Logan left them to comfort each other. He glanced over the rail at the broken body. The sharp angle of the neck left no doubt that the Snowman was finally dead.
Jean walked slowly toward him across the bridge. “Oh, Logan, it’s terrible. Once he was psychically healed, the Snowman couldn’t live with what he’d done.”
“Who could, darlin’? The kid?”
She shook her head and sniffed. “Gone, I think. That makes two lives sacrificed today.”
He put his hand on her arm. “And two saved. Prob’ly more. You did good.”
But Jean drew away, turning her attention to the fallen man. She knelt next to him, picking his dark glasses up from where they’d fallen in the snow.
He moaned softly, and his eyelids fluttered. The dog whined and licked his face. He chuckled softly and started to push the animal away. Then his eyes opened, “You’re hurt,” he said to the dog. He gingerly explored the dog’s injuries with his fingers, but there was more than that. “You can see!” she exclaimed.
“I can see,” the man parroted flatly. He repeated the words with more emotion, like an infant trying his second spoonful of ice cream. “I can see. I can’t believe it.” He climbed unsteadily to his feet, refusing Jean’s offer of the glasses. He picked up his white cane, perhaps merely as a familiar comfort, since he seemed at a loss as to what to do with it.
Logan watched as the man walked to the far railing, leaning over to look down at the body. Jean followed the man, taking his arm to steady him. “Are you all right?” “We’re better now—both of us.” He nodded downward.
“Even he was better in the end.” He turned and smiled. “Thank you, Jean, for everything.”
“I don’t know your name,” she said.
“My name is Roger Besda. Our name is Roger.” He chuckled. “A nice coincidence, isn’t it?”
Jean laughed, squeezing Roger’s hands.
Logan drifted back, feeling an outsider in this moment of warmth and renewal. He and Jean could never be together. He knew that now. He’d battied the beast today, knowing he could never win. That was how it would ever be.
He stood at the far end of the bridge, looking out into the wild places beyond. That was where his destiny lay, with the inner-beast, and the battle that he must ever fight— alone.
Illustration by Brent Anderson
nank McCoy knew something was wrong, but he couldn’t quite pin it down. He glanced at his shoes, brushed a hand across his white linen smock, and lifted his pen off the lined page of the patient medical file in front of him. He stared at the sentence he’d just written, suddenly uncertain that the handwriting was his.
“Is something wrong, Dr. McCoy?”
He turned to the patient on the exam table. The unfamiliarity faded. Of course. Mrs. Wilson. Age forty-one. He’d just removed a mole from her shoulder for a biopsy.
“Not to worry. As I said, your body is positively brimming with puissance and vitality,” he said in his most soothing tone. “My apologies. I was thinking of something entirely unrelated to your visit.”
Mrs. Wilson settled back into the relief of a person who has just been told the growth she feared was malignant is surely nothing of the kind. She fastened the last button of her blouse and, at the doctor’s reassuring gesture, exited the exam room.
As soon as the door closed, Hank stood and gazed into the mirror above the sink. Slowly, unsteadily, his fingers made contact with the smooth flesh of his cheeks, then rode down to his chin, the nubs of his beard resisting the action like sandpaper.
“In the proverbial pink,” whispered Hank. Not a single blue hair or elongated canine tooth could he find—just the brown hair and ruddy complexion he’d once owned, before the experiment that gave him his feral appearance. He was staring at a face that belonged in old photographs.
He turned away, hissing between his teeth. He’d been
taunted this way in the past, only to see his human form vanish—the last time stolen away by an evil mutant who called herself Infectia. But hands, not gorilla paws, still jutted from his sleeves, and his body no longer exuded the aroma or held in the heat of a thick indigo pelt. It didn’t feel like a trick.
The Beast had disappeared. In his place was a totally different Hank McCoy. He squeezed his temples, trying to force the unfamiliar, mid memories from the confines of his skull. The office in which he stood was his own, located outside Boston, shared with three other general practitioners. It was not the Brand Corporation labs, and he was not a biochemist. He was just a regular doctor, seeing ordinary patients in a peaceful suburban neighborhood. The memories were complete—all the way back to childhood, up through med school, and into private practice.
Nowhere in that life history was there any manifestation of mutant abilities in high school, no entry into a facility run by Charles Xavier, no charter membership in the X-Men, no details of a thousand incredible events since then. In fact, any recollection of being the Beast was growing muted, as if banished to the same place that had claimed his fur and the points of his ears.
