pa*

III can almost hear that Mission: Impossible theme song,” I Rogue said, and followed the comment with a laugh as ■ gentle as her lilting Southern accent.

Nobody else laughed. Professor Xavier even gave her something of a dirty look, that little frown he had practiced so often when the Xavier Institute was still teaching academics.

“Just tryin’ to lighten the moment,” she added.

Then she shut up.

In silence, she, Cyclops, and Jean finished the meal that had been hastily cobbled together from the mess tent in the section of Exchange Place that had been taken over by the military. None of them had eaten for a while, and it was good to have something in her belly. Not to mention sitting down for a few minutes. It was almost time to go, to put their collective heads in the proverbial lion’s mouth. As far as Rogue was concerned, another few minutes would be welcome.

But she didn’t want to wait too long. If she really started to analyze the situation, to calculate the odds, she might head west rather than east when the team began to move out. Gambit and Archangel had already departed with Val Cooper, trying to track the Alpha Sentinel. It would be just the three of them, then—she and Scott and Jean—against the mutant army Magneto was amassing.

They didn’t stand a chance.

But they were going anyway.

That’s what it meant to be one of the X-Men.

“So, we’re sure the others are being kept in the Empire State Building?” Jean asked. “I’ve tried a psi-scan, but I’m being blocked.”

“I’m getting a bit of static myself, Jean, but I did get through,” Professor Xavier said. “Storm, Wolverine, Bishop, and the Beast are all still alive and well and Magneto’s captives. You three alone will not be able to win the day. Your teammates must be freed before you truly enter into the battle.”

M

“Though I doubt Magneto’s hordes are just going to let us walk in,” Cyclops said cynically.

Another long silence.

“Have you all read Norse mythology?” Jean asked, a non-sequitur that caused them all to look at her askance.

“The gods and the giants spend tens of thousands of years fighting one another, neither ever really gaining the upper hand. Then the apocalypse comes, only they call it Ragnarok. It’s their final battle, and they pull out all the stops. It’s total chaos.”

“I always enjoyed the stories, Jean,” Professor Xavier said. “But is there a point to this?”

“Just that, in the end, neither side is victorious. They are all destroyed.”

“And y’think that’s us?” Rogue asked, surprised at her teammate’s pessimism.

“I hope it’s not,” Jean said.

“And on that happy note,” Cyclops said, shaking his head, “let’s get going. We’ve got some X-Men to liberate, and a city to save.”

“I don’t suppose we can get a cab to the Empire State Building?” Jean asked, making her own attempt at levity.

Rogue was relieved to see that she wasn’t the only one whose jokes were bombing. She understood, though. There just wasn’t much to laugh about.

“Jean?” Professor Xavier asked.

“I know, Professor,” Jean answered, tapping her temple. “We’ll keep in touch.”

* • *

Amelia Voght stood side by side with several of her fellow Acolytes, including Senyaka, Cargil, and the Kleinstock brothers, and looked out over a veritable sea of Alpha- and Beta-level mutants. They had gathered for the first formal explanation of how, exactly, Haven was to be governed. What were the laws, they all wanted to know. Voght wanted to know as well.

Magneto had delegated the duty of presenting his imperial

decrees to Major Skolnick, who would serve as a sort of governor for Haven. The gathered mutants seemed somewhat disappointed that Magneto would not be there, but Voght saw the logic.

Better that he remain apart from the others, above and beyond their reach. He was the emperor, after all. The Acolytes had always afforded him the obedience and respect due an omnipotent ruler. But this was different, Voght thought. For the first time, Magneto actually had an empire to rule. Or, at least, the beginnings of one.

Skolnick called for attention, and a hush fell over the gathered mutants. Voght marveled at the sheer power gathered in that room, and felt something akin to awe beginning to grow within her.

One would have to be completely insane to willingly enter into battle with the forces Magneto had at his beck and call. But Voght had to remind herself that she lived in a world with no shortage of insane people.

* * *

“Is it me,” Rogue asked, “or are we completely out of our minds?”

Jean grinned and Scott actually cracked a smile.

“It isn’t you,” Jean answered.

“Thank you.”

They had emerged from the Holland Tunnel to find Manhattan’s lower west side almost completely devoid of life. The Sentinels had not moved to stop them because the X-Men were, of course, mutants. Still, passing beneath the gargantuan robot had given Rogue a feeling of terrible dread. They were behind enemy lines, now. Anything could happen.

“Talk about The Twilight Zone,” Jean said quietly.

“You too?” Scott asked.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “With the sun high in the sky, and nobody around, it’s like we’ve been shunted to some side dimension where we can’t see or hear anyone else in the city.”

“Ain’t you two forgettin’ somethin’?” Rogue asked. “I

mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but do we really want t’see anyone else?”

They hugged the buildings, taking advantage of what few shadows the midday sun offered. Not far off, Rogue could smell something good cooking, and her stomach grumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t had enough to eat before leaving New Jersey.

“Smell that?” Cyclops said. “Obviously, some people are getting on with their lives.”

“Lucky them,” Rogue muttered.

At West Broadway, they turned north. Six blocks later, they turned east again. There were, they quickly discovered, far more people out and about than they would ever have imagined. Several people had cheered out loud when they had approached or passed by. Nearly as many had ducked or run into hiding. One old man actually hurled a bottle of whiskey at them. It smashed at Jean’s feet, but the three X-Men kept moving right along.

They met with no other resistance, human or mutant. No mutant militia showed up to detain them, though all three admitted that Magneto might very well already know they were in the city.

Rogue took point. When she turned north on Sixth Avenue, Scott and Jean were half a block behind. Almost immediately, she heard raucous, drunken laughter and loud male voices. The sounds came from the shattered plate-glass window of a dive with the words keith’s pub in fractured neon above the door.

Quickly, she stepped to the window. The sun’s glare made it almost reflective, so she moved to the huge jagged hole in its center, and peered in. Six leather-clad, body-pierced, tattooed young men menaced the bartender, who was serving them whole bottles from behind the bar. The largest man, whom Rogue took to be the leader, had glowing eyes. Mutants. Already fulfilling Magneto’s “dream.” Though Magneto’s words were seductive, Rogue knew that what she was witnessing was the reality of his new empire. Sadistic mutant tyrants would band together to rule Manhatttan, terrorizing the city’s human citizens.

hi

One of the mutants, a large man with a ponytail and a pink scar running down his left cheek, noticed her standing in the broken window.

“Hey, hey, boys!” he crowed. “Check out the girly-girl.”

The other live mutants, and the cowed bartender, all looked her way. After a heartbeat’s pause, the inebriated fools began to swagger toward her. Most of them looked relatively harmless, but the one she had assumed was the leader had an aura of blue energy around him that began to crackle as he moved toward Rogue. He might have the power to back up his attitude.

“Hello, darlin’,” the leader said. “Why don’t you come on in here and be friendly instead of standin’ out there and starin’ at us?”

“Actually, I prefer it out here,” Rogue said, purposely baiting them. “A girl’s got to have fresh air.”

The leader's energy aura brightened, flashing around him and rising toward the bar’s ceiling like a raging blaze of fire.

“I don’t think you heard me,” he said, and the bartender was forgotten as all six mutants moved toward Rogue. “Don’t you know who we are?”

Rogue raised an eyebrow. For a moment, she imagined how they must see her. A pretty girl, model tall, model thin, auburn hair with that white streak, green eyes, and a Southern accent. The green boots, jacket, and gloves would seem flashy if you didn’t know it was a uniform. Despite the exhausting events of the past couple of days, Rogue knew she looked good. And that was all they saw.

Prey.

“Well?” the leader demanded, raising a hand and sending a crackling tendril of energy reaching toward Rogue’s face.

“Oh, darlin’,” Rogue said, shaking her head with a small smile. “Don’t y’all know who I am?”

Several of the mutants snickered, but the leader didn’t find it funny. His lips curled up in a sneer and he stepped even closer to the broken window. The aura surrounding him melted the jagged glass that it came into contact with.

‘ ‘See, now, I was going to be nice, but you had to go and

get attitude on me,” he said. “Now I’m going to have to fry you.”

Out of the comer of her eye, Rogue saw the faces of two mutants go slack with sudden fear, and then understanding.

“Uh, Billy?” one of them asked, tapping the leader on the shoulder.

“Not now!” Billy snapped.

“But, Billy,” the other said. “Check the dude with the visor.”

They were all staring now. Cyclops and Jean Grey stood directly behind Rogue, but she didn’t turn to acknowledge them, only continued to stare at Billy. For his part, Billy looked from Cyclops, to Rogue, to Jean, back to Cyclops, and finally, back to Rogue, all in about three seconds.

“Oh, God,” Billy said. “You guys are ... 1 know who you guys are. Oh, man. You guys are... you’re them, aren’t you?”

“Yep,” Rogue said coldly. “We’re them.”

“Oh, man,” Billy said, as his friends moved, very un-subtly, away from him, away from the broken window, back into the bar.

“I’m sorry,” he added.

“Don’t tell us, sugar,” Rogue said. “Tell the bartender.”

Billy did as he was told.

“Now,” Rogue added. “All’a you, take out y’wallets, give whatever cash you have to the bartender, and get your butts out of here.”

“Where should we go?” one of them asked.

Rogue smiled. “Oh, that one’s just screamin’ for a tasteless comment.”

“You have two choices,” Jean said. “You can go home and stay inside until Magneto and his little army are gone, or you can leave the city.”

“If we see you again, no more choices,” Cyclops added.

For a few seconds, the gang members stood unmoving. Then, one by one, they removed their wallets, laid cash on the bar, and headed for the door. Billy glared at them on the way out, but Rogue gave him an extra hard look, and he turned

away. When he had hit the street, he ran faster than any of his buddies.

“We’ve got to get this city back in order before chaos takes complete control,” Jean said, shaking her head in disbelief.

But Rogue wasn’t listening. She was staring in the direction the mutant punks had gone. A familiar figure had turned the comer. His back was to the sun, casting his face in shadow, but that nearly seven-foot frame and the helmet that stretched almost shoulder to shoulder were unmistakable.

“Scott, Jean,” Rogue said. “We got trouble. Magneto ain’t wastin’ time before sendin’ in the big guns.”

Cyclops whipped around, even as Jean whispered their old enemy’s name.

“Juggernaut.”

“Take him down!” Cyclops ordered, and the three X-Men went into action.

Rogue took to the air, speeding toward the Juggernaut even as several of Cyclops’s optic blasts slammed into their enemy’s chest. The Juggernaut took a single step backward, and looked up in annoyance and what appeared to be confusion as Rogue slammed into him, driving him to the ground but barely able to do even that.

Still, she’d take it. Most of the time it was all she could do to stand toe to toe with Juggernaut and duke it out. A takedown was a step up. After all, that was part of his power, what made him the Juggernaut. Once he had momentum, nothing could stop the Juggernaut. If he’d been coming at her, there was no way he would have gone down.

The Juggernaut’s real name was Cain Marko, and much to Charles Xavier’s chagrin, he was the Professor’s stepbrother. The two had grown up together, with Cain quickly developing into a bully, partially due to abuse he received at his father’s hands.

Thing was, Marko wasn’t a mutant. It had been his misfortune to discover an ancient jewel mystically endowed with extraordinary power. That gem turned him into the Juggernaut. His stamina was limitless, his onslaught unstoppable, and his body totally indestructible. He could be hurt, but as long as he wore his helmet, which blocked any psionic attack, he couid not be beaten.

Which had never stopped the X-Men.

“Hit him, Jean!” Cyclops called.

As Juggernaut leaped to his feet, he was lifted off the ground by Jean’s telekinetic power. This time, when Cyclops let loose with an optic blast, Marko tumbled backward through the air and crashed through a brick wall. Rogue knew she was in line for the follow-through, and she was after him in a flash.

But not fast enough. Juggernaut emerged from the debris with a massive hunk of brick masonry in his hands and tossed it at Cyclops. Distracted, Rogue glanced back to see Scott incinerate most of the huge projectile with a blast from his eyes. The rest was about to hit him when it simply stopped in midair and fell to the ground.

Jean again.

