by Alex Irvine
“And we need to do it now, before the Sentinels peel the roof off this tunnel,” Logan said. The FCA soldiers looked up nervously.
“It’s not right,” Kitty said.
“The minute we can, we’ll go get him. If he’s still alive.”
Kitty nodded. She could see Ororo’s point, and Logan’s, even though she hated to admit it. And she’d done a dumb thing, phasing like that. She wasn’t holding it together—and if she didn’t shape up, a lot of people were going to get killed. Knowing that Rachel was also violating the no-powers rule made her feel a little better—but only a little.
She wondered what Magneto was doing right then, if he was even still alive. She had to admit it was pretty unlikely. All those Sentinels, against one old man…
“Let’s go, then,” she said.
“’Bout time,” Logan said and started to lead them to the west.
* * *
IT WAS a misperception, Magnus thought, that the powers of mutants were limitless. That idea, that mutants were inexhaustible machines rather than people who grew tired, careless, sad—it contributed to the unease and fear many nonmutants felt toward his kind. He knew this because he had heard it firsthand from haters of mutants, from demagogues and well-meaning rabble-rousers, all of them convinced that a quirk in a mutant’s genome meant somehow that none of the rules of the natural world applied anymore. The questions they had asked him…Do you sleep? Do you require food? Are you indestructible? And so forth.
No one cared about what it was like to be literally one in a million, marked out from the rest of your species by a particular, unique ability. Everyone gawked at difference, but no one wanted to be different. Not really. They wanted to dress differently, paint themselves differently, ink different designs in their skin—but real difference was beyond them, and so those who truly were different seemed…well, like gods. And that, Magnus admitted, was a delusion too many mutants had agreed to share.
But it was not the case. Even when he had been at his peak, he remembered the feeling of slippage—when his mind and body grew weary of battle, and eventually even the will began to surrender. He was not at that point now, but he was also not as strong as he once had been. He was an old man, with his hundredth birthday gone by—spent with a single candle on a rare loaf of fresh bread, with Peter improvising Russian lyrics to “Happy Birthday” and everyone clapping in an evanescent moment of joy. It would stand out to him forever, that moment.
But it was gone. And he was tired. He was an old man, his powers diminished, and he was too tired even to lift himself from the ground. One more task yet remained before him, and he did not know whether he would recover quickly enough to perform it.
Magneto had earned his fatigue. The Sentinel garrison of the South Bronx Mutant Internment Center was reduced to scrap. Some of them had been blown to pieces when he forced their individual components to repel each other. Others had imploded when he increased the attraction of those same sets of components. He had dismembered one Sentinel as it lifted off, squawking warnings and threatening to bring in reinforcements.
Magneto had waited twenty years to unleash his fury on the Sentinels. This was a good beginning, but he was not done yet.
The fences of the camp were gone. He had coiled them around the Sentinels, who now lay incapacitated in the streets surrounding the camp. He was the last mutant in the Mutant Internment Center, but not the last person. More than ninety percent of the inmates here were nonmutant criminals and undesirables, held officially in a parallel institution blandly designated the South Bronx Processing Center. These criminals were in full-scale riot—sacking and destroying camp facilities, and killing the staff.
Magneto did nothing to stop them. He had no sympathy for those who had chosen to work with the Sentinels. Any of the prisoners at Auschwitz would have done the same to him during his days as a Sonderkommando, and they would have been fully justified.
Other humans had escaped instead of waiting around to exact revenge. Fires burned, people screamed. Groups ran back and forth across the open grounds, carrying equipment and God only knew what else from the camp facilities.
A band of rioters saw him, dragging himself across the ground. “Hey, look, the wheelchair mutie doesn’t have his chair,” one of them said. From his right hand dangled a length of two-by-four, bent nails still sticking out of the end where he had twisted it free of whatever structure it had once been part of.
With a flick of his wrist, Magneto drove the nails into the man’s forehead. He let out a long whistling sigh, bit down on his tongue, and sagged to the ground.
Magneto turned to the others. “I have freed you,” he said. “But if you would prefer, I can kill you here. It makes no difference whatsoever to me. Decide now.”
They ran back into the fury of the riot.
To the northwest, Magneto saw the flares of Sentinel booster rockets. Reinforcements. They would arrive before he was finished, but that problem could wait. There was one task yet to complete before he could leave this camp for the last time.
He dragged himself closer to the smoldering ruin of the camp command center. As he drew nearer to it, he used its metal frame to attract him, speeding his progress. He moved through the command center, not expending the energy it would have taken to magnetically levitate—he would need every erg and joule later—but instead pulling himself along the smooth tile floor into the medical facility.
There he found a stainless-steel surgical table. With a wave he peeled away a portion of it and shaped it to fit his head. It hung in the air as he turned it back and forth and decided it would do. The color was wrong, but this was not the time to quibble over aesthetics. He reached his left hand toward the bank of computers and diagnostic instruments lining one wall of the examination room. They began to disassemble themselves, screws popping loose and welds breaking. He drew wires together, arranged them on the inside surface of the helmet, sealed them in place. Then a second layer of sheet metal from the examination table formed the inside of the helmet.
