The cues radiating off the boy were even less subtle.
“Her boyfriend,” Bobby said flatly, looking the older man in the eye.
Logan held out a hand, Bobby took it, and immediately there was the faint crackle of ice and a burst of frozen vapor into the air between them. Rogue muttered under her breath, but Logan sensed she was also pleased. The two men in her life were fighting over her. Cool!
“They call me Iceman,” Bobby said, unnecessarily.
Logan looked totally unimpressed. He flexed his hand to shake free the last bits of ice clinging to his skin hair and looked toward Rogue.
“Boyfriend?” he inquired innocently. “So, ah, how do you two—”
Rogue blushed crimson and turned away, and Bobby colored a little bit himself.
“We’re working on that.”
“Ohhh-kay,” Logan said. “Lemme know how it turns out. Meantime, I need the prof—”
“Well, well, well,” called a throaty contralto from the stairs. “Look who’s come back.”
Logan returned Storm’s smile, hers unrestrained, his much more guarded.
“Isn’t that what the prodigal son does?”
“We certainly won’t fault your timing.”
“Eh?” Logan wondered.
“We need a baby-sitter.”
“I’m outta here, darlin’.”
“No, you aren’t, my friend.” She gave him a proper hug and a kiss on the cheek. “It’s good to see you, Logan.”
“Likewise,” he replied, but he no longer had eyes for her. She didn’t need to be told who’d followed her down the stairs.
“Hey,” he said to Jean.
“Hi,” she told him. “Welcome home.”
Storm picked up the cue that neither of the others were aware they were broadcasting and flicked her fingers in the general direction of Bobby and Rogue. A puff of breeze whirled across the foyer to give them a gentle push back toward the common room. They took the hint, with all manner of semisecret giggles at how the tables had suddenly been reversed.
“I’ll go preflight the Blackbird,” Storm said, but she might as well have been speaking to herself.
“Bye, Logan,” Rogue called out as Bobby pulled her through the double doorway.
“Later,” Logan replied absently.
“Nice to meet you, sir,” said Bobby.
“You, too, kid.” Then, at last, once they were alone, to Jean: “You look good.”
“You, too,” she said, descending the last few steps to the foyer. They kept a distance between them because the signals their bodies were giving were pushing hard to bring them together. She took refuge in business. “You heard about what’s happened in Washington?”
“Haven’t stopped except for gas since morning,” he answered with a nod. He’d pushed the bike to its limits, on back roads and interstates, covering better than a thousand miles over the course of the day.
“Storm and I are heading for Boston,” she continued. “Cerebro has tagged the mutant who attacked the President. Professor Xavier wants us to try and make contact. We won’t be gone long.”
“I just got here.”
“And you’ll be here when we get back—unless you plan on running off again.”
“If this hitter’s the real deal, you could use some muscle taking him down.”
That made her laugh. “We can handle ourselves, thank you very much.”
He shrugged, posing nonchalance. “Then I guess I can probably think of a few reasons to stick around.”
“That’s my guy.”
“Find what you were looking for, Logan?” called Scott, entering the foyer and catching sight of them both.
Logan didn’t spare him a glance. “More or less,” he said.
Jean broke their eye contact and strode across the floor to Scott, hating the moment and hating her reactions even more. She didn’t like being out of control, of herself, of situations. She was a doctor, with a doctor’s abhorrence of surprises and chaos. Logan was the personification of chaos. Sometimes she couldn’t stand the little runt, he couldn’t hold a candle to Scott in any respect—or so she told herself. Yet she couldn’t get him out of her thoughts. And the thoughts she had of him made her nervous.
“I’ll see you later,” she said to Scott.
“Be safe, okay?”
“Always,” she said, and gave him a powerful, passionate kiss that was undercut a moment later as she couldn’t help looking back at Logan. “You, too,” she said, telling herself she was talking to them both, while both men knew that wasn’t quite true.
