X-Men 2

by Chris Claremont

  But then Storm knew different. As the shock wave thundered past, the girl had lost control of her illusion, allowing them to see things as they truly were. Around them was a vast holographic construct of the globe, festooned with an uncountable number of blinding lights that Storm intuited at once represented the nonmutant population of the Earth. Remembering what she had endured when the Cerebro had been calibrated for mutants, she closed her eyes in empathy. Even if they found a way to save everyone, what could they do about the traumatic scars left on their memories? In some ways, that would be far worse than death because with it would be the constant terror that it could happen again.

  That couldn’t be her concern right now. First and foremost, she had to save them.

  The momentary disruption of the illusion had revealed one thing more: the true identity of their adversary, not a little girl at all but a misshapen creature in a wheelchair, whose mind had latched onto Xavier like a lamprey.

  Her initial, her main, reaction was sorrow that something so damaged could come into the world and never find the help needed to make it whole, in spirit if not in flesh. Much like Magneto, she dealt with the primal energies of the world. It gave her perceptions far beyond those of normal vision, and those in turn gave her an insight into people that was almost as effective as Logan’s physical senses. She had seen cruelty in her life and once, when she was very young, had encountered a being that became for her the living embodiment of evil. She had known that at first glance, the same way that her first awareness of Xavier told her that he was a man to be trusted.

  The man in the other wheelchair was not to be trusted. There was a wrongness to his spirit that made the patterns of energy cast off by his body as twisted as his body itself.

  And for the second time in her life, staring at the false face of the little girl, Ororo Munroe knew that she was face-to-face with evil.

  “He’ll be finished soon,” she said in a voice rich with satisfaction, a glutton enjoying the feast of a lifetime. The agonies—the ones she remembered, the ones she imagined—that tore at Storm’s heart only filled his with delight. “It’s almost over.”

  “This is not good,” Nightcrawler muttered, looking up and around them nervously in the vain hope he might find a way to pierce the veil that the girl had cast around them. It bothered him to know that the place was collapsing about their ears and yet be unable to see any part of it.

  Storm nodded agreement. They were out of time. “Kurt,” she told him, “it’s going to get very cold.”

  He nodded back to her, understanding that she was talking about more than the usual winter chill.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “When the times comes, we’ll likely have to hurry—and there won’t be any margin for error.”

  “In my whole life on the trapeze, I’ve never missed a catch. Do what you have to . . . Ororo. Trust me for the rest.”

  She spared him a glance and a smile that had nothing to do with business. “I like the way you say my name.”

  She couldn’t see him blush, not with his indigo skin, and for that he was supremely grateful. “I like saying it.”

  As he spoke, he saw mist on his breath and realized she’d started what she had planned. Her warning was no joke; the room’s ambient temperature had already dropped enough to make him shiver.

  Her eyes were silver, highlighted in a crystalline blue, the rich color of the Earth’s sky as seen from space, standing out dramatically against her chocolate skin. Her hair stirred in a breeze of her own creation, and Nightcrawler knew that this represented the calm center of an increasingly powerful whirlwind.

  “There are winds you find in the wastelands of both poles,” he heard her say, as though she were conducting a seminar. “Gravity grabs hold of cold, dense air and pulls it down the slopes of mountains and plateaus. In a volcanic eruption, the same thing happens with a pyroclastic flow. The air picks up an incredible amount of speed and that speed makes it colder. It’s a dry wind, there’s no precipitation. You can consider it a sandstorm of ice and snow. This wind cuts. It can freeze you in a heartbeat, not by coating you in ice but by turning the marrow of your bones to crystal. You don’t fight this wind, you go to ground, you endure. You find a way to survive.”

  “What are you doing?” the girl wailed.

  Nightcrawler, already shivering violently because Ororo couldn’t spare the concentration or the effort to shield him, clutched at her arm.

  “Storm,” he cried, “she’s a child.”

  “She’s an illusion.”