Rogue realized her mistake a moment too late. The Juggernaut’s massive fist, two or three times the size of an average man’s, slammed into her chest and she felt the world slide out from under her. She crashed through a bakery window and landed on a service counter, demolishing it. She was only glad there had not been anyone inside the bakery.

“Girl,” she said to herself, “you’ve just got to start payin’ attention.”

She stood, brushed off shattered glass, and headed back out to the street. There was one other way they could beat Juggernaut, but Rogue didn’t really relish the idea. She could allow her skin to touch his, a process through which she would temporarily absorb all of his abilities and many of his memories. It wasn’t something she liked to do under any circumstance, but it did look as though it might become a necessity.

“What the hell is your problem, X-Men?” the Juggernaut roared, even as he bore down on Jean and Scott, head bowed with anger and determination.

“I think you know the answer to that, Marko,” Cyclops retorted, and let loose another full-force optic blast.

But the Juggernaut was in motion. It barely fazed him.

Scott and Jean leaped aside at the last minute, and the fight continued. Rogue was reminded of a bullfight she had once seen on a trip to Mexico. That’s exactly what this was, she thought. And the X all three of them had emblazoned somewhere on their uniforms was like a red flag for the maddened bull called Cain Marko.

“This city’s filled with crazy people!” the Juggernaut cried in frustration. “A man can’t even get a few days of R & R without all hell breaking loose, then everybody and their brother wants a piece of ya!”

“What are you complainin’ about, sugar?” Rogue asked from the air. “Ain’t Magneto and his lapdogs treatin’ you right?”

“Good God!” Marko shouted. “Do I look stupid to you?”

Suddenly, the Juggernaut’s face was battered with a rapid-fire succession of bricks from the wall he’d crashed through. Jean was telekinetically controlling the bricks, trying to keep Marko off balance and vulnerable. Or as vulnerable as the Juggernaut could be.

“Hey!” Juggernaut protested.

Rogue moved in for another attack. With Marko off balance, she wanted to make an attempt to rip off his helmet so Jean could lay him out with a telepathic assault. If that didn’t work, she would have to resort to absorbing the Juggernaut’s powers. Instantly, she was reminded that the Juggernaut was much faster than he looked. Marko whipped around and gave Rogue a severe backhand that knocked her into a boarded-up comer newsstand. The place fell apart beneath her like kindling.

“That’s it!” the Juggernaut roared. “Now I’m really starting to get mad!”

Rogue shivered. Now he’s getting mad? Just over a day earlier, she had battled Gladiator of the Imperial Guard, one of the physically strongest beings in the universe. Now she was realizing that physical strength didn’t count for much when one was dealing with ... well, for lack of a better word, magic. They would have been better off if Juggernaut had been a mutant. At least then, he ...

Suddenly, doubt overwhelmed her. The Juggernaut hadn’t

attacked them, they had attacked him. Certainly, he was one of the team’s oldest enemies, since before Rogue had ever met any of the team’s members, but he had merely been walking toward them, then standing still, when they had launched their attack.

The key, though, was that Cain Marko was not a mutant. His response when Magneto’s name had been mentioned erased any doubts Rogue might have had. The Juggernaut was not working with or for Magneto at all. But then, why ...

“Rogue, can we get a little assistance here?” Cyclops called, even as the Juggernaut bore down on him again.

“Wait!” Rogue cried. “Stop! All of you! Marko, please, hold on a minute.”

The Juggernaut did not slow down. Did not even pay attention to her pleas. And who could blame him? They had, apparently, pushed him much too far.

A moment before he would have been crushed beneath the Juggernaut’s attack, Jean telekinetically removed Cyclops from danger, lifting him clear of Marko’s path. Rogue knew she had to force the huge man to catch his breath, to take a moment to reevaluate the situation. A moment later, she knew how to do it.

Even as Cyclops was spirited away, Rogue sped toward the Juggernaut’s back. When he attempted to slow his momentum, to turn and attack the X-Men anew, Rogue got up behind him and began to push with all her strength. She wasn’t trying to stop the Juggernaut. Just the opposite, in fact.

' ‘What the... ?” he began, but then he saw the traffic-signal pole sticking out of the sidewalk right in front of him.

The Juggernaut, growled, and ran right over the pole, which snapped off as he passed. Turning, he bent down to pick it up, single-handed, then held it like a baseball bat and set his feet to swing at Rogue.

“Juggernaut... Cain, just listen a second,” she said quickly. “We thought you were with Magneto in this whole thing. Now I’m getting the idea we were wrong. It was a natural mistake, but we’re sorry.”

The Juggernaut raised and lowered the pole like a batter

choking up, ready for a pitch. She could see the confusion, the hesitation, in his face.

“We’re sorry,” she said again.

With a heavy sigh and a shake of his head, the Juggernaut tossed the signal pole to one side. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, then flicked both hands in a dismissive gesture and turned to walk away.

“Forget it,” he said, and moved south, heading out of the city.

Rogue turned to look at Cyclops and Jean, who were staring at her, mouths open wide.

“How did you know?” Scott asked.

“We attacked him,” she explained. “Marko’s not a mutant, remember?”

Cyclops slapped himself on the forehead. Jean looked at Rogue, then turned to gaze thoughtfully at the Juggernaut’s retreating form.

“Cain,” she called after him. “Cain, wait up a moment, would you?”

Jean started walking after him, and Cyclops and Rogue fell in behind her a moment later.

“What is it now?” Marko growled. “I thought we were done with our little ‘chat.’ ”

“You want to walk away from a fight with the X-Men?” Cyclops pushed. “That’s a first, I’d say.”

“It ain’t you, Summers,” the Juggernaut barked. “I got no fear of my little stepbrother’s mutie encounter group. You chumps have tried time after time to take me out of the game, and I’m still here, ain’t I?”

He looked particularly pleased with himself.

“Then why?” Rogue asked.

“Ah, hell,” Cain Marko said, rolling his eyes. “I guess you guys aren’t gonna leave me alone, are ya?”

The X-Men were silent.

“Nah, didn’t think so. Look, I came into Manhattan a couple nights ago to meet this lady . . . and, yeah, the Juggernaut gets dates now and then. She wants to get together the next night, so I stayed another night in the hotel. Then, just before

dawn, the world goes all to hell. It’s a good thing I brought my gear. Things didn’t work out with my ladyfriend, and I just wanted to go home. But, noooooo!”

“Magneto came after you?” Cyclops asked.

Juggernaut laughed.

“Not in the way you mean, Summers. A couple of his little stormtroopers got up in my face, gave me a hard time about joining ‘the cause’ when all I wanted to do was go home. Then these two German boneheads start in on me, twins they were—’ ’    .

“The Kleinstocks,” Jean said.

‘ ‘Whatever,” Marko said with a wave of his hand. ‘ ‘Magneto’s toy soldiers were all over me.”

“But you ain’t a mutant,” Rogue said.

Marko raised an eyebrow. “No kidding. But the morons wouldn’t listen. I had to get a little mean with them. And they’re like guard dogs, once they get their teeth in, they don’t let go until you take them down. Once they saw I meant to leave, and I told them another dozen times I wasn’t a mutant, they gave up. Helped that they could barely stand, and that I explained as how me an’ Charley Xavier ain’t blood related.”

Uncomfortable silence followed. Rogue looked back and forth between Juggernaut and Cyclops. Finally, the huge man shook his head slightly, his helmet rotating slowly from side to side.

“Well,” he said, “not like I actually expected an apology or anything. You guys still want to fight?”

“Hmm?” Cyclops asked, as though just returning to a conversation he’d tuned out. And Rogue thought that maybe he had.

“No,” Jean said quickly. “No, we don’t.”

“Suit yourself,” Marko said with a shrug, then turned and began to walk south once more.

“Wait!” Rogue said, and glanced at Cyclops and Jean, whose face was creased in an incredulous frown.

“What?” the Juggernaut asked.

“Stay,” she said. “We could use the help.”

Once again the other X-Men looked at Rogue with incredulity. Juggernaut only laughed.

“You’re kidding,” he said. “If I wasn’t going to help Magneto, what the hell makes you think I’d help you?”

“You ain’t payin’ attention, are you?” Rogue asked, hand on hip. “Listen up, Marko, maybe I won’t have to explain myself twice.”

“Um, Rogue,” Jean said tentatively, “I’m not even sure why you’d want to, but if you’re trying to endear yourself to the Juggernaut, that may not be the best way to—”

“No, Jean, I’m not tryin’ to make friends with Mr. Marko,” Rogue snapped. “He’s been a pain since the first time the X-Men laid eyes on him.”

She rounded on the Juggernaut and started to advance. Wide eyed with surprise, he did not attempt to defend himself. There was no need. Rogue’s attack was all verbal.

“Thing is, though, you ain’t evil, Cain. You’re just one mean sucker,” she said harshly. “Try to follow me, here. It’s the X-Men versus Magneto, the Sentinels, and however many mutants he’s got under his thumb already, not to mention whatever others may be on the way. We’re working at less than half our strength, and we’re flat-out exhausted to boot.

“If we lose, and it don’t look like we got much chance of winnin’, there’s two ways this thing can go. First, New York City ends up gettin' nuked, ’cause you know the army can’t beat Magneto. Maybe you don’t care about all the people in the city dyin’ like that, but I’ve got a feelin’ you ain’t as unfeelin’ as you make out.

“Second—and you’ll like this—Magneto wins, and the Mutant Empire expands faster and faster until the entire Earth has been remade. You’ll be bowin’ and scrapin’ before Emperor Magnus in no time, bein’ as how you were so insistent upon provin’ that you weren’t one of us.”

Cain Marko looked from one face to the next. From Rogue, to Jean, to Scott. Rogue wasn’t sure what he was searching for, maybe some confirmation that they all believed what she had said.

“I’ve got friends here, in the city,” he said, almost absently.

“Not for long,” Rogue answered.

The Juggernaut took several steps forward, until he was standing, towering, over Cyclops. Marko looked down at the leader of the X-Men, eyes hard inside his mask.

“What about it, Summers?” he asked. “This all for real? Your team gonna get trounced here today?”

“It’s a distinct possibility,” Cyclops reluctantly agreed.

“I don’t like you, Summers,” the Juggernaut said.

“The feeling’s entirely mutual, Marko.”

Juggernaut looked around again, at Rogue, then Jean, then back at Cyclops. He put out his hand.

“Just as long as we understand each other.”

It was wrong. All wrong.

Once upon a time, the Worthington family had been Manhattan royalty. Richer than God, they’d been. Yet as a boy Warren had been blissfully unaware of the harsh realities life held for others. Little things like being forced to go to bed without supper—for so minute a transgression as drawing on his father’s favorite tie with magic markers—those had been the sum total of his childhood hardships.

Then came the wings. Warren had blossomed early, hitting puberty at the tender age of eleven. At first, his parents had terrified him with their own fears, that the growths on his back might be some form of cancer. Soon enough, it became plain to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention exactly what those growths were.

Mother had always called him her little angel. She’d no way of knowing that term of endearment would one day prove prophetic.

He had to admire his parents’ fortitude, though. With an inside track on all the latest research—because after all, knowledge was power and Warren K. Worthington Jr. had enough money to buy whatever power he ever needed—his father had determined that little Warren III was a mutant. He paid all the doctors a fortune in hush money, including the man who’d devised the truss that held Warren’s wings flat against his back.

His father, Warren had long since determined, had just wanted it all to go away. If the wings weren’t seen, they weren’t really there. The Worthington family could go on with their business dynasty as if they were unaware of their son’s genetic status. Warren grew up to be a playboy, just as his father had expected. But in the privacy of his own home, in his own room, away from the stigma society placed on mutants, the stigma his own parents, by their silence, had placed on him, he unfurled his beautiful wings and dreamed of flying.

He dreamed of it until one day he couldn’t stop himself. And Warren Worthington III, his mother’s little angel, flew.

Not long thereafter he was packed off to Xavier’s School

for Gifted Youngsters. The next time he toid his parents he loved them was the day he wept over their graves.

But while his father had been alive, he had shown his mutant son all the wonders of Manhattan, the curious behavior of the city’s idle rich. New York City belonged to the captains of industry, he would always say. The wealthy families that were the power behind every company and politician in the region. Like the Worthingtons.

