circles without him knowing it. It wasn’t a fair challenge. But he could teleport out of here. The problem was, it would have to be a blind ’port. He had no destination to visualize, no idea if he was ten yards inside the labyrinth or ten miles. And, under those circumstances, he could easily find himself trying to occupy the same space as an unexpected wall or a piece of furniture. Nightcrawler swallowed at the very thought. He had no choice but to do this-he knew that-but he also knew he might be about to commit suicide.
He closed his eyes, breathed in deeply, and focussed on a virtual spot one mile straight up from his present position. At least, this way, he could be sure of clearing this maze with its dangerously narrow corridors and low ceilings. Of course, it also meant he was more likely to find himself in a fatal plunge towards the roof of whichever building he was in.
Nightcrawler let out a therapeutic yell as he made the ’port.
When he opened his eyes again, he was standing with his nose pressed against a cold metal wall, and he recoiled from it with a startled gasp ...
... to find, to his despair, that he was still inside the labyrinth.
Rogue was floating.
At first, she thought she was underwater. Her lungs balked at the act of respiration, and she suffered a minor coughing fit.
Somehow, though, she could breathe.
The liquid around her was green-tinged, cold and, apparently, super-oxygenated.
It was also full of people.
They stretched for as far as she could see—which wasn’t too far, through the murk-in all directions, in rows and columns, all floating upright as she did, all unconscious, arms limp by their sides. Their heads tilted forwards at identical angles, their chins resting on their chests. Their faces were composed into identical expressions of contentment.
They were identical. Dozens of identical men with the same short, sandy hair, the same bland features, the same slight dimple in each of their chins. Rogue wondered if they were all clones.
The identical men were all naked. She realized, with a start, that she was too.
Automatically, she folded in her arms and legs, looking around warily in case any of the men came towards her. If she touched one-even brushed against him-with her bare skin, her mutant ability of absorption would kick in.
She needn’t have worried. The men weren’t moving. They remained in their perfect rows and columns, not even drifting. But this gave Rogue a problem: how to get past them?
There was space between them, but not a great deal. She could swim through it, but only if she kept tight control over every movement of her body. Could she do it? She was used to fighting with strength, not precision. And the consequences of failure terrified her. All those people, all those personalities, those ideas and emotions. She shuddered at the thought of them invading her mind, destroying her sense of self.
Best, perhaps, not to take the chance; to stay where she was.
Or was that what her captors wanted her to think?
Whatever these things around her were, they weren’t real people. They were artificial life forms, grown in a laboratory. What if they were empty vessels, with no thoughts of their own? What if it was safe for her to touch them after all? What if the only thing keeping her here, floating in this tank or whatever it was, was her own paranoia?
It wasn’t the most convincing argument, but it was enough to persuade Rogue that she had to take a risk.
She kicked out tentatively, and sent herself drifting upwards. It didn’t feel like swimming, more like maneuvering in zero gravity. Fortunately, she had been trained to do just that. She floated between two of the clone men, her arms above her head, heels pressed together. She even pulled in her stomach, taking up as little space as she could. She resisted the urge to close her eyes, to prevent herself from seeing if this all went wrong. Never before in her life had she felt so exposed, so much in danger.
She took a deep, calming breath as she came face to face with one of the clone men, her nose inches from his. Her first impulse was to flinch, but there was an identical man only the same distance behind her. The first man’s eyes remained closed, his expression unchanging. Tiny bubbles emerged from his mouth as he breathed out gently.
Rogue had stopped moving. She gave another tiny kick, as soft as she could manage, and resumed her slow rise. She didn't even dare to look up; she just hoped that, soon, she would bump into a roof. One with a hatch in it, preferably.
And then, to her horror, she realized she was drifting off-course. Almost touching one of the clone men, she back-pedaled frantically.
A little too frantically.
She felt the awful press of skin against her skin-a bare foot against her back—and she screamed as a thousand unwanted thoughts flooded into her mind. She recoiled instinctively, only to collide with another clone. She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, and tried not to let the images of other lives, the opinions of other people, affect her; just let them sluice through her mind without changing her. Her body spiraling out of control, she touched another man, and another, and suddenly a dozen more voices were shouting to be heard, protesting at what she was doing to them and at the same time assailing her with their mundane lives, and she couldn’t stand it any more.
