KITTY LEAPT to her feet, shielding her eyes from a fusillade of glass and metal. Before she knew what was happening, Storm’s arm had slammed across her chest, pushing her back from the table.
Three huge men stood in a giant hole that led to the back parking lot. At least, she assumed they were men—they might have been robots. Their bodies were entirely covered in thick red metallic armor. Each of them held an identical high-tech weapon, like a cross between a dueling staff and a laser gun.
The coffee-shop patrons took one look at them and fled, almost trampling each other on their way out the front door. The hipster clerk just stared. A china mug slipped from his grip and shattered on the floor.
One of the armored men stepped forward. “Targets acquired,” he said in a heavily filtered voice. “We’ve found the X-Men.”
Logan moved toward them. He held up both fists and unsheathed his claws.
“Sure have,” he said.
“Kitty,” Ororo said, motioning her away. “Leave this to us.”
She looked from Storm to the armored men. One of them raised his weapon, aiming it at the table.
“Go!” Storm said.
Kitty broke and ran. She skirted a round table, heading for the side of the shop. When she reached the wall, she stopped, turned to look back—
—and gasped.
Peter, the young X-Man, had positioned his body between his teammates and the attackers. As Kitty watched, his entire form swelled, growing even more massive. His skin shimmered and glistened as every inch of it turned to solid, gleaming metal.
Fire erupted from the armored man’s staff. Kitty’s breath caught in her throat, but the X-Man’s steel body blocked the flame, shielding Storm and Wolverine from its searing heat.
They really are mutants, Kitty realized. They’re used to this— using their powers in combat, facing incredibly powerful enemies. Risking their lives.
They’re used to it.
I’m not.
Concentrating, she turned and ran—straight through the side wall. Phasing through solid objects had become easier these past few days. Her head barely throbbed at all. She found herself in a narrow storeroom piled high with T-shirts and canvas bags filled with coffee beans.
I’m not running away, she told herself. I’m not. I’m just going to get help!
On impulse, she turned and charged toward the back of the store. She phased through the wall, emerging into the parking lot right next to the gaping hole the attackers had blasted into the building. Pieces of wood and plaster lay strewn across the pavement, littering an unoccupied loading zone. A clash of alarms blared out from the nearby stores.
A strange black vehicle the size of a minibus floated just off the ground a few feet away. It looked like a cross between a hovercraft and a manta ray, and it bore a stylized “H” logo with a pitchfork design. Armed men—more of them—poured out of the vehicle. They wore Kevlar body armor, with eerie blank-faced masks bisected down the middle. They drew hand lasers and ran toward the now-exposed coffee shop.
Before the men could spot her, Kitty ducked back through the wall into the storeroom. From there she could hear the sound of laser blasts and tables crashing in the adjacent room.
What am I doing? she thought. I’m not an X-Man—but I can’t just abandon them, either!
She crept up to the side wall, allowing her power to build slowly inside her. Then she crouched down and pushed her head through the wall, back into the main seating area of the coffee shop. The first thing she saw was the man with the flamethrower. He’d backed Peter—Colossus—up against the wall, pushing the flaming tip of his weapon closer and closer to Peter’s face. The X-Man’s steel skin remained untouched, but the expression on his face showed he wasn’t invulnerable to pain.
A flash of steel caught Kitty’s eye—Wolverine’s claws. He was slashing, leaping, running faster than she’d ever seen a person move. Sweeping a single deadly claw through the air, he forced another of the red-armored men to back away.
“Don’t know who you fellas are,” Wolverine said, “and frankly, I don’t care. Right now I just feel like killin’ something.” He unsheathed the rest of his claws and jabbed forward, straight toward the man’s chest. The gleaming metal blades seemed to slow and stop, skittering off some invisible barrier in a shower of sparks.
“Logan!” Storm called. “He is protected by some sort of force field.”
The man lunged forward, his staff catching Wolverine hard on the chin. The hairy X-Man grunted and fell to the ground, then scrambled back to his feet.
Across the room, Storm faced off against the third attacker, keeping a table between them. As he took a step forward, she raised a hand; a gale-force blast of wind appeared from nowhere, flipping the table into the air and slamming it into the armored man’s chest. He grunted, lurched back, and swept aside the table with a swipe of his gauntlet.
Kitty watched in a state of shock. She’d seen super hero battles on the news, read accounts of these fierce, rapid-fire exchanges of power—but she’d never witnessed one in person. The X-Men really were more than human.
Am I like that? she thought. Will I have to fight for my life, too?
Storm turned toward the hole in the wall, her eyes strobing from yellow to white. Outside, the sky turned dark. Lightning flashed.
“Ororo!” Wolverine yelled.
Storm ignored him, reaching out to summon the lightning. A jagged bolt lanced down, arcing through the hole in the wall to engulf her attacker in a burst of light. The armored man stood perfectly still as the electrical corona around him glowed bright, then faded. He shook his head, brushed a hand against his shoulder—then he continued forward, unharmed.
“Listen up,” Wolverine said. “Each of these clowns seems equipped to counter our specific powers.”
“So I see,” Storm said, eyeing the man moving toward her. “Your recommendation?”
