There has to be a way to put an end to all these overlapping personalities, Jean thought with a grim smile. I’m not sure there’s any room left for more me’s in this brain . . .
Well, if anyone could help her find a solution, there was no one better than Professor Charles Xavier ... at least, she hoped that would be the case.
She’d felt Xavier’s mind brush hers back on Magneto’s world, when her alternate had psychically interrogated him. At first, Jean had been surprised to realize that the Professor was on Earth—she and the X-Men had left him back on Roma’s Starlight Citadel, while they traveled to von Doom’s reality; Xavier had known the group would be better able to gather intelligence without having to worry about their wheelchair-bound mentor. Obviously, he had taken matters into his own hands when his students failed in their mission, but he must have known the trouble he’d get into once Magneto’s followers became aware he was on Earth. Still, Jean had been comforted by his presence; just knowing he was there had given her enough hope that the X-Men would ultimately succeed. She hadn’t been able to contact him, to let him know that she could telepathically “hear” him, but the desire to do so gave her the strength to overcome a good deal of her alternate’s mental defenses as she fought her way to the front of the brain, determined to wrest control of what she had thought was her own body from the usurper who had stolen it from her. Given enough time, she might have succeeded—but then all hell had broken loose once more, and she’d awoken on another Earth, trapped in another version of herself. No doubt the same had happened to her teammates, and Xavier as well; like her alternate, they would all be followers of the Red Skull now, their personalities submerged in the depths of their counterparts’ minds.
Would Xavier help her to free them—for that matter, would she be able to help him free himself? Or would he turn against her, maybe even notify her hunters, who were probably scouring every inch of Manhattan to locate her at this very moment?
Good questions, all, but she would never find any answers ... if she didn’t ring the doorbell first.
Hesitantly, she stepped through the weeds that sprouted across the cracked asphalt, the toes of her shoes occasionally jarring the stem of a dandelion, or scraping the top of a wildflower. And then, before she knew it, she was at the door, index finger pressing against the rusted button to the left of the frame.
Nothing.
No clanging of chimes, no grating buzz—just silence.
Well, I can’t say I’m all that surprised, Jean thought. There’s probably not an electrician in Westchester County who ’d be willing to navigate that jungle back there just to fix a doorbell.
She stepped back and considered her options. She could try climbing through the library’s shattered windows, but the tight fit of her knee-length skirt ruled that out; she’d never be able to lift her legs high enough to clamber over the molding wood. She could use her mental powers to lift herself up to the second floor, but someone passing by on the road might see her.
Or I could just give the door a good telekinetic shove. Given the state of this place, what’s a little more property damage . . . ?
She braced herself, feeling the power build within her mind—
And then the door opened.
It swung in on well-oiled hinges—quickly, silently. And standing on the other side of the threshold, one hand holding the edge of the door, was an attractive woman in her twenties. She wore a black, knee-length dress, with a wide leather belt cinched tightly at the waist, making her look like a human hourglass. High-heeled shoes—and a formidable-looking handgun—completed her ensemble. Her shoulder-length blond hair hung loosely, parted on the left side of her head to flow over the right side of her face, in a style like that adopted by 1940s movie star Veronica Lake. And although Jean couldn’t see the woman’s right eye clearly, its icy-blue pupil more than likely matched the heated gaze that shone brightly from the left eye. .
But it wasn’t the sudden appearance of someone at the door that took Jean by surprise—it was the fact that she knew this woman.
“Carol Danvers?” she exclaimed.
To say it was a shock seeing her old friend would have been an understatement. The last time Jean and Carol had been together was on von Doom’s world, where Danvers had been one of countless political prisoners held in work camps around the planet because their views differed from that of the much-exalted emperor. The difference, however, was that this particular camp had been built on the very grounds upon which Jean now stood—the location of the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning. As an enemy of the state, Carol was facing a life of hard labor and harsher abuse, at the hands of both camp guards and other inmates. The X-Men had put an end to those barbaric conditions, though, when they liberated the camp, and Carol had elected to join them on their mission to locate other superpowered men and women who could aid them in overthrowing von Doom’s regime. The group reached New York without any problems, but once Jean had started psi-scanning for possible allies, her efforts had somehow been detected, and the X-Men suddenly found themselves facing off against a team of super-villains who worked for one of von Doom’s security agencies. In the midst of the battle that erupted on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, Jean had lost track of Carol, then forgotten all about her in the chaotic events that followed.
But now, here she stood, staring at Jean as though she were a stranger—and looking none too happy about having an unexpected visitor.
Of course she wouldn’t recognize me, Jean realized. To her, I’m just another citizen of the Reich . . . one trespassing on private property. Her glance momentarily moved to the gun in Danvers’ hand, its barrel pointing at her chest. She didn’t doubt for an instant that this woman was as deadly a marksman as her friend—not that she’d give her any chance to prove it if the time came ...
Danvers frowned. “What is it you want?” she demanded.
Jean’s smile evaporated under her heated glare. “I’d .. . like to see Professor Xavier.”
The frown became a teeth-baring sneer. “No.”