  “Does that give you the right to condemn the being who created her?”

  “Do we have a choice, Kurt? That mutant’s life for the professor’s, and likely the world!”

  “That’s a decision Magneto would not hesitate to make, I know. Nor have the slightest regret over it,” he replied.

  Storm said nothing, but her eyes blazed like silver beacons against the darkness.

  “I’m freezing,” the girl shrieked, her voice breaking, turning masculine and adult, then back to a girl once more. “You’re hurting me. Make it stop!

  “Stop it,” the girl cried. And then, in 143’s own voice, “Stop it!”

  Just like that, the illusion flickered, faster and faster, like a manic strobe. The girl vanished, as did the illusion of the silent room and the deactivated Cerebro. They found themselves in chaos, with chunks of scaffolding and shielding plate tumbling all around.

  Feeling frozen solid, Nightcrawler ducked as a piece the size of a limo took out a portion of the gallery back by the doorway. Storm ignored it all and stood her ground, her eyes fixed on her adversary.

  Mutant 143 sat hunkered deep in his chair, eyes radiant with fury as he tried to grab hold of Storm’s thoughts, only to discover what Xavier had learned years before—and just as painfully. That when she was fully in tune with her powers, when they were active on this level, it became virtually impossible to access her mind. The energies she manifested created too much psychic interference. To the unwary telepath, it was much the same as trying to grab hold of a bolt of lightning.

  Mutant 143 cried out, so staggered by the backlash that his leash on Xavier also slipped.

  Xavier felt the chill and knew it at once for what it was. He sensed the ripples of static on the fringes of his awareness and understood at once what Storm was doing. He beheld the hologram of the globe at life-size and the lights that blazed across its surface, bright, so bright, like candles on the brink of going out forever.

  And he knew, with a realization that would haunt him to the end of his days, what he was doing here.

  His first instinct was to shut down the Cerebro wave at once, but he held back. The process of disengagement had to be gradual, to allow the afflicted bodies and psyches to decompress, lest the shock of instant recovery do as much damage as the attacking wave itself.

  To do that, though, he had to deal once and for all with—

  “Jason,” he said quietly as he turned. He didn’t ask Storm to temper her winds. The young man who sat across from him knew too many pathways into his mind, he dared not allow him another opportunity to reassert control.

  “No,” the girl pouted defiantly, narrowing her eyes, shaking her head, fiercely trying to compel obedience.

  “No,” she repeated.

  There was no inhibitor on Xavier’s thoughts now; with it in place he couldn’t operate Cerebro. That was why he had to be completely under 143’s influence before he was allowed into the chamber. The pathways that 143 had used to worm his way into the core of Xavier’s being now provided equal access to their source. The young man was gifted, and powerful, but Xavier acknowledged no equals, especially with the survival of humanity at stake.

  “No,” she cried again, with tears. “Stop! You’re hurting me!”

  The air rippled outward from her, looking much like the heat flow from a jet-engine exhaust, and in its wake the substance of the room’s reality once again changed. It reminded Xavier of so
me of the classic cartoons, where the animator would swipe his brush across the screen, unleashing a cascade of color like a waterfall, which in turn would transform the scene into something altogether different from what had come before.

  They found themselves on a battlefield, an image Xavier recognized from his own past, before the X-Men, before he lost the use of his legs, when he’d found himself cut off from his unit and caught in the middle of a firefight that was rapidly turning into a major pitched battle. Death came from all sides: It claimed men with stakes buried in the grass, with bullets, with cannon shells, with splinters blasted every which way by exploding trees, by a carpet of bombs tumbling from planes that flew so high no one knew they were in danger until the world erupted around them. They died from fire, they died broken, they died in agony, they died weeping and screaming and cursing and lost and lonely.

