“No,” Trish said, shaking her head. “No way. I’m not the subject here, I’m the reporter. I don’t care who wants to carry it, but I’m going to be the one reporting the story.”

Nobody argued with that. Which was good. Trish would not have been able to handle argument.

When all the cameras were set up, Trish began to speak.

“This is Trish Tilby reporting from hell,” she said.

Nobody snickered.

“You've all seen my reports, I assume, but I have no idea what parts of them were censored,” Trish continued. “Before I tell you the story, what I’ve been through, before I talk about Magneto, or the X-Men, or what’s really at stake here, I want to tell you about two people.

“Their names were Kevin and Caroline, and they died a little while ago. A man and a woman, a human and a mutant, they gave their lives to see that you, the people of our world, would have an opportunity to decide for yourselves what you want to make of it. They died believing that we, as a race of beings, could separate what Magneto and other mutants have done, from mutantkind in general. That we would do the right thing.

“What saddens me is, I’m not certain if they died in vain. I truthfully don’t know if we’re all grown up enough, we humans, to judge all beings individually. Or I should say, I know that some of us can and will be fair and logical and rational. Others will not. What I am uncertain about is the numbers. How many of you are the ones Kevin and Caroline died for?

And how many are the kind whose words and beliefs motivate a monster like Magneto?

“I’m trying to have the same faith Kevin and Caroline did. I’m trying so very hard.”

• • *

The Harley had been abandoned as they got within half a block of the Alpha Sentinel. Archangel grabbed Gambit and Val Cooper, each by an upraised hand, and flew. Val knew it had to be a strain for Warren. He was powerful, but he had no super-enhanced strength to go along with his other mutant gifts.

Val felt extremely vulnerable, dangling there in the sky with only one man’s grip between her and certain death on the street below. Still, it wasn’t as if she had any real choice. The Alpha Sentinel had to be reprogrammed and she was the only one who could do it.

As they flew to the height of the Alpha unit’s waist, it spoke, its voice a soulless, mechanical drone that seemed, nevertheless, to have a distinctly hostile personality.

“Halt, mutants,” it commanded, and Val was relieved that Professor Xavier’s psionic presence in her mind had fooled the killing computer.

“You are approaching too close to this unit,” it announced. “Please do not approach any further.”

Archangel flew higher, and Val felt for a moment as though she was going to slip from his grasp. She was tempted to grab for his hand with her other, but that would throw off his equilibrium, and they might all fall.

“You ready, Gambit?” Archangel asked.

“Gambit was bom ready, mon ami,” the Cajun answered.

“Hang on.”

Then he dive-bombed the Sentinel, trailing Gambit and Val beneath him. She wanted to scream. She didn’t. Perhaps Professor Xavier’s psionic presence was calming her, she thought.

“Warning!” the Alpha Sentinel barked. “You are too close to this unit. While this unit is programmed not to attack mutants, this unit is also programmed to defend itself against any attack which is hostile, or which this unit perceives to be hostile.”

“Bombs away!” Archangel shouted as he swooped low above the Sentinel’s head and shoulders.

Then he dropped Gambit.

“Allez!” Gambit shouted.

Val couldn’t look. As Archangel snagged her other hand, getting a better grip on her, she tried not to think about how close he might have come to dropping her. She tried not to imagine Gambit’s calculated fall down to the Sentinel’s shoulder.

“Fast, Remy!” Warren shouted. “Move it, man!”

Then Val had to look. Gambit stood on the lip of titanium alloy that separated the Sentinel’s shoulder from its neck. With one hand on the upraised seam that surrounded the Alpha unit’s head like a crown, Gambit leaned out over open space, many stories above the street.

The Sentinel was reaching for him.

Archangel urged Gambit on. Val was not certain if that urgency was driven by fear for the Cajun’s safety—now that the Sentinel was reacting to his presence—or concern that he would not be able to carry Val much longer. She realized rather quickly that she did not want to know.

In the shadow thrown by the robot’s massive head, Gambit’s eyes glowed red. The Sentinel touched its own shoulder, its hand scrambling with a metal-on-metal scrape that made Val want to scream.

Gambit laid his palm flat on the back of the Sentinel’s head, precisely where Val had instructed him to. Instantly, the metal began to glow ever brighter. At the last possible moment, Gambit pulled away and the back of the Sentinel’s head exploded.

The Alpha unit reached for him. From within the long duster, Gambit pulled out his bo-stick, which telescoped out in his hands to a length of more than five feet. With one thrust, he threw off the Sentinel’s grasp, but that would be his only chance.

He took it. With only two steps to gain momentum, he leaped up on top of the Sentinel’s head, where he would be an easy target for its groping hands. Before it could react, he reached down, grabbed hold of the edge of the hole made by his volatile mutant power, and flipped down inside the Sentinel’s head, into the command center whose entrance he had blown wide open.

Once inside, Gambit disappeared from the Sentinel’s sensors as if into thin air. As far as it was concerned, he was gone. That left Val and Archangel to deal with.

“Go, Warren, quick, before it gets pissed off enough to swat us out of the sky!” she barked.

With nauseating speed, Archangel swooped low toward the Sentinel’s back, then climbed rapidly in a straight line, out of its reach, toward the exposed computerized brain of the robot. A moment later, they were inside and Warren was massaging his strained arm muscles and stretching his fingers. Val let out a long sigh of relief.

Gambit smiled at her.

“Something funny, X-Man?” Val asked, in no mood for humor.

‘Won, Valerie,” he said. “Gambit jus’ relieved, de same as you. Look around, mes amis, we did it. We’re inside.”

Then they were all smiling.

“You do your job, Val,” Archangel said, “and then it’s dinner at Tavern on the Green for everybody, on me!”

Val liked the sound of that. Assuming, of course, that Tavern on the Green was still there. But the smile left her face the moment she turned her attention to the command center of the Alpha Sentinel’s brain. If she could reprogram it, something she had vowed to everyone that she could, indeed, do, then the war against Magneto would take an almost surely decisive turn in their favor.

Problem was, she wasn’t exactly certain what Magneto had done to them, how he had reprogrammed the Sentinels in the first place. Or if he’d prepared some kind of failsafe that might kill her merely for logging into the command center.

But she was about to find out.

It was the only option. Their only real hope.

uy ot another step, Marko, or you will face the wrath of Mthe terrible Toad!” Mortimer Toynbee shrieked, as

■ »he leaped into the path of destruction the Juggernaut was tearing through Magneto’s forces.

“Hmm, hmm,” the Juggernaut said through a smile. “Ya gotta be ... oh, come on, I...”

Then he laughed so hard, he threw back his head and tears rolled down his cheeks inside his mask. Infuriated, the Toad sprang at him and those extraordinarily powerful legs knocked Cain Marko on his butt in the middle of Thirty-third Street. But Cain was still laughing. He tried to get up, and the Toad knocked him down again.

Inside his mystical armor, the Juggernaut felt pain.

“Hey,” he said. “That kinda—”

The Toad leaped again, lightning quick, and laid him out in the street with a kick so powerful, it left the Juggernaut gasping for air, even inside his armor.

“I will teach you to laugh at me, you dimwitted ...” Toynbee began, as he leaped at the Juggernaut for the fourth time, his pistoning feet aimed directly at the neck joint where helmet met armor, the spot where Cain was most vulnerable.

But even those who had seen him move often forgot how fast Cain Marko was, which was understandable given his size. Understandable, but unforgivable.

He snatched the Toad out of the air by his feet, then stood quickly, holding Toynbee upside down. The Juggernaut wasn’t laughing anymore.    •

“You pissed me off, Toynbee,” he said. “Yer lucky I don’t break both your legs.”

“Sure, you’re making nice with Xavier’s brood now,” the Toad said, the mockery quite clear in his voice. “You’re a Boy Scout, Marko.”

That did it. Cain righted the Toad with one twist, and held the little mutant up so they were face to face, Toynbee’s legs ratcheting beneath him, trying to get traction anywhere, even off the Juggernaut’s chest. Cain wasn’t having any of it. “You can’t win, Marko!” he cried. “Magneto’s reign has

come, as I always knew it would. Your kind will be trampled underfoot along with all the other flatscans, and traitors like the X-Men. You’re a dead man, Marko. Why don’t you lie down like a good boy, so we can bury you?”

Cain was flush with rage, so overwhelmed with fury that he couldn’t think straight enough to form any kind of cogent response. He spit his frustration, and gave up trying to speak. Instead, he cracked the Toad across the face with a backhand so massive, and backed by such extraordinary strength, that Toynbee sagged limp in his hands, unconscious from the blow.

“Runt,” Cain growled, and dropped the Toad at his feet.

He was tempted to step on Toynbee’s head, but he was acutely aware of the fight raging around him. That day, he was one of the white hats. It would probably never happen again, but as long as he could, and foolish as it was, he was going to play by Xavier’s rules.

“All right,” he growled. “Who’s next?”

“Try me.” A bass rumble came from behind him, and a hand, large even by his standards, landed on Cain’s shoulder.

The Juggernaut turned to face Javits, one of Magneto’s original Acolytes, a powerful mutant even larger than he himself was. The one-eyed Acolyte didn’t move.

“There’s a difference between brave and stupid,” Cain said, and slammed a fist into Javits’s left cheek.

The Acolyte blinked. That was all.

“Indeed there is,” Javits said. “But the difference is lost on you.”

Javits hit him and Cain stumbled backward. He’d heard a crack that he was afraid might be his helmet, and more afraid might be his skull. A second later, he realized it had been one of Javits’s fingers breaking. The huge mutant shook his right hand, sucking a breath in between his teeth.

The Juggernaut smiled as he stood, glad the jerk was in pain, and determined to make it continue. He’d been standing still when Javits hit him. When he was moving, it would be a different story. He launched himself toward the Acolyte.

Out of instinct developed over the years because of his size and strength, Javits stood his ground.

“Moron,” Cain mumbled under his breath.

He felt ribs snap under his helmet as he slammed headfirst into Javits’s chest. The Acolyte cried out and went down, trampled under the Juggernaut’s massive boots. He didn’t look back to see if Javits was still alive, and despite his attitude about being one of the good guys, he didn’t much care.

Half a block away, he saw a group of several dozen people, probably mutants, turning down Fifth Avenue. They might have been moving on to another skirmish, ordered to another location because the Acolytes figured they had the X-Men contained. But the way they were nervously glancing back at the battlefield on Thirty-third Street, Cain didn’t think so.

He thought they were running away. It made no sense, but that’s how he figured it.

A sudden blast of energy struck him between the shoulder blades, and Cain actually stumbled forward slightly. He turned, ready to fight, but his opponents were not advancing. Not yet.

Three Acolytes faced him: the field leader, Amelia Voght, whom Cain remembered as an old flame of his half-brother’s, and a pair of blond bruisers, identical twins down to their Marine buzz-cuts. These were the Kleinstocks, the twerps who had tried to recruit him earlier that day.

“You’ve caused enough trouble, Juggernaut,” Voght said. “Why don’t we see if I can teleport that helmet off your head without taking your head with it. Either way, I’m going to win.”

“You can try, babe,’ ’ he snarled. ‘ ‘Either way, I’m gonna—’ ’

Cain faltered. Gears churned in his head, actions and consequences roiled together. He glanced quickly around at the battle that, no matter how long they held out, the X-Men didn’t have a chance in hell of winning.

“Ah, screw it,” he said.

The Juggernaut turned and ran.

* * *

Ivan Skolnick had had enough. He was loyal to the government, to human society, to the Earth, not because any of those things were perfect—in truth, humanity was little better than a primal beast. But tyranny, like Magneto’s new empire, was the ultimate primal beast. Humanity was about choice and evolution, about the collective will of billions of people, not the new order demanded by one individual, no matter how powerful.

Skolnick knew that his own nagging self-doubt and fear had driven him to betray his fundamental faith in humanity, and he now regretted it. He knew, also, that he could never turn back. That he could not expect to be forgiven for actions the American government would consider the most heinous of crimes. There was fear, there, as well, fear of the consequences of his actions.

