by Alex Irvine
“Mutant Control Act. I do not like the sound of that,” Nightcrawler said. He would be one of the first to be controlled, due to his unusual appearance, and he knew it. “When was this act passed? Or should I say when will it be?”
“Five years from now,” Kate said. “After Kelly’s assassination and the next election. Things get worse fast.” She looked toward the cockpit. “Of all of us, only Logan is free, in my time. He’s the one who got us the parts for the Jammer.”
“That got you out of your collars,” Ororo prompted.
“Right. Then we were ready. Rachel…did whatever she did, and then the rest were going to break out of the camp, with Logan’s help.”
“This is getting us back to the nuclear attack from Europe?”
Kate nodded. “Yes, the only chance we have… had? I don’t even know how to talk about this. The only chance was to take out the Sentinels at their command center, cripple their communications so the Europeans would hold off on their attack. We were all…I don’t know, going to go to Canada or something. If it worked.”
It occurred to her that the events she was describing were, in a sense, happening even as she spoke. If time moved the same way, at the same speed…if any of it was real… “They might already all be dead,” she said. “I might be. If my body is dead there—”
“Try not to think about it,” Ororo said. “Nobody’s unlocked the puzzle of time yet, and we will not be the first. What we need to know is what we tell Professor Xavier if we’re going to pull him out of a Senate hearing.”
“Tell him he’s going to die,” Kate said. “Tell him if the Brotherhood assassinates Senator Kelly, we’re all going to die.”
There was silence in the Blackbird. Then Kate said, “I can’t believe I made it. Rachel said she could do it, but I didn’t believe her. She…I guess I owe her an apology, if I ever see her again. If…I wonder where the teenage me is.”
“She’s fine,” Ororo said. “You have to believe that. This is against my better judgment, but I think I believe you, Kate Pryde. And if what you’re saying is true, we need you absolutely focused and committed, if we are going to avert this future.”
Nightcrawler spoke up again. “I am dead, as well, nicht wahr, Kitten?”
“A long time ago,” she said.
“A long time ago, and not so very far in the future,” Kurt mused. “No one really understands time, I suppose.”
“Here’s a time we can understand. We’re going to be in D.C. in about forty minutes,” Logan said. “All we can do until then is hang tight.”
SIX
KITTY stopped shaking about the time Wolverine finished digging Colossus out of the rubble from the tunnel collapse. The job should have gone quicker, but Rachel couldn’t use her telekinetic abilities for fear of drawing the Sentinels to them.
Kitty couldn’t do anything but look around her and tremble. She was old. Look how old she was. She tried to talk, then shied away from the sound of her own voice. The others…all of them except Logan were so much older. “What’s happening?” she asked, over and over.
Ororo came over to her. Logan was busy digging, Peter was buried, and the other two watched the collapsed area for some sign of... “Was that Magneto?” Kitty asked incredulously.
“It was,” Ororo said.
“You guys are friends with Magneto?”
She’d sunk through the tunnel ceiling just as the X-Men freed themselves from the falling debris and figured out that Colossus was trapped. Kitty was on a thin edge, with different kinds of madness on either side.
The X-Men, with the exception of Peter, were equally confused. Peter was still being excavated from under a hundred tons of rock and steel, so he wasn’t contributing to the conversation. The others spoke quietly, knowing the Sentinels would be searching. As long as they stayed underground, they would probably be safe. The Sentinels were too big to operate effectively in the tunnels.
“So, did it work?” asked a man Kitty didn’t recognize. He’d stuck close to the red-haired woman. “Who did you see?”
“See?” Kitty had no idea what he was talking about. “Who was I supposed to see?”
Logan pulled Peter free of the rubble. Peter muttered in Russian. One of his eyelids wouldn’t stop twitching.
“Hold off with the questions, Franklin,” Ororo said. “There’s something going on here. Kate—”
“You’re all so old,” Kitty said in wonder, looking at Peter and then Ororo. “And I don’t even know you,” she said to Franklin. “Or you,” to Rachel.