  There were more images, none, thankfully, from Xavier’s life, all of them skewed toward the cruel and the painful. As Xavier had sensed during that first interview, there was no empathy in Jason, no acknowledgment of the people around him as living, sentient beings worthy of even the slightest respect. To him, they were a different order of interactive toy. He took his pleasure from “mounting” them as the practitioners of voodoo believed their gods did when possessing their worshipers. He created scenarios that literally put his victims through Hell and gloried in the agonies that resulted.

  There was nothing in him that responded to joy or that even recognized its existence. He considered his life a misery, and by sublimating those feelings through the torment of others, he made himself feel not so much better as less awful.

  Had Xavier worked with him from the start, perhaps things might have been different. But Stryker had closed that door. Perhaps he had been right. Perhaps Xavier had been afraid of Jason. Had he only wanted those students at his school who could be saved?

  “Get out of my head!”

  “No,” Xavier said. All those years ago, when he wasn’t so sure of his vocation, or his own abilities, he’d made a terrible mistake. Could that be explained, could it be excused? That didn’t matter to him now. Those options didn’t exist today. He could no more abandon Jason now than one of his own. Succeed or fail, he had to try now, as he’d refused to then.

  The ripples bounced off the wall, shunting all the images they carried with them into an incredible collision that made it impossible for a moment to tell which pieces of wreckage and shattering realities were illusion, and which were actual pieces of the room that was collapsing about their heads.

  Through all the chaos, the only constant that remained was the facsimile globe, but at long last even that seemed to lose form and substance. Its outlines smeared, as transmitted images do when overtaken by static. Unnoticed in the ancillary din, the hum put forth by Cerebro gradually faded, as did the lights on the globe.

  Xavier took a deep breath, mustering his strength for a last effort, and sent a thought pulse of his own along all the linkages that had been established between his mind and the rest of the world. Deep down inside there was a part of him that was tempted to try a global rewrite, something on the order of “love thy mutant neighbor as thyself,” but it was an enticement easily resisted. Storm was fond of telling him that nature moved at its own pace, that some things had to be taught—and learned—in their own time. Short-circuit the process, shortchange the result, little good would come of it.

  Having just endured firsthand what that meant, he had no desire to compound the resulting mess, just to try as best he could to set things right.

  What he sent was a little bit of energy, or personal grace. A psychic aspirin. He couldn’t banish the physical effects of the Cerebro wave, but at least he could ameliorate the residual pain. The victims might remember that pain, but they would no longer feel it. Quite the contrary. They’d actively feel better, like waking at the dawn of a fresh and beautiful day, whose sunrise contained the promise that anything was possible. And that those possibilities were good ones.

  He reached up and removed his helmet, and with that severed his direct contact with Cerebro, which obligingly completed the full shutdown process. The globe vanished as if it had never been.

  With it went Storm’s winds, her eyes reverting to normal as Nightcrawler took her by the hand. Because the air was so dry, there was no evidence of the terrible cold she’d created beyond the residual chill itself.

  Jean must have been monitoring the situation with her own telepathy, because the moment the helmet cleared Xavier’s head, the vault door blocking the entrance was blown wide open, taking with it a fair chunk of surrounding wall.

  Hot on its heels, Cyclops plunged into the chamber, only to backpedal frantically as a new series of explosions deep within the complex dropped another length of ceiling on the entrance, hopelessly blocking it.

  The room shook as if it were a ball being worried by a playful puppy, and this latest assault proved far more than its structure could bear. As the platform and gallery began to twist alarmingly, Xavier chose to ignore the risk as he pivoted his chair and pushed toward Jason. The young man, grotesque as he was, had taken on the aspect of a waxworks mannequin. There was no expression on his face, no emotion in his eyes. Xavier sent thought after thought to him, but the harder he reached, the more defiantly Jason pushed him away.

  He wanted no part of what Xavier had to offer.