But all doubt was gone. He knew what he must do.

In the space between breaths, that certainty coalesced into action. As Funnel renewed his attack, as human police officers loyal to Manhattan’s conquerors turned their guns on their brothers in blue, Major Ivan Skolnick called up every ounce of concentration he could muster, and turned his mutant powers on his allies.

With a single clap of his hands, Skolnick sent a wave of stunning force toward Funnel, pummeling the other mutant and several police officers. They were driven across the steps, several stumbled and fell, but Funnel stayed up until the force of Skolnick’s blast slammed him into a hand railing. Skolnick heard bones break, but he couldn’t allow himself to be concerned. It wasn't that difficult. Special Ops had trained him not only to fight, but to kill when necessary' and feel remorse only in church.

Funnel wasn’t dead, though. He simply wouldn’t be getting up for a while.

“Freeze!” two police officers shouted simultaneously.

In the moment it took them to swing their weapons toward Major Skolnick, the moment in which he also swung his empty—but no less deadly—hands toward them, he noted and filed a thought for later amusement. They actually say “freeze” in real life, he thought. But then, what else would they say?

The officers fired just as Skolnick snapped his fingers, slapping the bullets back along their trajectories and blowing out the doors of City Hall.

* t »

Gabi Frigerio hung back as the resistance fighters stormed City Hall, crying out in triumph over a victory they owed to the other side. Well, not exactly the other side. Still, it had been one of Magneto’s top people, the former soldier, Major Skolnick, who had been the deciding factor.

The people of Manhattan streamed into City Hall and the police officers who had remained loyal to Commissioner Ramos began to incarcerate those who had followed Magneto. In minutes, the building was completely in their control. Maxine Perkins, the woman Magneto had appointed mayor, did not even argue as she was placed behind bars. Gabi liked to think it was because the woman had enough sense to be ashamed of herself.

Major Skolnick stood on the steps, watching the commotion. Gabi thought he looked like a man with nowhere to go. She could not help but approach him.

“That was a courageous and unbelievably stupid thing you did,” she said. “Why did you?”

For a few moments, Skolnick didn’t respond. Then, finally, he looked up at her as if waking from a daydream.

“It was my only choice,” he said cryptically.

“There are always choices,” she said. “We just have to be brave or stupid enough to make them.”

Her brother was calling for her from within City Hall. She looked through the shattered doorway and saw him with Lamarre and Miguelito, talking to Commissioner Ramos about something. She ignored them, turning her attention back to Major Skolnick. That he was a mutant did not upset her. That he had been on Magneto’s side did not turn her away. She was fascinated by his actions, and profoundly affected by his despair.

“I guess you’re right,” he answered, after she’d begun to think he had forgotten she was there.

For a long time, the day had been growing more dull, less vibrantly alive. Now, finally, the sky was beginning to darken.

“It’s not over, you know,” he said suddenly, still watching the sky as if waiting, at any moment, for the judgment of God to thunder down from the heavens.

“What isn’t?” she asked.

“The war,” he said. “Magneto could take back City Hall in an instant, and he will, the moment it pleases him to do so. ’ ’

“If he gets the chance,” Gabi said offhandedly. “But I don’t think the X-Men are going to allow that to happen.”

Skolnick sighed. “The X-Men are already his prisoners.”

“Wrong,” Gabi said happily. “Not only is Iceman around, but the guerrilla news stations that are running out of MTV’s offices have reported that the X-Men have escaped and are fighting Magneto’s stormtroopers ... no offense....”

“None taken,” he said softly.

“Anyway,” she continued, “there’s a big battle near the Empire State Building. Of course, with these odds, they don’t have much hope.”

But even as she said it, she saw Major Skolnick’s eyes light up with joyous energy.

“They’re free?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I heard. But with the odds ...”

Major Skolnick looked at her for the first time, really looked at her. Gabi smiled at him, so infectious was his sudden enthusiasm.

“What’s your name, ma’am?” he asked, with perfect military politeness.

“Uh, Gabriela Frigerio,” she answered.

“Well, Ms. Frigerio, the odds might be impossible, but we can change the odds, can’t we?” he asked, glancing around.

Gabi scanned the rubble on the steps, the ragged doorframe, looked at Commissioner Ramos talking with her comrades inside the building.

“Yeah,” she said in realization. “Yeah, we can.”

* * •

“You gotta be kidding me,” Sven Kleinstock said, and he and his brother began to laugh.

“Shut up and fight, you morons!” Amelia Voght snapped, and the Kleinstocks responded.

She knew they didn’t like her very much. Actually, they didn’t like her at all. But they’d seen what she had done to Unuscione, and at least for the duration of the war, they didn’t seem like they were going to question her anymore. Magneto had chosen Voght as field leader. She’d done the job, and dealt with the consequences.

She believed in the dream. No question. She had believed in Xavier’s dream first, until she came to understand that it was only a dream. That no matter how hard he fought, no matter how clever he might be, or how brilliant, Xavier would never be able to make that dream a reality. It depended on the intelligence, the reason, the goodwill, of humanity. It was a joke.

Magneto’s dream, on the other hand, was one that required nothing more than power and the will to use it. Voght understood that, and believed Magneto had the power to make it real. And here it was, right in front of them, the actualization of a dream that had taken years to come to fruition.

The execution had gone smoothly. Haven had been founded with a minumum of trouble. But conquest meant taking land and keeping it, and the latter was far more difficult. They had reached the crisis point now, the time when they had to give everything they had to keep the sanctuary that they had so quickly won. It would not truly be theirs until the challenges had been met and overcome.

But Voght was in it all the way. She pitied Charles Xavier, whom she had loved in a once-upon-a-time past when she had been little more than a naive girl. She pitied the X-Men, who, like their mentor, only wanted the best for the world. But that was their problem. As much as Voght might also pity the humans who weren’t ignorant savages, she knew that the choice came down to the same one it always did: them or us.

With those options, Voght knew that she was always going to choose “us.” Anything else was foolish. And Xavier the biggest fool of all because he believed there was a third choice.

A belief that, if Voght was correct, was being strongly challenged by Magneto’s triumph.

And it would be a triumph, of that she was certain.

The X-Men had no chance. Were there twenty of them, or thirty, or fifty, rather than a mere eight, they would not have defeated Magneto’s combined forces. No matter how long the X-Men might hold out, no matter how many mutants they might take out of the fight, it was the eight of them against hundreds of enemies, plus Magneto, and the fleet of Sentinels waiting in the wings if they became necessary.

It was hopeless for them. Voght only wished they would realize it, and surrender. Or run away as the Juggernaut had seemed to. Which was, of course, what the Kleinstocks had been laughing about. Cain Marko, the Juggernaut, one of the most powerful and destructive superhumans in the world, had seen the odds against them and taken off. Voght didn’t blame Sven and Harlan for laughing. They saw Marko as a coward, but Voght thought the man was just smart. Against impossible odds, the best bet was simply to retreat.

But not the X-Men. They would never retreat. Voght was saddened to realize that, in all likelihood, this would mean that the Acolytes would be forced to kill Xavier’s followers to put a stop to them. A waste that would greatly displease Magneto. But if necessary, Voght would not balk at ordering that execution.

Her train of thought was broken by a plasma blast which cut the street dangerously close to where she stood, and Voght realized how foolish she’d been. She’d cussed out the Kleinstocks for less, and here she was playing walking target for whoever might want to take a shot at her. Well, no more. It was time for the final push. Magneto and the Sentinels would keep the army busy. She had another job.

“Acolytes!” she cried, her upraised arms drawing the attention of Magneto’s entire army of followers. “Take them!”

Those who could not hear her words over the din of battle would not fail to understand her meaning.

“You’re making a terrible mistake, Voght,’’ Cyclops shouted from behind her.

Foolish of him. Before he could take her out of the fight with an optic blast, Amelia teleported behind him. Cyclops rolled down and away, and was quickly swept up in the tide of battle, which seemed to roil all around Voght like sea currents.

Then she was in the maelstrom again. A blue-furred hand landed on her shoulder, spun her around. It was Hank McCoy, the Beast, and even in the thick of battle, he was attempting to be reasonable. It was obvious that he was hoping for the same from Voght.

“Amelia,” he said, using her first name though they had never been anything but enemies, “you never appeared as barbarous, as zealous, as the others are. Do something! You must see that no benefit can come from this. Magneto is leading us all to a war that will tear the world apart, philosophically, and quite possibly, literally.”

“Magneto is not going to let that happen, McCoy,” she said. “You’re wasting your breath. The time for talk—”

Voght launched into a side kick aimed at the Beast’s head. She had no great strength, but superior skill, and despite his speed, she caught him on the temple and he stumbled back, more surprised than fazed by her attack.

“—is at an end.”

“Apparently,” the Beast said, muttering to himself.

Another kick missed completely, and then the Beast grabbed her in a painful, implacable grip, and lifted her from her feet.

“Drop me if you want to keep your hands, McCoy,” she snapped. “I’ll teleport your arms off your body without a single regret.”

In one smooth move, far too fast for Voght to react, the Beast threw her.

“I never intended to hold on, madam,” he said, his tone disturbingly genteel.

Voght tumbled through the air, all bearings gone, unable to teleport without any sense of place or destination. She hit someone, or several someones, hard, and went down in a jumble of limbs. The breath knocked out of her, she wheezed in an attempt to get oxygen, and still could not focus as McCoy picked her up again. She didn’t have the voice to threaten him again, or the concentration to follow through.

“My chivalry has been sorely tested these last few days,” he said whimsically.

The whimsy was what did it. It really pissed her off.

Behind him, she could see the Kleinstocks getting to their feet. The Beast had aimed well, taking the twins down with their own leader. McCoy hesitated, though Voght could not pinpoint exactly why, and in that moment, she knew what to do.

Harlan and Sven were trading fire with Bishop. Each time they buffeted him with their plasma blasts, the future-man would take a step or two back from the brunt of the attack, smile, and return fire. Sven and Harlan were both bleeding. Sven was limping and Harlan was holding one arm to his ribs. Bishop was going to hold his ground until he destroyed them.

Voght couldn’t afford to lose. And as much as she hated to admit it, she couldn’t afford to lose the Kleinstocks to their own stupidity either. They knew what Bishop could do, had faced his power before. Every time they fired at him, he simply absorbed their power and threw it back at them. While it didn’t harm him, it did them severe damage.

The idiots.

“Wolverine,” the Beast shouted, “catch!”

Amelia did not want to face off against Wolverine again. She’d gotten lucky the last time they’d clashed. Chances were, he would hold a grudge. Unlike the other X-Men, the diminutive Canadian was just as likely to kill her over it as just try to take her out of play. Killing was more certain, and this was war, after all. But once they started killing, either side, it was going to be a bloodbath.

If only Magneto didn’t want the X-Men alive.

The Beast hauled back to toss Voght to Wolverine, who might even use her life to end the conflict. The idea amused her. As if the others would hesitate for a moment before consigning her to execution. Her life meant nothing to them. Less than nothing. But the X-Men didn’t know that.

Fortunately, Voght got her voice back.

“Sven!” she shouted.

The Kleinstock brothers looked her way, scoped out the situation, and reacted. War was a function of the lizard brain, the primeval intellect, and required no real intelligence. Voght thanked God for that. The Kleinstocks worked best on instinct, and reacted that way in this situation.

Sven blasted Hank McCoy in the back. The Beast howled in pain and dropped her on the street. The twins began to buffet the Beast and Wolverine with plasma blasts until the two X-Men were driven back into a crowd of less powerful mutants, who nevertheless swarmed over them.

Bishop nailed them. Sven and Harlan went down, hard. They were trying, weakly, to rise, when Bishop moved in for another shot. Here was another X-Man, Voght thought, who might not hesitate to kill if that was the only way to assure victory.

