He had attacked Fitzroy from behind, knocking him out with one punch. He would need him again soon. Until then, he didn’t intend to take any risks with his treacherous former Rook.
The wrought-iron gates of the cemetery had almost rusted shut. The lawns were overgrown and weeds encroached upon the pathways. Among the headstones, paper-wrapped bunches of dead flowers decayed. If this place suffered from neglect, however, then at least it had been spared the wanton destruction inflicted upon Midtown. Shaw wondered how long it would be before mutant gangs took over the streets here too, pushed northward by the search for sustenance and fresh victims.
Reeva Payge’s directions had been vague, and it took him a wearying hour to find the right grave. When he finally set eyes upon it, it was with a mixture of relief and a plunging sensation in his stomach. He let go of Fitzroy, who fell into a heap on the frost-hardened turf.
There was no headstone, just a simple wooden marker. The grave’s occupant had been an exceedingly wealthy young man, but his friends had been forced to bury him in secret, in a hurry. Shaw’s legs felt weak as he forced them to approach the makeshift memorial. He resisted the urge to kneel, listening instead to his own breathing as he stood and looked at the carved name and dates until time no longer had any meaning to him. Then, at last, he spoke.
“Hello, Shinobi,” he said in a husky voice. “Hello, son. It’s been a long time.”
When Iceman saw the kindly face of Doctor Moira MacTaggert hovering over him, he thought for a blissful instant that he was still in his room beneath the Kree island, that Hank was still alive and everything could still be all right.
He struggled to sit up, not fully awake yet, not even aware of his surroundings. He just wanted reassurance, some confirmation that the events of the past day had been no more than a bad dream. Instead, he felt Moira’s hands pressing him down into a threadbare mattress. White walls closed in around him and, aware of an itch around his neck, he felt for it and found something cold and metallic. The memory of his defeat by the Sentinels crashed into his mind, too vivid and painful to have been a simple nightmare.
There were two guards on the door, clad in green and golden armor, armed with blasters.
“Easy, Bobby,” said Moira, “you’ve had a wee bit of a shock. Your body needs time to throw off the effects of the anaesthetic gas.”
He was breathing heavily. His throat was dry. His skin was slick with sweat, and he had become dehydrated. He tried to replenish himself by drawing fresh moisture from the atmosphere, but no matter how he tried, nothing happened. It was the collar, he realized, inhibiting his mutant powers. “Where am I?” he croaked.
“In hospital. Don’t worry, you’re getting the best of care.”
He glanced at the guards. “I preferred the old nurses’ uniform.” “You’re under strict quarantine.” Moira put a glass of cold water to his lips, and he sipped from it gratefully. “Just be glad you’re not showing any symptoms of the Legacy Virus,” she said in a conspiratorial tone, “or they might have killed you before you even reached me.” “ ‘They? Who are ‘they’? Who runs this place?”
“The U.S. government.”
Of course. It made sense. Iceman’s own government had used Sentinels to deal with the “mutant problem” in the past. And if they couldn’t reclaim Manhattan Island from Selene, then neither could they ignore the situation there. They had to attempt to contain it, at least.
A memory shook itself loose inside his head. He wasn’t sure where it had come from. He was being manhandled out of the back of a large white van, each arm taken by an armored guard, neither of whom seemed to care what they knocked him against or how hard. His head lolled, his neck feeling like a worn-out spring. He was staring at a sky made gray and heavy by the threat of rain, thinking how strange it looked. It took his cotton wool brain several seconds to realize that he had become used to seeing the stark white ceilmg that Selene had placed over New York City.
A shape loomed before him: a building, dark and forbidding, its lines drawn harshly across the dull background. He was being carried towards it, his nostrils filling with the scent of rusted iron. The image of a barbed wire fence was imprinted upon his thoughts, but he didn’t recall seeing such a thing.
There was a tender spot on the back of his head. Dimly, he recalled hearing, as if from the far end of a long tunnel, one of his guards shouting: “The mutt’s awake!” And that was where the snatch of memory ended, in an explosion of pain and color.
