Half Lit World: Part Three

by XanderDig

Chapter III: Hell in Small Places

. . . Our Story So Far . . .

 
In an isolated field in rural Montana, the ATF surrounds the cabin of suspected child killer, Joshua Leonard Kirby. When communications break down and an earsplitting noise assaults the field, only Agent Palmer Canon finds the courage to enter the charnel house. Inside, the experience he faces is impossible and otherworldly, and when he returns to the field, he carries a redheaded child in his arms. Neither Canon nor the child have been seen since.

Half a country away, changes are coming in New York. Scott and Jean Grey-Summers have moved into an apartment in the City, away from the Salem Center house that serves as both headquarters of the X-Men and the home of their youth. Jean grows concerned about a treacherous distance in her relationship with Scott at the same time that more and more of her friends move apart. Ororo is absent, Warren is detached and Jean's argument with Logan drove him away months ago. She has become lonely. On some level, she is becoming angry.

For his part, the problems with Jean sent Logan all the way to Alexandria, Egypt. He has been helping his friend, Dr. Juniper Faraway on an archaeological dig. As they have delved deeper and deeper into the secrets of the ancient Library of Echoes, events in the town have become strange. Now, on the very night that they have discovered an epiphany that may shake the very foundations of modern science, five tall strangers have come demanding to take away Logan's friend. Wolverine faces these low men even now, and the outcome of this battle is completely in doubt.

Jean and Logan are not the only X-Men who feel isolated. Since her return from Great Britain, Kitty Pryde has wondered if the super hero's life is for her. As she watches the other denizens of the Graymalkin house go through their trials and tribulations, the young woman thinks more and more of the broader world outside. She answers an ad in the paper to meet with a fiction writer doing research for a story about mutants. Over the course of their lunch together, she and Rose Walker hit it off. Just as their interview seems to cross the gulf from professional into friendship, though, Kitty is called away. An emergency has come to the X-Men's own backyard.

There are other events, to be sure. An Initiate quickly rises through the ranks of the Hellfire Club even as the order builds a new headquarters. A young mutant discovers his powers and thinks of revenge on those who have wronged him. Charles Xavier dreams. Not the dream he has held close to his heart for so many years, but a new set of dreams. He dreams of a tower, of a figure in red and a man in black, and of the end of all things. The mentor of the X-Men knows that it's coming, but has no idea how to stop it.

1

When Alicia Monroe passed a note to Doug Philips, she extended her hand surreptitiously behind her as though she were the James Bond of first period algebra. Her face held Mr. Williamson as he wrote on the board, a look of studied concentration frozen on her pretty face, nodding her head slightly as though she agreed. "Yes, sir," she might have been thinking, "I do believe that formula is correct." She even scribbled lightly with her free hand, miming note taking. Doug reached forward under the desk with his long basketball player's arm and captured the paper, his fingers lingering with Alicia's for a moment. He unfolded the note and smiled as he read before he noticed Kenny out of the corner of his eye, staring frankly at him.

Doug turned to the smaller boy with a challenging look. On any other day, Kenny might have looked hurriedly away in an attempt to avoid notice, but today he only held Doug's stare, regarding him with a cooly indifferent countenance. After a time, Philips broke the eye contact - Kenny's eyes never wavered.

The boy knew the note was about him. "Isn't Kenny Thompson a mutie freak?" it probably asked. Kenny figured that most of the notes he saw passed were about himself. Most quiet whispers he overheard in the halls, as well. It seemed to him that the entire school was a hive, a great single living thing only brought into the world to torment him.

"Isn't Kenny Thompson a Mutie Freak?" Kenny thought that today Alicia would learn the answer to that question.

The bullies must have been planing something big for him, because nobody had said a word to the wild haired child all day. Even after first period, Doug said nothing to Kenny about the staring. Instead, he and Alicia laced their hands together and pretended to be a loving couple as they walked down the hall together. If they thought they fooled Kenny into thinking they were going to do anything other than whisper about him, they were mistaken.

Kenny walked downstairs to the basement for his second period class, and he wished that he had washed his sewing project before he put it on under his civilian clothes. It was itching terribly bound so close to his skin. Still, once he shed his disguise, things would become different. As he descended the stairwell, a big senior whose name Kenny didn't know bumped into his shoulder.

"'Scuse me, bro," the guy said as he climbed. Kenny could see the smirk under the boy's apologetic face. Who would be smirking come lunchtime?

The late bell rang for second, and kids scattered from the hall. Kenny did not increase his pace even a hair, and by the time he stepped out onto the hall of the basement floor it was empty. He stopped and tilted his head slightly. The floor of the hall had been cleaned overnight. It reflected the pale glow of the fluorescent lights. It reminded Kenny of a hospital.

He closed his eyes and the fluorescent lights dimmed. There. Better. The only lights in the windowless hall now were the haphazard strings of holiday lights strung along either wall. Festive. Near the end of the long corridor, a moon-faced hall monitor peeked out of a classroom, sure to demand a hall pass in a petty display of power. The boy caught one sight of Kenny, his hair standing perfectly on end, eyes rolled back, and he decided against a confrontation.

Kenny resumed his pace, heading toward his classroom when he heard a cricket chirp. The noise was distant, muffled, and the boy frowned. He went toward the song, stopping in front of the janitor's closet - it must have been trapped in there. Kenny reached forward to try the door, but jerked his hand away the second it touched the knob. It was cold as ice. He listened to the cricket song for another moment and went to class.

Second period passed uneventfully, and third period was phys. ed. Coach Vogler assigned Kenny to floor hockey, and he was picked last. By this time, such an event was neither surprising nor insulting; it was simply the way things were. Kenny warmed the bench for the entire game. When Lake Anderson asked him if he wanted in with a fake smile on his heroic face, Kenny didn't respond. He knew that the older boy only wanted an excuse to high stick him or exercise some other pedantic torture.

Kenny had to change after class. He decided that it was as good a time as any to show off his sewing project. He threw his jeans and flannel shirt into the locker room hamper; he wouldn't be needing them again. When the other boys began filing in from the shower, their jaws dropped when they saw Kenny. Some of the kids averted their eyes, holding back their snickers and others laughed openly.

"Nice, Thompson," said Doug Philips, wearing only a towel. He pulled the terrycloth from around his waist and snapped it at Kenny, laughing jovially as he moved around the row to his locker. Coach Vogler came in carrying a large mesh bag containing the various balls used for PE, took one look at the boy and threw his head back. His laugh was full throated and loud. Fifty-six minutes later, another loud noise would issue pass his lips, though no joy would be contained in that one.

For his part, Kenny gave no reaction to any of the heckling. The fourth period classroom buzzed with quiet whispers. "What is he thinking?" a girl would ask. "What a total freak," came a response. He paid no attention to the lesson on civic responsibility, preferring to watch the clock. Lunch grew closer, and when the bell finally rang, the hungry students bolted the room like pigs to a trough. Kenny sat, breathing deeply while Mrs. Bedrosian erased the board. She turned around and jumped slightly upon seeing the boy.

"That's a nice outfit, Kenny," she said. She put the eraser in the tray beneath the blackboard, raising a small dust cloud. The lights in the room flickered, and Bedrosian looked up, then back down at her pupil. "Where did you get it?"

The boy looked at her, but it seemed that his thoughts were really elsewhere. "I made it," he said. He reached into his bag and pulled out the headpiece, pulling over his skull and tying a knot under his chin. Mrs. Bedrosian frowned as she felt the small hairs all over her body stand simultaneously on end. She began to quickly gather her things.

"You better shake a leg. That lunch line is going to be long."

"I sewed it all myself. See?" Kenny stood and walked slowly to the front of the room. He peeled a glove from his left hand and held it out for the teacher to see. A latticework of thin white scars covered his fingers; a tribal tattoo in reverse. Almost unconsciously, Mrs. Bedrosian backed away from the small, masked boy. Her hand went into her pocket, feeling for her pepper spray.

"Do you see?" He held his palm right in front of her face and her back touched the blackboard. The cool metal of the spray bottle reassured her, and she flipped the safety cap off. There had been an incident before, years ago. Bedrosian would not allow history to repeat itself. She smelled the thin, acidic scent of unwashed sweat on the boy's hand.

"That's very nice, Kenny," she said in her most authoritative tone. "Now, you'd better get to the dining hall before you get a tardiness detention."

Kenny pulled his small hand back and for a brief moment she thought that the strangeness was over. Then the lights in the room dimmed as he slid his slick palm back into the odd looking glove. Bedrosian felt the hair on her head beginning to stand.

"We wouldn't want that, would we Mrs. B?" he asked. "Tell me. When Bruce Moyers and his buddies were beating me up during lunch, why didn't you give them a detention?"

"I, I . . . I don't know what . . ." the boy reached forward to touch her face and she violently jerked the pepper spray key chain from her pocket. It snagged, and in that fraction of a second, Kenny's eyes flicked downward. He looked back at her and smiled. Suddenly, her hand twinged violently - it was as though the pepper spray had turned into a live battery. Mrs. Bedrosdian screeched, her lip trembling as the boy reached up and put his hands on either side of her face. His touch was almost soft, loving.

"They always called me a teacher's pet," he said distractedly.

The students in the cafeteria didn't react at all when the lights flickered. It was a cacophony of adolescent noise. A cauldron of flirtation and fantasy, of filigree and feasting as children on the edge of adulthood tried their hands at maturity. When the large double doors opened and the boy who had been Kenny Thompson walked in fully regaled in his sewing project, thin wisps of smoke wafting off his gloved fingertips, a few people near the edge of the room giggled. For the most part, nobody noticed at all, even when Kenny turned around and flipped the locks on the doors.

The sniggering spread as he moved through the room, some even making catcalls. When he got to the front of the room, though, kicking trays calmly out of the way and standing on top of the steam table, the laugher petered out. Kenny spread his arms, and the hair on more than a hundred fifty boys and girls simultaneously stood up. Coach Vogler stood from where he was talking with his basketball players. He chomped his gum and walked toward the freaky kid with his usual swagger. Kenny Thompson smiled at him as he approached, and the lights went out.

2

"Stand aside, Hoss," said the tall man in the yellow coat. His impossible smile indicated that he wanted Logan to do anything but. "The Doc's ours."

Wolverine rested down on his haunches, his feet wide apart and his fists balled at his side. The five tall strangers in their strange, inaccurate cowboy gear fanned out in a semicircle. With one hand, Logan waved Juniper behind him as he countered the movements of the regulators; above all, they had to avoid being surrounded. Their metal teeth glittering in the dying reddish light of the flare, the grotesque, unnatural smiles never left the faces of the strangers. The line began to close in, a cloying, sweet and rotten smell drifting off of them and permeating the vast gallery. They seemed to glide as they moved, as though their feet were not touching the ground. The only sound was Juniper's hyperventilating, and the metallic treble of spurs dragging along the sandstone floor.

The tall man in the yellow coat was clearly the leader, leastwise, he had done all the group's talking when there had still been room for it. Him first, then. Wolverine snarled and sprang forward, his adamantium claws extended. These guys had no idea what they were up against.

Logan was among the fastest and most deadly fighters in the world. Nothing surprised him much in a scrap, so when the tall man simply backpedaled, he only thought to press his advantage for a moment. He swung his claws in a wide arc, coming close enough that he tore the man's yellow duster. He didn't realize that things had already gone to hell.

Wolverine rolled forward on the ground, planning to take out the tall man's legs. In the mere moment when his eyes were off his adversary, he felt a sharp pain in his back as the low man put the boots to him. The thin, reedy man kicked Logan so hard that he flew back through the air. Were it not for the adamantium lacing his bones and reinforcing his spinal column, his back would have broken. Instead, he bit back the pain and turned back toward Juniper.

"Logan!" she screamed. She was backing toward the wall, and had moved the computer table between her and the men.

He saw the ploy immediately. The others were almost upon Logan's old friend. He surged forward, and a cowboy in a green coat whirled around, seeking to backhand the smaller man. Wolverine ducked under the wild blow, grabbing the stranger around the waist, his wide shoulder pressed hard into his torso. Logan pivoted, arching over backwards and taking the cowboy with him. The man's head slammed into the ground before Wolverine completed the bridge, bringing forth a satisfying crack that echoed through the chamber. His neck twisted to an angle north of obscene. Before any of the others could respond, Logan kicked up and was already on his feet, his broken opponent twitching beneath him.

"Come on, boys," he growled. Two of the others turned around, their wide, steel smiles never portraying surprise at their comrade's defeat, never betraying pity at his destruction. They simply moved, charging at Wolverine.