A quick teleport took her behind him. She grabbed Bishop around the waist, teleported twenty stories up, where Rogue, Storm, and several other mutants with the power of flight were struggling with one another. The winds were extraordinary, and Storm was wiping out Magneto’s airborne followers.

Voght knew strategy. The moment she appeared with Bishop and began to fall, Storm and Rogue saw her. She teleported back to safety, and watched with interest as Bishop plummeted to the ground with Rogue in pursuit and Storm staving off their other attackers.

Rogue was making a good effort, but Amelia seriously doubted she would catch up to Bishop in time. Which was okay. Of all the X-Men, she knew that Magneto had the least attachment to Bishop. He was an unknown quantity, hostile and dangerous. Magneto wouldn’t mind if Bishop died, not at all.

He was expendable.

* * *

A warm July night, and dusk over Manhattan. Two lone stars twinkled above and a pale sliver shadow of moon hung above the city. A time for quiet, for calm, for small children to crawl into bed, for lovers to swing their clasped hands between them as they go off to dinner, or the theater, or window-shopping up Fifth Avenue.

That was how it was supposed to be. Magneto knew it, and in the rare moment when he relaxed his mind, took a tiny respite from the burden of empire, it saddened him greatly. He wanted to bring all of those things, the quiet moments, back to the city. But as his city. As Haven.

Instead, he reached out with his mind, bending the Earth’s magnetic field to his will, and tore the George Washington Bridge apart. The matrix of steel beams that forged the upper portions of the bridge broke away. Magneto carried them with him, their weight barely an encumbrance.

Across the Hudson River, American military forces fired again and again upon the Sentinel that stood on the island’s shore. Moments earlier, it had been guarding the bridge; now it had nothing to guard. The military had massed on the Jersey side, preparing to cross. Magneto had been astounded at the audacity and foolishness of the move. And at his own foolishness, for not having believed they would invade.

And they were invading. Or at least, attempting to do so. The Sentinels would be a bloody deterrent. Already, soldiers were dying in the attempt, distracting a Sentinel here and there by the bridge and tunnel routes, so their fellows could get across the river.

The center span of the George Washington Bridge collapsed into the Hudson. There would be no invasion via that route. Traditional tanks and those with plasma weapons fired upon the Sentinel still. From gun emplacements on the Jersey shoreline, the shelling continued. Many of the more modem weapons were not made, specifically, of metal, and so were harder for Magneto to latch on to.

Instead, he hovered above the tanks and guns, weapons fire dissipating harmlessly the moment it came into contact with his force field. With his magnetic power, he held the crisscrossed structure of the top of the bridge so that his intention was clear. He was going to drop it, destroying the armored vehicles below.

Silently, he counted to ten, giving the soldiers the opportunity to run. He wasn’t certain if his hesitation saved the lives of brilliant men or cowards, and frankly didn’t care.

Then he let the massive metalwork fall, crushing the tanks, destroying the guns. Lives probably were lost. Regrettable, he knew. But it was a war. A war that the American military was pressing, unwanted, on the emperor of Haven.

“My lord?” Scanner said, shimmering into view. Distracted by the battle, Magneto had not heard the telltale buzz of her arrival.

“What is it, Scanner?” he asked. “I’m a little busy.”

‘ ‘We... I thought you should know that the X-Men are free,” she answered.

“Free!” he snapped. Then sighed. “Once more, my good will is flaunted by Xavier’s little puppets. No matter, what can four X-Men do?”

“Eight, actually, Emperor,” she said, obviously unhappy to be the bearer of bad tidings. “We are fighting them now, in the streets.”

Magneto said nothing. So the other X-Men had returned. It was to be expected, he assumed. But he vowed he would not allow it to hurt morale. The X-Men didn’t have a chance to win, and he wanted his people to know that he was not going to let it happen.

“One other thing, my lord,” Scanner said. “Milan wanted me to pass on to you that one of the Sentinels has reported an attack by mutants, in addition to the human invasion.”

“Thank you, Scanner,” Magneto said, flying downriver toward the next Sentinel. “That will do.”

Scanner flashed out of existence, her disappearance leaving Magneto to blink away bright spots from his eyes. But he could not as easily rid himself of his concern and suspicion. Mutants attacking a Sentinel.

Which mutants?

More to the point, which Sentinel?

A small flame blazed up in Professor Charles Xavier’s gut. It wasn’t an ulcer. Another had formed in the back of his head, where all the worst headaches started. Two more, one behind each eye. But in the center of his heart, it was brutally cold, agonizingly painful, without the promise of merciful numbness ever setting in.

The world was collapsing around him. The world he lived in every day, and the one he had envisioned for the future, his future, the future of his friends, colleagues, and students. Falling in a bloody massacre of large-weapons fire and volatile words.

The fire and ice in every inch of his being, in the depths of his soul, were anger and despair. He was a spectator, and it disgusted him. He ought to be in the thick of things, he could most certainly have been of use in the X-Men’s battle against Magneto’s forces. If he’d had legs. Which he didn’t. Instead, he had two choices. He could monitor the fight, help where possible, continue to attempt some kind of spin control; or he could stop Magneto once and for all.

God, it was tempting. Xavier had never felt such grand temptation to perform an act that his conscience told him was so completely wrong, so utterly indecent. It frightened him, that temptation. He pushed it aside, but it didn’t go away. It nagged at him, like childhood guilt or romantic infatuation.

He could not bring himself to do it, to take Magneto out of the game. But without that as an active role, he had begun to feel ever more useless.

“Professor,” Gyrich said tentatively, though he’d already sensed the man’s approach.

Despicable as he found Gyrich, Xavier thought it amusing that the two had found a sort of odd companionship in the disaster that was unfolding. The views they held were radically different, and yet they shared an intense stake in the result of the day’s events.

“Mr. Gyrich,” he acknowledged.

“I thought you’d want to know, that Tilby woman is broadcasting from the MTV offices, on several networks. Seems the

captured X-Men have been freed, and if her story turns out to be true, they’re all in there fighting on humanity’s side,” Gyrich said.

Xavier did not need to scan Gyrich’s thoughts. He could hear the man’s emotions in his voice. And the number one emotion was disappointment. Gyrich did not want the X-Men to be heroes. It didn’t fit in with his plan of the way the world should be.

Which was just too bad.

“Thank you,” Xavier said. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’d tell me that.”

“Well, don’t be,” Gyrich answered gruffly. “I may have problems with muties, but you’re an academic, you’re entitled to your opinion. And, frankly, I tend to agree with you on the outcome to this thing. One way or another, when we bring Magneto down, we could very well have a bloodbath. I don’t mind one bit if normal people think the government should carefully regulate mutants. But we don’t need another civil war.”

Xavier was disgusted, but with Gyrich, he was becoming used to being disgusted. He wasn’t at all sure that was a good thing. Being inured to bigotry might dull the edge of the mission over time, he thought.

‘ ‘Thank you for the information, Mr. Gyrich,’ ’ he said, in a tone that was clearly meant to dismiss the man.

He was surprised when Gyrich took the hint, and walked away.

Any other day, Xavier might have launched into a tirade against Gyrich and his prejudiced remarks. Not today. It was getting dark, a beautiful night, and Xavier wanted nothing more than to sleep. But he had a duty to his people, and to his dream, and he would never shirk that duty. Already, he was disturbed by how much he was forced to allow others to shoulder what he considered his responsibility.

There was stubble on his chin. He had not slept for two days. He was a man prone to obsession. There was a martial-arts principle which taught that when one dedicated every ounce of energy, every waking moment, to a single goal, little was impossible. Xavier lived his life by that principle, his every breath for the dream.

Moments ago, he had been faltering in his pursuit of that principle, in his faith in the dream.

“Bless you, Trish,” he whispered to himself, and sent the message out into the darkening Manhattan skies.

She heard his telepathic voice, heard his words, felt his gratitude. Professor Xavier felt her smile. That was their only communication, but it was enough.

If Trish could continue to work her magic over the airwaves, and Xavier did the same with his interviews and debates ... they might turn the tide. If the X-Men could find a way to defeat Magneto and the Sentinels, Trish Tilby and Charles Xavier himself might be able to make certain the nation didn’t destroy itself in the aftermath.

A lot of ifs.

“If you can keep your head, when all around you are losing theirs,” he said, under his breath once more. But this time, he kept the thought to himself, a bit of whimsy that he would not normally have indulged.

Xavier was getting a little punchy. The lack of sleep was getting to him. He wondered how the X-Men were dealing with it. He would check up on them in a few minutes.

He allowed himself a moment to monitor the progress of Valerie Cooper, Archangel, and Gambit. They seemed to be moving along fine. He would have known if anything significant had gone wrong, because he had kept a telepathic line open to Val throughout their mission. He might not be “with” her all the time, but he was still there, listening peripherally.

Then it was time to make another attempt at communicating with his oldest friend, his greatest enemy.

Xavier closed his eyes, and his mind called out the name: Magnus.

In the psionic world, the realm of telepathy, the astral plane, Charles Xavier stood. Though in reality he could hardly feel his legs at all, his brain remembered what it felt like to walk, to run. Simply to stand tall and proud. Synapses fired in his mind, for the brain was Xavier’s province, and within it, he was capable of anything.

His body was trapped within the steel wheelchair that, despite all the padding he might have installed, would never be truly comfortable. Xavier could not move across a room without that chair.

But in the world of his mind, he stood.

And it was glorious.

Magnus, he called again.

I am here, Charles, though your timing is wretched as ever, Magneto responded.

Their minds linked, and Xavier could see him. Or at least, he could see the mental image that Magneto had of himself. Most people had a mental self-image that was generally better, prettier, stronger, taller—or worse, uglier, weaker, shorter— than they actually were. Magneto was an odd case. His mental self-image was a perfect reflection of the man himself.

But Xavier had no time for pop psychology. There was a war on.

A refreshing change, Magneto thought, his arms spread wide.

Xavier glanced around the Astral Plane, only now becoming conscious of the environment he was psion ically creating around them. Unlike the starscape asteroid field he had provided when last he contacted Magneto, this time they stood facing one another in Xavier’s own study, back at the Institute in Salem Center.

I’m exhausted, Xavier admitted. I suppose I thought we could both use a quiet, comfortable space.

Within the psychic manifestation of his study, Charles Xavier walked across the floor, enjoying the feeling of the hardwood beneath the soles of his shoes, until he stood only a few steps before the mutant conqueror.

Conqueror? Magneto thought, surprising Xavier by picking up the thought. He was more tired than he realized. Conqueror brings to mind so many negatives, images of tyranny and slaughter. I want none of those things. Only freedom to live, for myself and the rest of my kind. That includes you, Charles.

You may not want to be a tyrant, Magnus. You may not want to oppress, to slaughter, to destroy. But surely you have realized by now that those things cannot be avoided. You have become what you once most despised, Xavier retorted.

Magneto’s face grew cold, all the amused detachment becoming a shattered mask, falling away in pieces.

How dare you? Magneto hissed.

I am the only one who would dare, and the only one who would know enough to tell you what you’ve done, Xavier thought. As oppressive as society has become for mutants, we are still captains of our own destiny. What you have begun will only lead to the enslavement of humanity. What next, Magnus, work camps?

Magneto’s gray-blue eyes narrowed with fury. His jaw worked as he clenched his teeth together. Then he punched Charles Xavier in the face, nearly breaking his nose.

That hurt, Xavier thought.

We're on the Astral Plane, Charles, how could that have hurt you ?

Perhaps I allowed it to, or maybe I’m too tired to care, too tired to separate conscious from subconscious. But I guess I hit a nerve.

You know you did. That was your intention, Magneto thought. But don't think it’s going to deter me. I may have lost everything to the Nazis, but I myself am not a Nazi■ I will not allow my dream to be corrupted that way.

It isn’t up to you, Magnus, Xavier replied. You can't micromanage the world. Violence begets violence. No matter that you are more high minded than many of those who serve your cause. That isn’t going to change them. You’ve fed their paranoia and hatred so long, and now all you ’re doing is giving them a license to punish humanity for its transgressions.

