The Sentinel towered above the UN building, just blocks ahead now. There was a huge explosion to the south, and Val shivered as she realized the war was quickly spreading. She wanted to blame someone. Magneto. Gyrich. The President. Somebody. She needed a face to focus her hatred upon, to condemn for starting the war that would surely kill innocents.
But it was too late for blame. She’d seen enough warfare, in the Middle East and Genosha, not to know that. War was the villain now, war was the enemy. It was the ultimate killer, primal rage unleashed without any conscience whatsoever. It had to be stopped.
“Warren,” Val said to Archangel over the comm, “we’re going in for a closer look. I can’t get a decent view from the highway.”
“Be careful, Val,” Archangel cautioned. “All three of us are vital to the success of this mission. We can’t afford any screwups.”
“You’re the master of understatement, Warren,” Val observed. “With the battle started, the clock is ticking.”
Gambit steered the Harley down off the FDR, and they hit the side streets of Manhattan. At First Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, several teenagers came running across a small park, shouting at them, trying to get their attention, and, apparently, assistance.
“Great, more trouble.” Archangel sighed softly into the comm. “What now?”
“Nothing, Warren, keep moving,” Val said.
Gambit started to slow the Harley.
“Gambit, keep going!” she snapped. “Didn’t you hear me? The clock is ticking! We don’t have time for anything but the mission now. No matter what we see, we’ve got to keep going!”
The Cajun started to open his mouth, likely with some smart-aleck response. Then he closed it again. Gambit knew she was right, of course. But she took no pleasure from having her way. As they passed the teens, who still cried out for their help, Val could see that it was not a trick of any kind. These kids needed help; someone, or something, was threatening them.
“We be back for you, kids,” Gambit called to them, but even if the kids heard and understood him, their faces did not betray any indication that they believed what he had said.
Frankly, Val didn’t believe it either. Even if they took the Sentinels out of the game, the fight wasn’t over. But as long as the Sentinels were a part of the equation, the answer was always going to be the same. Magneto would win.
“Hang a right here, Remy,” Val said, and Gambit nodded once and swung over to the east side of the avenue. “That’s going to put us right between the thing’s legs.”
“An’ you t’ink dis is a good idea?” Gambit asked, his sarcasm as cutting as ever.
But he took the turn. They slowed to make the corner, and Val finally saw Archangel out of the corner of her eye. He didn’t acknowledge them, and even from the ground, he looked so grim that Val imagined him to be some colorful angel of death. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
“Dere,” Gambit said, as they took the turn.
Directly in front of them, the Sentinel straddling the street like a modern Colossus of Rhodes.
To their left, the south wall of the United Nations building exploded outward in a shower of glass and concrete. Gambit opened up the throttle, speeding away from the explosion and toward the massive Sentinel.
“Incoming!” Archangel shouted, and now he was close enough so Val could have heard him without their comm-link.
“A little late on dat one, mon ami,” Gambit called back.
Val exhaled, and couldn’t remember when she’d last taken a breath. Her body was humming with the energy of anticipating the next explosion, or whatever else might come. For it wasn’t the Sentinel attacking. The huge construct was itself under attack.
“We getting too close, petite,” Gambit said, and Val was so absorbed by their situation that she ignored the diminutive, sexist reference.
Gambit braked, the Harley slid sideways, tires streaking pavement, black on black. They stopped, and Val took another breath. For the first time since they had turned the corner, Val ignored everything around her, tapped the button on her goggles, and studied the Sentinel ahead.
Painted on the Sentinel’s back with a substance invisible in all but one light spectrum, infrared, was a massive symbol: the Greek letter Omega. The end. A small joke, back when Val Cooper could still find anything funny.
“That’s it!” she cried. “That’s the Alpha Sentinel!”
“All right!” Archangel cheered. “Now let’s take this tin man apart.”
