by Alex Irvine
“He’s in Washington about to testify before the Senate,” Storm said. “He’s very much alive, yes.”
“That’s exactly why I’m here!” Kate said. “The Senate! The Brotherhood is going to attack the hearing and assassinate Senator Kelly—and Professor Xavier, and Moira! When that happens, a whole new series of Sentinels are going to be unleashed, and in twenty years there won’t be a dozen mutants left alive in North America.”
“Paranoia worthy of Magneto,” Nightcrawler commented. “Our Kitten is scared out of her mind.”
“Yes, I am. And you would be too, if you’d seen what I’ve seen. We live in an internment camp in the Bronx. The Sentinels are almost finished with their work. You have to believe me! If we don’t do something, the professor and Senator Kelly will be dead by the end of the day, and it’ll be too late to change anything.” She turned to Kurt, talking fast. She had to get it all out, all at once. “You mentioned Magneto. He’s still alive, but crippled. He’s in a wheelchair, but he helped Rachel prepare to send me back. She’s the only telepath left.”
“Who’s Rachel?” Storm asked.
Seizing on this tiny expression of belief, Kate whirled back to Storm. “Rachel Summers. She’s Scott’s, Cyclops’, daughter. Where is Scott, anyway—oh. Right. I remember. Jean.”
“Yeah. Jean,” Wolverine said. “Cyke is taking himself a little mental-health sabbatical. We all could use one after the Dark Phoenix business but hey, someone has to mind the store. Also, you know Scotty doesn’t have any kids, right?”
“Let her talk, Logan,” Storm warned.
“Scott dies,” Kate said. “Not right away. Later, when the Sentinels really take over.”
“How ’bout the rest of us?” Wolverine asked.
“Storm and Peter are still alive. You too, Logan. You’re the only one who’s not in the camp. Also Magneto’s there, like I said, and Franklin.”
“Franklin Richards?” Storm said.
Kate nodded. Every question they asked gave her a little more hope that they were starting to believe her. “But Reed and Sue are both gone, along with Ben and Johnny. The Sentinels didn’t just kill a few mutants. They decided the best way to control the mutant threat was to eliminate all opposition. There’s a graveyard in the camp—I walk by it every day.”
She looked around. “This feels so strange,” she said. “To be only thirteen again…and to know everything that’s going to happen to all of us…” Her gaze lingered on Peter for a long moment.
“What—”
But Peter never got to finish his question. Over his shoulder, Kate saw the Sentinel.
Oh no, she thought. Something went wrong. This is the wrong past. The Sentinels are already loose…
It was too much, on top of the Rogue attack and the unfamiliarity of everything around her. Seeing the Sentinel triggered an ingrained flight reflex. She screamed and turned to run, plowing straight into Logan, who caught her in a bear hug. “Whoa, Kit!” he said. But she phased right through him and ran blindly away from the Sentinel, across the cleared ground toward the brushy hills. Anywhere to escape the Sentinel.
Nightcrawler teleported into her path, and she ran into him, staggering him as he tried to hold on to her.
“Ruh, Kätzchen,” he said. “You’re safe, you’re safe—” And then she phased through him too, sinking up to her waist in the rocky ground and scrambling back to the surface. Nightcrawler caught her again, and again she phased through him. Storm swooped overhead, unable to help. Kate and Kurt hopscotched across the open ground in a series of brimstone-scented collisions until she exhausted herself and collapsed, with him kneeling at her side.
“The Sentinels,” she said. “They’re already here. I…for a minute I thought…”
Storm landed next to them and crouched alongside Kurt. “Kitten, Kitten,” she said. “You’ve had a shock. Try to calm yourself.”
“I’m not Kitten! I’m Kate!” she cried out. “Don’t tell me to be calm! You don’t know what they’ve done!”
Logan and Peter caught up to the three of them, and stood looking down at her. She had to get herself under control. They were never going to believe her if she couldn’t handle herself. “Give her a moment,” Storm said.
