by Alex Irvine
Ororo saw Xavier glance away from Kelly’s oration, turning in her direction as if he had heard her thinking about him. Then she felt his touch, gentle but firm, in her mind. Ororo. All is well in New Mexico? Your anxiety preceded you into the room.
There have been urgent developments since last we spoke, Professor. It would take some time to summarize.
Open your mind to me, then. Permit me your experiences. A moment is all that will be required.
Ororo did not like letting anyone into her mind, even Xavier, but she could see no better way to get across the urgency of the situation. Yes, she said.
She felt Xavier’s presence, briefly but long enough to thoroughly unsettle both her mind and her stomach. Then he withdrew, leaving behind a lingering sense of shock, apprehension, and curiosity. Ororo looked to her left, where Kitty was sitting between her and Peter. Warren was on her other side, placed so he would be in the foreground of most camera angles.
Kitty’s—Kate’s—eyes widened and the muscles around her mouth tensed as Xavier announced himself inside her mind. A moment later, she looked around reflexively—the way a non-telepath almost always did when a telepath withdrew, as if the brain could not process the absence without relating it to a person nearby.
Kate reached over and took Ororo’s hand. Ororo leaned in. “He won’t hurt you. You know that.”
She nodded. “This is where it’s all going to happen, though. And I don’t know how well my body—this body—is trained, what it can do…I hope I’m up to whatever is required of me.” Then she leaned even closer. “Also, this is driving me crazy. I haven’t told Peter yet that we’re married in the future. Every time I look at him, I get a terrible pang, like I’m never going to see my Peter again.”
“Shh,” Ororo said—not to silence Kate, but to soothe her.
Xavier’s mind alit on hers again. Kitty believes her story, he said. And I can find no sign that she has been manipulated into telling it.
“Some of your X-Men are in fact present at this hearing, are they not?” Senator Kelly was saying. Ororo looked around the room, wondering from which direction the attack would come. Capitol police officers were everywhere; she imagined there to be a significant undercover Secret Service presence, as well.
Any one of them might have been Mystique. To make matters worse, she did not know who else Mystique might have recruited to her new iteration of the Brotherhood—other than the Blob, who was certainly not in the room.
Xavier should have been able to find Mystique, though—and he had said nothing about detecting her presence. Had she hidden herself from his mental probes somehow, or had she changed her plan?
Or had the psychic projection of Kate Rasputin back in time disrupted this timeline already, setting off consequences for which they could not plan? Once time travel was injected into a situation, everything else became maddeningly uncertain.
“They are,” Xavier said. “I see four of them: Piotr Rasputin, Katherine Pryde, Ororo Munroe, and Warren Worthington.”
“Better known as…” Kelly made a production of consulting his notes and holding up pictures of each X-Man in costume as he continued. “Colossus! Sprite! Storm! And Angel! Mighty names. Where do the names come from, anyway?”
“The group assigns each other code names. As I imagine most groups do, whatever the genetic quirks of their members.”
Kelly smiled. “Of course. I do hope, Professor Xavier, that their group presence is not intended as a show of…strength, perhaps?”
“They are here—as I am—to speak clearly on behalf of a population that is often misunderstood—and regrettably also often demonized,” Xavier said.
At the same time, in Ororo’s mind, he asked: Do you believe her?
I do.
As do I. Be prepared, Ororo. I fear no attack on myself, but if Senator Kelly dies today—demagogue though he may be—that bleak future Kate remembers may well come to pass.
Kelly had moved on. “Doctor MacTaggert.”
“Yes, Senator Kelly. Please. Explain to me the need for these hearings, because frankly I cannot see it.”
Ororo saw what she was doing, playing the aggressive role to make Xavier seem yet more reasonable and sympathetic. “The need,” Senator Kelly answered, “is simple.” He turned to the gallery, squaring his shoulders toward the anti-mutant protesters. “I merely wonder if—in a world of beings like Doctor Doom, like Magneto, like the Fantastic Four…these names! The Avengers! In such a world, with these and God knows how many others like them…I merely wonder if there’s any place left for ordinary men and women.”