Without warning, a barrage of plasma fire and concussive blasts slammed into the Sentinel, which still faced away from them. It turned its massive head, apparently toward the source of the attack, and lifted a hand. Energy lanced from its palm and ought to have flash-fried whatever it had aimed at. But the attack continued.
“It’s time, Valerie,” Gambit said. “Maybe you should contact Professor Xavier before we go any farther. Dat Sentinel, he won’ let you near him if he knows you’re human.”
Val nodded, then leaned forward to switch channels on the comm-unit.
“Charles?” she asked. “Are you there?”
Yes, Professor Xavier answered, but the voice was in her head, not on the comm. I’ve been monitoring your progress, Val. Now that you have need of me, I’m going to stay with you from here on in.
“Thanks,” Val said aloud, knowing he could hear her one way or another. “It’s a comfort to know you’re with us. Okay, Warren, Remy, let’s get inside that robot’s head and see if we can’t rearrange things a bit.”
Gambit opened the throttle and the Harley shot forward.
* * *
“DO you think she’ll go for it?” Trish Tilby asked.
Kevin O’Leary shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
After a moment’s consideration, Trish went to the window and looked outside again. The madness in the street was growing, with mutants congregating in front of the lobby and then marching off in groups in different directions. Even inside the building, they could hear the muffled, rapid-fire crack of faraway explosions, like fireworks in the distance. Trish wondered idly if the war might not look like a massive fireworks display, once the sun set.
It dawned on her, then, that Manhattan might be gone long before sundown. Someone had to do something. The only people capable of halting the insanity and destruction were captive in the basement of the Empire State Building, many floors below. They had to get down there, no matter what. No matter who was hurt by it.
“Get your gear,” she told Kevin, and he nodded grimly. More often than not, he was an outgoing, generally happy guy. Not today. But, hell, who could blame him?
Kevin packed up his camera bag with everything he might need. Magneto had seen that they lacked nothing by way of equipment. He hefted the bag to his shoulder, picked up the camera, and gave Trish the thumbs-up.
“Let’s go,” she said.
They headed out of the small office into the larger foyer area of the firm that had used the space before Magneto took over. Caroline was there, waiting for them.
“What the hell are you doing?” Caroline asked, in a hushed voice, talking more to Kevin than to Trish.
“We’re here to cover Magneto’s new world order, Caroline,” Trish said simply. “This is the biggest part of the story so far. We’ve got to do our job.”
“Yeah, but …” she sputtered, then moved to block their access to the door. “Look, you guys, I’ve put my butt on the line for you already. I really like you, and I know you’re not, like, the enemy or anything. But you aren’t supposed to go out and tape—heck, you’re not supposed to go out at all—without Magneto’s say-so.”
Kevin approached Caroline and put a hand on her cheek. Trish winced at the way the girl almost seemed to lean into that hand, looking for something to lean on, someone to care. She hoped Kevin really did care, that it wasn’t all just a game, a way to get out. Caroline was a sweet kid, though obviously misled. Or, at the very least, misinformed. She didn’t deserve heart
break.
But then, Trish thought, who did?
“Caroline, let’s get down to it, huh?” Kevin said.
Not at all the way Trish thought he’d handle it.
“I like you,” he said. “I really do. If the world wasn’t upside down, I’d love to go out to a movie, maybe have one too many drinks at the Slaughtered Lamb. Hell, I’d like to buy you some roses and rollerblade through Central Park, if you’d like to know the truth of it.”
Kevin shook his head just a bit, and his sigh told Trish what she’d wanted to know all along. He wasn’t just playing. He really did care for the girl. But with that settled, she still had to wonder if they were using her unfairly.
Hell, she thought. It’s war, right?
“Kevin,” Caroline said. “I—”
“No, let me finish,” he interrupted. “I’d like to do all those things. But I can’t. We can’t. And you know why we can’t, don’t you?”
Their eyes met, locked, and suddenly Trish felt very much like an intruder. She wanted to crawl under the rug, to flee into the back office. But she didn’t dare. Too much rested on the next few moments.
