The Black King raised an eyebrow, and tried not to betray the feeling of impending triumph that welled within him. If he read the situation right, then it was all he could have hoped for. “I was on my way to check the progress of your patients. Nothing has gone wrong, I hope?”
Moreau made to push past him. “We need to speak to Magneto.”
He restrained the young man with a hand on his shoulder. “Magneto is busy.” With a wry smile, he added: “As I expect you can hear.”
With impeccable timing, a tremendous crash resounded from the throne room upstairs. Moreau and Ransome exchanged an uncertain glance.
Shaw smiled, and held out his hands in a magnanimous gesture. “Perhaps I can be of assistance?”
Once again, three X-Men rushed Magneto. Once again, they were thrown back. It was becoming almost a ritual.
Phoenix had linked the six heroes telepathically. They were well used to working in concert with each other, to coordinating their attacks-but this way, each knew for sure what the others were thinking. It gave them an additional edge. Cyclops and Wolverine, for example, concentrated their blows upon the same square inch of their foe’s force field, Scott timing his optic blasts perfectly to avoid hitting his teammate. Iceman and Storm worked together to lower the temperature inside the field, forcing Magneto to expend precious energy on exciting the molecules around him if he didn’t want to freeze. The onslaught was relentless. As Jean continued to probe the force field telekinetically, she sensed it weakening—but she could also feel Magneto’s anger, his determination, like a physical force. The longer he was kept from his laboratory and the cure therein, the more savagely he fought.
He picked up Wolverine and used him as a cannonball, shooting him into Nightcrawler even as he materialized from his latest ’port.
Nightcrawler collided with Phoenix in turn, and Magneto devoted a small fraction of his power to keeping Logan pinned down, trapping Jean and a dazed Kurt beneath his reinforced frame. He also redirected one of Storm’s lightning bolts to strike Iceman. And, while the X-Men were still reeling, trying to regroup, he drew himself to his full height, spread his arms wide and bellowed: “Enough of this!”
He brought down the ceiling. Phoenix erected a TK bubble around herself, Wolverine and Nightcrawler, and wished she had the strength to extend it to the others. Bombarded by debris, Storm was forced to land and take cover. Iceman was out. Jean could also sense her husband, using a wide-angled blast to pulverize as much of the plummeting ceiling as he could-but she couldn’t see him through a billowing cloud of dust.
Magneto was screaming through the chaos: “You only seek to delay the inevitable!”
But he had lost his grip on Wolverine. With the speed of a striking snake, Logan leapt at him, and plunged his claws straight through his weakened force field. Magneto fell back before him, and Jean thought she could see actual fear in his eyes as he stopped his attacker’s claws less than an inch in front of his face. She could see the effort that it took him to push Wolverine back, but he succeeded in doing so nevertheless, and in building up enough momentum to knock him senseless against the far wall.
A scarlet energy beam stabbed through the dust haze, catching Magneto unawares. It struck him in the back, and he fell to his knees with a gasp. But Jean knew that Cyclops couldn’t press his attack: a heavy timber had fallen across his chest, restricting his movement, and his foe had fallen out of the limited range of his optic blasts. Then, Nightcrawler disappeared from Jean’s side and reappeared on Magneto’s shoulders. He wrenched the metal helmet from his head, but was felled by a blast of magnetic force for his troubles.
Phoenix seized her opportunity.
Launching a psi-bolt at an opponent was like attacking him with a piece of her innermost self, seeking to overwhelm his very being with a concentrated expression of her own. In the fraction of a second that it took Jean to strike, at the speed of thought, Magneto erected his force field again—but he was an instant too late. She had almost reached him.
She was only dimly aware of her physical body, in its prone position, clenching its fists and gritting its teeth, feeling as if its eyes were bleeding, as she pushed her way through the final inch of the magnetic shield. But her attack had lost momentum, and she still had to contend with Magneto’s natural psychic defenses.
