by Alex Irvine
Wolverine was the first to call out. “Everyone sound off.”
“I’m here,” Rachel said. “And Franklin’s right next to me.”
“’Ro? You in here?”
“Yes.”
Franklin switched on a flashlight, their only one, and played the beam around the tunnel until he saw her. She was closest to the vertical drain shaft and had taken the worst of the explosion. Blood ran in her hair and down one leg.
“Where’s Kate and Peter?”
“They went back for Magneto,” Ororo said. “They’re still up there. So is he.” She felt heavy with the knowledge that already they might have lost half their team. No, not they: she. Leadership had always been difficult for Ororo, because she felt the responsibility for those she commanded more personally than was healthy.
“Well, there’s no going back for ’em now,” Logan said. “We have to move. Nobody use powers. They need to think we’re dead, or else we’re not getting anywhere.”
“Wait, wait!” Rachel said. She caught Franklin’s arm and aimed the flashlight at the collapsed part of the tunnel, where rubble nearly choked it off. Beyond that, to the south, was the route to freedom. “Look,” Rachel said. The rest of them saw a steel elbow and forearm, a flash of red.
“Let’s get digging.” Wolverine started probing at the rubble. Above and around them, the steel reinforcing the tunnel groaned and shifted. “And let’s do it fast. This isn’t going to hold forever.”
“Especially if Sentinels start stomping around up there,” Rachel said.
“He must be out cold, or he’d be digging himself out,” Logan said.
“But he’s not dead, or he’d revert to human form. So let’s get it done.” Franklin stepped to Logan’s side; the two of them started shifting rubble, as carefully and quickly as they could. Rachel pitched in, too. When they uncovered Peter’s head, she held it and started talking to him, trying to wake him up.
Ororo came to help, as well, but Logan held her back. “Take a minute, ’Ro. You need it. We got this.”
So she sat, and watched, and waited for her hearing to come all the way back. She wondered what had become of Magneto and Kate Pryde. So much death already, Ororo thought. Did they really have any chance?
* * *
MAGNETO slowly recovered his senses. He smelled burning hair, and he tried to get up and run before he remembered that he had lost the use of his legs, long ago, in a situation not unlike this one. He raised his head and saw a smoking crater, filled with debris, where the stormwater drain had been. That avenue of escape, it seemed, had been cut off permanently. The Sentinels were calling out warnings, but he couldn’t hear them very well with the explosion still ringing in his ears. Of Peter and Kate there was no sign.
The others…he could not keep in his mind who the others had been. He knew he was suffering some kind of blast injury because there was an idea dancing just at the edge of his cognition. But he was an old man, and he could not bring it into focus.
He began to drag himself away from the edge of the crater, looking through the smoke for his wheelchair. He spotted it, farther down along the crater’s edge toward the fence. A Sentinel stood there, watching him. Then it shifted its gaze.
Propping himself on one elbow, Magneto turned to see what it was looking at. Kate Pryde stood unscathed at the edge of the crater, having instinctively phased when her body felt the first whisper of overpressure in the air.
“Go, girl,” he said.
“How? The hole—”
“Phase, dammit. You just did, at the explosion. How do you think you’re still alive? Now do it again! Go! Now!”
She looked over his shoulder, apparently at another Sentinel, because her eyes grew very wide and her form translucent. Then she dropped straight down into the ground and was gone.
He was trapped, by himself in the camp, with Sentinels all around.
But as he had said to the group just an hour or so before: Max Eisenhardt had spent part of his childhood in a camp not unlike this one. Magneto would not end his days here.
“Mutant 067, do not move!” the nearest Sentinel commanded. “Your next potentially hostile action will result in immediate termination.”
All actions are potentially hostile, Magneto thought. It was a critical flaw in the Sentinels’ approach that they did not understand that.
Then something dawned on him, the idea he had not been able to catch a moment before. His head was beginning to clear. It was time to take his own advice, was it not? He had fought the Nazis. He had fought the X-Men. He had fought Hydra, and the first generations of Sentinels, and more other enemies than he could enumerate. And then, for almost twenty years, he had been a prisoner. Confined to a wheelchair, a collar on his neck for so long that he had nearly forgotten he had any powers to inhibit.