He set his feet, but the tall men were deceptively fast. Their hands almost seemed to blur as the rushed forward, and Logan was pushed backward under their openhanded assault. They were not hurting him; rather, each small blow pushed Wolverine back another inch, another step, another foot. In moments, the cowboys' tsunami pushed him the length of the hall. Behind his opponents, he could see Juniper cowering in the corner behind the cowboy who wore the giant, almost comical hat. Where was the man in yellow?

Wolverine did the only thing he could. He stopped trying to block and resist the slapping onslaught and allowed his body to go limp, collapsing to the floor. The strangers overcompensated. One of them overreached, toppling over Logan. The other stopped in time and reached down to grab Wolverine a moment too late. He whipped his legs around, sweeping the feet of the tall man and sending him hard to the ground. Logan whirled to his feet and grabbed the prone cowboy by the scruff of his neck and rearing back his other fist. He extended the claws on his other hand, prepared to part the cowboy's head from his lanky shoulders when Juniper screamed behind him.

Logan turned and saw his friend in the arms of the stranger across the room. He picked her up over Juniper's stringent resistance - she was a dervish twisting and screaming and scratching, but she could not escape his grasp. Without hesitation, Wolverine bolted toward her, leaving the men on the floor alive behind him. The light from the flare finally sputtered out, and in the final flashing moment Logan saw a shadow move in front of him. He didn't have time to break his momentum at all.

The man in the yellow coat threw his arm out. He was thin, reed-like, but to Logan, it felt as though he had run throat first into an iron bar. His torso felt like it exploded, and he pin wheeled madly through the air, landing in an ungainly heap. Logan tried to rise, but he couldn't get a breath. His throat burned, and he could feel liquid trickling down - blood. He coughed, momentarily powerless even as he heard his friend screaming. A boot appeared before his face.

"Quit playing with the little sumbitch," the man in the yellow coat commanded his compadres. "It's almost time to git. Tak!" The two regulators who Logan left behind approached, and Logan saw the man in yellow move toward Juniper and her captor. The room was only half lit by the faint glow emanating from the black obelisk in the center.

     With her arms held behind her, Juniper shrank as the tall man approached in the darkness. She couldn't see Logan, but she heard the beating he was taking, the unmistakable tone of flesh smacking into flesh. The tall man smiled his glinting smile at her and leaned down, nearly touching his nose to hers. His breath was cool and it reeked of rare meat.

"You've done the King a great service, ma'am," he said softly. There might have been reverence in his raspy voice. "Time to move on, now." He reached up to run his spindly fingers along her cheek and Juniper was overcome by nausea and vertigo, the Library of Echoes spinning madly around her. The man in the yellow coat turned his head abruptly just before he was tossed over the computer.

Wolverine threw the man hard, returning the favor from the kick. Blood covered his chin, glittering in the opaque light. His teeth were barred like an animal's. The cowboy holding Juniper released her arms to draw back and fight. Logan popped his claws as the regulator moved to come around Juniper.

"The eyes, Junie!" he hissed. The stranger's hands were up, expecting a brawl with his stout enemy. He never thought to defend against the small woman to whom his face was open. Just as he passed Juniper, she screeched like a banshee and leapt upon his back. Never ceasing her toneless yowl, she dug her fingernails into his eyes, ignoring the harrowing sense of dislocation that touching the man caused. The stranger rocked backwards, desperately trying to pull away her hands as Wolverine rushed forward.

The man reached behind him, grabbing Juniper Faraway's head on either side. Still spinning wildly, he threw her forward, sending her crashing through the cheap, collapsible table where all of the equipment rested. Dazed, she rolled onto her side.

"No!" yelled the tall man in the yellow coat, rising to his feet. It was too late, though.

The stranger wheeled back to Wolverine, his hands still defensively holding his eyes. Logan rammed his claws into the lanky scarecrow's mid section. Instead of what he expected, the sound that the creature issued was hollow. It was as though Wolverine had punctured plastic instead of skin, an insect's chitin rather than a man's flesh. The thing's mouth opened and a monstrous sound issued forth. Steam rose from its depths.

His claws still extended into the creature, Wolverine barred his teeth and wrenched his arm upwards, into the heart of the beast. With his arm lodged there, he yanked his arm outward, and the entire breast of the stranger ripped away in one hard piece. Logan gasped as the cowboy fell to his knees. Instead of the wet death of a man, sand spilled from the creatures husk. Red-hot sand, like the embers of some infernal fire. What the hell?

Wolverine turned to the tower in the center of the room. Its glow had brightened, and he could clearly see where the three strangers had regrouped. Low in the shifting heat the dead man's innards were producing, Logan growled. There would be time for the why of things later.

"Two down," he rasped. The low man in the yellow coat came at him.

3

The Salem Center Council had been surprised by Charles Xavier's fervent support of the new sewage system. Typically, he had been the community's most outspoken opponent of development, fighting tooth and nail against the Chamber of Commerce's increasingly frequent attempts to turn large swaths of Westchester into shopping malls. However, when the new county wide wastewater management system had been proposed, Xavier had practically railroaded the idea through. No one had been more surprised by this than the X-Men themselves, and only now, in the cold and wet beneath Westchester Consolidated did Jean understand. When you had to get around fast and unnoticed, there was no better route.

There were four of them in the stinking darkness, standing at the base of a ladder leading into the high school's sub-basement. Gambit had wanted to come, of course, insisting that he could be of use despite his shattered leg. Xavier had mercifully ruled against that. Though they had been spread across town, Jean thought, this was a good crew to have assembled in fifteen minutes.

Cyclops led the band, the golden accents of his visor glittering in the shadows. His blue uniform soaked up the dark in such a way that it almost appeared that Jean's husband was a disembodied head floating in the air. Rogue's green tunic similarly blended into the bleak darkness, but her pale features and white stripe gave her a ghostly presence. Psylocke was there as well, but Betsy's skills in the dark were superior to any of the other's. She would only be seen or heard if she wanted to be. The others made Jean feel exposed in her bright green singlet, the golden firebird on her chest glittering like a target.

If anyone else had been there to observe the oddly costumed group, then the strange clothing would not have been the only thing to say that they were crazy. All of them stood poised as though listening to something, but no sound other than the ceaseless dripping of distant water and constant drone of the fire alarm above broke the silence. Of course, the X-Men could hear their mentor quite well.

"The press is reporting that a mutant with unknown capabilities has taken hostages in the school, and that SHIELD is on their way," Xavier said into the minds of his students. Cyclops answered aloud.

"How long before agents arrive?"

"Radio traffic indicates that it could be soon. Fifteen minutes? Thirty, perhaps? You will have to act quickly to save the children and get the mutant out. Have you received the plans, Psylocke?"

Jean shuddered internally when Elizabeth Braddock's face appeared right next to her own, bathed in the blue light from her palm pilot. Had Betsy been standing so close the entire time? The woman's hair appeared black in the darkness, and her brow furrowed as she studied the graphic before her. "It's a bloody labyrinth," she said. Psylocke's lips never moved. "Three floors, multiple halls."

"Do we know what the mutant can do, Professor?" asked Rogue.

"No. There is some kind of interference stopping me from establishing a firm link."

"I've felt it, too," said Jean. "There are so many other voices up there. So afraid. They're screaming for help."

"The only thing I know for certain is that this is a child."

"An angry, hateful one," Psylocke added.

"We must try to save it anyway, Elizabeth. That is what we do." There was no room for debating Xavier's summation. Though the team could feel him subtly in the backs of their minds, the time for conversation was clearly over. It was in their hands now.

Scott's head dipped for a moment, thinking, then it came back up. "We'll separate. Psylocke, Rogue: take the main floor," he whispered. "I'll take the top. Jeannie . . . Phoenix, take the basement. Quick sweep, no engagement. We meet in the middle in ten minutes." There was a clang as he began up the ladder. Rogue put an arm around Psylocke and glided into the air, passing Jean's husband and breaking the lock on the access grate with her free hand. She pushed the covering easily aside and flew through, the pair's feet still dripping water. Everything was happening so fast.

"Cyclops?" Jean called telepathically. Scott did not reply. He got to the top of the ladder and began to pull himself up through the grate. "Scott," she called out again with her mind. He had nearly disappeared through the hole. Jean stepped into the shaft of light.

"Scott!" she called. He turned quickly down with gritted teeth.

"Shhh!" he hissed. For an instant, Jean's lip rose involuntarily, snarling angrily at the dismissal. He only looked down at his wife, and she whispered to him imperatively.

"The Professor said that Kitty was on her way and . . ."

"Kitty's a big girl, Jeannie. If she gets here, she'll figure out what to do. We have to go right now." Cyclops did not allow and questioning. He pulled himself through the manhole, leaving his wife to stare after. Jean stood down in the sewer looking quietly at where he had been for almost a full minute before she rose from the stagnant water, floating up and through the grate, her crimson hair streaming behind her.

***

Kitty hadn't taken a car in order to avoid exactly the kind of questioning that she was now certain to undergo. A crisis had arisen and now she could not rendezvous with her teammates at a time when they desperately needed her. She was strong, a tremendous athlete, really, but if only she'd taken a car, she would already be with the other X-Men. As it was, she was running at a speed that would be considered a sprint by anyone less gifted but there was still more then two miles to go to get to the school. Xavier had clearly given up on her, and the rest of the team was already in the building. Still, she was Shadowcat with or without a uniform, and she would get to the high school soon.

Sirens blared behind her for the fifth time since she left the restaurant and she moved as close as she could to the soft shoulder as three more police cars roared past. She had already seen all manner of fire engines and ambulances. Most daunting had been the armored CRT vehicle carrying a SWAT team from the New York State Police. Still, Kitty ran, forcing her legs to pump at an almost inhuman rate as she climbed the steady incline to Westchester Consolidated. Surely there would be something she could do when she arrived. Kitty had tried to call out to Xavier, to Jean or Psylocke, but their attention was otherwise occupied and Kitty had no psychic abilities of her own.

"Maybe some psychiatric ones, though," she rasped. Her breath was coming harder when she heard another vehicle approaching behind her. Kitty scooted back to the shoulder, but the car didn't pass. She turned abruptly when it honked.

Rose Walker looked over from the driver's seat. The sporty little coupe was pacing her. "Need a ride?" the redhead called. It was not a question. Kitty's mouth worked for a moment before she could respond. This was a civilian, and one she had only just met. Kitty knew very well that the last thing she ought to do was pull some poor innocent into a dangerous situation. At the same time, Kitty suspected that there was more to Rose than met the eye, and beside, a car was a car at this point.

Kitty stopped, and Rose did the same. The younger woman threw open the door and jumped in. Before Kitty could say a word, Rose floored the accelerator and the car was picking up speed.

"Rose, I need to get to the . . ."

". . . high school. Figured that out on my own, Katherine. Can you tell me what's going on?" She took her eyes off the road for a moment to make contact. "What's *really* going on?"

Kitty thought about it for a moment. On the radio, the usual programming had been interrupted with live reports of the "mutant attack" on the high school. Police and rescue from five counties were in route, and the Governor was considering calling out the national guard. Nobody knew how many hostages were being held, and the police could not even enter the building because it appeared that all points of entrance and egress were electrified. Kitty began to try and think of some kind of covering answer, something about how a sibling was a student at the school when they were nearly driven off the road.

They were moving along at almost sixty on a two-lane country highway when four black sedans blew by them like they were sitting still. The vehicles employed no sirens. Indeed, they didn't even honk their horns. Rose cranked the wheel to the right to avoid the colorless parade, and the small car almost lost it on the gravel of the shoulder, spewing a cloud of dusty debris behind them before finding the asphalt again. They had avoided tumbling into the shallow embankment at the side of the road by inches.

"Shit," said Kitty. Rose looked at her again, and she decided. "That was the reason I have to get there right away, Rose. I was at the World Series, too. I was on the field." Rose's lips parted slightly and her eyes were wide as she hit the breaks to come around a curve. They crested the hill and the scene that spread below them was immense.

Westchester Consolidated was a squat, low building as wide as a football field. It was completely surrounded by the flashing lights of a hundred emergency vehicles, and the football field was tightly packed with half again as many press and concerned parents. Helicopters circled above. Rose stopped the car and looked at Kitty.

"Are you saying . . ."

"Yes, Rose. I'm an X-Man. I've got lives to save down there." Rose blinked at her, then began driving down the hill even as the radio continued its warnings to stay clear of the mutant terrorists killing our kids.

