//e stood at the brink of impossibility itself, grasping at science so advanced it seemed like magic, and effectively was magic. Practicing ancient spells that bridged the gap between science and the supernatural. Decrypting the work of mathematicians who used chaos theory over two thousand years before Western science even noticed or named it.
What it came down to was simply this: all things are predictable, if you know the initial conditions and understand physics to an infinite degree. Everything that seems random is just the interaction of so many variables that we can’t keep track of them, so we write them off as being random. But they ’re not. And he who can keep track of all the variables can predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy.
Predict the future—and control it.
Sharpe sighed and began meditating again, trying to achieve affinity with the nine chaos talismans. Their power, though hobbled by the lack of the tenth and final artifact, was still great. And soon, very soon, he would use the combined power of the nine to locate and retrieve the tenth.
Once the two new variables were factored out of the equation, of course . . .
“Thank God the concept of a bath is universal,” Jubilee sighed from the hotel bathroom.
“Glad you’re enjoying it,” Storm called back while finishing her unpacking.
“Totally,” Jubilee replied, blowing bubbles across the bathwater’s gently undulating surface. Then, realizing she might not be the only person feeling the need for cleanliness after their midafternoon trek, she added, “Hey, you waiting for the tub?”
“No, you relax,” Storm told Jubilee almost absentmind-edly, as she closed her bureau drawer, then looked out their tenth-floor window at the darkening Egyptian sky. Cairo, the Jewel of the Nile, was starting to glisten as, one by one, city lights were turned on. “I want to feel like a native right now,” Storm continued, as much to Jubilee as to herself.
“Well, you’re sure gonna smell like one,” Jubes whispered, but Storm’s acute hearing picked up on it. She was too distracted to chide the youth on her manners, however; Jubilee was deep in the throes of culture shock, and Ororo knew she wras secretly loving every minute.
Besides, Ororo’s mind was otherwise occupied. The original note from Alia was disturbing enough, and the message left at the hotel’s front desk—in which Alia had mysteriously changed tonight’s meeting time and place—only added to Storm’s uneasiness.
But there was something else too. Something wrong out there. Waiting. Watching. And, most of all, calculating.
Ororo knew she wouldn’t get any answers sitting around the hotel room for the next three hours, waiting for the rendezvous with Alia. And she wanted more information before she walked right into what might turn out to be some kind of trap.
“Jubilation, I’m going to go out and get some air,” she called out. “I’ll bring something back for dinner, and then we can meet up with Alia.”
“Fine by me,” Jubilee called back as Storm headed for the door. “Don’t drink the water.”
Storm chuckled, then left Jubilation to relax in the tub.
* * *
Ororo walked out into the rapidly cooling Egyptian air, watching the sky turn a hundred shades of red, orange, blue, and purple as the sun mercifully withdrew, giving the desert city some respite from the day’s searing heat.
She wished she could fully appreciate the sunset’s beauty, but that strange feeling of wrongness was growing more intense, almost as if it wrere watching her. There was a coldness to it, the kind of razor-sharp logic and order you feel when confronted by a dizzying mathematical equation you can’t solve.
Mathematics—was it Alia herself who was the threat? That hadn’t even occurred to Storm until she arrived at the hotel, and felt the bizarre oppressiveness of the city. She’d never experienced anything like it before, and barely even understood why she associated these feelings with numbers.
But Cairo had changed little since she last called it home, at least in the important ways. Ororo still knew where to go to get the word on the street, without getting her throat slit. She had been more than capable of taking care of herself as a gawky street urchin; now, returned as a virtual goddess, Storm knew the city’s secrets would soon reveal themselves to her probing eyes, one way or another.
She ducked into a dark alley. . . .
Towels aren’t too shabby, either, Jubilee silently admitted to herself as she pulled a comfortable oversized sweatshirt over her black tights and hung the fluffy white hotel towel up to dry. This place is starting to look up.
She flopped onto one of the queen-sized beds, fearing the worst—and finding herself once again pleasantly surprised by the mattress’s enveloping softness. “This’ll be
murder on my back,” she muttered to herself, her face halfburied in a pillow. “But that’s what vacation’s all about, right?”
It was starting to feel like a proper vacation, too, instead of the hellish obligatory field trip Jubilee had thought it was going to be. She almost wished the rest of Generation X were here so they could all do a way-cool night on the town. . . . But she knew was too tired for that, anyway.
Noticing the old-fashioned-looking television remote control on the bed table, Jubilee rolled over lazily and grabbed it, turning on the small TV across the room. “Foreign TV—cool,” she told herself, until she realized that there were only five channels, and they were all in Arabic. “My best friend in the whole wide world, turned against me,” she sighed, turning the TV off and rolling again onto her back. “Maybe I’ll see if there’re any cute guys . . . down . . . stairs. ...” Her voice trailed off as the long day’s journey and jet lag caught up with her, and she dropped off to sleep.
At first Jubilee thought the buzzing was her alarm clock. Through a fog of half-sleep, she reached over to the night table, and began her usual ritual of flopping her hand around until the offending noise stopped. She knocked the TV remote onto the floor, smacked the phone, and banged her hand into the bedside lamp. But the buzzing was coming from the other direction.
Then Jubilee remembered that her alarm clock was over five thousand miles away.
Her sticky eyelids blinked reluctantly open as she turned to see what was making the buzzing, crackling noise. It
seemed to be coming from outside, or from near the window. But she didn’t see anything there. Jubilee wondered if maybe there were an electrical short-circuit in one of the walls, or—
Her eyes caught movement. Sitting up, she kept her gaze focused on the window. The air was undulating, crackling, moving. Like the heat distortion she’d seen in the desert from the jet, or like the kind of fluid distortion you might observe underwater.
It was moving toward her.
Flowing through the cracks in the multipaned window, the boundaries of its amorphous form were now becoming clearer to Jubilee. It was like the thing from that old Blob movie, except that it was nearly invisible and hovering in the air. The crackling noise it made was definitely getting closer. Tendrils of the thing reached toward Jubilee, who scrambled to get off the bed while grabbing for the phone.
She suddenly felt a sharp stinging sensation on her lower right leg, and yelped as she instinctively pulled away and fell onto the floor, with the phone falling on top of her. “Help!” Jubilee screamed into the phone receiver, not waiting for the front desk to pick up. She saw that the skin on her leg where the tendril had touched her had exploded outward, as if a microscopic firecracker had been implanted under her skin and detonated.
“Firecrackers, huh?” she asked herself as she watched the thing still pulling itself through the spaces between the window panes, still reaching for her. “Two can play at that game, Sparky,” she answered herself, pointing at the bizarre phantom and letting her mutant ability handle the rest.
Bursts of brightly colored energy shot from her out-
stretched hand and exploded in and around the faceless thing. Jubilee was used to seeing the bright flashes of her infamous “energy plasmoids”—they’d saved her skin on more than one occasion—but right now the dazzling display was making it hard to see what (if any) effect her attack had had on the creature.
“Hello?” the front desk clerk’s voice came through on the phone, in heavily accented English. “What is going on up there?”
“Your freakin’ see-through curtains are tryin’ to eat me, dude!” Jubilee yelled back into the mouthpiece, ceasing fire and trying to see if the phantom was still there. “If you’ve got cops in this town, you better send for ’em, pronto!”
The confused clerk started asking more questions, but Jubilee had stopped listening as she let the receiver drop to the carpeted floor. The barely discernible phantom had been blown into several chunks by her onslaught of “fireworks”—and now they were all converging on her!
To the chaos spirit, Jubilation Lee was nothing more than a stream of data that was to be moved to another section of the master equation. From the spirit’s purely mathematical point of view, she was a virus in the program of reality itself. The chaos spirit had only one goal—to rewrite the code of Jubilation Lee so that she would function, not as a living, breathing, active variable, but as a dead, cold zero.
