X-Men

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Ororo pushed herself back to her feet, the brown dirt sticking to her sweating arms and legs. Her stick was broken in half. Now there was no way she could win. No way at all.

  One of the kids saw what had happened, and in a moment, before she could even look up from her broken stick, they had all surrounded her, laughing, poking at her with their sticks.

  “Stop!” she shouted, but that just made them laugh even harder, taunting her that she was too slow to make them stop, that she had broken her stick. And with her stick broken, how could she tag them?

  Ororo was getting angrier and angrier as the others kept poking at her. Then one of them hit her.

  The hit stung like a bee.

  It sounded like someone had snapped their fingers. She could feel the pain of it coming off her shoulder.

  She tried to move away, but they wouldn’t let her, keeping her surrounded, hitting her more and more.

  Snap! Snap!

  Each hit hurt really bad. “Stop!” she shouted. “Stop it now!”

  They laughed and hit her again and again.

  And each hit hurt her more and more, until it became one big stinging pain on her back and shoulders and arms.

  They were all hitting her with their sticks, telling her to run. They wanted to see her run.

  But Ororo knew she couldn’t outrun them, so she just stood there, turning to avoid the hits as best she could, as she would avoid the stings of swarming insects.

  They laughed and yelled at her to run. It had become a new game of sorts, and she had become the object of the game.

  Snap! Snap! Snap! The sticks whipped at her skin, drawing blood in places, raising welts in others.

  Her voice was getting louder and louder. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  But that, too, just made them hit her harder and harder.

  Why were they doing this to her?

  All Ororo wanted them to do was stop.

  Why couldn’t they just leave her alone? She could feel her face getting hot from the anger.

  All she wanted to do was hit them all back, show them how it felt.

  How it hurt.

  But they kept on, and it seemed to go on forever.

  As Ororo got angrier and angrier, she could feel the air around her clutching at her, pulling her.

  Snap! Snap-snap-snap! The hits were coming even faster now, the laughter less and less.

  She spun and moved, trying to get out of the way of each hit, usually failing.

  She cried, and the nightmare continued.

  Between sobs, she yelled at them to stop.

  They kept going.

  She wished for something to stop them.

  Then everything changed. The hitting slowed, then stopped, as the other children looked up in awe at what was happening around them. The sky was falling, in big white flakes.

  White, cold flakes in the heat of the afternoon, out of the blue, cloudless sky.

  They fell slowly at first. Then faster, harder.

  But none of the snow was falling on her. She was so angry, so racked with sobs, that she didn’t notice, didn’t care what was happening. Her shoulders and arms still stung where the other kids had hit her, and she wanted the sky to keep falling on them all, to hurt them all.

  Gradually the white flakes falling from the clear, blue, cloudless heavens turned heavier, then became small chunks of ice.

  The kids picked up the ice, looked at it. They laughed, staring upward as it pounded down.

  It was still fun for them.

  She dropped to the dry ground, sobbing as around her the falling ice got larger, still not touching her. Just them.

  She stared at the other kids, the force of her anger more overwhelming than any she had ever felt. It had built up in her for years, like water behind a dam. And now the dam had burst, and she was letting all the anger flow. She had wanted, more than anything, for the sky to fall on them. It was doing just that, but she wanted more.

  She wanted them to hurt as she hurt.

  The ice chunks coming from the cloudless heavens got larger and larger. Soon the other children began shouting in pain. They scattered, trying to run for the tents.

  But now the chunks of ice were so large that they began knocking the kids down, smashing into the tents, breaking off limbs from the trees.

  She cried even harder as the kids shouted and screamed for it to stop.

  Now they knew how she felt.

  Maybe next time they wouldn’t torment her again.

  Ororo looked around, and it dawned upon her that the flakes of sky and ice hadn’t hit her.

  She put her head down in the dirt, feeling the ground and the comfort of the solidness. Every part of her back and arms hurt, yet the anger was ebbing. In its place was a deep feeling of knowing the winds and rains, of understanding the clouds and the sky. She could feel the water in the earth and the energy of the sun. All felt comforting. Deep inside she understood them, knew them all, as if they were her friends.

  And as if she were theirs.

  It wasn’t until much later that she learned that, at that moment, her hair had turned as white as the falling sky.

  Mississippi—The Not-Too-Distant Future

  Marie traced the line on the map while pointing with her other hand to the picture of the Statue of Liberty on her bedroom wall. She had spent hours staring at that statue, and at the map, dreaming of traveling there, seeing the sights. Now she was sharing her dream with David.

  David was from her school, and at sixteen, the same age. They had just started to date.

  “I want to spend time in New York City,” Marie said, smiling at David. He was sitting on the edge of her bed. Her parents were downstairs watching television and the door was open, but it still felt odd to have him in her room. Exciting, too. Only a few of her girlfriends had ever seen the inside of her bedroom.

  “You going to live there?” David asked.

