Ororo Munroe smiled, experiencing in her relief a tiny moment of blissful serenity.
And then, she opened her eyes to find that she had never left the ballroom.
Shaw was still there, as was Tessa. And there was a third person present: an attractive young woman whom Ororo found vaguely familiar. Her brunette hair fell straight down to her shoulders, and she was clad from neck to toe in form-fitting black leather. Her lips were pursed into a smirk to match Shaw’s own.
“Very impressive,” purred Shaw. “Of all the X-Men, I expected Phoenix to see through your illusions first.”
“She could dismiss them with ease,” admitted the woman. “She has the power. But she has to choose to employ it-and she does not yet suspect anything.”
“You can see now why I hold Miss Munroe in such high regard.” Storm was still trying to take in her new situation. Cyclops and Phoenix were on their knees, distraught, their arms wrapped around each other. The Beast was struggling as if with unseen assailants—but as Ororo watched, he seemed to break free of them. A shadow of concern flickered across Shaw’s face as the X-Man bounded toward the door. “Miss Wyngarde . . .?” he said.
“I have it covered,” said the young woman confidently-and suddenly, the Beast stiffened and fell as if he had been shot in the back.
That was when Storm remembered where she had seen the woman before. She had studied a photograph of her after Wolverine and another fellow X-Man, Gambit, had reported encountering her in London. She had been using the name Martinique Jason, but a little research had exposed her as Regan Wyngarde, the daughter of one of the X-Men’s oldest enemies.
Jason Wyngarde had gone by the code name of Mastermind. He had died a few months ago, another victim of the Legacy Virus-but this new Lady Mastermind was carrying on the family tradition. Like her father, she had the mutant power to create sophisticated illusions— but hers were more effective than his had ever been, because she was also a low-grade telepath. She could rifle through the minds of her victims, finding inspiration for her creations in their nightmares. Storm was sick of being manipulated by people like her.
The quickest way to free her teammates was to remove the source of their delusions. Storm tensed herself, and whipped up a wind on which to sail—but even as she started toward Lady Mastermind, she slammed into an unseen barrier. Groggily, she picked herself up to see that Shaw’s smirk had widened, almost reaching his ears now. And there was somebody else in the room; somebody who had entered quietly behind her.
“I do beg your pardon,” said Shaw. “I have not introduced you to the final member of our quartet. But then, I believe you two have met.” Storm already knew who had felled her. She had recognized his power signature: the application of pure magnetic force. She had felt it many times before. And she knew now that the battle was lost. Shaw and Tessa, she could have bested; Lady Mastermind too, at a pinch. But not him. Not the X-Men’s first, deadliest and most bitter foe.
Not the mutant known as Magneto.
CHAPTER 5
ICEMAN WAS exhausted. He felt as if he had spent the whole night running, although in fact he had spent much of the past few hours
_in hiding, crouching in the shadows of the forest and waiting for
the sounds of footsteps or voices or aircar engines to recede.
He had been forced to fight just once: he had been lying in the shade of a thorny bush, straining his ears to confirm that what he had heard ahead of him had been no more than a rustle of a bird’s wings, when a mutate had stumbled across him. To his chagrin, the woman had been a heat-generator. Mindful of the need to take her down before she could raise the alarm, Iceman had pushed himself to his limit. He had dampened her down with a snow coating and rendered her unconscious with his fists. Then, sacrificing caution, he had run, getting as far away from her as he could before she was found.
Throughout his nerve-wracking flight, he had remained in his ice form, comforted by the limited protection that his frozen armor would afford him from unexpected attacks. Now,-he was beginning to regret that decision. A familiar muzzy feeling told him that he had overextended himself, he was using his body’s moisture faster than he could replenish it. Narrow rivulets of water were already beginning to run down his chest, but he didn’t dare return to his human form. Not now.