“Cornin’ through!” Jubilee’s voice pierced the early-evening bustle in the hotel lobby. “Heads up!”
Heads obligingly turned as Jubilee, still clad in her oversized sweatshirt and firing barrage after barrage of fireworks
behind her, blew into the main lobby, still pursued by the indistinct, globulous thing. The tourists and native Egyptians, seeing explosions and fearing terrorist gunplay, screamed and scattered or dropped down behind furniture.
Jubilee’s eyes had started to adjust to the thing’s energy signature; she could see it more easily now. She knew that it always coalesced back into its original single form no matter how many times she tried to blow it apart. And she knew that it was moving a lot faster, here in the open air, than it had been when trying to sift itself through the hotel room window.
It was faster than Jubilee, and she knew that too.
Her only chance was to somehow find Storm. Once Jubilee got outside, she could send up a fireworks flare as high as possible, and hope that Ororo saw it from wherever she was.
The thing touched Jubilee again, and the back of her neck erupted in pain—she could feel blood trickling down her neck and back. She instinctively threwT herself forward onto the marble floor, rolled once, and fired back with her maximum-force fireworks. The detonation was deafening, like a small bomb. The thing was shredded-—along with most of the front lobby. Jubilee herself was blown backwards along the floor, toward the front doors. More screams from terrified tourists followed the still-echoing reverberations of the blast.
Jubilee, holding the back of her neck and applying pressure to stop the bleeding, staggered out through one of the hotel’s revolving front doors. Once outside, she risked a glance behind her, and saw that the thing was again reform-
ing itself. She had perhaps ten seconds before it would be back on her.
Gathering her strength, Jubilee raised both arms skyward and fired off one huge fireball toward the sky. She mentally willed it to keep rising as high as possible before detonating in a dazzling burst of color about two hundred feet in the air.
She looked back toward the hotel, and saw that the whatever-it-was had already reassembled itself, and was oozing through the cracks in a revolving door.
She staggered across the Corniche, dimly aware of the cars honking and steering crazily to avoid hitting her. She ducked into an alley, hoping it wasn’t a dead end.
The alley led onto a quiet side-street, but Jubilee knew she was running out of time. She didn’t even risk looking behind her, for fear it would slow her down. Instead, she left a trail of exploding fireworks behind her as she ran, hoping it would slow the pursuit, but knowing that the thing was recovering from the blasts at an ever-increasing rate.
“Storm!” Jubilee called hoarsely, dodging into another alley, emerging onto another road. “Storrrrm!” she screamed, not wanting to die alone on these unfamiliar streets, so far from home. Hearing no response, she risked a quick look over her shoulder, and noted with some satisfaction that it was still a good thirty feet behind her.
Jubilee suddenly cried out in pain as her shin smashed into a garbage can and she went sprawling onto the cobblestone sidewalk. The early evening sky whirled crazily above her as she rolled painfully onto her back. She tried to scrabble to her feet, already knowing that it was over, she was dead—
—and then she noticed the hooded figure in white desert robes standing right next to her. But rather than run away from her as everyone else on the street had been doing, this person stepped between Jubilee and the rapidly approaching energy, as if to intervene.
“Wait, you don’t know what you’re doing—” Jubilee started to warn.
“Yes, I do, child,” a woman’s voice answered sternly from under the hood, in English laced with a slight Egyptian accent. “Now, stay down!”
Dumbfounded, Jubilee complied—not that she was in any shape to do much else—as the thing moved ever closer to them. The robed woman raised her right arm toward it, and Jubilee thought she might’ve been holding something in her hand.
As her pursuer approached within five feet, a series of bright white lines began forming in the air, all seemingly emanating from the woman’s right palm. More and more straight lines burned themselves into the air, forming a geometrically perfect spiderweblike pattern between the women and the indistinct energy form, which stopped its forward movement and hovered in the air before the growing web of light.
The lines continued to appear, now reaching up and around the thing to form a more three-dimensional pattern—like old-style computer graphics, Jubilee thought numbly. There were dozens of lines, then scores, then hundreds, creating a delicate-looking cage of light around the now-motionless phantom.
A tendril of energy extended from the creature between the “bars” of its rapidly forming cage, almost experimen-
tally—and was abrupdy recoiled. The light-cage continued to form around it. Then, finally complete in breathtakingly perfect symmetry, the cage began to shrink.
Jubilee slowly got to her feet, awed by the clashing of forces she did not comprehend. The cage’s rate of implosion seemed to increase exponentially, until it winked out of existence in a pinpoint of light, apparently taking its prisoner with it.
“Wicked,” Jubilee muttered, looking at the mysterious woman as she pulled back her hood to reveal a beautiful Egyptian with pitch-black eyes and matching long hair. “Thanks, I don’t know how you knew about—”
“I’m Ororo’s friend, Alia Taymur,” the woman answered solemnly. “You must be Jubilee. I had hoped we wouldn’t meet this way.”
“Hey, better this way than at the funeral parlor,” Jubilee answered ruefully, holding out her right hand to Alia, then pulling it back on finding that it was covered in her own blood, “(jeez.”
Alia held out in her right palm the object with which she had subdued the energy thing. Jubilee could now see that it was a flat stone disc, an ancient artifact of some kind inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. It had four hooklike extensions that fit between the fingers of Alia’s hand, allowing her to hold on to it even when her palm was open.
Alia held the artifact close to Jubilee, who assumed the woman was simply showing it to her. But then Alia whispered something in a language Jubilee hadn’t heard before, not even in the cacophony of the bazaar. Jubilee pulled back slightiy as the enigmatic symbols on the disc’s face
glowed with the same bright white intensity that the cage had emitted earlier—then faded back to ordinary stone.
Jubilee looked at her right hand again. It was clean. She felt the back of her neck, and found no trace of the wound that had been stinging only moments before. Her leg, too, had been miraculously healed, and her black tights had been repaired.
“What the—” Jubilee marveled. “How’d you do that? What’s goin’ on here?”
“The fractal disc can be used to retroactively alter very small, simple variables in the equation of reality—especially those that were artificially manipulated in the first place,” Alia answered. “Because the chaos spirit was unable to alter any major variables, I can cancel most of the minor ones out.”
“Right, should’ve known,” Jubilee said with mild sarcasm. “And as for w'hat’s going on . . . ?”
“We’ll go to the rendezvous point first,” Alia answered, taking Jubilee by the arm and leading her into a dark alley. “Once Ororo’s joined us, I’ll be able to tell you both why I need your help.”
“Why you need our help, huh?” Jubilee asked ironically, rubbing the back of her neck again.
Jubilee pulled her hands into the long sleeves of her sweatshirt and shivered a little, sitting cross-legged on the dock and looking out onto the Nile. She couldn’t believe how a city that was so hot by day could be so chilly by night; in this respect, Cairo was even worse than the Australian outback, where she had lived alongside the X-Men for a while. It was about ten-thirty at night, and Storm and Alia were just ending their trip down Memory Lane, and none too soon for Jubilee. She had listened at first to the street-urchin tales of wonder and woe, but talking over old times and old friends quickly loses its appeal if you weren’t actually there in the first place.
According to Storm, she had returned to the hotel and found no evidence of the damage caused by Jubilee’s encounter with the thing that Alia called a “chaos spirit”— just a missing Jubilee. Alia had apparently used that disc of hers to undo most of the aftereffects of the chase, and had also left a phone message at the front desk letting Storm know that Jubilee was safe.
Alia’s stern manner was replaced by childlike giddiness when Storm showed up at the preappointed meeting place on the docks of the river. Storm, too, let a good portion of her guard down upon seeing her childhood friend. They had written each other a few letters over the years, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of catching up to be done. And that’s what the two old pickpocket partners had been doing for the past half hour, talking and laughing while Jubilee pretended to listen and stared out at the dark surface of the river.