“What are you talking about, Kate?” Franklin asked. “Of course you know us. Did you hit your head? How old do you think you are?”
“Thirteen,” she said. “I won’t be fourteen for another couple of months.”
“Oh, my God,” Rachel said. “It worked. The switch worked.”
Kitty’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. “Switch? You switched me with my old self?”
“We’re not that old, Kitten,” Ororo said.
Kitty wondered whether Ororo had looked in a mirror lately. “You were just…I just saw you a minute ago! And you were…” She stalled, too many questions competing for space in her brain. “You switched me? Why? What…what is this place?”
“New York. South Bronx,” Logan said.
“But…the Sentinels? And who’s…is the Kitty from now back in my body?”
“We call her Kate, but yes,” Ororo said.
Kitty paused for a long moment. Then she said, with a brittle laugh, “Boy, they told me I’d see some strange stuff in the X-Men. Where’s everyone else? Angel, Nightcrawler?”
Now it was Logan and Ororo’s turn to pause. Rachel and Franklin looked to them, since they’d been there when this teenage Kitty had joined the X-Men.
“Kit-Kat,” Logan said, “I’m going to hit you with it all at once. Everyone you don’t see right here is dead, except for a couple of guys in Alpha Flight, and I’m not sure about them. We’re about to raid the Sentinel HQ in the Baxter Building. If we don’t take it out, there’s going to be a nuclear strike and all of us will be dead.” He looked her in the eye, keeping her gaze focused on his. “Those are the facts. We sent Kate back in time to see if we could do something about it, and you showed up here. Guess your mind needed a place to hang out while future-you checked out your time again.”
“I time-traveled and body-switched, all at once,” Kitty said. Her voice was almost entirely drained of inflection. “And Peter said my love—”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Ororo said.
Kitty looked at Peter, who was studying the ground. The whole situation was too many kinds of wrong. She opened her mouth and started talking, trying to anchor herself with the sound of her own voice. “I can’t handle this. I can’t handle this. I can’t handle this!”
“Kit-Kat, you need to handle it, because we need you,” Logan said. “Now let’s get moving. First person makes a Freaky Friday joke gets claws in his gizzard.”
* * *
THEY moved fast through the abandoned maintenance tunnel, angling back into the main tunnel that crossed under the Harlem River into Manhattan. “Only a hundred and some blocks to the Baxter Building,” Logan said. “We take this tunnel straight down to Grand Central, come up on 42nd Street, we’re right there. Piece of cake, unless we run into a collapse.”
“Or Rogues,” the red-haired woman said. Her name was Rachel, but that was all Kitty knew about her.
“Mind-control ’em. Set ’em on each other and watch the fun,” Logan said. “Easy, right?”
“Sure, easy,” Rachel said. “Until it brings the Sentinels down on us.”
“That’s gonna happen anyway, Rachel. Sooner or later they’re gonna know where we are. All that means is we gotta be ready to fight. Kitten, how you doing?”
“I’m having a little trouble, Logan. I mean…a lot of trouble. My body doesn’t feel right. My eyes are different, I’m…bigger all over, my voice…this doesn’t even feel like m
e! And everyone’s dead, and—”
Abruptly she stopped talking—so abruptly that Ororo shot a warning glance at Rachel, who shook her head. “I didn’t do anything,” Rachel said.
“I’m okay,” Kitty said. “I’ll get a grip, I’ll handle it. But did we have to leave Magneto? I always thought of him as an enemy, but seeing him in his wheelchair…it reminded me of Professor Xavier.”
“The Sentinels almost collapsed the tunnel on us, Kitten,” Ororo said. “There was no way for us to get back and help him.” Sadly she added, “When I think of what he said, about not ending his days in such a place…it’s cruel, what happened to him.”
“I’ll bet he gave ’em hell before they got him, though. Ol’ Magnus wasn’t going to screw around once his collar was off,” Logan said.
“A noble death is still a death,” Peter said. “I am sick of death.”
“We don’t know for sure he’s dead,” Kitty said. “I don’t believe it.”