Warren had never understood the attitude of ownership, but he did value Manhattan for everything it had. When others complained of the homelessness, the crime, the corruption, Warren used his family’s money to do what he could in those areas. But in doing so, he constantly reminded anyone who would listen that New York was the greatest city in the world.

But now it was all wrong. He glided between old four- and five-story buildings, biometallic razor wings slicing the air, wounding the sky. Once, he’d been an angel, ivory feathers floating, muscles powering him aloft. His new wings matched his altered nature, violent and incisive. He had begun to gain control over the violence that raged within him, but he could never bring back the natural wings that had been mutilated, then amputated.

Something about Archangel would never be right again. Now his city was twisted as well. It looked the same on the outside, but its soul was being drained away, with every person fleeing in terror.

A rare trace of birdsong lilted through the air above. A nice breeze spared him a moment of the stagnant, superheated air that hung in the city’s concrete canyons. The sun shone down, glinting off display windows and forcing him to squint. It should have been a perfect New York City day.

But New York City had all but disappeared. The rude, stressed-out tribe that called Manhattan home had been thinned nearly to nothing to make room for a new tribe, a dangerous tribe. That was the way of the wild, but it didn’t sit right with him. This wasn’t the wild, after all. More than anywhere else, for better or for worse, Manhattan island was civilization.

Or had been. Now it was wild again. The structure of civilization still stood, but rather than brimming with life, it was filled with the terrified and the terrifying, lurking in doorways and subway stations and narrow alleys.

It was wrong. All wrong.

They had already checked out two Sentinels, the robots that stood guard over the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, respectively, on the western shore of the island. Cooper had said before that there was no visible marking to identify the Sentinels, but had not mentioned that there were markings. She had brought infrared goggles in her gear from Washington for that specific purpose.

It would have been a stroke of true luck if one of those Sentinels had turned out to be the Alpha unit. But they just weren’t that lucky. Now, Archangel winged his way above, acting as point man and scout, while Gambit and Cooper navigated abandoned cars, cabs, buses, and trucks on the streets below on a motorcycle they’d come upon just beyond the Manhattan-side mouth of the Holland Tunnel.

Gambit had it hot-wired in seconds, literally. Watching him, Warren had realized for the first time that all the talk of Remy LeBeau having been an international master thief before joining the X-Men had been one hundred percent truth. It made him wonder, not for the first time, how much of Gambit’s past was still a total mystery to the X-Men.

On the other hand, nobody fought harder than Remy LeBeau. For all his sarcasm, Warren figured Gambit was a good man to have at his back.

Greenwich Village was beneath him now, and the buildings had gotten even shorter. No skyscrapers down here. Offices, warehouses, retail space, that was the old city. The face of this part of the city changed from day to day, new restaurants and boutiques opening as last month’s hot spots closed.

Almost directly south, he could see the twin towers of the World Trade Center jutting up next to Battery Park City. Beyond them, over blocks of buildings of every shape and size, Archangel could see the head of the next Sentinel. Canal Street heading southeast and West Street running south were packed with vehicles, so Gambit guided the Harley down Greenwich Street.

They’d already passed several small groups of humans, even a couple of people who appeared, courageously, to be out on their own. Warren figured they were trying to discover how much the city had actually changed. They barely blinked when Gambit and Cooper drove by, but the few who spotted Archangel in the air definitely reacted. Some ran for cover, others threw whatever was at hand, still others merely pointed in fear or astonishment.

It didn’t matter that they had decided to stay in the city despite Magneto’s rule, these people were not prepared for it. Many of them would die if Magneto were left in charge. The X-Men were not about to allow that to happen.

“Swing over to Broadway when you have a chance,” he said into the comm-link on his left wrist. “From there it’s a straight shot down to Battery Park. Looks like that’s where Robby the Robot is hanging out.”

“Check,” Cooper responded.

“Val, there are twenty of these bad boys, and we’ve only checked out two,” Warren said, concerned. “It’s going to take a while. Isn’t there any other way to do this?”

“Not unless you can carry me on a flying circuit of the whole island, Warren,” Cooper responded. “No way would we get an airship or a chopper in here, buzz around Manhattan, without Magneto and his goons taking notice, and action.” Archangel sighed. Cooper was right.

“All right,” he answered. “Tell me again where they’re all located. We may have to split up if we don’t get lucky in the next hour or so.”

“We did the Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln Tunnel,” she answered. “We thought the next one was the downtown heliport, but you said Battery Park, so that’s two. Brooklyn Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, Midtown Tunnel, UN Building, Queensboro Bridge, Metro Hospital Center, Triborough Bridge.”

She stopped, presumably to take a breath and rack her brain.

“There’s one in Harlem in the one-forties, one at the Cross Bronx, one at the Henry Hudson, the GW Bridge, then four more along Riverside Park facing Jersey.”

She paused.

“Warren?”

“Pray for luck, Val,” he said. “We’re gonna need it.”

On the street, the Harley swung east. They were past the Village now, rapidly approaching the financial district. With one thrust of his wings, Warren also turned east, speeding up to get ahead of them, to do his duty as the point man. But he hadn’t been paying enough attention.

“Heads up, Remy,” he said. “Activity ahead, by City Hall.”    .    .

They were coming up on City Hall fast, and the street was filled with people. More people than Warren had seen in one spot since entering Manhattan, maybe more people than he’d imagined had stayed behind. But these folks weren’t kowtowing to Magneto. They were fighting for their city.

There were hundreds of them, the true melting pot of New York, crossing every imaginary boundary people put between them, race, gender, religion, age, income. TTiey were New Yorkers first and there to fight. Problem was, they were losing.

On the steps of City Hall, police officers and mutants stood side by side, keeping the citizens out. Warren recognized several of the mutants, including Senyaka, an Acolyte in the colorful uniform all of Magneto’s inner circle wore. Even as he looked on, Senyaka lashed out with his psionic whip and began to choke one of the men closing in on the cops. The others began to back off.

“My God,” Archangel said, then spoke into the comm again. “Magneto’s co-opted City Hall, Val. We’ve got cops and Acolytes working together. These people don’t have a chance.”

“Back off, Warren!” Val’s panicked voice erupted from the comm-link. “Get out of sight immediately. Don’t let them see you!”

“What?” Archangel asked. “What are you—”

“La petite fille is right, man ami,” Gambit interrupted, the roar of the Harley coming through the link with his heavily accented voice. “Gambit don’ like it any better den you, but we can’t afford to have Magneto and de Acolytes down on us now. We got a job to do.”

Warren ground his teeth together, took one last look at the chaos at City Hall, and turned away, heading for cover at top speed. In an instant he was gone, and he didn’t think anyone had seen him.

“Let’s get this done,” he said into the comm.

Yet he knew that no matter how lucky they were, no matter how quickly they might get the job done, the city would be deeply scarred. The psychological scars on the population were a part of it, but there was no way this thing was going to end without some serious collateral damage.

Gambit had turned the Harley down Church Street, only a block away from the City Hall madness. Archangel swiftly followed, catching up as they passed the spires of Trinity Church. Several blocks farther south, Gambit swung left for a block, then turned south onto Broadway. The green lawn of Battery Park was just ahead.

Archangel held back, not wanting to gain more attention from the Sentinel than was absolutely necessary. Now that he saw it, standing its silent, deadly vigil at the southern tip of the island, he realized how vital that particular spot was.

From Battery Park, ferries ran to and from Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Close by was the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry. Far more important, however, were the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the downtown heliport, and Fort Jay, the U.S. Coast Guard station on Governors Island, just a short way across the Upper New York Bay.

It occurred to him then that Magneto was very serious about his plans for Haven. His behavior had been eminently reasonable, and insane at the same time. He truly believed that Haven would be able to function with the rest of the world. If he’d thought the island would have to be completely self-sufficient, he’d have ordered the Sentinels to simply destroy the bridges and tunnels and be done with it.

Somehow, the idea that Magneto believed the world might come to accept his Mutant Empire was more chilling than the inevitable catastrophe that was guaranteed when he realized he was wrong.

“How about it, Val?” Archangel asked over the comm. “What’s the infrared say? This our boy?”

“Negative, Warren,” she said. “Let’s move on.”

As they headed for the Brooklyn Bridge, Warren started praying for luck once more. It was all they had.

* * *

The human resistance was growing. The relatively small group of somewhere between one and two hundred that Bobby Drake had gotten involved with had already hooked up with several others. It was a network of people who refused to kneel before Magneto. Some were bigots. Some had not been bigots before Magneto took over, but were gradually devolving into bigotry. But the majority were just people who didn’t want to give up without a fight.

Bobby had tagged along, helping out where he could, for most of the morning. In fact, it had been Gabi, one of the resistance fighters, who had confirmed for him that the X-Men were indeed being held inside the Empire State Building. He’d thought about it for quite some time before he realized that he had only one option.

Iceman was going to have to go in after them.

Of course, some of his new friends had offered to help. Gabi and her brother Michael had nearly forced themselves on him, and it had taken some effort to talk them out of it. After all, if the X-Men were the city’s best hope, it was in all their interests to break the rest of the team out. Still, they were new to this kind of thing. He’d been risking his neck for years, gone up against Magneto what seemed like dozens of times, and he was still around to talk about it.

Truth be told, once he’d thought about it, he stopped viewing himself as the X-Men’s resident clown. He was, in the end, the last X-Man. That was some incredible billing, and fulfilling the role would be a daunting task. Iceman didn’t know if he was capable of it, but he was certain of one thing:

If he couldn’t rescue the X-Men, it would only be because he himself had either become a captive, or had died in the effort.

A sobering thought. But Bobby had been having quite a few of those today.

Like most buildings of its size, the Empire State Building had several entrances to the lobby. Magneto’s own little Gestapo guarded the lobby as if it were Fort Knox, but Bobby knew that the majority of his experienced Acolytes would be off handling more important and immediate tasks throughout the city. In fact, in making a wide circuit of the building, he did not see a single mutant that he recognized. Iceman had assumed that Voght, or Unuscione, or even the Blob, would have been left in charge of the new recruits. But if there was a seasoned warrior among them, it wasn’t anyone he’d ever run across.

The lobby was a death trap. But as far as he could tell, little or no attention was being paid to an additional entrance, a service door that did not go into the lobby itself. He had to assume that it would be guarded on the inside, but there was no sentry posted outside the door. That would be his entry point.

Carefully avoiding the conspicuous sight lines of those mutants guarding the lobby, he made his way to the side of the building as quickly as possible. He hoped that anyone seeing him might mistake him for a New Yorker either brave or stupid enough to have come this close to ground zero.

Once at the door, however, he had to work fast. It was a heavy metal thing, probably foam core, and there were two deadbolts above the lock that was in the knob itself. No time for niceties, though. Icing up his right hand, he concentrated on freezing one side of the door frame and the locks. He didn’t ice the knob, however. He needed something to hold on to.

Fully human again, for his ice form did not give him any additional strength, Bobby wrapped a hand around the doorknob and yanked with all his might. With a crack, the brittle frozen metal of the deadbolts snapped and the door swung open in his hand.

There was only one guard. The mutant turned toward him in speechless surprise, jaw slack and eyes wide. Bobby didn’t know what his power was, but he knew the guy might call out an alarm any second. Like a batter going for a home run, Iceman swung his hands through the air. Mid-swing, the ice bat formed in his hands, and a second later, it connected with the guard’s skull.

The guy went down hard in a shower of ice shards, totally out. Iceman looked down at him, and couldn’t help but feel a little guilty.

“Sorry about that, rookie,” he said quietly. “But you bet on the wrong horse.”

A moment passed and Bobby heard nothing, no shouts or running footfalls. He was in, that was a start. Now he had to do his best to see that nobody knew he was in. There was nothing he could do about the ice on the floor. He would have to hope that it melted before anyone came by to check on or relieve the guard. There were larger problems.

