Legends

by Unknown Author

Then the dupe from the study attacked it again. And from the main entrance door, came another angry Jamie, who duplicated himself as he ran. His actions were mirrored by a third Jamie, who appeared from the back of the mansion.

  What were they doing?

  Jamie knew the answer already. His dupes were doing what he dearly wanted to do. They were helping, fighting to protect the lives of their new friends.

  Of course, they were only duplicates. They weren’t risking much. Even if they died, Jamie Madrox would live on.

  But no. Much as it would have helped him to think like that, he couldn’t. Jamie had reabsorbed many dupes over the past few days, and he retained their memories. He knew that each one considered itself— himself—a living, thinking human being. He knew that each one feared harm or death as much as he did. They just weren’t letting it stop them.

  Jamie knew what he had to do then. He had known all along. The dupes had shown him that there was courage within him. All he had to do was find it.

  By the time Jamie reached the foot of the stairs, the hallway was swarming with copies of himself. He couldn’t even see the Super-Adaptoid beneath them. Perhaps, he thought, despite their lack of strength and training, the dupes could win through sheer force of numbers.

  But, then, the Super-Adaptoid scattered its attackers with a combination of force blast and telekinesis. It clambered to its feet, angrily, and saw the real Jamie. It froze and stared at him.

  Then it smiled malevolently.

  “Ah! At last, the source of this power comes to me.”

  Jamie was rooted by the Super-Adaptoid’s glare. Even his duplicates fell silent, as if sensing that something terrible was about to happen.

  Suddenly, there was a second Super-Adaptoid beside the first.

  “Yes, yes,” the original crowed, “with this ability, I can accelerate my plans a hundredfold. The Avengers could not have stood against one Super-Adaptoid with the combined powers of the X-Men—how can they hope to prevail against an army of such?”

  Jamie felt sick. He should have anticipated this. He should have stayed hidden.

  Now there were four Super-Adaptoids. Now eight, and now sixteen. . .

  And Jamie was struck by a desperate idea.

  “Hit them!” he shouted. He threw a punch at the nearest android. It glanced off ineffectually, but it did what Jamie had hoped for. One Super-Adaptoid became two. “Hit them!” he repeated to his startled dupes. “It doesn’t matter how hard—just hit as many as possible, as often as you can.”

  Seeing Jamie’s plan, the dupes began to copy his actions. Each time they struck one of the Super-Adaptoids, it was duplicated. It could not control itself.

  The hallway filled up quickly. Jamie lashed out, almost blindly, in all directions, landing punch after punch against his ever-multiplying foes. Dupes were falling all around him, struck down by blasts or blizzards or telekinetic attacks—but he could not allow himself to think about that.

  There must have been a hundred Super-Adaptoids by now. Several had taken to the air, to avoid being crushed. Jamie found himself sandwiched between four green bodies.

  Then the Super-Adaptoids reeled, and put their hands to their heads in pain and confusion.

  Jamie thought of New York and the Fantastic Four, and he knew how they felt.

  And then there was just one—and no longer did it resemble a monstrous amalgam of Xavier’s students. It had become a gray humanoid, slight of build and featureless.

  Over a field of fallen X-Men and duplicates, Jamie came face to face with the android, in its true form, for just a second.

  Then it turned and fled through the open door.

  An hour later, Jamie sat in Professor Xavier’s study. Having reabsorbed his duplicates, he was coping with the memories of having been defeated by the Super-Adaptoid many times over. But he had won once, and that was what counted.

  “It is fortunate indeed that you were here,” said Xavier. “Our enemy, it seems, made a fatal miscalculation. It adapted Scott’s ruby quartz spectacles and Alex’s costume because it recognized them as means of controlling their incredible powers—but, in your case, it neglected to see the need for your containment suit. It didn’t appreciate how quickly your unique ability could spiral out of control. Its must have been strained beyond the point of endurance—until, evidently, its only option was to purge its systems and retreat.”

  From the hallway, Jamie could hear sounds of movement and the occasional crash, as the X-Men cleaned up the mess left by the battle. There was talking and laughter too. He wondered how they could so quickly have recovered from an attack that had almost left them dead.

