"Wanda," warned Storm, guessing what was coming. "Don't hurt him, please."
Wanda kept on walking forward.
"Listen to me," Ororo continued, desperate to avoid the use of force. "I know you and Pietro have a ... difficult relationship, I know you want revenge, but now is not the time."
Wanda stopped walking forward, but kept her gaze pinned on Pietro.
"There are big, dangerous things going on, Wanda," said Storm. "Maybe you know a little about it already, but you must realize that in the coming hours every mutant will be needed, even Pietro. When this is over, if we all survive it, then you may continue your relationship how you will. For now, though, you must call a truce, or every mutant will be locked away for good."
Wanda was silent, she appeared to be considering the prospect Storm had handed to her.
At that momment there was a croaky cough behind her. She spun round to see Todd.
"Please ... uh ... I know you must hate Pietro an' all, but we gotta put our differences aside, I mean, me an' Fuzzball are usually at each other's throats, like. But now we're all, 'hey, let's work together to stop evil things happenin'' and I know I'm blithering so I'll shut up."
Todd bit his tongue, literally, as Wanda continued to mull over their words.
Eventually she spoke.
"Very well, I'll put aside the vendetta for now. For now. But I want to talk with Pietro. Alone. You have my word I won't hurt him."
The mutants looked at each other, unsure how to respond.
"It'll be OK," said Pietro, much to the surprise of everyone there. "She gave her word, she won't break that."
Storm nodded and, with a final, warning glace towards Wanda, she herded everyone out, closing the door behind her.
Five minutes later, Wanda exited and strode down the corridor as if nothing had happend.
Todd and the others looked in, half expecting to see nothing but a greasy burnt patch on the ground. Instead they saw Pietro, a very quiet and pale Pietro.
"You OK, man?" asked Todd.
"Yeah, sorta," replied the speedster.
"Uh ... glad to see it," sighed Todd, allowing himself to breath again. "Um ... well, that's over, then."
"Yeah," whispered Pietro. "It's over."
*
Curiously, Logan's band had encountered no more opposition as they advanced through the maze of hallways. Or not so curiously, if one was privy to certain events that had occurred during the single battle. Just after the second guard had fired his weapon, he'd pressed the alert button hidden in the butt. The man in the control room tracked the signal, and had since been watching the intruders sneak blithely past one hidden camera after another.
"Points for bravery," he said to Lieutenant Richards.
"A-plus for troop loyalty." She tapped the screen, indicating the boy being carried. "Can't give them the benefit of the doubt on IQ, though."
*
"We're getting close," Jean said. "Might be there already if these people didn't put walls everywhere."
"I'd shred some," Logan said, "but that would probably set off the alarms."
"Can't have that," Evan agreed.
"We most certainly can't." Nicole was increasingly irked by the boy's flippant attitude. "I'm sure we're hugely outnumbered, even if we weren't effectively down two people."
"I'm not down yet!" Kitty declared.
Jean stopped, forcing everyone else to also stop, or run into her. They all succeeded in choosing the former.
"Forge and Jubilee," she pointed to the wall in front of them, "are through there. The guards," her arm swung a few degrees to the left, "are in there."
"All right," growled Logan. "Shadowcat, can you phase once more? Just through that wall."
"Sure," gasped an exhausted Kitty. "Hold on ..."
Concentrating, trying to ignore the pain in her head, and holding hands with the others, she did as she was told and phased them through the wall.
She then collapsed, totally worn out.
Evan ran straight to the prone forms of Jubilee and Forge, both of whom seemed to be totally out of it.
He was about to try and tear their collars off, when Nicole stopped him.
"They're programmed to self-destruct if taken off forcefully," she explained. "Hold on, I'll hack into the computer and deactivate them remotely."
"Well hurry," gasped Evan. "We don't have much time."
Luckily, it only took a few seconds to work the controls, and the collars fell away easily and safely.
Unluckily, but a few moments after that, the alarm rang out.
Logan swore loudly.
"Get us out of here, Shadowcat!" he bellowed. Kitty, despite her weakened state, made to do just that, but as soon as she touched the wall with her phased form there was a {Skizzzzt} of a force field, and she was repelled backwards, gasping in pain.
"What the Sam-Hell was that?" asked Evan.
"That," replied a woman, who had just entered the room, "was what we term as a 'cat box'. You didn't think we managed to keep Katherine Pryde locked up for so many years without some way of counteracting her phasing, did you? The field is a box, which covers this entire room. Bodies, phased or otherwise, cannot escape it, though the energy beams from our guns are perfectly able to penetrate it. In short, you are trapped. Now lie down on the tables and we can strap you all in like good little mutant animals."
