by Alex Irvine
Blob sneered. “You just got through tellin’ us you don’t know what’s gonna happen, but you know what I was gonna say?”
Destiny smiled. “Exactly. You are gathering your courage right now to say something you think will advance your position within the group by demeaning what you see as my failure. But doing that will exceed Raven’s patience and will elicit consequences for you. Believe me, they are not consequences you wish to suffer. So you will not say it.”
Blob opened his mouth, then shut it again. Pyro snickered.
“You don’t know nothin’ about Fred J. Dukes,” Blob said.
“Believe that if you wish,” Destiny said, still wearing her condescending smile.
“Who is this variable? One of us?” Mystique asked.
“I do not believe so,” Destiny said. “We are all as we were: creatures of this moment in time, and only this moment. But there is another, who has… changed. That change has disrupted the possibilities.”
This morning, Mystique thought. It hardly seemed possible that Destiny’s sudden uncertainty and the X-Men’s jaunt out to Max-X after Blob’s breakout could be a coincidence.
Had something happened during the Hellfire Club’s ambush of the X-Men? Mystique ran through the possibilities. Had word gotten to Xavier somehow? That wasn’t possible. No one knew of the Brotherhood’s plan except the five people in this room. Had some of the X-Men been killed? That would make no difference to the hearings. Senator Kelly would merely use it as an occasion to paint them posthumously as dangerously out-of-control vigilantes.
Was Blob the uncertainty? She couldn’t believe that. He was exactly what he appeared to be: a hypermassive slab of humanity, his speech and demeanor as coarse as his limbs were powerful. A blunt instrument. Nothing about him was uncertain. You didn’t have to have Destiny’s precognitive abilities to be sure what the Blob would do in any given situation.
Who, then?
She did not know who the X-Men had sent to New Mexico, but which of the X-Men could destabilize probabilities enough to interfere with Destiny? The Scarlet Witch was the only mutant with that ability, and she was not a member of the X-Men. Still...
Mystique placed a quick call to a source on the staff at Max-X and learned that the Scarlet Witch had not been seen in New Mexico. Her source did complain that the X-Men had completely overwhelmed the Hellfire Club—but not only was that not Mystique’s problem, she was glad to hear it. The more the Hellfire Club and X-Men focused on each other, the more room the Brotherhood had to carry out her plans.
The death of Senator Kelly was just the beginning. Magneto had once envisioned the Brotherhood ruling the world, empowering mutants to take their rightful place in control of normal humans—those unfortunates whose genomes had done nothing more interesting than predispose them to heart disease or give them red hair. Mystique intended to succeed where Magneto had failed.
First the Brotherhood would announce itself and fire a symbolic shot across the bow of humanity by silencing the most strident anti-mutant voice in the United States government. Some mutants would rally to the Brotherhood. Others would cower behind Xavier. Mystique would face the X-Men—and destroy them. Then, a united mutantkind would end thousands of years of this ridiculous upside-down way of things, with normal humans reigning over mutants…oppressing them…massacring them…
United mutantkind would rule the world. As befitted their superiority. And at the head of mutantkind would stand Mystique, ruling over all.
That was the task they were beginning today, whether or not Destiny’s vision was cloudy.
“This changes nothing,” Mystique said. “Robert Kelly dies today. So, too, does anyone who opposes us. Perhaps, to remove even more uncertainty, we should eliminate Xavier and MacTaggert, as well.”
“I have anticipated this speculation,” Destiny said. “The existing irreducible variable is not affected.”
“As distasteful as I find it to agree with Fred J. Dukes,” Pyro said, “now I too find myself wanting to know exactly what she’s on about.”
“Yeah,” Avalanche said. “Do we know what’s going to happen or not?”
“We will attack the Senate,” Destiny said. “That much is still certain.”
“That’s all we need,” Mystique said.
“With all due respect, Raven, the situation is quite different if our pet precognitive here can no longer fulfill her role,” Pyro said. “It is one thing to attack the Senate and perform an assassination when we have anticipated the outcome. It is quite another to mount such an attack when we find ourselves stripped of the predictive powers that gave us our advantage.”