She wished she had had such a girlfriend when she had been younger—or even now, for that matter. It seemed like such a special kind of friendship, but female bonding was something that Jubilee’s childhood as a homeless mutant orphan in Beverly Hills hadn’t lent itself to. Even now, the only person who seemed to really understand Jubilee was Logan, the berserker mutant who called himself Wolverine. And what did that say about Jubilee?
“All right, enough old stories, Alia,” Storm decided, no-
ticing Jubilee’s uncharacteristically quiet demeanor. “We need to talk about why you asked me out here.”
“You’re right,” Alia admitted, the smile fading from her face and her big dark eyes looking down almost in shame. “It’s just—I’ve been facing this alone for so long, it’s so nice to have someone to talk to.”
Jubilee looked over at Alia again. Maybe they were more alike than Jubes had realized.
“It’s all right, Alia,” Storm comforted her. “But I don’t want to wait for another of those so-called ‘chaos spirits’ to come looking for us.”
“There are far worse things that could come looking, believe me,” Alia answered, meeting her friend’s eyes again with her own. “Over the past three months, I’ve fought off a bizarre array of these ‘mathemagical’ creatures, as I call them. In fact, I had to delay our meeting tonight in order to deal with one of them. And they’re all after this,” she added, holding out the fractal disc she had used to save Jubilee.
“Can you tell us what that thing is, now?” Jubilee asked, not unkindly but a little impatiently. She didn’t want to wait for another creature to show up, either.
“I’ve had this artifact for nearly twenty years,” Alia told them while running her fingers over the disc’s engraved hieroglyphics. “I lifted it off a man who must’ve been an archaeologist. When I first saw it, I figured it was just some kind of souvenir. I knew el-Gibar would have no use for it, and I thought it might come in handy as a concealed weapon,” she said, palming the disc and swinging her open hand in the air to demonstrate its damage potential.
“Sensible,” Ororo commented, to Jubilee’s surprise.
She still wasn’t used to seeing this side of Storm. “Almost invisible until it’s being used.”
“Exacdy,” Alia agreed. “It was only later, when I was studying the physics of chaotic systems, that I saw an article theorizing that the ancient Egyptians had dabbled in some kind of supernatural approach to chaos theory.”
“I’ve heard of that, but I never really got it,” Jubilee broke in. “Fractals and stuff like that, right? What is chaos theory, anyway?”
“It’s a new kind of science that helps us understand the properties of irregular fluctuations in nature,” Alia told her, as if reading from a mathematics texts. ‘ A chaotic system is simply one that’s sensitive to initial conditions. For example, the Earth’s weather systems are chaotic—that’s why they’re so hard to predict.”
“Because there are so many variables?” Storm asked, also curious.
“That, and the fact that even the slightest miscalculation at the outset will lead to results that diverge farther and farther from what you predicted,” Alia explained. “For example, a butterfly flapping its wings on the United States’ west coast might have what appears to be an infinitesimally small effect on the weather system there, correct?”
“A butterfly?” Jubilee asked, chuckling despite herself. “Yeah, I think you could pretty much count that effect as being zero.”
“Ah, but you can’t,” Alia told her with a smile. “The effect might be almost zero, and totally negligible for all intents and purposes right there and then. But the slight breeze from its wings would affect the air molecules around it, which would in turn slightly alter the courses of the air
molecules next to them, and so on. By the time a month had passed and the weather system had made its way around the world and back, that slight change in initial conditions could’ve helped cause a thunderstorm that would otherwise never have happened.”
“Whoa,” Jubilee said. “Heaviness.”
“That’s why, despite all our recent advances with satellites and radar technologies, weather prediction beyond a day or two will never be one hundred percent accurate, nor even come close. It’s impossible to know all the starting variables to an infinite degree—and even the slightest miscalculation on Monday can grow to a huge miscalculation by Friday.”
“So it is just a theory,” Storm concluded, “with little practical basis in reality.”
“Scientists are still exploring the ways chaos theory can be applied to help our understanding of turbulent systems like the weather, electrical currents, heart arrythmia, epileptic seizures, the movement of the planets. ...” Alia answered, trailing off.
‘ ‘But what does that have to do with this disc, and with that thing that came after me?” Jubilee asked impatiendy. She had never been much of a math whiz.
“Like I was saying, I did some research and found that the ancient Egyptians w'ere apparently dabbling in this area over two thousand years ago,” Alia told them. “They had more of a supernatural approach, of course, but I believe it all comes down to the ability to comprehend and actually rewrite the mathematical code that we call reality. ’ ’
“Mathematical code?” Storm asked. “I don’t understand.”
“If you accept that all matter in the entire universe is composed of atoms and subatomic structures that follow very strict physical laws,” Alia continued, “then it’s possible to see those atoms as being numbers in a huge cosmic equation, which all fit together to form what we perceive as reality. Now, if it were possible to read those numbers, to see the equation, to understand the mathematics of it—”
“You could change some of the numbers and alter reality?” Jubilee finished. “Wow.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Alia contended. “Both you and Ororo display mutant powers that may very well be tapping into this ‘mathemagical’ sphere of influence. Especially you, Ororo—your ability to affect a chaotic system like the weather may involve your mutant x-factor helping you retroactively change initial conditions on a truly cosmic scale.” “Intriguing,” Storm admitted, “but you still haven’t told us who—or what—is sending these creatures after you and that artifact.”
“I believe it’s an American archaeologist named Damian Sharpe,” Alia answered.
“Damian? Ooh, that’s a bad Omen,” Jubilee joked halfheartedly.
“There are a total of ten fractal talismans listed in the historical records,” Alia continued. “Over the past decade, Sharpe has been involved in the recovery7 of the other nine. It’s said that the talismans can’t be destroyed by conventional means—that if you try to do so, they’ll simply reappear someplace else. That’s why I haven’t just thrown this disc away or smashed it—it’d show up somewhere else, and he’d find it. He only lacks this one. And he’s willing to do almost anything to get it.”
“Why?” Storm pressed. “What will he do?”
“If he’s able to bring all ten talismans together?” Alia asked ruefully. “Anything he wants, Ororo.”
He was just about to call it a night, when they silently beckoned to him.
His candles were extinguished and packed, the nine talismans were safely stored in his beaten-up leather backpack, and Damian Sharpe had concluded that the numbers favored a morning attempt to rework the variables. He was just opening the door to his dirt-encrusted Jeep, knowing that tonight’s failure to eliminate one of the strange attractors would make tomorrow’s efforts doubly challenging.
But the talismans called to him in a way they never had before. Something was happening, the numbers were changing, right now.
He looked up at the stars, and for a moment just stood there in the deep desert, dumbfounded. It appeared as though some cosmic prankster had decided to draw lines between the stars—as if to give official weight to the ancient astrological signs that had been founded so close to this very site, in ancient Babylon, thousands of years before.
Then he realized the lines were not in fact connecting the stars, but were coalescing into a geometically perfect pattern, which was growing and moving directly toward him.
The tenth talisman, he realized in awe, dropping his backpack and fumbling to get it open. She’s bringing it right to me!
He yanked the bag open, and was surprised to see that the stone artifacts were glowing with an eerie green light. He reached for the largest of them, the fractal breastplate—
—and was smashed backward as the glowing flat stone flew out of the backpack and into his chest!
Burning, screaming, Sharpe was only dimly aware of the other talismans also impossibly leaping toward him nothing is impossible painfully grafting themselves to his knees, elbows, waist pain is mere perception feeling his conventional grasp of reality fade an illusion no more real than a picture on TV overwhelmed by his dream-state image of the master equation.
The numbers continued to change.
“There he is!” Jubilee yelled to Storm and Alia as the three women floated high above the craggy desert. “Gotta be, right?”