“What do you mean about the Sentinels?” Logan asked. “It’s weird that one showed up here, but that’s the only one I’ve seen lately. They’re not doing anything.”
“They’re not?” Kate took a deep breath. She had to not panic. She had to focus. But it wasn’t easy, with the stress of her last few hours now being routed through the hormonal hair trigger of adolescence. This was part of the projection that she had considered intellectually without really being prepared for. Her entire body felt like it might fly apart from pure nervous energy. “That’s the only Sentinel you’ve seen? Please, tell me again.”
“That is the only Sentinel we’ve seen,” Peter said.
Hearing his voice settled Kate’s nerves a little. She reached for him. “You’ve always been the one I can count on,” she said.
Peter caught Storm’s warning glance and held her at arm’s length. “Count on all of us, Kitty,” he said. “We are all X-Men.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “I…”
She stopped. She’d been about to tell him about their future together: their marriage, the children they’d and lost. But she held herself back. How would Peter react? What effect would that knowledge have on him in the battle that was coming? That secret, Kate decided, was just one more part of the burden she had assumed when she had agreed to this desperate plan.
“It’s all just…it’s too much,” she said. “I can’t handle this.”
“You can, and you will,” Storm said. “Because you must.”
“I don’t know if I believe this,” Wolverine said.
“Logan, you saved my life today,” Kate said.
“Just doing my job, Kit.”
“No, I mean in the future. We were supposed to meet because you’d gotten the last component of the device we needed to deactivate the in-hibitor collars. On the way to our meeting, I had an accident, and I was attacked. You saw it happen and you saved me. It was on Park Avenue.”
“You got mugged on Park Avenue?” Wolverine looked even more skeptical.
“You don’t know what New York is like now. It’s in ruins. There are gangs everywhere; they prey on anyone they think is a mutant, or might carry a mutant gene. They can spot us by our collars and uniforms.” Reflexively Kate’s hand went to her throat. “I don’t have mine on.”
“Kitten, listen,” Storm said. “Nobody has to wear a collar.”
“No, you listen. If you don’t hear me, you will have to wear one,” Kate said.
“She sure has gotten lippy just now,” Wolverine said. “That’s not like her. But I still don’t believe it. No offense, Kit, but I think you’re just scared and got your bell rung.”
“Perhaps,” Kurt said. “But her reaction to the Sentinel…had we even begun telling her about them? Did she even know they existed?”
Wolverine shrugged. “Ask her.”
“If what she says is true, this is not thirteen-year-old Kitty.”
“Now, that is an interesting question,” Peter said. “Kitty. Or Kate. If you’re here, what has happened to Kitty? Where is she?”
“With me, I guess. I mean, with my body,” Kate said. “God, I hope she’s all right. This was—is—hard enough for me. I can only imagine what it will be like for her.”
“Look, whatever we’re going to do about Kit-Kat, we’re not gonna do it here,” Logan said. “Charlie Xavier needs to know about the ambush—and he’ll want to hear about the Sentinel, too. I say we get moving.”
“Yes,” Storm said. She put an arm around Kate’s shoulders. “Keep talking, Kitten. Tell us more.”
“Kate.”
“All right. Kate. I’ll try to remember that.”
They walked quickly back to the Blackbird. Kate tried not to look at the Sentinel,
and she was glad when she boarded in the plane. It wouldn’t be able to see her there.
FOUR
AFTER Rachel finished the psychic projection of Kate Pryde back in time, it took less than thirty minutes for the group to shed their collars, gather anything useful they could carry in their pockets, and leave the South Bronx Mutant Internment Center—for the last time, with any luck. The Sentinels had not detected Rachel’s telepathic exercise. They stood outside the fence, watching as always. But as a rule they paid little attention to what went on inside the camp, unless there was an outbreak of violence.