“Great,” he sighed, “so I’m in some kind of internment camp for mutants.”
“Until your trial,” said Moira, “yes.”
“My trial for what? For being bom different? And I thought it was bad enough for our kind inside the barrier.”
“It’s not what we dreamed of, that’s for sure.”
“Not even close.”
“Selene was sending mutants out from the city, Bobby, to infect people with Legacy. The Sentinels patrol the outside of the barrier to keep it from happening again.”
“You mean they want to keep us penned up inside,” Iceman retorted. “And you, Moira—I can’t believe you’re working with them! What happened to your principles?”
“I’m doing all I can!” Moira’s raised voice drew the attention of the guards. She smiled to reassure them before continuing in a tone that was softer but no less urgent. “I’m the resident doctor here, Bobby. I do my best for everyone who comes into this camp. Most of them are infected, but these days I can prolong their lives by a year or more. So yes, I work for the government—but that doesn’t mean I make their policies for them or condone them. I’m a Legacy sufferer myself; in some eyes, that makes me no better than my patients.”
Bobby’s anger turned to despondency at this reminder of his friend’s condition. “You haven’t found a cure yet?” he asked, although she had already told him the answer.
Moira shook her head. “I’m doing my best. I’ve tried to recreate Hank’s findings-but without the data from the Kree computer, there’s just too much guesswork involved. It’s still my top priority. It’s the only way I can think of to make things better. There are mutants in New York City who don’t want to be there. If they weren’t dependent on Selene to keep their symptoms at bay, they could leave.”
“What, and spend their lives in prison?”
“While they’re inside the barrier,” said Moira, almost pleading, as if trying to convince herself as much as him, “it’s easy for the media to paint them as dangerous villains. If they were out here to put their own case, we could convince the world that they’re the victims in all this. And if they were no longer infected, the government would find it much harder to justify detaining them. We could start to turn things around.”
Bobby clenched his fists in frustration. “If we could only get that cure from Selene...”
“Enough people have tried.”
“Maybe,” he said, his lower lip protruding stubbornly, “but not the X-Men.”
He hadn’t realized how tired Moira had looked until hope dawned across her features and washed away the lines of hardship. She glanced over at the guards and lowered her voice again, sounding overcome. “You mean, all seven of you... the X-Men who disappeared a year ago, with Sebastian Shaw? I hardly dared hope... I thought you might be alone ..
Bobby Drake saw a glimmer of Moira’s old passionate fire, and it made him smile for the first time since he had arrived in this time period. “We’re back, Moira. We're all back!”
Sebastian Shaw was swimming through a sea of painful memories.
He wasn’t accustomed to looking back across the forty-plus years of his life; he had survived this long, come this far, by focusing himself upon the future. But now his eyes glazed over until he was no longer aware of the wooden marker before him, of the cemetery itself. He saw only the surly, defiant face of his dead son, heard only the angiy words of days long past. He saw the poor steelworker who had forged a multi-billion-dollar empire with his bare hands, and he
asked himself what it had all been for.
Shaw had only ever loved one woman, and she had died in his arms. He had almost forgotten what it was like to be held, to confide in somebody, to feel the simple warmth of companionship. He had built for himself a world in which such things had no place. His relationships were handled like chess games. He engaged with others only for the purpose of advancing his own position, and he always knew that their eyes were on the grand prize too. Nobody could be trusted. They would all betray him in the end.
For the first time since he had plotted the course of his life in the sweltering heat of a Pennsylvania steel mill, Shaw asked himself if he had taken the right path.
Lost in such anguished thoughts, he failed to hear the approach of his enemies until it was too late.
He was alerted, in the end, by Trevor Fitzroy’s death rattle: He must have been stirring from his unconscious state when Lady Deathstrike had impaled his heart upon her adamantium claws. The brash young upstart was no loss, of course, but he took with him Shaw’s only hope of escape from this miserable world. He felt the all-too-familiar ache of despair at seeing his plans crushed, and a surge of irrational anger toward Shinobi for delaying him here, for reaching out beyond the grave to frustrate and disappoint him again.