They need a home, a sanctuaiy, a place where they can find love and confidence and security. I’m giving them that. I’m giving them salvation, Magneto explained, his tone less sure now.

How presumptuous to think you can save them by yourself, Xavier pointed out. You ’re no savior, old friend. You aren't offering the world salvation. We all need to be saved from your dream, not by it.

There was silence then. Magneto sat in one of the soft leather chairs in Xavier’s study. Xavier knew he should sit as well, but he could not bring himself to do so. Though all of it was pretense, it felt like standing, and standing felt wonderful. He wouldn’t sit down, not for a moment.

You may be right, Magneto finally admitted. But even if you are, it is too late to turn back. Hundreds, thousands of mutants have come to take the new life I have offered to them. Most of them are innocents, Charles. Without me, they have nothing but the hellish life they left to come here.

Xavier nodded.

Perhaps you have become a kind of salvation for some, he admitted. But at what price, Magnus? That is my question for you today. At what price? What value is a home that has been razed to the ground by hatred, by war? How happily can one live in the shadow of sixty-foot-high murder machines?

In that moment, Magneto seemed to be listening in despair. To Xavier he seemed older than he had ever been, burdened by the consequences of victory. He felt that he might actually be getting through. Magneto understood what he was saying, there was no doubt about that. But Charles thought Magneto might actually have begun to realize that his dream was flawed.

His old friend, a man whose name was feared in every corner of the globe, looked up at him with a terrible confusion in his eyes. He seemed about to speak. Then Magneto’s eyes went wide with surprise, narrowed with fury.

What a fool you must think me, Charles, he cried, leaping to his feet, to spout this gibberish from the pulpit of your arrogance and expect me to prostrate myself in some foul act of contrition. And what a fool I am to believe your appeal was in earnest, rather than some shoddy attempt to distract me from your true goal.

Magnus, I don’t know what— Xavier began.

The Mutant Empire is not a threat any longer, Charles, it is a reality, Magnus said. There is nothing that you, or your toy soldiers can do about it. Now, if you ’II excuse me, I obviously have somewhere else to be.

Even as Magneto faded away, ghostlike, from the Astral Plane, Xavier tried to understand what had happened. He had been so close to breaking through to the man, at least partially. He had felt it in the psychic ether, the psionic communication between them. What could have .. . ?

No, he thought.

In his mind, Xavier turned to see that the corner of the study was gone. In its place, a mental window on the command center of the Alpha Sentinel, where Val Cooper, Gambit, and Archangel were hard at work trying to reprogram the monstrous robots. Xavier was so exhausted, that he had not been able to ... no, in truth, he had not even attempted to hide the telepathic connection he still maintained with Val Cooper. Magneto had seen, and understood.

Dear God, he thought, even as the Astral Plane disappeared around him, and back in his flesh and blood body, back in the wheelchair, he opened his eyes.

“What have I done?” he asked aloud.

• * *

As Valerie Cooper worked, bent over the command-center terminal, furiously trying to get around the failsafes Magneto had implanted in the Alpha Sentinel's programming, Gambit and Archangel could do nothing but wait. It didn’t seem to bother Archangel much, but it was driving Gambit crazy.

“How’s it going, Val?” Archangel asked.

The woman mumbled something in response.

“I don’ know ’bout you, ’Angel,” Gambit said, “but most of de time, I need words to understand what somebody is trying to say.”

Archangel smiled, and suddenly Val was brought out of her almost trancelike concentration by what Gambit had always thought of as “a change in de weather,” a significant alteration of the emotional climate of the room. He believed that people knew when they were being spoken to, or focused upon.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “Were you guys talking to me?”

“Oui,” Gambit said. “Why don’ you tell us what’s happening. De suspense is starting to get to me. Not to mention dat all dis swaying back and forth as de Sentinel walks .. .je me sens mal.”

“I don’t speak French,” Cooper said.

“I feel like t’rowin’ up,” Gambit explained, with a weak smile.

“I have the opposite problem,” Archangel said. “I’m tired and hungry and cranky, and I could do without being inside a giant robot that’s being shot at. It’s like having a metal barrel over your head and having people throw rocks at it. What’s the story? We getting out of here soon?”

“I’m trying,” Val answered. “I’m having a problem getting through Magneto’s program, though. The override codes are useless if I can’t get into the system in the first place.” “Why don’ you try another way in?” Gambit asked. “Dere must be a back door or somet’ing, non?"

Cooper paused before looking down at the keyboard, then at the monitor in front of her. Finally, she looked back at them.

“I’m sure there is. Magneto had to have a back door built in to reprogram them in the first place,” Cooper explained. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this. We know he was involved with the Hellfire Club for a while. Well, before anyone knew he was a mutant, Sebastian Shaw was building Sentinels for the government. He could have put something in, told Magneto. That’s all I can think of.”

“But we aren’t going to get that information, are we?” Archangel reasoned.

‘ ‘Well, that back door was probably set up for a single use anyway,” she replied.

“So what are our other options?” Gambit asked.

“Only one,” Cooper answered. “Gyrich.”

“You expect him to help you?” Archangel asked.

“Hey,” Gambit broke in, “if he don’ help us, his derriere is on de fire right along wit’ de rest of us.”

“That doesn’t mean he’ll help, though,” Val said. “Still,

it may be our best hope. Let me try to get him on the comm-link.”

She reached for the comm-unit on her wrist. Before she could speak, something slammed into the Alpha Sentinel, rocking it hard. Val fell to the floor from her seat. Gambit and Archangel stumbled, nearly falling themselves. Another blast struck the Sentinel, and plasma burst through the hole Gambit had blown in the metal hunter’s head.

“Cover!” Cooper yelled, and all three of them flattened out on the floor.

Sparks flew in the command center, but Gambit did not think there had been any real damage. Still, it had been a close call.

“Enough of that!” Val said, and slid into her seat once more. “Let me just adjust the frequency of this thing and . ..

“Gyrich!” she barked into the comm-unit. “Come in, Gyrich!”

“Who the hell is this?” an unfamiliar but authoritative voice demanded on the link.

“This is Valerie Cooper,” Val snapped. “You know the name?’ ’

“Well, yes, Ms. Cooper, I—”

“Get me Gyrich on the comm,” she said.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, I—” the military man began.

“Now!” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” the soldier complied.

They waited.

“Warning!” the Alpha Sentinel said, its voice loud enough to hurt their ears. “Intruders detected. Commencing termination.”

• • *

“I can’t believe Marko turned coward and ran,” Wolverine snarled, and popped a single claw through the lower abdomen of a mutant whose main power seemed to be particularly repulsive body odor, backed up by a small dose of telekinesis.

“Find a doctor,” he said gruffly to the mutant, and then turned away.

The man would live, but he was most definitely out of the fight.

“You’re showing amazing restraint,” Iceman said, watching the mutant clutch his belly and stumble into the midst of the mosh pit that passed for a battleground.

Wolverine grunted something in return. Drake was right. While the others were going a bit farther than usual—not killing, but not holding back nearly as much as they normally would—he was drawing the line. Most of their enemies were relatively decent folks duped into a war they had never asked for by Magneto himself. ’Course, if he ended up ripping open Senyaka’s rib cage, or Voght’s, well, that was another story. He had plans for that punk Pyro too. If he ever got his hands on the guy.

“You’re right about Marko, though,” Iceman said. “I mean, I was stunned as anyone to see him fighting with us instead of against us. But then to turn tail and run—it just doesn’t make sense.”

They spun and danced and cut and bludgeoned their way through half a dozen of Magneto’s faithful. Wolverine’s healing factor made up quite handily for his lack of sleep. He had no idea how the others were even standing up.

“Getting dark,” Drake observed at his side.

“Yeah,” Wolverine agreed, “good for us. Bad for them.” “Look around, Logan,” Iceman said. “You actually think we’ve got a shot at winning this thing?”

“More than a shot,” Wolverine answered. “We’re gonna win because that’s the only acceptable outcome. No matter what it takes, we have to win. It wouldn’t hurt if we had more help, I’ll tell ya, but we’ll make do.”

But even as he said it, Wolverine recognized that his words were empty. There was the distinct possibility, given the numbers involved, that they would fail. Off to the left, he could see Rogue and the Beast driving through a parade of attackers. Scott and Jean were somewhere up the street, and Storm was above them, dropping miniature tornadoes and hailstorms on the enemy. She might be their greatest asset in a battle this size, he thought. He didn’t know where the hell Bishop had gotten to. The last time Wolverine had seen him, the future X-Man had been falling out of the sky, and Rogue had barely saved him from becoming so much Manhattan road pizza.

“Time to die, traitors!” cried a thin man with skin like polished ebony and features so angular, they might be diamond sharp.

He slashed long fingers toward Wolverine, who put his fists up, claws in the air, and blocked the attack. The crystalline man grunted his displeasure, but before he could withdraw his deadly hands, Wolverine whipped his claws to either side, neatly slicing off the end of each digit. The man screamed in pain.

“Traitors!” he cried again, this time making the word a pained curse.

A swarm of other mutants moved in. They’d been backed up to the massive glass display window of a designer clothing store. Thirty of Magneto’s followers, and only two of them. Wolverine knew that he couldn’t beat them all without killing some of them, or at least he feared that was the case.

“Freeze ’em,” Wolverine growled.

Iceman didn’t miss a beat. He might have been an X-Man a lot longer than Wolverine, but he never failed to defer to Logan in the field. Wolverine chalked that up to good teamwork. Drake had proven over and over in the past few days something that Wolverine had always known but never voiced. Iceman was a lot better at being an X-Man than anyone ever gave him credit for.

With a muttered, regretful curse that Wolverine’s enhanced hearing could not have failed to pick up, Bobby Drake lifted both his hands, and poured on the ice.

“Traitors?” he screamed in fury. “We’re traitors? To what? Insanity? All we want is an end to this kind of garbage. All we want is peace! There are humans who hate all mutants because of your actions, your beliefs. You’re no better than they are!”

Thirty mutants were frozen in the street. Iceman controlled his powers to an extent Wolverine had never witnessed, leaving, in every case, only the individual’s head exposed. Just enough to breathe. As he produced the ice, Bobby slid along, propelling himself with his power, as he would on an ice slide. Wolverine scrambled after him, looking for trouble, watching for an aerial attack.

Bobby continued out into the middle of the street, freezing at least a dozen more mutants. Rogue had to fly the Beast out of the way so Iceman could continue. Half a dozen more of the enemy force were frozen solid. Rogue landed with the Beast just behind Wolverine, and they marched on with him, over the newly made tundra.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said in awe.

“Nor I, dear Rogue,” Hank said. “And I’ve known the boy for many years.”

“I just wish he’d thought o’ this a while ago,” Wolverine grumbled.

Ahead of them, Iceman stumbled.

And fell.

“Bobby!” Rogue called, and went toward him.

“I was afraid of this,” the Beast said, mainly to himself, and followed. “He’s completely drained himself.”

Wolverine was going to follow, but he heard the sounds of battle moving toward him from behind. He turned, and across the ice came the war, Scott and Jean and Bishop trying their best to hold back hordes of mutants, more than Wolverine had even imagined they were facing.

“Wolverine, we’ve got to regroup, watch each other’s backs!” Cyclops shouted over the din. “Otherwise, we’re dead!”

Logan snapped his head around to pass the command on to Rogue and the others, but she and Hank were in a battle to keep Iceman’s unconscious form from being dragged away.

It looked awfully grim. Wolverine held his claws up in front of him in battle stance, and hung his head a moment. With a deep breath, he prepared to experience the worst life had to offer, and not for the first time. He had seen friends die before, faced death himself many times. He had killed. Whatever it took, that’s what Wolverine would do.

Whatever it took.

Then, beyond the mob attacking Rogue and Hank and Bobby, came a familiar, thundering noise that shook the halfblock-long field of ice Logan stood upon.

“One side, goons!” a deep voice rumbled. “The cavalry’s cornin’, and you’re all in for a world of hurt!”