He glanced at his watch. Another dozen people to see that morning. He stepped toward the door, to head to the next room, where another patient was no doubt waiting. Then, with a low, Beastlike growl, he stopped. Such a powerful, persuasive milieu. At every turn it was seducing him into forgetting who he was.
What could this be? Some sort of alternate universe? Another timeline? Certainly the X-Men had encountered
those before. Yet every7 other trip to such places had involved a transition of sorts, such as a jump through a portal. Even teleportation left momentary tingles. This time he had simply become aware, at nine fifty-one in the morning, that something was wrong with the context around him.
A dream? Dreams didn’t feel like this. The clipboard was firm in his grip, the floor solid, the sunlight out the window crisp and bright. Like his strange new memories, this place had the aspect of reality. Something told him whatever happened here would have genuine effects. This was no fantasy.
Desperate to break the routine that was making this place so compelling, he made his way to the nurse’s station, where he found a receptionist whom he’d never met before, yet whom, paradoxically, he’d known for two years.
“Developments have arisen,” he said, measuring the words out with forced calm. “Kindly cancel the rest of my appointments today.”
“Mr. Grauehe’s already in room three,” she said.
“My regrets,” Hank replied, and turned his back on her worried frown.
Back in the exam room, alone, he slid out of his shoes and socks. Bounding forward, he somersaulted onto the exam table. There. He still had his mutant agility. But his leg muscles quivered, overtaxed by the effort. He overbalanced, and had to hop to the floor to avoid falling. He had congratulated himself prematurely. Yes, his powers were there, but they had faded. Were fading.
He looked again at his human body. Perhaps miracles did occur, after all.
* * *
Scott Summers was walking across the campus when he tripped on the flagstone path. Suddenly the lawns, the landscaping, the vine-cloaked brick buildings of the university, took on a numinous clarity. That was all the more alarming, because he was certain the scene had to be false.
He sat down on a bench, trying to sort out particulars of two separate lives: one as Cyclops, co-leader of the X-Men, the other as Scott Summers, PhD, assistant professor in an excellent, but typical, chemistry department at a modest undergraduate school in Illinois. The former seemed more true, but the latter was more vivid. He recalled verbatim sentences from the class he had just taught; he could cite the names of pupils he’d had over the last several semesters, complete with the grades they’d received. He knew that his excursion was taking him to the library in order to pick up an abstract not yet available by modem. These were all the sorts of evidence he could easily track down and confirm. Their undeniability confronted him.
One fact stunned him more than any other. He wore no visor or glasses, yet he was viewing the world with eyelids wide open.
“Can’t be,” he muttered. He peered at a blade of cut grass lying on the flagstones, examined an individual petal of a flower growing beside the walkway, and scanned a leaf in the nearest tree, a young Japanese elm. Not only did his gaze lack its usual destructive effect, what he saw only affirmed the palpability of the place. He recalled, for instance, that the tree had been planted two years before. The campus’s handsome American elms had succumbed to the infestation that was destroying the variety throughout the continent. The details couldn’t have been more clear.
Suddenly he began to chuckle. How blue the sky was.
Clouds hung like decorations placed by a divine hand. How fine the architecture of the campus buildings—such handsome lines of brick and mortar, laced with shrubbery.
To see. To see as he had not seen since childhood. It was grand, potent, compelling. . . .
But it was not right. He was Cyclops, and long ago he had become reconciled to living without normal vision. He struggled to his feet, fighting off the complacency this environment evoked.
Keening his mind for the telepathic whisper of Jean or of Professor X, he heard nothing. Was he the only X-Man affected? He reached out, but even his psionic rapport with his beloved proved insufficient to achieve contact.
One obvious test remained. He concentrated on the building site across the quad. The new student union. The structure was unoccupied; the construction crew had suspended work, unable to do more until a state inspector made a visit. There. That spot—where the upper-story window was due to be installed.
A familiar, momentary blindness seized him. He heard the moan of an optic blast. As his vision returned, he saw girders and concrete collapse within the building site. Dust poured out of the window he’d aimed through.
Students nearby gawked and pointed. Fortunately the burst had been too fleeting, and its effects too distracting, to mark Scott as the cause. He listened to the outbursts, taking strange comfort in the tones of dismay, fear, and excitement. The reaction was familiar to the part of him that remembered being an X-Man.
He waited for the inevitable exclamations—“Must be mutants! What are those freaks up to now?” No one uttered
them. Instead, the talk buzzed with phrases like, “Political protest?” and “Gas leak?” and “Never seen anything like it.”