Storm concentrated on keeping her compatriots and herself afloat on mutant-controlled desert winds as they followed the geometric light pattern emitted by Alia’s fractal disc. The talisman was building a bridge of light across the sky, a fiery white latticework that was leading them toward a glowing green figure wTithing on the ground, next to a Jeep parked near the entrance to some kind of archaeological dig.
“It looks like he is in pain,” Storm observed as they descended on Damian Sharpe’s twitching body. Nine glowing stone talismans were attached—no, fused to him: a helmet, a breastplate, a backplate, shin-and thigh-guards, a medallion at his throat, and a fractal disc identical to Alia’s in his left palm. “Alia. . . ?” Storm started to ask.
But Alia was screaming, her right palm crisping as her fractal disc began to glow with the same green energy that was emanating from Sharpe’s adornments. “Their energy is
building,” Alia managed to choke out as the women landed and Storm caught Alia before she fell to the ground. “Can’t hold out long before they’re drawn together.”
Sharpe stopped twitching. He leapt to his feet with unnatural speed and agility, turning to face the newcomers. His body seethed and crackled with green energy, and the talismans on his body now resembled the ancient Egyptian battle armor after which they had obviously been patterned.
“It’s sucked him in,” Alia explained, fighting the green energy creeping up her right arm. “He’s lost all sense of reality—all he sees is the equation! And if he gets the last talisman, he’ll be able to change it in any way he wants!” “Then he shall not have it,” Storm declared. She raised an arm toward Sharpe and, like Zeus himself, fired off a lightning bolt. But the jagged arc of electricity somehow raced around Sharpe’s body, as if purposely avoiding him.
Or as if its trajectory had been recalculated at the last millisecond.
“That can’t be good,” Jubilee said, trying to blitz Sharpe with a barrage of fireworks—but they exploded almost immediately after Jubilee created them, blowing the surprised teen off her feet and temporarily blinding her.
(Sharpe laughed maniacally, watching the numbers change and shift light before him. It was within his grasp, he could almost taste full comprehension of the equation—if he could just remove those annoying extra variables. . . . )
Raising the fractal disc in his left hand, Sharpe aimed it at Storm and Alia and released a cone-shaped beam of energy with the same liquid-air consistency of the chaos spirit that had chased Jubilee earlier. Alia quickly countered with a spiderweb shield, which seemed to absorb the assault. But
Alia screamed in pain as the talisman’s green energy continued to flow up her arm. She was losing the ability to hang on to reality.
Storm floated up into the air again, and summoned a gale-force wind to blow7 Sharpe back. But he seemed totally unaffected by it, as if the air itself were moving around him, not into him. Jubilee risked another volley of fireworks, with no discernible effect on their opponent. Seemingly oblivious to the mutant heroines and their desperate attacks, he started walking toward Alia.
He fired another energy beam at her, and she blocked it with another spider-web shield—but just barely. Though her knowledge of mathematics served her well, Alia still possessed only one of the talismans, against the combined power of Sharpe’s nine. And she somehow sensed that the artifacts wanted to come together—they hungered to rewrite the equation of reality, over and over, forever.
In a last-ditch effort, Storm used her control over the wind to lift Sharpe’s Jeep into the air, then brought it crashing down on him. “Nowr, Jubilee!” Storm called, and the teen launched a maximum-power fireburst into the twisted wreckage, detonating it from within. The vehicle’s gas tank ignited, answering Jubilee’s controlled explosion with an even louder one.
Ororo bent the winds, protecting Alia, Jubilee, and herself from the flying metal shrapnel. The wind also served to blow away the smoke that enshrouded the remains of the Jeep.
And, glowing more brighdy than ever, Damian Sharpe emerged smiling from the wreck, reaching for Alia with his left hand. A tendril of bright green energy started to form
in the air between his fractal disc and Alia’s. Still fighting the energy of the talisman in her right hand, Alia started reluctantly to stagger toward him.
“We’ve got to get you out of here!” Storm realized, swooping down on Alia to lift her away. “Come on!”
“No!” Alia protested, grabbing hold of Storm’s arm and forcing her hand dowrn to touch the fractal disc. Storm screamed, as much from the intense supernatural heat as from the thought that one of her oldest friends was betraying her to chaos itself!
Storm gasped, unable to remove her hand from the blinding disc. Reality started to warp, twist, become a strange mass of color. She felt sick as her perceptions lurched and shifted to another plane.
She felt light. Saw silence. Heard coldness. Sensed nothing but variables, numbers, possibilities. They would drown her before she could comprehend them.
She tried to focus on the familiar. The sun. The rain. The wind.
Just more numbers.
She cried out in despair, unable to accept a universe laid bare to its pure mathematical core. No beauty, no grace, no justice. Just numbers. Her very soul rebelled, withdrew, surrendered, inverted.
Sun. Rain. Wind. Nothing but numbers.
She was drowning.
But she would not die like this! She would not be cancelled, rounded down, written off. The world may have been nothing more than a massive equation on God’s pocket calculator—but she was more than that. She was alive!
She shifted the numbers then, feeling the rush she knew so well, the rush of wind through her hair. She was Storm. Chaos knew enough to arrange itself to her liking.
Now she saw the nine offending points of light. They had possessed a man, driven him to madness, used his body as a conduit through which they could infect reality.
He wasn’t the target. They were.
She reached for their numbers, too, and told them where to go.
They hissed in protest.
“Hey, I think she’s waking up,” Jubilee noted with a smile. “Looks like we get our lift home, after all.”
“Ororo?” Alia called gentiy to her, as she lifted her head slowly from the sandy rock. “Praise Allah.”
“Yeah, all’a that,” Jubilee said, bending over Storm. “You okay, chief?”
“I—I believe I am,” Storm ventured, never more pleased to see Jubilee’s mischievously smiling face. She sat up, trying to figure out just what had happened.
“You used Alia’s disc to eighty-six all of Sharpe’s little toys,” Jubilee answered Ororo’s unspoken query. “Don’t know how you did it, Storm, but it was rad.”
“I’m not sure how I did it, either,” Storm admitted, allowing Alia and Jubilee to help her to her feet. Alia’s right arm was back to normal, and the fractal disc—no longer glowing—lay on the ground, looking much like the innocent desert souvenir for which Alia Taymur had first mistaken it.
Storm looked around for Sharpe, but there was nothing. Not even a body. “What happened to him?” Storm asked.
“We were hoping you could tell us that,” Alia admitted. “With your natural ability to affect chaotic systems, Ororo, I suspected you would have greater control over the fractal talismans than either Sharpe or I ever could. You’d only been touching the disc for a second when a flash of light shot out from my disc and into Sharpe. Then he was gone with the talismans, and you were unconscious.”
Storm struggled to piece her memory together. Here in the world of flesh, form, and feeling, it wras already hard to shift her perceptions back to the nightmarish digital world that had almost swallowed her soul. “I—I believe I used the fractal disc to retroactively eliminate the other nine artifacts from ever having been constructed,” she said. “It couldn’t affect or unmake itself, but at least the threat is largely diminished.”
“What about Sharpe?” Jubilee wanted to know. “Is he toast, or—?”
“I think I simply ‘reset’ him, Jubilee,” Storm recalled. “He’s alive, out there somewhere. None of this ever happened to him. He’s never heard of the chaos talismans, because the only one that ever existed is that one.” She pointed at the stone disc on the ground.
Alia picked it up and studied its encrypted surface, as she had done a thousand times before. “So there’s no way to eliminate this last one,” she ventured. “I guess I’m stuck with the last fractal artifact in the world.”
“The only one,” Storm corrected. “Most people would have a hard time using it to predict or control the lottery numbers, let alone alter reality to their liking,” she said. “But in the wrong hands, its power could still be more than a little dangerous.”