Powers like the ones Kitty had just exhibited. Colossus, as well. He wondered briefly whether Kate Pryde would be having the same difficulty back in the past…if, indeed, she had survived the projection.
“Godspeed, friends,” Magneto said softly.
He felt the lines and fields of magnetic force around him. And for the first time in more than fifteen years, he began to focus, their patterns and idiosyncrasies flooding back into his consciousness. The rush of it blasted through his endocrine system and into his mind, filling him with a joy he had forgotten how to feel. For a moment, he almost believed that he could walk again, so powerful was the surge. Then he refocused his attention and began to concentrate his power on his chair.
“Exercise of your powers will result in immediate termination,” the Sentinel warned.
“I’m only getting my wheelchair, Sentinel,” Magneto said in his best old-man quaver.
The Sentinel hesitated, for the briefest moment. But that was all Magneto needed to see the fields and currents of magnetism inside its body. With the slightest mental tug, he tore it apart.
FIVE
ON THE Blackbird, Storm continued trying to probe at Kate’s story. “Tell me again,” she said. “How were you going to get free of the collars so Rachel could send you back?”
“Logan did most of the work,” Kate said. “He spends a lot of time in Canada, with the Free Canadian Army. There are rumors that some other mutants are up there, too, but we don’t know for sure. They put together a jamming device that masked the fields from the inhibitor collars so we could remove them. Then we could use our powers—but we didn’t know how long it would last. Once they sent me back, the rest of the group was going to break out of the camp and head for the Baxter Building.”
“The Baxter Building?”
“That’s the Sentinels’ command center. We needed to disable them, their whole operation. If we didn’t, things were going to get a lot worse.”
“From what you have already told us, that does not seem possible,” Peter said.
“But it is,” Kate said. “The Sentinels are planning to expand their anti-mutant operations to other continents once they’ve completely pacified North America. Europe has been watching, and they’ve seen how the Sentinels work. They just slaughter everyone they think might be a threat, and only leave enough alive to do research so they can do a better job of killing next time. So the Europeans have decided there’s only one thing they can do. Tomorrow, they’re going to nuke every Sentinel installation they can find.”
“Good riddance,” Logan said from the cockpit, where he was finishing preflight checks while the Blackbird’s engines warmed up.
“One of those installations is in the Baxter Building,” Kate said. “There are others in cities all over North America. Hundreds of them. It’s not going to be a surgical strike. It’s going to be a nuclear apocalypse.”
There was a brief silence while they all digested this. “Well, that’s a little different,” Logan said. “If it’s true.”
He backed the Blackbird around, then waited while Max-X guards cleared the bodies of Hellfire Club mercenaries from the landing strip. One of the guards waved an al
l-clear. Logan eased the Blackbird forward through a tight turn, aiming it back up the runway just north of the prison. “Windy as hell,” he grumbled. “Hate taking off in this.”
As the Blackbird picked up speed, everyone strapped in to a semicircle of seats at the front end of the passenger cabin. Farther back was a narrow passage between compartments jammed with surveillance equipment and other stores, making the Blackbird a mobile command center.
Logan glared at the Sentinel, still standing watch as the Max-X staff got on with their cleanup.
Coming over the spine of the Rockies, Kate saw a formation of cargo helicopters. Support crews and equipment, probably, she thought. It was going to be a while before Max-X was a suitable place to imprison anyone more dangerous than a car thief.
Looking at the Sentinel, she had a shiver of recollection, picturing the pickets of Sentinels around the perimeter of the camp in the South Bronx.
“Wish we had onboard missiles,” Logan said. “It’d do me good to slag that tin can on our way out.”
“That’s going to be part of our debrief with Professor Xavier,” Ororo said. “A s well as the Hellfire Club ambush. You know they were after you, Kitten, don’t you?”