Rachel winced a little as they walked. The projection had left her with a fierce headache. Franklin stayed close to her. The other three—Peter, Ororo, and Magneto in his rickety wheelchair—followed in a loose group behind them, Peter carrying the unconscious Kate. He had not spoken since the projection except to whisper Kate’s name every so often. Nobody had the heart to tell him to stop. “Did it work, Rach?”
“I think it did,” she said. “I felt…” She glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “I felt the teenage Kitty, just for a second, right at the end. Do you…I don’t know what happened to her. I hope—”
“Don’t,” Franklin said. “This is the only thing we can do. Second-guessing will kill us.”
She didn’t answer. They strolled along, not hurrying, doing nothing to draw attention from the Sentinels or the other inmates—most of whom were clustered in groups for safety, around barrel fires or at the doorways of the barracks. They angled toward the perimeter fence closest to 161st Street, looking for the marker Logan was supposed to have left the night before.
“There,” Ororo said quietly. All of them saw it: a newspaper box, lying on its side between the street and the sidewalk. It marked the place where, less than three feet below the asphalt surface of the former parking lot, a subway maintenance tunnel angled under the camp grounds. Storm drains just inside the fence were big enough to admit a person. The plan was simple: Logan would push one of the grates off, and they would get down into the drain as quickly as possible, then follow it to a maintenance door. That would lead to an old storage room between the storm sewers and the subway tunnel, with access to both.
From there they would head south, toward the Baxter Building, and after that…
They slowed down, to avoid being seen hanging around too close to the fence.
There was a soft scrape as the storm grate shifted and rose slowly out of its frame. Ororo looked around for the two nearest Sentinels, maybe fifty yards away on either side of the newspaper box. Neither of them appeared to have noticed.
“Let’s go,” she said quietly. The group picked up its collective pace, still not hurrying.
Logan’s head and arms appeared as he gently set the grate down next to the open drain.
It’s going to work, Rachel thought. She felt a ripple of pure elation, both at the idea of freedom and at the yearned-for possibility that she might at last have balanced the karmic scales. She couldn’t bring back the mutants she had hunted down, but she could maybe do something better. She could help to undo the entire future. Her entire existing self.
She could start over again, as a girl in Xavier’s school, and no commandos would ever come through the door.
With that possibility shining in her mind, she quickened her pace just a little more—and that was when Kate’s eyes blinked open, and she started to scream.
“Shut her up!” Logan growled. The Sentinels at the nearest posts along the fence turned to look. Peter clapped a hand over her mouth, but Kate kept screaming into it and thrashing in his arms.
“Kate, Kate, it is all right. Peter’s here.”
“So are a lot of Sentinels,” Rachel said. “We better move faster.”
“Go,” Peter said. She and Franklin ran, disappearing into the storm drain.
All of the Sentinels were on full alert now, and once they powered up their repulsors they would lay down a devastating concentration of fire. The X-Men had to get out before that happened.
The impact of an energy beam blasted a large, irregular crater in the asphalt between Peter and the drain. He stumbled and put a hand out to break his fall, inadvertently uncovering Kate’s mouth.
“Peter! Peter, what happened to you? Where are we?! What’s going on?” Twisting around, Kate saw Ororo and cried out again. “Ororo! What’s happening?”
“Mutants, any attempt to escape will be cause for termination,” one of the Sentinels said from the fence line, less than thirty yards away. Storm whirled and raised her arms, summoning lightning that seemed to come from every part of the sky at once. It crackled along the entire length of the fence, blasting into every Sentinel patrolling there. They were staggered, but the backup Sentinels coming from within the camp were not.
Another Sentinel’s beam thrummed past Peter, who transformed into his steel form and threw the first piece of broken concrete he found back at the robot. The concrete crashed into it, shattering the lens on its torso repulsor. The other Sentinels sidestepped as it stumbled, clearing their field of fire.
Peter hurled more pieces of rock and debris at the approaching Sentinels, trying to buy Magnus some time while carrying Kate toward the drain. The broken ground was difficult for Magnus’ wheelchair. While the Sentinels at the fence were still recovering, the ones inside the compound would make short work of him. One of them stomped straight through a nearby barracks from its post deeper in the camp. Others were coming from the headquarters just inside the front gate. Soon they would have the mutants trapped in the open space between the fence and the barracks.
