He didn’t know how long he had been here, but it felt like a long time.
What if the other X-Men weren’t coming? What if they were all trapped in cells like this one? What if they were all waiting, like he was, for somebody else to rescue them?
What if it was up to him to do something after all?
He scowled, and resisted the unpleasant notion. “It can’t be up to me,” he muttered under his breath. “It can’t be my responsibility.” One of the others would escape. One of the stronger X-Men. Storm, perhaps, or Phoenix or Wolverine. But a little voice inside his head told him otherwise. He was one of the stronger ones, it told him; one of the strongest mutants alive, if only he could accept the fact. But he didn’t want to hear it.
He looked at the doors around the circular room, so close but unreachable. He even formed another ice slide, towards what he judged to be the nearest exit by a fraction, but the very act of doing so made his heart beat faster with fear.
He could do it. He could get out of this room. It would be the work of seconds. The flames would hardly touch him. They couldn’t get through his protective ice coating.
No, he couldn’t. It was too far. He wouldn’t be able to keep his armor up all the way. The heat would melt it, and his slide, and then his skin and bones. He wasn’t strong enough.
He put one foot on the base of the slide, not far enough along to activate the flames. An idea occurred to him, and he walked to the opposite edge of the platform. He could run across it, and then along his frozen construct, picking up some precious extra momentum before he crossed the platform’s edge. He could shave a vital half-second off his time.
He almost went for it, he really did. But something paralyzed his legs: the part of himself that knew he was weak, the part that knew— no matter how many times he was told otherwise—that his power was useless, childish, no more than a gimmick, good for snowball fights but not much else.
The moment passed, and Iceman returned to the center of the platform. He sat down again and looked at the slide, his path to free-dom-and the door, so close to him.
But so far away.
Jean pulled away from Madelyne, breathing hard, appalled at herself, appalled at what she had thought of doing, however briefly. She could see the marks left by her fingers, vivid red against the white skin of her enemy’s throat. This wasn’t her, she told himself. That evil witch had got into her mind, perverted her thoughts. The battle had only been a distraction.
“Go on then,” challenged Madelyne Pryor, “do it! Kill me! Because I swear to you, Jean Grey, that, as long as I live, I’ll haunt you. I will fight for the life you stole from me!” But there was disappointment in her eyes, for she, like Jean, knew the moment had passed.
“I wanted to,” she breathed. “More than anything, I wanted to do it. You did a good job on me, Madelyne. You made me fear my future, what I could become. You made me want to destroy you, as the symbol of that fear. And then you would have won, wouldn’t you? Then I would have become you.” She didn’t reveal how hard it had been to pull herself back from that brink. But she had managed it, and she felt a new strength for having done so.
She looked at her twin, still lying in the mud, and she almost felt sorry for her, with her half-life and her longing to become something more than a shadow. And she realized she would never again be afraid of Madelyne Pryor. Not like she had been.
“I’m not you, Madelyne,” she reiterated—and, for the first time, she believed the words herself. “And I’ve told you before, I won’t become like you. You can’t make me doubt myself. I know who I am.” With a hint of pity, she added: “I hope you can say the same, one day.”
It was too much for Madelyne. With a cry of rage and frustration that was more animal than human, she leapt to her feet and launched herself at Jean, who was ready for her.
The two women grappled, Jean employing all her mental strength to protect her from her foe, who was fighting more savagely than ever before. This time, however, no words were spoken, no taunts or insults hurled.
The time for talking was past.
Tessa had had an idea. She had worked out how to solve her employer’s problems.
For once, she hadn’t told Sebastian about it. It was important that he should be able to retain plausible deniability. He would have to assure the X-Men that he hadn’t authorized what she was about to do—and to be telling the truth, because Phoenix would detect any lies. He needed to be able to persuade the Beast that nothing had changed, that the unfortunate actions of one disobedient subordinate shouldn’t keep him from concluding his research here. He might even have to issue his assistant with a reprimand. But, secretly, he would be pleased with her work, unsanctioned or not, because, by taking the initiative, she would have given him what he wanted.