“Of course there is,” Moira said. “There is room for anyone who wishes to abide by the rules of our collective civil society.”
“Yes,” Kelly said, striking a thoughtful pose. “I wonder if the first Cro-Magnon said something similar to the last Neanderthal?”
Ororo. Kate is utterly certain of herself and her recent memories…let us say they bear out her story. We must act as if her information is correct and prepare for a Brotherhood attack.
She rose, and the others rose with her, following her up the aisle and out into the lobby. “Warren, are Kurt and Logan still in your car?”
“Last I knew,” he said. “But when did I ever tell either one of them where to go?”
“Kitty, go and bring them in,” Storm said. “Now.”
* * *
“WHAT a fascinating and inflammatory question, Senator,” Moira said.
Kelly’s smile grew just the slightest bit more predatory. “Inflammatory? The presence of costumed vigilantes in our midst—who can fly or turn to steel, who look like blue demons or clawed monsters—that’s not inflammatory? It has certainly inflamed the good people of the gallery, who have turned out in such numbers to express their uncertainties. Which, Doctor MacTaggert, are my uncertainties as well.”
He paused. “Professor Xavier, where have your X-Men gone? Are they afraid of a little public scrutiny?”
“Perhaps,” Xavier said with a tight smile, “they were called away to fulfill an important task.”
“No more mutants!” someone yelled from the gallery. Others picked it up, and it grew into a chant of more than a hundred people. Kelly looked around, half-heartedly gesturing for the committee chair to gavel the proceedings back to order. Cameras pushed in on him. NO MORE MUTANTS. NO MORE MUTANTS.
Kelly was trying not to smile.
People in the gallery started to stomp their feet. The balconies thumped and rocked. Even those not close to the anti-mutant protesters looked around, some up at the ceiling, as the vibrations grew stronger. Senate bailiffs and Capitol police made their way to the protesters, motioning for silence.
Meanwhile, TV cameras drank it all in and sent it out on a thousand feeds to millions of people. The feeds grew jerky as the shaking from the gallery increased. Throughout the hearing chamber, the faces of senators and spectators alike grew fearful as they started to realize that this much motion, this much noise, couldn’t just be coming from people stomping their feet up in the balcony. This was something different.
As that thought took hold in the minds of everyone present, the vibration peaked. Cracks appeared along one wall of the hearing chamber. “Get out of here, everyone! Run!” a Capitol policeman shouted.
Then the wall collapsed. The sound of it boomed through the chamber, punctuated by the screams of spectators and those injured by flying debris. Sunlight flooded in, briefly blinding most of those present—except the senators themselves and Xavier and MacTaggert. They had been under the glare of TV lights, so their eyes to adjusted quickly to the sight of five figures standing in the rubble of the collapse.
“You will forgive the interruption, Senator Kelly,” said the figure in the center. The cameras loved her: tight white dress over athletic curves, red hair setting off deep blue skin. “But I found your question particularly apt, for we all know what the first Cro-Magnons did to the last Neanderthals.”
She stepped forward, baskin
g in the panic as hundreds of spectators—including the protesters, scrambling to get off the balcony before it collapsed—trampled each other on their way to the doors. “I am Mystique!” she announced. “My colleagues and I comprise the Brotherhood of Mutants. We are your future, humans. Resist us at your peril.”
Mystique! The name went out to the millions—forever to be associated with the rumble of the collapsed wall, the screams of the injured and afraid, the shocked senators gaping from behind their table in a swirl of dust. And flanking her: Avalanche in his gauntlets and helmet, Pyro like ambulatory flame in his red-and-yellow suit, Blob in his black wrestler’s singlet. And the silent Destiny, caped in blue, her eyes hidden as though her visions of the future must blind her to the present. No one who witnessed that moment would ever forget it.