Kate hadn’t given it a thought. “They were? I mean, I just woke up in the middle of everything. Yes, I remember a long time ago they…what did they want me for?”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Peter said. “That’s over. Let us not confuse her, Ororo. She is having a difficult time, whatever the reason.”
“Also I think we should be more concerned with the Brotherhood than with the Hellfire Club,” Nightcrawler said.
“You got that right, Kurt,” Logan called over the rising roar of the Blackbird’s engines. “I think the whole time-travel thing is a smoke screen. I don’t doubt for a second the Brotherhood’s behind this.”
Kate didn’t know how to answer this. It seemed cruel that Logan was the fulcrum of all their plans in the future, yet here he dismissed her story out of hand.
The Blackbird picked up speed and lifted off, skimming over the foothills and climbing sharply to reach cruising altitude. The Rocky Mountains fell behind and the high plains appeared, stretching unbroken to the horizon. Logan leveled off at fifty thousand feet, well above commercial traffic, and pointed the Blackbird east-northeast.
Kate stayed quiet as long as she could, needing the time to collect herself and knowing that she was asking her friends to believe a story that seemed crazy from beginning to end—or perhaps from end to beginning, since they were now in a time period before her actual story began. But soon she started to feel that the longer she let the silence go, the more likely it became that the rest of the X-Men would find ways to dismiss her. If that happened, she would be stuck here, or put in a padded room somewhere in Xavier’s mansion while they worked on her mind. Meanwhile, the future versions of these people who had become so dear to her would die.
Perhaps her own future self would die…or was already dead? If so, what would happen to wide-eyed Kitty, the newly minted X-Man with no idea of what her future held? Would she be returned to her body if Kate’s was killed in the future? Or would Kitty’s mind dissipate into the psychic ether, leaving Kate to relive, Cassandra-like, the coming terrible years?
Fear got her talking again, and she knew she sounded scared. “Logan, I thought at least you would believe me.”
“Me? What the hell gave you that idea?”
“Two or three hours ago you saved my life. I guess that’s what.”
“Hell of a story, Kit-Kat. But it just doesn’t hang together.” Logan engaged the Blackbird’s autopilot and turned around in the pilot’s chair. “Everybody hear me out. The Blob was one of the original Brotherhood members, right? We know that.”
“Yes,” Ororo said.
“And he’s such a wad that nobody except the Brotherhood would lift a finger to help him, right?”
“Okay.”
“So today he breaks out of Max-X, and Kit has this episode not two hours later.”
“Genau,” Nightcrawler jumped in. “And now she is warning us about the Brotherhood. Do you believe in that kind of coincidence?”
Logan was shaking his head. “I don’t believe in any kind of coincidence. But we don’t have to believe her to know something shifty’s going on. Try this one: Emma Frost or some other mind-control mastermind—hell, maybe Mastermind himself—is doing this to get us all ruffled and sucker us all into being there for a big attack on not just Xavier, but all the X-Men they can get.”
“Now that is a conspiracy theory,” Peter commented.
“You’re damn right it is, Petey, because one way or another we’re dealing with a conspiracy. I just don’t think it has anything to do with time travel.”
“You’re wrong,” Kate said. “Listen to you making up a story, just because you don’t like the one I’m telling.”
“The story I’m making up doesn’t involve time travel and mutant concentration camps,” Logan said. “You tell me, Kit. Would you believe you, if you were hearing this story?”
“How about we all cool off?” Ororo said. “Kitty’s story is difficult to believe, but it will be easy enough to disprove. We’ll be in Washington, D.C., in about an hour. Then we will touch base with Professor Xavier and see what he can sense inside Kitty’s mind.”
“Seems like maybe we ought to just give him a call,” Wolverine said. “Save ourselves the detour. The kid needs help.”
“As you said, Logan, this may be a mind-control initiative by Emma Frost or a Brotherhood telepath,” Storm said. “Taking that into account, we must also consider the possibility that any communication channel is compromised. The only thing we can do is get to Washington and speak to Xavier directly. He will need to be in close contact with Kitty—or Kate—to understand what has happened to her mind in any case. No point in agitating him before he can take any real action.”