He brought it to himself, felt its cold weight in his hands. When he put it on, a smile broke across his face.
Yes, he thought. The final destiny of this future is still to be determined.
There was enough left of the table surface to separate into strips. He formed those strips to fit into the soles of his boots, with smaller pieces worked into the linings of his camp coverall. When he was done, he felt exhausted. He had not used his powers in almost twenty years, and his concentration was lagging. But there was another, much greater task yet to be performed. He could not rest yet.
He closed his eyes, feeling the flow and surge of that most intimate of universal forces: electromagnetism. Yes, he thought. At last.
And Magneto rose from the floor. He gestured at the ceiling, and the steel beams holding it up lifted away, tearing loose the roof and exposing a sky thick with smoke. He rose above the destroyed building and saw two Sentinels, the first of the reinforcements, settling into their work of annihilating the rioters. He seized both of them and lifted them into the air, repelling them from the Earth itself.
He held them for a moment as they recognized him. “Mutant 067—” one of them began, but he did not let it finish.
“Magneto,” he corrected the Sentinel. He said it again, louder—“Magneto!”—and brought the two Sentinels crashing together with an inward sweep of his arms. He repeated his name and hammered the Sentinels together until the ground below them was littered with broken-off pieces of their armor. Both Sentinels hung limp, dangling lazily in the air from invisible strings of magnetic force.
“Never again,” Magneto said, and let them fall.
He floated out over the devastated grounds of the camp. He saw what he had done and found it good. The work, however, was not yet complete. As long as he stayed here, more Sentinels would come.
The Baxter Building, he thought. Perhaps I cannot walk. Perhaps I will never walk.
But now, once again, I can fly.
ELEVEN
RIGHT on schedule, the Blackbird touched down at a private airport in the D.C. suburbs. Warren Worthington, Angel, was there to meet them with a helicopter, and ten minutes later they were disembarking from it at a private helipad attached to one of his many penthouse condominiums. All of them were in civilian clothing, not wishing to draw attention to themselves—although Angel, with his movie-star looks and immense wealth, could not avoid attention wherever he went. And that was before one took into account the magnificent sixteen-foot span of the wings that gave him his code name.
According to Angel, Charles Xavier was already in the Senate hearing room waiting for the proceedings to begin. Angel had been monitoring Hellfire Club activity and helping Xavier and Moira MacTaggert prep for the Senate hearings.
“Emma Frost and the Hellfire Club are still after Kitty, in case you were wondering,” he said. “You know Emma, the minute someone tells her no…”
“The Hellfire Club is an irritation, Warren,” Ororo said. “We have more pressing problems at the moment. Get us to the hearing. I’ll fill you in along the way.”
At first, like the rest of them, Angel didn’t believe the story. “She’s traumatized,” he said, gesturing at Kate. “Xavier’s going to tell you the same thing when we get there. Then he’ll point out that there are problems we need to handle ourselves—without always going to him for advice. So how about we just handle this ourselves?”
“Sure. Let’s do that,” Kate said. “Then when the Sentinels kill you in 2021, I’ll get to smell your wings burning all over again.”
“Is she going through a Goth phase?” Angel asked Ororo.
“I’m right here, Warren. You can talk to me like I’m a scared kid if you want to—but three hours ago by my internal clock I was smuggling the last piece of the Jammer into the camp, and Logan had just saved my life from the Rogues. I walked by your tombstone on my way to our quarters. Make fun of me all you want.”
He looked at her, then at Logan, then back to Ororo. “Well, she’s serious. I guess the least we can do is try to make it to the hearing before everything gets started, so Xavier can rummage around in her head.”
They got into a limo waiting in front of the condominium tower. Angel told the driver their destination, then rolled up the window divider.
“After we see the Professor, you can apologize,” Kate said.
“For what?” Warren asked.
“For not believing me.”
“I don’t know about that, little Kitty. Even if your story turns out to be true, which it won’t, you can hardly expect me to apologize for being rational.”
“Rationally address this, then,” Ororo said. “There was a Sentinel at Max-X. Someone is playing on Senator Kelly’s misgivings to convince authorities to deploy Sentinels again. That would be ominous even if we did not have Kitty’s story to deal with.”
“Agreed,” Warren said. “We’ll address that. But I don’t have to believe fairy tales about mind-swaps and time travel to know the Hellfire Club and Sentinels are a threat. We’ve got enough problems without buying into every crazy story that comes along.”
Logan hadn’t said a word since landing the Blackbird, but now he did. “You’ll see, bub.”
“Will I? She’s convinced even you?”
“Not all the way. But enough to think we’d better get to this hearing sooner rather than later.”
Warren looked to Kurt. “What about you, mein Freund? You don’t believe this, do you?”
“I do,” Kurt said. “I think you would, too, if you had seen the change in her when it happened.”
Warren had access to restricted parking areas, either because of his own influence or because Xavier was on the day’s witness list. The group spilled out of the limousine and entered through a security checkpoint far from the public areas of the building—except for Logan and Kurt, who preferred to stay out of the public eye. The group paused in the lobby to watch the introductory proceedings on a closed-circuit monitor.
