X-Men; X-Men 2

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Lehnsherr’s face relaxed, his eyes wide, pupils dilating to their limit. Stryker nodded approvingly: After the initial exposure, results were virtually instantaneous.

  Laurio yanked Lehnsherr up by the collar and deposited him back in his chair. There was no readable expression whatsoever on the prisoner’s face; but for the metronomic rise and fall of his chest he might have been a mannequin.

  Stryker put away the pipette and its case and perched himself on the corner of the table, reaching down to catch Lehnsherr by the chin and tilt the other man’s face up to his. Lehnsherr didn’t react to him at all. Perfect.

  “Now, Eric—may I call you Eric? Course I can, ’cause thanks to my little serum here, we’re the best of friends. And friends have no secrets from one another, am I right? So while we have this special time together, I’d like to have one final talk about the school that you and Charles Xavier built. And especially that wonderful machine you both call Cerebro.”

  Back at the school, Bobby Drake was flirting. He’d started with a shared Dr Pepper, to go with popcorn and a mix of Skittles and M&M’s in Marie’s favorite colors, while they gathered with a clutch of other kids in a corner of the common room to watch some DVDs. They tried broadcast, but most of the networks were still showcasing their in-house talking heads with more pointless blather about the attempted assassination.

  She wasn’t in the mood for talking, she never was after one of those encounters she called “imprinting,” so he handled most of the conversation himself. He was a Boston boy and proud of it and didn’t mind sharing. He talked of baseball at Fenway and how like every true believer he dreamed of the day the Red Sox would reclaim the World Series for their own, or at least stomp the hated Yankees on the way to a pennant. He talked about rowing on the Charles and sailing out of Marblehead and giant dunes that filled the shores of Cape Cod. Every now and then he’d pause, offering her an opening to talk about her home in return, but she wasn’t interested.

  She didn’t seem bored, either, which he took as a good sign.

  Somewhere along the way, their fingers brushed. Marie flinched, even though she was wearing gloves and there was no danger, but Bobby was ready for that. He covered the gesture by challenging her to a bout of thumb wrestling. She didn’t believe her ears at first, who the hell thumb wrestles anymore? When Bobby assured her it was the done thing in Beantown, she muttered, “That ’splains a lot.” But when he waggled his hand at her, cocking his thumb in challenge, she responded with a grin, shifted herself on the couch to face him, and held out her own hand.

  She trapped him in a heartbeat. She was faster than she acted and way stronger, easily able to wiggle free whenever he tried to pin her and then turn the tables. He kept coming back for more, though, and she continued to let him, stifling the occasional giggle.

  Neither of them realized they were being watched or, worse, recorded. Catching a nuance of expression, Peter Rasputin applied his eraser to paper and then tweaked a couple of pencil lines to make art more like life. He was sketching, which is what he did every chance he got, which was a strange sight to see in a young man the size and build of a small mountain. He stood six-foot-eight, with a physique and the natural athletic talent that would make any NFL head coach weep for joy. He played passable sports—not because he wasn’t any good, but because he wasn’t interested. His great and abiding love was the images that flowed down his arm from eye to pencil and from there to paper. He’d started drawing almost as soon as he could hold a pencil. It was what defined his life.

  Right now he was having some fun with the lovebirds.

  “Is that them?” asked a much smaller figure craning over his shoulder. Flea was on the short side to begin with, so when the two of them were together it was like parking a toy airplane beside a working 747.

  Peter grunted. He was usually nonverbal when he was working, which was pretty much all the time. The other kids were used to it.

  The picture was recognizably Bobby and Marie, even though Peter was intentionally erring on the side of caricature. They were in the early stages of a kiss. From the expression on Marie’s face, she looked embarked on a course of major league passion. Bobby may have had that idea at the start. Right now, he was being electrocuted. Arms and legs akimbo, hair extended to full length, eyes bugging from their sockets in a classic Tex Avery pose, his body surrounded by a corona of shock waves and speed lines and appropriate other pyrotechnics.

  “This,” Flea chortled, “I would pay to see.”

  Peter blinked, shifting mental gears to reengage himself with his surroundings, and shook his head.

  “No,” he said, origins immediately revealed by his Russian-accented English, “because it would be wrong.”

  “Then you better say something, big guy,” Flea said with irrepressible glee, “ ‘cause they’re goin’ for the gold!”

  No more thumb wrestling. The couple were just holding hands now. Neither was initiating the move; they were moving together of their own accord as fascination overcame common sense.

  Peter opened his mouth, aware they’d likely hate him for it, but never got the chance to do any more as the roar of an unmufflered Harley rumbled over the house. The sound rose in a steady crescendo as the bike raced up the long drive toward the house and just as suddenly went silent, right outside.

  By then, Marie was on her feet, the bowl of popcorn and treats flying off her lap, Bobby completely forgotten as she charged the front door with a cry of “Logan!”

  “Miss me, kid?” the Canadian growled as he sauntered inside.

  She answered by hurling herself into his arms, and for that first minute, they just held each other, before she pushed against him just enough to clear some room between them, assumed what she hoped was a languid and uninvolved expression, and drawled, “Not really.”

  Logan laughed, and her expression immediately changed as she intuited that he hadn’t done that in quite a while. Before she could ask about him, though, and perhaps as a way of deflecting those questions, Logan jutted his chin toward the boy standing just inside the foyer.

  “Who’s this?” Logan asked.

  “This is Bobby,” she told him, with just enough of a hitch to her voice to make his eyes crinkle with amusement. Along with his healing factor, Logan possessed exceptionally acute physical senses, and they told him volumes about Rogue’s feelings for the boy, probably more than she admitted to herself. A faint flush to the skin, a change in pulse and respiration, the faintest of goose bumps at the hollow of her throat said there was something serious at work here.

  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-leather 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 bree
d 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.