He had reached the edge of the woods, and he could see man-made structures and a few lights ahead of him. He was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that the architecture was wrong for Hammer Bay. He had tried to head toward the Genoshan capital, but he had become disoriented in the darkness. Nevertheless, any reasonably-sized settlement offered him a chance to lose himself in its streets, to become anonymous among its people. The only problem was, he would have to cross a wide area of open scrub land to reach this one. He would be exposed.
He hesitated for long minutes, pondering the wisdom of his plan. But he concluded that he had no choice. He had detected no sign of pursuit for over half an hour now—and the sooner he got this over with, he told himself, the sooner he could rest.
He gathered up his courage and made a run for it. But in the scant moonlight, he had misjudged the distance to the buildings: no matter how many steps he took toward them, they never seemed to draw closer. And suddenly, he heard an aircar engine behind him.
He glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes wide with fear. The silver vehicle had appeared from nowhere, swooping toward him from above the trees, its two uniformed occupants shouting and pointing at him. Iceman gritted his teeth and tried to ignore them, tried to ignore the protesting of his leg muscles and the pounding of his heart against his chest as he drove himself on. He created an ice slide for himself, forming each section in front of his feet an instant before he skated onto it. It was his customary mode of transport, whenever he needed speed; he had not used it before as its residue would have pointed straight to him, but that hardly mattered now. However, the effort required to maintain the slide was almost too much, setting off a trip hammer inside his head.
The village loomed before him, tantalizingly close. He was almost upon it now.
But then, a well-placed shot from one of the aircar’s blaster weapons shattered the slide behind him. Its anchor to the ground destroyed, it collapsed. Iceman hit the hard turf in a hail of fragments, and his armor dissipated. He was flesh and blood and vulnerable, and the aircar sounded as if it were directly above him. Panicking, he clenched his fists and tried to force his unwilling body to “ice up" again. To no avail. The pain in his head was extreme, and his vision misted over. He scrambled back to his feet and set off again with lurching, faltering steps, not sure how far he had to go, not knowing even if he was heading in the right direction. He expected to be engulfed in flames at any second.
There was an explosion of sound behind him, and Iceman cried out as he flung himself to the ground, in no doubt that he had just heard the killing shot. He would die with his nose and mouth full of Genosha’s barren soil. But slowly, incredibly, his muddied brain began to register the fact that there was no pain, no dimming of the light. Just the sound of his own shallow breathing as it echoed inside his eardrums.
And then footsteps, thundering across the earth to each side of him.
Nightcrawler’s progress through the forest had been painfully slow. He had expected his teammate to recover at any moment, but if anything his condition had worsened. Wolverine had staggered along at Kurt’s side, their arms around each other’s shoulders, but Logan had become heavier as he had leaned increasingly on his friend for support, his chin sagging further toward his chest. At one point, he had started to mutter nonsensical words as if he had become delirious, and his forehead had been hot to the touch.
Kurt had inspected the gash in Logan’s side, dismayed to find that it was still bleeding. He had tom his friend’s shirt into strips and used it to bandage the wound. Fortunately, it was a warm night. He would have used his own shirt, had he been wearing one-but his civilian clothing, like his human face, had been an in
substantial product of the image inducer. He wore only his fighting clothes: a one-piece red tunic with a plunging neckline.
Hoping to confuse his hunters, Nightcrawler had headed away from his true target, the capital. When the village had come into sight at the edge of the woods, he had decided to take a chance. With the aircars still loud above him, he hadn’t wanted to risk dragging his cumbersome charge across open land, so he had teleported with him instead. They had materialized in the shadow of a burnt-out building, Nightcrawler feeling as if his insides had been put through a blender. Wolverine had been sick on the ground, and had responded to Kurt’s expressions of concern with a series of grunts.
The village was much smaller than Hammer Bay, its buildings shorter and more angular. Still, it looked as if it had once been a pleasant enough place to live. But now, its office blocks had cram-bled and its houses had been firebombed out. Walls were blackened with soot, the streets ankle-deep in litter. The sewers had backed up, and a rotting stench permeated the night air. The lawns and parks had been neglected, their flowers strangled by weeds, and small, unidentifiable creatures nested in the uncut grass.