“Then I’ll have to protect it vigorously, and use it wisely, eh?” Alia smiled at the two mutants. “Maybe that breakthrough in accurate wreather prediction is just around the corner.”
Storm laughed, sweeping her arm in the air and summoning a wind gust that lifted the three women into the cool night air, back toward Cairo.
Illustration by Ralph Reese
The hunt. Logan paused at the edge of a snow-covered meadow, his body motionless yet tensed. All his senses were sharp, hyperaware. The golden light of morning filtered through the last remains of the clouds that had deposited the snow late the previous night, traces of tiny footprints left by birds and other small animals, and a well-worn scar of a game trail, where a herd of deer must have recently passed. He sniffed, breathing their lingering musk, the sweetness of spruce and evergreen, and the cool, fresh smell of the snow itself.
He sniffed again. There. He sorted though the scents: rabbit, field mouse, the overpowering musk of deer, and there, nearly lost in the riot of nature—a hint of herbal shampoo, a floral perfume, and human sweat. Prey.
He quickened his pace, cold air burning in his lungs, snow crunching softly under his boots, hands out and ready, the corded muscles in his arms—the ones that would pop his razor claws out through the backs of his hands—flexing unconsciously, teasing just short of the release point.
The hunt. This was when he felt truly alive, when he could shed the tangled life of the man called Logan like an ill-fitted coat and earn his other name: Wolverine.
The trail followed the deer path, and even his keen senses were able to follow it only in spots, like an invisible dotted line across the snow-covered fields. Then, the dots came closer, stronger, not just perfume and sweat, but the new leather of her shoes, the worn denim of her jeans.
He climbed the tree quickly, quietly, careful not to disturb the snow-laden branches. The woman was there, crouched in a clearing, throwing out handfuls of seed to
hungry birds. She was beautiful, long red hair spilling over the fleece collar of her coat. Though a few flakes of snow had begun falling, none of it seemed to touch her, as though nature itself stood in awe of the woman.
Wolverine was not immune to her charms. He watched, transfixed, and took a deep breath, softly releasing it, before popping his claws. The sting of the blades piercing his skin brought his instincts back to razor clarity. He judged the distance to the woman, and tensed to leap.
Just then, the woman smiled without turning, and he felt a familiar touch inside his mind. You really didn’t think you could sneak up on a telepath, did you, Logan ?
He relaxed and sheathed his claws. “Least you could have done, Jean darlin’, was to let me tag off and say, ‘You’re it.’ Some things, the Danger Room just ain’t no good for practicing. Did you follow that deer trail on purpose? If so, I give you credit for good instincts.”
Jean turned toward him and laughed softly, her eyes twinkling with inner light. Come down so we can talk.
An invisible force tingled around Logan, and he felt himself lifted from the tree, to float, softly down next to Jean.
“I’ll confess, you did surprise me, at least in that I didn’t expect to see you, or anyone, out here. How did you find me?”
“I got back from Muir Island and the mansion was empty, but I found your note and figured I’d just missed you.”
“But I just said I was going out for a few7 hours. I didn’t say where, and we’re miles from the mansion.”
“Charley’s Rolls was missing, so I figured you took it. 1
called the cell phone in the car, and back-traced the signal. A little spy trick I picked up from Nick Fury.” He looked down at the birds. Frightened by his presence, they hopped skittishly away from the bounty of seed on the snow. “You come here often?”
She brushed her hair back around her right ear and gazed off at the horizon. “Sometimes, when the Institute becomes too familiar, and the din of telepathic voices in my head unbearable, I come out here to be alone, to escape, and to think. Our lives—” the words seemed to catch in her throat “—our lives are so full of chaos and horror. There’s so little time to think and reflect. I need this time alone.”
Logan suddenly felt like an intruder. He still had feelings for Jean, feelings that had led him to her on the chance they could spend some time alone together. Now it seemed that he’d invaded something important and private. “Hey, I didn’t know. I got stuff to do back at the ranch.”
He started to turn, but she reached out to touch his arm. “No, stay. This is a wild place, as much yours as mine.” She smiled. “I’d be glad to share it with a friend.”
Logan hesitated. What could he read into that touch? Had there been something in her eyes, something in her voice? Jean was married to Scott now, but he knew their attraction had once been mutual. There was a dark aspect to Jean not unlike his own. Had he only imagined this new spark between them? For all his hypersenses, he couldn’t read minds.
“Walk with me,” she said.
They were silent for a while. The hunt was over for now, the hunter’s sensibilities submerged. Now he could see the
forest through Jean’s eyes, the white blanketed hills, the snow-draped trees, the soft sound of the wind. It relaxed him, and heightened his awareness of Jean. Her sidelong glances created an uncomfortable tension. “We really are alone out here,” he said.
She glanced around casually, her eyes focused on infinity, and he knew that she was telepathically scanning their surroundings. “There’s only one person within three miles of us—a hiker.” Her smile flashed and boiled over into a laugh. “It’s just so quiet. I can hear myself think, Logan. I wonder if you can even know what I’m feeling.”
But he did, or thought he did, the way he felt sometimes when he escaped the cacophony of human civilization for the wild places.
“I can relax for once,” she went on, “let down my psychic shields and ...”
Logan wasn’t looking at her the precise instant she screamed, his gaze having drifted to the trail ahead. His reaction was instant and automatic, his claws out and up, flashing in the sun as he spun, seeking the threat. But there was nothing, only Jean on her knees in the snowT, sobbing in horror, and staring at her empty hands.
“No,” she said, “no.” Abruptly, she seemed to remember herself. “We’re too late!”
She reached up and clutched his forearm. Whether it was to calm him, for comfort, or to help pull herself back to her feet, he couldn’t be sure. She stood, wobbling for a moment, then she began to run, unsteadily at first, then faster. “This way!”
Logan followed, more out of concern for her than anything else. They were running toward nothing as far as he
could tell, a section of tree line like any other, about a quarter mile distant. They’d covered perhaps a dozen yards when Logan felt the familiar tingling around him, and the snow fell away under his feet. Whatever had happened to Jean, she was recovering. They soared over the tree line and a ridge beyond. He could see the highway curving ahead where he’d left his Jeep.
They dropped down near a junction between two hiking paths, both well marked with fresh prints and the tracks of cross-country skis. But Logan’s attention w'as drawn immediately to a dark heap just visible in the shadow of a trail marker, half under the low limbs of an evergreen. It looked like nothing, perhaps a pile of rags, but it was the smell. He signaled Jean to stay back as he crouched by the body. It was a young woman in her twenties, small build, red hair only a shade or two darker than Jean’s. Someone, something, had gutted her like a fish. She’d been dead only a few minutes.
There was no helping her. He could only find the killer. Now that he knew what to look for, the trail should be easy. The killer would be covered in fresh blood, a strong smell, easy to track. It took only a moment to pick it up and follow it up the trail toward the highway. He zigzagged up the trail like a bloodhound on the scent, moving rapidly because there were few places where the killer could part from the trail without leaving obvious tracks.
Then Logan stopped, puzzled, and doubled back for a few yards. He sniffed deeply. The blood trail was fading, almost gone. But that was impossible. Blood is not easily washed off. It should remain in the clothes, the hair, the skin, under the nails. Nevertheless it was fading, and what
remained under it was strange and difficult to follow, a faint tang of human sweat, adrenaline, ozone, and an undeniable
something else.
Logan knew he was losing time. Ignoring caution, he charged ahead, checking the scent only w7hen there was a very obvious possibility the killer could have left the trail. Better to risk a chance of losing him than the certainty of falling hopelessly behind.
He went on for several minutes until the trees thinned ahead, and he heard the sound of a truck downshifting on the highway. It was then he knew he was too late. The trail ended in a roadside turnout, at fresh tire tracks and a fading cloud of exhaust fumes. “Damn,” he said, the word swallowed in a sudden gust of frigid wind.