It was a sight Wolverine never would have imagined he would see, could barely believe even though it was right before his eyes. With nearly twenty other mutants behind him, Cain Marko was tearing a wide swath through the enemy lines. Incredibly, the Juggernaut had come to the rescue.

1181 ow the hell did the thing know where we were?” Val •■shouted. “There are no sensors in here!”

■ I Massive fingers began to grope around the opening in the back of the Sentinel’s head. It had figured out their location, and now it was determined to pull them out of its skull and vaporize them, or stomp them underfoot, or something equally nasty,

Val was not happy.

“How ... ?” she began to ask again.

“No sensors?” Archangel asked.

“Are you sure ’bout dat?” Gambit added.

“Absolutely!”

“You t’inkin’ what Gambit is t’inkin’, mon ami?” the Cajun asked his teammate.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Enough of this cryptic stuff,” Val shouted at them. “What? What?”

“Well, if there are no sensors, then somebody told it we were in here,” Archangel explained. “Who has contact with the Alpha unit? Who can give it orders?”

“Oh, my God,” Val said. “Not now! We haven’t done the override yet!”

There was a shrieking of metal and the Sentinel began to widen the hole in the back of its skull, tearing at it as if it were peeling a piece of fruit.

“We in trouble,” Gambit said softly. “But Magneto can’t be here yet, or he’d come in after us, right? Depechez-vous, Valerie. Hurry up!”

“Cooper, are you there?” Gyrich’s voice came over the comm.

Val, Gambit, and Archangel all looked at one another in horror, as they realized that the success of their mission, and their lives, might depend upon a man who hated them all.

“Gyrich, listen,” Val said hurriedly. “The thing knows we’re in here, Magneto’s on the way. I need a back door. A bypass, before I can even enter the override codes to restart the original program.”

Silence. Then Gyrich said, “Let me think.”

“Not what we want to hear, Gyrich!” Archangel shouted. “We don’t have time for games.”

“Nobody’s playing,” Gyrich said. “I’m trying to remember the code phrase.”

“A phrase,” Val asked, panicking. “A quote of some kind, a rhyme, what is it?”

“Just give me a second,” Gyrich roared in frustration.

He was serious, not toying with them. All the barriers had fallen, all the political differences, philosophical arguments, were cast aside. Everything that meant anything was in jeopardy. Gyrich was a mean-spirited, ignorant fool, but not fool enough that he didn’t understand the stakes. Val would like to have been relieved, but they didn’t have time for sentiment.

Screeching metal. Val whipped around even as Gambit said, “He cornin’ in, Valerie,” so calmly that she wanted to slap him.

“Oh, God,” she said, looking around the command center frantically for some way to stop it.

“Gyrich!” she snapped.

“I’m thinking!” he yelled back.

“No, wait, first tell me, can we disable this thing from in here, shut down its motor controls without cutting off our ability to shut down all the others from in here?” she asked.

“Well, yes, but—”

“Gambit, ’Angel, those panels!” Val barked, and pointed.

Remy and Warren fired everything they had at the motor controls of the Sentinel, leaving its brain and memory intact but stopping it cold. It froze in the street, completely paralyzed. The hand stopped clawing at them, but it blocked their exit. Val figured they could worry about that when the job was done.

“Cooper!” Gyrich shouted, trying to get her attention.

“What?” she asked.

“What I was saying was, you can disable the Sentinel, but you’ll be a sitting duck for the army in there. No defenses. Which Sentinel is it?”

“The one by the UN. Tell them to cease fire on us,” she said. “And give me the back door code.”

“It’s Shakespeare,” Gyrich said. “I’m trying to remember what the quote is.”

“Well, hurry,” she said.

They were quiet then, all staring at the monitor, which showed some of her failed attempts at hacking Magneto’s program. She would have been able to break it, eventually, she knew. But they didn’t have time for eventually.

A clanging broke the silence. A repetitive noise, like the sounding of a large bell.

“What in the name of God is—” she began.

“Somebody’s knocking,” Archangel said.

“I guess we know who it is too,” Gambit added.

There was a terrible shrieking sound as the metal hand of the Sentinel was tom away and flung down onto the street below. Outside the hole in the robot’s skull, Magneto hovered in the air, encapsulated in magnetic power.

“You three are trying my patience,” he said.

• • •

It was all Bishop could do to keep from screaming. All the horrors that he had witnessed in the not-so-distant future where he had been bom and raised, every act of violence or oppression, every broken spirit or cowering soul, were there all around him. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not so soon. The Sentinels, and the chaos and the destruction, it was decades early.

He wanted to close his eyes, wanted to pretend it was just another session in the Danger Room. But he knew it was true, all of it. And the only way he could prevent that hellish future from coming to pass that very night, was by fighting as he had never fought before.

So he clenched his teeth to bite off a scream unvoiced, and he pumped round after round of plasma fire into the attacking mutant hordes. It was everything he’d been trained to do in the XSE, the mutant police force of that future time, but even the XSE’s worst-case-scenario battle plans never accounted for something like this.

It was getting dark now but the sky was still lit with the memory of sunshine. A bright day had ended in low clouds, which reflected the sickly glow of fires and the streaking, whistling, pastel contrails of overland missiles and other large-weapons fire.

For Bishop, it was as if every nightmare he had ever had, those fever dreams of terror yet to come, had not ended in his waking warm and safe in his bed at the Xavier Institute. A nightmare that might never end.

“No,” he said simply, softly, to himself.

Bishop used his elbows, his forehead, his knees, the butt of his plasma rifle, and the hard set of his face to splinter passage through a tight knot of mutants ahead. He left the other X-Men behind, though Cyclops had called for them to regroup. The man was a more-than-capable field leader, but Bishop thought that Cyclops didn’t want to understand what was really happening here. Bishop knew war. He knew you never put all your soldiers in one spot, or the war could be over very, very quickly.

A low growl that erupted into a full-throated battle cry came unbidden from his lips as he slammed into, then trampled over, a man whose empty eye sockets swirled with orange mist. He leaped to the trunk, and then the roof, of an Olds-mobile. The thin roof buckled slightly under his weight.

Trembling with the fury and the fear that raged within him, Bishop turned his plasma rifle on the crowd of mutants trying to take advantage of his sudden separation from his comrades.

“Fools!” he shouted. “You’re just giving them what they want! All the people who want to see us caged, or dead. You’re handing them the very tools they can use to destroy us!”    '

A narrow-focus beam of electric flame sliced across his face. If anyone else had been the target, it would have sliced their head in half. Bishop absorbed the energy of the attack, held the plasma rifle in one hand, and prepared to cut down the crowd with that devastating blade of fire.

m

In his own time, he wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But this was a different time. It wasn’t the XSE. He had learned much since he came to live and fight beside the very legends he had venerated as a boy. Killing was the final option, invoked rarely enough that the gravity of it had finally reached him. Though Wolverine would likely not have hesitated, Bishop had changed. The X-Men had changed him.

He discharged the killing blast into the pavement in front of the Olds.

Then the barrage came, energy blasts of every type arcing toward him. No projectile weapons. They were mutants, after all. How foolish they were. Apparently, none of them were paying attention.

Channeling the attackers’ energy into his plasma rifle, Bishop cut a wide swath through Magneto’s followers. Nearly two dozen mutants fell under his furious assault, as he stood upon the car and swung the weapon back and forth like a fire hose. Two dozen. And he was fairly certain that all of them would live. Fairly certain.

“Bishop!”

He turned to see Cyclops coming toward him, taking advantage of their enemies’ momentary confusion and fear to run a clean path and leap up onto the car.

“I give orders for a reason, friend,” Cyclops said sternly. “Get back to your teammates so we can give each other cover.”

He wanted to snap at Cyclops. Wanted to say something about “getting results” in a flip way that would let the man know he didn’t like to be ordered around. But, though he didn’t like it, he was used to it. Hierarchy was valuable, leadership important. Summers wasn’t perfect, but he was a good leader. And Bishop? Bishop was a good soldier.

“Bishop?” Cyclops asked, a note of concern in his voice.

“I’m okay,” Bishop said, “it’s all just a bit too close to my reality.”

“Down!” Cyclops shouted, and Bishop responded instantly, no thought given to the rapid change in tone on the battlefield.

A burst of energy shot from Cyclops’s visor, and tore up the street and the advancing enemy behind them. Bishop fired his plasma rifle in the opposite direction, defeating the quickly hatched two-pronged attack.

Two-pronged. But they were dealing with mutants, so ...

Bishop let himself fall backward off the roof of the car, firing straight into the air even before he slammed into the hood of the Olds. A woman, whose body was so distended she resembled nothing so much as a manta ray, had been floating down on top of them, her open mouth lined with rows of razor teeth and her talons reaching for the next kill.

Bishop shot her out of the sky, and rolled off the car to hit pavement. Cyclops took out two more attackers on the ground with his optic blasts, then jumped down to join Bishop in the street.

“Let’s move,” Cyclops said.

Bishop led the way, breaking bones and banging heads as he went. When they reached the X-Men, Bishop at first thought the team was about to be ambushed. He trained his plasma rifle on three mutants who stood by Jean Grey, ready to shoot them down.

A huge hand landed on the rifle, and pushed its barrel up.

“They’re with me,” the Juggernaut said. “The odds are bad enough without you firin’ on your allies.”

Bishop nodded. It disturbed him to have the Juggernaut fighting at his side. There was no question that the man was fighting in earnest, that he was fully aligned with the X-Men for the duration of the battle. But who knew what might happen after? That was what disturbed Bishop. Enemies never made comfortable allies.

But with the team so horribly outmatched, with so little on which to pin their hopes, any help was appreciated, no matter its origins.

Rogue and Wolverine seemed to be handling an enemy attack without help off to one side. The woman Arclight, who’d been among the Marauders they had defeated in the small hours of the morning, was attacking once more. Apparently she was too stubborn or too stupid to quit while she could still walk upright.

Bishop trained his weapon on her.

“Who’s that?” Jean Grey asked, and he was startled that she’d come up so close by without his noticing her approach.

He glanced at her in confusion, and she pointed toward a commotion taking place a block or so to the south. Mutants were turning to face some new threat, but the weakest ones had hung back, not wanting to risk battle with the X-Men. A line of humans—humans!—marched down the center of the street. Many of them were police officers, armed with guns and tear gas. Both were fired into the tightly knit group of mutant aggressors, which was broken up quickly enough.

Some wore gas masks, but most did not. It didn’t matter, though. The man in front, who Bishop thought looked familiar, lifted his hands, made a small movement with them, and the gas seemed to be lifted from the street, pushed into the sky. Hacking, coughing mutants tried to stumble away, but the same man motioned again and they went down as if rammed by a fast-moving car.

That’s when Bishop knew him. Skolnick was his name, a military man who’d defected to become one of Magneto’s lap-dogs. Bishop had seen him on the dais with Magneto that very morning. Magneto had crowed about his defection, about what it meant for mutantkind. Obviously, Skolnick had seen the error of his ways. He was fighting the good fight again, and this time, he wasn’t alone. Bishop didn’t have time to count the cops and human civilians backing Skolnick up, but there were well over one hundred.

He worried for them, that they would be cattle to the slaughter in a battle of mutants. But the X-Men could use all the help they could find.

The odds looked a little brighter. Now if the others could only take care of the Sentinels, he thought....

• • •

“Gyrich!” Val Cooper screamed. “We don’t have time to waste! Let’s have that code!”

“God, I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” he answered over the comm.

“We’re dead,” Archangel said, mostly to himself, as he and Gambit raced to the hole tom out of the Sentinel’s skull.

Magneto floated in a ball of electromagnetic power, just beyond the hole, and a sixty-foot drop waited below. Archangel knew that he alone was no match for Magneto. In the end, none of them were. But up there he wasn’t even sure what kind of help Gambit would be, given that he could not fly.

