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Pyro was facing the open end of the mobile prison where the daylight shone in, tilting the clipboard so he could read and half-listening to the conversation. Later, he remembered that detail. Magneto and Mystique both had their backs turned. Magneto was asking Juggernaut about his helmet or something. But Pyro was facing the door and he still had no idea what was happening until he saw her fall.
“No!” Mystique said.
Magneto must have figured it out right away because the gun the last guard had been holding came spinning to his hand immediately. Pyro still didn't understand, exactly, but it didn't matter, he chased the narrow corridor with a ring of flame that filled it from side to side and the man screamed and screamed and then stopped.
Inside the trailer Magneto was turning it over in his hands, this weapon shaped like a bulky handgun, but he was looking down at Mystique on the floor of the truck.
Her whole body was seizing. She rolled, shuddering, from her stomach onto her back, and all the while, she was changing. Pyro knew she had been shot, he was looking for the wound and the blood and trying to remember the first aid training he'd gotten at Xavier's, but Magneto and the others stood impassive and watched the blue leave her. Her face and hands were last.
Maybe it was a defense thing, Pyro thought as the scales on her fingers smoothed themselves away. Maybe when she was about to pass out, she changed automatically, to protect herself. This was a shape he hadn't seen before, but it was similar to her real form, tall and thin with long limbs and slim hips. She had become a white woman in her 30s. Her skin was pale, she had black hair and blue-gray eyes.
And she was still moving. She was alive, and not wounded in any way that he could see. That's when the dart fell from her hand and Pyro realized what everyone else already knew.
“You saved me,” Magneto said.
Her hand, extended in front of her face, was trembling.
He looked away.
“Erik,” she said. Her voice was stripped of the resonance of what Pyro thought of as her natural tone, but Magneto turned, then. Slowly and painfully, he got onto his knees on the grating beside her.
Mystique sat up, arms crossed protectively over her belly. Her nipples were visible, dark pink. Pyro had always wondered about that.
“I'm sorry, my dear,” Magneto said. “I'm so sorry.” He was close to her, but not touching.
Pyro took off his jacket and bent to hand it over.
“Thanks,” she said. She spoke quietly, without affect. He couldn't tell if she meant it or not. She got to her feet, pushing off against the wall of the truck. She was shivering, none of the habitual whipcrack grace in evidence. She stood, feet planted.
Mystique was human, baseline human. Pyro couldn't stop himself. He looked at her toes, at her pale thighs, pimpled with gooseflesh, at the triangle of dark pubic hair, the slight round of her belly. It was still the body of a strong woman, an athlete, but it was no longer frightening and strange. She was a flatscan. For real. Her nipples were erect, the tiny hairs on her arms standing on end. She looked so cold.
She dropped his coat to the ground like she'd dropped the used dart and held her shoulders straight, staring back at him.
When he first knew her, she used to tease him about the way his eyes were involuntarily drawn to her naked breasts and blue hips. Now, he realized that had been another game. She had never minded the attention. Her body had been a weapon in every way possible.
What was going to happen now?
Day 2
Mystique dipped her finger into a plastic container of hummus. She was sitting at the built-in counter in the base off the Maine coast, dressed in a pair of Pyro's cargo pants, a tank top, and a cream-colored cable-knit fisherman's sweater with toggles and a collar and pockets, almost like a coat. This was her own, Pyro had seen her wear it before. The base was carved out of solid rock; it got really cold in there sometimes. Her slippered feet were hooked over the lower bar of the chair.
Magneto was lying supine on the kitchen floor. Last year, he had installed a radiant heating system in the living quarters; no doubt, he could feel the intricate network of 16 millimeter pipe that carried the hot water zig-zagging through the concrete beneath him.
The dart gun rested in his lap. He'd barely set it down in two days. “Voluntary?” he muttered. “I knew they would weaponize it. I knew they would draw first blood.”
In the helicopter on the way back to Butte last night, there had been some question about how she would be presented to the Omega mutants. At first, Magneto wanted to tell them about her camouflaging abilities without mentioning that she'd lost them. Mystique said no to that, even before Pyro could remind them that Callisto could sense powers, anyway.
“I'm one of you,” Mystique had told them, in the motel room off the interstate. “I spent my whole life under the same conditions of oppression that you have. I've lived with an extreme physical mutation for thirty-three years.” She held her chin high, daring anyone to challenge her. She was still naked then, her legs white against the navy blue bedspread. “I'm proud of who I am – who I was.”
Magneto sat in the chair in front of the door, away from the others, paging through some paperwork. He let her speak for herself, but as he read, the deadbolt clicked open and shut, open and shut.
Pyro had always guessed she was older. He always thought she'd worked with Magneto for decades.
“I know what people are,” Mystique said. “I know where my loyalties lie.”
“What were you like, before?” asked Callisto's girlfriend, the one in the net shirt who could make seismic energy blasts.
“She was beautiful,” Magneto said darkly, without looking up.
That was the first day.