Sebastian’s greatest worry was that the X-Men would interfere in his plans. But he couldn’t do anything to harm them himself, because he needed the Beast’s help.
So, Tessa would act in his stead.
She passed the guards again, and stood outside one of the cells, using her telepathic abilities to eavesdrop upon the thoughts of the three men within. They were still trapped inside their mental prisons. Nightcrawler had become disheartened, but he hadn’t given up. He still wandered around his gloomy labyrinth, looking for a way out. Cyclops smashed his way out of his fourth ruby quartz cell, refusing to surrender, refusing to believe that there wouldn’t be an end to this madness. By contrast, Iceman was resigned to his fate, accepting that he could never leave his room of fire without help.
Tessa had to admit, begrudgingly, that Pryor had done her job well. But, as Sebastian himself knew, the X-Men could never be underestimated. They had escaped from seemingly inescapable situations before. It would only take one of them to break the Black Rook’s mind-grip-or for Pryor herself to lose the upper hand in her ongoing battle against Phoenix. It behooved the Hellfire Club to be prepared for such a possibility, to guard against it.
Tessa unbolted the cell door, and entered. She took a pair of silk gloves from her pocket, and slipped her fingers into them. Then she produced a clear plastic bag, which she opened to reveal two items that she had taken from the vault in Sebastian Shaw’s office, while he had been absent. She removed them carefully.
One of the items was a large, stoppered vial, which contained a transparent liquid. It looked harmless enough, but Tessa held it gingerly away from her. The liquid was swarming with viral cultures, and she was determined not to let a drop of it touch her skin. She wouldn’t even breathe in its fumes if she could help it.
The other item was a syringe.
It was a simple enough plan, really. Sebastian had already forced three human scientists to help him by infecting them with the Legacy Virus. She would do the same to his mutant prisoners. That way, even if they did escape, they would face a dilemma.
Tessa knew the X-Men. She knew, as Sebastian did, that they would be fully prepared to wreck this project on a point of principle; that, like Moira MacTaggert, they would rather ensure that no cure for the Legacy Virus existed than see one in the Black King’s hands. But how many of them might find the choice more difficult, might even come to think as the Beast had, if they were dying themselves; if the Hellfire Club offered them their only chance of survival? It would, at least, be enough to plant seeds of dissent among their ranks.
She decided to start with the X-Men’s leader. She lowered herself into a kneeling position on the metal floor beside Cyclops. She removed the stopper from the vial, concentrating to keep her hands from trembling as she did so. She siphoned a tiny measure of the clear liquid into the syringe. She didn’t need much. She breathed a small sigh of relief as she sealed the dangerous vial again. Then she took Cyclops's left hand in hers, reached under his yellow glove and rolled back his dark blue sleeve. She rubbed his skin, until she could see the faint blue outline of a vein beneath it.
Then she lowered the needlepoint of the syringe towards Cyclops’s arm.
�
��Oh no you don’t, sister!”
Tessa whirled at the sound of the voice behind her. She barely had time to register the sight of Iceman, somehow impossibly awake and springing across the room, his arms outstretched, a clear shell crackling into existence around his body. She put up her hands by reflex, and the syringe dropped to the floor and rolled away, as she reached for his mind telepathically. Then something hard and cold slammed into her face.
Tessa’s last thought, as she felt herself slumping forwards, black spots beginning to crowd her vision, was a simple prayer that she wouldn’t land on top of the vial of Legacy Virus.
“You can’t seriously be considering this,” said Rory Campbell.
The Beast was sitting on his lab stool again, staring down at the object in his hands, and turning it over and over. He looked up at Campbell, with a melancholy expression. “Can’t I? From where I’m sitting, it makes perfect logical sense. Sebastian Shaw has us over a metaphorical barrel. If I agree to his terms, then I will become responsible for infecting an innocent mutant, and probably a good friend, with Legacy. I can’t let that happen. But what are my realistic alternatives?”
