by Alex Irvine
She looked up at the sky, dreary and spitting rain, and imagined what it might look like when the warheads began to fall.
In Canada, according to Logan, things were a little better—but only because Canadian mutants had seen what was coming, soon after Project Wideawake went active. They’d had time to plan, to get out of the cities and make themselves as hard to find as possible. Logan didn’t share much with Kate because neither of them knew when the Sentinels might interrogate her, but she had gathered from passing references that the Canadian super-team Alpha Flight might still be alive and active, somewhere northwest of the Great Lakes.
Not that Alpha Flight could do her any good from that far away. If the fragmentary remains of the once-proud X-Men were going to stave off a nuclear devastation of North America, they would have to do it from the South Bronx.
TWO
KATE got off the bus near Yankee Stadium and crossed the parking lots to the camp gates, where two Sentinels stood guard. The first spoke as she approached. “Mutant 187, you are behind schedule. Explain.”
“I was attacked by Rogues on Park Avenue,” she said, choosing her words carefully to keep the Sentinels’ sensors from detecting hesitation or omission. She’d rehearsed possible responses for days, anticipating this scenario. “I escaped. That caused the delay.”
“Encephalo-scan indicates truthful response. Proceed.” Luckily for Kate, the Sentinel did not interrogate her further. It would have been very easy to get caught in a lie, which would likely mean execution on the spot. If the Sentinel were even slightly uncertain, it would subject her to a process of exhaustive and humiliating interrogations that might uncover the Jammer component. That would end the plan before it ever had a chance to begin.
But none of that happened. Quit with the flights of fancy, she told herself. You don’t need to imagine alternative futures—you’re about to live one.
At least she hoped she was. The next few hours would tell most of that story, one way or another.
Once she had passed through the security checkpoint at the gate, Kate walked along the fence line, staying away from the maze-like interior of the camp. It was dangerous in there. At the time of its construction, the camp had been organized into three sections. The first, near the front gates, consisted of a group of low buildings housing a research lab, medical facilities, and administrative offices.
Most of the original mutant inmates were now in the cemetery that occupied part of the space between the administrative complex and the main body of the camp. Here, a long double row of barracks stood in front of crumbling row houses. The whole capacity of the place had never been dedicated to mutants: From the beginning, it had also housed normal-human resisters and various other unfortunates deemed undesirable by the Sentinels. Some of these were members of anti-mutant groups whose violent tendencies put them on the wrong side of the Sentinels’ desire for order. Theoretically, they were not supposed to come into contact with the dwindling number of mutant inmates. In practice, the Sentinels looked the other way. A number of the mutants buried in the cemetery had died at the hands of other inmates. The most recent casualty had been Kurt Wagner, the mutant called Nightcrawler, just a year or so before.
After that incident, the Sentinels had confined the mutants to a single building in one corner of the camp, where sentries could keep a closer eye on them. Eventually, Kate knew, the Sentinels would achieve whatever research goal they had set themselves, and then they would kill the remaining mutants. Until then, however, the mutants had their own housing, with its own kitchen to keep them out of the camp dining area.
The original barracks buildings had been modified over the years, their clean, regular lines transformed into a jumble of makeshift barriers, catwalks, tunnels, and covered passages that reflected the Balkanization of the camp population. The nonmutant inmates came from various gangs and groups on the outside, and they brought those affiliations in with them. The Sentinels didn’t care unless violence broke out; when it did, their reprisals were swift and brutal. Several times since Kate had been brought to the camp, Sentinels had burned part of it down. Then the inmates rebuilt—further altering the original, orderly layout.
Just as no mutant would willingly go into Rogue territory on the outside, no mutant would willingly enter that warren. Kate headed for the medical facility, sticking to the open spaces within sight of the Sentinel guards posted along the fence. She walked by Kurt’s grave, and tried not to look at all the others. The past was past. She had to stay focused on the future—on making sure they would have one.
She returned the medical case to the camp infirmary, where the doctors dismissed her without looking her in the eye. To them, she was subhuman, an aberrant strain, a genetic dead end soon to be eliminated from the species. Maybe some of them didn’t believe that, but in the camp it didn’t matter what you believed. What mattered were your actions, and the H-class humans who worked for the Sentinels were utterly complicit in the ongoing mutant genocide in North America. Thinking of it made Kate wonder whether maybe Magneto hadn’t been right all along.
On the other hand, Magneto himself had traded in his former militancy for a weary, plodding cynicism. Mutants were too few and too far gone, perhaps, to believe that militant action would do any good.
Unless the Jammer worked. It was their last chance.
The rest of the X-Men…Kate caught herself. It was easy to think of them still as the X-Men. But wasn’t that a dead appellation for a dead group, from a dead history? The X-Men had died when Charles Xavier died, really. Now they were just the rest of the surviving mutants, the last great hope of mutantkind in North America and maybe the world. And they were waiting for her in their small prefabricated sheet-metal barracks.
She stepped inside and immediately felt safer among her friends.
