X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  John flicked the lighter again, his eyes momentarily caressing the flame before returning to Marie, who tried to look bored to tears as she met that gaze but knew she wasn’t quite pulling it off.

  “It is,” John said.

  Marie turned her eyes away and knew the moment she did that she’d made a mistake. There was another crowd of teens sitting at the next table, a little bit older, taking advantage of this out-of-the-way alcove to sneak some smokes. One of them looked up at exactly the same moment, and for that moment their gazes locked. He smiled, Marie let the edges of her mouth quirk in response, then she turned back to her friends in time to hear Bobby start to turn the verbal tables on John.

  “But you know,” Bobby said, “there’s something pretty agonizing about freezing to death. You don’t just drift off to sleep like most people think.”

  “Damn,” Marie muttered, “I was so hoping for a nap!”

  “Enlighten us, snowman,” John instructed.

  “It all starts with shivering. Just a little at first as the body struggles to keep warm. Your skin turns a pale blue.”

  “Guys, not again,” Marie pleaded. “Change of topic, okay?”

  Being guys, they ignored her.

  “Then,” Bobby continued, “the moisture in your lungs starts to freeze, so that even breathing is painful.”

  “This conversation,” she tried again, “is painful!”

  Marie snuck another sidelong glance at the other table, to find two pairs of eyes staring back. They looked nice, they looked interesting, they were a pleasant change to this pissing match she had heard too many times before. So when they smiled, she didn’t try to hide her response.

  Neither of the boys at her table even noticed.

  “Those shivers,” Bobby said, “turn into violent convulsions as your blood begins to crystallize.”

  The other boys got up from their table.

  “Wouldn’t you be, like, so dead by then, Bobby?” asked Marie in a tone that broadcast boredom.

  “Worse,” he replied. “Your brain starts to scream for oxygen and you can’t stop yourself slowly, inexorably sinking into complete and utter . . . insanity!”

  John looked wholly unimpressed. Marie actually yawned.

  “Insanity, huh? I s’pose that might be considered an improvement over this little colloquy.”

  “Hey,” said one of the boys from the next table.

  All three of Xavier’s students looked up. Marie turned around in her chair to find the boys standing over her. This was so not what she wanted. It had never occurred to her that they’d take a little bit of flirting as an outright invitation.

  “He said, ‘Hey,’ ” said one of the others, after an uncomfortable silence.

  “Hey,” Bobby replied with a grin, hoping to defuse the situation.

  But it didn’t work. The others had responded to what they thought were a set of definite cues. When Marie didn’t greet them enthusiastically, they weren’t happy to discover they’d perhaps made a mistake, and adolescent pride wouldn’t let them back down.

  The second boy spoke again, jabbing a thumb toward his friend, who took a drag on his cigarette—ostensibly to show how cool he was, but more likely to hide a sudden attack of nerves. “He was talking to her,” the boy said, meaning his friend and meaning Marie.

  “What’s your name?” the first boy asked.

  She had more than one, but the situation was making her a little bit nervous as well, and the boys were crowding her awfully close. So she answered with the name she’d chosen for herself, rather than the one with which she’d been born.

  “Rogue,” she said.

  That prompted a snort from the third newcomer.

  “Cool,” he said, meaning exactly the opposite, as in “look at these prep school jag-offs throwing off street names, figuring we’ll be impressed.” “This is Slash,” boy number one, “And I’m Bobcat! Nice ta meetcha!”

  He finished by reaching for Marie’s arm.

  Bobby intercepted him, placing his hand on the older teen’s wrist and speaking as easily as could be. “You really don’t want to touch her.”

  “Excuse me,” said Bobcat.

  “Or what?” echoed Slash, “you gonna hurt him?”

  Bobby shook his head. “Nope. But she might.”

  The two teens looked at him, looked at Marie, looked at each other—and burst out laughing. To them, it was such an outrageous idea, there was no other response, which was precisely what Bobby had in mind. It made the Xavier’s students look a little silly and gave these guys a way out without losing face. Crisis averted, no harm done.