Logan tossed Scott the keys to the bike.
“Good wheels,” he said. “Needs gas.”
Without missing a beat, Scott grabbed the keys out of the air and tossed them right back.
“Fill her up, then.”
“If you say so, bub,” Logan muttered under his breath. He watched the taller man walk away and permitted himself a grin while jumping the keys up and down in his palm. He liked surprises, and Scott was proving more full of them than he’d ever imagined.
I’m downstairs, Logan, came a familiar voice in his head.
He didn’t move at first. He stood in the foyer, breathing in a slow, deep cadence, filtering out the myriad scents filling the air around him until just one remained. She favored Folavril, Annick Goutal. He’d know her anywhere and, more importantly for him, find her anywhere.
He knew he was keeping Xavier waiting. Didn’t bother him a bit.
He found the professor in what was literally the heart of the underground complex, buried deep beneath the mansion proper and extending for hundreds of yards under the estate. He’d wondered from the start how something this big could have been built in complete secrecy, but when he considered the capabilities of the man responsible, it no longer seemed like such a mystery.
At the end of a main hallway stood a circular door that would have done justice to a Federal Reserve bank vault. Its diameter was twice Logan’s height, and it was easily a couple of feet thick. Through that portal, a gallery walkway led out to a circular platform in what he assumed was the center of the room, but there was no way of knowing if that was really true. The curvature of the interior walls near the doorway suggested that the room was a great globe, but a wicked trick of design and lighting made it impossible for anyone, even Logan with his enhanced senses, to perceive its true dimensions. He couldn’t see the far wall, or the summit, or the base, and the anechoic properties of the tiling deadened sound to such an extent that there wasn’t even a ghost of an echo. He thought of pitching a penny but suspected he wouldn’t hear it make contact.
Psychically, this was a “clean room.” The only thoughts that entered were the ones Charles Xavier permitted or sought out himself.
Xavier was seated in his wheelchair on the central dais, adjusting the controls of the main console. There was a skeletal helmet on the panel, connected to it by a pair of umbilical cables that ran from either ear flap. That, Logan knew, was the receiver. The room itself was a focusing chamber for Cerebro, a titanic array of sensors, daisy-chained multiprocessors, and resonance amplifiers all intended to magnify Xavier’s already considerable telepathic abilities to a quantum level.
Without looking up from his work, Xavier said aloud: “Logan, my repeated requests about smoking in the mansion notwithstanding, continue smoking that in here . . .”
Idly Logan took the cigar from his mouth and looked at it. He hadn’t indulged during the entire last leg on the cycle; he’d lit it up on the walk downstairs without a second thought to the propriety—or the consequences. A man with a built-in healing factor doesn’t have to worry about lung cancer.
Xavier finished silently, mind to mind: . . . and you will spend the rest of your days under the belief that you are a six-year-old girl.
With the thought came an image: Logan in a frilly party dress, something out of the Barbie collection, with layer upon layer of silk and crinoline petticoats, bows galore, ankle socks, and patent-leath
er shoes.
Both men registered the snikt of his claws extending, from the hand that held the cigar, but Logan made no move.
“I’ll have Jean braid your hair,” Xavier said aloud, and mentally tweaked the image to match, in a way that was so ridiculous and over the top that Logan couldn’t help snorting in rough, rude humor.
They’d each had their moment and taken the measure of each other. Xavier probably could impose his psychic will on Logan, but he also now knew that, either right at the start or some inevitable time down the line, the berserker in Logan’s soul would square accounts—and he would likely die for it.
Logan thought then of the kids upstairs as he put his claws away and crushed the burning embers against the palm of his left hand. The students didn’t have a healing factor.
“Please, Logan,” Xavier said, “come in.”
“What’s the phrase? ‘Enter freely and of your own will’?”
“Dracula to Jonathan Harker, welcoming him to his castle. Is that how you see me?”
“You’re the telepath, you tell me.”
