Scott Lobdell & Elliot S! Maggin

Illustrations by Tom Grummett & Doug Hazlewood

Generation X created by Scott Loisdf.i.l & Chios Bachalo

BYRON PREISS MULTIMEDIA COMPANY, INC. NEW YORK

BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK

CHAPTER ONE

BIOSPHERE

The pine forest to the north of Snow Valley, Massachusetts, near Stockbridge, is a little blank smudge on the road maps. There is no road. The only distinguishing feature is the snaky path that the Mad River takes down Sugar Mountain, eventually to join the Housatonic River, and wash into the Atlantic. Only the property map sketched out at the home of Edna Gross, the County Registrar of Deeds in Lenox, tells what really occupies that smudge of Mad River Valley at the base of Sugar Mountain, somewhere between the boyhood home of singer James Taylor and the old art studio of the legendary illustrator Norman Rockwell: a large irregular tract of acreage to either side of the river, once belonging to a prestigious private school, now owned and operated by the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning.

Rockwell was the visual scribe of rural New England, the place where America takes place. He made a great deal of the people he found here. The artist chronicled, through the faces he rendered on the covers of Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, what the American nation was becoming through the folk of these little towns. One has to wonder what he would have made of Jono-thon Starsmore.

Jonothon really had no face to speak of. More accurately, he had about half a face. A top half. The bottom half was a free-floating suspension of plasma waves, matter in the process of converting to pure energy, over which Jono had only nominal control. That was what he

needed to change at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

Jono had been a cute kid. He shined back in the old country, like a jewel. Like pretty much all the homo superior kids until they start manifesting their special abilities. On weekends in Glasgow in the little towns in western Scotland, he had been a promising young rock musician, swooned over and chased around through basement clubs and the odd hotel hallway until his voice box started to turn into pure energy.

It started for Jonothon Starsmore when he was an eleven-year-old Glasgow schoolboy. He casually blasted a noisy political sound truck out of existence with a burst of energy from his midsection. The blast left a pinhole of roiling psionic power that doctors who didn’t know any better mistook for a birthmark until they looked closer.

Gradually, Jonothon had occasion to do away with increasingly large chunks of the matter that composed his body. There was the rescue of the old lady who was tumbling onto the tram track. Then the young woman on that bridge by the Firth of Clyde being chased by those toffs whose brass knuckles fused to their teeth as they chewed their fists in pain. That one was the first time he got the idea that he could use this power surgically: he could pull back on it, limit it through force of will. But that little maneuver cost Jono what was left of his stomach cavity. No one would ever accuse Jono of being a cute kid again.

Just, a few years ago, Jono scared some of his classmates by undoing his bandages to reveal the white -hot plasma suspension of his former body from thighs to sternum. This prompted the local authorities to encourage his parents into putting together a home schooling program for which they were ill qualified and less inclined. So for a few months Jonothon’s math teacher was his father who still ran his dry cleaning shop out of an old NCR cash register. He took French with his mother, also a condition of dubious benefit. Jono once walked with his mom into a little restaurant in Normandie, both of them excited to try out their French on someone who didn’t speak anything else. When Mum said a simple burr-infested “Oui” in answer to the hostess’s question, “Deux pour petit-dejeuner?” the hostess’s cute smile darkened and she turned, saying in English, “Oh, right this way.”

Uncle Ian the auto mechanic, though, sure did know his physics. Ian and Jono figured out the proper oil-to-air ratio in Master Tomas’s old beater of a ’55 Mercedes using an ohm-meter, checking the results against an oscilloscope. Pretty soon they measured the side-particle throw-weight in photons through the micro-pores in the bandages over Jono’s chest. They found that if Jono could harness the waste material of his personal biogenerator alone, he could focus enough power to lift downtown Glasgow to Saturn and back between lunch and dinner. It was Uncle Ian’s physics classes that prompted Jono to take seriously the possibility of enrolling at Xavier’s School.

Now here he was in America not a year later, climbing up the geodesic grid on the inside of the biosphere to spy on Emma Frost, the headmistress, and Monet St. Croix, one of Jono’s fellow students. Jonothon could not imagine that either Emma or Monet could be unaware of him there—particularly given that Emma was a powerful telepath; very little got by her—but they were both too busy to notice. So he watched as they worked out their combat maneuvers. Monet, who was some kind of Algerian princess according to what little she let on, flexed somehow, in that ineffable, more-than-human way, all over her body when she launched herself into flight. Like Hideo Nomo about to launch a pitch, only hotter.

Emma was the White Queen, the mutant telepath who once trained a group of mutant kids called the Hellions. They were all gone now. Squashed like bugs by some super-powered doofus named Fitzroy, but Jono knew what’d really gotten the Hellions: government. Not like the government in Washington or London. All governments. Everywhere. The collective hive mind of people that set themselves up with great ceremony and ritual and derive their respectability from identifying with those who win a war or step on a problem or perpetuate a delusion. Government got the Hellions and Jono had come here to throw in with other people like himself— or enough like himself—so government would have a harder time and take longer to get him.