First, of course, was the guard himself. He was out cold, though Bobby checked to make certain he was not seriously injured. It looked like he’d be out for a while. But that wasn’t the problem. Sure, he could be stashed in a stairwell or an air duct, but his absence could not go unnoticed for long, so Iceman would have to work fast. On the other hand, given the likelihood that a number of mutants who’d lined up to follow Magneto were already having second thoughts, the guard’s superiors would have to consider the possibility that he had gone AWOL.

Bobby crossed his fingers.

Then there was the door. He brushed the remnants of the shattered lock out onto the sidewalk and closed it. Relief spread through him when the door actually stayed closed. It was perfectly balanced, and didn’t hang open at all. If someone tugged on it, the cat would be out of the bag. But other than that, and the ice on the floor, he thought he’d be safe for a little while.

Nearby there was a maintenance closet. Inside, he found a mop and bucket, and a sink. Moving as fast as he could, he put some water in the bucket and left it with the mop leaning against a wall. If the ice melted, nobody would think twice about the water.

He called the service elevator, ready for anything when its doors slid open. There was nobody inside, so he pressed stop and opened the trapdoor in the ceiling. It took all his strength to shove the guard up through the hole—thank God he’d been working out—but he didn’t dare use his powers on the elevator. There’d be no way to cover it up.

With all of that taken care of, though, Bobby still had to deal with the biggest problem of all: finding the X-Men.

He stared at the service elevator for a moment, then smiled. It had given him an idea. He didn’t have much time, but without knowing where the X-Men were, he also didn’t have a lot of options. Bobby pressed the button to call the elevator again and the door slid open. He scanned the floor numbers. Most of Magneto’s operations would likely be clumped together in one section of the building—or at least, that was his logic. At random, he pressed twenty-three, then quickly pulled himself up through the trap door where the guard still lay unconscious.

As the floors ticked by, he looked at the welt that had risen on the guard’s forehead, already turning black and blue. The guy might have a concussion, if not something worse. It was regrettable, but at least Bobby figured he didn’t have to put the guard on ice. That could cause even more medical problems, not to mention giving him away once somebody noticed the cold water dripping down into the elevator from the melting ice.

Luck was with him. The elevator didn’t stop on any other floors. He held open the trapdoor slightly, enough to see through. When the doors slid open on twenty-three, he waited a few moments to see that there was nobody there. Then he hung his head down to look out into the hallway. He saw nothing but offices. Apparently empty offices. The door slid shut even as he swung down into the elevator, and he jabbed at the door open button quickly.

Bobby closed the trapdoor, and moved out onto the twenty-third floor, staying close to the wall. Every nerve was tingling, every muscle taut. He didn’t think he had ever been so tense.

Tempted to transform into Iceman, he resisted. If he was spotted, staying flesh and blood would hopefully give him some element of surprise and confusion over his enemies. Unless he ran into someone who knew what Bobby Drake looked like.

Magneto, for instance.

But he didn’t want to think about that.

Down the hall, he found the main elevator bank. He called the elevator and ducked into an office across from it. When he heard the ding of its arrival, he peeked out just as the doors slid open ... and quickly ducked back in. There were three people on the elevator, likely mutants he did not recognize.

The fourth try, he got an empty elevator. He scrambled up through the trapdoor, this one much smaller than the one on the service elevator, and lay down on top.

Alone in enemy headquarters, he considered what he was doing to be foolhardy at best, completely nuts more likely, and suicidal at worst. But there really wasn’t any other choice. He was an X-Man, and the X-Men took care of their own.

No matter what the risk.

The elevator began to move. Iceman lay still, listening, and hoped for the best.

• * •

On the vid-comm unit Magneto had set up in his makeshift office, the stem face of Exodus, as always, showed little emotional reaction to his master’s words. For without question, Magneto was the mysterious mutant’s master. Exodus had been in some kind of mutant hibernation before Magneto had reawakened him to become the shepherd of Avalon.

Magneto’s right hand, Exodus had been left behind on Avalon to continue that job. He was the being responsible for finding only the most powerful, most desirable mutants for relocation to Avalon, where they would make a contribution to the new society. Exodus was also the ferryman, like Charon on the river Styx, who brought those mutants to the space station, the last haven for mutantkind.

After this new Haven that Magneto was building on Earth, of course.

“You seem surprised,” Magneto said, though it was only because he was so familiar with Exodus that he could read such an emotion in the mutant’s motionless features.

“Dukes and Allerdyce were specifically excluded from Avalon,” Exodus explained. “It is somewhat surprising, yes, that you decided to recruit them for Haven.”

“Don’t be such a snob, Exodus,” Magneto said, half attempting humor, an effort he rarely made but which Exodus’s stone-faced manner inspired him to. “Pyro and the Blob might not be what we were looking for on Avalon, but Haven is a harsher environment, the testing ground, I suppose, for the final hierarchy of the Mutant Empire.

“In any case, as you know, all mutants are welcome here. It is a sanctuary. We don’t have the space or the supplies to make such a broad-minded offer regarding Avalon.”

After a brief silence, Exodus nodded.

“But it goes well?” he asked. “I would remind you, Lord Magneto, that you have but to call and I will be instantly at your side.”

“Actually,” Magneto said, leaning back in the leather chair he’d moved into his office, “it goes extremely well. Most of the Acolytes have been given different duties. We’ve a city and, eventually, an empire to run. These kinds of things are vital if we are to succeed. Even those you despise have been dispatched for one purpose or another.

‘ ‘The authorities that remain have wisely chosen to collaborate with us on the new regime. Even now, mutants and human police officers are beginning to implement the new laws I have put into place.”

“There is no resistance by the humans?” Exodus asked, obviously surprised. Magneto thought the change in his expression was refreshing.

“There is always resistance among the humans,” he responded. “I imagine there always will be. But it is nothing we cannot handle.”

“What of the X-Men?”

“Half of them are my prisoners already,” Magneto said. “The others are on the prowl. I’m sure, but there are a handful of them and many hundreds, soon maybe even thousands, of us. What can they do?

“No, Exodus,” Magneto said, shaking his head slightly. “I don’t think I’ll be needing you down here. If I do, of course I shall call for you. But for now, continue operating Avalon in my stead. That is all I ask.”

“As you command, my Emperor,” Exodus answered, the first time he had called Magneto by that title.

It felt right.

For most of his life, Cain Marko had equated kindness in any form with despicable weakness. As a child, he had felt his father’s hand more times than he could count. But the physical abuse wasn’t the worst part, not nearly. Far more painful were the harsh words, the hard looks, the utter and complete coldness of his father’s heart. Watching his stepmother quiver and his stepbrother Charles escape into his studies, Cain nurtured a terrible hatred for them that grew with each passing day.

They were weak. They deserved what they got. Cain vowed that he would be strong, that he would never shrink in fear from anyone or anything, never show weakness. But around his father, he couldn’t help himself.

Cain Marko became cruel. Not merely a bully, but a tyrant of the schoolyard, and even worse at home to his stepbrother, who somehow escaped the brunt of his father’s wrath.

By the time he discovered the mystical gemstone that transformed him into the Juggernaut, Cain Marko had already developed an inclination toward crime and a sadistic streak wide as the Grand Canyon. His exploits as the Juggernaut, and his career as a criminal, led him, eventually, to make the acquaintance of the man who would change his life.

Tom Cassidy—called “Black Tom” by Interpol, the X-Men, and anybody else who’d ever run into him—was the first person Cain had ever known who could be both ruthless and kind. His kindness to Cain was an awakening of sorts. He had been wrong, for most of his life, about something he had believed in as gospel. Kindness did not always equal weakness. Friendship was possible, even desirable, if one chose carefully.

Steadily, Cain had changed. He was still a criminal. He was still ruthless when it was necessary to get the job done. He still gave no quarter in battle, particularly with the X-Men. He still hated his stepbrother, Charles Xavier.

But the sadistic side of the Juggernaut began to erode. In those quiet moments when he was honest with himself, Cain realized that part of him was almost completely gone, and he

n

was glad. He might be an international fugitive, wanted in nearly every major nation in the world, but he was motivated by confidence, dignity, and greed, now, not pure hatred.

He was never completely certain the change was for the better, but it sure as hell felt like it.

Now this. Now he was going into battle side by side with the X-Men, the goody-two-shoes Boy Scouts he had always gone out of his way to trounce before. Yet, one of the reasons he had always hated them was because of the holier-than-thou crap they constantly spouted, the way they treated him like he was gum on the bottom of their shoe, the same way Charles had always treated him. He hated the way they made their offers of help seem a weakness on his part rather than on their own, so ... condescending, that was the word.

It infuriated him.

But today was different. After the short fight they’d had, which he had actually enjoyed, they had been almost respectful toward him. Sure, they’d jumped him without so much as a “heads up,” but, given the circumstances, he could understand that kind of overreaction. He didn’t really blame them.

So he walked down the middle of the street shoulder to shoulder with the X-Men, ready to take back the city, not because he cared about its people or aspired to be a hero in any way—he sure as hell didn’t—but because he was a human being and it was his world too. Magneto could kiss his butt, as far as Cain was concerned.

Truth be told, he thought it was pretty cool. Like something out of an old Western flick. Not to mention that the Grey woman and Rogue were both totally delicious-looking company. At the end of the day, he’d be just as happy to kick the crap out of the X-Men all over again, but for the moment....

And the very best part of all, the thing that had clinched it for him, even beyond his determination not to bow to Magneto, was the fact that Charles Xavier, his hated stepbrother, was the founder and benefactor of the X-Men.

Knowing his precious soldiers were heading into battle side by side with the Juggernaut would really get under his skin. Cain loved that. Even if he and the X-Men got their heads

handed to them by the Sentinels, it would be worth it.

Far ahead, he could see the Empire State Building jutting up out of the jagged skyline, dwarfing anything around it. It wouldn’t be long now.

“Shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, a little less conspicuous at this point?” he asked. “I mean, the OK Corral has a kind of glamorous history to it, but the odds there were a little more even, y’know.”

“What are you saying, Juggernaut?” Cyclops asked.

“I guess what I want to know is, do you have a plan, or are we just going to waltz in and stomp heads until we end up getting stomped, then it’s game over?” the Juggernaut explained.

“Both,” Rogue said, and smiled.

“Huh?”

“We don’t stand a chance without the other X-Men, Cain,” Jean Grey said. “Even with you on our side. Now, if we can’t get them out, we’re going to have to go it alone. But that’s the last resort.”

“Has it occurred to you people that, if we don’t stand a chance of winning, we don’t stand a chance of getting in to free your buddies anyway?” Cain asked.

“Not true,” Cyclops said. “We have one chance. We lose.”

Cain stared at Scott Summers.

“You mean, like, on purpose?” he asked.

“You just said we didn’t have a chance of winning, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get in. If we’re going to lose anyway, let’s put that to our advantage,” Cyclops said.

Before the Juggernaut could protest, Jean spoke up.

“If they’re using inhibitor collars, which is highly likely, considering Magneto’s past tactics, that won’t work for you because you’re not a mutant. And since each collar is calibrated for the individual mutant, I can psionically confuse our captors so that we’re given the wrong collars,” she said.

“Yeah, but to do that, you have to be conscious,” Cain replied.

“There are always risks,” Rogue said.

“That’s a hell of a risk,” he said. “Why take the chance? If we’re all captured, there isn’t anyone left to come to the rescue.”

“You have a better idea,” Cyclops said, somewhat sarcastically.

Cain’s eyes narrowed inside his helmet. The amiable spirit with which he’d been dealing with the X-Men dissipated. Scott Summers was a good tactician, an excellent field commander, and courageous as they came. Just because the X-Men had always been his enemies did not mean he could not appreciate, or even respect, their strengths. But he was something of an academic snob as well. Summers must have figured just because Cain didn’t finish high school that he was stupid. Well, he was wrong.

“In fact,” he said coldly. “I think I do.”

“Well, I for one would like to hear it,” Rogue said. “If we can avoid a head-on confrontation until after the X-Men are free, I’d be happy.”

“You guys think too heroically,” Cain said, and smiled in amusement at his own words. “This martyr-complex thing has got to stop if you want to see breakfast tomorrow. You’ve got to start to think like a thief, like a criminal. The rule there is, whatever you steal is only valuable if you’re still around to benefit from its theft.