Interlude

You're dreaming. You must be. No beach's sand is so white, so soft under your feet, tamping down like snow if snow were warm and pleasing to the touch. No water ever shimmered so blue, an electric carpet, an ephemeral mirage, a pinkish haze hanging over everything. In the middle of the sea, rising infinitely into the cobalt sky is a tower, black as obsidian, thicker than any skyscraper, than any mountain, than any world. Thunder echoes in the distance, and you hear the familiar sound of a bee hive. It is the same one your dad smoked out behind the house when you were two. You had cried and cried when you were stung, and it was only mother's succor that silenced you, though you were too old for the breast. Those are the bees you hear.

Then you notice *him,* though you instinctually know that he has been here the whole time.

You call out, unsure of where you are, disoriented, but no sound escapes your throat. You realize that this is because you don't have one. You are here, you can taste the salt in the air, but you are also not here. A voyeur at the edge of the world. You're dreaming. You must be, because you realize that you aren't on the beach of a great crystal sea, but on the precipice of a shallow fountain. The figure in red still stands at the water, seeming to waver in the sourceless light. You approach him, but his illusory quality only seems to increase as you come closer, as does the sound of the bees. With his crimson cloak billowing around him despite the fact that no breeze seems to blow, you are practically on top of the figure before you realize that this is not a man after all. It has only taken the shape of a man for the sake of convenience. Or mockery.

They are no bigger than domestic bees, only instead of yellow, they are red and black. They swirl cyclonically in and around each other, hundreds of thousands of individual creatures, but manage to hold their shape, giving the phantasm the look of a man with a regal appearance. You know somehow that this is royalty, though you would not want to live in his kingdom. That the man made of red bees doesn't notice you is a fact that you are mercifully thankful for. There's no telling what he might do. He might sting you, or devour you completely.

Instead, the shape moves out on the water of his crystal fountain. His cape billows behind him, the swarm perfectly synchronized, and you realize that if you listen to the hissing buzz for too much longer that you might go completely mad. Can dreams do that? Can they drive you insane? There is no weight to the being, so what passes as footfalls leave no ripples in the water. Then you notice that the water is not what it appears either. Instead of liquid, the surface of the pool is composed of millions upon millions of infinitesimally small blue globules. They are small, to be sure, but large enough to see. Some of the little orbs turn black as you watch, the phenomenon spreading like ink on fabric. Everything in this space seems to be composed of smaller, constituent parts except for the tower itself. The monolith is solid, and everything orbits around it.

The crimson figure moves across the surface of the pool, its head swinging too and fro, looking down upon the minuscule globes. Finally, it settles upon one of them, and seems to flow through itself squatting down to regard it more closely. You're dreaming. You must be, because the crimson swarm's thoughts are your own.

What an arrogant little world, you think. So comically sure of its place at the center of all things. It believes that because it dreams all of the other dreams into being, that its destiny must not be connected to its bastard children. You remind yourself that this little orb will be the last to go, that when the raven-haired bitch closes the door on the universe behind her and the tower crumbles into the sea, it will be because the place egotistical enough to think of itself as reality has finally gone the way of the dinosaur. The thing that scares you the most, gentle reader, is that the blue orb is your home.

With a loud hiss, the ruby swarm loses its cohesion, seeming to forget that it is pretending to be a man. It flows liquidly through the air and reforms at another point, nearer the tower. You notice that the areas of blackness are spreading, leaking from the bottom edges of the tower like some poisonous oil slick. The bees become a man again, and the wavering illusion of its hand reaches down to take hold of one of the little blue spheres. The bees crawl over it hefting it into the air and holding it before the ephemeral face of the creature. Though it has no eyes, you can feel it looking carefully, examining the marble in minute detail.

The key is there - the key to all of the others. The key to opening all of the doors and bringing the whole failed experiment crashing down, and that is the task of the bees, the man, the Crimson King. To move the worlds on and finish things up. The Seven can not stop it now, nor any of the little gods. All of the eventualities are accounted for. As soon as the Breaker is in his possession, the King will finish the destiny he is designed for. It's already written in the blind fool's book.

You're dreaming. You must be, because a normal person cannot think so casually about bringing about the end of the universe. But you were never much for normalcy at all, were you, with your dreams burned to cinders about you. Leave them. It's fine. Forget your petty struggles and pedantic concerns. Set yourself free. Become a bee, roaming without a care, feasting on honey and succor. All you need to do is ask - you're already on the path. You're almost here already.

Without warning, the bees lose their human form again. There is a moment of panic as they surround you, but the stinging you expect never comes. Instead, they feel cool against your skin, the ticklish beating of their tiny wings massaging you. The swarm surrounds you completely, blotting out the light. In the darkness, you begin to understand the shifting hiss of the buzzing. It sounds like whispers.

4

Smoke wafted through the main floor, illuminated intermittently by the blue fire of electrical discharge coming from the light fixtures, the wall sockets, the screeching smoke detectors. The whole place smelled of ozone, of burning plastic, of burning hair. Psylocke had inhaled these mingled torturous scents before, in a former life she had no wish to remember. She stayed low to the ground when she came through the large double doors, keeping close to the wall. Rogue was more or less invulnerable to harm, but she still wrinkled her nose against the foul, toxic potpourri. The women were on either side of the wide hall, and the air was so thick they couldn't see the end. About halfway down, a rain of white sparks vomited out of the ruin of a flourescent light like some Fourth of July exhibition gone horribly wrong.

"Careful, Psylocke," Rogue called over the den. She motioned at the floor. The sprinklers must have been activated before they arrived because there were pools of water everywhere. With all the current, things could become dangerous quickly. Psylocke looked across at her teammate, and Rogue felt a brief moment of dislocation. For an instant, she saw from her own eyes and she saw herself through Betsy Braddock's before the English woman spoke in her mind.

"I see it. Thanks." The women crept forward, and it took all of Psylocke's discipline to keep from shivering. The high school was so cold that they could see their own breath. "Your bond dollars at work," she thought. Rogue snorted and Betsy frowned. She had not intended to broadcast that.

She pulled her palm pilot from the pouch laced onto one on the bands of fabric on her leg and called up the map that the professor had sent her. The design of the hall was simple: there was a T junction up ahead, and the hallway terminated in the cafeteria. She relayed the map telepathically to Rogue, and the younger woman levitated off the ground and began floating up the hall.

"No!" Betsy thought imperatively. Rouge stopped.

"Why not just go, grab the kid, and get out?" Rogue didn't speak aloud either, this time. She could feel Betsy in her mind, listening for her answer. The first time she felt something like this, Rogue wasn't close to being able to identify what it was. She had been eleven, twelve maybe, still living life under a name half gone and half forgotten. Autumn had come to Mississippi and her family had gone to Oxford for the Ole Miss homecoming weekend. The county fair was in full swing, and as always the Gypsies had come along with it. It took a great deal of cajoling to get ten bucks out of her mother, but she knew just where to spend it.

The fortune teller grinned at Rogue's younger self and launched into a fast talking patter that she found difficult to follow. At last, though, he spread brightly colored tarot cards before her and she got a strange feeling in the back of her mind, like an itch, or a feather-light weight. The fortune had been accurate, of course, at least in describing the life of an eleven-year-old girl. On the future, though, the man had been woefully inaccurate.

Psylocke saw all of this in a flash, right down to the way that the carnival air was scented heavily with fried bread and cotton candy. All she responded to was the question. "It might work, Rogue. But I have a sense of this child and it's bloody frightening. If we spook him early, the other kids might be endangered." She caught a note of inarticulate impatience from Rogue, but she came back down to the ground and resumed matching Braddock's pace on the other side of the hall. Then she felt something else up ahead.

"Hold on," she broadcast. Rogue stopped, trying to listen over the ceaseless bray of the fire alarm. There was something else underneath. Something human.

Betsy tried to listen telepathically, but there were so many echoes of fear and terror, of anger and rage whipping through the structure that it was difficult to focus on an individual whose patterns were unfamiliar. Still, there was the sound. Psylocke didn't need telepathy for this.

She looked across at Rogue and held up her gloved fist. Then she raised one finger, pointed forward and to Rogue's side of the hall. Rogue nodded and came slightly off the floor so as not to make any noise. She floated to the shallow alcove in front of an open door to find a young girl, perhaps fifteen, sitting with her knees held closely to her chest. The child looked at Rogue with wide eyes containing fear and hope entirely commingled.

"Ah'm here to help you, sugah," she said, kneeling down. The kid's jaw trembled for only a moment before she burst into tears and lurched into Rogue's arms. The woman stiffened, patting the child on the back lightly. "It's all right. You're okay now, darlin'."

"He . . . he . . . he . . . *killed* them," the girl sobbed. Psylocke approached them and reached down, running her fingers through the girls hair. Her crying began to subside almost immediately. "He's gonna kill everyone."

"Who is, dearie?"

"He k . . . k . . . killed Mrs. B!" The girl gestured behind her at the yawning door. Psylocke and Rogue exchanged a look, and Betsy and moved into the room. Rogue rocked the child in her arms there on the floor.

"Jesus," she heard in her mind. "Jesus Christ." There was an image, a brief one, charred, burned. Rogue was happy when it was gone. Betsy golden skin had taken on an ashen tone when she emerged and knelt down next to the shivering child.

"Who is doing this, Alicia?" The child looked up at the sound of her name.

"I just went out to go to the b . . . bathroom. I left my friends to die. It's K . . . Kenny Thompson. Kenny Thompson the mutie freak!" The girl sobbed again, and Rogue and Psylocke stiffened.

"Where are the others?" Rogue pushed Alicia Monroe from her arms and looked deep into the young girl's eyes. The sympathy had vanished from Rogue's face, at least in part.

"In the c . . . c . . . caff!" She pointed to the end of the hall. Rogue and Psylocke stood.

"Go in that classroom and wait for the police. Don't you come out for any other reason," demanded Rogue.

"B . . . b . . . but Mrs. B . . ."

"Mrs. B. can't hurt you," said Psylocke. The women turned heel and strode away down the hall. They never gave a backward glance. Alicia Monroe watched them go, shivering in the cold.
***

The ancient boiler was a freezing hulk, but warmth drifted off the school's generator in waves. It was whining in a high tone, taxed beyond its capacity. Jean wondered where the power was going. She stood in the cold room for nearly five minutes after Scott and the others had left, the only illumination coming from the red "EXIT" sign over the door. Something wasn't right.

Though she could feel the tremulous fear wavering off the children, it was distant, an echo. Psylocke and Rogue were far afield as well, and Scott was only a shadow, a series of disconnected pinkish images of the world seen through his ruby-red visor. On one level, Jean knew that the others were only feet above her. She knew that she could telekinetically punch through the ceiling of this sub-basement room and end up standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her compatriots if she wanted. At the same time her friends, her husband felt a million miles away. A million years ago.

Jean shook the feeling off and moved through the door. She climbed the wide institutional stairs up to the basement proper, passing row after row of the institutional cinder blocks that constituted the wall. It seemed that every surface was covered by the random symbols of the kids' graffiti tags. There were many more stairs to climb than Jean expected. It seemed more like a skyscraper than a school.

She looked at the markings on the wall. These Westchester kids had nothing on their counterparts in the Greenwich Village neighborhood Jean now reluctantly called home. Some of their complicated work seemed to approach high art. The walls before her said nothing; they held only obscure, crosshatched pictograms Jean could make neither heads nor tails out of. At last she arrived at a set of large, institutional fire doors. She raised one eyebrow, and the doors opened of their own accord. Jean Gray was greeted by the sound of crickets. Thousands of them, like it was midnight in the bayou.

Her red hair glowed in the pale light of the hallway as she stood in the doorway. The noise of the crickets reverberated in the empty hall. It was like an insect choir, though Jean could see none of the singers. The hall was both wide and completely empty.

"Hello?" Jean asked. The crickets continued their song. The woman in green stepped across the threshold into the hallway when all at once the singing ceased. The *click* of her boot heel striking the poorly tiled institutional floor made a hollow noise. Jean frowned at the silence and stepped forward into the hall, allowing the doors to close behind her.

The first thing she noticed was how much warmer it was. The air was moist, almost sultry, like the interior of a greenhouse. The corridor was different up ahead, as though the architect has changed his mind halfway through the process. As Jean moved along, the hallway changed, her staccato footfalls following behind. The linoleum gave way to cobblestone, and she immediately thought of how Mastermind had fooled her other self all those years ago. She shut her eyes for a moment, using all her power to reach out, but detected nothing of her old enemy. She did not pause to wonder why she always remembered that other's life so clearly.