Brows furrowing, Scott headed for the newspaper dispenser outside the library doors. The headlines contained no references to X-Men or their splinter teams, to renegades such as the Mutant Liberation Front or the Acolytes, or to any mutants at all. He pored through the entire edition page by page. There weren’t even any articles about the latest doings of the Avengers, Spider-Man, or the Fantastic Four. The only thing that seemed right was the date on the masthead.
Shifting to the phone booth in the foyer, he began leafing through the Yellow Pages, but under “Attorneys,” he found no ubiquitous advertisements by shysters offering to file personal injury claims on behalf of bystanders caught in the crossfire during fights between super heroes and super-villains.
“Can’t be,” he said again, and called Information.
“What city, please?” asked a voice that might, or might not, have been a recording.
“Salem Center, New York. I want a number for the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning.”
“I’m sorry1. No such listing.”
“Thanks anyway,” Scott said, the sinking feeling in his heart advising him not to protest. He waited a moment, breathing unevenly, and punched in the number he knew should work. An obnoxious mechanized voice began, “We’re sorry. The number you have dialed . . .” He clanked down the receiver.
The rules were different here. This was a reality in which
mutants, super heroes, and their powers were unknown. He shook his head, trying to deny what his surroundings were telling him, but the more time that passed, the more convinced he was that these new conditions were how things should be.
His optic blast had not been as powerful as usual. Given the amount of focus and intention, it should have pulverized objects that had only been dislodged. The suspicion grew that if he were to try again, his powers would prove to be reduced even further.
Leaving him as what? A human?
If only it could be true.
While there was any vestige of Cyclops left, he couldn’t just stand by passively. He had to contact the others. How, he didn’t know. Perhaps if he . . .
Llis concentration faltered. Shouldn’t he just go upstairs and pick up the abstract, make some photocopies, and prepare the handouts for his one o’clock class? No, that wasn’t right. There was something nagging him—an image of a red-haired woman.
He rose, and instead of continuing into the library, as Professor Scott Summers would have done, he wandered outside, unsure where he was going, or what he was doing.
Jean Grey set her fork down on her plate, swallowed the bite of mashed potatoes she had taken, and tried not to show the alarm she was experiencing.
At the table with her sat her parents, John and Elaine, and her sister, Sara. The familiar walls of her childhood home enclosed her, the dining room arrayed with family photos. It was all as it should have been. She was a lawyer
specializing in environmental issues, enjoying a lively but not overly taxing career, home for a long weekend with the folks—a regular occurrence, now that she had passed the bar and set up her practice only a two-hour drive away.
The part that didn’t fit was the recurring impressions of another life, far removed from this calm, nurturing scene. She closed her eyes and saw starships explode, buildings crumble, colleagues fall, witnessed a woman with white hair riding the winds, and a man with claws slash through steel cables. She remembered the tug of a uniform against her skin, and the highly trained muscles beneath that fabric. When she asked herself who she was, she was tantalized with names like Marvel Girl and Phoenix.
“Jean? Are you all right?” Sara asked.
Jean flinched. Her gaze roved over her sister’s face, noting the tiny mole on her right cheek, the precise shade of her irises, the sheer . . . health ... of her complexion.
“Sara? You’re supposed to be dead.”
Sara’s mouth dropped open. “Jeannie!” blurted her parents simultaneously. And Jean, blushing, suddenly had no idea what had prompted her throat to produce such a statement.
“I’m . . . sorry. I was recalling a dream I had last night,” she lied. “Didn’t know I was saying anything out loud.”
As the heat dissipated from her cheeks and the meal resumed, the cordiality1 and sense of security Jean had felt earlier took on a brittle quality. The X-Men identity solidified, and though it was as faint as the nightmare she had invented to excuse her faux pas, it didn’t waver. It was no hallucination. Jean guarded her reaction carefully, until the plates were cleared and she could excuse herself.
“I think I need a nap,” she said, and disappeared into her bedroom.
First, the tests. She gestured, trying to telekinetically lift a chair. It rose. Frowning, she deposited it where it had been. Six inches? She had meant to raise it to the ceiling.
Still, even a minor amount of levitation proved she couldn’t be plain old Jean Grey, attorney-at-law, no matter what her memories said. Time, then, to explore the “dream,” and come up with some explanations.
She lay back on her bed and focused. Her last distinct memory of her existence as an X-Man surfaced: she and Scott had shared a cup of coffee after breakfast, savoring a little domestic ritual before suiting up for a session in the Danger Room. Professor X was out of town. The X-Men in residence that morning included herself, Cyclops, Wolverine, Archangel, Psylocke, Iceman, Beast, and Rogue.