“That’s why we need a diversion,” he said, looking to Jean because he was slightly irked at Cyclops just then. “If me, Summers, and Rogue start raising hell not far from Magneto’s headquarters, the attention will be diverted from the building. You probably wouldn’t be able to get in and find the X-Men without being discovered, but I’m sure you can convince a guard or three here and there that they didn’t see or hear you at all. Right?”

“It’s a fine line, Cain,” Jean responded, “but I try not to use wholesale telepathic manipulation on people when it can be helped.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t understand that...” Cyclops began, but let it go when he received an annoyed glance from Grey,

n

his longtime lady. Juggernaut would have been amused, but they didn’t have much time.

“Look,” he said, “I understand perfectly that you guys try to tread some fine line. To be honest, I think it’s pretty cowardly—when you go into a fight, it should be to win, no matter what—but somehow you seem to win anyway, so who’s to argue with success, right? Point is, we’ve got no time for things like good manners here. You said yourselves that this was it, the big one, that the future of the world rests on whether we can beat Magneto or not. Let’s worry about crossing boundaries later, okay?

“Besides, once I’ve started a fight, there’s only one way it ends,” Cain vowed. “The other guy goes down, or I do. I’m not playing dead for anybody. I just can’t do it.”

He watched them, what was left of the X-Men, as each weighed what he had said. Except for Wolverine, he’d always considered them a bunch of liberal wimps with their heads in the clouds. Now, though, with the fire in Rogue’s eyes, the resolve on Jean Grey’s face, and the tightening of Scott Summers’s fists, Cain wasn’t so sure.

One thing he was certain of, though, was that their plan sucked. Getting captured, on purpose or otherwise, just didn’t sit right with him. If they weren’t prepared to go along with his alternate suggestion, well, the Juggernaut would have to come up with a third plan for himself. Cain wondered if Summers would be so used to running the show that he’d ignore his suggestion out of spite. After a moment’s consideration, he pushed the thought away. Summers was smarter than that.

It wasn’t at all that the Juggernaut was extremely intelligent, or a good strategist, or anything of the sort. It was only as he’d said: in his line of work, you got in, grabbed your objective, and got out, one way or another.

Yeah, they’d have to go with his—

“Company,” Jean said quietly, taking several steps toward an eccentric clothing store on the right, hugging close to the building.

The others quickly followed, and so did Juggernaut, though he didn’t see anyone. He quickly discovered that he wasn’t

built for stealth, however. He was just too damn big to be inconspicuous, no matter where he was.

“What am I missing?” Cain asked.

Jean held up a finger to shush him. Rogue went to the shop’s door, and with a quick twist of the knob that shattered the locks, they were inside. The Juggernaut was about to follow when Cyclops held up a hand, urging him to stay out on the sidewalk.

“We’re not close enough,” Summers said. “Let’s try to do this fast.”

“Do what?” Cain replied, beginning to get frustrated.

Then he heard the voices.

Twenty-five yards ahead was an intersection. Traffic lights continued their mute exercise of authority with no regard to the lack of vehicles they might command. The voices were loud, one particularly deep and booming, magnified all the more by the haunting absence of noise in a city normally so saturated with it.

“This is the life, buddy!” the loudest voice thundered. “Always knew being a cop was easy. Free donuts, your own little kingdom like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. It’s a pretty good deal.”

“Frankly, Fred, I was hoping for a position with a bit more long-term potential, more responsibility,” said another male voice, this one with a strong Australian accent.

Juggernaut recognized them both. Grey must have been psi-scanning their immediate area almost constantly, watching for an attack or even a chance meeting, as this apparently was going to be.

Pyro and the Blob came around the corner as close to side by side as they could get, considering the Blob’s extraordinary girth. They weren’t alone. At least a dozen other mutants trailed behind them, some familiar to him, most not. Blob and Pyro, though, were easy to recognize. They’d been part of Freedom Force for a while, celebrities, but even before that, they’d made the news. Major troublemakers, hellraisers of the first order.

“Well, well, well,” Juggernaut said, “what’ve we got here?”

As a fighting force, these later-generation Acolytes were untrained. Several seemed to freeze, uncertain how to react. Fully half a dozen spread out in attack formation, those who were armed bringing weapons to bear. Mutant mercenaries. Not criminals, not terrorists, just creeps with powers hiring out to the highest bidder without a moment’s consideration of who they were working for, what they were destroying. Juggernaut had no illusions: he was no hero, he was one of the bad guys. But even the guys in the black hats in the cowboy flicks had dignity, honor.

Mercenaries were scum.

There were a pair of mutants in the back—a big bruiser and a stout guy with spiky hair all over his body—who looked like tag-team wrestlers and clearly worked as a team. They looked familiar, but Juggernaut couldn’t place them. Those two bothered him. They seemed dangerous, far more so than the mercenaries, because these other two were obviously a little nuts.

Pyro and the Blob both merely smiled and kept walking.

“Do my eyes deceive me, Fred, or is that the Juggernaut?” Pyro asked, even as he waved at the mercenaries to be sure they wouldn’t attack ... yet. “Why, I’d heard as how he’d turned tail and abandoned the cause. Was kind of surprised, actually. Not a good idea to piss Lord Magneto off these days.”

Lord Magneto, Juggernaut thought with venomous sarcasm. What a load of crap.

“How about it, buddy?” the Blob said, ignoring his partner’s amused babble. “You come back to tell us you’ve changed your mind?”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” Cain replied.

He could feel the sigh of relief that went through the group. The Juggernaut’s reputation had preceded him after all. Who in their right mind would want a battle, no matter what the odds? As Pyro and the Blob stopped a few feet away from him, Cain studied the rest of them, trying to figure out what their powers were. Far as he could tell, the tag-team boys didn’t have any kind of weapon, mechanical or natural, other than strength and, he guessed, agility.

Of the four mutants who were obviously inexperienced, two looked as if they might pose a threat—not to him, of course. One had bony spines lining his body, and the way he stood it seemed likely the teenager could fire the spines from his body or from some natural-flesh projectile housing on the back of his hands. The other was leaking phosphorescent radiation or something from his mouth. The rest of the rookies looked harmless, but you could never judge a mutant just on appearance.

The mercenaries were another story. Three were armed with high-powered automatic rifles, so their mutant gifts were probably more cerebral. Another was nearly feral, with a collar and heavy chain leash held by a seven-foot hulk of a man whose flesh seemed made of granite. Then there was the woman, exquisitely beautiful with her tumble of chestnut-brown hair and a gown of some gossamer material so thin it was nearly impossible for Cain to take his eyes off her, even though he could see nothing of her revealed beneath the dress.

They were dangerous, though obviously those armed with conventional weapons were low-level mutants at best.

“Changed your mind, eh?” Pyro sneered. “S’funny. Harlan Kleinstock told me you insisted you weren’t a mutant at all. You had a few choice words for him, is what he said, and none of them were real nice.”

“That’s true,” Juggernaut agreed. “But like I said, I changed my mind.”

“So now you want to join up—maybe you realized Magneto’s gonna be the only game in town pretty soon,” the Blob reasoned aloud.

“You got it,” Cain admitted. “Magneto’s getting ready to change the world. But you’re wrong about one thing: I didn’t come back to join up.”

The Blob narrowed his eyes in confusion. “But I thought you said you changed your mind?” he asked.

“I did, but not how you’re thinking,” the Juggernaut said, a thin smile splitting his face. “See, I wasn’t lying when I said I wasn’t a mutant. Now, I figure, I’ve got a lot to lose if Magneto makes every human being a second-class citizen— assuming he’ll even be that kind about it.”

Pyro held up a hand and the mercenaries started to close in, spreading out a bit to be sure that the Juggernaut couldn’t escape. With the rookies along for the ride, they started to circle around behind him. What fools, he thought. They actually imagined he was planning to make a break for it, even after he’d been standing there nearly two minutes already.

“Y’know, you actually are as stupid as you are big,” the Blob said, smiling a schoolyard bully smile that was as obvious a threat as if he’d been slamming a fist into his palm.

Juggernaut snorted laughter.

“Oh, that’s rich,” he said. “I’ve been called big and stupid by a guy named ‘The Blob’! That’s one to tell the grandchildren!”

The Blob began to go for him, but stopped when Pyro held up a hand and mumbled a warning.

“We’re gonna do this the right way, the way Magneto wants it done,” Pyro said. “You have been summoned before the Emperor Magneto, Juggernaut. This is a direct order from an Imperial officer. Will you comply?”

“Yeah, right,” Juggernaut said derisively.

“In that case, in the name of Emperor Magneto, you are hereby under arrest,” Pyro said, one comer of his mouth rising in a bratty smirk. “Okay, people. He’s all yours.”

The Blob took a step forward, precisely what the Juggernaut had been waiting for. As Fred Dukes was in midstep, Cain hauled back and hit him with all the strength he could muster, right in the face. There was a crack, like bone breaking, and the Blob cried out in pain and fell onto his butt on the pavement, accompanied by a minor earth tremor.

The rest of them would probably be a cinch. Even if he’d been alone. Which he wasn’t.

“The X-Men!” Pyro cried as he saw Cyclops, Rogue, and Jean Grey burst from the clothing store.

It got ugly after that.

Pyro tried to flash-fry the Juggernaut where he stood. Cain reached for him, completely unscathed by the flames, and the little man tried to leap away. But the Juggernaut was faster than most of his enemies imagined, and snagged Pyro by the ankle. He tore the gas tanks from the mutant’s back, and tossed them away. Then he held Pyro up in front of him and slapped him once across the face. Pyro hung limp, out cold, and the Juggernaut threw him away as carelessly as he had the gas tanks, not even bothering to watch where the Australian landed.

“Next!” he shouted, thrilled by the fight. It was a real kick to see the X-Men fighting beside him, knowing they weren’t going to try to stop him because, for once, he was on the side of the angels.

Bullets sprayed the X-Men, bouncing off Rogue and the psi-shield Jean had thrown up around herself and Cyclops. In seconds, all the rookies were down except the one with the phosphorescence around his lips. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and green chemical fire raged forth, and this time, Juggernaut could feel the heat. This was no ordinary flame, but some mutant combination of normal fire, chemical heat, and intense hatred, a psionic blaze with a formidable mind behind it.

Cain snarled at the rookie, snapping one of tire armed mutants up in his hands and using the man for a shield. The guy was lucky, his mutant power was a personal force shield. However, it wasn’t a very powerful shield. It was going to keep him alive, but not from getting burned.

The Juggernaut heard a howl and before he could turn, the feral mercenary was on his back tearing at his helmet, trying to get it off. He didn’t think the thing knew that his helmet protected him from psychic probes and attacks. No, the savage mutant just wanted to tear at his face and eyes, since the flesh of his anus resisted its claws.

Cyclops quickly took out the two other armed mutants, then fired a shot at the ghostly woman who now floated toward him. As Cain looked on, the woman seemed to become a kind of copper mist, sparkling in the sun and yet unmoved by the slight breeze that stirred the day’s heat. It enveloped Cyclops, but the Juggernaut couldn’t see anymore because the feral mercenary was still on his back. He swatted at it, reaching back to try and get hold of it, but the thing, or man if it still was a man, was too quick.

Cain saw Rogue, about to be pummeled by the huge mutant who appeared made of stone. He spun around, reaching for the wild thing on his shoulders, and saw Jean Grey, using a telekinetic shield to hold off an attack by the green fire breather. Spun again, and there was Cyclops, on the ground, clutching at his throat as if he could find no air to breathe. The copper mist that had been a beautiful mutant woman hung around him in a cloud. He blasted an optic charge into the metallic ether, but with no result.

Part of the Juggernaut wanted to watch, to savor the end of an enemy’s life. But that was the part of him, the cruel, sadistic part, that he had been working at eliminating for years. It wasn’t professional, and it didn’t feel very good either. Besides, for now, Cyclops was on his side.

The Juggernaut stopped spinning and bent over fast. The feral mutant was momentarily thrown into the air, though it kept its clawed hold on his armored neck. Still, it flew up high enough so that Cain could grab it by its odd coat, his invulnerable skin splintering a number of spines that might have been tipped with poison.