Like the X-Men themselves, he had trained his mind to resist outside influences. But his mind was even more difficult to penetrate than any of theirs: Professor Xavier had conjectured that Magneto possessed latent telepathic abilities of his own, although this remained unproven. Whatever the reason, it took all of Jean’s remaining energy to push her way into his psyche, and only a ghost of herself made it through at all.
She was kneeling on moist soil, the tang of iron and blood on her tongue, surrounded by mutates with skinsuits and shaved heads. She felt weak, too weak to stand, but she dragged herself to her feet anyway. Magneto was still trying to rebuff her, to dispel her faint psychic presence, and her mind translated his attack into the unpleasant sensation of her muscles straining to pull themselves apart. She was blurring around the edges, but she had to hold herself together. She had to find him, had to locate his essential self—the part of his mind that she had to shut down—in this cluttered psi-scape, She didn’t have long. She fought her way through the mutate crowd, none of whom moved either to get out of her way or to stop her. They were like zombies. Zombies with numbers tattooed upon their foreheads.
If Jean had been stronger, more alert, she would have seen it right away. She would have known exactly which part of Magneto’s mental landscape she had intruded upon.
Reaching the edge of the subdued crowd, she found herself pressed up against a chain link fence. With a sense of foreboding, she looked up, knowing what she would see. Barbed wire.
Black-uniformed, jackbooted guards surrounded her. They lashed out with sturdy truncheons, and she folded and almost dissipated there and then. They lifted her by the arms and hauled her away, and Jean chose not to resist. Perhaps they were taking her to Magneto. Perhaps he wanted to gloat before he expelled her from his consciousness.
But the gray, cubic, hard-angled concrete building into which the guards dragged her was empty. One look at the bare walls of its single room, and she began to struggle in vain. It was only after she had been beaten again and flung to the floor that she looked up and saw the nozzles that extended from the ceiling like shower heads. And her blood froze, her heart numbed by the very idea that someone could do—had done—this to another person. To a whole race. The room was filling up around her, mutates filing in without protest until there was no space left and they were pressed up against the walls. They trampled Jean, but she couldn’t rise from her knees. She had to fight, but she had no strength left. No willpower. Her psychic form was clinging to this realm by its metaphorical fingernails.
And, too late, she knew where Magneto had to be.
She looked up into his creased face and his sad, gray eyes, and the number in blue ink on his shaved head. He was Mutant #0001.
He reached down to her with a spindly arm, and helped her to her feet with apparent difficulty. In the physical world, it was easy to forget Magneto’s advanced age, because he burnt with such power and passion. But here, in this comer of his mind, he was an old man, stooped and frail. For a moment, Jean couldn’t bring herself to hurt him. She had to remind herself what he was capable of, what he was doing. She had to gather her shattered resolve.
But it would have made no difference, anyway.
The concrete chamber was already fading around her, and she could feel the floor of the throne room beneath her back again. She was exhausted. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even open her eyes. For a long moment, the only image in her mind was that of Magneto’s gray eyes, and she felt a tear on her cheek.
And then, there was nothing.
Holocaust’s weapon arm was almost pressed into Rogue’s face.
She had closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, awaiting the le
thal blast.
The Beast was on his back, nestled in the remnants of a lab stool that had shattered when he had fell on it. He was winded, he didn’t want to move, but he fought to override his weakness. He dragged himself to his feet, but he felt as if he were moving through treacle. He was too slow. He couldn’t possibly reach his teammate in time to save her life.
“Holocaust, no!”
The inteijection had come from the female scientist: the one who had stayed behind when her colleagues had taken flight. She wore round, rimless glasses, and her blonde hair was tied back into a severe bun. She had only half-risen from behind the lab bench that sheltered her, ready to drop again if the battle resumed. She was trembling, and Hank admired her for having had the compassion to intercede on Rogue’s behalf despite her obvious terror.
Or had there been something more to it than that?
Holocaust rotated the top half of his bulky armor, awkwardly, and glared at the scientist. She gave him a desperate, meaningful look. And, when he returned his attention to Rogue, he lowered his weapon arm and raised his equally huge fist instead.