  But John Allardyce wouldn’t let it go.

  “You know,” he said, his voice dripping unmistakably acid contempt, “there’s no smoking in here.”

  That was a challenge. No way would the others back down now.

  “No shit?” Slash sounded incredulous, returning an equal measure of insult. “Really? You got a problem with that?”

  John flicked his lighter—open, closed, open, closed—while never taking his eyes off Slash.

  Slash gestured toward John’s lighter with his cigarette. “Got a light?” Challenge, served and returned. Another opportunity for all concerned to back off.

  John wasn’t interested. He was enjoying himself.

  “It’s a simple question,” Slash said, finishing with the silent but unmistakable comment “asshole.”

  John shrugged, so bored. “And I’ll give you a simple answer.” Suggesting, just as plainly, that these mooks were too damn dumb for anything better.

  Slash let his temper show, spacing his words for emphasis: “Do . . . you . . . have . . . a . . . light?”

  John kept flicking the cap of his lighter. “Sorry, pal,” he said, “can’t help ya.”

  Marie sighed.

  “Knock it off, John,” Marie hissed at him.

  “Please,” Bobby echoed in frustration, figuring that before this was through he was going to have to grab his friend and hustle him bodily out of here.

  “Yeah, John,” Shadow chimed in, “listen to your girlfriends.”

  John, not about to yield center stage, winked at Marie.

  “I’m sorry, guys,” he told them all. “Besides the fact that this is clearly marked as a nonsmoking environment”—he pointed to a sign—“I couldn’t bear knowing that I contributed to your collective slow, tumor-ridden deaths.”

  For final emphasis, he flicked his lighter shut. But he’d miscalculated as Slash snatched it away.

  “What’s this?” he demanded, spinning it between his own fingers. “A fashion accessory?”

  His pals laughed and smirked, enjoying how the tables had suddenly turned in their favor. John, all humor gone from his face, lunged for the lighter, only to be shoved hard by Bobcat back into his chair.

  Slash struck a flame and lit his cigarette, making an exaggerated show of blowing a lungful of smoke into John’s face.

  Later, much later, they all told themselves they should have seen this moment coming, they should have been prepared, they should have stopped him. Truth was, though, they never imagined it could happen. John, of all people, knew the nature of his mutant power and how important—how essential—it was to use it properly. They didn’t think he was serious, and once it started, there was simply no time.

  John was a pyrotic. His mutant ability was to control flame. Before any of them could stop him, before they realized the danger, he amplified the tip of the burning cigarette to white-hot incandescence and sent it flashing all the way to the boy’s fingers and beyond. Instantly what was left of the cigarette was reduced to ash. Slash opened his hand, even as the tips of his fingers blistered from the sudden, scorching heat, but it was far too late as raw flame raced up his sleeve to ignite his jacket and hair and set him aflame from head to toe.

  Slash screamed—mostly in terror, there hadn’t been time yet for any pain to register—and reeled away from the corner, slapping at himself in a doomed attempt to extin
guish the flames. A succession of other screams were heard as patrons of the food court reacted to what was happening, scrambling to get clear of the young man or pull their own children to safety, calling for fire extinguishers, starting a stampede for the sole exit.

  John stayed where he was, watching with a smile.

  With a curse, Bobby leaped to his feet, reaching out to Slash with his right hand, which suddenly turned transparent, as if the skin had turned to crystal-clear ice. The temperature in the corner dropped so low, so fast, that every breath around their table left clouds in the air, but more importantly a stream of frost embraced Slash like a blanket to smother his flames.

  Marie stood, but before she could get clear of the corner the second boy—Bobcat—made a grab for her. In her hurry, her coat had slipped off her shoulder, baring a stretch of bicep. Bare hand closed on bare arm, flesh made direct contact with flesh, and all of a sudden Bobcat looked like he’d just been hit in the belly by a battering ram.