Outside, winter was cracking open at the edges. Here in the biosphere, a pair of stupefyingly beautiful superpowered women wove in and out among the treetops of the indoor jungle stalking one another like enemy predators. The game was simple: Monet hunted Emma and Emma hunted Monet. To win, one had to slap the other on her heel.

It was impossible to sneak up on the White Queen. No one sneaks up on a telepath. But Monet had an effective weapon in her speed; she simply had to move faster than either she or Emma could think.

No problem.

The biosphere was a controlled environment in a geodesic dome with the ground space of a football field inside. The various species of vegetation within shouldn’t be able to coexist. Tropical herbs from the Amazon basin mixed roots with trillium from the Great White North. An unnaturally fast-growing saguaro from Arizona fought it out for its water supply with a larch from the foothills of the Italian Alps.

Like the school itself, the biosphere was a laboratory. Every time the lavish strains of flora produced what looked to be a mutant strain, Sean Cassidy (aka Banshee, former member of the X-Men), the headmaster, would send out a call over a secret cellular line, and within twenty-four hours Dr. Henry McCoy (aka the Beast, current member of the X-Men and a leading biochemist) would come barreling in to pick apart the little shoot, classify it, and send cuttings to who-knew-where. If it was lucky, the new plant would grow up someday. A lot like the kids here.

Jonothon Starsmore, code-named Chamber—potentially one of the most powerful beings on the planet if only he were to learn how to harness his psionic powers and live until, say, his eighteenth birthday—hung on the struts of the biosphere like a fly on the wall. And if anybody asked why he was here, which they probably wouldn’t, he would say that it was to study the training session as Emma drilled Monet. In truth, he just liked to watch the two of them move.

Emma Frost elbowed through the root system of a giant yucca plant to evade detection by Monet. At first glance, Emma seemed to have little in the way of defense against a girl who could fly and lift a mountain and move faster than the image could register on a person’s eyes.

Monet flew through the air over the treetops of the biosphere, whipping around in circles. She flew around in an ever-tightening pattern, faster and faster, until the Monet Jono watched was laps behind the one up front.

To Jono, Monet was perfect. Monet was the golden apple under the sun. She spoke the Queen’s English with the slightest touch of an accent leftover from a collection of French tutors in Algeria. She grew up as the treasured daughter of a sultan whose tradition generally reserved privileges only for sons. Her skin was golden brown. Her voice was a slow crackling flame. Jono could see how a guy could fall in love with her. He saw it every time she walked among a crowd of people she didn’t know to go into a store or wave down a cab or watch a soccer game. Guys fell in love with Monet as the dust settled in her wake, but they lost all illusion of such things when she spoke to them. She was imperious

and demanding with every resonation of her being.

Jonothon thought it was odd to see Emma appear uncertain, but in terms of raw power, Monet appeared to outmatch her instructor easily. It was all Emma could do to find a hiding place somewhere in the dirt in the hopes that the girl would trip up, blow her advantage, open herself to attack before she could determine where the White Queen hid.

It didn’t seem likely.

As Jono watched, Emma lurked and Monet threw off a humming sound as she vibrated the air. Then, like a skier missing a gate, Monet broke her pattern.

Monet swooped down from the air like a falcon in a power dive. Behind her, the blurred circular image of her spinning path faded like skywriting.

Monet plunged into the earth underneath the yucca tree which Emma rooted around in. As she plowed into the ground, earth sprayed upward. She hardly noticed how far down she dove, so intent was she on finding her teacher’s heel.

Then Monet felt a light tap on her own right heel, then her left, just as she submerged into the dirt below the biosphere. Monet was so caught up in the hunt that she had no plan to stop her plunge. Fortunately, the ground broke her descent.

She flapped her arms and she swallowed dirt and she tried to spin but that only bored her in further. She thought about that awful movie about premature burial she’d sneaked a look at as a child. She thought about being in a box below the ground screaming and pulling her hair out and then she thought about being a ghost with nowhere to go except to hang around watching your body decompose and she thought it was going to make her crazy if she didn’t stop plowing into the dirt—and then she stopped. Only the two lately insulted heels of her terribly fashionable, antelope-hide super heroine boots jutted out of the ground.

Jono, watching from high on the triangular struts of the inside wall of the dome, scrambled down. Emma, laughing that cruel laugh of hers, got on her knees amidst the yucca root and pulled to no avail on Monet’s ankles.

‘ ‘Is she all right?’ ’ Jono projected onto sound waves in the air as he reached the White Queen. He had no mouth, after all, but he had enough psionic energy to simulate pretty much anything—other than his boyish good looks.

“How would I know?”

“Well read her mind or something!”

