When the pings and whistles and pops and crackles and booms had all faded, leaving Mystique coughing from the smoke and the stench of ruined flesh, her ears ringing from the shock waves, Magneto set aside his shield, and they proceeded on their way.
There wasn’t anything left of the defenders worth looking at. Magneto paused a moment at the entrance, standing by a bloody mess that was unrecognizable as a man. Oddly, a photo had survived the slaughter, a little singed at the edges, a handsome woman of middle age and two bright-eyed dogs. Mystique kneeled for a closer look, but Magneto shook his head. He opened his hand, which was filled with the pins he’d pulled from the grenades, and let them fall, burying the photograph in steel.
Then his head jerked up and he staggered as if he’d just been physically struck, Mystique hissing in agony as a phantom ice pick went straight through her brain, as the hum radiating from inside the room got louder, grew deeper and more intense.
In front of Charles Xavier, a light appeared. In terms of the holographic globe being displayed by Cerebro, it was located at the core of the world. From that point, radiant spears stabbed outward to connect with each and every one of the scarlet dots that represented an active or potential mutant.
“Oh,” Jean cried suddenly, and then she cried out in real pain as her concentration slipped and the teke splints vanished from around her broken leg. Psychically damping the pain didn’t make it go away, it just made things feel worse every time she had to notice. But her injury was the least of her concern as her hand tightened on Scott’s shoulder so tightly he winced, half wondering if she was going to crush his bones.
“Jean,” he demanded, placing an arm around her waist, pulling one of her arms across his shoulder so he could better handle her weight, “what’s wrong?”
“Voices,” she gasped, “so many voices, can’t you hear them, of course you can’t what am I saying oh Charles oh Charles what have you done?”
“Jean!”
“Scott, it’s Cerebro,” she cried, and for the first time since he’d known her, Scott heard genuine terror in her voice. “We’re too late!”
She screamed. He’d only heard its like once before, when he was young and hunting. It was one of the few memories that he knew dated from before the orphanage where he’d grown up. He was in mountains, so many they filled the horizon on every side, and though his dad carried a gun for protection, they were there to shoot pictures. Some poor fool in another hunting party had stumbled into a bear trap, and the metal jaws had nearly taken off his leg.
Jean collapsed to the floor, clutching at her head and howling. Scott knelt beside her, struck through the heart to see her in such pain, yet utterly helpless to alleviate it.
He heard a deep, basso profundo thrum that sounded to him like tectonic plates grinding, and then, just like that, he lost all ability for rational thought as his own head was overwhelmed by a sleet storm of pain. His eyes were burning and his brain with it, the fire coursing down his spine and along every path and linkage of his nervous system.
His last, desperate, marginally conscious act was to throw himself clear of Jean, to wrap his arms around his head and tuck his body in as tight upon itself as he could manage. His beams couldn’t punch through his own flesh; this way, he hoped, he prayed, he wouldn’t unleash them on anyone else. He wouldn’t hurt Jean—any more than he already had.
Storm and the children were making good time through the bowels of the complex. For once, even Artie was behaving. No smart remarks, no haring off on his own, he held her hand tight and kept pace, even though her legs were twice the length of his and she was walking fast. Nightcrawler was on point and so far, thankfully, the way ahead was clear.
She sensed the psi wave before actually hearing it, in the same way she sensed changes in the weather. The shape of the air, the energies coursing through it, bulged and rippled as though they were being shunted aside by the approach of a power far more massive than themselves.
Nightcrawler felt it, too. He dropped from the ceiling, bracing a hand against the wall to steady himself. He looked dizzy and felt far worse. In his whole life he’d never suffered from vertigo and now, suddenly, he was glad for what he’d been spared all these years. He tried to focus his eyesight, and when that failed, he realized it was getting harder to form coherent thoughts as well. It was as though every cell in his body had acquired the ability to teleport independently of one another, and they’d all decided to go their separate ways.