"What the hell?" She raised her eyebrows and continued, wary but curious. The cinder blocks were replaced by red brick. The grey metal lockers became trellises covered in ivory, in fragrant jasmine, and the featureless wooden classroom doors grew more ornate. Jean turned around to look back, and she could readily see the entry, the tiles, the blocks, the colorless institutional reality that spoke more readily of incarceration than education. The normalcy of Westchester Consolidated was still very much in evidence and only yards away. Where she stood now, though, Jean would swear she was outside if it were not for the cave-like ceiling. She walked forward again, chagrined by her own pleasure at the unusual turn of events. Apparently, Jean Gray-Summers was still an adventurer at heart, all domesticity to the contrary.

"Pssst!"

Jean whirled. There was a door in front of her, slightly ajar. No light came from within, but a distinctive aroma issued from inside: frankincense coupled with something darker and more organic. Sulphur, maybe, or asafotea. Jean opened the door with a thought and walked inside.

***

Rose almost lost control of the car when she screeched up to the roadblock. The young police officer in front of her actually gritted his teeth. He yanked his hat a little further down on his forehead and began moving around to her window. She looked over at Kitty.

"Grab me the press ID out of the glove box!" Kitty fumbled with the latch as she watched the cop approach. The door finally opened and a torrent of papers, gum wrappers, tampons, soy sauce packets and miscellaneous junk spilled out.

"Nice," Kitty said. Rose wrinkled her nose in response as Kitty fumbled through the confusing pile in her lap. The policeman arrived by Rose's window and tapped lightly upon it with his flashlight. The redhead abruptly threw a Stepford smile on her face and it was all Kitty could do to keep from issuing a manic chortle when she turned and rolled down the window.

"Hi! Rose Walker and Katherine Marrymount. Atlantic Weekly." Kitty raised an eyebrow as she tried to find the identification. Marrymount?

"I'm sorry ma'am," said the cop. "All press is to assemble on the athletic field, so if you'll kindly turn your vehicle around and join the others."

Kitty and Rose both looked out the front window. The action was in front of them. The high school's parking lot was a sea of activity; cops, SWAT, fire and rescue rushed around chaotically. If there was a codified plan of action, it was impossible to identify from this perspective. The men in the black vehicles clustered around their cars, calmer than the others.

"Look, officer . . ." Rose looked at his name tag, "Augarde. The story isn't on a soccer field; it's at the school."

"Look, Miss Walker, I've heard just about everything you can think of today and I've told everyone the same thing: go to the athletic field. There will be regular briefings and . . ."

"We *have* to get through, officer! There are facts here that you just do not understand . . ."

"Forget it, Rose," Kitty said distractedly. She watched one of the men in black move around to the trunk of his vehicle and remove a briefcase while the others spoke to the man she recognized as the chief of the Salem Center Police Department.

"But Katherine, this guy . . ."

"Go *now* Rose." Kitty looked at her companion. There was a heavy furrow between her eyes. "Please."

"Done." She turned back to Augarde, bringing a rough approximation of the Betty Crocker smile back to her lips. "You have a nice day now." Rose floored the accelerator, whipping the car around the frightened cop. She roared back down the road, passing a number of oncoming emergency vehicles and press trucks. It was practically a caravan. Before she reached the turnoff to the football field, Kitty reached over and put her hand on Rose's shoulder.

"Stop here, Rose." They pulled over next to the thicket that divided the school from its stadium. "Thank you so much. For everything."

"No problem, Katherine." Rose looked in her side mirror, checking to see whether the police at the road block were paying them any attention. They were dealing with other customers, it seemed. "Just promise you'll talk to me when all this is . . ." When she turned back to the passenger seat, she found it empty. Katherine was gone.

"Oh, Rosie, Rosie," she said to herself. "You sure this is worth doing?" She sat behind the wheel for a moment, then came to her decision.

5

The leader of the X-Men made no sound as he moved. He entered the darkened gym, virtually invisible in his dark blue uniform, and quietly observed the large empty space. Steam rose from his breath - it was so cold that one of the pipes on the sprinkler system had burst. The whole gymnasium was covered in puddles of standing water that were rapidly freezing. Scott Summers moved down the steps of the painted concrete bleachers (fight, fight, fight for the purple and the white!), careful to avoid slipping on the treacherous black patches.

When he reached the warping hardwood of the basketball court, Cyclops strode out to the middle of the floor. There was a basketball laying on one side of the half-court line and he reached down to pick it up. He dribbled once, twice, the hollow sound pinging and reverberating in the great, empty space.

"Summers from half," he said softly. Scott heaved the ball in a reasonable facsimile of Dr. J's skyhook. It sailed through the air in a graceful arc, falling through the hoop with a satisfying *swish*. It hit the ground, bouncing until it rolled into the corner of the room. Scott watched it go, standing calmly with his arms by his side. At last he raised them slowly, standing like a triumphant gladiator.

"Swishhhaaa," he said, the sound trailing away into the universal noise of a cheering crowd. Suddenly, Scott stopped and tilted his head. He turned abruptly around, staring intently at an open door at the end of the room: "MEN'S LOCKERS."

Summers whistled. A single, piercing tone meant to capture the attention of a person in a noisy crowd. It echoed in the barren darkness. Then Scott heard a faint, recognizable response. Fabric rustling. Sneaking. Hiding. He walked to the door.

Cyclops knew that he wasn't alone the very moment he entered the locker room. He might not have had preternaturally expanded senses, but he knew how to use what he had. There was an old, musky smell in the room; years, decades of sour sweat, of victory and defeat and blood. Deeper still, the smell of Ivory soap and the wet taste from the showers. Scott passed the first row of lockers and was aware of a more immediate smell.

He turned down the row, passing the dull gray lockers. At the end of the line was a giant equipment locker overflowing with gloves and balls, nets and bats. Bats. Scott looked at the padlock on the locker for a moment before turning and walking up the next row. He stopped for a moment, tasting the air. Since he was a boy, Cyclops always associated the aroma of fear with the foul odor that those massive cans of government issue spaghetti would release when they were heated back at the orphanage. He thought he detected that now, along with the unmistakable bray of rapid breathing.

There were two large linen hampers at the end of the row surrounded by towels and jocks. Summers didn't even try to hide the sound of his footsteps as he approached them, his boots clicking on the mildew green tiles. Scott was a super hero. He heard the boy plodding up behind him in an insipid attempt at stealth. He knew the boy's intentions before the child even worked them out for himself.

Expending virtually no energy, Scott turned slightly and the large teenager nearly fell over, missing with a wild swing of the Louisville Slugger he carried. The bat struck one of the lockers, a crunching, aluminum explosion echoing through the room. Cyclops thought the boy looked like a frightened horse, off balance, eyes white with horror. It didn't last. Scott launched a straight right into the kid's jaw that connected with so much force that he spun around before falling to the floor unconscious.

Scott plucked the baseball bat from the meaty boy's twitching fingers and stood above him.

"Please, mister!" shouted a voice from the linen hamper. The lid slowly raised, and a smaller boy stood up. He was shaking, and tears pooled in his wide eyes.

"What's going on here, boy? Why'd your buddy attack me?"

"We thought you were Kenny! We were scared! We didn't know!"

"I'm not Kenny," Scott said with a reassuring smile. He reached out with his free hand. "Let me help you."

Scott stepped forward and the boy shrank back in the hamper, desperate to be away from the man with the red visor and the wide smile. All at once, Cyclops stopped, tilting his head. For a moment there was only the sound of the small boy's breathing.

"Where is the cafeteria?" The boy's mouth moved, but no answer emerged from his dry throat. Scott leaned down into the child's face. "*Where*?"

"Main hall," croaked the boy. "It's at the end of the main hall!"

"Tend to your friend, kid." The large boy wasn't moving where he had collapsed on the floor, and a thin line of blood flowed down his cheek. Scott lifted the smaller boy from the linen basket and set him down on the floor. He stared up, paralyzed in fear when Summers tousled his hair, almost playfully.

Cyclops walked to the door, then turned back with that same toothy smile stretched across his face. "You're safe now."

***

The katana breathed a metallic whisper as Psylocke pulled it slowly from the scabbard. She and Rogue could hear little from the other side of the doors to the dining hall, at least not audibly. Psylocke had been grimacing painfully since they had approached the doors though, and a single tear had flowed down her face. Rogue said nothing, but she figured she knew what was happening in her teammate's mind from the moment she had peeked through the fire window - all those terrified children. It had to be wearing Betsy down.

"I'll make it," Psylocke said. Rogue wondered if she knew she had said that out loud. Then she heard the answer in her mind: "Nope." Braddock smiled at her, the pained look still etched on her face.

Rogue stole another peek through the heavy steel door, careful not to touch it. Though it would not have hurt her, the steel practically hummed with electric current, and their adversary would certainly have been alerted to their presence if she sparked it.

She still couldn't see the enemy. There were tables upended throughout the smoke-filled room, and the lights flashed in random strobes. The disembodied ranting voice the women heard was somewhere amongst them, pacing frantically. The figure's words were not articulate. They were little more articulate than the droning one heard at the Graymalkin house when your neighbor had friends in their room. But there was something about the pitch, something escalating, something mad . . . time was running short.

Rogue caught Psylocke's eye and tapped her temple. Betsy nodded, and Rogue thought, "did you call them?"

"I did," came Betsy's fevered response. Rogue also heard inarticulate relays from the children in the background *marymotherfullofgrace, marymotherfullofgrace*. "Cyclops is on his way - he said to wait. Phoenix didn't answer, I don't think."

"It's hard to hear, Rogue," she whispered. Betsy sucked in a breath and held it, closing her eyes. Rogue felt another of the weird telepathic echoes: *prayforussinners, prayforus, prayforus*. She felt something beneath that, too. Something hard and flinty and hateful and similar to the buzz of angry bees. *Shut up, shut up shut up!*

There was a loud, electric crack and the spark shower began again down the hall, an electric waterfall falling to the ground. The women's hair stood on end, and the humming noise issuing from the door gained intensity. In the dining hall, a girl screamed.

"Oh shit!" Psylocke yelled. She shot to her feet and whirled to the door, the blade in her hand glinting in the simmering light. "We have to go now!" Rogue grimaced as the purple-haired woman called out telepathically. She screamed out to Cyclops, to Phoenix and Kitty, to Rogue and Xavier and even instinctually to Angel. The time had come to move.

The windows into the dining hall blared with fiery blue light and an earsplitting crack shot from the room. The kids inside howled as one, a mix of terror and pain. One scream rose above the others, though it was silenced quickly.

"The door, Rogue!" Without a moment's hesitation, Rogue flew through the steel locks and table barricades, knocking them easily aside. Hundreds of thousands of volts of current flowed harmlessly over her invulnerable body, burning some of her clothing away. Terrified students scattered before her as she burst in, her fists balled by her sides in the ozone haze.

Psylocke leapt forward behind her, dancing easily over the deadly threshold and leaping over a table. She rolled when she hit the floor, coming up with the katana extended at the ready position. Both women ignored the screaming of the scattering children. The kids had been cowering wherever they could, and those with the fortitude to raise their heads stared with a mixture of hope, wonder, fear and dread at the new arrivals.

The two X-Men noticed the smouldering body of Coach Vogler first. They had both read the many stories about people struck by lightening whose only injuries were that the clothes had been burned from their bodies. Indeed, that was not far from Rogue's current state. The poor soul before them now, frozen forever on his knees, hands defensively in front of himself, begging, was just the opposite. The letterman's jacket on the smoking corpse was virtually untouched, but the body might have come right from the fire. Above him, standing atop a pile of broken tables and chairs was a figure alight with blue electric fire.

"At last," the figure said. The bright electric field surrounding the adversary dissipated, and the lights in the room that were still functional returned to their normal flourescent glow. "At last you've come." The shape whirled, his long cape flapping behind him.

Kenny Thompson's costume was a bit too big. It was powder blue, made from his bed sheets, the leggings stuffed into red rubber galoshes. The cape was orange and gold, a curtain taken from the Holiday Inn where Kenny's family had stayed in Orlando the previous summer. The crowning achievement, though, was the mask. Rubber and vinyl, Kenny had glued ball bearings to the piece. Residual electricity flowed between them, creating a glowing "T" from the boy's mouth to the top of his forehead.

"I knew you would come to me, my sisters. My family!" Kenny smiled ecstatically at Rogue and Psylocke. The women only stared for a moment before Betsy finally spoke.