“Nah, that don’t matter,” Blob said. “We go in, we bust stuff up, we do the job on Kelly. The rest of it don’t matter.”
“He curries favor after his bluster is unrewarded,” Pyro said. “How predictable. Am I right, Destiny? Oh, pardon me. You don’t know anymore, do you?”
“Here is what I know,” Mystique said. “At the appointed time, we are going to walk out this door and make our way to the rear of the Hart Building. Then everyone will do what they are supposed to do. Whoever does not, will answer to me…after Senator Kelly is dead, and the world once again learns to fear the Brotherhood.”
Her form shifted again; a moment later Raven Darkholme, top Defense Department advisor, stood before them once more. “Would anyone like to share their misgivings?” she asked. Her tone made it clear that she expected only silence in return. “Good,” she said. “Then let’s go.”
* * *
AS THEY passed by his station on their way out, Sergeant Cabrera said, “Have a good day, Ms. Darkholme.”
“You too, Sergeant.” She smiled and returned the visitor pass for Duke Frederickson. She had three more people with her now, and Cabrera said, “Hold on there a minute. I need all of your visitor passes back, please.”
Something had melted part of one of the passes. Cabrera looked up at the wiry blond Englishman who had given it to him. “What were you guys doing in there? Interrogations happen in another part of the building,” he joked.
“Oh, we had a bit of a heated discussion,” the Englishman said. According to the pass, his name was St. John Allerdyce. Cabrera had read somewhere that the name was pronounced Sinjin, but something about the man’s demeanor stopped him from asking. One of the other passes, for Jon Bloom, was covered in some kind of fine dust. He saw Ms. Darkholme watching as he passed a chemical-sensing pad over it.
“Is there a problem, Sergeant?” she asked, her tone managing to be both friendly and threatening.
That set him on edge a little, that know-your-place tone he heard all too often from civilians. After they’d gone to Afghanistan and dodged RPGs for two years, they could talk to him like that. Not before. “Procedures, ma’am,” he said, and put the chemically sensitive pad through a scanner at the checkpoint workstation.
The scan came up negative, so that was that. Darkholme probably wouldn’t shoot him a wink next time she came in, but Cabrera didn’t care. He had a job to do. “Enjoy your day, folks,” he said and watched the five of them head out the door.
Irene Adler, the other woman with Ms. Darkholme, looked to be blind, but she walked like she could see. Weird bunch, Cabrera thought. Not like the policy wonks and officers Darkholme usually traveled with.
He wondered what kind of project she was involved in. Her record showed work with DARPA and other weapons stuff, which explained the motley group of civilians. Defense was a pretty buttoned-down outfit, but their contractors—especially the ones working on far-out tech—tended to be T-shirt-and-sandal types with their heads in the clouds. Except Tony Stark, Cabrera thought. Now that was a guy with style. He’d gotten Stark’s autograph once, when the man himself stopped by the Pentagon for a meeting. It was at home in one of Cabrera’s scrapbooks. When his kids were old enough to read, he’d show it to them and say: I met that guy. That’s what you should want to be when you grow up.
That wasn’t something he’d
ever say about Jon Bloom or Irene Adler or St. John Allerdyce. Or especially Duke Frederickson. Takes all kinds, Cabrera thought. But you have to be careful who you choose as your role models.
Cabrera had standing orders to report to his superiors whenever a staff member did something unusual, and he was starting to think that this was one of those times. Plenty of contractors came and went in the Pentagon, and Duke Frederickson wasn’t the first person he’d seen come in wearing handcuffs. But the whole scene struck him as…off.
He wrote down the names of all the visitors and ran them through the system, looking to see whether any of them had ever been in the building before. He also ran facial-recognition scans on the photos he’d taken for their visitor passes.
No alerts came up.
Still, Cabrera had an uneasy feeling. The melted pass, and the powder…he decided to do the safe thing, which was kick it up the chain of command. All four passes and a printout of the entry and exit times went into a sealed envelope, with a report documenting Cabrera’s feeling that something out of the ordinary might be going on. His superiors could ignore it, and God knew they probably would, but he was doing this one by the book.