And with that, she slammed the door—or, at least, tried to do so. Unwilling to be stopped this early in her quest, Jean caught it in a telekinetic grip and shoved—hard. The door flew back, catching Danvers across the temple and knocking her to the floor. As the gun flew from her hand, Jean caught that, too, with a mental snare, and tossed it deep into the weeds behind her.
Smiling sweetly, she stepped around the stunned Danvers. “Don’t get up—I know my way around.” Not waiting for a reply, she proceeded down the main hallway.
The interior of the manor house was only slightly less depressing than its exterior. The main hall alone was an interior decorator’s nightmare: paint faded and chipped, blue-and-gold runner beneath Jean’s feet dirty and threadbare, furnishings coated with a thick layer of dust; she could only imagine what the rest of the house looked like. From within the recesses of her subconscious, Jean felt her Skull-world alternate practically quiver with the urge to shriek in horror and run for the nearest vacuum.
Well, I think it’s safe to assume that whatever job Carol has here, it certainly doesn’t involve housework, Jean thought, fighting a sudden urge to sneeze as dust particles swirled around her.
She continued down the hall until she came to a familiar door— one that, on her world, she had walked through a thousand times. This was the portal to the calm eye of the storm of prejudice and intolerance that had constantly threatened to destroy every mutant on the planet, in the years before von Doom had activated his Cosmic Cube. A place of refuge for those seeking to understand what they had become, why they were so hated; a place of security, protecting those same lost souls against the forces that hunted them down like wild animals. The very spot from which a dream had been bom: of humanity and mutantkind living in harmony, their differences forgotten, their hatreds banished.
A birthing chamber Jean knew better as the private study of Professor Charles Xavier.
Swallowing hard, she reac
hed out and lightly knocked on the door.
“Yes?” replied a coarse, tired voice.
Slowly, Jean opened the door and stepped inside the room. And immediately wished she hadn’t.
“Oh, my God ...” she croaked.
Her breath caught in her throat as she glanced around—at the mountainous piles of yellowed news journals and scraps of paper; at the halfeaten meals, around which flies buzzed; at the chipped cups and cracked glasses crusted over with the thick film of various beverages, long since evaporated. The air was thick with the stench of decay, the noxious odor a jarring counterpoint to the gentle ballet of dust motes that danced across shafts of morning sunlight spilling through the tom velvet curtains that hung over the windows.
But it was the sight of the man sitting behind the mold-encrusted mahogany desk on the other side of the room that almost brought Jean to her knees in despair.
He was scrawny and thin-limbed, his bald head looking immense in comparison to his body. His scalp and hands were dotted with liver spots, his cheeks and eyes so sunken as to resemble a death-mask, rather than the sharp, hawkish features of the great leader he had once been. A charcoal-gray suit now a size too big for him hung on his frame, its dark color broken by a once-white dress shirt, frayed at the collar, and a bright red tie. He sat slumped in his wheelchair, hands folded on the blanket covering his legs, staring blankly through the grime-covered window that faced the weed-covered grounds and, beyond that, the deserted stretch of Graymalkin Drive outside the main gates.
“Professor Xavier . . . ?” Jean said softly.
“I felt you coming,” Xavier said. He turned to face her, tapped the side of his head with a gnarled index finger. “In my mind. You’re a mutant.” A wizened smile split his creased features. “Have you come to kill me?”
The question took Jean aback. “N-no . . .” she stammered.
Xavier’s smile brightened. “Why not?” he purred. There was something about the sudden gleam in his eyes that made Jean take a step back; something about the way his lips pulled back to bare his teeth .. .
She cleared her throat. “Professor, I’m here because I need your help.”
“My. . . ?” Xavier stared at her for a moment, then suddenly burst out laughing; the sound reminded Jean of a worn bellows expelling a puff of air. She stared at her hands, feeling extremely uncomfortable as the laugh degenerated into a brief coughing spell. Eventually, the coughing subsided, and the professor chuckled mildly. “You want my help. Are you absolutely certain of that, Frau Sommers?” He smiled as her eyes widened in surprise. “Oh, yes, I’m well aware of your identity. I try to keep up-to-date on current events.” He waved a hand at the newspapers around him; some of the piles looked dangerously close to crashing down on him. “Perhaps you should have done a bit of reading yourself,” he said, the smile fading, “before you wasted your time coming here.”
“I... I don’t understand,” Jean said.
Xavier sneered. “Not a student of history, FraU Sommers?” Gripping the tires of his wheelchair, the professor rolled himself out from behind the desk and maneuvered his way through the debris, coming to a halt before his visitor. He studied her for a moment. “You really have no idea who I am, do you?” When Jean found herself unable to mouth an answer, he shook his head in disgust. “Then allow me to enlighten you.”
The assault on her mind was sudden—and brutal. Without warning, Xavier forced his way into her thoughts, ripping through her psychic defenses as though they were tissue paper. The room swayed, blurred, disappeared, to be replaced by a flood of sound and images: smoke filled her lungs, heat reddened her skin. Her eardrums vibrated with the wails of the dying and the damned.