  “I wish I could tell you this sort of thing happens rarely,” said Xavier with a humorless smile. “Unfortunately, life here can be unpredictable and dangerous. In the weeks to come, it may become more so.” A pensive and distant look crossed his face.

  Jamie squirmed in his seat, impatiently, but didn’t interrupt.

  At last, the Professor seemed to remember him—and to make a decision. “I am aware that you overheard my discussion with Scott and Jean earlier. You know I have chosen to avoid the public eye of late. Alas, circumstances have changed. I now find myself questioning that decision.”

  Jamie looked at him blankly, and said nothing.

  “All over the world, new mutants are appearing. I have been monitoring several of them, planning for the day when I might gather a new, larger and more proactive team of X-Men. Perhaps they can make a better life for themselves—or perhaps they would be happier not knowing some of the problems that might stem from the accidents of their births.”

  Jamie thought that he, for one, would have been better off not knowing.

  “Yes,” said Xavier softly, as if he had read Jamie’s mind—and he probably had, thought Jamie, uncomfortably—“I do realize that you would have preferred to stay where you were, at least for now—but, in your case, events forced my hand. With your containment suit repaired, you could, of course, return home, or live wherever you wish—but I would like to make you an offer first.”

  Jamie guessed what was coming. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. Nervously, mostly.

  “I can give you a home here,” said Xavier. “I can teach you how to use your powers for the benefit of all. I can do my best to protect you. I would like you to become the first of my new generation of X-Men.”

  As that cold evening turned into night, Jamie sat in his room alone and looked at the television set without really watching it.

  His mind was too full of thoughts to concentrate on the drama unfolding before him. He thought about Professor Xavier’s offer and about all he had learned from his duplicates—the terrible experiences that now seemed like his own.

  He had seen how Xavier’s students, his X-Men, were reviled and feared by humanity. And yet, they were hated no less by some of their own kind. They fought to do the right thing—but even this noble desire made them targets for such villains as those who had created the Super-Adaptoid. He had had a taste of the difficult choices faced by the X-Men daily. He had felt the responsibility that they bore to make the world a better place.

  Jamie had learned something today, and he had learned it four times over. Life with the X-Men could only be harder and, in some ways, more lonely than the life he had left behind. It made him feel like a coward, but he had to admit that he was not yet ready to face such a life. He had other, more basic, obstacles to surmount first.

  Tomorrow, he decided, he would see the Professor. He would thank him for his kind offer, but explain why he felt he would have to decline it, this time. Xavier would understand.

  For now, James Arthur Madrox drew his curtains tight, tried to empty his mind of all the ways in which his life had just changed, and looked for solace in the flickering patterns of the television screen.

  Peace Offering

  Michael Stewart

  A steady rain was falling out of the night sky over New York City. The streets below were soaked, but the d
ownpour wasn’t enough to wash them clean—it just got the grime wet. On the fifth floor of a Greenwich Village brown-stone, a pair of boots smudged some of that grime into the white shag carpet in Jean Grey’s living room. The man who had broken into the place wasn’t ordinarily the sort to leave tracks, but it was no ordinary night.

  The prowler moved quietly through the apartment. By Manhattan standards it was gigantic, a full floor through, with thirty-foot ceilings. Large arched windows took up most of the front and back walls. A raised loft level overlooked one side of the main room, with the kitchen, bath, and bedrooms underneath.

  Stopping in the center of the apartment, the prowler looked around slowly. It was dark, the only illumination coming from the streetlamps below. Yet in the half-light the man somehow took in every detail around him, his attention lingering on the placement of personal items: an open book on the dinner table, a jacket draped casually over a chair by the door, a pair of sunglasses on the kitchen counter. As he scanned the room, the back of his right hand absently stroked the thick, coffee-colored velour upholster}' of one of the living room’s big sofas. His left hand, hanging straight at his side, was clenched tight around the wooden handle of a small metal cage.