But the two X-Men had had the moment’s respite they needed. Rogue scrambled out of the way of a punishing blow that buried Holocaust’s fist in the floor. As he fought to pull it free, a stool hurled by the Beast bounced off his head, widening the crack in his protective dome.
The scientist ducked again, with a high-pitched shriek—and the next thing Hank knew, a blast of energy came his way. He leapt above it, and it destroyed a shelving unit behind him. It seemed to him, though, that the blast hadn’t had half the power of the last one he had seen. Holocaust was weakening, his life essence pouring out of his breached containment suit. Rogue must have seen it too, because she dared to get nearer to her foe, taunting him. Assailed by punch after earth-shattering punch, he gave ground, arms flailing wildly, and Hank was able to reach the metal cabinet against which his teammate had earlier lain.
It was locked-but the doors were already damaged, and it didn’t take much effort to wrench them off their hinges. A wave of cold air hit the Beast: the contents of the cabinet were refrigerated. The top shelf held a rack of thin vials, each containing a measure of a translucent, red-tinted liquid. The other shelves were empty-apart for the bottom one, in which another vial sat in a rack of its own, filled with a darker red and more viscous substance. He reached for it, forcing his hand to stop shaking in anticipation, ignoring the cold bum against his skin as he lifted the vial to his eyes and read its label.
He read his own name, and knew that this was the sample of his blood that Sebastian Shaw had stolen. The sample that contained the super-cell.
And his lips stretched into a broad, toothy grin as he confirmed what he had deduced: that Magneto’s scientist hadn’t cared about Rogue’s life at all, she had simply not wanted Holocaust to fire his weapon at this cabinet because of its precious, irreplaceable contents. He looked at the vials on the top shelf again, and he knew that this was the realization of his greatest dream. The cure to the Legacy Vims. Every one of those vials could save one life.
And he had to destroy them.
It was a matter of logic. If he succeeded in getting the cure out of Genosha, then it wouldn’t matter that Magneto had it too. But if he failed-and there was a good chance of that-then the master of magnetism couldn’t be allowed to keep it either. Even so, the Beast felt a hollow pain in his stomach as he forced himself to yank the full rack from the cabinet and let its contents shatter on the floor.
The Legacy-busting super-cell existed only in one place now, as it had before: in Hank’s blood sample, which he tucked carefully into a belt pouch. He remembered seeing a freezer cabinet in Shaw’s jet: he had to get the blood into it, and get it away from here. And he couldn’t let anybody or anything stop him.
Now that he had this vial in his possession at last, he couldn’t face the thought of having to destroy it too.
Startled by a tremendous crash behind him, he whirled around-to find that Holocaust had been felled again. And this time, he wasn’t getting up. Rogue stood over him, an expression of supreme satisfaction on her face, her fists still clenched. “How’s that for deja vu, sugar?” she gloated. “You getting your tail busted by the X-Men again!” With a cruel glint in her eyes, she added: “I bet your masters’ll be none too happy about that.”
“You assume correctly.”
The Beast started again, his eyes darting across the lab to find Magneto in the doorway. He was standing upright but hovering a foot or so above the floor, having evidently approached in silence on the crest of a magnetic wave. Hank’s heart sank into his stomach, and his hand went to his belt pouch. Rogue didn’t have time to react at all. Magneto gestured toward her, and she stiffened, her eyes rolling back into their sockets and the merest gasp of pain escaping from her throat. Then, she collapsed across the armor of her fallen foe.
Magneto floated into the room and inspected the destruction around him with a hooded gaze, which lingered longest on the sundered metal cabinet and the broken glass beneath it.
He turned to Hank, and loomed over him, his face dark but his eyes aflame. And he held out a purple-gloved hand, and spoke in a stem voice that brooked no argument.
“You have something of mine, I think.”
Waking from unconsciousness was not covered in the X-Men’s formal training, but it was certainly something that they had to get used to.