With a yell of pain, Rogue lashed out. She didn’t care how hard she hit the men, she just had to get them away from her. She created a space for herself, but at the expense of adding a few new voices to the cacophony in her head. She hardly knew who she was any more. She curled into a ball and tried to find an essential, inviolate part of herself upon which she could focus, to tune out all else. She didn’t want to listen, to think, to feel. All notions of escape were pushed out of her mind as she drifted in the greenish liquid and sobbed quietly to herself.
“I think we’ve done it,” whispered Rory Campbell. “We’ve actually done it.”
The five scienti
sts stared up in awe at the wall-mounted main screen of the Kree computer. Travers, Scott and Takamoto crowded around the Beast in their eagerness to see, their hostility towards him temporarily forgotten in the sheer excitement of discovery.
“Let’s wait and see how the simulation plays itself out,” Hank cautioned, although he could feel the same excitement building within himself.
The screen displayed a graphical representation of a human blood cell. It was stained around the edges, as if somebody had injected black ink into the cytoplasm. And the ink spot was wriggling, reaching out towards the center of the cell, trying to grow. But it wasn’t succeeding. Its questing tendrils were blocked by a similarly amorphous white blob, its equal and opposite. And, as the two forces met in combat, they were canceling each other out, until only the healthy cell remained.
“It’s unbelievable!” said Campbell. “All the time and effort we put into finding a cure, and you come along and finish the job in a matter of hours. Doctor McCoy, you are a genius!”
The Beast waved aside the compliment, graciously. “You would have reached this same conclusion sooner or later. Your team had already laid the groundwork. I was simply able to utilize my experience to build upon it all the faster.” His experience, he thought, refreshed by Moira MacTaggert’s purloined notes of their research together. He felt a twinge of guilt. “I should also remind you that this is only a computer projection. We have months of trials ahead of us before we can even think about testing our formula on a living subject.” He looked up at the screen again. Both the black and white stains were appreciably smaller. “Nevertheless,” he said, “I think I can safely state that congratulations are due.”
The last remnants of black and white merged, and blinked out in a final whimper of mutual destruction. Professor Travers drew a sharp breath, Rory Campbell laughed giddily, and Doctors Takamoto and Scott began to applaud. Hank felt like throwing his arms around all four of them, but restrained himself. Even in their present mood, that might not have gone down too well.
“My fellow scientists,” he announced, “I believe we have found our cure.”
Iceman was standing on a circular white platform, only inches above the ground, in a circular white room. The wall was about thirty feet away, and it rose towards a white dome about ten feet above his head. There were several doors, evenly spaced around the wall. He could see nothing amiss, nothing to stop him from just walking away. So, every fiber of his being told him that this had to be a trap.
He ‘iced up’ with a thought, surrounding himself with his customary protective shell. When the trap was sprung, he would be ready. At least, as ready as he could be.
“I hate this!” he said, to fill the unnerving silence. “I hate it when the bad guys have watched too many episodes of Batman. I hate it when they build these elaborate prisons. I mean, why go to all this trouble just to make our lives miserable?” No answer came, but for the echo of his own voice from the blank walls.
The platform itself was suspicious. “No prizes for guessing that, whatever’s gonna happen, it’ll happen the second I step off this thing,” he considered. He reached out with a tentative foot, but snatched it back. “On second thought, let’s show a tiny bit of caution.”
Iceman rarely gave much consideration to the mechanics of his powers. He just used them. He didn’t think about how he was condensing moisture from the air—nor about how, in that same instant, he was draining every iota of heat from a small, localized area. As far as he was concerned, he was just doing something that came naturally: he was making ice cubes. And, once they were made, he sent them skittering and bouncing along the white floor.
“And, to my immense surprise, nothing happens. Perhaps I got this place wrong after all?” He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so!”
Still, there was only one thing to do, much as he disliked it.
He extended his leg again and, this time, he let his foot touch the floor.
Immediately, the room was filled with fire.
With a strangulated ciy, Iceman leapt back, almost falling. The fire burnt fiercely, giving off waves of heat that began to melt his armor, but it didn’t touch the platform.
Then, in the space of a second, it died down and went out altogether.
He looked around, wide-eyed, but he couldn’t see where the flames had come from. From beneath the floor, he guessed, although he could see no gaps in the smooth surface. Nor were there any scorch marks, nor lingering traces of smoke. Iceman entertained the possibility that the fire had been an illusion. But he had felt its heat against his face, and he saw now that there was nothing left of his ice cubes. They had melted.
“OK,” he muttered to himself, “if the ' is pressure-sensitive...