He started to turn, to warn Storm, to cry out to her for help, but that simple action proved beyond his capability as he stumbled over his own feet and flailed desperately for a handhold to stop himself from falling.
“Storm!” he cried with the frantic desperation of a drowning man, but she was in no position to help.
She was already on her knees, hands clutched to her head, caught in her own whirlwind and shot through with lightning that exploded from her eyes and circled right around to strike her back. Always before she’d been immune to the elements she wielded, but that was no longer the case as wicked arcs of electricity exploded over and through her. She writhed with every impact, and while the winds attacking her swept away the smoke raised by these repeated attacks, they couldn’t dispel the quickly rising stench of burned uniform. Or the certain knowledge that in very little time, her flesh would be burning, too.
The children were screaming now, howling like souls being tormented by demons, Nightcrawler’s eyes going wide with horror, his mouth forming the words—part demand, part prayer—“Stop it! Please, stop it! For the love of God—stop!” But no sound emerged. He was beyond the ability to speak.
He knew, as Storm did, that this was just the leading edge of the nightmare coming for them, the merest prelude to what lay ahead. He prayed for mercy, not only for himself and his companions, but for the souls of those responsible.
He forced one hand in front of the other, climbing along the floor as he would up a vertical rock face, determined to reach Storm, to give her what shelter and comfort he could so that together they could try to protect the children. There’d been no one to protect him growing up. He’d learned early how to fight and, far more importantly, how to defuse a fight, and he’d sworn afterward he would never allow anyone to be without a protector.
He stretched his right arm forward, a distance that seemed to his disoriented eyes to be miles. It was so hard to move, to think, there was a tremendous numbing pressure right behind his eyes that threatened to pop them from their sockets and he was sure his brain was swelling from the onslaught of the energy pulse.
Then the hum enveloped them, and all that came before faded to insignificance.
Nightcrawler’s last conscious thought was of wonderment. He’d always believed you had to be dead before you went to Hell.
Logan tried to snarl, but it came out more like a scream. Claws emerged from both his hands, but they extended no more than an inch before retracting. This time, though, Logan’s healing factor didn’t close the wounds behind them, and blood sprayed from the open cuts. Indeed, it appeared that all the wounds he’d ever endured were coming back to haunt him as a score of gashes opened across his flesh, splashing the floor around him scarlet. Some were random and messy, the legacy of knives or bullets or the cruel vagaries of nature, but many were neat and purposeful, the incisions of careful men who’d abandoned all allegiance to the Hippocratic oath they’d taken as medical students to do no harm. They’d laid Logan open to the bone and now, in the place Stryker implied he had been born, it was happening all over again.
* * *
Magneto staggered under the onslaught of the psychic pressure wave, standing against it as he would against the full force of a hurricane’s winds. Step by determined step, he advanced on the doorway to Stryker’s version of the Cerebro chamber.
“Eric,” he heard from behind and to the side, Mystique’s voice, shattering between one syllable of his name and the next, between that word and the one which followed. “Hurry!” Feminine for one, mas
culine for another, plunging from soprano to bass and back again.
He didn’t look back, he couldn’t spare the effort—and besides, he could imagine what was happening. Somehow Cerebro was attacking them through their very powers, turning what made them unique against them and consuming them with it. Mystique was a metamorph, a shape-shifter, able to mimic any conceivable human form perfectly. Size, age, gender, none of these were obstacles.
Now, as with Logan, her past came back to torment her. Cerebro made her flesh pliable, like soft wax, and then like mercury, as she underwent change after involuntary change, revisiting every face and form she’d ever copied. Even though she made it seem easy, it really wasn’t. Her apparent speed came with years of training, of practice, of preparation. Each transformation was an effort, and the more she executed, the faster she did them, the greater the toll. If she needed to grow taller, she had to bulk up to provide the raw material. Shorter required burning off mass. Flesh was comparatively easy to sculpt, bones less so, and internal organs the most demanding of all. That’s why most gender shifts were cosmetic.