“There are carrots in the fridge,” Pyro said. He had been the last one to go shopping, before all of this happened.
Mystique licked the hummus off her finger, ignoring him. “Of course they were going to weaponize it. But if they had it right there all along, right in the convoy, I don't know why they didn't shoot me sooner.”
“Maybe they needed probable cause,” Pyro offered, thinking of Law and Order and the guard outside the cell where they'd kept her, lying with his head twisted to the side.
Magneto looked at him like he was disappointingly stupid. He was still wearing his helmet. “They were taking her to San Francisco, to Worthington Industries.” He turned back to Mystique. “Perhaps they wished to observe you making the change under more controlled circumstances.”
Mystique tugged at the neck of her shirt, as though it chafed her. “It doesn't matter now. The question is, who will they use it on next?”
There were footsteps on the metal stairs leading from the den, where the new recruits were bivouacked with the sleeping bags and blankets Mystique had dug up. One of Jamie Madrox's duplicates leaned around the corner. “Uh, boss? You might want to check out CNN. They're covering the escape, and the Secretary of Mutant Affairs is resigning or something.”
Magneto lifted his head. “Tell me what they are saying now.”
“It doesn't work that way. I can't hear what the others are hearing or know what they're doing until we get reabsorbed.”
“Fine. Go back up and watch. Fill me in later.”
“So,” Mystique said when he was gone. “Where were we?”
“Who will they target next,” Pyro said. He went to the fridge anyway and got out the carrots. He took out a few for himself and tossed Mystique the bag. She caught it one-handed.
“Right. Whatever the scope of this, there's one clear solution – we go to San Francisco to break the kid out of that lab. I'll call McCoy tonight and ask him why he's giving up the Mutant Affairs post. Maybe he's on to something.” She paused to think. “Senator Kelly knows him.”
“Raven --”
“Don't call me that.”
Magneto pushed himself into a sitting position, his back against the brushed steel cabinets. The cure-gun was in his hand, his index finger looped through the trigger-guard as though he was about to shoot, although Pyro knew it was no longer loaded. “It's not … I've always called you that.”
“I'm your fucking lieutenant, Erik. Please call me what I ask you to call me.”
“Fine.” He tapped at the floor restlessly with the gun. “Mystique. You know you can't talk to McCoy – Beast – as Kelly.”
“Yes, Erik, I know.”
“And you know you can't call him as yourself.” He shook his head shortly. “Henry is in Charles's pocket – if he's not at that school right this instant, Charles is surely in his head.”
“Hey!” This time it was Callisto on the stairs, followed closely by Arclight, trailing her hand along the rough-hewn stone walls of the cave.
“Yes?” Magneto said testily.
The two woman looked at each other, then at Mystique. They seemed to find her less threatening – or maybe they just liked her more. “I picked something up,” Callisto said. “An electromagnetic force, from a mutant. It's massive. Like, Class 5. Crazy big.” She turned to Magneto, her face very serious. “Bigger than you.”
“Jean,” said Magneto, the name seeming to come to him from a long way away.
“OK.” Mystique stood up. “I'm calling Beast.”
Day 3
Underneath them, the great plains stretched as far as the eye could see. The distorted shadow of the copter fell onto the fields far below, like that of a giant bird of prey. “You know this is the right decision.” Mystique said, at the controls.
Behind Pyro's seat, Magneto sighed. “Sometimes, I wish I had young Multiple Man's abilities.”
“Don't we all. It would really come in handy in Congress, believe me.”
The two of them had spent the first leg of the trip arguing – leaving the island, Mystique was so distracted she let Pyro run through most of the pre-flight checks by himself, which was kind of cool – but they seemed to have come to some kind of understanding on the second refueling stop. Since then, Magneto had mostly stayed quiet, with Mystique making occasional attempts to soothe him.
“He must have her by now,” Magneto said.
“The longer we wait, the more time we give the government to get ready. They'll move the boy. They'll issue their soldiers plastic guns. This has to be first. We can stop to renegotiate alliances once the common danger is out of the way.”
“I'm not sure the vaccine is the common danger. Not the biggest one. I don't trust Charles to manage her. He's always been spectacularly bad at it, for a telepath. No one likes to be managed,” he added a little sharply.
Mystique let that one drop. “Let's run through the timeline again.”
Pyro was starting to feel claustrophobic in the cockpit. He stood up from the copilot's seat. “Can you spell me? I gotta go take a piss.”
“Fine,” Magneto said with distaste. He moved forward.
The rear cargo area was crowded, with six people plus Juggernaut's armor, but the atmosphere wasn't nearly as tense. Pyro squeezed in between Arclight and Kid Omega, the dude with the spikes, who was reading a Robert Ludlum paperback.
“How much further?” Callisto asked.
“A long way. We're going all the way to California. Worthington Industries, like on TV.”
“Where does Magneto think we should be going?” It was Psylocke, the girl with purple hair and some kind of teleportation powers. Pyro hadn't known her long, but she always seemed to know more than she should.