  His mouth opened wide, but he couldn’t find the air—or even the will—to shriek his heart out as veins distended on his head and throat and Marie bared her own teeth in a grimace of sympathetic pain, giving voice herself to the raw terror the young man felt. In midscream, she wrenched free of him, breaking contact with such force that Bobcat collapsed forward onto the table, and Marie stumble-spun into John’s arms, which made his day.

  Bobcat pulled himself up and cocked a fist to deliver a blind-side punch to John’s head.

  The punch was never thrown.

  The three Xavier students looked around in amazement to discover that every person in the food court was frozen in place. They looked accusingly at Bobby, but he only shrugged in helpless demurral: This wasn’t his doing.

  Then the penny dropped, and four sets of eyes turned as one to the doorway, where Charles Xavier sat grim-faced in his chair. Clustered close behind him were Jean, Scott, and Storm, and, farther back, the rest of the tour group. One look at the faces of their teachers told the students how badly they’d just screwed up. “The next time you feel like showing off, don’t!” the professor said curtly.

  Standing, Charles Xavier would have matched Scott Summer’s height, but he was in a wheelchair and had been for as long as the young man had known him. He was twice Scott’s age and more, but he carried those years easily, and the wiry strength of his body made no concession to his disability. He spoke with a rich English accent he’d acquired as a student at Cambridge and although he possessed a smile as generous as his nature, he generally presented himself in a manner as formal as his attire. When he looked you in the eye, he gave the impression that your whole being had suddenly gone transparent. Scott was one of the few who knew that wasn’t hyperbole. Xavier was a telepath, perhaps the foremost on Earth. He could read minds as easily as anyone else might read a book. Jean was his prize pupil.

  He had founded his school to provide a venue where young mutants could learn not simply to use their powers properly and safely, but also responsibly. The core curriculum was as much about the ethics of being a mutant as the practicalities. At the moment it was plain that he was wondering why he even bothered.

  As the students gathered their gear and trudged across the court, a look suddenly swept across Jean’s face, as if she’d heard something from outside the building. Xavier’s concentration was occupied keeping the patrons of the food court “off-line”; he hadn’t noticed what she had.

  There was a television set suspended from the ceiling, turned off. A faint flicker of energy appeared around Jean’s eyes, and the set came on. The channel quickly changed to Fox News as a title banner at the bottom of the screen announced the news that the midday anchor was breathlessly repeating aloud: MUTANT ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT. Behind the anchor there was a secondary window showing a live shot of the White House, surrounded by Secret Service and a detachment of Marines in full combat gear.

  “. . . we repeat,” the anchor was saying, relief as palpable on her face and in her voice as terror, “the President is unharmed. We are awaiting confirmation from the White House, but informed sources have told Fox News that an attempt was made on the President’s life less than an hour ago by an assailant who has been tentatively identified as a mutant!”

  No one said a word for what seemed like the longest time. Scott finally broke the silence.

  “Professor, “ he said quietly, “people, I think it’s time to go.”

  Xavier drew a deep breath and nodded his head.

  “I think you’re right,” he agreed.

  A moment later, the food court came back to life—with a startled yelp from over by the soft ice cream machine as the attendant found his hand covered with chocolate/vanilla twist. Slash couldn’t recall why he was on his hands and knees—or why he smelled like he’d just walked through a smoke factory—as he sucked on a set of scorched fingertips, but right then and there he made a silent vow that he and cigarettes were done. As for the rest, they had no idea that a minute was missing from their lives, or that the table in the corner had been occupied by a pair of boys and a girl. Or that those three teens had ever even existed.

  Outside, Scott pushed Xavier’s chair while Jean and Storm kept the children in line as they hurried past a succession of momentarily “frozen” patrons on their way to the parking lot.

  Marie had her coat wrapped close around her, her hood pulled up to hide her face, and while she kept pace with the group, she kept a definite distance between herself and everybody else. Bobby tried to walk beside her, but she made it clear she wasn’t interested, and he had sense enough to back off.