On this occasion, Storm hadn’t been out for long, and a quick touch to the thin cut on her temple told her that the injury wasn’t serious. She dismissed the muzzy feeling in her head with a combination of experience and willpower, and assessed the conditions of her teammates. Wolverine, as usual, had recovered quickly and was coaxing Phoenix awake. Ororo doused Nightcrawler and Iceman with a miniature rainstorm, which shocked them to their senses and also served to replenish Bobby’s vital moisture. In the meantime, Phoenix and Wolverine worked together to lift the beam that pinned Cyclops— although Ororo noted that Jean didn’t employ her telekinesis.
“We have to get after him,” insisted Cyclops, sounding as if every word were an effort. “The Beast and Rogue can’t handle him on their own.”
“Just one problem there, boss-man,” said Wolverine, sniffing the air. “We got company!”
He turned to face the doorway, adopting a battle-ready stance, even as Sebastian Shaw appeared. The Black King cast a disdainful glance at the feral Canadian, then held up a placatory hand. “I am not here to fight you,” he said.
“Then why are you here, Shaw?” asked Storm coldly.
“How did you get free?” asked Cyclops tersely.
Shaw looked at the X-Men’s leader with a pained expression. “Please, Mr. Summers. To judge by the condition of your team, I would say that this is your day for underestimating your opponents.” “If you came here to gloat, Shaw—”
He shook his head grimly. “I came to frnd Magneto. Where is he?” Nobody answered him, but Shaw surveyed the room through narrowed eyes, and then nodded to himself. “The laboratory, no doubt.” He turned to leave.
“Hold on, Shaw!” Cyclops took two steps toward him, fingering the controls on his golden visor. Normally, Storm knew, he would have activated it with his palm studs; the overt gesture was for the Black King’s benefit. “You don’t expect us to just let you walk out of here and rejoin your partner, I hope?”
“It would be in your interest to do so,” said Shaw smoothly. “There is no reason for us to fight any more. My intention is to end this, if you’ll let me.”
“You have asked for our trust before,” said Storm with a hint of bitterness, “but you do little to earn it.”
Shaw inclined his head as if accepting the criticism. “In this case, however,” he said, his dark eyes gleaming, “I don’t think you have much choice in the matter.”
CHAPTER 15
THE BEAST stared up into Magneto’s fiery gaze, and time stretched like elastic as his clawed fingers surreptitiously teased the vial from
his belt pouch. He ought to have destroyed it by now-he was gambling with billions of lives-but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not until he was sure that there was no other choice.
“I developed this cure for the good of mutantkind,” he insisted hoarsely, his tongue feeling swollen in his mouth. “I beg you, don’t force me to destroy it!”
Magneto’s silver eyebrows knitted together, and his lips peeled back from his teeth. His hand remained stubbornly outstretched. “I will use it to save lives. Nobody will be left wanting if they are prepared to renounce their prejudice. On that, I give you my word.” “And I accept it,” said the Beast quietly. “Unfortunately, I cannot accept your desire to make a distinction between those who deserve life and those who do not.”
“If you destroy that cure,” said Magneto, “nobody will be saved. You’ll condemn thousands of Genoshan citizens, and many more, to death.”
“Perhaps so-but such an action would, I believe, end your mad scheme to extend the contagion.”
“Perhaps it will not,” said Magneto with a sudden flash of anger. “Perhaps I will release the reengineered virus anyway, and give humanity a taste of what we have had to endure.”
“I don’t believe you possess such a nihilistic streak,” countered the Beast. “And I doubt the mutant Messiah is yet ready to martyr himself to his cause.” He shook his head. “No, Magnus, I can’t let you have my blood. I will not have the resultant death toll upon my conscience. But I appeal to you as a fellow mutant-as a fellow human being—to allow me to keep it. Let some good come of this.”
“Would you give up your dream so easily?” Magneto’s demeanor had changed again, and Hank could see something of the vulnerable, abused child within him: the child who had vowed to reform a cruel world, but who had buried his own innocence in the process. He could see the pain, the desperate plea, in the depths of his deadliest foe’s eyes. “You are all that stands between me and the better future for which I yearn. I swear, I will kill you, Henry, before I allow you to extinguish that hope.”
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