by Alex Irvine
Or would she just die?
“I’ll try, Kitty. I’ll try…” Rachel trailed off. Kitty couldn’t tell whether she was alive or dead.
The Sentinels loomed closer. Some of them turned to look at Kitty and Rachel, then looked away again, still focused on damage control at their command center. Lower-ranking Sentinels arrived and started cleaning up the debris, scattered along the entire block from 42nd to 43rd streets.
Kitty sat still, cradling Rachel and feeling each shallow rise and fall of the older mutant’s breath.
“I should have done something,” Kitty said.
“You did,” Rachel breathed. “You were here. You got us this far.”
“I did nothing. I watched all my friends die.”
“Me, too,” Rachel said, her voice only audible because Kitty bent close to hear her.
We lost, Kitty thought. I’m never going to grow up. I’m going to die in this future. And Kate—me, this me I started to imagine because everyone talked about her—she failed, too.
“What do I do now?” Kitty asked. “Do I have to do anything to help you?”
Rachel didn’t answer.
“Rachel?” Kitty said. She leaned down again and listened. “Rachel?”
I’m the only one, Kitty thought. The last living mutant, but for how long? Everything around her blurred; she squeezed her eyes shut to clear her vision of tears. Crying was pointless now. If she was the last mutant, and if she was going to be stranded here in this future, she was going to have to get herself together and figure out how to survive.
Until the bombs started falling, anyway.
She wanted to give up. She couldn’t help it. If she was going to die anyway, why not go out in some blaze of pointless glory? She could take a Sentinel with her, maybe more than one. That was one thing she’d learned here, at least.
Kitty eased herself out from under Rachel and set her head down gently on the sidewalk. Kitty’s coat was soaked through with Rachel’s blood. She stood up and looked again at the top floors of the Baxter Building. Sentinels were moving in and out, already beginning the repairs and reconstruction. They didn’t know they only had another day to exist. Would they care? Probably not. They had a directive, and that directive was all that mattered to them.
A thought occurred to her. If she sacrificed herself, would the nuclear strike be averted? The Sentinels would have no mission objectives remaining in North America. Would they immediately move on Europe, bringing the battlefield with them? How many lives might that save? There were too many variables for her to predict, too many uncertainties.
The only thing Kitty knew for sure was that she was never going home. That knowledge, and her utter isolation, paralyzed her for a moment. She stood watching the Sentinels with the strange premonition that she was observing the successors to the human race. No nuclear strike could destroy them all. Somewhere, a Sentinel factory would survive. More of them would be built, and more and more, until the Earth belonged to them alone. And then what would they do?
The question would matter only to them.
Something was moving in the sky to the north. It was only two or three blocks away, too small to be a Sentinel, and it lacked the telltale flare of their boot rockets. It was man-shaped, though, moving slowly toward her at the level of the upper floors of the taller buildings along Madison Avenue. Something about it…
Kitty gasped. Her heart leaped.
“Magneto,” she said.
She was not alone after all.
* * *
HE RODE lines of force, invisible to all but him. The ruined streets of Manhattan four hundred feet below looked like pockets and reservoirs, lines and fields of conductivity and resistance. They were part of him, extensions of him, the magnetic field of the Earth itself like a nervous system that extended his perceptions and powers. Ahead, the Baxter Building burned. Magneto could see the concentration of electromagnetic energies focused in the spires of its rooftop antenna nest.
The Sentinels’ internal devices alerted them to the use of his mutant powers. He saw and felt all of them at once, in their dozens. They marched along the street, worked inside the destroyed areas of the Baxter Building, arrayed themselves on its roof, flew in tight groupings from all directions toward him.
He halted, letting the steel skeletons of the buildings on either side of him provide the balance of repulsion he required to stay aloft. His legs hung below him, useless but not needed, and he appeared to stand on air.
The Sentinels boomed out their warnings. “Mutant 067, your use of powers is prohibited. Cease or be terminated.”
Interesting, he thought. Even now they do not strike first. They need mutants—at least a few.
And a few was all they had. Fewer even than an hour before, was his guess. He saw none of his fellow inmates from the camp. He did, however, see the traces of their presence in the heavy damage to the Baxter Building and in the crushed and dismembered Sentinels littering the street below. They had fought valiantly. In all likelihood, they had died.
A dozen Sentinels ringed him in the air, at a distance of less than fifty yards. One of them repeated its warning. “Mutant 067, your use of powers is—”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
The Sentinel paused to process this ambiguous statement. He allowed himself a moment to savor its confusion, then he thrust his arms out. A torus of magnetic repulsion expanded outward from him, moving at the speed of the Earth’s rotation—nearly one thousand miles per hour. It hit the Sentinels all at once, and all their metallic components instantly repelled each other at the same speed. A dozen Sentinels became a debris field in the blink of an eye, briefly hanging in the air like a ring with Magneto as the planet holding it in orbit. Their internal fluids fell in a shower to the street below, along with the Sentinels’ plastic and glass and rubber components. He held the ring for a moment, enjoying the sight and letting it stand as a statement to the rest of the Sentinels. This was his announcement: Magneto is here.