“To San Francisco,” he said firmly. “That's why we're going there. Magneto makes the calls.”
“We're just saying, the Class 5 is still in New York,” Callisto said. “I felt the energy signature in Westchester first, then in Dutchess County. Now in Westchester again.”
“Magneto knows who has her,” Pyro said, and it was true. On the phone, Beast had told Mystique that Dr. Grey appeared to be alive, but that her powers were out of control. She – or something using her body and her TK -- had killed Mr. Summers. Pyro could not even to begin to wrap his mind around that, but if it was true, and if he were Xavier, in charge of a school for mutant kids that he was supposed to protect, he wouldn't want the thing that took out his second anywhere near.
Did he trust the Professor? Pyro realized he still did. Mystique didn't, though. It was funny that she was the one arguing the point that Xavier knew what he was doing.
“Who?” Callisto asked. “Who has her?”
“A telepath we know.” Pyro tried to remember the right euphemism. “He was Magneto's best friend. Now they don't really get along, but they trust each other.”
“Oh.” Callisto said something to Arclight in Spanish. The bone-skinny girl looked up toward the doors of the hold and said something back.
“She wants to know if this mutant I sensed, if she came between them?” Callisto relayed.
Pyro had to laugh. “Not like that. She was their student, both of theirs. And then she was my teacher.”
“And you picked Magneto, and she picked the other guy.”
“Pretty much. Sort of. But not in that order.” He thought about arriving at Alkali Lake in the Blackbird a year ago, how the sun had shone on the water as they touched down in the snow. “And then she died.”
“She died?” Kid Omega popped his spikes, incredulous.
“Well, we all thought so at the time.”
“Maybe that's her power,” Arclight said gravely.
Magneto made the calls. Pyro wondered what would have happened if they'd gone to Annandale-On-Hudson today like Magneto wanted to and tried to get Dr. Grey for the Brotherhood. Another mutant who couldn't control herself was not what they needed, in Pyro's humble opinion. He didn't understand Magneto's motives any better than he understood the Professor's. Still, his was not to reason why or whatever.
“Let Magneto know if she starts moving again,” he told Callisto.
“Jean.” Psylocke looked down at her hands. “That's what Magneto called it.”
“Jean Grey,” Pyro said. “That was her name.”
Day 4
They stood at the Marin Headlands at sunrise of the fourth day after Mystique was cured, looking out at Alcatraz Island across the waters.
“At the beginning of the '70s, Native American activists took over the base. They didn't give it back until Nixon ended the policy that was dissolving all the tribes and forcing Indians to assimilate.”
“I remember that,” Magneto said. He turned to Mystique. “You were a child, weren't you?” Maybe he also found it easier to keep track of her age now that she was changed.
She shrugged. “I read about it when I was a teenager.” She had ditched the sweater-coat; she was wearing a fitted leather jacket borrowed from Psylocke. It looked good with his camo-patterned pants, Pyro thought. All she needed to complete the effect was a face piercing or three. “It was important to me to know that you can get what you want, if you fight.”
“Sometimes,” Pyro said.
She laid a hand on Pyro's shoulder. It was the first time he'd noticed her touching anyone since Monday. “The activists burned down some buildings during the occupation, too.”
“How are we doing for time?” Callisto asked. She seemed nervous without Arclight at her side, but Phillipa Domingo, Dan Wang and Elizabeth Braddock were the only current Brotherhood members without extensive criminal records, so Arclight, Kid Omega and Psylocke were waiting in a crowd of tourists at Fisherman's Wharf across the bay for the first ferry to Alcatraz. They would be in position by the time the others joined them. Callisto shook her head, sensing them, and answered her own question. “I think they're boarding now.”
“Good.” The authorities didn't really know what Mystique's new face looked like. She could have gone with the vanguard ferry party, but she had chosen to stay close to Magneto, presumably to keep him from doing something crazy like ripping up the Golden Gate Bridge if things didn't go how he wanted. She led the way to the boats, climbing into the first one with Pyro and Multiple Man. Magneto and Callisto got in the other, Magneto's powers keeping the hull from dipping while Juggernaut settled himself in the back. With a wave of his hand, they began to move toward the far side of the island, faster than the wind.
The aluminum rowboats were dented and beat up, but they were easy for Magneto to handle. He didn't bother to look for a good place to land them; instead, they steered toward a place where the rocks fell away sharply in a ten-foot cliff. When the first boat reached the island, it floated up out of the water so that its passengers could step out. No one would expect an approach from this side. After a minute, they were all on dry land.
The labs occupied a compound of low-lying buildings. Callisto pointed. “He's in the southeast corner of this one. Psylocke already must have already 'ported Arclight inside, but they don't know where to look.” She closed her eyes. “I can feel them all. The kid's a floor above. Danny's on standby.”