First to meet her inside the door was Ororo Munroe, Kate’s guiding light when she’d first come to the X-Men all those years ago. The intervening years showed in a slight rounding of Ororo’s features and figure—but she was still strong and graceful, with an air of calm command that belied her X-Men name: Storm. Just behind her came Franklin Richards who, having reached middle age, had the same pattern of gray at his temples as his late father, Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four.
Rachel Summers looked up from a table in the common space just inside the front doorway. Her red hair had been chopped raggedly short by her own hand; her face was perpetually drawn and pale, as if she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in decades. Rachel was a mystery to the rest of them—even Franklin, whom Rachel had married soon after being imprisoned. Kate knew nothing about Rachel’s past, which seemed to be a forbidden topic of discussion. This had always struck her as unfair: Rachel was a telepath and therefore had probably learned everything there was to know about the rest of them before the Sentinels had forced an inhibitor collar on her.
Hanging back from the group was Magneto in his wheelchair. He’d been crippled by a Sentinel raid on his secret base in the Caribbean, during which all of his closest Brotherhood lieutenants had been killed. He looked much the same as he always had, Kate thought—his face lined, and his unruly shock of gray hair never changing. It was odd to see, in light of how the others had aged.
And next to Magneto stood Kate’s own husband, Peter Alexandreivich Rasputin. It had been a long time since anyone called him Colossus. Kate went to Peter and leaned into him, taking comfort as she always did from his size and his calm demeanor. Even when he wasn’t transformed into shining organic steel—as he had not done for many years—he was still a mountainous presence.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I ran into a Rogue pack. They ran into Wolverine.” Concern passed across Peter’s face at the mention of Rogues, but disappeared at the mention of Wolverine.
“He didn’t do anything…?” Ororo let the question hang.
“No, nothing that would draw the Sentinels’ attention,” Kate said. “Logan’s smarter than that.”
“It’s not his intel
ligence I question, Kate,” Ororo said. “I question his temper.”
“Well, I have the final module,” Kate said. “Logan’s going to do his part at midnight, like we talked about. Phase One has to be complete by then.”
“Phase One,” Peter said. “How normal we make it sound, yet what we contemplate is so fantastic. I still cannot believe it is possible.”
“Strange words, Piotr Alexandreivich, coming from one who’s seen and done the things you have.” Magneto moved his wheelchair slowly across the broken asphalt. He was no longer an enemy—there were too few mutants left to permit differences among them—but he still stayed apart from the other five. Old separations, old enmities, took even longer than twenty years to fully die out.
Peter chuckled. “I have ever been a simple man, old friend. More farmer in my soul than super hero.”
“That may be what we need: a little touch of the New Soviet Man,” Magneto said. “Optimism. The will to move forward no matter what the cost. If there were any alternative, we would take it. But if we do nothing, the world will be at war by tomorrow. By the day after…North America will be craters and ashes. Our actions may not make things better, either for us or for humanity as a whole, but we certainly cannot make them worse.”
How easily he slipped into the role of leader, Kate noted. He spoke for them all, incorporated their concerns and fears, turned them into strength. No wonder he had been such a dangerous enemy.
“Rachel,” he was saying, wheeling himself closer to her and Franklin. “So much depends on you tonight.”
“I won’t fail, Magneto,” she said. “I’ve been meditating all day. Once the Jammer’s operational, we can start anytime.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Kate blurted out. She immediately regretted her tone—she hadn’t meant to snap at anyone, but her nerves were getting the better of her, especially after her encounter with the Rogues. The plan depended on her as much as it did on Rachel, and the waiting—the endless preparation and speculation, the talking—it was killing her.
“A moment, my wife,” Peter said. She stopped and turned to him. The other four moved a respectful distance away. “I have doubts. Can this work? And even if it can, should it? We are proposing to toy with the basic fabric of reality. What happens if we succeed? What might we unmake?” He took her hands, an oddly courtly gesture against the backdrop of the camp. “We ourselves—this love of ours that has survived so much—it might cease to exist along with the Sentinels.”
“That’s a risk we have to take, Peter,” she said. “What does the love of two people matter against the lives of billions? I don’t even know what will happen to the younger me. I might unmake myself. But if our love was meant to be, it will be. We must believe that. Only this time, it will be in a world where our children can grow up free and unafraid. The Sentinels killed that, along with our…our children. If changing the past holds out even the slightest hope of undoing that, I’ll do it. No matter what else the cost.”
His head bowed, Peter listened to her. When she was done talking, he said simply, “I love you, Kate.”
“And I you, Peter…from the moment we first met.”
Now he smiled. “A lovely thing to say, but you were only thirteen. Just a girl. Love—true love—comes later.”
“And it will be there for us later, after I do this,” Kate said. “I need you to believe that. If you don’t believe it, how can I?”
“Then I will,” Peter said.
An hour later, the Jammer was assembled, and they had cleared out the small room. All of them gathered briefly for a last consultation.
“We do not know—and cannot know—exactly what will happen when this projection takes place,” Magneto said. “But you may be certain that the X-Men of twenty-two years ago will be highly skeptical. If I am remembering correctly, you will appear in the immediate aftermath of Jean Grey’s death. The team will be grappling with that and with Scott Summers’ decision to leave the X-Men for a time. Ororo, does that match your recollection?”