“You been babblin’ a lot about the mutant menace, Kelly,” Blob said. Mystique shot him a look, but he ignored it and shoved his way forward through the rubble into the hearing chamber proper. “We’re here to teach ya the error of your ways.”
“You’re hearing from the Blob,” Mystique said. “In his unrefined way, he speaks for all of us. He is the immovable object, symbolizing the strength of our resolve. We have also brought to you Avalanche. Show them what you can do!”
Avalanche pointed at the marble floor; it crumbled to powder around Kelly’s feet, leaving him trapped on a single tile with the beams of the floor exposed for twenty feet on three sides around him.
Before the crowd and the cameras could assimilate what had happened, Mystique went on. She didn’t want to give them a chance to get their breath. The more off-balance they were, the greater an impression the Brotherhood would leave—even before their final act: the public execution of Senator Robert Kelly. “Pyro!” she cried out like a circus ringmaster.
Pyro, with a malevolent wink, snapped his fingers. Gouts of fire shot from the portable spotlights set up for the television crews. The fires grew and intertwined, becoming a great flaming eagle that soared and floated out over the gallery.
“From England, a salute to the symbol of America,” he said. The eagle crackled over the spectators. More of them fled. On the floor, Professor Xavier backed his wheelchair carefully away from the cracked and unstable edge of the hole Avalanche had opened in the floor.
“You see, Senator Kelly was correct,” Mystique said. “We do have abilities and powers that you can never have. You should be afraid of us, because for centuries you have hunted and oppressed and vilified us. You have murdered us when you could. I myself have lost children because of human hate and fear.
“But now—from this moment forward—things will be very different. We are the Brotherhood of Mutants and we will not be cowed!”
Kelly, stunned like everyone else by the Brotherhood’s violent appearance, at last recovered his composure. “This…is… monstrous!” he shouted over the din. “How dare you freaks turn the United States Senate into a battlefield!” He started to step toward Mystique, but halted at the edge of his small island in the middle of the disintegrated floor. “How dare you threaten me?! Marshals, arrest those…people!”
Blob laughed. “Kelly, you’re either the bravest man here or the dumbest. Either way, you’re gonna die today.”
“That’s enough out of you, fatso,” said a Senate marshal who had worked his way around the rubble at the edge of the Brotherhood’s entry hole. He put a hand on Blob’s arm. “You and your mutie playmates have gone too far this time. You’re under arrest!”
Blob looked at the hand on his forearm, and then at the marshal. His eyes narrowed. “Chump, you’re talkin’ to the Blob!” he said, and he backhanded the marshal hard enough to send him pinwheeling out over the hole in the floor, halfway to Kelly’s island. The marshal’s limp body caught for a moment on one of the exposed beams and then fell out of sight.
“I didn’t get a chance to show what I could do for the cameras yet,” he said, “but here’s the short version. Nothing moves me if I don’t wanna be moved, and there ain’t a force on Earth that can hurt me. Anybody else wanna test me?”
There were several other marshals and Capitol police officers in the chamber, making sure civilians got out the public entrances. More had appeared behind the Senators’ table, escorting the stunned Senators out and trying to reach Kelly. “Never mind me,” he shouted. “Get them out of here and into jail! For good!”
The Brotherhood, as one, stepped into the chamber. “Jail?” Blob repeated. “I just got out. And I ain’t goin’ back.”
“No media members will be harmed as long as their cameras keep recording,” Mystique announced. “The Brotherhood wishes everyone to see this.”
“See you murder me?” Kelly challenged. “You’re proud of that?”
“I will be when it’s done,” Mystique said. “But since we are going to have the last word, I’ll let you have your say now. Speak to the American people. Tell them again how mutants are to be hated and feared, and how we must be separated from everyone else. Perhaps herded into camps and exterminated. That’s what you really want, isn’t it, Senator Kelly? Go on. Tell them.”
“They’ve already seen what they need to see. You’re proving me right. If you’re going to kill me, get on with it. History will show you for the craven murderers you are.”