  Chapter

  Three

  A straight line from Xavier’s School on Graymalkin Lane in the town of Salem Center to the Empire State Building runs forty-five miles. An hour by Metro North from Grand Central Station, generally two by car at rush hour.

  Scott made better time than that. There wasn’t much traffic on the roads, everyone seemed to be glued to the nearest TV, waiting for word from Washington on the President’s condition and what might happen next. Lacking definitive hard news—beyond the initial announcement of the attack and the fact that the President was alive and unharmed—talking heads filled the airwaves with blather and speculation, almost all of it fixated on the as-yet unconfirmed report that the assailant was some kind of mutant, and almost all of it hostile. Was this a follow-up, people wondered, to the recent mutant terrorist attack on the World Unity Conference on Ellis Island? Had any other nations been attacked? Was the President the only target? Was this a conspiracy? Was it a declaration of war?

  The questions fed on one another like a brushfire. Even the President’s hurried appearance and brief statement from the White House Press Room didn’t make much difference. It was as if there was this incredible reservoir of anxiety where it came to mutants, held back by a dam of faith and hope that the government had a handle on the situation, that maybe mutants weren’t so bad. With this one terrible blow, the dam had cracked and people across the country, across the world, were venting their fears about what would come next.

  As more details about the attack were revealed, this proved a far more damaging blow to the national psyche than the Ellis Island incident. That had involved some incredible machine whose fantastic energies had lit up the New York skyline more vividly than any fireworks display. No one had really understood what was going on, save that official spokesmen said it was really dangerous.

  This, though, was a man with a knife, who’d penetrated one of the most secure locations in existence. If mutants could get that close to the President, where only a miracle had saved him, nobody was safe.

  The irony was, the mutants—young and old, students and teachers—driving through the wrought-iron gates that marked the entrance to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters felt just the same. Fearful that a suddenly uncertain present was giving way to an ominous and threatening future.

  Xavier’s ancestors had settled this part of Westchester County when Salem Center its
elf was little more than a tavern and trading post. They’d laid claim to a five-mile stretch of land along the north shore of Breakstone Lake and held on to it ever since. Some generations prospered, others struggled, as what began as the wilderness frontier gradually evolved into one of the wealthiest counties on the globe, home now to billionaires and ex-presidents. But the enduring constant for the family was that they never let go of their land.

  The original mansion had been Georgian in style, two stories high with pillared porticos offering a magnificent view down the sweeping lawn to the lake. A century or so later, it was replaced by the current structure, a late Victorian stronghold of dark, gray stone, meant to look as solid and eternal as the lake itself. They built big in those days, so what was entirely excessive for a family residence became ideal for a school. There were wings and battlements and turrets galore and a layout so eccentric every new arrival was told suitably spooky stories about kids who’d gotten lost, never to be seen again. The newbies scoffed, of course—until one of them actually did get lost. Then they paid more attention to the maps and the rules.

  Classes had already been canceled for the day because of the field trip, which left the students free to find their own ways of coping with the news.

  Theresa Roarke angrily stormed out of the common room, snarling to everyone within earshot how fed up she was with the doom and gloom that filled every channel and radio frequency. She’d grown up in Northern Ireland; terrorism was a fact of life for her. She learned early to cope with the moment but not to obsess. Feel angry, fine. Feel scared, fine. Wallow in it, not on a bet. Especially on so beautiful an afternoon. Especially if that afternoon could be shared with a certain boy.

  Tracy was everything her name and antecedents implied: sandy red hair and aquamarine eyes, pert features, a dusting of freckles across a classic peaches-and-cream complexion, a face and figure that nicely mixed cute and pretty. She was a girl of big gestures and big emotions. She had a voice like an angel, if that angel liked to hang out in honky-tonks and sing Motown, and she could dance everyone else in the school, teachers included, into the ground.