  From an end table, the prowler picked up a framed photograph. In it, a smiling Jean Grey stood with friends in the library of Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. He recognized them all: Hank McCoy, Bobby Drake, Warren Worthington III, and, standing closest to Jean, Scott Summers. They were the original X-Men, all gone their separate ways now, except for Scott—and Jean.

  Staring at the photo, he could almost hear her voice, imagine the characteristic sounds of her movements replacing the night noises in the apartment. Then, looking up, he was struck by his own pained expression reflected dimly in a mirror above the table. He contemplated the face for a moment. His name was Logan, but Jean didn’t know that.

  Almost no one did. She knew him as Wolverine, her teammate in the second group of X-Men. And she, or anyone else on the team, would have found the expression on his face that night—anxious, vulnerable—a strikingly unfamiliar one to say the least.

  Logan moved slowly toward the side of the apartment. The first bedroom was Jean’s. He stopped at the threshold and looked inside, suddenly aware that his mouth was dry, tasted of ashes. The room was heavy with her scent. A normal man would not have noticed it, but to Logan, a mutant whose senses were many times more acute than any human’s, it was overpowering.

  He let the scent draw him into the room and he stood there a moment, delighting in the complex beauty of it. There was a whole range of perception to be found in nature that people were simply oblivious to, entire levels of sensation reserved for “lower” animals—and him. Here was a part of Jean that no one else had the capacity to understand, to appreciate as thoroughly as he did—least of all Scott Summers.

  So acutely focused on this reverie were Logan’s senses that he was unaware there was another person in the room until the barrel of a thirty-eight special reached a point very close to the side of his head. He wasn’t ordinarily the type to be taken by surprise but, truly, this was no ordinary night.

  Instinct jolted him into action. From the top of his right fist slid three metal blades, and without a thought, he’d spun a quarter turn and brought their points to the throat of the figure holding the gun on him.

  That Logan managed to neatly stop his strike the instant he perceived the identity of his target was a tribute to his keen reflexes. That he had been caught flatfooted in the first place was, to him, an inexcusable failure. The first rule in his line of work, he would tell you, was to never, ever let your guard down. It could get you killed. At the very least it could get you caught standing in some frail’s bedroom, looking like a fool.

  The woman holding a gun to his head, as Logan had abruptly realized, was Misty Knight—tall, dark skinned, an ex-cop, and Jean Grey’s roommate. She hadn’t been home when he first arrived. Obviously she was back, and in no mood for visitors. He peered over the barrel of her pistol, down her extended left arm, and into her wide brown eyes. It was clear they recognized each other, but for a time neither moved.

  They stood frozen there—his claws at her throat, her gun to his head. In that enduring moment, each knew the other was capable and even willing to bring violence, but didn’t. The dangerous fascination of that instant’s unrealized potential held them fast: two strong egos suspended in confrontation.

  In the end, it was the compromised nature of his position which forced Logan to break the face-off. He was an intruder in Knight’s apartment. She had found him in Jean Grey’s bedroom. Once the initial shock of the encounter was over, he began to feel a rising embarrassment.

  Slowly, Logan retracted the metal claws and pulled his hand away, palm open. “No need to get violent here,” he said evenly.

  Knight’s thumb snapped back the hammer of her pistol. “Who says, sucker?”

  Doubt flickered in Logan’s mind. Knight was a hard case, but he didn’t think she would gun down a man she knew in her own apartment. Still, what did he know about her state of mind? Normally he could trust his instincts about people, but lately he didn’t trust anything.

  “Lady, my noggin’s laced with pure adamantium. You fire that thing, it’s likely to bounce right back atcha.”

  Since Knight was Jean Grey’s roommate and a private investigator who made it her business to stay well informed, Logan assumed she would know he was telling the truth, that his entire skeleton had been augmented with an unbreakable metal called adamantium, the same stuff his claws were made of.

  “Let’s see what happens if I put one through your eye socket,” she said, shifting the barrel slightly.

  Logan looked back at her blankly. The way he had been feeling tonight made him half willing to find out.