After an excruciating pause, Caroline nodded.
“Good,” Kevin said. “If you didn’t get it, I don’t know how I could have explained it to you. This isn’t utopia, sweetheart, and it isn’t hell either. One thing for certain, though, it isn’t anything like the land of the free that Magneto promised.”
“You’re not really going out to cover the war, are you?” Caroline asked, looking up at Kevin from beneath long eyelashes.
“You know we’re not,” Kevin said.
Trish knew that was her cue.
“Caroline,” she said, the apology explicit in her voice, “we can do this a lot of ways, but however we do it, it’s going to be fast. We can tie you up and leave you here, or we can take you with us. You can try to stop us if you want to, but I think you know the difference between right and wrong, though it’s taken you a while to see it.”
“You’re going to try to free the X-Men?” Caroline asked, though in her face Trish could see that the woman already knew the answer.
“We’ve no choice,” Kevin said. “They’re the only hope we’ve got. Don’t you see that nothing good can come of this? Magneto is just going to get himself and a whole lot of other people killed.”
“Magneto will kill me,” Caroline replied, the terrible words delivered in a drifting, matter-of-fact tone.
“No,” Trish interjected quickly. “No, I don’t think he would. But the Acolytes would do it in a heartbeat. You’ve got to come with us.”
“You need my help?” Caroline asked.
“We can use all the help we can get,” Kevin answered. “But you don’t have to help us. Even if you don’t, I—I’d still like you to leave here with us, with the X-Men. It isn’t safe for you around here, no matter what. Please say you’ll come.”
Trish was a little taken aback. Kevin usually hid himself behind an impenetrable wall of good humor and sarcasm, a potent mixture. Charm ruled, but it hid raw emotion as well. What she saw now was a Kevin O’Leary stripped bare of all pretension.
Trish could feel the afternoon shadows lengthening in the room around them.
“We’ve got to move, Caroline,” she said. “Everything depends on the X-Men, and the X-Men are depending on us.”
Caroline looked at Trish, then back at Kevin. She reached up and grabbed the back of his head, pulled him down, and kissed him long and deep.
“That’s for luck,” she said when she released him. “Don’t play with me, Kevin. I may not be the brightest girl in the world, but I won’t be toyed with.”
“No games,” Kevin promised.
Caroline paused a moment, then nodded. “Giddyup,” she said, and gave Kevin a shove out the door.
In the hall, they were challenged immediately.
“Whoa!” cried a burly guard, whom Trish had never seen before.
The man was hideously ugly, and his skin had a gray, lifeless color to it. He wore some kind of assault weapon slung across his chest, a good indicator that he had no particular powers behind obvious strength. Definitely not an Alpha mutant, as Caroline had called them.
“Where do you think you’re all going?” the man asked.
Trish was going to speak, afraid Caroline would blow the whole thing. But before she could utter a word, the mutant woman stepped right on up to the guard.
“I am Caroline Zarin, Acolyte cadet,” she announced. “These people are from the press, not prisoners. I am under direct orders from Lord Magneto to see that they get whatever cooperation they need to correctly document and report upon this incredible event in history. Get out of the way.” Caroline’s voice was pregnant with ominous, yet false, authority.
The guard moved. “Sorry,” he said. “Just relax. Sheesh.”
Caroline pressed the elevator call button and looked at Trish, who raised an eyebrow in appreciation of the woman’s performance.
“Brava,” she whispered.
When the elevator had arrived, and the doors were closing behind them, she turned to Caroline again.
“No stairs this time?”
“We’re in a rush,” Caroline answered. “Plus you need to conserve your strength. Lord knows who they’ve left to guard the X-Men, but you can be sure it’s somebody with a bit more brains than Mr. Magoo back there. Whatever your plan is …”
She stopped. Looked at Trish. Then Kevin. Then back at Trish.
“You don’t have a plan at all, do you?” Caroline gasped. Trish stood, trying to think of a reply that would make any kind of sense. She failed miserably.