He was worried that Jean hadn’t contacted him tele-pathically, and it was some relief when he found her kneeling quietly by the body.
She looked up at him, the tear streaks already drying on her cheeks, a burning anger in her eyes. “Her name was Petra. I was in her mind when she died.” She swallowed, struggling for control. “It isn’t the first time, but you can’t imagine anything more terrible. I saw her killer, a big man, silver hair, with—” her brow furrowed, as though she were trying to remember the image “—knives of green fire.”
Logan knelt next to her. “I lost him. He took a car. No way to track him on the highway. You sure about those knives?” The look in her eyes said she was very sure. He nodded. “It would fit. This ain’t no ordinary killer, that’s for sure.”
“I couldn’t read him, Logan, not at all. I didn’t even know he was here until the moment he struck. Then it was
as if a cloak were thrown aside for a moment, just for a moment.”
“You get anything?”
She frowned. “It was confusing, not like one person, but several voices, three or four, talking at once, some to me, some among themselves. It was all a jumble, so difficult to sort out. One of them is a killer, a serial killer, and he’ll kill again. One of them, well, I think our killer may have a hostage, Logan. And this was the really strange thing. I’d swear that one of them, only one of them, was a mutant.”
They returned to Logan’s Jeep and called the state police from his cell phone. Jean knew someone in the department, a woman whose brother was a low-level mutant, to whom she could tell their whole story with some expectation of being believed.
She clicked off the phone and looked at Logan. “Drive,” she said. “We can’t leave this to the police.”
He looked up and down the empty highway. “Which way?”
“There are only two to choose from.” She hesitated only a moment before glancing back over her shoulder. “That way. ’ ’
He was already turning. “You know something, darlin’?” “I’m just guessing, Logan. Fifty-fifty chance, and God forgive me if I’m wrong.”
Logan drove as fast as he dared on the slick road. The Jeep was surefooted but top heavy like most four-by-fours. He knew its limitations, and pushed every one. What he didn’t know was where they were going, or what they were
looking for. He glanced over at Jean, uncertain if she was scanning, or just watching the scenery.
“My friend on the state police said there were three other killings in this part of the state last year, all outdoors, all around the time of the first heavy snow. Not as brutal as what we just saw, and no evidence of anything supernatural or superhuman, but. . . these crimes often escalate as the killer gains confidence. The police considered the idea that there was a new serial killer operating, but they found no solid evidence to link them, and the files are still open.” The sun flashed through the trees into her eyes, making her blink and turn away. “The code name on the file is ‘Snowman.’ ”
“Well, when we meet the devil, at least we know what to call him. ’ ’ Logan tapped an index finger against his temple. “You gettin’ anything?*’
She shook her head. “I can’t read him, Logan. Maybe he was distracted by bloodlust and lowered his defenses for a moment.”
“Great. So all we gotta do is wait for someone else to get killed.” He saw the hurt in her eyes, and regretted his words immediately. “Sorry, darlin’. I know you’re doing the best you can.”
She put her fingertips over her mouth. “Unless,” she said. “Unless. I said there were several voices. One was a killer, one was a hostage, the others, I’m not sure about. It’s like one of them might be trying to help us.”
Logan shook his head. “None of this makes sense. I followed one trail back to the highway. He didn’t have a flamin’ entourage with him.”
She looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “Are you sure, Logan?”
And of course, he wasn’t. The scent had been strange, unlike anything he’d encountered before. There had been that extra something he’d detected, but still only one trail of scent. “If there was more than one, they must have been ridin’ piggyback.”
“I have another idea, too, about how7 the Snowman picks his victims. Some killers go for a particular physical type—children, or women with long, straight hair—but there was nothing like that in the first three killings. Different sexes, different ages, but I do see something now they may have missed. All of them could be seen as weak or infirm in some way. The last victim was a small woman. One of the earlier ones was in a wheelchair, another an old man with a cane, and so on. For all his apparent power, he preys on the weakest...” Just then she glanced up.
“Logan, stop!”
He slammed on the brakes, and the Jeep w^ent into a four-w7heel skid. He turned with it, powering it through a full circle. For a moment he thought they’d get to try out the roll bar, then they w7ere stopped, right in the middle of a five-way intersection. He spun his head from side to side, looking both for cross traffic and less conventional threats, “mat?”
Jean already had the door open, and had dropped to the icy pavement. “I know this. I’ve seen it before through someone else’s eyes. No, not seen; remembered, or maybe thought. That jumble of images I saw—this was one of them, not a memory, but a plan. He came this way and
turned.” She turned in a complete circle, looking down each road. “But which way?”
A metallic glint caught Logan’s eye, and he climbed out of the Jeep to investigate. At the far right of the intersection the metal support for a stop sign had been bent flat by some impact. “We didn’t do that.” He knelt to examine the post where it has been scraped down to shiny metal, sniffing the exposed surface. “Fresh. Done in the last hour.” He inspected a lone tire track, far enough onto the shoulder not to be lost among the hundreds of others. “It matches what I saw at the turnout.”
He stepped back to the fallen sign, popped the two outer claws on his right hand, and brought it down hard. Jean flinched at the sound of shearing metal, but the post sliced like butter. He tossed her a three-inch section of metal.
She looked at it, puzzled.
“Now we know something else,” he explained, pointing a claw at a smear of pale green paint. ‘ ‘We know what color his wheels are.”
Back in the car, Jean glanced down at the piece of metal resting on the dash. “Not very stylish, is it?”
“Good for us. Easier to spot. Besides, this isn’t a new car. No catalytic converter. I could smell that much back at the turnout. Look for a beater. This is getting better. Half an hour back I didn’t think we had a prayer.”
“You aren’t smiling.”
“This business is too serious for smilin’, but you’re right. Stupid mistake clipping that sign. No reason for it. Good light, not much traffic, and we weren’t right on his tail.
Stupid move with us after him, but probably useless if anyone else were doing it. You got something from him during your contact—you think he knows about us too? Him, or our invisible ‘helper’?” That part still didn’t make sense to Logan. Were they talking about one person? Two? Four? A busload? And just who was siding with who?
Jean seemed confused too. She shook her head. “Maybe, I don’t know. I keep moving the pieces around in my head, and I keep coming back to one result. It doesn’t make sense, but I think the hostage is the mutant.”
Logan gripped the wheel tighter. A nonmutant killer with super powers, a nonexistent hostage who was a mutant, and a mystery cast of equally nonexistent supporting characters. They were coming into a village, and Jean was looking around anxiously.
“This could be it,” she said. “Slow down.”
“I don’t see any cars the right color.”
“There,” she pointed at a directional sign, “that way.” Logan read the sign as they turned: community senior center V* mile. “Another guess?”
She shook her head. “Logic.”
The center was a converted school building, two stories of brick and marble blackened with age. Though the sign out front advertised a potluck lunch to have been held only a few hours before, the place was nearly deserted now. There was no sign of the green beater they were looking for.
“Go around the block,” Jean suggested.
Still no sign of the car. They were cruising slowly through a tree-lined residential street when Jean’s face went
ashen. “I can read them, Logan, like someone opening a door. He’s stalking his victim now!”
She directed him through several turns toward a block several streets east.
“It’s an elderly woman walking home from the potluck. I’m going to try and warn her telepathically. I only hope I don’t frighten her into inaction.” Jean’s eyes closed and she frowned with concentration. “She understands. She’s trying to get to safety, Logan, but she’s too slow! The Snowman is moving toward her!”
“She only needs ta buy us a couple seconds, darlin’.” He wrenched the wheel to the right, sliding into the empty driveway of a brick rambler, into the backyard, and straight through a picket fence. They hit a snowbank and cleared a frozen drainage ditch by at least six feet.