Nightcrawler had found a place to rest, on a pile of refuse sacks behind an overflowing dumpster in a dark alleyway. He hadn’t wanted to investigate any of the buildings, empty though they seemed, for fear of finding squatters. Neither of the X-Men was in any condition for another fight. One of the sacks had split open, oozing rusted tin cans and soft food waste. He didn’t like to think about what was in the rest of them.
Wolverine shifted and groaned in his arms. He had passed out for a few minutes, but now his eyes fluttered open. He looked confused, lost, but he tried to drag himself to his feet. Kurt held him down, relieved all the same that he was moving again. “Take it easy,” he said, “you took a nasty scratch back there. You need to give your healing factor a little more time to do its work.” His gaze flicked involuntarily to the scraps that bound Wolverine’s side. His blood had soaked them through.
“Feels... different,” murmured Logan. “What did that... witch do to me?”
“Nothing your body can’t handle,” said Kurt, “if you give it a chance.”
Wolverine shook his head insistently. “Didn’t just... cut me. Feel dizzy, sick... poisoned my blood. ...” He closed his eyes again and took a long, shuddering breath.
Nightcrawler hadn’t realized before how pale he looked. “It will pass, meinfreund,” he assured him, but he was no longer sure of anything himself. Kurt had been counting on Logan’s remarkable physiognomy to pull him through this, to restore him to health. Now, he was beginning to worry that, whatever had happened to him, it was far too serious for that.
Iceman didn’t want to move. But he had to know what was happening.
With a supreme effort, ignoring a dozen aches and pains, he rolled over onto his back and tried to make some sense of what he could see from his worm’s eye point of view.
There were scraps of metal in the scrub, and he realized that the aircar had crashed. That must have been the noise he had heard: the rending of metal, although he was sure there had been something else too, something more insistent and high-pitched, more dangerous. One of the car’s former occupants was lying facedown, limbs splayed out, beside the main body of the wreckage. The other was on his feet, but he had come under attack. He appeared to possess great strength, and he was fighting hard, but he was outnumbered. The six newcomers varied in age and gender: a teenaged boy had leapt onto the mutate’s back and was pummeling at his head, while an elderly woman was aiming swipes at him with a metal walking cane as she hurled choice insults. Nor did they identify themselves with costumes or uniforms. They wore normal, everyday clothes, a little untidy perhaps—and as far as Iceman could see, they had no supernormal powers.
Nevertheless, the mutate fell to his knees beneath the sustained onslaught. And that was when a middle-aged, heavyset man with a graying beard stepped forward, reached under his loose-fitting, khaki-colored shirt and produced a gun from his waistband.
The rest of the group deferred to the bearded man, stepping aside as he approached the defeated mutate and leveled the gun at his temple. Their expressions were calm, almost neutral, and this fooled Iceman into thinking that the man did not intend to pull the trigger, that the weapon had been drawn only as a threat. That was why he didn’t say anything, why he didn’t tiy to stop the cold-blooded execution until it was too late.
Not that he could have done much. As he pulled himself to his feet, he felt his head spinning and his stomach lurching, and not only because of the grisly sight he had just witnessed. He almost fell again, but he settled upon the compromise position of stooping to rest his hands on his calves as he tried to get his breath back.
He hadn’t realized until now how close his mad flight had brought him to the outskirts of the village. Its nearest building was only a few yards away. His unlikely saviors must have come from there. They must have seen that he was in trouble. He didn’t know whether to feel grateful to them or just sickened by what they had done to their helpless captive.
Then, the bearded man blew imaginary smoke from his gun barrel like a cowboy in an old Western movie and, in a gruff voice, he said: “Score two points for our side. That’s another pair of stinking muties who won’t be polluting our good, clean air any more!”
And even Iceman’s powers could not allay the prickly chill that broke out all over his skin as his erstwhile rescuers moved to surround him.