It was at that moment that Nicole saw red.
Visions and memories came back to her. A brief glance of her mother, now a pitiful and wretched thing, screaming behind the bars and fields of a mutant breeding cell. The dreadful cries of her brother as they cut him apart whilst she watched. The constant wish to be away ... to be free ... I won't be caged again! I won't be caged! I WON'T BE CAGED!
The world melted before her eyes.
Everyone in the room stared in shock and fascination as Nicole literally dissolved before them. One moment there was a girl, the next a pillar of smoky gas.
Before anyone could compose themselves enough to take action, the gas surged forward.
The cat box was designed to stop solid molecules, and the slightly unstable molecules of phasing. It was not designed to stop gasses escaping; otherwise oxygen would have to be pumped into it. Thus it was that the gas had no problem exiting the box. It moved quckly through the air, writhing forward to hover over the heads of the FoH guards. They gasped and choked, for whilst the gas was not in itself toxic, it smelt worse than one of Nightcrawler's teleports. Several of them ran away right then, and more would soon join them in fleeing as Nicole returned to her original state.
Performing a dazzling array of combat movements, she took down several other guards, and grabbed their guns. Firing randomly, she felled three more guards, and the remainder, which included the woman, ran for their lives.
A quick search of the control panels revealed to Nicole the 'off' button for the cat box. She pressed it and the field went down.
"Seems we've found out what your power is, Smoky," grunted Logan. "Not a bad one, either."
"Thanks," replied Nicole, gasping for breath. "And I think there's more to it than that, as well. But that's not importanat. We were lucky, those guys weren't expecting any sort of resistance, we had an easy time of it. Now they've been forewarned, things will get a lot harder. Let's get out, and get out now."
Wolverine nodded, and they began to move through the twisting corridors once again.
*
"Time," Smash sang, "is on my side."
He warped time around the wall in front of him, drawing unneeded years from the dirt beneath his feet and tossing them against the window. The glass pane melted as if in time-lapse, the bricks crumbling to dust in mere minutes. He stepped through the wreckage into the principal's office, noting that some misdirected time had caused massive dust pile-ups on the room's surfaces, but otherwise done no damage.
He held out his hands, calling the dust bunnies to himself and rapidly converting their molecules to wood pulp and ink. The grey mass broke down to near invisibility, reconstructing itself into a sheaf of papers. In fact, an exact replica of the sheaf of papers Amara had destroyed that very morning.
Smash frowned at his work, feeling that something was missing. Ah. He reached for the heavy black stapler and neatly pressed a single metallic clip into the documents. He tossed the office tool callously aside, but the papers he placed lovingly in the first drawer on the left, at the bottom.
He withdrew from the school, leaving everything as it had been, save for the mysteriously destroyed wall, and softly singing something by The Police.
*
The X-Jet cut through the clouds. Betsy and Kevin looked outside the window, watching the land of America pass beneath them.
They were close to the Institute now. McCoy turned on the communicator.
"Beast to Institute," he said. "We'll be with you soon, open the doors up ready."
There was a crackling sound and the voice of Storm, sounding slightly harassed, came through.
"We're here, Wanda is also here, as is another mutant we've rescued. Logan, Jean, Ricky, Nicole, Kitty and Evan are not. Jubilee and Forge were kidnapped, Logan took the kids and went on a rescue mission. We haven't heard back from them yet."
"Hummm, sounds like things have been interesting at your end," replied Beast.
"Definitely. I'll fill you in fully when you arrive. Over and out."
The communication fizzled out.
"It seems like we're reaching the end, Professor," remarked McCoy. "Soon we'll have everyone together, and we can finish this off."
"Hummm ..." said Xavier, wishing he was feeling more secure. There was something ... wrong. Something was tickling at the back of his mind, something vaguely familiar and yet ...
He shook his head. It was probably nothing, perhaps he was just stressed, perhaps he was finally feeling the presence of Smash. Either way, if all went well it would be over soon.
Of course, it was very rare that all went well.
*
David hugged his Safe Thing. He'd calmed down now, a vague sense of contentment rushed through him. Wa-wa was here, he had a teddy bear, he'd eaten, nice people surrounded him. He hadn't felt so good since ... well, since before he could remember.
Suddenly something ... strange ... crossed his brain. Something familiar. It was gone as soon as it came.
_Stupid, freakish powers,_ thought David, and paid no more attention to the strange feeling.
For once he was happy.