* * *
A BOOM echoed up and down the tunnel as they approached the 96th Street station. It was empty and dark. The ticket booth’s bulletproof glass was shattered, and its contents—including several bones—had been scattered around the turnstiles.
“What’s that?” Franklin said. Another boom shook the tunnel. Pieces of concrete, from pebbles to blocks the size of a human being, fell onto the platform and the tracks.
Then, with a deafening sound of rending metal and collapsing concrete, the station ceiling was torn away, revealing the night sky—and three Sentinels looming through the hole.
“Sentinels!” Franklin cried out reflexively. The air shifted as he began to focus his powers, but a blinding energy beam as wide as Colossus’ shoulder lanced down through the hole and incinerated Franklin where he stood.
The blast of the beam’s impact on the tunnel floor drowned out Rachel’s screams and knocked all of them sprawling. Ororo hit the tracks, her senses dulled by the sound and smoke. Her mind spun back to a conversation a few weeks before. They’d just confirmed that Logan could get them the Jammer. Briefly intoxicated with the glimmer of possibility, Kate had said: We should get the collars off and show them what we can do. Franklin could just think the Baxter Building out of existence.
I…no, Franklin had said. No. I can’t do that kind of reality-shifting anymore. The consequences…I can’t control them.
Rachel had tried to convince him, but even she could not break through the psychological barrier—or get him to explain his reasoning any further. No, Franklin had said over and over. I can’t.
Perhaps he had been correct to worry. Once a mutant of Franklin’s power started tinkering with the fabric of reality, there was no way to know for certain where the ramifications of that change would stop.
Now it no longer mattered.
As they scrambled to their feet, the Sentinels broadcast an alert. “Patrol 3L-40 has contacted mutant escapees. All patrols respond.”
The other Sentinels’ torso-embedded repulsors were charging. “Surrender or face immediate termination,” one of the Sentinels said. “You will receive no other warning.”
All of them froze for a moment, conditioned by years of prison and inhibitor collars to obey Sentinel commands. “You call that a warning?” Logan growled.
Rachel, with a howl of agonized fury, unleashed a telekinetic pulse that turned the molecules of the atmosphere itself into a blast wave. It struck the Sentinel that had killed Franklin with the equivalent of the overpressure from a megaton nuclear bomb. The Sentinel’s head and torso disintegrated into shrapnel, peppering the two on either side of it, staggering but not damaging them.
“Control,” one of the Sentinels said. “Escapees also not wearing inhibitor—ZZZKK!”
Storm shot up out of the subway station, unleashing a blast of lightning that interrupted the Sentinel’s transmission. Electricity arced between the two Sentinels, momentarily causing the lights of nearby traffic signals to blink. Then they went dark again, and the Sentinels regained their balance. Their repulsors began to charge again, the process reset by the electrical interference.
Storm hit both of them with another blast, but their insulation and composite structure lessened the lightning’s effect. She was damaging them, but not fast enough.
Down in the tunnel, Colossus gleamed in the lightning flashes, his banded organic-steel body tensing to join the battle. Kate ducked away from him, under the remaining roof overhang, searching for a way to help. Logan saw Colossus and yelled out, “How long’s it been, Petey?!”
“Far too long, Wolverine!”
Logan jumped toward Colossus, who caught him and launched him upward in the first Fastball Special seen for almost twenty years. The snikt of Wolverine’s claws cut through the din of the battle just as the Adamantium slashed through the side of the Sentinel’s face, gouging out one of its eyes and exposing interior circuitry for a follow-up slash as Logan landed on its shoulder. A high electronic squeal, uncomfortably like a scream, burst from two different places in the Sentinel’s cranial assembly.
It clapped a huge hand onto its shoulder, smashing Logan down and grabbing him up in its fist. “TerminationSQUEEEEEE,” it said, the voice coming from the hole in its head as well as its mouth. The sound would have burst a normal man’s eardrums, and the pressure of its fist was slowly crushing even Logan’s Adamantium-reinforced body.
“Storm! You got an opening here!” he yelled. “Finish this sucker!”