“Mutates in magistrates’ clothing,” mumbled Wolverine for the fourth time, shaking his head in lethargic disbelief. His eyes were closed, but he seemed to want to keep talking, to keep his mind active. Nightcrawler, for his part, longed to sleep-but worrying about his friend’s condition and the possibility of discovery kept him awake and alert, albeit with a dull ache spreading slowly behind his eyes.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “These are our own kind, and yet they have been turned against us. It does not seem so long ago that they would have welcomed us into their land.”
“X-Men ... helped to free them ... we told ... we told the world. . .
Kurt nodded sadly. He had not been with Wolverine and the others when they had first visited Genosha, when they had exposed its darkest secret, but he had heard the story. He thought about everything that had happened here since, all the misery that civil war had brought to this once-fair island, and he wondered briefly if his colleagues should have left well enough alone. But that would have meant condemning many more people-an entire race—to generations of slavery, of being denied their very identities. Sometimes, it was important to make a stand, whatever the consequences.
“And now,” he sighed, “they see Magneto as their one hope of salvation. They will do anything for him. How did it come to this, mein freund? Should we have done more?”
“Magneto,” snarled Logan, his hatred for Genosha’s ruler seeming to energize him temporarily. “He did this. He took their pain and their anger, and he used it. Did what the... the humans did to him ... made them as bitter and twisted as ... as he is. ...”
“He made them paranoid, taught them to distrust anyone who is different.”
“He ... put them in... magistrates' clothing.”
Kurt added quietly: “Magneto has turned the mutates into everything they once hated.”
The pair lapsed into a reflective silence, then, and Kurt soon realized that his friend had drifted off to sleep. He hoped it would do him good—but Logan’s breaths rattled in his chest, and his skin was now cold to the touch. Kurt didn’t like to untie the blood-sodden bandages to see if his wound looked any better, if the tissue had begun to knit back together. All he could do was keep him warm with his own body heat, and say a silent prayer for him. He feared that it would not be enough, that Wolverine might not survive the night.
When he heard footsteps and low voices from the direction of the street, he was tom by indecision. Logan was making too much noise, snoring and rasping. If anyone stop
ped at the mouth of the alleyway to listen, they would hear him for sure. But it seemed cruel to wake him, at least until it was absolutely necessary.
He decided to reconnoiter. He untangled himself from his friend, laying Logan’s head down gently on one of the refuse sacks, and padded softly toward the source of the disturbance. Hidden by the shadows, he peered out onto the sidewalk and saw a small group of people-two men and a woman-conducting an urgent, whispered conversation. They wore skinsuits, but no uniforms. They were probably civilians. Perhaps they weren’t loyal to Magneto at all; even some of the mutates must have chosen to resist his rule.
Under normal circumstances, Nightcrawler would have assumed the strangers hostile. It was the safest way. But Wolverine, he had become convinced, was in need of proper medical treatment, and maybe they could provide it.
He strained to overhear what the mutates were saying, to get some idea of whose side they were on, but to no avail. He wanted to believe in human nature, in the essential goodness of the spirit, but he had seen its dark side too many times. Looking over his shoulder, he could just about make out his teammate’s body, an unmoving lump. Then Wolverine stirred and let out a soft howl of pain like that of a dying animal, and Nightcrawler’s decision was made.
In the X-Men’s Blackbird, during the flight from America, he had programmed a few useful costume changes into his image inducer. He activated it now, leaving his features the same but clothing himself in an illusory skinsuit of blue and red. Then, he teleported past the mutates, thinking that if things went badly, at least he would have led them away from Logan. They reacted with predictable alarm to his sudden noisy appearance, and he threw up his hands and called to them, in his best Genoshan accent: “I mean you no harm!”
They didn’t attack him, but he could see suspicion in their eyes. He took two steps toward them, and continued: “My name’s Kurt. Kurt Wagner. I’m a mutate, like you. You can see that, can’t you?” He just hoped that his fame as a member of the X-Men hadn’t preceded him.
The Legacy Quest Trilogy Page 56