He finished the report, sealed it in the envelope with the passes, and put it in the box for the interoffice mail to pick up. When shift change came around and he headed for the cafeteria to grab a sandwich, he was relieved—both emotionally and professionally. Something about working in the Pentagon made a guy suspicious.
TEN
GRAND Central Terminal was only a couple of blocks from the Baxter Building, so the final stage of the team’s mission prep didn’t involve much travel. They followed the disused track to a juncture where maintenance hatches went up a level, somewhere around the intersection of Vanderbilt and 45th. From there, they planned to proceed west one short block to Madison, then double back south. At 42nd, they would split up. Logan and Storm would continue on to the Fifth Avenue subway station with some of the FCA guerrillas while Rachel, Peter, and Kate waited.
“Once the fireworks start,” Logan said, “Petey can come on in and join the fun.”
“What about me?” Kitty said.
“You’re staying with Rachel so she can send you home once everything is on track,” Ororo said.
“Wait a minute. That wasn’t what we decided before, was it?”
“Kitten, you’ve got a life to live. Part of why we’re doing this is so you can live it. We brought you here without meaning to because we needed to send Kate back…but you don’t need to suffer for that.” Ororo looked at Peter, prompting him.
“Ororo is right, Kitty,” he said. “This is not your time. Whatever happens here, we fight so you will have a different future.”
She knew there was something he wasn’t telling her, though, and she wasn’t prepared to let it go. “Why did you want him to say that, Ororo? Why does everyone look at us funny? Will someone explain to me what’s going on?”
“Petey, this one’s all yours,” Logan said.
“Kitty, in this future…you and I have been married for some time. It is difficult for me, telling you this. When I look at you, I see my wife. But I know that you are just a girl on the inside, and…” Peter ran out of words. “It is difficult. I do not wish it to be difficult for you, as well.”
“We’re married?” Kitty repeated. She couldn’t fathom it. Married? And when he saw her, he…?
She looked down at herself, her adult body, with its twenty-two extra years of life that she had never experienced. Every feeling in the world seemed to rush through her at once. Anger that no one had told her before. Confusion about futures overlaid, lived and unlived. Uncertainty about how she would feel toward Peter when she got home, and he was so much younger, and she knew this, and he didn’t. How could she talk to him? How would she…? And then, deep revulsion that Peter must have been…
“No,” she said. “That’s…why did you tell me that?”
“You asked,” Logan said.
“Then, then, you should get Kate back,” Kitty said. “Rachel should…” She stumbled, realizing she was just about to argue the exact opposite of what she’d been arguing a moment before. “How am I supposed to deal with this?”
“Good question,” Logan said.
“Very good question,” Peter said. “I do not have an answer. It is my hope that we will do this, and survive, and you will go home. Then whatever happens in that past…in your future…will either happen or not. We may change something, we may change everything, we may change nothing.”
“Whoa,” Rick said. “Deep.”
“Easy for you to say,” Kitty said. “You don’t have to go back.”
“But you do. Which is why we do not want you in the fight. If you were to be killed, God forbid, not only would you die, but we do not know what would happen to Kate.” For the only time she could remember—but of course, she hadn’t known him that long—Kitty saw fear on Peter’s face. He was on the verge of tears.
“Hey,” she said. “If my other self…my future me, or this me in the future…if she chose you, she made a pretty good choice.” She paused. “Not that I’m doing that. Um.”
“Let’s talk about something else, shall we?” Ororo suggested.
“Like maybe how we all plan to live through the next hour,” Logan said.
“Most of us, anyway,” Rachel said. She had gotten paler even in the last twenty minutes, since Peter had started carrying her.
With a sick pang of fear, Kitty realized that Rachel might be too weak to send her back when the time came. But she said nothing. The stakes, she realized, were life and death—and not just for them. Whatever happened to the five X-Men, that fate would be writ large in the destiny of all humankind.