A flat, empty yard separated them from the buildings, with guard towers set every two hundred yards. There were floodlights, too, but they'd already been extinguished for the day. Pyro could see a crouching figure behind a biohazard-designated Dumpster next to a set of double doors. That must be Kid Omega, waiting for them.
“Good,” Magneto said. “Juggernaut, Multiple Man, Callisto. That door, on my signal. Pyro.” The way Magneto said his name when he was serious about something always made the hair rise on the back of his neck. “Create a distraction. I'll make sure you needn't worry about bullets.”
“What about cure needles?”
Magneto risked a glance at Mystique. Her face was impassive. “It's early in the game yet.” Magneto said. “I hope they are still being made of metal, too.” His voice dropped lower. “If not, we will have to duck.”
If that was a joke, it was one of the grimmer ones Pyro had heard recently.
“Now,” Mystique said, and they were off and running. Callisto flickered out of sight almost instantly, leaving the doors by the Dumpster propped open with a cinderblock; Pyro saw Kid Omega follow her inside. The rest of them were in the middle of the clearing by then. Magneto threw a car at the nearest tower and Pyro set in on fire in the air. The ground shook underneath them as the hut on the platform came crashing down in a flare of combustion and a cloud of oily smoke.
Fighting was not like running, Pyro always thought. Running meant he was scared. His breath came fast and his heart pumped hard. When he used his power, all those rhythms immediately slowed down to normal or better and he didn't feel fear. It was like drinking, or like coke or E, or some mix of all of them, only natural. His body wanted to do this. It was what he was built for. Burning things was too easy.
Juggernaut was much slower than the others, but even he was almost inside the building when the first bullets bounced off his shoulders. By the time he had crashed through the outside wall of the compound, there were no more shots being fired. The guards' guns lay on the grass in neat rows. Two of the men's bodies lay sprawled where they fell, not so neat.
Mystique took the lead as they entered the building. There were no alarms; apparently Arclight's pulse had messed them up, but reinforcements would be arriving from the mainland. Kid Omega and Psylocke were waiting by the door. There was no one else in sight.
“I took out everybody down here,” Psylocke said.
Mystique nodded. “Good. We're going up. Wait for us here. Where did Juggernaut go?”
Kid Omega pointed toward a series of man-shaped holes leading off the main corridor. “Um, that way.”
“We'll be on the third floor. Get him to stay with you, if you see him.”
They pushed through the doors of a set of fire stairs and climbed two flights, exiting into another gray passageway. Rooms opened to both sides. Mystique turned left and started counting doors, but just then, Arclight came around the corner, pushing a dark-haired woman in a lab coat in front of her. “Callisto, she say you want this one.”
“Thank you, Arclight. What's your name?” Mystique asked, stepping into the shorter woman's personal space. Pyro flanked her, lighting up immediately.
“Dr. Kavita Rao.” Pyro thought she must be someone pretty important. There was authority in the way she spoke, and you could tell she was not just terrified, but angry. “What are you doing with Mr. Worthington?”
Arclight smiled, but didn't say anything.
“I'm afraid you're the one who has questions to answer,” Mystique said. “Where is Jimmy Simon?”
The room where they kept the boy had white walls, three of them, a white floor, a white ceiling. The last side of the cube was plexiglass, with sliding doors that led into waiting or viewing area crowded with white-upholstered benches that looked like they came from Evil IKEA.
Jimmy's room was furnished with a bed, desk and nightstand, like a standard-issue Xavier dorm room without the wood paneling or the freak roommate. There were toys on the floor, a race-car track and cars and a robot dog, but the boy was not playing with them, or using the computer or reading any of the books piled neatly on the desk. He stood in his sneakers and his sterile white pjs on the green bedspread, facing the plexiglass separating him from the observation room. It was clear to Pyro that a moment before, he had been turned the other way, toward the single window, like a porthole, that looked out on the water.
The doors slid open and Magneto stepped inside, gathering his cape around him. He took in the boy's shaved head. “We're here to rescue you,” he said abruptly. “Come along, please.”
“We're mutants, too.” Pyro would have made a fireball – a contained one, just to show him – if he hadn't been warned that it was impossible. He grinned instead, his coolest big brother grin. “I'm Pyro. You don't want to stay in here, do you? You'll be safe with us.”
Jimmy jumped down and they walked through the anteroom, past the empty reception desk. Mystique and Arclight were in the corridor, but Dr. Rao was no longer with them. Pyro thought about the way Magneto's mouth had tightened as he first entered the viewing area with the glass wall, and guessed that she had probably been lucky to have it so quick.
When they got back down to the main floor, Juggernaut was waiting with the others. Mystique threw him a Kalashnikov from the gear bag she'd left inside the door.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” the big man asked.
“It's mostly a prop. It wouldn't hurt to figure out how to shoot it, though.” She passed Pyro his own assault rifle. He saw her exchange a meaningful glance with Magneto, but neither of them said anything. Magneto went outside and kicked at the loose cinderblock. Pyro saw him frown at the metal door, but he was still too close to Jimmy to make it move without pushing it.