He created an ice slide: a cantilever structure, anchored to the platform. The far end of it was within reach of a door handle. But, as soon as he took his first cautious step along it, the fire erupted again, its flames touching the ceiling. This time, as it beat him back, he lost control of his armor altogether, and he was just plain, helpless Bobby Drake, cowering from his natural enemy, sweat running down his brow.
The fire was extinguished again, and Bobby felt a shiver of fear running through him. The slide had gone. Not just melted but evaporated, leaving only a misshapen lump of ice on the platform itself. What would happen to him, he wondered, if he was caught in that furnace? If he tried to make it all the way to a door? He could reach one in seconds, using his powers to replenish a slide beneath him as fast as it could be melted. But what if he wasn’t strong enough? What if he couldn’t keep his protective shell up all the way?
No, he decided, sitting down on the platform, knees up against his chest and arms around his knees. It was too much of a risk. He didn’t have that kind of control over his powers. He wasn’t good enough. He couldn’t make it out of here alone.
It was up to the others to find him.
JEAN GREY’S head throbbed. She had expected that, but the pain was worse than it ought to have been. She had over-extended
__ herself, overtaxed her powers, but it wasn’t for the first time, and
it had never felt this bad before. She could taste blood on her lips, and she realized it had trickled down from her nose. She feared she might have done herself some permanent damage.
But that possibility was the least immediate of her problems.
She was lying on a hard rock surface, staring up at the roof of a rough-hewn cavern, which was held up by granite pillars. The air was hot and dry, and the back of her throat felt like parchment. Carefully, she eased herself to her feet, carrying her head like a fragile egg on her shoulders. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at the blood on her face.
It took her a moment to realize that she shouldn’t have had pockets. She had been wearing her Phoenix costume when she was felled, but now she was in her own conservative civilian clothing: a smart, gray jacket and skirt, over a turquoise blouse. She remembered how Selene had altered her attire in New York, and she wondered if the Black Queen was in league with Shaw after all.
As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, Jean saw there was only one way out of the cave. The flickering light of flames glowed in the jagged opening, and she crept towards it, poking a cautious head around the corner of the slime-encrusted rock.
She gasped at the sight of an enormous pit of fire, from some medieval vision of Hell itself. It was crisscrossed by crumbling stone walkways, which in turn were guarded by malformed gargoyle statues. The infernal vista stretched for as far as Jean could see. She heard a papery rustle of batwings, and a sinister shadow slid across the roof. Somewhere, somebody was screaming, and somebody—or something—responded with a demonic cackle.
“Where am I?” she whispered, in awe and horror.
She jumped, as the answer leapt into her head from nowhere. Where do you think?
The voice was Jean Grey’s own. Or rather, it wasn’t.
I thought you’d be familiar enou
gh with this place, cow. Look into your subconscious, your repressed memories. You’ve been here before. We both have. We’ve both returned from death.
I never died! she insisted, ramming the words home with telepathic force.
Time to remedy that, then.
Jean could see her now, standing on a walkway in the middistance, hot smoke and glowing ashes roiling in the air behind her. It was like staring into a funhouse mirror, at a woman who should have been her twin, but who looked very different. Madelyne Pryor: the erstwhile Goblin Queen, the current Black Rook of Sebastian Shaw’s Inner Circle, and the living embodiment of everything Jean Grey had ever feared she could become. She was a nightmare in a black leather bodice, her garb reminiscent of Selene’s, the Hellfire Club’s trident symbol embossed upon a clasp at her throat, and a smile of pure evil darkening her face.
Madelyne was walking slowly, confidently, towards Jean. Jean stayed put and let her foe approach her, but she was nervous. As she had noted before, Madelyne’s powers were equal to her own. In this unfamiliar realm, she might even have the advantage.
You had your crack at life, you witch, said Madelyne Pryor’s voice, full of hate, in Jean Grey’s mind. You screwed it up. You don’t get another chance. You don’t get to take my life!
I didn’t take anything from you!
“You took everything from me!” spat Madelyne, near enough for her voice to carry now. “This should be my time, not yours. It will be my time again.”
“So, you want to kill me,” said Jean. She struggled to keep her own voice from trembling. She wasn’t afraid of dying in combat, not really. But she was chilled by the thought of what might happen after her death (of what happened last time, screamed a part of her mind, which she tried to tune out). She couldn’t stand the idea of Madelyne walking back into her life and taking it over, taking her place with
Scott. Logically, she knew it couldn’t happen. She knew Scott better than to think he could ever go back to his first wife, no matter how much he might be hurting. She had to keep telling herself that.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 20