He tossed the thing into the poison mist next to the writhing form of Cyclops. Immediately, the woman solidified. Though he ought to have been near death after having been so long without air, his lungs filled with some awful poison until she had drawn herself out of him to reform, Scott Summers was on his knees in a heartbeat. The feral thing reached for him, and Juggernaut worried that he’d made a mistake, that he’d saved Cyclops from one form of poisoning only to confront him with another by way of the savage mutant’s porcupinelike spines.

Cyclops toasted it with a full-force optic blast from about three feet away. The savage creature was thrown across the

street and through a department store’s plate-glass window. It stirred, alive still, but did not rise.

“Scott, get ready!” Jean shouted.

Juggernaut looked over to where Jean still protected herself against the rookie mutant spitting toxic flame. Suddenly, he realized what she intended. She was going to telepathically force the ghostly poison woman to become solid so that Cyclops could take her down—leaving herself deliberately open to attack.

He moved.

“Now!” Jean said, dropping her telekinetic shield and forcing the ghost woman to solidify.

Cyclops decked the woman with a fist as Juggernaut hurled himself in front of the flames that were about to engulf Jean Grey. He howled in agony, and the thing turned on him, advancing, trying to finish the job.

“Thanks, Cain, I just needed a momentary distraction,” Jean said, and suddenly, no more fire came out of the mutant’s mouth. Even the phosphorescence that had been omnipresent had now disappeared.

The rookie’s eyes went wide.

“What did you do?” he said in horror, then, realizing he had no weapon, turned and ran away.

“What did you do?” Cain asked.

“Unlike most mutants who have energy powers, like Scott or Gambit, that guy’s fire was not merely psionically controlled but psionically generated. I turned it off. He can’t remember how to generate it anymore,” Jean said, her voice harsh, and yet somehow sad.

“Pretty nasty for the X-Men,” Cain remarked. “I wonder if Charley would approve.”

“Probably not,” Jean admitted. “But we don’t have time for manners, or so I’m told.”

“Touche,” Cain said.

“Juggernaut!” the Blob boomed, just to the left. “You hurt me!”

“Good!” Cain replied, smiling broadly.

“What’s wrong with you, siding with them?” the Blob

asked, advancing dangerously, clutching his broken face. “You’re a criminal, you’re one of us.”

“One of you?” the Juggernaut asked. “Don’t insult me, man. You haven’t got any class at all. You’ll hire yourself out to anyone with a plan and some cash, or just tear up a town for the hell of it, because you can. I don’t have the time for those tantrums anymore, and I’m not about to become a mercenary. I’m a career criminal, Blob, in it for the gain, not the pain. If Magneto takes over, my career’s over.”

“If that’s the way you feel,” the Blob sneered, then winced at the pain it caused. ‘ ‘But your career is over anyway, right now. I know why they call you the Juggernaut. Story says once you’re moving, you can’t be stopped. Well, try me, buddy. Nothing moves the Blob.”

For a moment, Cain flashed back to the schoolyard of his childhood, to the dozens of similar taunting challenges he’d received from kids, mostly older, who’d heard he was a tough guy, a bully, and wanted to build their own reputations by taking him down. That was when he was filled with rage and hatred, when he passed on the pain his father gave him to any loudmouth or wiseass weakling who crossed his path.

There was joy in it then, and he felt that old joy rising again, the sadistic pleasure he could take in hurting his opponents. But he brushed it away. It didn’t make him want to take the Blob down any less, but in his mind, attacking was a dismissive gesture. Not to cause pain, but to eliminate an obstacle. And the Blob was the ultimate obstacle.

The Juggernaut roared as he sprinted the distance between himself and the Blob. Just before they collided, the Blob seemed to lose his arrogant certainty, and he flinched slightly, to one side. Then Juggernaut slammed into him, at an angle, and spun away to the left. His head was ringing from the impact, but he turned to take another crack at the Blob.

Who was staring down at his feet. He’d been moved at least twelve inches, and there was no telling what might have happened, to both of them, if he hadn’t flinched at the end. The Blob was still holding his shattered cheek, and after a moment, his eyes rolled back in his head and he once again fell to the pavement.

This time, he did not get up.

“What do you know?” Juggernaut said. “Unconscious. Maybe a concussion from the impact.’’

As he passed the Blob walking back toward Jean Grey, his mean streak resurfaced, just for a moment, and he turned to glare at the huge mutant’s unconscious form.

“Loser,” he snarled, and kept walking.

“Oh, God!” Rogue shouted suddenly.

Jean and the Juggernaut turned together and ran to where Rogue stood, staring in horror at a pile of rocks on the pavement in front of her.

“Rogue,” Cyclops said in a hush as he approached from the other side. “What did you do?”

“I don’t...” Rogue began, then took a breath before continuing. “It wasn’t one’a my punches. I had just thrown him down. I was purposely tryin’ not to hit him hard ’cause I wasn’t real sure what he was made of. Then he turns around and rushes me, with all he’s got.

“I just stood my ground, Scott,” she said. “An’ he crashed into me an’ jus’—jus’ broke! I swear I didn’t mean to kill him.”

“You didn’t kill him, Rogue,” Cain said in real sympathy. “There wasn’t anything else you could have done. The man was just a fool.”

After a moment of silence, Cyclops said: “Well, there’s nothing to be done for it now. We’ve just got to move on and get as close to the Empire State as we can before we run into another group like this.”

“You’ve got to wonder how many there are,’’ Jean said.

“I’m trying not to think about it,” Scott replied.

The comment hit a nerve. Cain looked around and realized that the two tag-team wrestlers he’d seen originally were not there. Had not been there, in fact, since just after the fight began.

“We’d better hurry,” he said. “I think word is already on the way back to Magneto.”

The X-Men looked around. Scott and Rogue didn’t seem to notice anything. Maybe they hadn’t seen the two stout mutants. But Jean realized it right away. She had probably sensed them earlier.

“Hairbag and Slab,” she said.

“Those are their names?” the Juggernaut asked. “No wonder they hang around with the Blob.”

“They never did before,” Cyclops answered.

“Yeah,” Rogue said, looking back once more at the remains of the mutant who had, in effect, killed himself using Rogue as his weapon. “It’s a whole new world.”

Xavier and Magneto had been in a philosophical war over the future of the mutant race for decades, a war that had suddenly, explosively, entered reality. Magneto had the Sentinels, the Acolytes, hundreds of recently converted followers, and an entire city at his command.

All Charles Xavier had was hope.

Hope that the President of the United States would act with wisdom and caution. Hope that the world would not be irrevocably turned against mutants by Magneto’s actions. Hope that Val Cooper could take the Sentinels out of the fight. Hope that the X-Men’s small numbers were enough to achieve victory. And, finally, hope that victory would not come at too high a price.

There was one other thing that Xavier had, one other weapon in the war against Magneto’s twisted racist dreams of conquest. Power. Charles Xavier might well have been the most powerful mutant on Earth. His strict moral code governed the use of that power very closely. Yet always there were catastrophes that could be averted, wrongs that could be put right, should he decide to throw off the chains of that code and assert his full power. If it came to that, he believed he might be able to end the conflict himself, by altering the minds and thought patterns of all the combatants.

But that would be the most grievous, the most hideous, misuse of power, no matter how many lives might be saved. Even God gave his creations free will, and Charles Xavier knew that he was not God. Did not aspire to be God. His own power held responsibility enough.

Instead, he used his stature as a respected member of society to do as much damage control as possible. He would not allow himself to imagine Magneto victorious, and therefore he tried to prepare the world for Magneto’s downfall, tried to soften ahead of time the inevitable anti-mutant backlash.

Xavier was something of a celebrity, if you judged such things by how often a person made the news. Not like a sports star or a musician, an actor, or even a writer. Rather, he was a celebrity the way politicians and scientists became celebri

ties. They gained a certain status out of a sense of obligation— not because the majority of people really cared to hear about their actions and achievements, but because they felt they ought to care.

But never before had Charles experienced the kind of media feeding frenzy he had been subjected to in the past twenty-four hours. The sharks were tearing him apart, fighting for a piece, and it was his duty to oblige them, to utilize their need for his own purposes.

CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, WNN, E!, MTV, several local stations—and that was just the U.S. media—had all asked him to either be an interview subject or part of a debate. His main opponents in the latter were Senator Robert Kelly, whose own fear of mutants had been horribly detrimental to society, and wealthy independent politico and likely presidential candidate Graydon Creed. Strangely, however, Creed had all but disappeared from the media circus since the previous evening. Xavier suspected there was purpose behind his lack of visibility. The man knew that there would be backlash no matter what the outcome. Creed was likely preparing to take advantage of that backlash.

There were plenty of other names and faces on television— the networks were desperate to fill the tense hours with whatever spin doctors they could locate—but Creed’s absence meant that Xavier and Kelly were the most prominent among them. ABC had scored a coup by setting up a debate between the two men. Charles was not looking forward to it, but he could hardly back out of it. The opportunity was too great. Many viewers would ignore his words, but many others would not. There were still rational minds and understanding hearts in America. To believe otherwise was to admit that the struggle had all been for nothing. They’d already lost.

“Shouldn’t you be getting some sleep?”

Charles started slightly at the voice, then turned to see An-nelise Dwyer, the CNN anchor whom he’d become rather friendly with over the past few days, walking toward him. He turned his wheelchair to face her. Privately, he was surprised that she had been able to approach him without his sensing her first. He must really be tired.

“I’d love to, but these media vultures keep picking at my corpse,” he said with a grin.

“Tell me about it,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Teasing, flirting, silliness in general, these were things Charles did not normally allow himself to indulge in, leaving them instead to his X-Men, who were more than happy to oblige. Even so, and despite his relationship with Lilandra, he had found himself growing quite fond of Annelise. And now, lack of sleep was making him punchy.

“So,” Annelise continued, “I see you have a big date with the enemy.”

“It’s been one long nightmarish blind date with the enemy since this whole thing started,’ ’ Xavier responded.

Annelise laughed.

“I didn’t mean the media in general, Charles,” she said. “I meant my number-one enemy, ABC.”

“Ah.” Xavier nodded. “Yes, thrown to the wolves again.”

There was a silent moment, though he did not find it especially uncomfortable. The two of them merely regarded one another, each alone with their thoughts of the precipitous situation that surrounded them.

“When this is all over,” Annelise ventured, “I’d like to put business aside and take you to dinner some night. You game?”

Xavier was taken slightly aback. But only for a moment.

“Without question,” he answered. “But let’s talk about it again, as you say, when this is all over.”

* * *

Throughout the debate, Xavier had been impressed, even stunned, by the self control Senator Kelly maintained. The man was calm, rational, and, despite his feelings about mutants, eminently responsible in the way he presented his arguments. Clearly, this was a man who understood the power of his words, and the potential for panic inherent in the current predicament. Charles was very pleased that Graydon Creed had not chosen to participate in the debate. His favorite pastime seemed to be fomenting anarchy.

“In closing,” Senator Kelly declared, “I will say only this. Our forefathers stated—and we have been fighting about these words for two hundred years—that all of us were created equal. You may call me a bigot if you wish, but I am not quibbling over such superficial differences as race, creed, or gender. Indeed, all men and women were created equal, even if they have not been treated so.

“They were equal—until the advent of mutants. Mutants are not equal to the rest of humanity. They are greater. I do not say better, but greater. More powerful, and thus inherently more dangerous. For the good of the entire world, all mutants must be registered and monitored. Mutants who prove hostile to authority must be dealt with in the harshest possible manner.”

The weight of expectation fell on Charles then. The cameras, and the attention of every person in that makeshift studio, including Senator Kelly, was on him, awaiting a response.

‘ ‘Senator Kelly is an intelligent man, wisely concerned for the welfare of the American people, and the future his children and grandchildren will inherit,” Xavier began, playing to those millions already swayed by Kelly’s speech.

“After what we have seen Magneto and his followers do, we should all be concerned,” he continued. “We should all be afraid. But, I must say, no more afraid of mutant terrorism than we are of other terrorists. The men who set off a bomb in Oklahoma City, or New York’s World Trade Center, are also dangerous people, not because of whatever power or weapons they might have at their disposal, but because of the hatred in their hearts.