Logan’s head hit the roll-bar as they landed, but he hardly noticed. Ahead he could see the old woman trying to run across a stretch of park meadow, an overturned two-wheel cart abandoned behind her. And he could see the killer, the Snowman, only a few yards behind. He threw the door open and jumped out while the Jeep was still slowing.
The Snowman stopped his advance when he spotted Wolverine, but he didn’t withdraw. Instead, he reached into his belt, cross-armed, with both hands, and drew a pair of ordinary looking hunting knives.
So much for “knives of green fire, ” Logan thought. He unsheathed his claws, anticipating his strike. He thought of the gutted young woman, the terrified old lady, the three bodies from last year, and mercy was not foremost on his mind.
Logan leapt, claws out. He hit, and hit hard. His claws
raked off something invisible, millimeters from the Snowman’s skin, leaving behind streaks of green electricity.
His momentum carried him past the killer; he landed off-balance and tumbled twice before coming up in a crouch.
He spun. The killer stood his ground, sheets of green lightning dancing around his body. In the background, he could see Jean helping the woman to safety. He had to keep the Snowman’s attention distracted. Logan growled deep in his throat, and charged for another attack. He moved in close, slashing with what should have been killing strokes. They skittered off harmlessly, stirring up the lightning, which flowed up the Snowman’s arms and into his knives.
The Snowman laughed and brought down his left arm.
The thick leather of Logan’s jacket sliced like tissue paper, and he felt the knife bite deep and jam between two of his ribs. He grunted as the knife pulled free, and tried to return a blow of his own. Ineffective. The Snowman’s other knife fell. Logan tried to stop it, and the blade sliced his forearm to the bone. He staggered. Before he could recover, the first blade stabbed completely through Logan’s left thigh.
Logan fell, rolling clear of his attacker. The green fire wrent with him, burning deep in his wounds, fighting his healing factor. The effort of the struggle dropped him to his knees, near unconsciousness.
He looked up, and through his blurry vision, the Snowman seemed to be running away. Logan could hear laughing. “Did he get her?” he hissed through clenched teeth.
She’s safe, Jean’s thoughts reached him as a note of belllike clarity in a pool of pain and confusion. I’m going to try
to stop him telekinetically if I can, and probe him at close range if I can’t.
“Don’t,” Logan managed to whisper. Then the screaming began again.
Logan leaned against the fender of the Jeep, trying to clear his head.
Next to him, the elderly woman was beaming at Jean, seemingly unfazed by the attack. “She’s my guardian angel,” the woman kept saying, “I saw her in a vision.”
Whatever gave comfort, Logan supposed, though right then her “guardian angel” looked like she’d been dragged through the deep end of the pool. Jean sat in the Jeep’s passenger seat, dazed and bedraggled, her hair wet with melting snow. He’d found her fallen in a snowbank and carried her back to the rig.
Jean shook her head slowly, stringy ringlets of hair tumbling over her face. Speaking telepathically, so as not to let the old woman know more than she needed to, she said, Got to stop them, Logan. They ’11 kill again unless we can stop them.
He reached out and brushed the hair back from her eyes. You sure you’re okay, Red? You’re talking “them” and “they” again.
She looked up, and met his eyes with a tired, but lucid, stare. I understand now, Logan, what we’re dealing with in the Snowman. The true horror of it nearly flattened me. The killer, the hostage, the mutant, and two others, the little boy and the old woman, all in one body.
Logan raised an eyebrow. Multiple personalities ? No ivay. Mutant isn’t personality, it’s genes. I don’t have to be the Professor to know that.
I didn’t understand it at first either. But the mutant isn’t an aspect of the killer’s shattered personality; he’s the killer’s third victim. She sighed, and wiped the moisture from her eyes. Imagine a young mutant, his power not yet expressed, a very unusual power. He was a symbiont, capable of surviving the death of his physical body by bonding with another being at the moment of death. Now imagine he becomes the victim of a serial killer, and at the moment of his death . . .
Logan’s thoughts wTent grim. He jumps straight into the body of his own killer.
He can’t control the host body, and his power makes him a true symbiont, not a parasite. His power “pays the rent” somehow. Maybe by making the host better at what he does. In this case, he certainly made the Snowman into a better killer, maybe a perfect one.
So, the victim, the mutant, he’s the “hostage”? He’s the one that’s been helping us?
Yes, he’s the hostage, and it makes sense that he’s the one helping us. Maybe he can control the body, but only when the host is sufficiently distracted. She hesitated. During a killing, for instance.
Logan just grunted.
I’m also worried, Jean continued, about what will happen if the symbiont draws too much attention to himself.
What do you mean ?
I mean, if you already have three personalities, what’s the big deal if another one shows up ? But if you learn that one of those personalities is an alien from outside ? He might be able to kill the boy, or wipe his personality and take his powers. We just don’t know.
Logan looked down at his shredded and bloodied
clothes. His wounds were completely healed. The effects of the green fire had burned themselves out in a few minutes. Still, it made the Snowman one of the more formidable opponents he’d ever faced. He sighed, and climbed into the driver’s seat of the Jeep. “Ma’am,” he said to the smiling woman, who probably had no idea why the two of them had been so quiet for the last few minutes, “you head home now.” She nodded, and watched as they drove off across the park.
They had picked up one other useful piece of information: Logan had recovered soon enough to catch a glimpse of the Snowman’s vehicle as it drove away across the park, a vintage green Corvair van, ancient and spotted with rust. They were building the clues to run the Snowman down, but could they find him before he killed again, and what would they do with him when they had him?
Logan stopped at the main road and looked both ways. “I need some help, Red. Which way?”
She shook her head. “You know I can’t track him, Logan.”
“We know somebody in there is tryin’ to help you, and you’ve already been inside his mind now. Give it a try.” She closed her eyes and concentrated, teeth gritted, breath held, her face lined with the strain. This continued for thirty seconds or so. Then her eyes snapped open. She blinked. “I saw something, just a flash, it could have been another victim. I couldn’t tell anything except—it was a man walking a dog.”
Logan unfolded a map and scanned the surrounding area. A small notation caught his eye. “A dog? Like a seein’-eye dog?”
She nodded. “It would fit the killer’s pattern.” “There’s a training academy for ’em in the next town east of here, ’bout six miles.” He tossed her the map without folding it and punched the accelerator. They skidded onto the highway.
Jean threw the map in the back, and drew herself up in her seat. She was finally recovering from their battle. “We still don’t know what to do with the Snowman when we find him. My TK seems to be as useless against him as your claws, and even if we could harm him, we don’t know what it would do to the innocent mutant trapped inside his body. ’ ’ “Could be,” suggested Logan, “that he’d just jump to a new host.”
“We don’t know that. It could be he can make the transfer only once. Our best bet is to find a way to contain him and take him back to the Institute—maybe the Professor can help him.”
“Whatever,” Logan said as he skidded the Jeep around an especially sharp corner, but he remained unconvinced. While he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of the symbiont setting up housekeeping in Jean’s or his body, there were worse alternatives.
They soon found the Oltion Dog Training Academy, but no sign of the killer’s van or a man walking with a dog. Logan had another idea. “That man you saw must have left here not long ago with a dog. We don’t have to find the hunter if we can track the prey.”
They left the Jeep in front of the academy while Logan attempted to pick up the trail. He’d circled only a part of the building before finding it. The nice thing about dogs
was that they were very easy to track by smell, especially when they were wet.
The trail led away from the road, through the academy grounds, and into the back country. They were headed up a steep grade paralleling a stream when Jean glanced back over her shoulder and pointed. Visible through the trees, parked next to a side road, was the light green van.
Logan picked up his pace, and trusted that Jean would keep time. As they rounded the next bend, the trail crossed from one side of the ravine to the other, via an arched concrete bridge that soared high over the rocky stream.