Campbell looked quickly around the room, as if fearing that somebody might be watching. Then he leaned closer to Hank, and lowered his voice. “The rest of your team can’t be more than a few floors away. We could release them.”
“I’d wager we would have to fight our way through several Lords Cardinal and sundry mercenary agents first. All the same, I am sorely tempted. The question is, could we prevent the resultant hostilities from escalating out of control?”
“If we could,” said Campbell, “we’d have everything we wanted.” Hank looked at him for a moment, wondering if this was some sort of a trick, a test engineered by Shaw. But he was doing Rory Campbell an injustice, he decided. Like Hank himself, Moira’s former assistant wasn’t working for the Hellfire Club by choice. He was working for them because he thought they could give the world its best chance of curing a seemingly incurable disease. He had just come to that conclusion a little more quickly, that was all. “We’d still have our cure,” said Campbell, “but we—not Shaw—would have control over it.” Hank thought about that, but shook his head. “As much as the possibility of such an outcome appeals to me, I can’t believe it’s very likely. If it came to a battle between the X-Men and the Hellfire Club, and if it appeared that our side was gaining the advantage ..
Campbell’s face fell. “You’re right. Shaw could destroy this island, the Kree computer and all our work with the touch of a button. And he’d do it too, rather than be defeated.”
“Which brings us back to our original dilemma. Is it better for a cure not to exist at all then for one to exist in the hands of such a man?”
“And have you changed your answer?”
“No,” said the Beast quietly.
“So,” said Campbell hesitantly, glancing at the object in his colleague’s hands: a medical syringe, filled with a clear liquid. “You’re going to do it then?”
“I don’t believe I have a choice.”
ICEMAN WAS still shaking. He had rarely been so terrified in his life as when he had been steeling himself to race across that cir-
_cular, white room, thinking about the consequences if he wasn’t
fast enough. In the end, though, once he had made up his mind, it had been over in seconds. There had been a blast of heat and a blazing light in his eyes, but he had tried to ignore both, concentrating until his head ached upon the act of creating fresh ice to keep up both the slide and his armor. He had hardly even seen where he was going.
His armor had fallen, and he had felt a tremendous heat upon his skin, but by that time he had already reached the door. And then he had awoken, in this metal-walled cell.
He smiled to himself as his fear began to wear off and was replaced by relief. He had done it. He had escaped from his prison— his mental prison, he now knew—when he had thought it impossible. And, it seemed, he was the first of the X-Men to have done so.
Cyclops and Nightcrawler were still lying on the floor, unconscious. So, rather more comfortingly, was the mutant known as Tessa. It had taken Iceman a moment, upon awakening, to adjust to the fact that he wasn’t where he had thought he was. But, quickly enough, he had realized what was happening: Shaw’s assistant had been kneeling beside Cyclops, about to inject something into his arm. Iceman could see the syringe now, lying beside the telepath’s outstretched hand. He couldn’t identify the clear liquid inside it, but it was unlikely to be anything medicinal.
He remembered Wolverine’s advice about Tessa: “Trick with her,” he had said, “is to knock her down before she can worm her way into your head.” He had done just that, pulling no punches, hitting her with a solid block of ice, shards of which still lay on the floor around her, and glistened in her black hair. She had sustained a shallow cut to her forehead.
Iceman hurried to Cyclops’s side and tried to shake him awake. When this didn’t work he mischievously dropped an ice cube down his leader’s back. It provoked no reaction, not even a grunt, and a quick check told Iceman that Nightcrawler was in a similarly deep slumber. Presumably, they were both trapped in virtual prisons like his own.
He decided to find the other X-Men. Phoenix would be able to deal with this far better than he could-at least, as long as she wasn’t in a comatose state too.