Then he let it go. The debris fell in a spreading rain, cascading down over several blocks of street and rooftop.
Missiles flew toward him from the Baxter Building’s rooftop and from Sentinels flying in from the west. He turned them easily; each found a new target, blasting the flying formations out of the sky. “More!” Magneto cried out. “Are there not more of you?”
There were, rising toward him from the streets all around, their torso and palm repulsors glowing. Magneto grinned. He knew repulsor technology was based on the creation and channelling of muons—and muons were strongly affected by electromagnetism. “Yes,” he said. He waited.
“Mutant 067,” the nearest Sentinel said. “You will cease.”
“I will not,” Magneto said.
Their repulsors discharged all at once. Magneto created a sphere of magnetic energy around himself, redirecting the streams of muons and the heat created by their decay. The sphere flashed a blinding white, like a miniature sun in the artificial canyon of Madison Avenue. The energy was nearly too much for him to handle, but handle it he did.
Then he released it.
The combined energy of all the Sentinels’ repulsor beams expanded away from him. The wave washed over the Sentinels and the facades of nearby buildings, burning everything it touched to slag and ashes. Past one hundred meters, the muons’ decay reached the point where they no longer gave off heat. The tiny supernova winked out, leaving only fires burning in the buildings and on the street.
The Baxter Building was just ahead. This would be Magneto’s piece de resistance. The satellites that were surely watching from Europe would see what he was about to do, and they would take note. What action that would prompt was uncertain. But even if he were the last surviving mutant in the western hemisphere, Magneto would send a message to the world that mutants were not finished just yet.
He drifted forward and saw, amid the wreckage on the street below the Baxter Building’s east face, a small figure running. Looking closer, he smil
ed. Kate Rasputin. Another still lived.
That made his mission all the more important. All his life, Magneto had fought not for himself but for other mutants. Now, unexpectedly, he was given the chance to fight for other mutants again.
Sentinels on the street below were firing metal spears at him. He deflected them with barely a thought. Why had he allowed this to go on so long? Perhaps he had been weak. Perhaps his judgment had been clouded. Perhaps he had feared to act decisively, lest decisive action inadvertently harm those precious to him.
None of those things mattered now.
From the ruined upper floors of the Baxter Building, repulsor beams reached out toward him. He bent them aside. A row of Omega-class Sentinels stood in the opening. Within the building, he could sense the concentrated flow and swirl of electromagnetism around what must be a plasma core. A force field, constructed to resist the intrusion of matter and energy both. He felt it, probed it, and understood the patterns of the particles that composed it.
He could not destroy it. The Sentinels had constructed it wisely, using a plasma composed of particles unresponsive to magnetism. Everything inside that core was driven by the other binding forces that held matter together. It was pure information, and the Sentinels picked and chose tiny bits of it to compose into the broadcasts that gave them their orders and kept them synchronized across the North American continent.
Below, two of the Sentinels confronted Kate. Irritated by the distraction, Magneto tore them apart, strewing the pieces away from her. “Get out of here, Kate Rasputin,” he called down. She shouted something back at him, but he did not hear what. He pointed, south and away. She ran.
The rush of adrenaline that had sustained Magneto started to abate. Again he was exhausted, and this time he would not be allowed the grace of time to recover. He began to descend, letting himself ride the opposing lines of the steel-framed buildings down to the street.
It galled him to give up the freedom of flight and return to his crippled and earthbound state, but he would need every particle of energy he could muster if his last gesture were not to be as futile as the brave deaths of the rest—for surely none of the rest had survived. That Kate had was a small miracle, if miracles there were. Magneto had never seen evidence of any, and had witnessed quite enough cruelty to argue they did not exist.
His feet touched the street, and he let himself down gently. He considered using the strips of metal threaded through his jumpsuit to keep himself upright, but any distraction of his powers from the main focus could prove fatal at this point. Fatigue buzzed in his head; he was having trouble focusing his vision. Sentinels tracked his trajectory and surrounded him on the street.
He wondered where Kate had gone, and hoped she had heeded his warning to put some distance between him and her. Proximity to Magneto was a poor survival strategy, and always had been. That was one more irony of his life’s work.
“Mutant 067,” one of the Sentinels said.
“My name is Magneto,” he answered. “Are you afraid that when we are all dead you will have only an empty directive? What will you do then?”
“That is not your concern,” the Sentinel said. “You will be taken for final analysis and terminated. As you should have been before.”
“You can’t win, you know,” Magneto said, even though he did not believe it. “The rest of the world has seen what you do. They will band together and destroy you.”
“Our directive must be fulfilled,” the Sentinel responded. “Now conversation will cease.”
It bent down and picked up Magneto, settling him in the palm of its hand and closing its fingers over him—not to crush, but to contain him. He took advantage of every precious second to rest—closing his eyes, letting the architecture of the command center’s data core wash again through his mind. Again he reached the same conclusion: He could not destroy it.
“Your exercise of your powers was futile,” the Sentinel said.
“The ending of that book is not yet written,” Magneto answered.