That group would be easiest to make contact with, assuming they were still in close proximity. If that failed, she could try the Professor or more distant comrades, but given her depleted resources, she didn’t want to attempt too much.
Naturally she tried Scott first. All that came back was an odd sort of echo—enough to confirm that he was alive and unharmed, but not enough to permit verbal messages, and not enough to fix his location relative to her.
She sagged back on the mattress, already wearied by the attempt. What was it about this world that sapped her powers so insidiously?
She had to try the others. No choice about that. Either she would succeed, or she wouldn’t, but she couldn’t go
down without a struggle. One by one, she reached for them. .. .
Logan crashed through the front window of the hardware store/lumberyard, landing on the balls of his feet on the sidewalk, defdy avoiding the shards of glass he’d caused.
Flaring his nostrils to take in scents, he glanced about, requiring no more than the span of a heartbeat to orient himself. To his left the main street led to the town square and courthouse. To his right the community trailed off into the taiga forest of northern Canada.
He sped off toward the forest, snarling at the storefront facades beside him, the electric lines snaking from poles to the eaves of the buildings. The call of native, untamed spaces overwhelmed any coherent thought he might have.
A woman passerby backpedalled into the street, shrieking as she caught a glimpse of Logan’s savage expression. He ran by, caring nothing about her as long as she wasn’t in his way, but ahead, a policeman on the corner turned, saw the commotion, and reached reflexively for his pistol.
Logan closed the gap between himself and the man before the latter could unsnap his holster. Logan swiped, and his claws ripped through the leather, knocking the gun to the concrete. He scooped up the weapon, tossed it onto the roof of the next building, and raced into an alley that led to the fringe of the wood.
The shrill call of the cop’s whistle faded as Logan lost himself amid boughs heavy with pine needles and trees higher than the town’s tallest building. Finally he slowed, though he was only mildly winded. His first truly conscious
act was to bring up the hand that had torn the pistol loose and stare at it.
The hand was scarred, powerful, with fingernails sharp and thick. But no claws protruded, as they had they when he slashed at the holster, no matter howr fiercely he flexed and squeezed.
He growled, trying to drive from his mind the memories of a life where he was a cutter in the lumberyard from which he had just fled, one of a series of jobs he’d held during a life spent entirely in the Great White North. He’d often imagined such a life—one he might have lived had he not been a mutant, and never been the subject of Weapon X experiments.
The false identity clung to his mind, eroding the essence of his Wolverine self. He had endured many kinds of madness, but this was new. He wasn’t sure how to fight it. He had done the one thing that made sense—got out among the trees, away from the stench of civilization. What now?
A weak telepathic voice called from deep in his brain— a shout reduced to a whisper.
“Red? ’Zat you?” He asked aloud because he couldn’t remember how to answer mentally.
An image came to him of a face. He knew' he should know her, but her name wouldn’t surface. He felt that if he tried too hard to recall it, he would forget his own.
The hunter in him recognized that she was that direction—over the hills, through more forest, and then who knew what. Far away. Hopelessly far.
Yet lurking here, passively accepting a transformation into a new self, was not something he would tolerate. He
needed to take action. Until he could think of something better, at least he could run.
He set off, the trail seeming more faint with every tree passed.
Hank McCoy, still ensconced in his office, unwound the cuff of a blood pressure gauge and tossed the device in its drawer. Once more he checked the printout of the treadmill test he’d performed on himself.
The proof was right there, stark and irrefutable. An hour earlier he had still shown indications of mutant, Beastlike physiology. Now his scores had fallen to levels within the reach of a trained athlete. At this rate another hour would bring the results down to a point that could only be described as “normal.”
And it was getting so, so hard to recall why that should bother him.
Bobby Drake lifted the ice cream cone to his mouth. How fascinating the cold felt as it caressed his tongue. The flavor almost seemed superfluous. Temperature mattered far more.
On the other side of the parlor, the freezer case beckoned. He had half a mind to crawl right in there among the tubs of Rocky Road and Orange Sherbet. Was that weird? Quickly he checked the faces of the servers and the other customers. They weren’t looking at him.
He laughed inwardly. Who the hell would care what off-the-wall ideas he had, as long as he kept them to himself? No one. Strange, then, that his paranoia lingered. Some part of him was accustomed to people staring at him, at-
tacking him, or running as fast as they could away from him. The eerie depth of the perception sent chills up his spine.