Logan leaped up, grabbed hold of a hanging light fixture, and swung toward Storm’s opponent.
“Let’s switch,” he said.
Storm glanced at Colossus, who still stood backed up against the wall by the third armored man. She caught Peter’s eye for a moment, then spread her arms and flew—flew!—toward him, knocking the armored man off his feet with a savage blast of wind. The man’s weapon pinwheeled through the air, trailing a gout of flame. She gestured, creating a sudden, localized rainfall to douse the fire.
Wolverine had landed on the back of Storm’s first opponent. The attacker lurched and swung his arms, but Logan held on tight, raising a fist and slashing his claws deep into the man’s armor. The man cried out and dropped to the floor.
A pool of blood spread slowly from the man’s unmoving body. Kitty stared at it in shock. I’m gonna be sick…
Across the room, Colossus’s steel fist slammed down on the last opponent’s head. The armored man’s force field stopped the blow short of his helmet, but the impact was heavy enough to knock him out. He struck the floor with a metallic CLANG.
“Sweet dreams, tovarisch,” Peter said.
All at once, it was over. The three attackers lay unmoving in the remains of the coffee shop. Tables were overturned; coffee stained the floor, pooling in dark brown puddles. Storm moved toward Wolverine, who waved her off.
“I’m good,” he said. “Barely worked up a sweat.”
“I sweated a bit,” Colossus said, gesturing toward the smoking flamethrower on the floor. His face was gleaming metal, his eyes blank.
Kitty blinked. None of them had noticed her yet, in her hiding place half-inside the side wall of the coffee shop.
If I show myself again, she thought, I’ll probably wind up going with them. But if I run—if I just bail, right now—
Suddenly there was pain. Something like a whining noise, just below the audible spectrum, seemed to stab into her skull. Colossus cried out, grabbing his temples. Storm fell back; Wolverine doubled forward. Before Kitty realized what was happening, the three X-Men had fallen to the floor.
“They’re unconscious.”
Kitty gasped. She knew that voice. She forced herself to focus, to concentrate on staying intangible within the wall. Not daring to move.
A woman strode into the coffee shop, through the hole in the back wall. She was clad entirely in white: thigh-high boots, tight shorts, an ivory corset stitched tight in back, and a swirling cape fastened at the neck with a ruby pendant.
Kitty recognized her right away, despite the bizarre clothing.
It’s Ms. Frost!
The blank-faced men poured into the coffee shop. Two of them took up position at Wolverine’s arms and legs, lifting him with some effort. Another pair hoisted Storm off the floor.
“Load them in the speeder,” Ms. Frost said. “No, wait—strip them first. Search their uniforms and their persons; remove anything that might be a weapon or signaling device. Take special care with Storm. We know about the lockpicks in her headdress— make sure she hasn’t got any other surprises.”
“What about the Pryde kid?” one man asked.
Ms. Frost looked around. Kitty ducked behind a bookcase, staying out of sight.
“The X-Men were our primary target,” Frost said. “I can find the girl whenever I like. Where’s she going to hide? Math class?”
The sound of sirens filled the air. “That’s enough,” she snapped. “Pawns! Come on. Let’s move.”
The teams assigned to Logan and Storm hefted their bodies, carrying them toward the waiting hovercraft. Colossus—Peter— had reverted to his human form, but even so, the two men assigned to him struggled to lift his large body. Ms. Frost snapped her fingers, summoning reinforcements.
A blank-masked figure gestured toward one of his heavily armored comrades, lying limp on the floor. “What about the knights?”
Ms. Frost smiled. A terrible, cruel smile.
Yup, Kitty thought. She’d lock me up in a tower, all right.
Frost glared at the fallen man. “The knights,” she sneered. “They had all the power they needed to defeat the X-Men, yet they performed like amateurs.” She lowered her head and furrowed her brow. Kitty felt a slight echo of the pain, the subsonic whine that had rendered the X-Men unconscious.
Ms. Frost, Kitty thought. She’s a mutant too!
Kitty jumped as a trio of small explosions went off inside the fallen men’s armor. Their bodies spasmed, arched, and went still.
Two of the Kevlar-clad men exchanged glances. One of them gasped.
“Compose yourself,” Frost snapped. “The Hellfire Club pays good wages, and we expect our money’s worth.”
Step by step, keeping pace with Frost, Kitty edged her way along the side wall. Peter, she thought. She barely knew him, but the sight of him so helpless made her…
…well, it made her furious.
She phased through the back wall, emerging into the open air and ducking out of sight. The Kevlar-clad men were loading Logan and Storm into the strange manta-shaped hovercraft, with Peter close behind. They still hadn’t noticed her.
Ms. Frost paused in the doorway of the hovercraft. She took one last look at the devastated coffee shop and smiled. In her ivory cape and boots, she seemed like an evil fantasy queen, somehow transported into the modern world.
Kitty hesitated. Wondered, again, just what the hell she’d gotten herself into. One last time, she considered bolting and leaving the X-Men to their fate.
Oh, screw it.
As the vehicle rose into the air, she sprinted toward it, willed her body to become intangible, and leaped inside.