Lightning split the sky, hitting the Sentinel squarely in the head. Its fist spasmed open as the electrical charge coursed through it—and through Logan, who fell, stunned, to crash down on the roof of a long-abandoned car.
Rachel and Colossus were coming out of the station onto the street. Rachel knocked the remaining Sentinel spinning with another telekinetic blast, and Storm summoned lightning that crackled around her body as she hung fifty feet in the air. But Storm couldn’t release the charge—Rachel was too close to the Sentinel and too far gone in her berserk grief to listen.
As Storm waited for her chance, she spotted three more Sentinels, coming at a run down Lexington from the north. Their footsteps shook loose bricks and shards of glass from the abandoned buildings on either side of the street.
Colossus saw them, too. Four at once? he thought. They could not fight so many, or the others that were surely coming, unless they kept moving. Guerrilla tactics: hit and run.
As all four Sentinels passed in front of a derelict hotel, Colossus put his head down and built up a head of steam. He drove himself into the corner of the building and along the length of its front wall, smashing the support beams as he went. The building sagged into an avalanche of bricks and steel, burying the Sentinels in six stories of rubble and collapsing another part of the damaged subway station across the street.
“Yeah!” Wolverine shouted. “Attaboy, Petey!”
Colossus turned back to rejoin the group. He clambered over the rubble, seeing the remains of one Sentinel partially exposed. Its eyes were blank, and he felt a pang of conscience at what he had done. This was his curse, to be a peaceful man gifted with powers that made him indispensable in a time of war.
Scared out of hiding by the rain of concrete and steel inside the station, Kitty Pryde reached street level just in time to see the wreckage shift under Colossus. An armored purple arm reached up and out, grabbing his leg and pulling him down. The rest of the Sentinel slowly appeared, wreckage cascading around its damaged, sparking body. It raised Colossus up. He twisted and turned in its grip. But dangling as he was from one foot, he couldn’t get the leverage to pry its fingers loose.
“Kate!” Logan shouted. He ran toward the Sentinel and jumped, using his claws like ice axes to climb its body. “Do the phasing thing!”
“What? Why?” she asked.
Logan started hacking at the Sentinel’s arm. It snapped the arm back, sending Logan flying over Kitty’s head into what had once been a restaurant storefront. The Sentinel was broadcasting a reques
t for reinforcements at deafening volume, periodically interrupted by gibberish and electronic noise.
“Just do it!” Logan shouted from inside the restaurant. He was struggling to get loose from the pile of tables and chairs his impact had shaken up.
Kitty covered the distance to the Sentinel in ten steps and reached out, feeling herself become incorporeal as her fingertips touched its leg. She passed through it and felt energy surge all around without touching her. There was a sound, a high-pitched mechanical scream. When she passed out the other side of the Sentinel, a rain of sparks was falling around her and Colossus was landing flat on his back on the street.
Kitty looked up as the Sentinel’s enormous bulk sagged down toward her, smoke leaking from its joints and eyes. She phased again, feeling it pass through her to sprawl face-down on the edge of the debris mountain left by the hotel’s collapse. When she was clear of it again, she became solid and smelled burned circuitry and insulation.
“I forgot, you haven’t learned that yet,” Logan said, wiping machine oils and hydraulic fluids off his claws with a tablecloth. “When you phase through something that’s got electrical works, your phasing fries them—for a minute, at least.”
“Good to know,” Kitty said. She looked at the fallen Sentinel and thought: I did that. A fierce pride rose in her. She was part of the X-Men. They were going to save the world.
“Company is coming, friends,” Colossus said. “We were not subtle.”
“Then let’s get outta here,” Logan said. “Back into the tunnels.”
“That restricts our movement,” Ororo objected.
“I got a plan, ’Ro. Remember, I’ve had a lot of time to set things up out here, and I couldn’t tell you everything while you were in Camp Sunshine up in the Bronx. Okay?”
Looking both curious and irritated, Ororo said, “Yes. Okay. But you will tell us very soon, Logan. No secrets.”