Chills were good, though. He relaxed. Get real, Drake. Just who or what do you think you are? The windows reflected back the image of a healthy, young, all-American guy. Nothing strange whatsoever.
Just hanging out, having a cone. A zen moment. Life didn’t get much better.
He licked again, letting the dollop of full-sugar, all-the-fat Mocha melt on his tongue until nothing remained but a tiny speck of ice that had crept into the mixture. Now, what was so hypnotic about ice?
The carousel sounds and popcorn aroma of a carnival surrounded Rogue as she took a place in line for the fourth time. Beneath her feet, straw kept the dust down; she liked the way it tickled her bare feet. The sun of the Deep South kneaded her skin—and there was a lot of that showing around her halter top and cutoff denim jeans. She treasured the heat with a fervor that verged on nostalgia. Now, why should that be? She'd lived in Dixie her w'hole life, hadn’t she?
“Back again?” asked an old lady with a wink.
Up ahead a sign read “kisses—$2.” Rogue blushed, then grinned. “Can’t seem to get enough,” she admitted.
“He’s quite a hunk, isn’t he?” remarked the matron.
The dark-haired, muscular occupant of the booth, just then lending his wares to a plump lady in a summer dress, was indeed a fine specimen of manhood, but Rogue didn’t really care about that. It was the kissing itself that compelled her to fork over her cash so generously. The contact of flesh
against flesh, even in such a relatively chaste, public way, gave her an indecently intense satisfaction.
The hunk finished with his chubby customer and, scanning down the line, saw Rogue. He winked.
She grinned back. Funny thing, after their first kiss, he’d seemed rather pale. She’d thought he might faint. But the color was back in his cheeks. The second and third times had been fine.
Why did that make her feel so good? So . . . forgiven?
Scott stood at a revolving display rack in a drugstore, trying out various pairs of sunglasses. He felt like a kid let loose in a toy store, though why all these silly little plastic shades should appeal to him so much he didn’t quite understand. After all, he’d never needed prescription lenses in his life. He could have bought any style he wanted at any point in the past—what was the big deal about them now?
As he selected a gray-lensed, bronze-frame aviator pair and set them on his nose, an image of a great-looking redhead popped into his mind. He hardly paid attention, since her description didn’t match any of his friends or acquaintances. Then he remembered that this was the fifth or sixth time he’d thought of her that day.
And then he remembered much more.
Steeling himself against the delicious contentment he’d been feeling, he finally succeeded in framing a reply to Jean’s psionic query: “How many of us are here? Is anyone missing?”
In the bedroom at her parents’ home, Jean Grey heard Scott’s question. Though it was a reply to her own, it came
back as if it were nothing more than television-show dialogue overheard from the living room, having nothing to do with the here and now.
A cozy, soothing mood possessed her. She wanted to go downstairs and play cards, or simply indulge in the companionship of her family, especially with Sara. What a silly question, anyhow.
Is anyone missing? The voice said it again, insistently.
Jean frowned, got a grip on her X-Man self, and laboriously combed her chaotically jumbled memories for the answer. Yes, other members of the team were “here” in this reality. She’d touched their minds, even if the brief comments of Logan and Scott were the only distinct examples of contact.
Or rather, she’d touched six out of seven. She’d completely failed with . . . Psylocke.
A cold sweat burst on her brow. Psylocke was another telepath. With the exception of Scott, with whom Jean shared a psychic rapport, Psylocke should have been the easiest to contact, even with weakened powers. Jean brought what little reserves she had left to bear, and from the place in her mind where she should have received a response— nothing.
“That’s the key,” Jean murmured to herself, and realized then how little time she had left to do anything. This new world had almost swallowed her true identity, and those of the others. If she were going to save the group, she had to find the answer to a puzzle quickly.
One option made the most sense. Before she lost track again, she broadcast a set of insistent telepathic instructions, but this time it was not toward Psylocke.
* * *
Warren Worthington III was flying a small airplane, and having a great time doing it. Barrel rolls and sudden swoops—they felt like second nature to him. His aircraft behaved like an extension of his body. He laughed out loud as he climbed through a layer of thin, scattered clouds, regaining altitude in order to try more antics. He couldn’t remember an hour in his life when flying had seemed so grand. As an heir of wealth, he had always enjoyed taking the plane up; it got him away from corporate boardrooms and obligatory high-society gatherings, out where he could be himself. Today, though, his piloting skills seemed almost more than human.