"Who. Are. You?"

"I?" the boy asked. The lights in the room flickered for a moment. Two snakes of electric current coiled out from broken light fixtures, and the boy raised his hands to meet them. The students huddled fearfully. "I am the elements gone awry!"

     Psylocke felt her hair stand on end again, and in her peripheral vision, she saw it do the same on every other head. The air in the cafeteria positively teemed with static electricity.

"I am the prodigal returned!" He floated into the air as the lights gave up all of their power to the boy, rising on a carpet of current until he was at Rogue's level. "I AM THUNDerBolt!"

The child grimaced when his voice cracked, his cheeks reddening in shame. He had worked for so long toward this moment . . .

Rogue stared at the ridiculous looking boy with his wavering voice and snorted, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.

***

The hallway was narrow and black as coal. Eddies of white mist swirled in the damp, musky air despite the lack of breeze. Jean's shoulder brushed one wall, and as she stepped away, the opposite brushed the other. She had to walk sideways to proceed. Painfully, she turned her head to see the entrance. Though she left the door opened behind her, she was unsurprised to note that there was no light where the hall should be.

She moved on, the passage becoming tighter and tighter. The stone wall pressed against her, constricting her breathing, yet still she pressed herself on in the blackness. Her breaths were more and more shallow, and she felt her head grow light before the moment of claustrophobic panic came. Jean tried to withdraw, but found that there was only rock the way she had come.

Thrashing, a small noise escaped Jean's mouth, and she reached out with all her power but found nothing. The air was so warm, so wet that it felt like she was getting no breath at all. Her leading hand found an open space, and she pulled with all her strength but only came forward a few inches. She pulled again, and again, and finally she got her head into the open space. The air was cooler and she drank it in. She pulled one last time and freed herself from the chasm, falling forward to the floor.

Jean laid there breathing deeply. Her cheek was raw where she had dragged it along the wall. So were her knuckles, scraped and bleeding from her desperate exit. She tried to get a sense of the space she was in - the floor was hardwood. She could detect the linseed oil used to clean, and the varnish beneath it. There was another smell. Timothy hay?

"Hello?" she asked.

"Hello, Jean Grey," answered a woman's voice. Mature and full, Jean thought it sounded like her mother. She shot to her feet looking for the source, high on the adrenaline that had dropped into her stomach.

"Who's there!?!"

"You're at a crossroads, Jean. We all are."

"It's dark! I can't see you!" Jean cried. The voice seemed to come from nowhere at all, and when she reached out with her telepathy, all Jean found was her own confusion and fear.

"Then make it light, you silly child," croaked another, older woman's voice.

"I . . . I can't do that." To Jean, her own voice sounded childlike. Petulant.

"Of course you can, my duck," said the old woman.

"You've only forgotten how," said the younger one.

"I have?" Jean heard herself ask. Then she began to remember, and in remembering, she began to *do*. She imagined the air in the room, its constituent parts: the molecules and atoms and quarks and whatzits and what-ifs. Then she thought about the ether that they all came from, that they would all return to again. Jean closed her eyes, not that she needed to in the blank darkness, and she imagined the darkness, and she imagined it faster, and brighter . . .

"That's it."

"Very good, child."

Jean Grey opened her eyes to find herself standing in a small classroom. Two women were seated in large chairs in front of a blackboard staring at her in frank astonishment. The older one wore a brightly colored polyester pantsuit, flowers and frogs covering the smooth, white fabric. Her jaw worked as though she were chewing something, and her wide eyes floated behind thick bifocals.

The other woman was a bit younger, in her forties perhaps. She was black, and dressed professionally in a dark suit. She might have been a lawyer or a doctor except for the large, white rabbit sitting quietly in her lap. The woman blinked at Jean and looked her up and down.

"My, my," she said, indicating the skin tight green costume the redhead wore. She was petting the bunny's ears. "That just doesn't seem to fit you at *all*, does it now?"

"No, indeed, Dolores," said the older woman. "It hasn't fit her in a long time."

6

Wolverine slammed into the support beam holding up the scaffold and it snapped it two. He looked up just in time to see the platform falling toward him, and he rolled quickly, barely dodging the piled of rocks and planks. There was a loud groan as the entire system of supports erected to hold the sandstone blocks in place shifted.

The man in the yellow coat was as fast as he was strong, and he was a tougher opponent than Logan had expected. He scrambled through the dust and debris and just as he found his feet the man emerged from the cloud. Wolverine didn't get his hands up fast enough to block the gloved fist. It struck his temple, knocking him back to the ground. Though it would be virtually impossible to break his bones, the whiplash from the punch was enough to knock him loopy.

"I told you, hoss!" The cowboy kicked him, knocking out Logan's wind. He tried to get his feet under him. "Around you or through you!" The absurd smile never left his giant mouth when he kicked Wolverine again, rolling him over. He crawled toward the scaffolding as the tall man walked a wide circle around him.

"Boy? You don't think there's one of you every single time?" He kicked Logan in the ribs again, rolling him closer to the support structures. "There's always some damn fool wants to play gunslinger and mess up the works!" Again he kicked him, smacking Wolverine on the side of the head with his boot heel, but this time, Logan was ready.

He caught the tall man's foot, jumped and rolled with it, taking the big man over. They were under another platform. Logan whirled to his feet just as the tall man rolled back and got to his. He popped his claws, but instead of charging his opponent, he snapped his eyes over to the scaffold's central support. The tall man's eyes followed his, and for the first time, the smile faltered on the stranger's face.

"Whoops," Logan said. He sprang backwards, sweeping his claws through the wooden pole. It snapped with a loud crack and the platform fell inward from above as though it were a door on a massive hinge. The man in the yellow coat raised his arms before the whole house of cards came down.

Logan rushed away from the collapse. The whole scaffolding structure seemed to fall in on itself, and the wall behind it could not take the added burden. A large section of the sandstone fell away, and the massive obsidian spoke above crumbled with it. For a moment, Wolverine was afraid that the whole room would collapse when the tower itself listed dangerously to one side and the whole world was blacked out with dirt and grit.

Three of the four walls held, though the way they creaked and groaned, this might not be a permanent thing. Logan listened carefully for sounds for the other two regulators, but he could hear nothing in the dust filled room. He turned around to run for Juniper - the best bet would be to get out while the getting was good. The tall man in the yellow coat was impossibly standing right behind him. The smile had returned

In the fraction of a second it took for Wolverine's claws to extend, the regulator had already struck him hard in the throat with the points of his bony fingers. He rocked back on his heels, coughing for breath when the man in the coat grabbed him by the neck. He lifted Logan off the ground so that they were eye to eye. "It's time to move on, son. Nobody can stop that." Logan barred his teeth at the tall man.

"Let's find out." Logan reared his head back and slammed it forward between the tall man's eyes. He fell back, his hands flying to his face, and Wolverine dropped to the floor. He shook his head once, clearing it, then flew at the tall man.

*Snikt!* The claws popped from the backs of his hands, and a smile bloomed on his own face. The tall stranger dropped his hands at his side, the smile still wide on his lips even as Logan was upon him. His eyes rolled back in his head as Wolverine thrust his claws forward, mind bright in anticipation of the satisfying pop of cartilage and bone. He crossed his hands in front of him in a wide arc, and found no resistence.

For a shadow of a moment, the tall man in the yellow coat seemed to flicker, and Wolverine's claws passed through him as if he wasn't there at all. The lack of resistance threw him off balance, and his enemy lashed upwards with a knee. It caught Logan flush on the nose and he fell back. "Just like Kitty," he thought stupidly.

Before he hit the ground, he found himself caught. The other two regulators held his arms fast. Wolverine thrashed against them, but found that their grips were like iron.

"Yup. Time to move on. And time for us to move on, too." The leader turned around and went to stand over the regulator in the green coat whose skull Logan had crushed first of all. "This one oughta do fine," the man in yellow called jovially in his West Texas drawl.

As Logan tried fruitlessly to escape the grip of the other two, the tall man leaned down to his fallen colleague and seemed to do nothing more than whisper in his ear. Then he stood and walked to Juniper. She was still unconscious, so he reached down and easily picked her up and threw her over his bony shoulder.

"If you harm her . . ."

"Hell, boy. We seem to've harm her already," said the tall man in the yellow coat. His two buddies laughed on either side of Logan, a wheezing, deathly sound. "But don't you worry. She'll be real safe with me for the ride home." The tall man in the yellow coat loped to the remaining scaffold and began to climb the long network of ladders up to the surface.

"You're a dead man!" Wolverine roared.

"Maybe so, old hoss! I'd be lookin' after my own self if I was you!" He continued to climb.

Logan turned back to the dead man in the green coat and found him distinctly animated. His forehead was crushed and hung open, a vile, gelatinous gel leaking steadily. The reedy, tall thing lurched toward where the cowboys held Logan as though it were a marionette being pulled by invisible strings. The walls groaned, and another of the great spokes shattered and fell to the floor. The choking dust glittered despite the darkness. The light from the broken tower was gaining intensity.

"Help!" Juniper screamed from the catwalks above. Logan looked over his shoulder to find his friend struggling with the tall man as he climbed the precarious structure. The scaffolding was swaying under their weight, and the whole room might cave in at any moment.

He turned back to find the anorexic, shambling thing was almost upon him. More of the black, syrupy fluid was leaking from the fissure bisecting his face, and there was a noise like a zipper issuing from the wound. It was spreading, growing, widening. Logan grimaced as the thing approaching him began to convulse, but the two regulators held fast.

The dead man stopped before Wolverine and shuddered spastically, his arms dangling limply. A loud pop came from deep in the rotting thing's innards, and a gout of the viscous matter spilled out onto the floor with a wet plop. The inhuman smile that all of the regulators wore was still in evidence, and it was expanding. Logan stopped struggling, staring at the beast is sheer horror. He went slack between his captors, but they adjusted, shifting to bear his weight.

The smile grew so wide that it seemed some invisible force was pulling the regulator's cheeks. Then his mouth began to open, steel teeth glinting in the impossible light. There was an explosion of sound as the south wall gave up its efforts and collapsed, a tidal wave of dust and debris billowing in from behind the yawning creature.

Even with the din of noise, Logan could hear the wet noises of the liquid hitting the sandstone floor. The creature began issuing a sound, a keen, screeching noise as its body shuddered violently. The regulator's cheeks split, the flesh tearing audibly. Wolverine gritted his teeth, the dust so thick he could barely see the creature as it reared back, preparing to strike. At last, there was a crack as the beast's jaw distended and its inhuman screaming reached a crescendo. It lanced down at its captive prey, meaning to take his head.

Hanging limply, Wolverine abruptly pulled one of the regulators with all his might. The whole chain of men shifted, and the man Logan pulled was in the path of the screeching beast. It bit into his head, lifting him off the ground and shaking him to and fro like a rabid dog.

     The tall stranger still holding Logan growled and reared back to hit him when the smaller man popped his claws. He punched forward at the tall man when the ground heaved beneath his feet. The whole room shook violently when the south wall shifted.

The regulator glared at Logan, then rolled back his eyes. "Tak!" he said. At once, both the regulators and their monstrous, reanimated companion were gone. Vanished as though they were never there.

Wolverine gaped at where his enemies had been standing, then he jumped to his feet and looked up despite the dust. He couldn't see his friend or the man in the yellow coat, and for all he knew they could be gone as well. Still, he had to try and get out either way. He rushed across the chamber and leapt to climb the crumbling scaffold.

7

"The mutant menace has arrived in America's schools. This is Charles Fillman live at Westchester Consolidated . . ." Rose walked out of earshot from the reporter doing his stand up on the crowded football field. She frowned, unconsciously rubbing her belly as he moved. How strange it was that less than an hour before she had been sitting two tables over from Fillman having lunch with a young woman who was now part of the menace the pretentious man was warning people against.

Rose strolled among the various news agencies. The TV people were the annoying ones. Technical personnel ran around chaotically, stringing cable behind them, yelling and screaming in what might have been a life or death quest for the best field position or the best backdrop or whatever the hell it was. Rose far preferred hanging around with the print guys. They clustered around their cars, talking amongst themselves. In some ways it seemed as though the photographers and writers used emergencies of all stripes as an excuse to socialize and gossip.

One of the technicians almost knocked her over as he ran past. "Sorry," he called.

"What's going on?"

"It's the feds," the young man called. He backpedaled for a moment, moving quickly. "They're about to move!" He bolted off to his destination.