The door of the cell was standing open, so Iceman poked his head out into the corridor. He looked left: the passageway continued for a few yards, with more doors at each side, before reaching a dead end. He looked right: two of the Hellfire Club’s mercenaries were staring at him. He ducked back into the room, narrowly avoiding a furious volley of machine-gun fire.
As the mercenaries’ footsteps pounded towards him, he gave the floor inside the doorway a thin, icy coating. They ran into the room, and lost their footing. One fell on his back and riddled the ceiling with bullets. The other dropped his gun as he waved his arms frantically to keep himself upright. Iceman blocked the weapon of the former, filling its barrel with snow, in case a ricochet caught one of his friends. In the meantime, the second agent regained control of his limbs. He lunged toward the X-Man and punched his ice-encased jaw, hurting him but hurting himself more. Iceman floored him with one blow, then dispatched his partner with similar efficiency, even as he was trying to stand.
Only then did he realize that the lights in the room-and in the corridor outside-had dimmed, taking on a dull red hue. From somewhere not too far away, he could hear the wail of a klaxon. He gritted his teeth and cursed under his breath. The agents had activated an alarm. Any second now, this area would be swarming with more of their kind.
He raced back into the corridor, and to the nearest closed door. It was sealed by a pair of sturdy bolts, which seemed to have been screwed into its metal surface recently. Iceman pulled them back, pushed the door open and found an empty room. The next room was empty too. In the next, he found Wolverine, Rogue and Storm, but no Phoenix.
He was heading further down the corridor, worried that he was about to run out of time, when he heard a scream behind him. It was a long, drawn-out scream of pain and frustration. And he recognized the screamer’s voice.
“Jean!” he yelled, running as fast as he could toward the source of the noise, terrified that something dreadful might have happened to her. He shot back two more bolts, and yanked open another door. She was there all right, sitting in the middle of another small, Spartan cell, blinking and wiping sweat from her forehead. And there was somebody else too: another woman, in black leather, apparently unconscious but staring blankly.
“Jean, are you all right?”
“Never better,” said Phoenix, with a faint but genuine smile. She looked down at the other woman, and Iceman started as he recognized her. Madelyne Pryor, Scott Summers’ former wife and one-time member of the X-Men. Of course, he thought, she was a clone of Jean, her voice was the same. It must have been her, not his teammate, who had screamed. And tha
t made him wonder what Jean had done to her to hurt her so much. “She attacked me,” said Phoenix, as if she had picked up the thought. “We fought on the astral plane. I won.”
“Look, Jeannie, we haven’t got much time.” Iceman reached out a hand to help her to her feet. It worried him how weak she seemed. He needed her.
“So I hear.” The klaxon was still wailing.
“The others, they’re trapped in their own minds somehow.”
Phoenix nodded. “Madelyne told me what she’d done to them. Where are they?”
“I’ll show you.”
They ran back to the room that had once served as Bobby’s cell. Phoenix saw Tessa, and Iceman quickly explained what had happened. He waited at the door so he could watch down the corridor for unwelcome arrivals, as Jean went to her husband’s side. She laid a hand on Cyclops’s masked forehead, and her green eyes flashed red, a telltale sign that she was employing her powers. But the red wasn’t as deep as usual, and, just for a second, Iceman thought he saw green again. She was exhausted. Nevertheless, she looked up at him after a couple of seconds, with a quizzical expression.
“He’s built his own prison in there-under Madelyne’s direction, of course. I can lead him out of it easily enough—but if she did this to everyone, then how on earth did you get free?”
Iceman shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I had more willpower than the others.”
It sounded unlikely, even to him-and he was a little embarrassed to see that Phoenix clearly didn’t believe it either. She frowned, and he felt her gentle presence in his mind. Then her face cleared, and she smiled. “You underestimated yourself, as usual. You only created a prison you thought you couldn’t get out of. Luckily for Scott, you learned better.”
Bobby didn’t know what to say to that. He stumbled over his words, and was almost grateful when the next wave of Hellfire Club agents ran into sight, interrupting him.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 22