“It’s happening,” Jean cried.
On the center of the bridge Logan could see three figures: two human and one canine. As they came closer, it became apparent that the dog was trying to defend its fallen master from the Snowman. It was a battie as brave as it was hopeless. Only the dog’s speed kept it from being cut to ribbons. That was a lesson Wolverine took careful note of as he broke into a full sprint.
Logan, he heard her in his thoughts, while you attack on the physical plane, I’m going to attempt to contact the mutant by deep probe. There may be a way we can help you from inside, or at least learn something useful.
He didn’t even think, Be careful. The time for care was past. This was war.
Logan ran onto the bridge just in time. The dog was withdrawing in defeat, bleeding from several seemingly minor cuts. The dog hunched down near the railing where his master had fallen. The man seemed disoriented, if unhurt. Logan placed himself between the killer and his intended victim, but kept his distance.
They danced a dance of death for a moment, then the Snowman struck. Logan stepped just outside the knife’s arc, then replied with a thrust of his own, aiming not for the vitals or limbs, but for the eyes. As always, the Snowman’s bioelectric field protected him from the blow, but he still instinctively pulled back, trying to protect his face.
Made you jump, thought Logan. It was a small victory, but he’d settle for anything at this point. The strike also had an unanticipated secondary effect. The green fire lingered over the Snowman’s face, interfering with his vision.
WJiile he’s confused, Logan, I’m going in .. .
Then things went terribly wrong. Jean’s psyche was suddenly sucked inside the Snowman, and, through their contact, a part of Logan as well.
It was a strange sensation, to see his physical self still doing battle with the Snowman, to still be a part of that, and yet to exist on this inner plane as well.
He and Jean were falling, though he had no fear of it. They were falling down a long shaft, like the vent of a deep volcano. He could see a shrinking circle of blue sky, wispy with cloud, far above, dwindling to only a spot as they reached the bottom. He had no memory of stopping, and yet they were there.
As he looked around the dark, fog shrouded plane, he saw four others besides Jean and himself standing there. One of them, a thin teenage boy with dishwater-blond hair, stepped forward. The symbiont, Logan knew.
“You came,” the symbiont said, his eyes wide with wonder. “Tommy said you’d come, but I didn’t believe .him.”
A flash of pain pulled Logan back into the part of his consciousness existing in the physical plane. The batde had
gotten close and bloody while his attention was elsewhere, and, from his current perspective, seemed to move in slow motion. Fury and confusion marked the Snowman’s face as he slashed at Logan, flashes of green fire illuminating his face in stark shadows.
A spray of blood arched through the air, his own, Logan realized. Got to pull back, get room to move. As he did, he saw Jean standing at the end of the bridge, frozen in midstride, the blind man still propped against the railing, and the Snowman, moving toward him. Logan moved to protect the helpless man.
Snap. He was back on the astral plane. Jean emerged from the shadows, holding the hand of a young black boy of about nine. “This is Tommy,” she said. “He wants to help us end the killing.”
The boy’s eyes were large and gende, and it was hard to believe that he was part of the Snowman. He looked up at Logan and nodded sadly. “We done some bad things, mister. Got to make it stop. That’s why I brought your lady friend to help our friend Roger,” he pointed at the symbiont, “and you, Mr. Wolverine, to help fight our Snow-beast.”
The nameless old woman glanced at Logan contemptuously, then turned her back on him. Three aspects of the Snowman, Jean had said. Tommy was one, this woman another, and the third . . . Something roared behind him. He turned to face a child’s nightmare: a buffalo sized lion made of soiled velvet drapery fabric and old buttons, held together with crude hand stitchery, its back crusted with fallen snow, as though it had just shambled out of a snowbank. Despite its bulk, it moved with easy grace, its eyes glowed
with green fire, and when it roared, it revealed a maw studded with very real teeth.
This was it, the killer’s dark soul, the inner beast. Logan knew it well, knew what could happen if it were set loose.
Tommy stepped forward, challenging the beast. “Got to stop it! Got to stop the killing, Snowbeast! Got to make it end!”
“Nooooo,” the Snowbeast roared, brushing the boy aside with his paw. “Kill the weak! Kill the weak!” He turned toward Roger, the symbiont. ‘ ‘Kill—the outsider?”
More pain, as his claws locked with the killer’s knives and the blades slid down to bite into his knuckles. Too close. Too close again. He shoved the Snowman backward, stepping back himself.
He was bleeding from a dozen places, none too serious, but the green energy was sapping his strength, and impeding his healing. He needed the breather.
The Snowman leaned back against the bridge rail, casually wiping a little saliva from the corner of his mouth. He looked at Logan and laughed. Then, too quickly for Logan to act, he grabbed the terrified blind man by his collar, pulled him up onto the bridge railing, and climbed up after him.
The concrete railing was only four or five inches wide and covered with snow. Using strength that could only have been granted by his symbiosis, the Snowman held the struggling man out over the drop.
“No!” cried Tommy. The Snowbeast lumbered toward the young mutant. Logan popped his claws, relieved that they worked here as well as the real world, plunging his right claws into the Snowbeast’s side, ripping down in a long
stroke. But there was no blood, just more of the green fire, spewing out, burning where it touched.
“Tommy,” urged Jean, “you have to help us.”
The boy just sat watching the battie, arms curled around his knees. “Can’t do nothing without Auntie.” He gestured at the old woman. “Her and me could outvote the Snow-beast, but she won’t vote. She don’t care. It’s always that way.”
Logan leapt and rolled beyond the Snowbeast’s claws. “We need help, Red, or the man’s gonna die. What about Blondie there?” He nodded toward the young symbiont before having to fend off another of the Snowbeast’s attacks.
Roger shook his head. “I can’t control his powers. I’ve tried, but I can’t.”
“Then,” said Jean, “control yours. I’ll help you see your true nature.” She waved her hand toward the three aspects of the Snowman. “You have the ability to enhance your host, compensate for his shortcomings, to make him better at what he is. But you didn’t understand that when you were suddenly cast into this poor shattered creature. You made him a better killer, and that’s all, but Roger, you can make him whole.”
The Snowbeast stopped for a moment, looking up in response to the words, then redoubled his attack on Logan.
“No,” said Roger, “I don’t know how.”
“I’ll help you,” said Jean.
Some part of Logan could see the Snowman’s fingers loosening from the man’s collar, even as the Snowbeast landed on top of his chest, huge jaws snapping shut just short of his throat.
“Now would be a good time,” he growled, freeing an arm to fend off another bite.
Then the Snow'beast was screaming, joining the chorus of Tommy and the old woman, with Jean, and with the mutant teenager, and finally with Logan himself, an animal howl rising from deep in his throat.
The weight lifted from Logan’s body as the Snowbeast and his other aspects were drawn together into a boiling ball of green anger and rage. Then the color warmed, to yellow, and then orange, and the ball coalesced into a single figure, the silver-haired man they had called the Snowman.
Suddenly, Logan was back in the real world. The Snowman still stood on the railing, a look of growing realization and horror on his face. In the corner of his vision, Logan saw Jean stagger from the psychic backlash of returning to her own body.
“Help me,” the blind man croaked, and the Snowman seemed to notice for the first time the helpless victim dangling from his hand. He placed the man’s feet back on the railing, but did not release him.
“What have we done?” asked the Snowman. “What have I done?” The Snowman turned his face toward the bright sky, the wind plucking at his short white hair.
“Justice,” he whispered, then pushed the man back onto the bridge, straight into Logan’s arms. Days later, Logan would still be wondering if that move, or what followed, was intentional, for just then, the Snowman’s feet slid from the icy railing and he tumbled to the sharp rocks waiting below.
There was a wet crunch, and then silence.
The injured dog stepped fox-ward to join his master, and