“I don’t go into other people’s minds on a casual basis.”
“You don’t like to pry?” Logan didn’t believe him.
“It’s not as easy as you think, or as pleasant. The danger is, it could be: easy and pleasant. To play the voyeur, to play the puppet master.”
“Power corrupts.”
“Power should breed responsibility. That’s why I built this school.”
Xavier rolled his chair into place at the console and set the helmet on his head. At once the chamber itself began to hum.
“You sure I should be here, Prof?” Logan asked. From the way the others talked, Xavier didn’t allow visitors when he used his toy, but the door had closed behind him.
“Just don’t move, all right?”
He did, though, the couple of steps remaining to take him to the platform just behind and beside Xavier, following the push of an instinct that had never played him false. He gasped as the fabric of the platform seemed to dissolve beneath him. There was a sensation of falling, like going over the top of the first riser at the ultimate roller coaster to start the plunge straight down to oblivion—or something even wilder.
Then, just as suddenly, he was at rest again, in the same position with Xavier as before, in the center of a giant three-dimensional representation of the world. Dotted across the land masses, lightly dusted here and there over the oceans, were uncountable numbers of white and scarlet lights that reminded Logan of fireflies or stars blazing in the heavens. There were a fair number of red, but they were no comparison to their counterparts.
“These lights,” Xavier said with the same hushed reverence reserved for speaking inside a cathedral, “represent the whole of humanity. Every living soul on Earth.”
“Lemme guess,” Logan said. “The red ones are us.”
Obligingly the white lights faded away. Only scarlet remained.
“These are the mutants,” Xavier acknowledged, impressed by Logan’s quick insight. “Many of them don’t even realize yet who they are, what they will become. We’re not quite as alone as some of us might think.”
“I found the base at Alkali Lake.” He thought of the slash marks on the wall, and decided to keep the thought to himself, partly to see if Xavier was peeking. “There was nothing there.”
Surprisingly, as far as he could tell, the other man didn’t even try.
Around them, the globe appeared to rush toward them, giving them a vastly expanded bird’s-eye view of the northeastern seaboard of the United States, the fabled BosNYWash megalopolis. Then Xavier blanked all the extraneous signals as well, leaving just a small scattering, which Logan deduced, from their placement and intensity, were himself, the professor, and the others who qualified as X-Men. There was also a jagged scarlet line running from Washington all the way to Boston.
“That trail,” Xavier pointed out, “represents the path of the mutant who attacked the President.”
“Jean said you were sending her and Storm after him.”
Xavier nodded. The scene above them resolved even more tightly on the Boston metropolitan area. Here, though, the trail, the contact waypoints, became more scattered and indistinct.
“I’m finding it hard to lock in on him,” he confessed.
“Can’t you just . . . I dunno, concentrate harder?”
“If I wanted to kill him, certainly.”
“You can do that?”
Xavier spared him a long and measured glance. “Easily.”
“Guys I know would pay a fortune for a skill like that.”
The scene changed again, zooming in again to a neighborhood in the South End.
The single scarlet light was blinking. After a moment, latitude and longitude points were displayed and, a moment after that, the appropriate cross streets.
“There,” Xavier said. “It appears our quarry has finally stopped running and gone to ground.”
He closed his eyes, and—presto!—the illusion vanished, and Logan found himself once more on the central platform with Xavier. An eddy of fresh air told him without looking that the door had cycled open. He wasn’t interested.
“I need you to read my mind again.”
Xavier took his time before replying, and Logan ignored the fatigue that caused it.
“And I told you it isn’t that easy,” he said at last. “I’m afraid the results will be no different than before.”
“We had a deal.”