He moved to the attack, but it was a futile gesture. He knew it in his heart, and he saw it in Magneto’s eyes, in the face of the greatest enemy Archangel, and the X-Men’s mentor, Professor Xavier, had ever had. Magneto could destroy him utterly, with little effort, if murder was his goal. And there was so very little that Warren could do, given that sphere of energy that protected Magneto from attack.

Together, Archangel knew that he and Gambit could buy Valerie mere moments. No more. But it might be ...

“Allez-vous-en, Magneto! Go home, we don’ want you here!” Gambit cried madly.

But his manic chatter was a pale shadow of the insanity of his actions. Before Archangel could even register what his teammate was up to, Gambit had telescoped out his bo-staff and was catapulting himself into the air. He flew toward Magneto, sixty feet from the ground. The mutant tyrant only watched in amused and somewhat surprised silence as Gambit slammed into the force shield surrounding him.

Gambit screamed. Archangel imagined it was something like being electrocuted; then he remembed that the Cajun actually had been electroshocked days earlier.

Slowly, he slid down through the field that surrounded Magneto. Magneto only watched. In seconds, Gambit would fall to his death, or Archangel would have to save him, leaving Valerie defenseless, and it would all be for nothing. Warren was at a loss. He had never felt more vulnerable.

Then he saw Gambit’s eyes. Despite the pain he was in, despite the danger, he was fighting. Halfway in, halfway out of Magneto’s defensive shielding, Gambit still held on to his bo-stick. He charged it with the explosive power that genetic fate had given him, and shoved it toward Magneto’s chest.

The stick exploded, throwing Magneto backward through the air.

Gambit fell.

Archangel dived after him, ignoring Magneto for that moment. Gambit was nearly unconscious when Warren snatched him out of the sky, but he could not take the time to put Remy down. As fast as he was able, he turned in midair, and carried Gambit back toward the Sentinel’s gaping head, and back toward Magneto.

Magneto had fallen for a moment. Warren had seen it out of the corner of his eye. But he had quickly recovered and was moving toward them again. Magneto’s uniform was durable enough to have significantly protected him from the blast. Still, he was shaken, and there was a blackened circle on his abdomen.

Warren did the only thing he could do. He launched a flurry of his wing-knives, biometallic feather blades, at Magneto’s newly restructured force shield.

Magneto was no longer amused, but he barely reacted to the attack. Archangel’s new wings were, after all, metal. His facing Magneto was almost laughable. Or it seemed so.

Until the wing-knives penetrated the shield and hit Magneto’s body armor. Where Gambit had attacked, on that burnt area of Magneto’s uniform, the knives passed through, slicing into Magneto’s skin.

The look of surprise on Magneto’s face was almost comical. He could control any metal, even the iron in human blood, if he concentrated, if he focused on it enough. Surely, Archangel’s wings, created by Apocalypse, had some kind of metal alloy as their base. But there was more to them than that, perhaps more flesh or living tissue than Warren had ever imagined. Magneto had miscalculated, a mistake he would not make again.

But once was enough.

Magneto was momentarily paralyzed.

Archangel could not believe his luck.

Then he realized that Magneto did not need to move to use his power, and all that good feeling went away fast.

Val had seconds. Seconds.

“Gyrich!” Val screamed. “I need that back door code now, or we’re dead!”

‘ ‘I—I—’ ’ Gyrich fumbled. ‘ ‘I just.. . What dreams may cornel’’ he shouted.

“What?” she cried.

“From Hamlet,” he said. “ ‘For in such sleep, what dreams may come’I”

Val keyed in the phrase, praying as she never had before that Magneto’s tinkering would not have affected the back door Gyrich’s people had built into the Alpha Sentinel’s control systems.

The word online blinked on the screen. Then the command prompt.

Val typed one more word.

RESET.

She waited half a dozen eternal seconds, holding her breath.

mutant target designate? the system, now back to its original programming, prompted.

She typed his name, and Magneto’s file scrolled across every screen, as if the Alpha Sentinel had suddenly gone mad. It couldn’t move, she had made certain of that. Now she had to make sure Magneto couldn’t get back in.

lockout until target acquisition? the computer asked.

Oh, yes, Valerie thought, and hit the affirmative command.

Nobody could abort the new mission until it had succeeded. Nobody.

* * *

Rogue was on the ground with the rest of the X-Men, backing their play. Storm was still in the air, though. Crowds played hell with her claustrophobia, Rogue knew. And she was much more effective from the sky. After all, Ororo had already been

decisive in the battle, literally sweeping one end of the street clean of enemies with hurricane-force winds. A number of those were injured, still others simply walked away, realizing that Storm could keep them away for as long as she wished.

For the first time, Rogue began to think that they might all have a chance at surviving to see the next day. And, if they were extremely fortunate, the day after that as well.

“Rogue,” Cyclops barked. “Get Iceman somewhere safe. We can’t fight and protect him at the same time.”

“Any ideas, Cyke?” she asked, only half sarcastically. Cyclops ignored her, so Rogue gathered the unconscious Iceman up into her arms, and flew north.

“Rogue?” he asked weakly, coming around for the first time since his extraordinary effort had evened the odds in the war, at least for a little while.

“Relax, Bobby,” she said gently. “You’ve earned it.” Bobby Drake started to drift off again, comfortable in her arms. Then his eyes snapped awake, as if he had truly realized, for the first time, exactly where he was.

“Whoa,” he said. “Where we going?”

“Someplace you can rest,” she answered.

“No.” ’

Rogue ignored him.

“No, Rogue, take me back,” Bobby demanded.

“Bobby, listen,” she began.

“No,” he interrupted. “I’m an X-Man, Rogue. As long as I’m alive, I’m not leaving my team in the field. Take me back there. We need all the help we can get.”

She thought about it for a moment, then turned back toward the field of battle, which had moved now to just outside the Empire State Building, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, “Y’gonna have to explain it to Scott,” she said.

“You let me worry about Scott,” Iceman responded. “I’ve been disobeying his orders since I was sixteen years old.” With pained concentration, he began to ice up again. Rogue was concerned for him, as well as impressed, surprised, and proud, all at the same time.

“How we doing?” he asked.

“See for yourself,” she suggested.

With Bobby hanging beneath her now, her hands holding him under the arms, Rogue flew a circuit of the battlefield. The only mutants she recognized from above were Arclight, the Blob, and several Acolytes including Amelia Voght, Senyaka, and the Kleinstock brothers.

“God,” Bobby said. “The Kleinstocks again? I feel like we’ve been fighting them for days.”

“You have,” Rogue said, and smiled to herself.

“Then I wish they’d just stay down,” Iceman said grimly. “In fact, why don’t you drop me down by them?”

“In a few minutes, if you think you can...” She let the comment trail off. Bobby was a big boy. He could take care of himself.

She flew down until she was about twenty feet above Sven and Harlan Kleinstock, then she let Bobby go. He did a forward roll, and when he came out of it, he was forming an ice ramp beneath him as if he were surfing a curl. She watched a moment longer, as he whipped up a huge club or bat made of ice, and as he fell on the unsuspecting Kleinstocks, he nailed a home ran off Sven Kleinstock’s head. Rogue heard the crack, and when Sven crumpled to the pavement, she knew he wasn’t getting up soon. He was out of it.

From above, she scoped out the war again. Since the Juggernaut had arrived with converts, and the huge wave of cops and civilians had shown up, the battle had most definitely turned. It was chess, now. Piece by piece, they would all be taken off the board. Pawns. Knights. Kings. Attrition ruled.

She started to turn back toward where her teammates were fighting hard, joined now by so many others that it was hard to tell who was friend and who was foe. There was a low rumbling noise, and Rogue turned just in time to see the earth erupt in a geyser of pavement, cement, stone, and soil—how deep it had come from she could not have said—a tower built instantaneously, and just as quickly put to use.

Like some monstrous earthen tentacle, the tower whipped and turned and slammed down on top of the Juggernaut and half a dozen other mutants. Rogue could only watch in horror.

When Cain Marko crawled from the massive tumble of debris, he was alone. There was no other movement under the stone and pavement. Nor had Rogue expected there to be.

The fury came upon her sudden as a heart attack, and Rogue scanned the street for the one man she knew might be responsible for such an assault. After a moment, she realized that he would need a line of sight for his power to work properly, and she raised her search up several stories. She saw him a few seconds later, standing atop a four-story office and retail building. She wouldn’t have seen him at all in the dark, despite the streetlights and still-burning neon, but the silver metal of his body armor caught the multicolored city lights and threw back a twisted reflection.

Rogue thought of Bobby and the Kleinstock brothers, of the five or six lives just snuffed out beneath an artificial avalanche, and she knew that the man had to be removed from play now, before he could take more lives on a whim.

As fast as she could, she flew down to fight at Wolverine’s side.

“It’s Avalanche,” she said.

“Saw him ’bout ten minutes ago,” Logan responded indifferently.

“We can’t afford to have him runnin’ around,” she urged.

“So stop him, Rogue,” Wolverine said. “Steal his powers, knock him off the building. You can take him.”

“I know I can take him,” she said testily. “But I don't want to steal his powers. I do that when there’s no other way to win. Plus, I don’t want to do it ’cause that means I get his mind, too, at least a little bit—”

She belted a man with walrus tusks and a long sharp tongue that she thought looked as though it could punch holes through steel beams.

“—I don’t want to see that. Ever. He’s a demented little sucker.”

“So what do you want with me?” Wolverine asked.

“Fastball special,” Rogue said simply.

Wolverine actually smiled, in the middle of so much bloodshed and destruction.

“I miss that Russkie,” he said.

“We all do,” she agreed. “So, you ready?”

“I’m a whole mess o’ ready,” he said, still smiling. “Give me a bull’s-eye, Rogue.”

Rogue lifted Wolverine up with both hands. In the old days, their former teammate Colossus had been able to do the man-uever with just one. It was something they’d practiced in the Danger Room, and in the field, many times over.

Taking air. Rogue flew up and to the side of the building where Avalanche stood. When she was about level with him, she simply hurled Wolverine with all her might across the sky. He landed on Avalanche, and his adamantium claws flashed in the same neon rainbow that had glinted from Avalanche’s armor a moment before.

She left Wolverine to his own devices, and returned to the fight. Seconds after her feet touched the ground, the Juggernaut was beside her.

“Saw that fastball special you ’n the runt pulled,” he said gruffly. “Well done.”

“What do you know about it?” she asked.

“The fastball special?” he said with a smile. “You’re kidding? You’ve used it against me enough times. I should know what it is. Fact is, I’ve done that move with Tom Cassidy a few times myself.”

“Thief,” Rogue said, doubly amused at finding herself bantering with a hated enemy, and in the middle of a war, no less.

“Yeah,” Marko agreed. “But a successful thief.”

Rogue couldn’t argue there.

The tide was turning in their favor, finally, and it felt good. Felt good, that was, as long as she didn’t think about lives already lost, and what else they might have to lose before the day was out, if they intended to defeat Magneto.

Chapter 15

Over the years that she had spent with the X-Men, Jean Grey had grown from an immature teenager who was happy to be known as Marvel Girl, into a woman of strength, a woman in control of her destiny. She had always been relatively quiet—though she seemed a chatterbox next to Scott. She thought that, maybe, she had become so introspective because, as a psi, she was always listening to the constant telepathic babble in her mind.

Or it might have been Scott’s influence. He was so serious.

In the end, it didn’t matter what forces had shaped Jean Grey, made her the woman she was now. The only thing that mattered was how the day ended, who was still standing when it was over. That was all she could think of.

Her jaw was set in a hard line of grim determination, and though her teammates made comments to one another during battle, Jean said not a word. Through the psychic rapport that they shared, she could sense that Cyclops was on edge. As well he should be, she thought. They might not all survive the next few minutes, never mind the many hours till morning. But his anxiety was not going to get them through, and so she tried to counter it with the confidence she had in him. With the determination she had summoned to keep going.

Thank you, he thought, and she picked up the gratitude, acknowledged it with a small nod.

They would make it through. No other outcome would be acceptable.