“Sure we have a plan,” she finally said. “We’re going to break out the X-Men. Whatever it takes to get that accomplished, that’s our plan.”
“Jesus,” Caroline hissed, and Trish couldn’t tell whether the look on the woman’s face was one of horror or admiration.
“All right, look,” she continued. “I’ve been working a little on my narcopathy, and—”
“Narcopathy?” Trish asked.
“You know what telepathy is? You know what narcolepsy is? You know what I can do? Figure it out, Trish, we’re almost there!” Caroline said, her patience obviously wearing thin.
Trish was appropriately chagrined. Here was a woman she had thought of, until a couple of minutes earlier, as pretty much a dim bulb, making her feel like a moron.
“I think I can get someone to sleep if I concentrate enough,” she said. “But I need time, and if there’s more than one of them, well …”
Ping!
The elevator slid to a stop, the doors began to roll back. Trish braced herself and Caroline squinted with intense concentration. After a moment, Kevin peeked out into the hall, then turned back to them.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Real smooth, Mr. Bond,” Trish cracked.
Kevin smiled, and the mood lightened for all three of them. What they were doing was insane. As far as Trish was concerned, when you were going over the abyss into bananaland, angst just wasn’t acceptable.
As quietly as possible, they moved down the hall toward the L-turn that led to the room where the X-Men were being held. As they approached, Trish had the nearly overwhelming urge to turn tail and run. She had been joking with herself about the mission: impossible they were on, even running the old theme song through her brain. But suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore. It was just her and Kevin, and Caroline, two frail humans and a … narcopath, whose power worked so slowly that Ted Koppel put people to sleep faster.
Eyes wide with horror at her own thoughts, Trish clamped a hand over her mouth to keep a Woody Woodpecker maniacal cackle from coming out.
Kevin was first. He paused at the corner and looked around, just barely inching his head forward to get a look at whoever was guarding the captive mutants.
He pulled back fast.
“Good news and bad news,” he whispered. “Bad news first: it’s Frenzy.”
&
nbsp; “Who?” Caroline asked in the same tone.
“Joanna Cargil. She was called Frenzy before she joined Magneto’s cause,” Trish explained, then turned to Kevin. “You did say there was also good news, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yeah.” He smiled. “We don’t have to worry about Caroline’s power working. She’s already asleep.”
Trish wanted to laugh. There just wasn’t time.
“More good news,” Kevin added, lowering his whisper even more. “She left the door open. Probably wanted to keep an eye on the hallway and the X-Men.”
Trish nodded. Hushing Kevin and Caroline, she slipped around the corner and began to move as rapidly and quietly as possible toward the steel door. On the other side of that door, four X-Men were shackled to a wall. A moment later, the others fell into line behind her.
Immediately upon seeing her, Hank and the other X-Men began to make facial motions, to mouth words, to try to warn her off. They couldn’t move their arms or legs, but they were doing their best to get her to turn back without actually calling out.
She would have been hurt, would have been angry at them for being so foolish, but they could not have known just how bad things had become in so short a time. Trish knew she was doing the only thing she could do. It was a risk, certainly. But there was so much at stake, it was a risk she had to take.
As Trish passed the slumbering Cargil, Hank’s face crinkled like the mug of one of those ugly dogs as he tried to use exaggerated lip movements to warn her off. Trish ignored him. All she had to do was look around for whatever device would bypass the X-Men’s bonds, and they’d be home free. Cargil wouldn’t last half a second against four X-Men.
She looked back to the prisoners. Each of them was making a strange face at her now, but still none of them would speak for fear of alerting the sleeping Cargil. Storm and Bishop were mouthing words as well, but Trish never claimed to be able to read lips.
Then she saw Wolverine. His face wasn’t moving. Only his eyes. First he would stare at Trish, then his eyes would glance past her, behind her, with obvious purpose. He wanted her to turn around.
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