“Magneto and his followers have not merely proven hostile to authority, they have violently usurped it. I applaud whatever measures can be taken to end this standoff quickly, and to punish those responsible for it.

“But I will not stand by while the senator, in spite of all his wisdom, suggests that we withdraw the civil rights of all mutants. There are many people proficient with guns, or martial arts, many people with extraordinary financial power or great intellect, who could be considered more than equal to the rest of us. No one has suggested we take away the civil rights of those people, who might use their special abilities in ways that make them dangerous to the general public.

“Every American has the right to a certain amount of privacy, the right to freedom of speech, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are not empty words, but the defining concepts of our nation. For them to work, they have to stand true for everyone.

“Yes, I implore you, punish criminals and terrorists, mutant or otherwise, to the full extent of the law. But protect the rights of innocent civilians who only want to live good, decent lives. These are your friends, your family, your neighbors, and you don’t even know it because they are terrified of being discovered. If there were some great conspiracy, if mutants were the . evil some claim, they would already rule the world. The majority of mutants wish for nothing more than to live in peace. “Whether that will happen is really up to you.”

There was silence for a moment after he’d finished. The commentator thanked Kelly and Xavier, and then signed off from the live broadcast. The moment the cameras were off, Senator Kelly crossed the short distance between the chair where he’d been seated and Xavier’s wheelchair. “Professor,” he said, by way of acknowledgment. “Senator,” Xavier answered, and after a pause added, “was there something you wanted?”

“Only ...” Kelly began, paused, and then began again. “Only to say that I know you’re right. But I believe in the old axiom that sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” the senator said.

“Indeed?” Xavier asked, raising an eyebrow. “What you seem to have missed, Senator, is that mutants are part of the many you refer to. Part of the human race. It is you, and people like you, who are pushing them away, forcing them to splinter off, to see themselves as something else entirely. Perhaps that is your goal, but if so, you should ask yourself a question.

‘ ‘If you succeed in alienating mutants, making them feel as though they are another tribe, warring with so-called ‘normal’ humans, what happens when enough time passes so that mutants have become ‘the many,’ and ‘normal’ humans have become ‘the few’? What happens then, Senator?”

“I take your point,” Kelly answered.

“I pray that you do,” Xavier said.

“No matter what,” the senator finished, “I hope that this whole debacle is resolved quickly, and as painlessly as possible.”

Professor Xavier held up his hand. Surprise evident in his face, Kelly clasped it. They shook.

“That, at least, is something upon which we can agree,” Xavier said.

Once again, his thoughts returned to hope.

* • •

“I’m gettin’ a little tired o’ this sittin’ around crap,” Wolverine snarled.

“You’re not alone, old friend,” Storm said, “but it isn’t as if we are free to simply walk out and rejoin the fight. Not yet, at least.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Bishop said.

The Beast said nothing, his mind still rapidly creating and discarding plans for their escape. They had made several attempts already, all halfhearted at best. Nothing any of them had thus far contrived had had even a chance of success.

Each of them would be a formidable opponent, even without their mutant abilities. Bishop was a battle-hardened soldier, Wolverine a savage fighter without peer. Storm had spent quite a bit of time stripped of her mutant powers, and had become a hand-to-hand combatant of the first order. And the Beast’s greatest asset, his intellect, was not a mutation.

Unbound, they might have fought their way to freedom without any genetic gifts at all, but the same technology that had temporarily stolen those gifts also imprisoned them.

Hank thought of Trish once again, and wondered, for the first time, if telling her to stay away had been a mistake.

* * *

The Sentinel at the Brooklyn Bridge had turned out to be a drone. With Archangel flying above them, Gambit raced his stolen Harley up the elevated FDR Drive as fast as he dared, while Cooper held on to his chest with a painful grip. It was taking too much time. They only had to get to the Sentinels, and have Val take a look at them with the infrared scope she had on, but still it was too time consuming.

If the Alpha Sentinel was on the other side of the island, if they had to go all the way around Manhattan before they reached it... there just wasn’t enough time. Gambit could feel the ticking of their seven-hour time limit, could hear it as clearly as if a clock had been set next to his ear. Time was running out.

They were headed for the Williamsburg Bridge, just south of Houston Street and Alphabet City.

“Gambit, hold up!” Archangel’s voice erupted from the commlink they all wore. “Pull over a minute.”

“What de hell’s de problem now, ’Angel?” Gambit asked. * ‘We got no time for foolin’ ...”

“In the park, to your left,” Archangel replied.

Gambit looked, and didn’t see anything at first. Then Val tapped his shoulder and pointed to a group of people in the midst of a fight. At least a dozen people, maybe more, were beating on two or three others that he could barely see. Any other time, Gambit would naturally have interfered. But time was of the essence. He didn’t understand why Archangel was taking such an interest.

Until he saw that one of the people being attacked had large, leathery bat wings protruding from her back.

The Harley’s rear tire screeched and Gambit could smell burning rubber as he swung the bike into a stop. Val jumped off and Gambit laid the Harley down on its side as he ran for the guardrail of the elevated highway.

“Warren?” he said into the comm.

“Got it,” Archangel replied.

“Sorry, Val,” Gambit said without turning around. “We’ll just be a minute.”

Without hesitation, without slowing, he put one foot on the guardrail and dived over the edge. Warren grabbed him from behind. Without a word, they flew to where the three mutants were being beaten by the mob. Above the crowd, Archangel simply dropped Gambit.

Somersaulting in the air, Remy LeBeau threw four playing cards into the group, which exploded with a minor charge on impact, clearing a spot for him to land and clearing the mob away from the mutants. A moment later, Archangel landed on the other side of the bloody and beaten mutants, and the mob cleared off even further, then began to close once more.

“Just a couple more muties,” one man shouted. “No problem.”    ' Archangel took him down with a flash of silver knives, which flew from his wings and sliced into the big man, immediately and temporarily paralyzing him. The musclehead went down like a sinking stone.

“What the hel) is the matter with you people?” Archangel yelled.

“You!” a woman screamed back. “You’re what’s wrong. All of you muties playing stormtrooper for Magneto. We caught these three on their own, figured it was time for some payback, a little vengeance for the Big Apple!”

Gambit looked back at the trio of mutants, the winged one and two others whose mutant powers or enhancements were not immediately visible.

“I was bom and raised in New York,” one of them said, his accent proving his claim. “We was just tryin’ to leave, ’cause we didn’t want no part of what Magneto’s doin’ here!” “Yeah, right!” a slim Latino man cried, and tossed a hammer he’d been waving right at the mutant who had spoken.

Gambit telescoped out his bo-stick and knocked the hammer from the air, then stepped forward and whacked the Latino man on the shoulder. He hit a nerve cluster, and the man grunted in pain and fell to his knees.

“We’re not afraid of you!” another man shouted.

“You idiots!” Gambit hissed. “Don’ you even pay attention? You may not be afraid of us, but de t’ree mutants you attackin’, dey very afraid of you, vous comprenezl Don’ you t’ink you should maybe make sure you fightin’ the enemy before you waste your time beatin’ on innocent people?”

“They’re muties, they’re not innocent!” the same man cried.

“That’s their curse,” Archangel said. “They’re mutants. Your curse is that you’re a bigot. Unfortunately for them, they can’t change what they are. The question is, can you?”

The man started to bluster something else, when a teenaged boy spoke up.

“I’m no bigot, mister,” he said. “We live here. Magneto and the rest, they’re trying to take our homes away.”

“But these people were trying to leave, they don’t want to live under Magneto any more than you do,” Archangel said.

The boy was quiet then, they all were, except the bigot in the back, who grumbled under his breath but dared not say anything. The mood of the group had changed.

“Me an’ Archangel, we mutants too,” Gambit said. “But we come ’ere, to Manhattan, jus’ to try an stop Magneto. We puttin’ our lives on de line for a city dat ain’t even home to us. You goin’ to stomp us a little bit, too, mes amisT’

Even the bigot was quiet, then.

The three injured mutants said nothing as they got up and continued on their way out of the city. The Sentinels would not stop them. Gambit only hoped they did not run into any other overzealous citizens.

After they were out of sight, Gambit turned to the mob again. Nobody would look at him. When he wasn’t paying attention, the bigot had slipped away, and Remy couldn’t help but think he had instigated the beating. He wished he could think of something more to say, but he was disgusted, and they had no time for preaching.

Warren lifted him. As they flew off, he thought he heard the teenaged boy say something that might have been, ‘ ‘Thank you,” and might have been something else entirely, something vile.

Gambit wished he could have been sure, or that he had faith enough in humanity to merely assume the best.

But he couldn’t. Not today.

« ft *

Lieutenant Jack Mariotte was a career soldier. The Army had put him through college, and by the time he’d finished paying them back with his service, he realized he had forgotten how to be anything else. He was old enough to know he’d never be a general, but young enough to believe if enough conflicts presented themselves, he might retire as a colonel, which meant a sweet pension and all the respect that came with the rank.

But he’d never counted on fighting Sentinels.

His squad stood ready at a battery of plasma cannons on the Jersey side of the Hudson, slightly north of the Holland Tunnel but well within range of the Sentinel who towered in silent menace over the river far below. Lieutenant Mariotte had stared at that Sentinel through part of the night, into the dawn, and throughout the morning and early afternoon. He was intimate with it now, knew every contour of its cold and sinister form.

Jack Mariotte was a brave man. He’d always prided himself on that. The Mariottes had always been a courageous family. All the way back to his grandfather, who’d been with the French underground during German occupation. Jack was brave, all right.

But the Sentinels scared the hell out of him. It was only natural, then, that he wanted very badly to destroy them.

One of the reasons the squad was so isolated was that the plasma cannons were a new technology. The media had long since lost any nationality, and coverage shown in one country was shown around the world, if it was important enough. Colonel Tomko had orders to attempt to keep the new tech off camera, to avoid letting any potential foreign enemies get a good look at it. Jack Mariotte thought that was foolishness. Espionage was alive and well—especially in the area of technology. Anyone who wanted to build a plasma cannon could

get hold of the plans if they knew who to pay.

But those were his orders.

Coincidentally, their location also meant that Lieutenant Mariotte and his squad were the first, and possibly the only, people to get a good look at the boatload of mutants that was, at that moment, sailing across the Hudson River toward Manhattan.

“Look at that,” Ray Keane said. “I’m tellin’ ya, guys, that just ain’t right.”

“You ain’t kidding,” Bernie Tarver agreed. “We just sit here and do nothing while the muties get constant reinforcements? Why, all the people on that boat are traitors to their country. They’re declaring war on us just by being there.”

“We ought to blow those mutie traitors out of the water,” Keane shot back. “Jesus, I can’t stand just sitting here.”

Lieutenant Mariotte heard all of this. He did not chastise his men, however, but rather remained silent. In fact, he agreed with them completely, but could never say so. It irked him to no end that they had to sit there, under the threatening glare of the Sentinels, and do nothing as Magneto continued to build his army.

“Traitors!” Tarver screamed across the water to the mutants on the boat, which was, even now, passing less than eighty yards away from them.

“Tarver!” Jack snapped. “Belay that crap!”

“But, Loot, those guys—” Tarver began.

“I gave you an order, Corporal!”

“Yes, sir!” Corporal Tarver replied, and offered a stiff salute.

It might have been over then, but Tarver’s cry had not been overlooked by the mutants on the boat, who began taunting them immediately.

“What’s wrong, soldier boys?” called one of the mutants, a woman whose hair and skin glowed with a weird blue light. “You flatscans worried that you’ll be out of a job once the Mutant Empire starts to spread?”

“Nobody respond!” Jack ordered, and his men complied with obvious reluctance. He didn’t blame them. In fact, he figured none of them wanted to scream back at the traitors more than he did.

“No answer, kids?” the woman screamed. “Well, I’m through being ignored!”

A flash of blue light arced across the surface of the water and fried Corporal Bemie Tarver where he stood. The entire squad shielded their eyes from the flash, and when they looked up, Bernie was a memory. The only thing left was a black scar on the shore of the Hudson.

“Mutie freaks!” Keane shouted as he cranked the plasma cannon around to sight on the boat.