It was time to bear down and do what needed to be done. But there was one more thing Kitty couldn’t get out of her mind. “If Rachel can’t fight, and you don’t want me to fight,” she said, “don’t we need Magneto?”
“Love to have him,” Logan said. “Going to get him, not so much.”
“But that’s not right,” Kitty said. “He helped you get free. We can’t just go off and leave him.”
Logan walked over and got right in her face. “What do you mean, can’t? We can’t do anything else. Unless you want to surrender, maybe, and you can get used to camp life the way your grown-up self did. How’s that sound, Kit-Kat?”
“Logan, you need to remember you’re talking to a thirteen-year-old girl,” Ororo said.
“You want to know what I was doing when I was thirteen? You can be damn sure nobody sugarcoated anything for me,” Logan said. “And anyway, we don’t know if he’s alive. Assuming he didn’t get nuked after he fell out of his chair, and assuming he remembered how to use all his powers, and assuming he wasn’t too old to fight…he might be. If he is, he knows the plan. He either gets here or he doesn’t.”
“Okay, you want to be tough? I can be tough, too,” Kitty said. “If you don’t want to go get Magneto, I’ll go myself.”
“Don’t write any checks you can’t cash, kid,” Logan said. “You don’t even know the way.”
“I can read a map,” Kitty said. “I can get to the Bronx. And from there I can find him.”
“Before or after the Rogues find you?”
“I don’t care. I’m going.”
Logan grabbed her arm, but Kitty phased out of his grip.
“Don’t, Kitten! The Sentinels!” Ororo said.
“Crap—she used her power. Now we have to move.” Logan spat on the tunnel floor. “Teenagers. Listen, kid. I’ll make this quick so we can get moving before your little tantrum gets us all killed. Rachel’s not gonna live long enough for you to get home if we go after him. That’s just the plain truth.”
“I don’t care,” Kitty said again, although she did care. She cared about that more than just about anything else. If Rachel died, Kitty Pryde was never going to feel her own body grow up. She was never going to see any of her friends again. She would, in all probabili
ty, die sometime within the next twenty-four hours, either from a Sentinel weapon or a nuclear explosion. She cared.
And she cared enough about these battered, cynical, doomed versions of her friends that she was racked with guilt about having used her powers. They all stared at her, waiting for her—for the kid, the teenager, the flighty one, the one who threw tantrums—to get her act together.
So she did. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to…you know.”
“Problem isn’t whether you meant to. Problem is you did it,” Logan said.
“I know, I know,” Kitty said, miserable, and then Rachel cut in and said, “Give the kid a break, Logan. I’m doing it, too…using my power to hold myself together.”
“Rachel, stop it right now. I mean it,” Storm said.
“Can’t,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “If I do, you’ll be carrying a body by the time we get to the end of this tunnel.”
“Maybe we will and maybe we won’t, but if you keep that up we’ll all be bodies for someone to carry.”
“Don’t think so,” Rachel said. “Just my body talking to itself. I’m real quiet when I have to be.”
“See?” Kitty said. “I can be quiet, too. Look at us! We lost Franklin. We won’t have Rachel much longer. You don’t think we could use Magneto in this fight? Or are you just too damn stubborn to listen to me because I’m a kid?”
“Watch your mouth there, Kitten, or Pete’s gonna wash it out with soap.”
“I hate to say this,” Ororo said, “but Logan’s right.”
“Ororo,” Kitty said. “I thought—”
“Listen to me. You’re right that we need Magnus. You’re right that we are depleted. You’re right that going after him is the ethical thing to do, and that it will weigh on our collective conscience for the rest of our lives if we do not go back and try to save him. But hear these words again: the rest of our lives.
“How long is that going to be if we do not destroy the Baxter Building? And do we have the strength to face the entire Sentinel garrison in the Bronx? Can we survive that and still get back here in time to avert the missile strikes from Europe? No, Kitten, we can’t. So the only way we can save Magneto is if we go in and take out the Sentinel nerve center in the Baxter Building. Once that is done, everything else becomes possible; until it is done, we can do nothing else.”