None of that applied now. The shifts came so fast that she presented herself as multiples. Her own coloring, Jean Grey’s face, Robert Kelly’s torso, Rogue’s legs, Xavier’s face, Rogue’s hair, Jean’s torso, Wolverine’s hands, claws sprouting from fingers, from between her toes, Magneto’s face rising from her belly, someone else’s from each breast, arms becoming legs and feet growing fingers, all these mad alterations accompanied by a rising chorus of howls from mouths that popped into view all over her body, each capable of independent speech and all of them shrieking in agony under the relentless and crushing pressure of the wave.
Soon, terribly soon, the transformations would come so quickly, the pain would grow so great, that Mystique’s consciousness—her sense of fundamental self—would shatter. In effect, on both a cerebral and a cellular level, she would forget who and what she was. Most likely, she would genetically discorporate into a muddle of mindless cells, and that would be the end of her.
Magneto knew all that, knew she was but one victim of far too many, knew something similar lay in store for him—unless he stopped it.
He lifted a hand and a new sound rose to challenge the hum of the Cerebro wave: the basso groan of metal finding itself subjected to stresses well beyond design tolerances. He couldn’t do this at Mount Haven; the part of the complex where he’d been incarcerated had been constructed of nonferrous materials and revolutionary plastics. But Alkali was much older, built in a day when the likes of him hadn’t been a factor. There was a lot of metal for him to play with, and even though the Cerebro wave presented a significant—for some, insurmountable—obstacle, he was determined to prevail.
He had survived Auschwitz. He had lived to see his captors in their graves, had helped deliver more than a few of them to that end by himself. This would be the same.
He flashed teeth with the effort, almost a snarl, and metal started to warp and tear around him. The timbre of the hum emanating from inside faded ever so slightly, and the pulse of the Cerebro wave . . . slowed.
Charles Xavier was aware of none of this. He stared up at the globe circling around him, transfixed by the firefly display of scarlet dots, paying not the slightest attention to the trickles of blood from nostrils and ears and the corners of his eyes as stress ruptured the pinpoint capillaries that fed his brain. These were the most minor manifestations of being at the wave’s source, of being the focal point of the power being unleashed, and at this moment they represented no lasting physical trauma.
That wouldn’t last, of course. Mutant 143 knew that, somewhere in the deepest recesses of his own twisted psyche. In short order, as the pulse built to its peak, the greater vessels would burst, and he would be consumed by a massive and all-encompassing cerebral hemorrhage. He would die from the ultimate stroke—but not before bearing witness to the brutal and merciless slaughter of every person on earth who Cerebro considered a mutant. This was Stryker’s revenge—not only would Xavier himself die, and all his precious students, but the future they represented. The murder of his dream would be the death of him, and before his own end Mutant 143 would make sure that Xavier realized the full import of what he had done.
And then, of course, 143 would die. Stryker appreciated the neatness and elegance of this resolution; it was ideal for a covert operation, one of his hallmarks. He didn’t like loose ends. In one stroke, this eliminated not only the threat to the world but the weapon used to deal with it. As for 143 himself, the realization of his fate didn’t bother him. Partly, he didn’t really believe it would happen to him. He still retained a child’s absolute faith in his own immortality. He couldn’t conceive of coming to an end. What mattered for him now, as always since the manifestation of his mutant powers, was playing with his toys. They were mortal, they were fragile. He was God. And He had work to do.
So 143’s eyes pulsed, casting their demented light into the core of Xavier’s being. Around them, what was normally heard as whispers, the background susurrus of all the myriad thoughts Cerebro allowed Xavier to perceive, rose to a chorus of screams.
Cyclops wrapped his hands as tight as he could across his eyes, but he was sick at heart at the realization that he couldn’t hold back his optic blasts much longer. Already they were reaching the containment capacity of his ruby quartz visor and little flashes of energy were beginning to pop through the spaces between his fingers, too small to do much damage but serving as eloquent harbingers for the devastation soon to follow.