  “No,” she said, tracing the map farther north. “Niagara Falls, then into Canada. Toronto, west to Calgary, then on to Anchorage.”

  “Wow,” David said, clearly impressed. He stood and moved over beside her, staring at the map. “Won’t it be kinda cold?”

  “Of course it will,” she said, laughing. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be an adventure.”

  She could feel his closeness, his shoulder rubbing against her shoulder.

  “When are you gonna do this?”

  Marie shrugged. “I don’t know. After school, but before college.”

  He reached over and rested his hand on her shoulder. She could feel it, almost like a hot iron touching her, yet it didn’t burn. It excited her, made her stomach twist like it had never twisted before. She had never been this close to a boy before. Not like this.

  Not in her bedroom with her parents downstairs.

  “So,” she said, turning to face him a little, “what do you want to do now?”

  He looked right into her eyes. Then he smiled, sending shivers down her back.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

  He moved closer to her, and she could smell him. She was having trouble breathing, yet there was no way in the world she wanted him to move away.

  “I don’t know,” she managed.

  He turned her slightly so they were facing each other, then slowly he moved forward until he was kissing her.

  It was as if a surge of electricity shot through every nerve cell in her body.

  A thousand thoughts flashed through her mind.

  He tastes good.

  My parents are downstairs.

  What will my friends think?

  His lips feel wonderful.

  I can’t breathe.

  I want to kiss him harder.

  Then suddenly it all changed.

  As she put her arms around him, kissing him back, suddenly his mind opened up to her.

  She knew what he was thinking, knew what he liked, what he hated, what he liked to do with the guys, what he wanted them to do.r />
  David’s eyes snapped open.

  His hands locked around her in a terrifying grip.

  She tried to pull away, but it felt as if he were pouring his every thought, his every wish, his every dream into her head.

  Energy crackled around them, until finally she managed to pull away.

  He dropped to the floor, his eyes open wide.

  The next thing she knew she was screaming. The images of David’s life were still tumbling in her head, filling her mind, mixing with her own until she almost couldn’t tell which were hers and which were his.

  He lay on the floor, twitching. It didn’t look like he was breathing.

  Had she killed him?

  She hadn’t done anything!

  Her parents slammed into the room behind her as she realized she was still screaming, backed against the wall, staring at his body. She tried to push his memories away without success.

  Her father immediately dropped to the floor and checked David, then started CPR.

  Her mother came to her, but Marie didn’t want her mother to touch her.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she said softly.

  Inside her head, his memories fought with hers. His images of her fought with how she saw herself. What he had wanted to do shocked her.

  “Honey, what happened?” her mother asked desperately.

  “Call a damned ambulance!” her father shouted.

  Her mother jumped, then ran for the door as her father gave David mouth-to-mouth, then pumped his chest.

  Marie pushed herself against the wall. She so wanted David to be all right. So wanted his memories and thoughts to leave her mind.

  “I didn’t do anything,” she said, softly. But inside, she knew that she had.

  She just didn’t know what.

  Chapter One

  Washington, DC—One Year Later

  The cold of the winter day was long forgotten inside the Senate Hearing Room, as the packed bodies in the gallery and the heat from the television lights forced the temperature in the room up far above normal. Several of the senators, despite the intense media scrutiny of these hearings, had taken off their jackets. Many viewers in the balcony were fanning themselves with notebooks or loose paper.

  Professor Charles Xavier sat in his wheelchair near the center of the room, watching patiently. He could tell that the crowd was a very hostile one. He didn’t need to read their minds to sense that. Their hostility clearly emerged with every action of the hearings’ chairman, the flamboyant senator Robert Kelly.

  Kelly was a white-faced, white-haired man who was clearly using the hearings on mutant registration to propel his own career closer to the White House. And it seemed as though he had other demons that were driving him, though it wasn’t quite clear to Professor Xavier what those demons were. At least not yet.

  In front of the hot room, at the witness table, sat Dr. Jean Grey. Even alone at the long wooden table, she had a commanding presence. A strong, good-looking woman in her early thirties, she had been called upon to explain to the Senate Hearing the basic science behind the emergence of mutants.

  Professor Xavier had helped her extensively with the drafting of her presentation. They had gone over it time and again so that it would be clear not only to the senators, but to the audience on the other side of the television cameras.

  And considering the hot-button interest the public had taken in the mutant registration law, there was no doubt her presentation would make the news. To many, mutants had proved ripe for persecution based on the long-standing tradition of fearing anything unknown. So the best defense, Jean and the professor had determined, was to help the regular people from middle America understand mutants and what they really were. The bigots like Senator Kelly would fold like wet tissue if public opinion shifted against them.

  But for the moment, the public was squarely against mutants. And the public was scared to death. Senator Kelly was a master of playing that to the hilt.

  “Lights, please?” Jean said.

  A few people murmured something about that helping the heat, at least.