“Exactly,” Storm said.
“Are we sure this is the best way?” Franklin asked. “Seems to me we’re risking everything on a plan that—as powerful as we all know Rachel to be—really isn’t likely to work.”
“If you have a better idea, Franklin, we’re all listening,” Rachel said. He looked at her much as Peter was looking at Kate: a man uncomfortable in the knowledge that he was going to be a bystander while his wife took the lead—but also a man plainly worried for her, because none of them knew what was going to happen in the next hour. Perhaps the last hour of their lives.
“None of us has a better idea,” Ororo said. “We have talked this to death. It is time to act. If we are to die, let it not be passively.”
Magneto nodded. “I spent much of my childhood in a place like this,” he said. “I will not end my days in one.”
Franklin held his wife’s gaze a moment longer. Then he held up his hands. “All right. Let’s do it, then.”
Magneto turned back to Rachel. “How much time do you think you need to prepare?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like this before. A few minutes of quiet to gather myself, then…” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Then let’s try it.”
“There’s not going to be any trying it,” Franklin said. “Either we do it or we’re all dead.”
“That’s really helping me focus, Franklin.” Rachel closed her eyes and sat still. Franklin started to say something, but Magneto held up a hand. Franklin cast a worried look back at Rachel, then led the others out of the room.
“Take time, Rachel,” Magneto said. “But not too much. Midnight is coming, and we will only have one chance.” Then he, too, was gone.
At last Rachel had a few minutes alone. She could prepare, could gather herself for a feat that even she did not know whether she could accomplish. She could ensure that Kate’s persona survived the wrenching transition from this future to her teenage self, anchored twenty-two years in the past.
She could also stew over past misdeeds and perform the fruitless calculus of transgression and atonement. How many good deeds, how many lives saved, could balance the years she had spent as Ahab’s hound, hunting down fugitive mutants in the early years of the Sentinel takeover?
None of the X-Men knew about her history, and Rachel wanted to keep it that way. Her sins were private. They knew her last name because the human staff of the camp used it, and Rachel had touched their minds enough to know they had drawn their own conclusions. But with so few mutants remaining, all of them knew better than to ask too many questions when the answers might create resentment and division. Sometimes she thought of telling them. It would be cathartic to unburden herself, but that benefit had to be balanced against their possible reaction upon learning she was responsible for so many of their friends’ deaths.
On the other hand, she had done what she had done to survive. That was the simple truth. If it did not give her peace, at least it allowed her to live with herself.
Guilty self-examination did not do much for her concentration. Rachel sat down and focused her thoughts. She slipped into the nourishing cadence of meditative breathing and stayed there, letting only the present matter.
She had survived the massacre at Xavier’s school. She had survived the purges and anti-mutant lynchings after that. She had done what she had to do to survive. And when she looked back at all those years, she could not believe that any path to redemption still lay open to her. Franklin believed in her—but perversely, that sharpened her own self-loathing. She did not deserve him. She would, she feared, fail his trust, as she had betrayed the trust of so many others before him.
Then Kate Pryde was walking back into the room, and Rachel no longer had the luxury of self-doubt.
“Are we ready?” Magneto asked, wheeling in behind Kate. Ororo, Peter, and Franklin followed behind him.
Franklin was the only one who approached Rachel. He took up a protective posi
tion behind her, hands resting on her shoulders—but she stiffened and said quietly, “I need a little space, Franklin.”
He stepped back. She didn’t look at him. If he was hurt, there was nothing she could do about that; knowing it would distract her.
Kitty leaned in close to Peter, who bent and kissed her once on top of her head and a second time on the lips. “Go, Kate,” he said. “We will do our part. Then return to us, my love.”
She nodded and walked over to the thin mattress. Here she would lie while her personality, her essence, was extracted and transmitted more than twenty years into the past.
Or she would be driven insane. Or she would die. Or her mind would arrive in a stranger’s body—the possibilities for mistakes were endless.
“We’ve assembled the Jammer,” Magneto said. “It won’t work for long. Our timing must be perfect, and we’re also going to need a bit of luck.”
“A bit,” Franklin repeated.
The Jammer sat on the floor next to the mat, at Rachel’s left side; it looked a bit like a teapot on three short legs. Its case contained a small battery, a cluster of antennae, and a multi-spectrum wave interruptor. Just about any mutant power had an effect on some part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the Sentinels were equipped with detectors keyed to the known patterns of surviving mutants. That was where the Jammer came in. It would mask the use of their abilities, permitting Rachel to perform the psychic projection. It would also let the six of them take their inhibitor collars off. Then, at least, they could put up a fight.
Kate corrected herself twice. First, only five of them would be taking off their inhibitor collars. She would be lying on the table. They’d rehearsed it, and they couldn’t risk the time they’d lose getting her collar off before Rachel attempted the telepathic projection. Second, they weren’t planning on putting up a fight right away. Their aim was first to escape.