Deathstrike was crouching over Fitzroy’s corpse, a euphoric grin on her face. Shaw turned his back to her. Now that he was listening for them, he had heard footsteps behind him. He was not surprised to find himself facing Donald Pierce.
“I didn’t think you were the family type, Shaw,” sneered the cyborg. He glanced at Shinobi’s grave. “Don’t worry, I can arrange a father-son reunion.”
“Is that the most original threat you can come up with?” asked Shaw mildly.
Pierce scowled. “I don’t need threats. I’ve waited a long time for this moment, Shaw. I’m going to crush the life out of you with my own cybernetic hands.”
“You always did lack imagination,” said Shaw. He sounded bored, but it was a bluff. He was trying to rile his foe into making mistakes as Fitzroy had done. It would be harder with Pierce, but not impossible. He was strong in physical terms but weak in all important respects. He had allowed himself to become consumed by jealousy and hatred. All Shaw had to do was coax those emotions to the surface.
“You never thought much of me, did you Shaw? You never thought I was good enough for your old boys’ club.” Shaw shrugged in a deliberately provocative manner. Pierce took two steps closer to him. “You left me to die!”
“I gave you a chance,” said Shaw. “You failed me. You weren’t good enough.”
“I proved myself a better man than you. What have you got now, Shaw? You’ve lost your precious Hellfire Club; you’ve lost everything!”
“Rather that,” said Shaw, “than play the role of lapdog to that treacherous witch.”
Pierce bristled. “I am a Black Bishop, a member of the Inner Circle. We rule this city!”
“You’re a liability, Pierce,” spat Shaw. “I realized that; Selene will too, in time.”
“A pity, then,” said Pierce coldly, “that you will not be around to see it.”
Shaw had been prepared for the telegraphed attack, but he was distracted by the sudden realization that Deathstrike was immediately behind him. She had sneaked up on him without him hearing her. He moved almost too late: an energy blast from Pierce’s eyes sizzled past his ear, and he felt its heat wash over him. He threw himself at his former colleague, bruising his shoulder as he collided with what felt like solid metal, unable to absorb the kinetic energy of his attack because he had created it himself. Pierce was staggered, but Shaw couldn’t unbalance him. The Black Bishop broke his hold and hurled him away. He expected to feel Lady Deathstrike’s claws across his back, but she made no such move. This was a personal vendetta for her partner, and she was leaving him to fulfil it. For now.
Pierce bore down upon Shaw: he was reaching for his throat with steel fingers, tiying to throttle him. But unable to get a grip on his writhing foe, the frustrated cyborg resorted to using his fists instead. That was just what Shaw had wanted.
In less fraught circumstances, he would have let the blows bounce off him and taunted his ineffectual attacker. Right now, however, he needed every advantage he could get. He reacted as if hurt, hoping that Pierce wouldn’t stop to realize the truth. He made a show of pretending to fight back but he was really biding his time, storing the power that was being fed to him. He could feel it crackling in his cells: it almost hurt to keep it contained.
When finally Shaw did strike, it was with a fully-charged uppercut, which cracked Pierce’s headset and sent him somersaulting head over heels and skidding across the dry mud on his back. He anticipated Deathstrike’s reaction to that. He turned and dropped to his haunches as she sprang at him. Her claws whistled over Shaw’s head, but she adjusted her tactics before he could retaliate. She was a more intelligent fighter than Pierce: she denied Shaw the brute force that would only strengthen him, but her claws thrust closer, ever closer, to his chest and he knew that his powers couldn’t stop her from cutting out his heart.
He tried to push her away from him, but she used her martial artistry to turn his bodyweight against him. Shaw crashed to the ground, and Deathstrike threw herself upon him. But that was her first mistake. She may have been aware of his abilities intellectually, but in the heat of battle she had expected him to react like anybody else upon being felled. She had expected him to be winded, to give her that vital instant in which to penetrate his defenses. She learned her folly as her chest was greeted by a punishing kick.