The chamber was packed, as it always was for hearings on issues that lent themselves to rabble-rousing. Hearings on policy were conducted before jaded audiences of reporters and policy wonks. But change the topic to social issues, and loud voices came out of the woodwork to clog up the gallery and interrupt the proceedings with staged sloganeering.
For this occasion, anti-mutant protesters had crowded into the gallery, bearing placards and chanting at a volume just below a level that would get them kicked out under the Senate’s rules. Those rules were somewhat arbitrary, but the anti-mutant group seemed to have rehearsed their behavior—or else the Senate bailiffs had some sympathy for the anti-mutant point of view.
The floor of the hearing chamber was a rectangular space walled in on three sides by galleries. On the fourth side, a long table on a raised dais ran along the wall, facing another long table placed in front of the first row of gallery seats. Behind the raised table were ten senators—the members of the Senate Special Committee on Superhuman Security—and a single empty chair belonging to Senator Robert Kelly. Kelly was pacing around the chamber, grandstanding for all he was worth.
At the witness table, Charles Xavier and Moira MacTaggert waited for him to finish his introductory remarks. Xavier was his usual collected self, impeccably dressed, not a drop of sweat on his shaven head even under the blazing lights of a dozen television crews. Ororo recognized his favorite green blanket draped over his legs. Moira, equally at ease, sat next to Xavier wearing the tailored suit of an aristocrat and the practical haircut of a researcher who needed to keep her hair out of the samples. Both remained impassive, but Ororo was fairly certain that if she had Xavier’s telepathic gifts, she would be hearing a number of unflattering things about the Senator.
“We are gathered here to address an issue of critical national and international importance,” Kelly was saying. “This is not a witch hunt, but—we hope and pray—a search for truth. Much about our world has changed. We face situations—and threats—undreamed-of by earlier generations.”
Kelly paced as he spoke, angling to deliver parts of his speech to each of the three gallery areas while keeping his face visible to at least one TV camera at all times. “One such change is the appearance of so-called Homo superior.” He lingered over those last two words, making his disapproval clear and taking a breath before going on. “Mutants! Flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, yet possessing powers and abilities which set them apart from—some, including many mutants themselves, would say above—the rest of humanity.
“Among our witnesses today is Professor Charles Xavier—world-renowned expert on genetics and unabashed advocate for mutants, including his protégés known as the X-Men. We also have Doctor Moira MacTaggert of Edinburgh University, whose work on human genetics and the mechanics of genetic mutation has won—deservedly, in my mind—the Nobel Prize. Doctors Xavier and MacTaggert, thank you very much for coming.”
“Pleasure,” Charles said.
“Happy to be here,” Moira said, although her expression suggested precisely the opposite.
There was a rustle in the gallery as several of the X-Men entered. Ororo, Peter, Kitty, and Warren made their way to a block of seats reserved as a courtesy for friends and supporters of those called to testify. Some of the anti-mutant protesters recognized them and muttered a stream of vitriol, just below the volume that would have brought the bailiffs over.
Warren led the group. Ororo believed that his fame and photogenic profile would draw attention from the rest of them, placing the entire team in the best possible light. Cynical, perhaps, but she was learning that managing the X-Men’s image in the public eye was in some ways more important to their survival than opposing the Brotherhood.
Or at least that had been true until today, if Kate Pryde was to be believed. On that score, Ororo was still uncertain. She inclined toward believing Kate, but she also had long ago learned to trust Logan’s instincts. She was conflicted.
Logan himself wa
s not at the hearing. Nor was Nightcrawler. Neither of them, particularly Kurt, provided what the PR professionals called good optics. Kurt was still in Warren’s car down in the garage, waiting to hear whether he would be needed. Logan had decided he was of more use scouting around for threats—the old lone-wolf instinct in him, rearing its head again. Probably he was sniffing around for the Brotherhood, seeing whether he could pick any of them out of the crowd.
Everyone, including cameramen trained to identify celebrity faces, recognized Warren. His combination of looks, money, profile, and wings had made him one of the most recognizable people in the country—not that he cared, or would admit to caring. Camera crews shifted their positions so they could cover both Warren and the hearing floor. A TV reporter came over and shoved a microphone in his face.
“No availabilities right now,” Warren said with a disarming smile. “Maybe after the business here is concluded. We’re just here to watch, like everyone else.”
Like everyone else, Ororo thought. Except we have knowledge the rest of you do not have. How many of the people in the gallery would cheer at the idea of a mutant-free future? More than would take action to prevent it, she knew that. Senator Kelly was more or less a decent human being, but he was driven by fear, and people driven by fear made poor choices. In a world where mutants were outnumbered at least a thousand to one, the poor choices of frightened nonmutants could have devastating, unintended consequences.
Sometimes Ororo believed that perhaps the X-Men did not listen enough to Magneto. Agree, no; listen, yes. Mutants should not try to conquer nonmutants, but there were certainly times when they did not do enough to advocate on their own behalf.
They were counting on Xavier to do exactly that. They always counted on him. If he could not defend them, they would be doomed to a pariah status—and that would lead to the murderous dystopia Kate had described to them that morning.