“I want the rocket launcher,” Pyro protested halfheartedly, trying to make a joke of it. He wasn't used to being armed any more than Juggernaut was, but the party that took the kid with them wouldn't be able to use their powers. Juggernaut had been chosen because he was big and looked pretty goddamn frightening, even without his mutant momentum. Pyro didn't know why he was going.
“Two hours,” Magneto said. He kissed Mystique on the cheek, the way you kiss someone else's wife at a dinner party. “Be safe.” He joined the others, waiting for him in a group by the Dumpster, and they began to cross the charred grass in the direction of the cliffs where they'd disembarked. By the time they got to the parking lot, Magneto's cloak started to move around him, as if stirred by a gentle breeze, and Pyro knew it was the metallic fibers in the fabric. They were out of Jimmy's range.
Jimmy stared at the guns. Pyro was a little worried about him. He'd been through more than most of the kids at Xavier's, but what he'd had was a different kind of hard time then some of them had. He might have never seen violence in his life.
With Jimmy nearby, Magneto wouldn't be able to steer the boats or keep them from capsizing in the choppy water, so Mystique's party was going to hijack a ferry coming in, force off the passengers on Alcatraz, and make the driver or captain or whatever turn around and take them to a rendezvous spot.
It worried Pyro that Magneto hadn't taken time to talk to the kid. He wished he had. For one thing, Magneto had a way of making you feel special with just a couple of words. There were enough variables in this plan; they needed Jimmy to want to leave the island with them, or at least to not actively fight them, and it wasn't clear yet how he felt about the Mutant Menace.
For another thing, Pyro wasn't sure what Magneto wanted with Jimmy in the first place. It would be nice to know that he at least had a vested interest in the four of them making it back alive to the helicopter.
Juggernaut fired a noisy round from the Kalashnikov into the yard, making Pyro and Jimmy jump. “It works,” he announced.
Mystique gave the rucksack to Juggernaut to carry, and hefted her rocket launcher. They followed her out the door and around the building to the left. They would cut across the island toward the cellblock that had become a museum, approaching the place where the ferry launched from the south.
Pyro punched the boy lightly on the shoulder. “You gonna be OK?”
Jimmy nodded. “Will you?” He looked at Mystique, then quickly down at the ground. “Sorry about whatever I'm stopping you guys from doing.”
“Don't worry about it,” Pyro said. The kid was smart, but he didn't know the half of it.
Day 5
Mystique checked her blind spot and the blue Windstar shot into the center lane. “Let me know,” she said. “No. No, I haven't.”
Pyro had lost track of what state they were in – they might have crossed from Utah into Wyoming while he was napping – and he had no idea whether her talking on the phone while driving was a finable offense here or not. When the sun set two hours ago, the road was still flat and dusty, with nothing under the big sky but scrub and every once in a while, a lonely filling station. He put his curled hand to the window now and tried to see out. He was fucking sick of I-80, which they'd been on since Oakland.
“Are you even listening to me?” she said into the phone. Her dark hair was greasy, held out of her face with a pair of aviator sunglasses she'd picked up somewhere. She looked tired, but her expression, when she noticed him watching, was as impassive as it ever been. “I've never been there. I don't know where she'd go. That's what I said, Hank. Fine.” She closed the cell with a snap.
“What?” Juggernaut asked. He was in the back seat, with the kid's head resting on his lap.
“Nothing,” Mystique said. She turned on the news. The minivan had satellite radio. Mystique checked all the channels, but no one was saying anything about Offutt they hadn't heard already. It was the same stuff as an hour ago; they were sending troops, who were standing by outside the invisible barrier. No one knew what was happening, but some of the commentators were calling it the Mutant Siege now. “Shit,” Mystique said. “Shit.” She'd been fine handling the terrified ferry passengers and the rocket launcher, but now she was rapidly loosing her cool.
So far, there had been nothing on the news about what had happened at Westchester. Hank McCoy was pulling strings to keep the school under the radar. “Are the X-Men on their way?” Pyro asked. “What did he say?”
“The Wolverine is the only one there who's regained consciousness so far, and obviously he's a special case. So it's Wolverine and Beast and – weirdly – Warren Worthington's son, who just turned up in Hank's office in D.C., apparently. He's a mutant with wings. Anyway. They just left from New York, but they'll beat us, I think.”
“The way you're driving, we might actually get there first,” Pyro said casually. “Unless we, you know, die in a horrible car crash. Mind if I take a turn at the wheel, give the Blackbird a chance to catch up?”
“Cute. We switch at Cheyenne.”
“When's that?”
Mystique threw a map into his lap. “Look it up.”
It hadn't been hard to figure out what had happened when Magneto and the Omega crew weren't at the meet-up spot in San Francisco like they were supposed to be. Callisto must have sensed Jean Grey moving while Mystique was on the hijacked ferry and told Magneto. He would have gone to meet her. The question was where had Callisto felt Jean move to? Magneto wouldn't answer his cell. No one was picking up the main line at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and when Mystique called the emergency contact number written on a slip of paper from her wallet, the phone rang and rang.