*
Logan pounded down the corridor, hoping the others were close behind. Nicole he knew was at his side, daring danger to appear. Evan was supporting Jubilee and Forge, who had come out of their ordeal somewhat woozy but otherwise all right. Jean carried Ricky, and Kitty was still doggedly standing on her own two feet.
"Orders, ma'am?" The security guard's hands brushed over the controls.
"Let them go," she intoned. The amassed soldiers looked at her curiously. "They have no value to us," Richards said. "They told us what they knew, and we dispatched a team."
"Ma'am," the assistant said tentatively. "You're aware that two of those *were* the Neos."
"Hm." Her blue eyes searched a frozen image of Nicole attacking the soldiers, and were drawn to her wrist. "Take their Nullifiers."
*
Someone had been thoughtful enough to equip the Blackbird for vertical landings, a very useful thing when the primary landing pad is underground.
Scott pressed his forehead to the side window, checking for wing clearance as he adjusted the thrusters and descended towards the hidden hangar.
"Is this it?" Betsy and Kevin asked in unison.
"Welcome home," Rogue said.
Victoria swallowed to ease the pressure building in her ears, and tried to think of something other than huge machines hovering in mid-air.
This time, the task of opening the hangar doors had fallen to Roberto. He stood impassively by the wall. He could hear the jet's engines fighting the laws of physics, but there wasn't really anything to see.
The Blackbird entered the cavernous, dimly-lit room in a sort of controlled fall. The landing gear touched the floor, accepted the jet's weight. Then nothing happened for quite some time.
Scott had a habit of not letting anyone off the plane until he had finished the post-flight checks.
When the hatch finally unlocked, Victoria bolted from the compartment. Susan followed at a similar speed, though her gait suggested a chase rather than an escape.
Tabitha emerged next, spotted Roberto, and gestured furiously to her face. In return, she got an extremely confused look.
"Fine, you can talk." Betsy appeared in the doorway, and released her invisible hold on the other girl's jaw. "Just not to me." She set off like she had crossed that room a thousand times before. Firmly attached to her left hand was a boy who appeared to be utterly fascinated by everything.
Xavier wheeled down the ramp and over to the young Brazilian. At his tired expression, the one known as Sunspot asked, "Jet lag?"
"Just a long day," the Professor sighed. "Can you brief me on events here?"
Roberto rubbed the back of his neck. "I know I was here, but ... I honestly have no idea what happened. Ask Kurt. He's in the living room with .. .um, that kid."
Xavier, recognizing that he had quite a bit to catch up on, declined to ask who 'that kid' was.
*
Someone had refilled Kurt's plate and passed it to him. He was doing his best to eat one-handed, as his other arm was still firmly in David's possession.
This was a very good teddy bear. It let him cuddle all he wanted, and kept poking forkfuls of food at his mouth. And it had never once told him to quit crying and act his age.
David was glad he had protected this teddy bear.
There was a new presence in the room. A presence with a very strong mind.
"Kurt," said the presence. "I'm told you were in charge today?"
"Ja." Safe Thing laughed. "I don't know how that happened." He licked cream sauce from his fork. "Ah, Professor. We picked up someone else at the asylum. David ... er ... Charles Haller."
Xavier was normally good at concealing his reactions. This pushed his limits. "Oh," he coughed. "Logan was in charge of that, yes? I must go see him."
"Logan isn't - here ..." Kurt trailed off as the Professor sped away.
David's dark eyes traced the man's passage, then buried themselves into Safe Thing's armpit.
*
"Come on!" roared Logan, egging the others
onward. They were lagging now, each breath tearing through their lungs,
but there was not far to go.
They were nearly at the hangar bay when the guards appeared. Nicole and Logan flew into combat, dodging the beams of light, hitting and punching with all their strength.
Evan's spikes flew through the air, also doing a fair amount of damage. Even Kitty got a punch in.
Suddenly one guard slipped past Logan, and flew at Ricky, grappling the youngster. They flailed on the floor for a few minutes. The guard managed to grab his wrist and find the Nullifier. Slipping his fingers beneath the strap, the guard tugged at the device with all his strength.
Jean was temporarily stunned by the guard tearing Ricky from her arms. She stood uselessly as they wrestled on the floor, watching as the soldier attempted to wrench off the boy's watch.
"The Nullifier!" Nicole's panicked thought pierced her sensitive mind.
Though the telepath did not consciously understand the significance of the device, she had a definite sense of its importance. More than that, she was overcome by a fierce maternal desire to protect her own.
All this happened before Nicole had sprinted halfway to the brawling men.