Though she could not see most of her teammates, she touched briefly on all their minds. Iceman was in a dark, furious rage that was quite unlike him, as he battered Harlan Kleinstock with all his might. Wolverine was vaulting down the stairs of an office building, hurrying to get back into the fight. He had just taken Avalanche down, and hard, but he shut out her psi-scan when she tried to inquire further.

Bishop and Cyclops fought side by side, the heir to Xavier’s dream and its far-removed descendant, grimly upholding the principles Charles had always espoused, willing to give their lives for that dream. That hope.

Ororo, lost in the power of the storm, thundering her judgment down upon the enemy with righteous anger, even a taste of which made Jean realize how the woman could once have allowed humans to call her goddess.

Rogue, tired of fighting. Inexhaustible, but nearly ready to drop. Jean wondered which of them would collapse from exhaustion first.

Finally, the Beast. She could actually see Hank, just ahead, through a screen of violent flesh. He was ...

Hank, look out! she psi-shouted. Senyaka had moved in and was about to snag Hank around the throat with that terrible psi-whip of his. Hank turned in time, batted the Acolyte’s hand away, and the two were one on one after that. Jean turned away. Senyaka didn’t have much of a chance.

“Hello, little girl,” a deep voice said.

When she turned, Jean was startled to find that the speaker was a woman, a huge, musclebound female whose eyes blazed with murderous intent. Arclight, Jean thought she was called.

“Such a pretty, flimsy, little thing,” Arclight said. “But I’m still going to have to break you in half.”

She moved in fast, hands up, fingers curled into a horrible set of claws. Jean didn’t flinch, didn’t turn, didn’t run. Reaching out with her mind, she tore a phone kiosk loose from its moorings and brought it flying across the street to slam into Arclight’s upper body and chest, driving her backward and to the pavement.

Jean wanted to move on, but a moment later, Arclight was up and after her again.

“Now you really did it, Red,” Arclight snarled. “I’ll enjoy killing you.”

“I’ve seen Caged Heat,” Jean said dismissively. “You didn’t impress me then, and you don’t impress me now,”

Arclight roared. Jean turned and walked away. With every ounce of psychic strength she could muster, Jean picked up what was left of the Oldsmobile Bishop had stood on earlier, and threw it at Arclight. Pain spiked through her head, like a migraine, but she ignored it. The price of power, she thought.

The car slammed into Arclight, knocked her down, and rolled over on top of her. She was not dead, Jean knew that she wouldn’t be. But she wasn’t conscious either.

Jean felt the tension exuding from all the X-Men. They had reached the end of their respective ropes. They’d crossed some lines that day, and she was sad to think that they would probably cross more before the night was through. It disturbed her.

Success! Professor Xavier telepathically shouted in her ear. Jean almost jumped a mile.

Professor? Charles?

Success, Jean, they’ve done it! They’ve taken the Sentinels away from Magneto!

Jean Grey smiled. Her eyes welled up with moisture. A single, ecstatic tear slid down her right cheek. She returned to the war with renewed vigor.

Nebulous hope had suddenly become tangible.

« * *

“No!” Magneto shouted.

Valerie Cooper thought he sounded like a petulant child. But whining toddlers were not capable of killing with a thought or a gesture.

Magneto had been paralyzed by Archangel’s wing-knives, but his powers were unaffected. He didn’t need to move to use them, could, in fact, propel himself wherever he wished to go using those powers. He seemed awkward, for a few moments, as he got his bearings, as he dealt with the crushing blow to his dreams of empire that Valerie had just struck.

But in a moment, he might well come into the Sentinel’s command center and take her life in retaliation.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” he cried in astonished fury.

A stupid question, really. Of course she knew. Now what she needed to know was whether or not he was planning to kill her. The Sentinels were on their way, she knew, to take Magneto down as she’d reprogrammed them to do. But he would have ample time to crush her to death in the immobile Alpha Sentinel’s skull if he so desired.

Seconds ticked by, matched by her heartbeat. Magneto’s disorientation was leaving him. She could see it in the cold and silent rage burning in his eyes. Val looked away. She didn’t want to see. She felt him moving toward her, and turned her body to the side. If death was coming for her, then ...

“Val, let’s go! Move it!” Archangel shouted at her.

Val snapped her head around to see Warren, silver wings almost invisible in the night air, hovering outside the shattered skull of the Sentinel, Gambit held in one outstretched arm.

“Here we go again!” she shouted, then ran to the blast hole and leaped through.

When Archangel caught her, he was already in motion, flying down and away from where Magneto stood in midair.

“Faster! Faster!” Gambit shouted, and though she didn’t want to look, Val had to glance back at their enemy.

Magneto was not giving chase. Instead, he had toppled the crippled Sentinel and it was falling toward them, would crush them to death in seconds.

“Faster!” Val cried, joining Gambit’s urgent call for speed.

Archangel knitted his eyebrows, gritted his teeth, and poured on the speed. Val thought for sure they had cleared it, but the thing was so tall it seemed to be chasing them rather than merely falling. Its head slammed into a mostly glass hotel building, barely missing them on the way down.

“He still cornin’, ’Angel,” Gambit said. “An’ he don’ look too happy.”

“I’m sure,” Archangel said, and as Val watched, a smirk appeared on his face.

Then Warren started to laugh.

“What’s so funny, Archangel?” she snapped. “He’s going to kill us.”

“Maybe,” Warren replied, and tried to get serious, putting all his effort into flying.

“But, Val,” he said, as the smile came back, “you should have seen his face.”

Archangel burst into a fit of laughter, and they dived lower as he roared helplessly on. A second later, Gambit began to laugh too. A snicker at first, and then full-throated bellowing. Val was afraid Warren was going to drop them, or smash into a building. They were still losing altitude. Warren just couldn’t keep going, not with the two of them in tow and the tears streaming down his face as he fought to breathe through a fit of giggles.    .

Val was about to tell them they were getting punchy, that Magneto was gaining. That they were going to be killed.

Warren was right, she hadn’t seen Magneto’s face when he lost control of the Sentinels. But the idea of it, and Remy and Warren’s cackling, was enough to get her going too. She didn’t know if she was laughing at Magneto, or at them.

“You clowns,” she said between breaths. “You’re sleep deprived and you’re going to get us all killed.”

They thought that was funny too.

Then they were going down.

“I just can’t—” Warren huffed for breath “—can’t keep going.”

They hit the street too fast, Warren let them go a few feet too high, and Val and Gambit both stumbled and rolled before leaping to their feet again. Together, the three of them turned to face Magneto.

He was just behind them.

“You’re pathetic,” he said. “Particularly you, Worthington. Once, I thought you might have been of some value to me, but now I see you are as worthless as these others.”

“God,” Warren said in mock-seriousness, unable to get control of himself despite the danger. “I feel like I’m back in grade school.”

Val watched as Archangel and Gambit made a halfhearted attempt at holding the laughter in, then both of them were bent over, holding their bellies as they howled.

“You dare laugh at me?” Magneto cried. “I have spared you one time too many I see. The time has come—”

“Oh, shut up!” Archangel snapped.

Val had been staring at Magneto in trepidation, but now her head swung around in shock. The humor was gone from Archangel’s face, and quickly draining from Gambit’s as the other X-Man watched the exchange.

“If you’re going to kill us, then just do it,” Warren said.

“I’ve been listening to your posturing and watching you feed off this world’s fears for too long. You’re the worst kind of leader, Magneto. You ignore your press, but believe all your own PR.”

Archangel stepped forward, into the spray of light thrown by a street lamp. He spread his arms wide, and his wings out to their full span.

“Go ahead, then,” Warren urged. “Strike me down with the wrath of the god you want us all to think you are. But when I’m dead, ask yourself one question. If your goals are so noble, why do you always leave corpses in your wake?”

Magneto opened his mouth to reply, took in the breath that would fuel his words, lifted his hands to launch the assault that would end all their lives.

Then he did something that Valerie Cooper would remember for the rest of her life.

He smiled.

“Bravo, Worthington,” Magneto said. “I hope you feel your words are a fitting epitaph.”

Gambit and Archangel had never been powerful enough to hold Magneto off for long, and now both were completely spent. In the next moment, they would all be dead.

“Mutant Target Designate Magneto, surrender yourself or face grievous injury during acquisition!” a robotic voice boomed.

Val looked up. They all looked up. Three Sentinels looked down at them. Several more were rocketing toward them across the night sky, their eerie running lights glowing in the darkness.

“Ah, a reprieve, then, Worthington,” Magneto said coldly. “Another time, perhaps.”

He turned, tore a signal lamp from the street corner with the wave of his hand, and send it flying. It tore through the lead Sentinel’s face like a razor-sharp arrow, savaging the robot’s operational equipment.

Then Magneto was airborne, headed south, and an entire fleet of Sentinels gave chase.

A winged man with a face and body reminiscent of a carrion bird dived from the sky toward Storm. She could easily have evaded him, or manipulated the winds around him to, very simply, keep him away from her. But exhaustion was starting to overwhelm her, and her patience was wearing thin. Yes, Jean had passed on that the Sentinels were no longer in Magneto’s control. Yes, they had been joined by human and mutant reinforcements. Yes, they had a chance, now, at long last. A chance.

But after a couple of hours in the sky, using the weather to slowly chip away at their overwhelming opposition, providing Iceman with all the moisture he might want to replenish what he stole from the air, Ororo Munroe was nearly spent. She did not have a single ounce of extra energy to use in her own defense. Storm was forced to use the simplest, and most drastic, tactic to keep the twisted bird man away from her.

She nailed him with lightning.

Ororo was an elegant woman, with elegant tastes. She was the very model of courtesy, nobility, and self-respect. But she had once led the Morlocks, a tribe of underground mutant warriors. To do that, she had to become an uncompromising warrior herself. And there was nothing elegant in war.

The charred mutant plummeted from the sky, and had the good fortune to land on the roof of a nine-story building rather than the street far below. Broken bones would heal. Storm breathed a sigh of relief, but there was no question in her mind that she would do it again.

Below, the battle raged on, the X-Men the center of a chaotic conflict, the focus of a maelstrom of blood and hatred. The combatants had merged so completely that she could no longer really use her power to advantage. At least not at the center of the battle.

At the edges, there were still mutants struggling to get into the fight, to take their anger out on anyone who would oppose Magneto. The Blob was with this group. She was too high to hear his oafish boasting voice, but she could imagine what he might say to exhort his comrades into battle. Just as she imagined the rest of the team was, Storm was tired. Tired of fighting, and just plain worn out. She had no patience with any of them, but Fred Dukes least of all.

Her problem was that no wind she might summon, even hurricane force, could make Dukes leave the battlefield. If they knew that the Sentinels were no longer under Magneto’s control, a lot of them might surrender, or flee, but Storm and Jean had discussed it telepathically. They wouldn’t believe the X-Men. Why should they? No, Storm had to think of...

Then she had it. She’d used winds, rain, lightning, to fight the battle. They could be devastating. But she didn’t need to destroy the Blob and his cohorts. Only to hurt and annoy them.

A moment later, hail the size of baseballs and hard as stone began to fall from the sky in a dense and destructive rain. The hailstorm only covered an area half a block long. Windows were smashed, cars and a newsstand pulverized.

All but the Blob ran for cover. After trying to escape the hail by moving closer to the fight and finding that the freak storm was following him, Dukes finally realized who was behind it. With surprising intelligence, he did not look up into the sky. Ororo assumed he didn’t want to be blinded.

Finally, likely cussing a blue streak, he stomped away from the battlefield. She hoped for good.

Now, she thought, time to see about the rest of Magneto’s pawns.

* • *

“Can’t you fly this thing any faster?” Gyrich snarled at the helicopter pilot.

The man ignored him. He was about to tear into the pilot, when Colonel Tomko’s hand landed on his shoulder from the back of the chopper.

“I’m not even sure why you’re along for this ride, Mr. Gyrich,” the Colonel said. “Why don’t you just sit tight and let your nation’s armed forces do their jobs?”