Then they saw it on the news – planes frozen in the air over an Air Force Base near Omaha and a barrier seven miles wide that no one could break through from either side.
“Why Nebraska?” Pyro had asked.
“Scott Summers' father was in the military. He got transferred to Offutt the year he was ten.”
“How do you know that?”
Mystique shrugged. “He told me once.”
Hank McCoy said Dr. Grey had put every single person at the school in a coma, from the smallest, youngest student to Charles Xavier. Pyro remembered how, in desperate circumstances, the Professor used to just freeze people. He pictured all of those planes hanging in the air like the syringes in Dr. Grey's medical lab in the basement, where he used to help her when he was supposed to be in math class. She was powerful. The same, but different.
The drive to eastern Nebraska was going to take all night, according to Mapquest, and there was nothing anyone could do. As long as they stuck together, they were three depowered mutants and a twelve-year-old. The only person whose abilities functioned was Jimmy, and that was pretty ironic. His range seemed to vary depending on his emotions but he couldn't control this consciously. When he was calm, he said, it only effected mutants he touched. Right now, it was everyone in the minivan – except Mystique, of course.
Pyro had tried doing the Magneto thing to him earlier, before he conked out, but it hadn't really worked. He'd started with “Jimmy Simon, huh? What kind of a name is Simon?”
The kid looked at him blankly. “English or something?”
“Your parents call you James when they're mad at you?”
He didn't flinch, but he wouldn't meet Pyro's eyes, either. “My whole name is Jimmy. It's on my birth certificate.”
White trash, Pyro thought. Takes one to know one. “I told you my name. I burn things. You haven't seen it yet, but I'll figure out a way so that you will. That's Juggernaut in the front next to Mystique. Magneto was the guy with the helmet, who let you out.”
“Right. The one who was supposed to meet us.”
Pyro ignored that. “He can control metal, like a magnet. You get my drift?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you want your name to be now?”
“I don't know.”
“Think of something.”
“I don't know, OK? Suck. Drain.” He spoke very seriously, but when the rest of them started laughing, he cracked a smile. “Leech?” he suggested.
“I used to work with a man called Toad.” Mystique said. “He was very good at what he did.”
“I don't care,” said Pyro. “That's fucking awful. Jimmy needs to pick something badass.”
“Cure,” said Juggernaut. “Can't do better than that to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies.”
“It depends on if your enemies are human or mutant,” Mystique said.
The big man rubbed at his scalp. He was going bald on top. “Who else do you think he's qualified to fight but us?”
“He's not going to fight us," Pyro said. "We're going to find a way for him to help.” Back at Xavier's, it seemed like they took anybody. Even if their power was no good. Even if their power was way more trouble than it was worth and always would be. Pyro wasn't sure if the Brotherhood operated that way, but Magneto wasn't here to say no. “Cure,” he tried. It had a kind of ring to it. “Do you like it? Do you think it fits?”
“Sure,” the kid said. It was hard to tell which question he was answering. “What are your real names?”
“Mystique is my real name,” Mystique said.
Pyro didn't think it was time for a lecture. “John,” he said, thinking about Bobby unconscious at Salem Center Medical. “But no one ever calls me that anymore.”
In the backseat, Cure's breathing was heavy and even. “My leg's gone asleep,” Juggernaut said softly.
Pyro lit his gauntlets; the mechanism Magneto had built into them caused a Zippo-sized tongue of flame to appear in each hand, but he couldn't manipulate the fire with Cure in the car. The pilot lights cast the sleeping kid's face in glow and shadow; the fuzz on his scalp was like a faint halo. He let them go out. It was a weird feeling.
“How are you holding up?” Mystique asked.
“Were you born blue? Or did you turn all of a sudden, when your powers manifested?”
There was a long pause. She flicked on her brights. “Born,” she said at last.
“Were you surprised when you saw the way you look now?”
“I look like my mother. Like my father's sisters. But yes. I guess I was.”
He thought about the assault rifle in his hands, about what it had been like to point it at some guy who was just an employee of the ferry company that contracted to the National Park Service at Alcatraz, telling him where to take them. It had worked out OK, but it really wasn't cool. Pyro was a terrorist because the world had a problem with who he was, who Mystique was. He used his power to hurt people who hurt mutants. He didn't just shoot guys.
He knew that this was the right place to be. He knew that if he was a free agent, he would have spent the last week wasting the ad-hoc vaccine clinics that had sprung up in New York and D.C. – satisfying, maybe, but not as effective as going after the source – and Cure would still be in a lab. He was glad to be with Mystique, who made the kind of plans that made sense to follow.
At the same time, he was scared. All he wanted was to get out of the minivan at the next gas station and run and run until the kid was behind him and he could feel his fire again.
Mystique could never do that. If he lost it forever, like she had, would he still be brave enough to fight?