Eschewing her powers, Jean leapt at the soldier attacking her son. With a headfirst dive, she toppled him bodily from his dominant position. Seeing that he still clung tenaciously to the time-fooling bit of technology, she sank her teeth into his forearm.
The man growled, sticking to his mission through the pain. Under Logan's incredulous stare, the normally passive redhead slammed her knee up into her opponent's crotch.
"That's gotta hurt," Forge winced.
"I can't watch this." Evan turned his face to Jubilee's feet.
"Neither can I." Logan stepped over to the tangled bodies, leaning close to the soldier's face. "Listen, bub. You let go of him, or I cut your hand off."
The man observed the three blades sliding out of the mutant's hand and assessed him fully capable of carrying out the threat. Eager, too.
Slowly, he slid his fingers out of the plastic loop.
"Let's book." Logan glanced up the hall. Only the one soldier was still conscious, and he wouldn't be walking for a while. Jean got off him grudgingly, but kicked him in the gut for good measure. She bundled Ricky protectively into her arms, and stalked off towards the hangar.
"One question," Evan asked breathlessly as they bolted towards the cargo bay. "How exactly are we supposed to escape from this place the same way we got in when we have the entire security population on our tails and after blood? Kitty's spent, and even if she *were* OK to phase, there's no way she and Jean could get everyone out of here at the same time."
Logan growled deep in his throat. Evidently, this wasn't something that had crossed his mind, and he made it quite clear with the help of several heavy expletives.
Nicole looked drawn and pale, but an expression of concentration was fixed on her face.
"We might ..." she began, frowning. Evan drew level with her, expectant.
"Might what? We're running low on both options and time, girl, so whatever your idea is, let's have it pronto."
She glared at him, eyes icy, but said, "The telporter pads."
"Say what?"
"If what Ororo told us about their abduction," she nodded at Forge and Jubilee, still staggering gamely along, "is true, then there's every possibility the Fiends here have brought along teleporter pads to get around quickly in this age without being too obvious."
Remembering his aunt's words, Evan puckered his brow. "Yeah, like a giant vertical beam of green light isn't too obvious."
"Can it. Basically, it works like Nightcrawler's power, save for the fact that it's artificially augmented and requires those wishing to be teleported to stand on a 'pad' inside a special booth."
"How exactly do you know ... never mind," Jean amended herself, catching the Neo's pointed look.
"I was one of the test subjects for it. Luckily for me, I was testing the delta model, so it worked without reassembling my molecules in the wrong order. Others weren't so lucky."
Evan bit his lip. How much had he let *happen* as team leader?
"So where exactly would these 'pads' be?" Logan asked, all business and clamping sharply down on Evan's slip into self-wrath.
"Probably towards the central areas of the ship," Nicole replied, waving a hand. "Better protection, and closer to the main generator for a handy source of power. Ask her over there for actual directions." Jean was spared a bob of the head even as she skidded to an abrupt halt.
"You mean we have to go *back* the way we've just *come*?" she demanded, annoyed and aghast in equal measure. However much motherliness she'd exhibited, she had no desire to just go walking back into the jaws of the security forces so intent on killing them.
"You have a better idea?" Nicole also ground to a halt, eyes challenging.
Jean glowered at the younger girl, but in her arms Ricky began to stir, and a reedy voice peeped softly into her ear. "Run, guys, run. Don't let 'em catch you, or they'll pull out your insides to see what makes you tick." He was verging on hallucination, but his future-mother's arms tightened, as did her jaw, and she closed her eyes and focused on the nearest soldier's mind to see where the teleporter pads were located.
"Follow me."
*
The situation was very bad, and contained a distinct possibility of becoming worse.
Had Xavier not been responsible for a number of lives, and ultimately the fate of the world, he would have quite happily locked himself in a room with a strong drink.
David Charles Haller was his son, born of bad judgment and a quick fling with an unfairly attractive woman named Gabrielle. They had lost touch when she moved to Israel. Some years later, following a tragic accident in which Gabrielle lost her life, Charles gained custody of a person he had not known existed. His mother's death had prompted David to manifest several powers, but also induced psychological trauma which made it impossible for him to hold them back.
The new father had done his best, but the young mutant was uncontrollably destructive. Grudgingly, Charles had signed his son over to men with drugs and padded rooms.
The boy's plight had moved him to open a school for mutants seeking help with their powers, and the obvious good work he was doing helped to ease his own pain.
Of course, he had never fully forgiven himself.
Would David hate him? Or would he simply not recognize him?