“Okay, ’Ro. If you say so. I’m just the chauffeur.” Logan visibly checked out of the conversation, focusing on piloting the Blackbird. They were already over the plains of the Oklahoma Panhandle, and Logan banked the Blackbird slightly north to skip around a thunderstorm visible ahead.
Storm thought for a moment, and then turned to Kate. “You said Logan saved your life. What were you doing out of the camp?”
“I’m kind of a trustee there,” Kate said. “They send me—the Sentinels, I mean—they send me on errands sometimes. Most of the non-mutant inmates in the camp are just criminals. So the Sentinels use us as couriers. They make sure we know that if anything goes wrong, the other mutants will suffer for it. Just this morning I was taking tissue samples to a lab at Hunter College. Or what used to be Hunter College. Now it’s just a research lab.”
Kate was still getting used to the sound of her adolescent voice, the astonishing energy and restlessness of being a teenager. Even her teeth felt different. Another wave of shock and unease swept over her. It didn’t help that she kept looking at Peter, who had no idea what their future held. He was leaning into the Blackbird’s small medical bay, getting some kind of field treatment for the wound in his shoulder. It wouldn’t slow him down much when he was in his steel form, but even a slight disability could be a problem if they were going to be taking on the Brotherhood.
“Kitty,” Storm prompted. “I mean Kate. Go on, please.”
She looked away from Peter. “I…tripped, I guess. Or there was some kind of trap set in the sidewalk. But I fell through and there were Rogues there.”
“But you got here. Logan saved you from these Rogues, and…?”
“Rachel thought up a plan to…project my mind back into me here,” Kate said. “This earlier me, I mean.”
“You’ve had quite a shock, Kitty,” Ororo said. “Take it slow. We would like to believe you, but—”
“Funny you should say that,” Kate said. “I remember you telling me the hardest part of this operation would be convincing you of the truth.”
“Touché,”
Nightcrawler said. “Listen to her, Ororo. Look at her. Does she speak and move like a girl of thirteen?”
“No, she doesn’t,” Ororo admitted.
“Well, she wouldn’t, if an adult woman was pulling her strings,” Logan said. “What we oughta do is head for home and get our little Kitten to a real doctor—”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a girl,” Kate said. “I’m thirty-five years old. And if you don’t listen to me, there’s…” She was at a loss, trying to describe everything that lay in their future. “You have to listen to me. If they kill Senator Kelly, Professor Xavier’s going to be next. And there won’t be any stopping it.”
“It seems to me that the safe thing would be to touch base with Professor Xavier,” Peter said. “He will be able to see what is happening inside our Kitty’s mind. Then, if necessary, it’s a short trip from Washington, D.C., to home.”
“Waste of time,” Logan said. “If she’s inventing kids for Scott—”
“I’m not,” Kate said. “I had children, too.” Her eyes looked off into the distance. “We would have had more, even as bad as things were getting, but mutants are forbidden to breed—”
“Kitty,” Storm said. “Let’s get back on track. If you want us to believe you, we need you to be very specific about how this happened and what you think we should do.”
“And let’s not forget, she’s got us all palling around with Magneto, too,” Logan said.
“That’s enough, Logan. You’re making things worse.”
“You got it, ’Ro. Lip zipped. You have fun with story time.”
As far as any of them knew, Magneto was dead following a confrontation with the X-Men in the Savage Land, when his polar fortress collapsed. If he was alive—which, given his resilience, was certainly possible—he had been keeping a low profile. It seemed fantastic that he would reconcile with the X-Men in the way Kate’s story suggested. “Are you sure about Magneto?” Ororo asked.
“Right before I left, he said something about living in a concentration camp when he was a child, and not wanting to die in one. That’s the last thing I remember about him. And he’s in a wheelchair. The Sentinels paralyzed him when they attacked a base of his in the Caribbean. I think he said it was right after the Mutant Control Act was passed.”