“Logan.” Xavier spoke more sharply than he’d intended, and he took a pause to dial his irritation back a notch. “The mind is not a box to be simply unlocked and opened, its contents parceled out willy-nilly for the world to see. On one level, it’s a beehive, with a million separate compartments. Yet on another, all those compartments are bound together, interconnected in a multidimensional holographic maze that would put the Gordian knot to shame. One moment of your life, one image of your memory, doesn’t lead in sequential, linear fashion to the next. It splinters off into a thousand different directions, each valid, each needing to be investigated. That takes time, that takes care.
“And that’s just a normal mind.
“The problem with yours is, someone’s already taken the Alexander the Great approach to untangling the mysteries—or perhaps to tangle them beyond all recovery.”
“I’m messed up. So what else is new?”
“Logan, sometimes there are things the mind needs to discover for itself.” As Xavier placed the helmet back on its pedestal, Logan felt a faint tap on the inside of his consciousness, akin to someone rapping a knuckle on his forehead. You have a healing factor, he “heard” Xavier say without speaking aloud, a most remarkable ability. Trust it to do the same with your psyche as it does so well with your physical body.
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” Xavier finished aloud. “You might make things worse.”
There was a fresh scent in the doorway: Ivory Soap and Old Spice, with a faint Armani chaser that had to come from Jean. Scott was standing there expectantly, dressed for the road. He wasn’t pleased to see Logan in here, any more than he had been to see him with Jean. As if Logan gave a tinker’s damn.
“I promise you, Logan,” Xavier said as he wheeled himself from the chamber, “we’ll talk more when I return. In the meanwhile . . .”
“You need a baby-sitter, Storm mentioned.”
“If you would be so kind as to chaperone the children tonight, Scott and I are going to pay a visit to an old friend.”
“Yo, Charley,” Logan called as Scott pushed the chair down the hall. He knew Xavier hated such familiarity, but he figured, since he’d backed down over the smoking, he was entitled. “When you see Magneto, give him my regards. Tell him to rot in hell. For what he did to Rogue, he got off easy.”
Chapter
Five
As she strode a bit too briskly into the hangar, almost fleeing the exchange that had just taken place in the foyer, Jean Grey couldn’t help
but take a moment to admire the magnificent aircraft waiting for her.
It was black as deep space, a paint scheme perfected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make a plane visually undetectable once the sun went down. The lines of the great jet were so sleek she seemed to be cutting through the air even while standing still, the slightly canted nose flowing aft past where the fuselage flared naturally into the main body of the hull above air intakes for the tremendously powerful ramjets. These engines were so powerful that Jean could stand upright in the intakes with room to spare. The wings themselves were swept sharply forward, in defiance of traditional design philosophy, creating an airframe that compensated for its inherent instability with the ability to perform combat aerobatics over a breadth of speeds and altitudes that its nearest rivals couldn’t hope to match. If it had any rivals worth the name.
They called her the Blackbird, as a tribute to the greatest achievement of one of the premier designers in aviation history, the justly famed Kelly Johnson, head of the equally renowned Skunk Works aeronautics team of Lockheed Aircraft. In the early 1960s the Skunk Works built an aircraft that was a generational leap ahead of anything else in the air. Only in retrospect, as years turned into decades, did the flying community realize just how spectacular an achievement that was. For the whole of its operational life, which extended right to the dawn of the twenty-first century, the SR-71 regularly flew higher, faster, and farther than pilots had ever gone before.
This vehicle was what came next, the product of a bunch of geniuses with a crazy idea and a man with the wherewithal to bankroll it to fruition. The geniuses were aeronautical engineers, downsized with their industry as the Cold War gradually came to an end. The money, of course, came from Xavier, who required something quick and stealthy, with a host of revolutionary capabilities, to transport his prospective team of heroes.
As before, the gearheads built far better than they realized. This Blackbird could take off like a helicopter and punch her way into a suborbital trajectory at velocities that would take her from one side of the globe to the other in barely an hour. Even better, the same structural integrity that allowed her to traverse the atmosphere to near-Earth space and back again also permitted a moderate immersion in shallow water. She couldn’t move well beneath the surface, but you could definitely hide her there.
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