The “almost” part struck him as particularly important. The seat beneath him, the cockpit around him, comforted him with their separateness from his body. It was a strange emotion, but he didn’t dwell on it. He had only a few more minutes until he’d have to land and immerse himself once again in the details of his busy life.
Warren! called a voice so clearly that he looked behind him to see if he had a stowaway. Only when it came a second time did he realize it was in his head.
“Jean,” he said. The knowledge of who Jean Grey was poured into him, and with it arrived the memory of being Archangel.
Go to Betsy, Jean said. She’s . . . she’s . . . The voice fell below7 the level of intelligibility.
Warren wasted no time. He wasn’t sure how long he could retain this sense of his proper identity. He brought his plane down low7 over the landscape. As his altitude plum-
meted, that landscape began to shift, becoming the familiar settled woodlands surrounding the town of Salem Center.
A large set of buildings emerged from the leaves. Emerged was precisely how it appeared. He was certain the structures hadn’t been there until he willed them to be. He banked the plane and straightened to attempt a landing.
As he settled in, the aircraft dissolved. His back tingled fiercely. The wings used to land himself on the broad lawns were no longer propeller-driven. Down and on his feet, he flapped them twice just to reinforce his mutant identity.
The ivy-encrusted walls of the Xavier Institute wavered, threatening to fade out of this world once more, but Warren didn’t let them disappear. He rushed inside, making straight for the quarters of Elisabeth Braddock.
Psylocke woke on an exam table in the infirmary. Warren was leaning over her, his somber expression easing as they made eye contact. Several other X-Men hovered in the background. The Beast switched off a monitor, having obviously tended to her.
“How do you feel?” Warren asked.
“Awful.” She coughed. Her muscles seemed to be slung on her bones like overstuffed luggage, and her skin itched as if bathed in grit and insecticide. Even lifting her tongue to form words proved taxing.
“You had a tremendous fever,” Warren told her. “It created some interesting effects.”
“I think I remember,” Betsy said. “It was like I was doing psi-probes of each of you. You were in places you have tucked deep in your minds. Except you weren’t there by choice. You had been forced there ... by me.”
“That is our working hypothesis,” the Beast confirmed. “While in the midst of your fever, instead of simply reading minds, you projected something—call it a fervent wish— into everyone in the building. Thanks to the abundant vigor of your psionic abilities, you overlaid alternate realities upon us all, each one a mixture of your own desires and those of the individual affected.”
Added Jean, “The illusions were so strong that we couldn’t break free of them until my telepathic red alert to Warren shook him awake here, in the real world, where we had all been rendered unconscious. He woke everyone up, then Bobby iced you down. We carried you to the infirmary, and Hank’s treatments brought your fever down the rest of the way.”
“I’m . . . sorry,” Betsy said. “I didn’t have any control over it. I don’t even know how it started. I’ve often had dreams where I was living in a world where I wasn’t a mutant—-where no one was. But I always woke up, same as ever. I had no idea anything like this would develop.”
“It was a narrow escape. This occurrence, thanks to the fever, activated a variation of your psychic knife,” Jean added, referring to Psylocke’s ability to telepathically “carve out” a person’s memories. “Those false memories we all experienced were given such a boost, they would have soon taken root permanently in our brains.”
“But when Warren realized that I was in distress, he found a way to get to me,” Betsy said, turning to gaze at him again. They clasped hands.
“Least I could do for my favorite ninja,” he replied. The words were flip, but the tenderness in the delivery was like a cool cloth on her forehead. It brought a romantic smile
to her lips, and worked to ease the guilt at having endangered everyone.
“Jean and Professor Xavier will do some scans of us all during the next few days, and make sure any residual effects are minimized,” Cyclops said.
“Well,” Iceman said, “I guess we can consider it a case of ‘no harm done.’ ”
Most of the group filed out, leaving Psylocke to recuperate. Archangel remained with her, trying out a joke or two to further revive her spirits.
No harm done? wondered Hank McCoy as he sequestered himself in the med lab next door. In the gleaming metal of a cabinet, his blue-haired face projected back, as brutish as ever.
A narrow escape? questioned Rogue. Bobby strode beside her down the corridor. She wanted very much to be able to take his arm in hers, laugh a little at another rescue accomplished, maybe even give him a peck on the cheek. All without having to restrain herself for fear that her power would drain him of things it shouldn’t.
In her and Scott’s bedroom later that day, Jean Grey picked up the picture of her sister that she kept on the dresser. She traced the edges of the frame, and sighed. A pair of tears fell from her lashes.