"Shit," she cursed under her breath. Rose paced for a moment, then she ran across the field, making for the entrance to the press area, the wind whipping her red hair into her face. Damned if she couldn't find a way to get closer to that school. Just as she got to the entrance, the police officer on guard stepped out to block her from leaving. Before he said a word, though, he looked beyond her.

"Excuse me?" called a gravelly voice behind her.

     Rose turned to see a tall, good-looking man jogging up to her. He had blond hair, receding slightly above a well-lined forehead. A badge hung from his suit pocket, and though Rose didn't know one agency from another, this guy didn't look local. The guard looked questioningly from Rose to the man behind her, and she used the opportunity to walk quickly past.

"It's fine," he said, hurrying to catch up with Rose. "Mrs. Summers?" he called. Just outside the entrance the man put his hand on her shoulder, and she turned around, brushing the hair out of her face. He looked down into her eyes for a moment, the crease deepening between his eyes.

"I apologize," he said. "I must have you confused with somebody else."

"No problem," Rose said. She looked back at the officer standing by the entrance. "Have a nice day." She smiled at the earnest man in the dark suit, then turned to hurry up the hill to the school. The man watched her walk away with his hands in his pockets.

***

The boy paced maniacally atop the mound of broken rubbish, the king of nothing hill. Rogue and Psylocke stood silently listening as he ranted. The story was one they had heard many times before in one variation or another. Parents who were afraid and repulsed. Peers who reviled and tortured. What was different about this child was the pain that every blow had inflicted upon him. He built none of the emotional armor that most mutants seemed to instinctually develop. Instead, every clipping insult had hardened to a single-minded hatred. What he did not recognize was that the lion's share was reserved for himself.

Psylocke began radiating a sense of calm to Kenny. She tried to reassure him as subtly as she could, to break down the layer of hatred with which the boy viewed everything and allow him to be a child again. She knew she might have to subdue him or worse. This child was powerful and completely out of control. He had already killed twice.

"I didn't know! I didn't know who to talk to or what to do! The only numbers that the TV ever tells you are ones to report us to the authorities!" He turned to one of the cowering students. "Bet you wish you called now, huh!?!" The lights dimmed for a moment, and Psylocke nearly moved, but the boy only turned back to her and Rogue.

"Do you know what I mean? Magneto doesn't have a fucking help line for young muties! I had to do something to bring you to me. I *had* to." The boy stopped pacing, and Rogue thought she might have seen tears welling in his eyes. "You see that don't you?"

"Of course we do, Thunderbolt. But we're here now," Betsy Braddock said softly. "Maybe you ought to let the other children go."

"NO!" Kenny started pacing again. Back and forth, back and forth, the tables and chairs shifting beneath him. "No! You don't understand what they've done to me. They sit around and talk about me all the time! They whisper about me in the faculty meetings! They tell lies about me! Lies! LIES!"

Psylocke looked at Rogue for a moment, then turned back to Kenny. She had been in his mind. She saw the monstrous bee hives with their stinging residents buzzing through every thought, coloring everything the boy saw a violent red. It only took a moment of looking at the world through the wrongness of his eyes before she recognized the obvious: this was not just an angry emergent mutant they were dealing with - this boy was a paranoid schizophrenic. There were all manners of spiders and scorpions dancing in the child's psyche, and they all bit. The other kids had been mean, to be sure. There was nothing as extreme as the cruelty of some children. But the real devils in this boy's mind were all his own.

Maintaining her alert demeanor, Betsy began breathing deeply. Though her eyes were open, she left partly left herself to wage a battle with the devils inside the boy. The only way she could visualize it, absurdly enough, was as an arcade game she had played once at Southampton: Whack-A-Mole. Small creatures with sharp teeth bounced out of their small caverns, and each time they did, Betsy swung a heavy mallet through the air to bash them back again. The whisperers were many in the boy's mind, though, and they kept hopping up faster than Braddock could knock them down.

"I know how you feel," said Rogue emphatically. "Little bastards where I went to school just never let up."

"Yeah. The just tear us down every day. It's like that's all they were born to do! That's why we have to get them back and . . ."

In Kenny's mind, Psylocke made a breakthrough. Perhaps she could not stop the infinite number of torturous little devils with her own two hands, but there were other ways. Betsy imagined herself as the Indian goddess, Shiva, her six arms more than adequate for tamping the vicious reptilian biters down. At last, the devils were silenced.

"Naw," Rogue responded. "If you go and get even with the people beating you down, you become just like 'em. Trust me, kid. I know."

With his mind quiet, the boy listened to the woman with the stripe in her hair. He sat down atop his mountain, and the two beautiful mutants continued to speak to him in soft, reassuring voices. Despite himself, Kenny began to cry as they moved closer.

Bruce Moyers watched the freaky little bastard sit down from his place on the floor. The two weird looking girls looked scared of him - one could fly and the other had a sword, but they hadn't done shit even though Kenny had smoked Coach Vogler. Chicks just couldn't handle emergencies.

The boy frowned, as he often did when he was thinking. When that kid went crazy with a gun in Oregon, one of the guys from the wrestling team took his scrawny ass down. Yeah. That dude became, like, a national hero. Bruce stood up, and neither Kenny nor the chicks seemed to notice. He grinned and looked down at his teammates. Terry Sullivan motioned desperately for him to get down again, but that was typical. Terry was a chickenshit on the court, too.

Bruce charged. He bolted across the room as fast as his athletic legs would carry him, quickly climbing the pile of chairs. It's too bad there weren't cameras in the dining hall, because this could go on his college reel like the sacks he'd perpetrated during football season.

"No!" Bruce thought. Oddly, the thought sounded like a girl with an English accent. The freaky little kid was wouldn't even turn around before Bruce tackled him. In those final moments, a smile appeared at the corners of Bruce's lips. This would be legendary. He imagined what he would say to Katie Couric the next morning. He considered how nice her legs were.

It was the last thing he ever thought.

***

Cyclops descended the wide stairs into the main hallway. He looked down the corridor, awash in the pink haze through which he'd viewed the world since joining Xavier. Sparks blew from nearly every fixture, falling to the floor and scattering as the bright jewels burned out. The heat from one open fuse had burned the fire-retardant American flag decorating the wall. The nylon was melting, and a trail of red, white and blue sludge trailed viscously down over the lockers. Scott stepped into the hall, walking right down the middle.

His step was even and calm. Regardless of Psylocke's stricken telepathic call, there was no need to panic. If he had learned anything over the years, it was that hurrying meant a job done poorly. Patience was where victory laid. So Summers moved down the hall at a prudent pace, neither hurried nor laconic.

He was naturally aware of the pale, frightened faces that peeked at him from classroom doorways and alcoves. They were students or teachers seeking a savior from their predicament, fearful and awestruck by the man in the blue tights. He had no time to smile heroically and reassure them - there was work to be done. Besides, if his time at the orphanage showed him anything, it was that these huddled fearful lambs could be lions when there was someone different in their midst.

Rounding the corner that led to the dining hall, Scott picked up his pace. The fire doors gaped open, and screaming issued from within. Bright flashes of blue illumination sparked like flashbulbs, accompanied by the loud cracking of open current. Smoke was thick on the air, making anything in the room difficult to discern beyond the fetid smell of burning hair. The screaming continued as he stepped across the threshold. The time had come for Cyclops to save the day.

8

"Well, hey there, Red. You decide to come and spend a little time with us old folks?" Jean blinked. She still couldn't get a telepathic reading on the two women sitting in front of her, but everything in the room seemed perfectly benign.

"Who are you?" she asked. "What are you doing here?"

"Questions, questions," grumbled the older woman, smoothing a crease in the leg of her pantsuit. Her hand shook slightly. "And always the wrong ones." Her friend shot her a disapproving look.

"I am Dolores Pelton," replied the black woman with a wide smile. "I'm the guidance counselor here. And grumpy over there is Mrs. Lynch." Dolores pet the rabbit on her lap and leaned forward, affecting an entre nous whisper to Jean. "She teaches math - no social skills. As to why we're here . . ."

 "Hush, you. A question a piece. That's the arrangement," Mrs. Lynch turned to look at Jean. Despite the fact that she was sitting down while the younger woman stood, she somehow managed to look down on Jean over the tops of her granny glasses. "We are here because with everything going on, this would appear to be the safest place to be, granddaughter."

Jean thought for a moment. She had been in strange hall and heard voices. But this was the high school. She and Scott and the others had come here to save an emergent mutant on some kind of rampage when she became lost and . . .

"Are you all right, sapling?" asked the elderly math teacher.

"Perhaps you ought to sit down?" asked the younger woman. Jean hadn't noticed the chair behind her before, but she was grateful it was there. She plunked down heavily, adjusting the gold sash around her waist. The lights flickered, and Jean shut her eyes for a moment, rubbing them with her palms. The three women sat in a small triangle: an old teacher, a matronly guidance counselor and Jean Grey-Summers wearing the vestments of a goddess. She lowered her hands and asked the only question that came to her tired mind.

"Who's your friend, Dolores?"

"Just Del, child," she said. She wiggled the ears on the large bunny, who clicked her teeth approvingly. "This here's Clarissa."

"Where's her cage, Del? Aren't you worried that she might get away?" Dolores laughed at the question.

"Goodness, no, child! Clarissa can't get away because she doesn't belong to anyone." She looked at Jean with an eyebrow raised. "She comes and goes as she pleases, moving as Destiny guides. Here."

"But . . ." Del picked Clarissa up and plunked her down on Jean's lap. The heavy creature looked up at the redhead and wiggled her nose impatiently. Jean tentatively began petting her ears, and the lupine settled heavily in on her lap.

"Clarissa? Piff!" grunted Mrs. Lynch. "Bunnies ought to be 'Hoppies' or 'Buttons!' What kind of name is 'Clarissa' for a rabbit like this?" The rabbit turned around in Jean's lap and jutted her head forward at Mrs. Lynch. She grunted before settling back in to be pet.

"We had a rabbit when I was a little girl," Jean said. "My dad named it 'Dutch,' after President Reagan."

"Mm," said Mrs. Lynch. "Oh, dear, yes. Yes, indeedy. That Ronald Reagan sure was a good-looking man."

"He's still alive, Mrs. Lynch."

"Yes, Del. Yes, I suppose he is. But he sure is in a bad way. That's a terrible disease he has." She turned to Jean. "Forgetting everything about who you are and where you come from. It's very like death, a life like that. Don't you think, my duck?"

"Yeah. That's a tough road," she said. On her lap, the rabbit's warmth was comforting. "I don't even like to think about it."

"Of course you don't, child. No one likes to think about what they've lost." The lights flickered again, then they gave up. It took Jean's eyes a moment to adjust, but she found that she could still see her companions, their eyes especially.

"We have a friend with the Forgetting," said one of the ladies. "She was lost to it."

"We used to be inseparable, we three," said the other.

"Like we three were one," they said together, then they tittered girlishly. "Jinx."

"You should probably get to your friends."

"Time is running short."

Clarissa jumped from Jean's lap, and she found herself saddened that the time had come to leave. She moved to cross the room, somehow aware of the door's location despite the darkness.

"I wish I didn't have to go," she heard herself say as she opened the door. The school hallway beyond was filled with smoke, and she smelled the overpowering scents of ozone, melting plastic and cleaning supplies. Her telepathic awareness flooded in, and she could hear Betsy's desperation.

"Yes, child, we do seem to get along well. I know you'll fill in that outfit someday," said Mrs. Lynch helpfully.

"Too bad about the questions, though."

"They *do* always ask the wrong ones. We might have given you different answers." Jean turned back to the dark room, and the voices that bloomed from its depths. "We might have warned you about the Crimson King and his earthly servant."

"And the child, and the choice."

"But you still have responsibilities, my duck . . ."

" . . . my daughter . . ."

 " . . . my sister . . ."

Jean felt along the wall inside the doorway until her hand found the light switch. She flipped it up and gasped. A janitor's closet hung open before her, filled with mops and brooms, bleach and linseed oil. She gaped for a moment, then turned around and ran for her friends.

9
     
The snow began to fall in earnest, and it couldn't have come at a better time from Kitty's perspective. The naked thicket of trees separating the school from the athletic field provided little cover, but the young woman had skills in the area of stealth. She moved cautiously across the open space when she heard the approach of the SWAT reconnaissance team. They moved with all the stealth and subtlety of a herd of elephants.

If one had been looking right at her, they would have sworn that Kitty simple vanished into the white ground. In fact, she was only using one of the more economical tricks she had learned in Japan when she and Logan had their little vacation. Sweet sixteen, indeed.