Behind them, Juggernaut shifted his weight carefully so as not to wake the sleeping boy. Pyro wondered if he had ever had kids. “At the school, Mystique, when you were a student there. You knew Mr. Summers and Dr. McCoy. Did you know Dr. Grey, too?”
“Mmm,” she confirmed.
“What do you think Magneto's going to do when he gets there?”
Mystique didn't take her eyes off the road. “I don't know what anyone's going to do but us.”
Day 6
This part of Bellevue, Nebraska was a neighborhood of modest one- and two-story houses just outside the boundaries of the Air Force Base. Maybe some of the people who lived in these houses were about to be shipped overseas, but you couldn't tell which from the sidewalks. It was like a suburban neighborhood like any other – like Bobby's street in Massachusetts, or the nice parts of Salem Center. It was even a little like the lower middle-class cul-de-sac outside Las Vegas where Pyro and his mom had lived when he was in grade school.
No one gave them trouble, coming in. They parked the van right on a main street. There were a lot of soldiers around, but none of them seemed to notice. As they walked down Calhoun, there was a place where Pyro thought he felt a push of protest in the air, and then Cure raised a hand and it disappeared, as if overruled. They kept walking, and the streets were silent and empty. There were no more soldiers.
Houses gave way to businesses as they turned from 21st Avenue onto Washington. Cure went first with Mystique. Juggernaut and Pyro followed behind, but it wasn't really following. They all knew where to go.
The sun shone. The sidewalks were even. It was a dream. Pyro tried to think of every terrible thing he knew. His mom was dead. Mr. Summers was dead. Dr. Grey was a murderer. He was a murderer. Magneto had abandoned them. Magneto had been in a concentration camp. Mystique was cured.
It wasn't helping. None of it felt real.
The school sat on a corner lot, a nondescript brick building with trees and a basketball hoop out front. They all knew it right away. There were some kind of renovations going on. The wood and tarpaper of the flat roof was exposed; a pile of asphalt shingles sat in the front lot under a blue tarp. There was a backhoe on the lawn and a small yellow-and-orange crane parked across two parking spaces with its arm folded down. A sign in front read Bellevue Mission Middle School.
Magneto and Psylocke were sitting on a bench under a pin oak in front of the barber shop across the street. Magneto's head was bare; his helmet rested in his lap.
As Cure got within arm's length, Pyro saw the purple fade from Psylocke's hair. It was funny; he had thought it was just dye.
“What are you doing?” Mystique asked.
“We're waiting.” Psylocke said. “She was talking, just now, but I can't hear her anymore.”
“It's me. Interference. Sorry.” As Cure backed away from the bench, toward the street and the school, her brown-black hair turned back to its more vibrant natural hue.
“It's OK,” Psylocke told him. “Jean Grey, she's just waiting too.”
Mystique walked right up to Magneto. “Where are the others? Callisto, Arclight?”
He shook his head, looking helpless. “Jean wouldn't let them in. Or out. I don't remember which.”
“Are they gone?”
“I think they're dead.”
Cure stood by himself on the curb a few yards away from them, one foot in the street. In his white clothing, with his shaved head, he looked like a very young monk of some strict order. Pyro was not sure if he was following the conversation. He hoped not.
The distance between them was probably enough now. Experimentally, Pyro lit his left gauntlet and then gathered the flame to him in a fist-sized bunch. The act of using his power seemed to clear his head a little.
“What about Hank?” Mystique asked.
“I don't know. I never saw him here.”
“Have you talked to her, Erik?”
“I wasn't waiting, but I knew you would come,” he said. “You're my second. You know what I want better than I do. You do what has to be done.”
In his year in the Brotherhood, Pyro had walked in on them fucking two times. Once on the soft leather sofa in the living quarters of the base off the Maine coast. Once in the second double bed of a dusty pension room they'd shared in Lahore, when they were breaking a Pakistani mutant out of prison.
He'd seen them fighting with each other -- really fighting -- only once. He had never known what that argument was even about. Pyro thought about that day now, called it up in his mind. He'd come into the room, noted how they were standing, their faces six inches apart or less, and immediately, without context, he had been able to see that Mystique wanted to hit Magneto, just haul off and punch him. And he could see that she wouldn’t, no more than Magneto would wrap her in rebar. He was old, and she was strong and fast, stronger and faster than should be possible for a woman her size. It wouldn’t have been fair. Pyro thought of ball games up at the school in Westchester, kids yelling “No powers!”
That was then. Mystique took a step forward. “Do you think you can control her?”
“No,” Magneto said. He sounded tired and very, very old, but as he spoke, the arm of the crane unfolded and stretched toward the sky. “I was wrong. No one could ever control her.”
“Did she kill Scott Summers at Alkali Lake, like Hank says?”
“If she did, she doesn't know it,” Psylocke said.
Mystique turned her attention to the young woman. “Do you have telepathic abilities? Why didn't you tell us?”