  As the lights dimmed around him, the professor didn’t need to shift in his wheelchair to watch the show. Instead he focused his gaze straight ahead and opened his mind, to let the feelings of those around him flow in, but only a little. Not enough to read their thoughts—just enough to gauge how reaction to the presentation was going.

  He could feel boredom and hostility. Jean had a very deep hole to climb out of, it seemed. They all did, if they were ever going to be accepted by society and defeat this registration law.

  “DNA,” Jean said, spacing each letter as she started her presentation. “It is the basic building block of evolution. Changes in our DNA are the reason we have evolved from single-celled organisms to Homo sapiens.”

  Figures on the screen showed the various stages of evolution, along with a graph displaying a diagonal line that indicated the ascent of the human animal: the evolution of man.

  One image took over the screen, focusing attention on the lowest order of humanoid: Homo habilis, a primitive apelike humanoid covered in thick hair.

  Around him, Professor Xavier could feel the crowd’s interest increase, ever so slightly. And some revulsion emerged, as men and women confronted images of what they were descended from.

  “Within our DNA,” Jean said, explaining what was happening on the screen, “are the genes that decide our physical characteristics. When these active genes mutate, we see changes in the body.”

  The image on the screen began to mutate, and the apelike humanoid slowly started looking more and more human.

  The professor could tell many of the people around him were becoming fascinated. Perfect. It was just what he and Jean had hoped would be their reaction at this point.

  “These evolutionary changes are subtle, and normally take thousands of years.”

  The image of the now-human man on the screen froze, and his body went transparent. Twenty percent of it was marked in blue, representing moving, active genes. The remainder of the image of the man was marked in red, showing static, dormant genes.

  Now the people around the professor were really caught up. The room fell silent, except for a few whispers coming from a couple of the senators who clearly were not paying any attention and didn’t want to.

  One of them was the chairman, Senator Kelly.

  “Within each of us,” Jean said, “lie not only the millions of genes which dictate our physical makeup, but millions upon millions more whose purpose has been completely unknown to us.”

  She paused for a breath, then went on. “These unused genes have traditionally been referred to as ‘junk DNA.’ In fact, over eighty percent of our genetic structure is made up of this so-called junk DNA.”

  The words PRESENT DAY appeared on the screen, as a number of the red, dormant genes began to move, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

  “In recent years,” Jean said, “and for reasons which are still a mystery, we have seen this latent DNA in our bodies mutating. These mutations manifest at puberty, and are often triggered by periods of heightened emotional stress.”

  With a glow of pride, the professor knew that—at this moment—with the exception of a few of the closed-minded senators, Jean had her audience. Despite the heat, they were paying rapt attention.

  “The new DNA strands caused by the mutations are producing some admittedly startling results. In other words, this previously unused DNA is not ‘junk’ DNA at all, but rather a vast storehouse which contains the almost limitless potential for human advancement.”

  Suddenly the graphic on the screen showed the man performing amazing feats. First he grew in size; then he moved an object with his mind; then he changed the color of his skin.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now seeing the beginnings of another stage of human evolution. Not a new race of creatures to be feared, but rather the opportunity to find advancement within us all.”

  The lights slowly brightene
d.

  Scanning the room once again, the professor could tell that Jean and the presentation had accomplished what they had hoped. With understanding, the perception of mutants seemed to have begun to shift ever so subtly. The professor began to pick up feelings of uncertainty, of people rethinking their positions. And the level of hostility was clearly lower. But now came the hard part. Jean had to hold this hard-won ground against Senator Kelly.

  Kelly turned from the man he’d been talking to and smiled at Jean, like a father might smile at a small child who had just done something cute. “Thank you for the wonderful cartoon, Ms. Grey,” he said in a vaguely patronizing tone. “It was quite—how should I say it?—educational.”

  Some of the crowd snickered.

  “However,” Kelly went on, “it failed to address the larger issue which, I might add, is the focus of this hearing. Three words: Are mutants dangerous?”

  There was a low rumbling among the crowd, and the professor could feel new and increased uncertainty flowing among the people.

  “Well, Senator Kelly,” Jean responded, “don’t you think that’s an unfair question? The wrong person behind the wheel of a car can be dangerous.”

  “Well,” Kelly countered, “we do license people to drive.”

  The professor listened carefully to the murmurs of the crowd as Senator Kelly’s aide, Henry Guyrich, moved behind the panel and handed Kelly a black folder filled with documents.

  “But we don’t license people to live, Senator,” Jean said.

  Kelly said nothing.

  “It is fact, Senator,” Jean said, pressing her point, “that mutants who have revealed themselves publicly have been met with fear, hostility, and even violence.”

  The professor could feel that things were again turning against Jean. This time, though, as he scanned the crowd with his mind, he felt a new presence, a powerful and familiar one. He turned around in his wheelchair and studied the back of the room, which rose above him.

  There, by the door, in the shadows where he couldn’t be seen, stood a dark figure wearing a very expensive suit.