She was standing in the middle of a street littered with waste, the asphalt cracked and discolored, the air heavy with the stench of rotting garbage and stagnant water. It was late at night, but the sky was awash in hues of red and gold, cinder and ash, making it appear more like twilight. Thick plumes of black smoke obscured the stars, and the full moon that shone high above was painted a hazy, burnt orange.
With a start, Jean realized that the tenement buildings around her were burning out of control. She glanced up the block to see a group of men and women clad in black leather uniforms and thick-soled boots, all moving in her direction. Each was equipped with a long-nozzled flamethrower, which they triggered seemingly at random, igniting the buildings on both sides of the street.
She knew that she was standing in the midst of a psychic projection—she’d been in similar memory-created environments countless times during her life with the X-Men—but she couldn’t remember the last occasion when she had been in one so tangible, so . .. real. Her throat burned from the acrid smoke; she couldn’t keep her eyes from watering. Not even “her” Charles Xavier was capable of creating such a powerful mental landscape ... at least not to her knowledge.
A sharp cry of anguish caught her attention, and she wheeled around. Behind her were gathered the residents of the block: hundreds of people surrounded by armed guards attired in the same type of uniform worn by the flamethrower brigade. And behind the soldiers, towering over the scene so high that Jean had momentarily thought they were office buildings, were two gigantic humanoid constructs, their metal-plated chests emblazoned with huge, black swastikas.
Jean gasped. “Sentinels ...”
On her world, Jean—and just about every mutant on the planet— knew of the robotic monsters. Originally created by a man named Bolivar Trask, the Sentinels’ duty was to protect humanity from the growing “mutant threat” by either capturing or exterminating the members of Homo sapiens superior—no matter how young or old their targets, no matter how weak or harmless their victims’ powers might be. To see that such emotionless hunter/killers had been incorporated into the Red Skull’s empire sent a chill through Jean; she wondered if mutants were all these Sentinels had been constructed to persecute . . .
She looked back to the crowd, and saw the fear etched into the features of the residents, all rousted from their homes in the middle of the night and forced to watch as lifetimes’ worth of memories were destroyed. They were all mutants in one form or another, most possessing the appearance of “normal” humans, though there were also quite a few unusual-looking individuals scattered amongst the hundreds huddling together. As she gazed at the haunted expressions of these frightened members of her race, Jean suddenly realized why there was such a high concentration of them in one place.
She was in a ghetto—a neighborhood into which mutants had been herded so a watchful eye could be kept on them. From the memories of her Skull-world counterpart, Jean saw that the same had been done with other races—at least those for which the Empire still had a use. It was a policy applied to the Jewish community, initiated under Adolf Hitler in World War II; apparently, the Red Skull had widened its parameters when he became emperor.
The roar of an approaching engine from behind made Jean glance over her shoulder. Down the street, the flamethrower brigade had stepped aside to allow passage to an armored transport, the manned cannon on its roof aimed directly at the crowd. The vehicle ground to a halt, and one side of it rolled back to reveal a metal platform, which slid out to reveal two passengers. One was a horrific little man whose face appeared on a viewing screen in the middle of his chest, rather than on a head he apparently didn’t possess; Jean had no idea who he was. The man’s companion, however, she knew all too well. He was a few years younger, handsome, arrogant in his bearing. Moonlight played across the top of his clean-shaven head.
Professor Charles Xavier stared at the frightened crowd, nodded in satisfaction, and leaned in close to the little man. He muttered something, and the abomination laughed loudly. A shared joke, perhaps. The professor gestured at the residents. “Your men work quickly, Minister Zola. I expected it would take them at least until morning to gather everyone together.”
Zola smiled—a grotesque twisting of facial muscles made even more disturbing by its appearance behind the
glass screen. “Fear can be a great motivator, Herr Professor—especially when one’s home is burning down. It tends to add wings to one’s feet.” The smile slowly drained away. “Now, then: Where is this ‘special’ freak you pulled me from my laboratories to see? The one you detected with that mutant-location computer of yours?”
“Cerebro,” Xavier corrected politely. “It first detected her powers in the American southeast, but she fled her home before she could be picked up for questioning. The delay was a temporary one, however; nothing remains hidden from Cerebro for long—not even when the subject tries to hide like the proverbial needle in a haystack of mutants.” He nodded toward the residents, who were moving aside to let someone through. “I believe your men have found her...”
A pair of soldiers marched past Jean, dragging a semi-conscious women between them. She couldn’t be older than seventeen or eighteen, bundled up in layers of clothing even though it was a warm summer night. A chill played along Jean’s spine as the light of the burning buildings highlighted the white streak that ran through the girl’s dark-brown hair.
“Minister Zola,” Xavier said, “allow me to introduce you to . . . er . . . Rogue.”
“ ‘Rogue’?” Zola said with a snarl. “What kind of insipid name is that?”
Xavier shrugged. “Who can understand the ways of today’s youth, Minister? I have long since given up trying.”
The soldiers dropped the girl on the ground, then stepped back to cover her with their weapons.
“From what you told me, Herr Professor, I thought she would be more . . . animated,” Zola commented.
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