“History,” said Mystique, “is written by the winners, is it not? From now on, mutants will tell their own story and control their own destiny. Die now, and your hate-mongering will start to die with you.” She nodded to Pyro. “Will you do the honors?”
“With pleasure,” Pyro said. “But perhaps an American should strike this symbolic blow? Seems only proper.”
“Everybody quit jawin’,” Blob said. “I’ll do it.”
That was when the lightning struck.
TWELVE
THEY split up as discussed. Wolverine planned to lead Storm and half of the FCA soldiers another block ahead to wrap around to the south on Fifth Avenue and approach the Baxter Building along 42nd Street. The rest of the FCA soldiers—including Rick—stayed with Peter, Kate, and the rapidly failing Rachel.
“I can’t keep this up much longer,” Rachel said.
“You must,” Peter answered. “Hang on a little while yet, Rachel. There are more sacrifices to be made today.”
“Franklin,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Yes, Franklin. He died for this. Perhaps you will, too. But not yet, Rachel. Not yet. We still need you.”
Peter carried her through the last stretch of the tunnel. Then they broke through a maintenance door into a parallel track that, according to Logan, would lead them to a subway-station entrance directly across the street from the Baxter Building’s main lobby. They had all gone over what they remembered of the building’s layout, knowing that the Sentinels would likely have rebuilt it to accommodate their size. Even so, they figured that the upper floors would still be laboratory and control space, because one of the Baxter Building’s primary functions was to coordinate communications among all Sentinels along the Eastern seaboard. The Sentinels had commandeered the great skyscrapers of other cities, as well—Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles—and they maintained a signal booster at the top of One World Trade Center, but the Baxter Building was their nerve center. There, they had put the Fantastic Four’s cutting-edge technology to work for their own genocidal ends.
And there, the X-Men were determined to strike the decisive blow. If they failed, tomorrow would see a rain of warheads over North America. And if that did not stop the Sentinels, would other warheads then fall over London, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo…?
Where would it end?
It wouldn’t. Humanity would nuke itself out of existence.
“Rachel,” Peter said.
She stirred and opened her eyes. “I’m still here,” she said. “But I can feel myself coming apart, Peter. I can’t—”
“Yes, you can.” He set her down gently at the station entrance.
Kitty watched him
and could understand why she had fallen in love with him. Would fall in love with him. How was her adult self coping with seeing Peter, knowing what their past was together—well, her past, and his future? It was a torment for all of them. She had to get back to her time so everything would be restored to its normal state. But what if adult-Kate succeeded? Would that undo this future? What else would it undo? How many future lives would be saved, and how many lost?
These were not the kinds of questions a thirteen-year-old rookie member of the X-Men could handle. Kitty had to focus on what was in front of her: this future. This horrible future, teetering on the edge of nuclear apocalypse. Whatever Kate Pryde might do back in the past, surely the future her actions spawned couldn’t be worse than this.
Framing the situation that way made her feel better. At least a little.
“Here is the danger,” Peter said. “You cannot communicate with us actively, Rachel. That will bring the Sentinels down on you and Kitty.”
“Me?” Kitty said. “I’m going in with you.”
“Absolutely not,” Peter said. “You must be here when the time comes for Rachel to send you back.”
“And when is that time, exactly?” Kitty asked. “I can fight until then. You saw what I did. I can hurt them. I’m part of the team.”
“Without a doubt, yes,” Peter said.
“Then I should fight.”
“If Sentinels approach you here, fight. If not, stay with Rachel. She should not be alone.”
“Oh, stop it,” Rachel said. “I’m going to die, Peter. It doesn’t matter if anyone’s here when it happens.”
“Can you send this Kitten back to her time if she is phasing through the frame of the Baxter Building?” Peter asked. Rachel said nothing. “I thought not. You must stay here, Kitty, if we are to have any hope of returning you to your time.”
He stood up. Across the intersection of Madison Avenue and 42nd Street, a Sentinel stood guard at the entrance to the Baxter Building. “It is almost three o’clock,” Peter said. “Time to go.”