  A massive plate clipped the edge of the platform, and Xavier looked up to see most of the upper hemisphere crashing down on them. He knew what had to be done and lunged forward in his chair, attempting to grab Jason by the body or the chair—by some part of him—in hopes of creating a daisy chain of physical contact that would allow Nightcrawler—whose capabilities he could see clearly in Jean’s mind—to teleport them all out of harm’s way.

  Jason would have none of it. Using the motor controls of his own chair, he backed out of reach just as the huge pieces of wreckage smashed into the gallery.

  Then they were all falling as the platform gave way. Xavier felt Storm’s arms, and something else that he belatedly realized was Nightcrawler’s tail, but he didn’t really register their touch. He had eyes only for the tortured, and now broken, semblance of a man whom he prayed had finally found his measure of peace.

  The next thing he knew, after a moment of altogether sublime misery—which Jean’s thoughts had not warned him about—he was in her arms, with Storm, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, and the stolen children crowded close around.

  Chapter

  Seventeen

  While Magneto climbed aboard and settled into the copilot’s seat, Mystique finished the start-up sequence. A rapid press of three buttons in sequence was rewarded by the rising whine of the twin jet engines coming on-line and spooling up to speed. She checked the gauges, satisfying herself that performance was nominal across the panel, and then engaged the rotors. Above their heads, through the clear canopy, the big blades began to spin.

  One hand on the control yoke, the other on the secondary, Mystique was about to lift off when she nudged Magneto with an elbow and thrust her chin off to the left. He followed her direction and quickly found the figure of a boy standing on the tree line, face expressionless as he watched the helicopter prepare to leave. The only part of him that moved was his right hand, flicking open the lid of his Zippo lighter and snapping it closed, over and over, steady as a metronome.

  Mystique looked at Magneto, wondering which way he’d jump.

  He watched the boy for perhaps a minute, until Mystique found herself about to remind him that it was past time to go. The longer they stayed, the greater the risk of being caught by the dam when it collapsed. Not a good thing.

  As if intuiting her thoughts, Magneto nodded once and beckoned once.

  The boy just stood there.

  John was thinking back to Boston, to how Bobby Drake had looked on the Blackbird’s ramp, staring up at his parents and his home as if he were saying good-bye to them forever. He’d ditched his own family ages back, a
nd forgotten them, so for him the guy’s hesitation had no meaning. Totally bogus moment. Now he found his cynicism and contempt thrown back in his face as he came face-to-face with the exact same choice. Walk away from Xavier’s now, he knew, there’d be no turning back. Things would never be the same. The friendships he’d made would probably come to an end. Rogue . . .

  What did he care about Rogue, really? The girl had the hairy wow-wows for Bobbeeee, for God’s sake, talk about your total lack of taste! That pair of lames were made for each other, and both of them made perfectly for Xavier’s. No way would John Allardyce turn out like them.

  Pyro was made for better things.

  He dropped the lighter into his pocket and headed for the open door of the helicopter.

  The smile he saw from Magneto when he came aboard made it all worthwhile. He’d made the right choice.

  As the helicopter lifted over the trees and Mystique accelerated toward the nearest line of mountains, Pyro had no regrets. And no worries, either, about the X-Men. He didn’t believe they were in any danger. After all, they had their Blackbird—and here he uncorked a wicked nasty grin—that is, assuming Rogue or Bobby found enough gumption to fly that puppy to their rescue. Of course, that would mean breaking the rules, disobeying Storm’s order. Fact is, Pyro didn’t think they had it in them.

  That thought didn’t bother Pyro at all.

  Storm led the way, wishing there was sufficient volume of air within the tunnels to generate a wind capable of carrying them all. The complex hadn’t seemed so huge going in, but now the tunnels seemed endless. Fast as they hurried, she knew this was taking too long.

  Nightcrawler was closest behind her, carrying Xavier in his arms as if the X-Men’s mentor weighed next to nothing. Poor Kurt didn’t look happy, either, probably because he wasn’t altogether comfortable moving on two legs. He could make much better time galloping upside down along the ceiling on all fours.