The cops passed so close that Kitty could have plucked the earpiece out of one of their ears and replaced marching orders with softly spoken words had she wanted. They stood for a moment, whispering back and forth about the best point of entry, and how the feds always screwed things up, and how they had to get into the cafeteria unnoticed.

"Maybe we could just blow the wall," said one of the goons, pointing to the edifice directly in front of him.

"And kill half the hostages? Maybe the feebs oughta look at your resume," shot back another. "Let's hit that roof."

The men ran off, and Kitty became noticeable again. She watched them lumber into the white, sticking out like sore thumbs in their hackneyed attempt at stealth. The wind kicked up, and for a moment the great hulk of the school vanished in the swirling whirlwinds of dry snow. Perfect.

Kitty darted across the open space in a sprint that would have turned many a track & field runner green with envy. She ended with her back against the wall the cop had been pointing to. Kitty looked about once more, then turned around and stepped through the wall.

The girl hiding under the table opened her mouth to scream when Kitty appeared before her in the darkness. The room flashed and pulsed like some hellish discotheque complete with strobes and smoke machines and a back beat composed of the screeching fire alarm. Before a sound could escape the girl's lips, Kitty put her hand over the frightened child's mouth with a hollow slap. She stared with wide eyes as Kitty extended the index finger on her other hand and held it to her own lips.

"Shh." She was about to ask the girl where the enemy was when she head a familiar voice scream. It was Psylocke, and she was in pain.

    Kitty forgot the girl and bolted to her feet, ready for action. Just as she rushed forward a hand grabbed her by the scruff of her jacket collar and she nearly lost her footing. Without thinking, she spun around, grabbing the restraining arm and twisting it at the same moment she struck with the other.

Her streaking fist only found empty air. Cyclops leaned out of a deep shadow and shook his head slightly.

"Not yet," he whispered. Betsy screamed again.

***

When the boy jumped at Kenny Thompson, Psylocke tried to stop him a moment too late. She had been so involved in calming the boy's fragmenting mind that she lost the rest of the room - she never saw Bruce Moyers' suicidal heroics coming. The big kid had been right in his imagination: the hit was tremendous. He knocked Kenny from the top of the table and they tumbled to the floor, the strange house of cards constructed by tables and chairs collapsing with them. At once, every light in the room went out, every open circuit ceased raining sparks.

"No!" Rogue flew down as quickly as she could, but the pile had already begun to shake as though the earth tremored.

"Brrrrrrrrrrr . . ." Bruce Moyers screamed. It was as though the poor soul's vocal cords were convulsing. Psylocke and Rogue flung themselves at the debris, pulling the flotsam desperately out of the way. At once, the whole pile exploded. Betsy found herself flying backwards through the air, but she turned gracefully and landed on her feet.

Rogue easily batted the table streaking in her direction away, but this didn't save her eyes. For a moment, it was only Kenny standing awkwardly with his epileptic attacker on his back, a low level of static current coursing through him. The small boy's nose was bleeding, and his mask had been knocked off. He looked over at Psylocke and his face twisted in a paroxysm of grief and rage.

He screamed, and in that instant, Kenny Thompson became a white-hot sun burning brightly in the middle of the room. The student screamed, and those who were looking directly at their captor during that terrible moment didn't completely recover their eyesight for days. Rogue shielded her face against the light, against the nauseating explosion of burning flesh and clothes and the heat from the boy as he turned Bruce Moyers to dust.

Psylocke fell backwards, sitting awkwardly on the floor. As suddenly as it had come, the boy's inner fire dissipated, and he stood naked in the pile of melted debris. Betsy couldn't perceive it, though - all she could see was white.

"You were in it with him!" screamed the boy. Tears streaked down his face as he stepped out of the pile. "I waited for you my whole life and you are JUST LIKE THEM!"

"No. No, Kenneth," Betsy said. She crawled backwards, trying to get to her feet. She didn't want to attack the boy. She thought she could still save him. "We're here to help you."

"I'm not the one who needs help anymore," he said quietly. The naked boy raised his hands in front of the blind woman, and Rogue knew what was coming. She flitted through the air to her friend.

On the ceiling, the light fixtures all exploded at once, and an electric fire rained down upon Elizabeth Braddock. She screamed, trying desperately to lash out with her telepathy, but the currents in her own brain became scrambled. Rogue covered her friend, getting between she and the deadly lightening. It did not occur to her that her invulnerability did not stop the current from flowing over her and into Psylocke.

Betsy screamed again, convulsing wildly. Throughout Westchester County, hundreds of people suddenly suffered intense migraines. Their noses bled with a sudden burst, and nobody could account for the debilitating symptoms.

The electric blasts stopped, and Betsy continued to shake in Rogue's arms. Rogue thought that her forehead was going to explode when she felt an indelible rage bloom within her. She turned to the boy, blood flowing from her nose down over her teeth. The hell with saving him. Kenny saw the look on the woman's face and knew his static hadn't harmed her in the least.

Just as Rogue lifted off of Psylocke, the child adapted his attack. He looked to the ceiling and visualized the wires that cris-crossed within it. At once, he imagined them coursing with more current than they could handle, boiling over with blue luminescence. As Kenny Thompson daydreamed, so reality became. The ceiling exploded, forcing Rogue to protect Psylocke as the floor above tumbled down into the dining hall with a loud crash.

The naked child looked upon his work, the coiled voices in his mind quelling at last. He stepped back slowly from the destruction. Brownish water rained from the broken pipes and a thick cloud of dust choked him. He heard coughing around the room and saw the other students looking at him in horror. For a moment, Kenny thought he must have been dreaming. He had often dreamed about being naked in front of a classroom, the other students laughing hysterically. They were not laughing now. He looked back at the rubble. How many others were buried there? What had he done?

"Now, Shadowcat!"

Kenny turned to the sound of the voice. A pretty girl with short hair ran at him from the dust cloud. He raised his hands, coursing with current again when she leapt forward. Despite his guilt, he stood ready to hold her in an electric embrace. The woman only passed through him like a ghost. Kenny shook his head and turned to look at the wraith when he heard someone else approaching.

The man was tall and big, dressed entirely in blue. He had a single, red eye, and a grimace on his angry face - a demon then, just as he had been warned. Kenny tried to lash out with his power, but found that the electric snakes that lived in his head did not respond. They slumbered now when they were finally needed. The man walked deliberately toward Kenny, neither hurried nor laconic. He held something in his hand.

10

Logan sprinted across the buckling floor. The whole room seemed to be turning in on itself, contracting and crumbling to oblivion. This was not merely a structural failure brought about by the collapse of some scaffolding. This was more like suicide.

Just as he passed the listing tower that glowed in the center of the room, the sound of stone grating against stone ripped through the air and Wolverine looked up. The great obsidian monolith cracked along its base and teetered for a terrible moment. Logan dived forward just as it collapsed completely, ripping the remaining stone spokes from the wall above.

The tower slammed into the sandstone wall, knocking a huge chunk to the floor. Logan scrambled forward to avoid it and found that things were only going from bad to worse. One of the spokes still moored to the wall fell inward from its umbilical connection to the tower and there was no time to move from the deadly black leviathan.

With reflexes honed by years of battle experience, Wolverine popped his claws and lashed out at the same time as rolling forward in apparent confrontation of the seven-ton stone. The adamantium blades protruding from the backs of his hands sliced easily through the rock. They knocked a chunk away just large enough for Logan to roll underneath. He whirled to his feet when the tower itself shattered like glass.

Heavy black chunks fell everywhere, and Wolverine had to move to get some distance between him and the chaos. He ran at one of the large pieces of black stone and leapt upon it, using the height to boost his jump away from the collapsing tower. His legs acting as pistons, he landed yards away, but immediately had to spring into action again.

He landed heavily on the floor, coughing from the reflective black dust the collapsing tower and thrown into the air like death-knell confetti. The floor cracked, opening a deep fissure, and Logan tried to move away from it but did not roll quickly enough. He tumbled over the edge and began to fall into the impossible oblivion below. He caught the edge of the crack with the tips of his fingers and managed to hold on despite the tossing earth, but he could find no traction.

Releasing one hand, Logan thrust his other fist against the wall and launched his claws into the rock. They found purchase, and he began to pull himself back up to the floor above when he heard a deep, mechanical noise beneath him. Steel worked on steel in rhythmic syncopations. Gritting his teeth, Logan looked into the abyss beneath him and saw a glint in the darkness. Gears were working in the distance beneath him, spinning and whirring like the guts of a watch.

"The hell?" he whispered beneath the cacophony. It wasn't possible. The Library of Echoes was more than two thousand years old, and the ancient Egyptians never . . .

But this wasn't the time to ruminate. The room shook terribly, and Logan raised himself back onto the wobbling floor. The thick dust made breathing hard and seeing harder. Indeed, the air was a reflective haze of lung tearing shards, but Logan could still sense the wall above him coming down. Without seeing it the exit, Logan still knew where he had to be and he sprinted forward as fast as his legs would carry him, careful to avoid the many fissures in the broken floor.

He came to the great broken piece that had been the apex of the tower and wrestled his way up on top of it. The dust was too thick to see the last sound wall, so Logan would have to make a leap of faith. He moved as far back as he could on the black stone, hopped once, priming his legs, then ran forward. At the last moment before falling from the edge, he leapt forward, reaching forward with his hands and coming as close to a prayer as he had in years. He thought he would tumble painfully to the floor when the scaffold reared up out of the whirlwind. Wolverine gripped it desperately, the momentum kicking his legs forward. He swung all the way around the support beam he grabbed and flipped up to the platform above, landing hard on his knees.

Logan grimaced and looked above him. Faintly, he could just make out the moon fifty feet above. The scaffolding shook wildly, and one look told him that it wouldn't be long before the other collapsing walls would knock his escape route to the floor. He began to climb, choosing frenetic speed over calculated safety. Below him, the Library of Echoes began to turn inward on itself.

***

Jean heard the girl's screams with her mind long before hearing them with her ears. It was the terrified patter of her feet running on the tile floor that struck the redhead though. Her panic-stricken footsteps echoed down the long corridor, all the way to where Jean stepped out of the stairwell. From the sound of it, the child had lost a shoe somewhere, but was too frightened to either find it or take the other one off. Instead, even before the girl rounded the corner, before Jean ever saw her she heard the girl approaching and there was something faintly grotesque about the sound rippling off the wet floor: click-slap! click-slap! click-slap! Above the footsteps, the screaming was ceaseless and piercing.

Raising her psychic defenses, Jean telepathically masked herself from the approaching girl. She finally came around the bend, and was so single minded in her need to escape that Jean could have danced in the hall and the child might not have noticed. Her clothes were wet, covered by a sheen of gray dust and brownish crud. Her eyes were racoon stained with tears, dark streaks of eyeliner running down her cheeks. Jean found herself wondering when children began wearing makeup nowadays.

"You really are getting out of touch, Jean," she thought. She tried to scan the child's mind as she bolted past, but the disconnected images shared more with the strange mosaic of nightmares than with the solid coherency of the real world. Electric fire and earthquakes and cold-blooded murder. As soon as the girl hit the stairwell, another pair of kids ran around the corner, followed by two others supporting a third, injured one between them. They all tried to move with the most speed their legs could carry them with. When she heard the rumble of feet and screaming as more and more kids poured into the hall, a hundred or more. Jean thought of stampedes.

Many of the kids were covered in cuts and scratches, and all of them were soaked through and through. Jean still felt the sense of dislocation she had on the floor below, when she sat with the
 *witches*

     school teachers. The scene unfolded before her as though it were some second rate metal video on MTV, the air filled with smoke as high school students ran in slow motion. She exerted just enough control over the herd that they avoided running into her as she walked slowly down the hall in the opposite direction, tasting their thoughts, rich with adrenaline and fear. The air was filled with screaming and low moans of terror and pain. Virgil might have guided Jean through this space.

An injured child fell in the crush, twisting his ankle badly. Two more tripped heavily over him. In the crunch of bodies the boy would quickly be trampled. Jean reached down and helped the frightened boy to his feet. In later years, after a great deal of therapy, Steve Longeram would remember the beautiful face of the redheaded woman appearing out of the smoke. He would remember the soft touch of her hand, and the ease with which she pulled him to his feet. He would tell his wife and children that he had met his guardian angel that day, and that she had the saddest eyes.