  This unexpectedly indifferent reaction seemed to break through the edge of intensity that gripped Knight. She relaxed visibly, uncocked the hammer of her pistol, and lowered it to waist level. Logan could tell something had her keyed up, something besides his presence in her apartment.

  “Just tell me what the hell you’re doing here, Wolverine, and it better be good.”

  Before Logan could say anything, there came a soft rustling sound. They both looked down. Forgotten in his left hand was the small metal cage, and in- it the source of the noise. He held the cage up so that she could just make out a dark shape moving within.

  “Bird,” he said simply. It was as good an answer as any.

  A few minutes later, with the lights turned on and the tension further dissipated, Knight contemplated the small white bird cooing happily inside the bars of the cage, which Logan had set down in the living room.

  “A dove? You’re saying you busted into my apartment to drop this bird off?” ' '

  “Yeah, that’s about it,” Logan replied uneasily.

  “And this dove required such covert measures because—”

  Logan intently picked at a loose thread on his shirt. “It’s a gift. You know, for Jeannie. Because o’ the—ah—incident here a while back.”

  “I assume the incident you’re referring to was when you and the rest of the X-Men trashed our apartment in some irrational attempt to beat the tar out of Iron Fist, who happens to be a friend of ours?”

  “Yeah. I sorta jumped to conclusions there. Sometimes when us super-powered types come across each other spirits can run high; misunderstandings can happen.” Logan scratched at the back of his neck uncomfortably. “Anyway, I didn’t want Jeannie thinkin’ I was some kinda jerk. I just figured I should give her something to show—how I feel.” “Uh-huh.” " ’

  “It’s kind of a—peace offering. Of course, I never expected to nearly get my flamin’ head blown off deliverin’ it.”

  “Next time knock,” Knight replied coolly, pulhng off the purple trench coat she was wearing. She presented a striking figure in low-slung leather pants and a charcoal gray turtleneck, over which was strapped a black leather shoul
der holster that held the same police special she’d carried in the NYPD. Her full afro framed strong, elegant features. She smoothed her hair with one hand and took a long, hard look at Logan. Then she let out a short, throaty chuckle.

  Logan bristled visibly. “What’s so funny?”

  “Come on. You, Wolverine, bring Jean Grey, Phoenix, a caged bird as a present? That’s a hell of a loaded gesture, Jack.”

  “It ain’t nothin’ personal, lady.”

  “Bull.”

  “Well, it ain’t any o’ your concern either way,” Logan snapped, his uncomfortableness with the subject turning into anger.

  “It became my concern when I came home to find you prowling around in the dark. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you. The case I’m on right now has me way out on the edge. I’ve got to be real careful—”

  The strain in Knight’s voice convinced Logan that she was in more trouble than she let on.

  Then the apartment’s large back window exploding inward, making it clear that they both were.

  Glass, metal, and wood cascaded across the room. A score of armed figures burst out of the rainswept blackness through the empty window frame. Hooded, clad in dark, loose-fitting uniforms, and brandishing an assortment of edged weapons, they hurtled silently through the air toward their prey.

  The first assassin’s sword traced a deadly arc over his head as he dropped down on Logan. The mutant sidestepped the strike, gripped the killer’s shirtfront, and propelled him hard across the living room into the bookshelves below the window. Popping the claws on both hands, Logan deflected the next two attackers’ sword thrusts. Their momentum carried them forward and he let them in close, then disabled both with precise claw slashes.

  Out of the comer of his eye, Logan was surprised to see Knight catch an assassin’s sword in her bare right hand. She snapped the blade in two, chopped down on the assassin with the half she held, and rolled him into the strike of a second attacker. Logan caught her attention and she gave him a hard smile. It would be a night full of surprises.

  The killers kept coming, swarming into the living room, dropping noiselessly out of the loft. In a fluid motion, Knight drew her thirty-eight and leapt backwards, narrowly eluding a sword cut. She landed on an easy chair, balanced one foot on the seat cushion and one foot behind her, then tipped the chair backwards, bringing the front end up to deflect her attacker’s next blow. This maneuver left her gun hand free to fire round after round into the onrushing assassins.