“People don't really like telepaths much.” She was bent forward on the bench like a question mark, her clasped hands between her knees. Her bangs fell in her eyes; they seemed to shift between black and purple.
“No. You can never get a straight answer out of them. What did she say?”
“She's waiting for Scott to come back. She doesn't say anything to me. She's calling for him.”
“We're going to go talk to her now,” Mystique said. “All of us. Stand up, Erik.”
The front doors opened for them at their approach. It didn't make sense, because Magneto was with Cure, close enough to touch. It couldn't have been him. Dr. Grey must have done it.
Pyro hadn't thought he remembered junior high all that well, but the buckling linoleum in the halls brought it all back. The double rows of lockers that alternated in color from yellow to orange to vomit green had probably been there when Mr. Summers was a student. The posters for “Jesus Christ, Superstar” looked new. Pyro looked at the dates; opening night was next week.
“Why are we here, anyway? Why would she come here?” Why not to the school in Westchester, Pyro wondered. That's what had been Mr. Summers' home for decades.
“This is where he manifested,” Magneto said. “Those optic blasts of his blew a hole through the gymnasium here, if I recall correctly. Charles and I came out to Nebraska to get him from the residential facility for blind children where they brought him, but the government had already found out what he was and taken him somewhere else. It took us months for us to track him down a second time.”
Behind him, Psylocke spoke softly. “This was the last place he felt normal.”
“I told him to take off his glasses at the bottom of the lake. He didn't need them anymore.” Dr. Grey was at the end of the hall. She was dressed in what looked like gym clothes; soft sweatpants and a tee shirt. Her feet were bare. Her skin looked paler than Pyro remembered, and her hair was the color of flame. She wasn't dead. Pyro wasn't sure what he was. “He opened his eyes and he saw me. And then he was gone.”
Psylocke stepped forward. “Where do you think he went?”
“I don't want anyone else in my head.”
“You call, but he doesn't answer.” Psylocke's hair and clothes stirred around her as though she were in water where there was a strong current, but her face was calm and full of compassion. “You are Class 5,” she said. “Phoenix. Best. Maybe you should look for him yourself?”
“He answered before,” Dr. Grey said. “I just had to wait long enough.”
“He was scared here. In the gym. He knew nothing would ever be the same. I'm scared, too.” Psylocke turned to Magneto, as if asking permission. “I need to leave.” She turned and started to walk quickly, back the way they had come. When she reached the end of the hall, there was a popping sound that Pyro recognized from other teleporters he'd known, the air entering the space her body had occupied, and she was gone.
Oh shit, Pyro thought. The rest of them were so screwed. He wished he'd stayed outside with Juggernaut. He wished he had access to his pyrokinesis.
“Jean,” Magneto said. “What did you do to my scouts? We came here in peace, to talk to you. I thought I taught you better.”
She did not seem to hear him at all. Her burning eyes were on Mystique. “Raven.”
“Yes,” Mystique said. She sounded wary, but not angry. “It's me.”
“I knew right away.”
“Well, you can read minds.”
“Not any more,” Dr. Grey said. “I like bigger things. The only human I know now is Scott. He left an imprint. I hear it. I see it. He came running into this hall with his eyes closed, knowing what would happen if he opened them. He wanted to take it all back. You can think you want your life the way it was, but you can't have it.”
“You would know something about that, too.”
“Will you just tell me something, Raven?” Tendrils of her hair waved gently, alive.
“Anything,” Mystique said.
“What was it like, turning back?
“For me, when I got my powers, it meant the freedom to change. To hide if I wanted. But I always knew who I really was. I still know, even in this body. I know because I feel the same. Maybe to Scott, it would feel different.”
"Do you think so?"
"I really can't guess," Mystique said. "You're the one who knew him best."
Dr. Grey dropped her shoulders, her whole body slumping. “What did I do, Mr. Lehnsherr?”
This was not Dr. Grey, his teacher. Pyro had never known this Jean, but he thought that maybe the others had, years ago, when she was a girl.
Magneto reached out, as if to touch her face, but his fingers stopped inches away. “I don't know, my dear child. The mental blocks are gone.”
“Would you kill me, if I asked you to?”
“He isn't strong enough.” Mystique was holding Cure in front of her like a shield. “But I will, if I can.”
The two women faced each other with the boy in white between them. Mystique looked smaller in her clothes, a soldier, not a lieutenant, but her posture was as straight as always. Dr. Grey floated in front of her, feet not quite touching the ground, hair loose around her drawn face, all kinds of forces pulling at her that they couldn't see. A drowned star, Pyro thought. A goddess.
“Please.”
“Will you hold his hands?”
Cure reached them out and Dr. Grey took them in her own.
Mystique cradled her chin and cupped the back of her head. She held her there, for a minute. Pyro had seen her break men's necks before. She probably wasn't sure if this would work, but she never hesitated for long.
Pyro closed his eyes.
“Jean,” he heard her say. “Are you ready?”
FIN
ugh_whyyy Wed 31 Dec 2025 04:06AM UTC
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