“Figurative language indicates evasion,” the Sentinel said.
“Ah,” Magneto said. “Allow me to explain in a language you will be sure to understand.”
“Further use of your powers will result in immediate termination,” the Sentinel said.
“Yes,” Magneto said. “I understand.”
* * *
KITTY had heard Magneto call her name, and she had seen him warn her away. Running away to the south, she had stopped across from the library. She was torn between the primal urge to survive and another urge, only slightly less primal, to keep contact with the only other living member of her kind.
She had seen Magneto destroy Sentinel after Sentinel, seemingly without effort, and she rejoiced. Then she saw him sink slowly to the ground, and her spirits fell. Now he was in the grip of the enemy, literally, and she had an awful feeling she knew what would happen next. She was going to witness the death of the last mutant in North America other than her.
Her mind raced through different fantastic scenarios. She imagined herself on a ship, seeing the European coast come into view over the horizon. Boats would come to meet her and welcome her. They would tell her everything was all right. The European powers would save her, would oppose and destroy the Sentinels without pushing the red button. Maybe the technological savants of Wakanda would have an answer. Their shining silver craft would fill the skies over New York, rescuing her and saving millions from death by fire and fallout and famine.
Or maybe this was all a terrible dream, a prophetic warning about something happening back in her time. Soon she would awaken in her bed at Xavier’s school. She would tell the rest of the X-Men about it over breakfast; they would tease her, but not cruelly. She would not be alone.
She was crying again, crouched in a bus shelter across from the library. The group of Sentinels moved toward the Baxter Building, keeping a tight circle around the one bearing Magneto. She could not see him.
A vibration rose in the air around her—almost a sound but not quite. It registered in her ears, but also in her bones and in the struts of the shelter around her. It intensified. She heard one of the Sentinels say something.
Then the group of Sentinels blew apart. Kitty flinched as a piece of Sentinel armor shattered the bus shelter’s Plexiglas wall. She scrambled around the other side of it, finding a protected spot in the recessed doorway of a building. She looked back toward the Baxter Building. What had Magneto done?
He was there, hovering in the air with the severed hand of a Sentinel serving as a seat. He rose higher, arms spread and head thrown back, and Kitty felt the vibration increase again. An almost tectonic groan began to sound from somewhere nearby. Concrete dust showered down the facades of buildings up and down Madison Avenue, along with shards of brick and marble. The groan grew louder. In a moment of terror and exhilaration, Kitty understood.
A series of loud pops sounded from the Baxter Building—sporadically at first but then faster, until they sounded like firecrackers. The building’s remaining intact windows shattered, falling in a glittering curtain, exposing the interior from ground to rooftop.
Magneto still hung in the air. She thought she saw his mouth moving, but could not imagine what he might be saying. His chin fell to his chest, but his arms remained spread. She could see ripples like convection in the air around him.
Almost imperceptibly, the shape of the Baxter Building began to change. Its metal sides screamed, became concave. Its roofline tilted and sagged. Sentinels streamed through the sky from every direction, but something prevented them from getting too close.
Magneto dropped one arm, and an invisible force dragged abandoned cars and pieces of Sentinels into a circular pattern. The building itself twisted in that same direction, its girders shrieking and huge chunks of concrete cracking loose to crash down into the street.
First, the Sentinels fired everything they had at Magneto, but he took no notice of them. Their missiles tore holes in the surroundin
g buildings; their repulsor beams diffused and died. He dropped his other arm, and the Baxter Building crumpled inward.
A dust cloud rose on the street—roiling higher, almost obscuring Magneto. Through it Kitty could see the dull glow of fires flaring inside the building. An entire corner of the roof peeled off, carrying with it a spidery collection of girders and beams. Magneto lifted his head and then held still for a suspended moment. The vibrations around Kitty paused, and she realized she’d been holding her breath.
As she inhaled, so did Magneto, lifting his arms and bringing them together in a clap. It made no sound that Kitty could hear, but the Baxter Building collapsed into itself with a sound she would never forget. As it disappeared into the dust and smoke of its own disintegration, a titanic explosion destroyed the buildings on either side of it. Magneto vanished in the fireball that billowed out of the wreckage, washing over the buildings across Madison Avenue and mushrooming up into the sky.
Kitty stood, thunderstruck. In her numb daze, she noticed two things. The Sentinels hovering in the sky after the explosion were no longer moving in unison. It took her some time to realize the significance of this.
Second, she saw a light in the east. It was almost dawn. She had never expected to see another one. Incongruously, she realized this was the first time she had ever stayed up all night.
SEVENTEEN
DESTINY waited, knowing what would happen. As Mystique had guessed, Senator Kelly would return to his office. There, he would gather up what was most important to him—files, personal belongings, and so forth—before trying to make his escape. Whatever his feelings about mutants, Robert Kelly could not be called a coward. He believed what he believed, and acted on his beliefs. This position, to Destiny’s mind, earned him the respect one felt for an enemy who tested one’s abilities—before, of course, yielding or dying, because the sporting fair-play school of battle never favored the underdog.