“Take cover!” Lieutenant Mariotte ordered. “Do not return fire! Sergeant Keane, do you hear me? I said do not return—”

But Keane didn’t hear Jack Mariotte’s order. His own screams were too loud. The lieutenant could only watch as a massive plasma burst lanced out toward the boat, and the vessel exploded in a shower of wood, metal and flesh.

“Jesus,” the lieutenant whispered.

“Lieutenant!” a green private named Carlos Mattei shouted, and pointed south, across the river.

Before he turned his head, Lieutenant Mariotte felt the nausea rising in his stomach. He knew exactly what Mattei was looking at. The only thing he could be looking at.

Across the river, just to the south, the massive robot head of the Sentinel had turned in their direction. Its red eyes glowed, even though the sun was shining above. It seemed unnatural, impossible somehow, and all the more frightening because of that.

The Sentinel’s upper body turned. It lifted an arm, palm up, aiming its weapons systems directly at them. Whether or not it planned to fire was a question that never even occurred to Lieutenant Jack Mariotte. Armageddon was riding down on them hard, and they’d no time to leap from its path, no way to avoid being trampled. Save one. Fight back.

“All stations fire,” Jack Mariotte cried, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “And may God have mercy on us all.”

The foundation of Haven was going extremely well. There were dozens of Alpha-level mutants, and more than a hundred Betas, who had already joined the empire’s ranks. However, Magneto was even more pleased by the number of nonpowered—and therefore most likely noncombatant—mutants who had either emerged from lives of ridicule in New York, or traveled some distance to the welcoming arms of a real home.

Some had intellects accelerated by the mutant x-factor in their genetic codes. Others had minor abilities, enhanced senses, light psi talents. And quite a few of those were also monstrous or bestial in appearance. These misfits and outcasts were the real reason Magneto had created Haven. They needed sanctuary quite badly indeed.

He had gathered these noncombatants so that he might address them, explain that Haven was for them. While some were nervous and flip, most were honored to be in his presence. Several could not contain their need to speak of their pasts, their pitiful existences before Magneto became their savior, and he allowed them the opportunity.

One by one, more than a dozen mutants testified, like sinners at a tent revival, about their suffering, and about their undying gratitude that they had finally found a home.

“Thank you, Emperor Magneto,” said a large man whose enhanced senses of smell, taste, and hearing were not enough to compensate for the ferociously canine structure of his face. “I have waited my whole life for salvation, and I’d almost given up until a couple of days ago. We owe you a debt that can never be paid.”

Magneto was about to respond when Amelia Voght entered, followed by Unuscione, Cargil, Javits, and the Kleinstock Brothers.

“Voght,” he said sternly. “What did I say about—”

“It’s begun, my lord,” Voght snapped, cutting him off. “The military and the Sentinels have begun firing upon one another all around the island.”

Magneto stared at her, brow furrowed in anger and amazement.

“I wish you were joking,” he said. “They must be out of their minds, to think they might win such a conflict! The arrogant fools!”

“Is it possible, my lord, that the Sentinels attacked first?” Unuscione asked.

Magneto sneered at her.

“Not at all,” he said. “They were programmed to attack only on my order, or in retaliation for a mass attack on mutants.”

He paused, listened for the sounds of battle, but could hear nothing so far from the action.

“It’s war, then,” he said finally. “The Sentinels should be sufficient to destroy any opposition, but I need to be in a position from which to monitor the progress of the conflict. I must go.”

Without so much as a wave to acknowledge the Acolytes, or the gathered noncombatant mutants, Magneto was suddenly enveloped in a sphere of crackling energy. Eighteen inches from the floor, he floated toward the huge row of windows. At his approach, glass exploded outward in a spray of jagged shards.

Then he was gone.

Gone to war.

• * •

“All right, then,” Voght began. “To work.”

She looked around the room at the noncombatant mutants gathered within and, for the first time, truly wondered if Magneto had done them a service by bringing them all together. If Haven survived, of course, they had a wonderful new home. But if Haven collapsed, all they had done was uproot themselves, and many of them had revealed their mutant nature for the first time in their lives. They had had enough faith to believe in Magneto, though, and Voght realized she would have to do the same.

If Haven fell, life would become even more difficult for those mutants who had gathered on the island.

Voght shook her head a moment, gathering her thoughts and her plans.

“What’s wrong, Amelia, haven’t got the stomach for a real fight, now that one’s knockin’ at our door?” Unuscione said, a sneer slashing her face. “Cowardice rears its ugly head every time, eh?”

Fighting the urge to snap or strike out at Unuscione, Voght instead simply ignored her.

“Cargil,” she said, “go down and relieve whoever is guarding the X-Men. I want one of the Acolytes’ inner circle there, looking after our prize catch like your life depended on it. Which, of course, it may.”

Before Voght had even finished issuing her instructions, Joanna Cargil was out the door and headed for the elevator. Cargil might not have been on her side, as it were, in the personality conflict she had going with Unuscione, but she knew enough not to jeopardize a combat situation because of individual gripes. She was a soldier.

“Javits, how do you feel?” she asked.

The towering, hugely muscled mutant merely shrugged, raising his eyebrows. Enough of an indication that he was ready for battle, despite wounds he had recently received from Wolverine. It made Voght realize just how many of them Wolverine had injured in the past couple of days, including the Kleinstock brothers. Sven and Harlan had been uncharacteristically silent since their battle with Wolverine. A newly arrived mutant who’d used her healing powers on the evangelical circuit before getting the call—not from God but from Magneto—had healed them both. It hadn’t improved their dispositions any.

No question, Wolverine was a dangerous man. Voght was glad he was already their prisoner. Things would go a lot more smoothly with him in a basement cell.

“Okay,” she said. “The rookies will be gathering in the lobby and on the street even as we speak. Unuscione, you and Javits head down there and get them moving. I want to touch

base with Skolnick at City Hall. Then I’ll join you.”

“What about us?” Harlan Kleinstock asked. “What are we supposed to do?”

“You two are going to see that the noncombatants get down to street level and on their way as quickly as possible. We want them back in their new homes and out of the way ASAP. Then you’re with me,” Voght explained.

Which didn’t go over well at all.

“You think you’re something else, don’t you?” Sven Kleinstock said. “Magneto appoints you field leader and you get to believing that makes you good at it.”

“It doesn’t really matter what I think, Sven,” Voght said sharply. “And it matters even less what you think. Magneto gave me the job, and I’m going to do it. You have a problem with that, why don’t you take it up with him? I’ve got work to do. We all do.”

Harlan Kleinstock started to speak, perhaps, Amelia considered, because Sven was not bright enough to reply on his own. But Unuscione took a step forward, a cruel smile curling her lip into an unattractive scowl.

“You’ve made your last mistake, Amelia,” Unuscione said, pleasantly enough for a woman with murder in her eyes.

“Back off, Carmela,” Voght snapped. “Now is not the time. Haven is in jeopardy.”

“The hell with that,” Unuscione said coolly. “We’ve got the Sentinels to protect us, and Lord Magneto watching out for the big robots. If he needs us at all, it won’t be right away.”

Voght sighed. She had never despised anyone as fervently as she hated Carmela Unuscione. She wanted very badly to give Unuscione the lesson the woman had been begging for since Amelia was first made field leader. But now was simply not the time.

Yet, that might not be her call. With Cargil already gone to guard the captured X-Men, and Senyaka down at City Hall with Major Skolnick... hell, even the Blob, Toad, and Pyro weren’t around. But she supposed she should be grateful for that. Given their appreciation for Unuscione’s father, Voght assumed they’d come down on the other woman’s side in a conflict, despite their supposed fealty to Magneto.

Cargil and Senyaka, while by no means her friends, would have fulfilled their obligations as Magneto’s Acolytes, would have put Haven first. Milan was in the nerve center of the new empire, and he was her only real friend in the ranks of the Acolytes. Even Javits, whose fife she had saved only days earlier, was not speaking up for her.

“We’re not following you anymore, Voght,” Harlan Klein-stock said. “Every time you’re in charge, we take a beating. Wolverine almost killed me and my brother last time. You can’t be trusted.”

“That’s how it is?” Voght asked.

There was no response from any of them, save for the widening smile on Unuscione’s face.

“We’re electing a new field leader, Amelia,” Unuscione said. “Namely, me. See, you were killed in the line of duty. I had to take over.”

Sven Kleinstock and Javits both started slightly at her mention of killing.

“You didn’t say anything about killing her, Unuscione,” Sven warned. “She may be a pain, but she’s still one of us.” “Shut up, Sven,” Voght ordered.

“Fine,” Sven said with a shrug. “The hell with you. Die if you want to.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Voght said, and took two steps back, giving herself room to maneuver. “You wanted it, Unuscione? Well, now you’ve got it. Come and get me. It’s time you found out what it means to be in pain.”

“Back off, boys,” Unuscione motioned to the others to give them room. “This is just between the two of us.”

With an electric crackle, Unuscione’s psionic exoskeleton appeared in a flash of green light. Voght leaped aside as Unuscione attacked, barely escaping the huge fist of psionic energy that devastated the podium behind her. The noncombatants scattered as Voght landed, knocking chairs aside as she turned to face her attacker.

“You have no idea who or what you’re dealing with,” Voght said.

“Sure I do,” Unuscione said. “A dead woman.”

She lunged for Voght again, her exoskeleton stretching out even farther this time. Once more, Amelia barely escaped. Quickly, she tried to grab on to the green force shield that surrounded Unuscione’s body.

“Oh, come on,” Unuscione yelled, retracting her exoskeleton instantly. “You didn’t think I’d let you do that to me again, did you?’ ’

Voght smiled grimly.

“No,” she said, and teleported.

Even as she appeared back in her bedroom, and grabbed up the taser gun lying on the desk that functioned as her bedside table, she smiled at the picture in her head. In it, Unuscione and her cronies looked around the room in astonishment for three or four seconds as it began to come into their dim brains that she had actually left.

Then she ’ported back into the room in an instant. Without an enemy to attack, Unuscione had let her guard down, had dropped her exoskeleton in confusion. When Voght appeared in front of her, Unuscione was too stunned to react immediately. She barely saw the taser coming.

Voght fired the taser at Unuscione. Its projectiles popped out and snagged themselves on her uniform, and she jerked around in agony as electricity flooded through her.

“Hey, no fair!” one of the Kleinstocks, or perhaps both— Voght wasn’t sure—called out. They reminded her of little boys in the schoolyard. Little boys she had always trounced for pulling her hair. They used to shout “no fair” as well.

Children. That’s what they were. Sometimes she wondered if that was what they all were, in the end.

Unuscione was still jerking madly, and Voght yanked back the taser’s wired projectiles. Unuscione stopped jerking and glared at her, a twitch on her face that hadn’t been there before. A side effect, Voght guessed, of being electroshocked.

“You should have killed me, Amelia,” Unuscione said. “It’s over for you now.”    ,

Unuscione lifted her arms to guide her exoskeleton, but it did not appear. Voght saw the confusion on her face. She knew that the taser had momentarily shorted out the other woman’s powers, just for a heartbeat, but she wasn’t going to be the one to explain.

She was going to be busy.

‘ ‘What the ... ?” Unuscione said.

Voght hit her. She felt a couple of the bones in her hand crack as her fist slammed into Unuscione’s face, but it didn’t hurt at all. It felt kind of good, actually.

Good enough that she hit Unuscione again.

Fifteen seconds or so later, when she had hit Unuscione many more times, the Kleinstock brothers pulled her off. She teleported them away, dropping them onto the metal chairs from near the ceiling of the room. Unuscione was rising from the ground, blood streaming from her nose and mouth. She still had that snarl that so infuriated Voght. Her exoskeleton was weakly shimmering into being.

Voght kicked her in the gut and Unuscione went down hard, the smirking scowl gone from her face.

“You’re out of here,” she said, and teleported Unuscione away.

Away.

“What the hell have you done with her?” Harlan Kleinstock demanded angrily.

“I’ve sent her back to Avalon,” Voght responded evenly. “The space station has medical facilities, and Exodus has personnel who can deal with her. She is no longer a part of this mission. Magneto will be very disappointed.”