She recovered quickly, but Shaw had time to stand and prepare himself for her next lunge. They grappled again, and her claws stabbed through his purloined combat jacket, between his ribs. He absorbed the kinetic component of the blow, but Deathstrike had four razor-sharp points of adamantium resting against his skin, and she eased them into his flesh. The pain brought tears to his eyes, but he blinked them away and seized her right arm before she could retract it. At last, he could put his superior strength to use. He didn’t know if the limb was real or artificial, but he tried to wrench it out of its socket all the same. Deathstrike couldn’t break his grip, so she slashed at him with her free hand. Her claws, sapped of their momentum, could not cut deep, but they left parallel marks across Shaw’s knuckles.
His left hand was afire, but he clung to his opponent stubbornly. With his right hand, he reached behind her back, took her right shoulder and twisted her around, using her as a shield as Pierce, now balancing groggily on his knees, unleashed another optic blast. His scarred face lengthened in horror as he saw that his partner had taken the brunt of his impetuous attack. With Deathstrike dazed, Shaw flexed his supercharged muscles and snapped her back.
Flinging the broken cyborg aside like a sack of garbage, he turned his attention to his lesser but more hated foe. Pierce ran at him with an incoherent scream but, confident of victory now, Shaw too allowed himself to surrender to his raw emotions. Fitzroy was dead. This miserable half-man had stolen his only chance to reverse his misfortune, to take the source of Selene’s power from her, and why? For the sake of some pathetic vendetta; because Donald Pierce had never been able to accept the fact that he wasn’t good enough. A hot well bubbled up inside Shaw's chest, only given more heat and force by the Black Bishop's hydraulically-powered, metal-reinforced punches. Engulfed in a red mist of fury, he lashed out again and again, not caring if his fists impacted with steel or flesh, not caring even as the steel began to crack and the flesh to liquefy beneath his knuckles.
Shaw didn’t recall the moment at which Pierce fell. He wasn’t consciously aware of pounding a fallen foe. He didn’t realize for a time that he was weakening, no longer invigorated by his enemy’s blows. It was only as his body discharged its last iota of stolen energy-or perhaps some time after that-that the red mist receded. He could see the gray world around him again, see Pierce’s battered corpse at his feet, and he felt cold and sick.
&n
bsp; Across the dead silence of the cemetery, he heard the sound of a slow handclap.
The White Knight was walking through the headstones towards him. He had removed his mask, but it took Shaw a moment to accept what was revealed as a consequence: a face that he was more accustomed to seeing reversed in mirrors.
“Bravo!” said the leader of the rebels. “I wasn’t sure you could beat both Pierce and Deathstrike alone. Sometimes I forget how driven I once was.”
Shaw didn’t know how it could be, but he was facing himself—or at least a good facsimile thereof. His mind cycled sluggishly through the possible explanations: could this be a trick on Selene’s part? A clone or a shape-shifter?
He didn't want his doppelganger to know that he had the advantage over him-so, instead of the obvious question, the important one, he asked: “How did you find me?”
The White Knight-the other Sebastian Shaw-halted a few feet in front of him. “I came here too,” he said, “when I was your age.' I was hurt, and I allowed my emotions to rule me, to divert me from my path. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I wanted to see where my son was buried,” snarled Shaw.
“As I recall,” said the White Knight smoothly. “But to mourn for an heir who was lost to us a long time before he died, or to dance on
his grave?” He held up a silencing hand. “No, don’t bother to say anything, Sebastian. I never did work out the answer to that question.” Shaw was beginning to realize what must have happened. “You went back, didn’t you?” He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “You made Fitzroy open a portal for you.”
His future self inclined his head in confirmation.
“Then ... your past isn’t mine. In your past, Deathstrike couldn’t have killed Fitzroy.”
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 42