It was a jab. He knew it was. But he wasn’t Tomko’s commander on this one. There wasn’t anything he could say now.

But Tomko had made a mistake, allowing himself to feel comfortable enough to insult Gyrich to his face.

Gyrich never forgot.

“What have got down there, Sanchez?” Colonel Tomko barked from the rear.

The pilot mumbled something into his headset, maneuvering between two particularly tall office buildings, then turned his head slightly to respond.

“Control says the media’s flooding the city, coming in through all the routes the Sentinels had blocked. Except the GW Bridge, of course,” the pilot said.

For a moment it didn’t click, then Gyrich remembered that there no longer was a George Washington Bridge.

“All right,” the colonel said, “see if we can’t get to the battle site first and seal it off from the media. That’s all we need, is a caravan of press from all over the world surveying the damage and getting in our way. We’re lucky to have taken such comparatively little collateral damage so far. Let’s try to keep it that way.”

The pilot relayed those orders on his headset.

Gyrich scanned what he could see of the city. Tomko tapped him on the shoulder, then pointed out the window to the southeast.

There were tanks moving through the streets. It occurred to Gyrich that the cumbersome metal war machines were far swifter than he would ever have imagined.

Gyrich smiled.

“With the Sentinels out of the way, Magneto doesn’t stand a chance,” he said gleefully.

He had to repeat himself, at much greater volume, for Tomko to hear. The colonel made a face.

“Let’s not forget who we’re dealing with here, Mr. Gyrich,” Colonel Tomko said. “We can do the rest, but without blowing up half the city, the X-Men are still the best chance at taking Magneto down. Maybe the only chance.”

Gyrich glared at the colonel. Neither man spoke again until the helicopter touched down several blocks east of the Empire State Building.

Magneto rode the planetary energies he controlled, propelling himself faster and faster to outpace the Sentinels that pursued him. It was hopeless. The faster he flew, the faster they flew. When he had reached New York Harbor, and the ocean was beneath him, he turned to make his stand.

He was trying not to think. Trying not to deal with the blow that had been struck against his plans for Haven, plans for empire. And the best way he knew to avoid thinking, considering, analyzing ... was to destroy things.

“Mutant Target Designate Magneto,” the new lead Sentinel droned at a painful decibel level. “Surrender now, or face painful acquisition procedures.”

Magneto warped the Earth’s magnetic field around him, reached out with nebulous hands of pure magnetic energy, and tried to tear the Sentinel’s head off.

Nothing happened.

The seven Sentinels who were first to arrive, all fired upon him at once. He erected a force shield just in time, but the brunt of their attack sent him reeling, falling, splashing in the salt water, cold even in July. Heavy body armor and helmet weighing him down, Magneto surfaced, gasping for breath, and a numbness came over him, body and soul.

With a burst of magnetic energy that threw the ocean water away from him, he rose, crackling, from the sea.

Eleven more Sentinels had arrived, and he knew that was all of them. The Alpha unit was out of commission, and he had disabled one other. Now he was out over the ocean with little at hand to be used as weapons or projectiles. And the Sentinels seemed to be made of some metal alloy mixed with a polymer that he could not easily grasp.

Which meant nothing, no hardship at all for Magneto. He merely focused his will and attention on the Sentinels, on the web of magnetic power that blanketed the earth, and how this unknown substance reacted to it. It might not, technically, be metal. But it certainly had metal in it. More than a trace.

That was enough.

The Sentinels attacked again, all eighteen of them blasting him with plasma cannons located in their palms. Some also fired solar radiation flares from their eyes. He dodged some, allowed others to be absorbed and dispersed by the much more powerful force shield he was generating.

He didn’t want to think. But he could not avoid it. Without the Sentinels, Haven’s future was in jeopardy. With the support of his Acolytes and other newly arrived followers, they might have enough power to keep the Mutant Empire intact, to repel invaders to build a new world. They might.

And they might not.

The Sentinels were useless to him now. As much as he regretted it, Magneto knew he had to destroy them.

As a new barrage of plasma beams buffeted his force shield, so intense that his entire body ached from the effort he made not to buckle under the attacks, he concentrated on the little metal that was part of the alloy used in creating the Sentinels’ shell. Focused on it, reached out with curses on his lips, and began to tear the fleet of Sentinels apart.

The debris piled up in the ocean until it looked like Pearl Harbor after the Japanese attacked, hulking metallic useless beasts with ugly faces staring up at the darkness. Dead. Defeated.

Magneto turned back toward Haven, and the war.

♦ * *

“Move it, people!” Trish Tilby shouted, in a tone she knew combined the worst traits of high school teacher and drill instructor.

But it was effective. The press corps she had gathered around her hustled like crazy.

“Set up wherever you like, get the best angles, whatever. Just stay out of the X-Men’s way. This thing is going to end fast when it ends, one way or another,” she explained.

She sounded confident. She knew that. But inside, she was wilting. The fight had gone on too long. If the X-Men were going to win, they’d have had it all wrapped up before now.

With the Sentinels keeping the military out, Magneto only had to destroy the X-Men and it was over.

And the X-Men, from what Trish could see of them a few blocks north of the conflict, were looking pretty haggard. It

was-—

“Trish!” one of the CNN crew shouted behind her.

When she turned around, she saw a tank rolling down Seventh Avenue toward them. Seconds later, she identified a sound blossoming on the air: helicopters. Trish looked up in time to see three choppers rise up over the long block between Sixth and Seventh, about ten blocks south of their own position.

“Get me set up, now!” Trish ordered.

“You’re ready to go, and mobile,” a producer named Gayle told her. “You’ve got the feed to all networks.”

Trish ran then. Forward a block and a half. Close enough to the fight to hear the grunting, the slap of flesh, the burning crackle of energy let loose on an unsuspecting enemy. That was as far as she wanted to get, and too close by far.

“Go,” she said simply.

The camera came up, and she began to speak.

‘ ‘This is Trish Tilby, reporting from the site of a new Civil War, a struggle fought not between blue and gray, but brother and brother nevertheless,” she said.

“There are humans in the fight, mainly New York City police officers, and other brave souls banded together to protect their city. But the main conflict is between mutants.

“Some of you, watching this, have begun to think this is my story. The story of what I’ve been through in the past day or so. That’s wrong. It’s the story of America. Of what we’ve come to, tearing one another apart because of our differences.

“Those of you out there in the dark, watching me now, watching the fight raging behind me and hoping the mutants doing battle destroy one another, you should be ashamed of yourselves. The X-Men, and others allied with them, are out here fighting your battles, putting their lives on the line for your well-being, for your children’s future.

“They would fight for themselves, but, you see, it is too late for them. Too late to be happy, too late to live normal lives, too late for the simple pleasures of life. You, Mr. and Ms. America, have taken that away from them. So, while Magneto punishes you for it, while Magneto tries to do to you exactly what you so desperately want to do to him—erase you from the picture—the X-Men stand and fight for a dream that is so much like the American dream. They fight for ideals that most of America seems to have forgotten. For justice. For equality. For freedom.

‘ ‘They fight for you. They may well die for you. The courage of fools, or the selflessness and benevolence of patriots?

I guess the answer to that question is fairly subjective, but how you answer it, ladies and gentlemen, how you answer it may tell you something about yourselves that you’d rather not know.

“The military can only stand by and wait. It’s the X-Men’s show, now. It all rests with them. If Magneto isn’t stopped here, he’ll be in your town next, that I guarantee. And as you watch for the next few moments in silence, as you watch what they are suffering for you, ask yourself one very disturbing question: What in the name of God would we have done, what would our fate have been, if the bigots of this nation had been successful in destroying the X-Men, as they’ve been trying to do for years? What would we have done without them?”

Trish signaled with her left hand, which was out of the camera frame, and the cameraman panned away from her and settled on the quickly dwindling war.

It stayed there a long time.

The world watched.

As staid as his well-deserved reputation painted him to be, Charles Xavier was not above childlike excitement. That was the very emotion he had felt when he realized that Valerie Cooper, Archangel, and Gambit had succeeded in their quest to take the Sentinels away from Magneto.

It was a huge victory, a priceless one. For several entire minutes, Xavier was able to put aside his anxiety over the continuing war, his political spin-doctoring of mutant-human relations, his constant monitoring of all the major parties involved.

The smile hurt his face.

When Gyrich had come over to deliver the good news, Xavier had forced himself to stifle the smile. As Gyrich walked away, he had thought it would return, but it did not. The reasons quickly became apparent.

In his youth, Charles Xavier had been a man of action; a soldier, an adventurer, so many things. After he lost the use of his legs, all of that changed. In his lowest times, he considered himself the worst kind of voyeur. Not that he eavesdropped on people’s thoughts, or peeked in on the fantasies in their minds. That never interested him.

Instead, he lived vicariously through the X-Men, in so many ways. They did what, in almost every case, he could not. They went out into the world and fought for his dream. He did all he could, politically, financially, personally. He guided their every action. But it was the X-Men in the field, without their teacher, mentor, founder.

Sometimes, Charles Xavier, among the two or three most powerful men on the planet, felt completely powerless. Useless.

He might have asked Gyrich to bring him along, but the man would never have complied. Who wants to take responsibility for a man who cannot walk in the middle of a war zone? He might have forced Gyrich to take him, but that would have led to disaster.

In any case, that was not his role. Xavier was to direct, to command, to inspire, to plan. There were things he might have

done to end the battle more swiftly, but his moral code would not allow him actually to undertake any of them. Under normal circumstances.

These were hardly normal circumstances. It was quite possible that, before dawn broke once more, Xavier would have broken even more of his own personal commandments, ignored his entirely subjective thou-shalt-nots in favor of safety, of life, of victory.

Part of his role was to see the big picture, to sense the danger the X-Men were in and try to guide them through it.

X-Men, beware, he thought, sending the message to each member of the team simultaneously. The deciding moment of this war has come. Magneto is on his way to you now. Enraged as he is, he is more dangerous than ever. Do not let your guard down for a moment, do not allow relief to diminish your readiness for battle. For everything you have done up until this moment has been but a prelude to this, the final battle with Magneto.

If you are not careful, he could destroy you all.

Message sent, and silently acknowledged, Xavier looked up at the night sky and breathed deeply. There was no pleasure in it, no relaxation of the grim set of his features. Only preparation for whatever might come.

For Charles Xavier had finally realized that he could remain on the sidelines no longer. The final battle with Magneto was his to fight. The X-Men might triumph without his help, but he feared that not all of them would survive.

Victory was his to earn.

He did not move from the spot where he had sat for hours in his wheelchair. Even so, Charles Xavier had gone to war.

* * *

Gambit and Val Cooper tore onto Fifth Avenue on another stolen motorcycle, with Archangel flying above. Mutants and humans alike were fleeing the field of battle—at least those that could still move under their own power. They seemed to sense that the end was near, and that none of them would have any impact over the outcome of the war for Manhattan.

“It’s like Times Square just after midnight on New Year’s Eve,” Archangel said on the comm.

“Or when de sun come up de morning after Mardi Gras,” Gambit agreed. ‘ ‘Nobody even want to look at anybody else, just get de hell out of dere and home to bed.”

It had come down to the X-Men and the Juggernaut against those Acolytes who remained conscious and some of their more powerful allies. By the time Gambit steered the bike through unconscious bodies he hoped were still alive, Archangel was already in the thick of battle. It would be over soon, he knew.

Or it would have been, if they had been the last of the enemy. But there was still Magneto to deal with. Soon. Very soon. But not yet. They could still finish off the others and present a united front against Magneto when he did get there.

“Valerie, get off,” he said grimly. “De toy soldiers are over dat way.”

She started to protest, even as she got off the motorcycle, but Gambit was gone before the first words were out. She’d done her part. Now the X-Men had to finish the job.

Cyclops was blasting away at a mutant who looked as if he were made of rubber, but the surface of his flesh rippled and shone like crude oil. Whenever Cyclops took a shot at him, the mutant’s body bent or opened to let the blast through.