Jean protected the boy as he made his way down the hall into the stairs. The crowd, more than a hundred fifty frightened teachers and students, simply parted around the woman in green. They all saw her even if their waking minds were blinded to the fact. They were all aware of her on some preconscious level. Many of them dreamed of her, and when she abruptly left their dreaming landscape some time later, these survivors of the Mutant Massacre in Westchester woke the next morning to find their pillows streaked with tears. This was not an unusual occurrence for them on the whole, so they thought little of it.

The crowd thinned, only the most critically injured or pathologically calm limped down the hall now, full throated screaming giving way to the dull moans of the weak or the wounded. Jean turned around and continued, the air pregnant with the stench of destiny. Though she had faced worse, far worse, she was frightened, butterflies fluttering lightly against the walls of her stomach. She rounded the corner and looked upon the destruction at the end of the hall.

A river of brownish sludge slowly flowed down the hall, pouring from the burst pipes. It overtook Jean's feet and she worried for a moment before she finally made the connection - all of the electrical discharges had ceased. It seemed that whatever had been causing the spark showers and massive blowouts of power had given up.

The hallway seemed to have folded in on itself at the end, the ceiling falling down in a raft of cheap sheet rock and grout. "Asbestos, too," Jean thought. The doors to the cafeteria hung askew, and there was so much dust, so much rubble and debris that she couldn't make anything out beyond the threshold.

Jean moved down the hall with a sense of trepidation. She reached out to Psylocke, but all she could find was a confused montage of imagery that she recognized immediately. There had been many times over the years that she encountered minds in Betsy's current state - the woman was in shock.

There was more, though. Jean caught flashes of panic from Rogue. She felt the same from Kitty, mingled with horrified disbelief. A single phrase repeated itself time and time again, blaring in a terrified loop. "Stopitstopitstopitstopit!" There was something else beneath the women's dissonant confusion. Something bleaker that Jean recognized but couldn't put her finger on. A smell? A sound?

     As her feet splashed in the deepening muck, she could not have told you why she was so hesitant to call out to Cyclops. To Scott. To her husband. All she might have been able to articulate was the strange sense of foreboding the thought of touching his mind gave her, and how that fear escalated the more she thought of it. Jean was brave, though. She reached for him as she arrived outside the door.

THWACK! The noise came from the swirling, smoky darkness in the room. A wet, meaty noise sharp enough to overtake the hiss of flowing water and sirens and alarms.

Scott's consciousness resounded with the same patterns as it always did recently. Love for Jean, fidelity to the Dream, seriousness of purpose and constancy of resolve. Her husband's mind was patterned and consistent, organized so neatly that it might have been designed. There was something else underneath this time, though. Something physical. A smell was heavy in her husband's nose, coppery and thick. Blood.

THWACK! This time, she felt the blow through Scott's mind. A vibration deep in his (her) hands and wrists, radiating all the way up her arms. As though awakened from a dream, Jean inhaled sharply. Was he under attack and bleeding? He didn't seem to be in pain, but everything pointed toward . . .

Jean made the decision not to follow that path of reasoning. The evidence led in a direction she did not wish to acknowledge. Instead, she looked at the pile of flotsam blocking her path. She could imagine how difficult it had been for the frightened students to traverse the broken mound. She thought she saw a foot extending from underneath the rubble, and decided that she had neither the time nor the inclination to navigate the broken access to the dining hall.

She made a subtle gesture of parting, her left hand sweeping in front of her, and the building rumbled to its very bowels. The air trembled with the sound of stone against stone, of steel against steel, and the debris parted like the sea before Moses. It slammed into either wall, opening the cafeteria to entry. Beneath the noise, she could hear Kitty screaming. Jean ran into the room.

***

A hunk of sandstone plunged from the wall, tumbling across the floor and slamming into the base of the scaffold. Wolverine looped his arm around a support and locked his hands together. The structure listed harshly, and for a moment Logan thought ridiculously of a mechanical bull he had ridden once in Calgary. He gritted his teeth together, briefly sure that it would tumble to the ground below, but the Egyptians had done their work well. The scaffold folded against itself and the opposite wall. Logan looked up - there was still a chance if he moved fast.

He spun around on the pole as he kicked his feet underneath him. When he was on the outside of the erector set, he reached up to grab the platform above and pulled himself up. Twenty feet to go. Maybe less.

The room oscillated badly, and Wolverine realized that something more was at work here than the loss of a support. It was as though the Library of Echoes was attempting to consume itself.

He stood on the platform and began to reach up to the next when the support beneath him snapped and fell on the other side. The plank fell diagonally, and Logan toppled forward, sliding on his belly to the abyss below. Adamantium or not, a fall from this height to the stone and bronze would not feel good. He gripped the edge as momentum carried his body past, crying out when he rolled. His shoulder nearly separated, and he could feel the muscle in his triceps tear in one arm.

Logan hung there, facing forward with his arms contorted behind him. His face was a kabuki mask of pain that only dissipated slightly when he noticed the room below.

The Ouroboros he and Juniper had discovered hidden within the chicken scratch hieroglyphics on the floor glowed in the galloping darkness. With the giant gears spinning, the great snake seemed massive and alive. As the space buckled and twisted, the beast seemed to be constricting. Its coiled, phosphorescent outline tightened around the shattered remains of the dark tower.

His eyes narrowed in incomprehension. The whole space below seemed to wobble and shimmer like a salt flat viewed from a distance at high noon. Worse, the warped air was expanding, climbing higher and higher, surrounding and distorting everything it came into contact with. Logan did not know what this meant, but his overriding instinct was to escape.

Wolverine looked briefly around, gauging the soundness of the scaffold, then decided to risk it. He released his grip on the safety of the platform with one hand, swinging around with his other hand as the only lifeline. Wheeling quickly, he came around the corner to face forward and gripped the other side, dangling from the edge. His nose brushed the point of the corner, and Logan grinned. Close.

Grapevining his legs around the corner's support pole, he tugged on it with one hand to test its viability. It seemed solid, so he grabbed on and began to pull himself upwards, hand over hand. For once, the training he put himself through in the Danger Room seemed worthwhile. With his platform broken, it was a good twelve feet up to the next level, and his arm hurt badly enough that the going was slow.

Risking a look over his shoulder, Logan saw that the muddled distortion grew closer, and that the glowing design on the floor was brighter, undulating with a disconcerting inner life. He pulled fast, climbing as quickly as he dared.

He had nearly arrived at the next level when the scaffold tumbled to the side. Logan squinted against the pain in his arm. He reached up to try and grab a hold of the platform when he saw the bolt holding the support beam he was climbing. It wobbled in its bent mounting, nearly free of its mooring.

"Cripes," he said. With all his strength he pushed himself upwards but it was too late. The pole detached from the platform and fell forward in a wide arc. The scaffolding above collapsed downward with a bang, and that was all that saved Logan from plunging into the abyss.

The strut held its lower clamp and slammed to a stop pointing out ninety degrees from the badly twisted scaffold. The jolt at the bottom of the plunge ripped Logan's legs from the pole and he hung from it with one hand. He breathed for a moment, pushing the pain from his mind. Then he reached forward to climb back to the structure hand-over-hand, but the stress was too much for his bad arm.

He kicked his legs up to try and loop them over the pole, but the movement jolted his lifeline. There was a terrible shrieking sound, the support bent even further. Painfully, he used his bad arm as a guide and began to pull himself forward on the pole. He slid with agonizing slowness, the broken scaffold a beacon of hope. It had folded on itself so badly that it was almost more stable than it would have been left to its own devices. If he could get on top, Logan might still be able to get out of the Library in one piece.

The distortion below moved closer, and Logan had to pull up his feet to keep away from it. He didn't know if the wavering air would harm him, and he had no intention of finding out. With a clang, the pole dropped again, and Wolverine nearly lost his grip. The beam swayed slightly, only held in place now by the weight of the collapsed structure. Logan was close, though. He reached forward, straining with all he had.

His fingertips brushed the edge of the scaffold, and a smile spread across his dust-chapped lips. Then the steel and wood of the great house of cards seemed to move away from him, flying quickly upwards toward the pale moon above. It took Wolverine a moment to realize the support pole was sliding free from the structure.

Logan held onto the long steel beam even as he tumbled into the wavering light and darkness below, the ancient hall collapsing around him.

***

The human mind is capable of billions of simultaneous actions. This is the reason that scientists of the time had such immeasurable difficulty in coming up with a useful model for artificial intelligence. Consider the average walk down a city street: not only does one take steps, one feels the ground, smells the air. A person defines each sensation within their own frame of reference, deciphers an infinite number of visual cues and sounds and scents and pulls meaning from them. They apply to each and every sensation and action a whole body of life experience, defining and relating and immediately transferring to memory.

Consider the mind of a telepath. The totality of their experience runs even deeper, a whole body of sensory experience open to them that is unavailable to the average person on the street. Not only do they sort out their own experience, but on some unconscious level, they do the same for every soul they come into contact with as they receive the psychic information every individual sloughs off. Those who are successful at sorting out this information lead full lives. Those who cannot often find themselves living voicelessly in institutions or seeking escape through drugs or worse. Jean Grey was as successful as a telepath might be expected to be. She had a full grasp on controlling her sensitivities and had a keen and intelligent mind capable of handling all of the reams of information she encountered on a daily basis.

What was it about the time when she entered the Westchester Consolidated High School cafeteria that caused her to remember it not as a whole, but as a series of disconnected sights and sounds and smells and tastes? Why are the memories a scrapbook of experiences wholly unrelated to anything before or after?

She walked into the room. She moved more than a ton of wet and broken refuse to do so. Jean Grey strode in with something like anger playing on her beautiful features, ready and willing to protect her distraught companions. She expected an enemy, and was prepared for battle. When she looked around, though, the world seemed to break apart. It became a mosaic, a perversion of reality. She heard her pulse in her ears, felt her heart beating in her chest. Jean tasted adrenaline and bile and fear, though she was not sure if they were her own or vestigial sensations from her teammates. She parted her lips to speak, but no words escaped. The scene played before her like some theatrical tableau isolated from the world beyond the stage.

Scott standing in his black uniform, his teeth glittering.

"Stop it!" Kitty screamed. She had become a woman at some point when Jean wasn't watching. "Stop it!" Her hands were on her face, as though she were trying to hold her head on.

There were tears streaming down Rogue's face as she stood with Betsy in her arms.

THWAK! The sound was wetter now. THWAK! THWAK!

The broken thing on the floor. It quivered.

Scott was wearing his black uniform.

"Stop it!" Kitty shouted again. There was a white tan line on the ring finger of her right hand. She must have been wearing a ring for a long time to get that.

Blood on the linoleum floor. So much blood.

Steam rising from the lunch counter. The food was still warm. Jean wasn't hungry.

Psylocke's beautiful hair was singed and streaked with the white dust that clouded the air.

     The thing on the floor, twisted and soaked. THWAK! It was struck again from above.

The tiles on the floor had small gaps between them. There must have been a subtle slant to the room because the blood flowed from the pool in a spider web of cracks. Jean worried that the janitors might have a hard time cleaning it up if it dried.

Tears flowed down Rogue's face, cutting through the patina of powdery soot.

Scott's *black* uniform.

"Stop it!"

THWAK! The baseball bat was *black*. It rose from the (body) thing on the floor slowly. A thin stream dripped from it.

Rogue's gloved hand stroked Betsy's neck protectively. She wasn't conscious that she was doing it, or that it did help in comforting the injured woman.

"Stop it, Scott!"

Scott's uniform was wet and black. It was supposed to be blue.

The janitor's would have a tough road to hoe. That was for sure.

The bat came down again. It poked the (little boy) thing on the floor, rolling it lifelessly. The (child) thing lolled bonelessly.

A rumble came from across the school. The police coming in.

Scott looked up at the sound. He looked at his wife. There was a drop of blood on his chin, but it wouldn't fall.

"Alright," he said. "Rogue, you've got Psylocke."

He poked at the dead child lying at his feet one last time, then tossed the bat. It clattered away, a hollow wooden sound trailing in its wake.

Kitty stood with her head in her hands. Her lips trembled. She looked from the body to Cyclops. Scott. Jean's husband and back.

     "Kitty, you're with me. Phoenix?"

His uniform was black as midnight, glittering wetly. Husband. Leader. Friend.

"Phoenix, I want you to deal with the police. Make sure they don't notice us, understand?"

Lover. Beloved. Soul mate.

"Understand?"

"I understand, Cyclops," she heard herself say. She did as she was told. They all did, moving like stunted ghosts out of the room.

"Alright, X-Men. By the numbers," he said, stepping over the dead child and walking toward the door. "It's time to move on."

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