“The mutants are not wearing inhibitor collars,” one of the Sentinels boomed. Others relayed the message up and down the fence.
“Peter, put me down, please, please, put me down!”
He knelt and turned his broad back to the oncoming Sentinel, shielding the woman he loved from anything they might fire or throw. “Kate,” he said. “Are you back already? Did it work? What did Xavier say?”
“What are you talking about?” She looked around wildly. “Where are we? Back from what? Peter, what’s going on? And nobody’s ever called me Kate in my life. What’s happening?!”
It hit him then. Rachel had not just projected Kate’s psyche back into Kitty. She had switched the two of them in each other’s bodies—or more correctly, into the temporally distant versions of their own bodies.
“Peter!” Storm shouted from the edge of the drain. “Is she awake? Get her in here!”
A blast from another Sentinel repulsor hit Peter a glancing blow. His organic-steel body absorbed and dissipated the heat, but the impact knocked him forward. He held Kate with one arm and punched the other one forearm-deep into the melted asphalt, stopping himself. Letting her go, he pulled himself free and said, “Okay, my love. Run.”
Something strange happened to her face when he said my love. If they hadn’t been in the middle of a combined jailbreak and battle for the lives of the entire human race, Peter might well have died of embarrassment. Of course she couldn’t know they were married. And what must he have sounded like, saying that to a girl of thirteen?
“The guy in the wheelchair, he’s getting stuck!” she cried out. Then she said incredulously, “Is that Magneto?”
“Yes,” Peter said. “We have few allies now, and need all we have.”
“You need him? For what?”
“Are you looking around you, girl?” he shouted at her. “There are maybe ten living mutants on this continent, and we are all about to be killed by Sentinels. Having Magneto on our side is not the oddest thing you will see tonight…if we live to see the rest of tonight!”
He immediately felt miserable for yelling at her.
Peter took two giant steps toward the drain. Storm had already gone through it, down and away. Peter, Kate, and Magneto were the last three. Getting through would be impossible in his steel form; he would have to transform back just as he approached, and hope the Sentinels didn’t pick him
off in the moment between his transformation and his disappearance into the haven of New York’s stormwater drainage system.
“Kate! Kitty, whichever! Let’s go!” he cried out. But when he looked back, not only was she not following him, she was going back for Magneto.
* * *
THE DAMNED chair would be the death of him. He supposed it was only just that he should die in a wheelchair, having been responsible for Charles dying in one. Karma, some might call it. Or poetic justice. What Magneto called it was death. And although he was more than one hundred years old and had lost the use of his legs, he had no interest whatsoever in experiencing death.
It looked, however, as if the choice would not be left up to him.
He forced the chair foot by foot over the ground. The pavement was pitted by years of neglect and thousands of Sentinel footfalls, and Magneto had never possessed Colossus’s enormous physical strength. There were four Sentinels within striking distance; although Ororo had disabled a number of the others with her lightning strike, those four would be more than enough to eliminate him.
Something tickled at the back of his mind—an idea that would not quite form, and probably would never have the chance, given the circumstances.
“Magneto!” Kate called. Something about her diction had changed, her posture…and then he knew. Rachel, thought Magneto, you have outdone yourself.
He pushed himself harder and shouted at her. “Stupid girl! Go!”
She was less than twenty feet away now. Behind her, Colossus had turned around, as well, and was returning for him. “Piotr, I forbid this!” he shouted. “You must survive! Get out of here!”
Colossus ignored him, and a moment later the world around all three of them disappeared in thunder and fire.
* * *
IN THE stormwater tunnel, the impact knocked everyone off their feet. The sound seemed to take forever to echo away down the maze of passages, and the water in the tunnel’s central trench rippled and sloshed back and forth from the impact above.