Jean wasn’t doing any better as she clutched her hands to her ears in a vain attempt to block the same threnody of desolation that enveloped her teacher. She swung her broken leg against a stanchion, not caring about any lasting damage she might be doing, praying instead that the pain she caused herself might serve as a bulwark against the assault from outside.
And she succeeded, although not quite in the way she had planned. Her teke slugged into high gear, stealing a page from Logan’s book as her body remembered on a cellular level what it was like to be whole and set her power to work bringing that about. All the shards of bones, large or small, visible or microscopic, were plucked from where they’d landed in her leg and pressed back into their proper position.
She thought she’d experienced pain in her life, either directly or vicariously as an aspect of her power, when she synced into the minds of patients to ease their suffering, but she realized now that she’d never even come close as all those pieces of bone tore their way through her flesh to set themselves. She howled, thankful for the respite from Cerebro, struggling to find a way to reach Charles through this nigh-unbearable sleet storm of acid, to join her own strength to his and together find a way to neutralize the wave.
There was a fire within her, and she assumed that it had to do with her leg, that her power was somehow finding a way to fuse the bone back together, but as it grew, as her thoughts splintered and the fear blossomed that she wouldn’t be equal to the task before her, it became a radiance too astounding to be described, too powerful to be measured, as though she were witnessing within herself the primal moment of creation, the lighting of the first spark within the infinite firmament.
With a cry of joy and longing, Jean Grey spread wide the arms of imagination and reached out to embrace the stars.
She knew then she was mad, but she refused to yield, to the pain or the madness. If this fire represented power, then she would find a way to harness it, to use it to save those she loved. If she was truly dying, she would find a way back from the ashes. She would never go quietly into the dark night of eternity.
Aboard the Blackbird, Rogue was struggling to reach the controls, to do as Storm had told her, but she couldn’t make it. She couldn’t even rise from the deck where she’d collapsed. Tears on her face, she couldn’t stop Bobby from grasping her by the hand—in a grip that froze her to the shoulder, as he’d coated every visible surface on the plane with a sheet of glittering hoarfrost. His skin was
transparent, she could see right through him, with him looking like a three-dimensional X ray—only this one was made entirely of ice. She could see his skeleton, and faint hints of what must be his heart and lungs and other organs. No sense of blood, no visible nerves, and he crackled faintly with every move, with every breath. His voice was arctic, biting and cold and nothing like he usually sounded.
Ice shattered as he wrenched her glove off her arm, she begged him to stop—at least in her mind—but nothing emerged from her mouth, there was this huge crowd crushing in around her, all the people she’d ever imprinted rising up inside her skull in rage at what she’d done, ignoring her apologies, her attempted explanations, demanding instead that she yield control to them. She knew he was trying to save her, offering his strength to give her a better chance of surviving, no matter the cost to himself. She didn’t want that, she couldn’t bear her own survival at the cost of his, and she knew as well that he didn’t care.
He held her bare hand in his, deliberately initiating contact—and imprinting—and her eyes bugged wide as it turned to ice the same as his, while his started to look more and more normally human.
“Bobby, stop it!” she shrieked, and from lips that tasted chill as the pole came a voice that was a match for his, cold and remote and unhuman as space itself.
And from her eyes, as she saw from his, fell tears that froze to both their cheeks.
Thunder rocked the tunnel around Storm, wind howled, rain fell, and lightning continued to strike. She wasn’t moving, sprawled on her face as bolt after bolt crashed against her body. Nightcrawler, by contrast, couldn’t stop as he teleported in place again and again and again, faster and faster and faster, until he flickered like a strobe image.
John Allardyce hadn’t made it to the entrance of the complex, hadn’t even come close, before the wave dropped him. He hadn’t moved from where he fell as breath kept coming in an ever-greater rush. He was hyperventilating, gulping huge amounts of air to fuel the raging conflagration within him, so much so that his skin was glowing—and the snow around him quickly melting away.
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