“Oh 1 did,” Emma offered, “at least enough to know she’s healthy. Any deeper into that black hole I don’t care to go just now.”

“How’d you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Sneak up behind her when she was moving that fast.”

“She’s fast,” the White Queen said, “but not faster than thought. She’s an intellectual creature who must sometimes learn to use her instincts.”

“Well stand back then,” Jono said, and began to unwrap the bandages over what had once been the lower part of his face.

“Wait a minute, Jono,” Emma put a hand on the shoulder of his jacket, which was squishy and shapeless to the touch. There was no flesh to pad him, only free-floating energy. ‘ ‘Are you good enough yet for this kind of surgical gardening?”

“Trust me,” Jono said.

The girl’s feet waved violently, despite her pinned torso. He shot the first beam of psionic energy at the ground near Monet’s head—as thin as a round of psionic energy gets. It chewed up the earth and left a big gully alongside Monet and the perimeter of the Yucca root.

Jono was about to loose another blast between Monet and the main body of the root itself when Monet moved. Fingers, then hands, reaching upward awkwardly, surfaced to either side of the girls’ boots. Monet yanked back at the surface of the ground—

—and her hands sank again, deep into the ground that Chamber’s bolt of energy had softened to make it easier for her to get out.

Jonothon revved up his power again, concentric circles of energy crackling the air around his body, and Monet leapt out of the ground with the sort of desperate alacrity usually reserved for people in the paths of industrial accidents and nuclear shock waves.

“Are you all right?” and Jonothon’s veneer of concern was less obvious than his feeling of guilt at his lame attempt at a rescue.

“Do you know what could have happened,” Monet started softly and slowly, inquiring as to Chamber’s sanity, “if the heat of your next bolt of energy had gone just a touch out of control?”

“Well—”

“The dirt itself could have fused into silicon and trapped me in there for, for maybe days.”

“Well actually, it’s only sand that turns to silicon. Sometimes actually to glass. This is mostly loam and silt and it tends—”

“It tends—” Monet realized that her voice had risen to a shrill pitch and so cut herself off. She brushed off the silt and loam that muddied her face—-casually, as though she had meant to get dirty—and lowered her voice to an imperious stage whisper. “—to do what?” Her usually red spandex flying suit was covered in a layer of mud and filth. She looked like the star of a grunge Kabuki play. Little pieces of mud dribbled to the ground as she talked, and Jonothon almost laughed. Nevertheless, he plunged in: “It tends to harden under heat into a kind of concrete and compress in volume. It’s a much more brittle material than glass.”

“And you know this from ... what?”

‘ ‘Experimentation. ’ ’

“You run around melting different kinds of soil?” “Well I did, one day. Back in Scotland, when I was walking the moors with the guys in the band.” “Walking the moors? With your band?”

“Well it was Scotland. There were lots of moors around.”

“Fusing soil into cement?”

“Well only that once.”

Monet nodded a slow, exaggerated nod.

“And this time too, of course,” Jono added.

Jonothon was actually shuffling one foot, looking for activity through which to displace his embarrassment. But Monet, dripping with topsoil, was in charge of the conversation anyway. He wondered whether it would keep her up all night if he slipped a pea under her mattress.

He had very little time to wonder before both of them heard Emma yell.

It was not a blood-curdling scream of the sort you might hear from a woman being attacked by a guy with an eyepatch brandishing a particularly nasty-looking piece of cutlery. It was more like the howl you heard from your mother half-a-second after she walked into your room to find one wall papered with the entire 1986 run of Topps baseball cards fastened there with Elmer’s glue.

Monet reached Emma first, her sudden speed removing most of the dirt that had caked on her.

Emma had composed herself by the time Monet arrived, and was staring at something that, as far as she knew, did not belong in the biosphere. It was a kind of big hazy red egg hovering over a big horizontal branch of one of the trees. Emma was looking at it intently, with the kind of look you get when you’re surprised by the appearance of an old friend.

“Do you see that?” Emma asked, as if making sure that she wasn’t imagining it.

“It’s some sort of phenomenon,” the student told her teacher in that authoritative way she grew back in her father’s court in Algeria. Monet jumped toward the manifestation, floating through the air with a hand extended, “Certainly nothing to be alarmed—” and as she touched it, the shape wobbled and fell out of the air.

“Are you ladies all right?” Jono’s artificial voice projected from behind a nearby clump of succulent bushes of a type never before found outside the Amazon rain forest. He stepped into view just in time to see Emma and Monet standing over something on the ground that glowed for a moment, and then vanished.

“What was that?” Jono wanted to know.

Monet shrugged. Emma muttered something, turned on her heel and went for the biosphere airlock.

Monet and jonothon followed Emma. The White Queen had gotten fairly far in front of them, but the trail of shallow footprints in the corn snow led to the main building.

“What was that thing?” Jonothon asked Monet on their own way along Emma’s path.

“She thought she recognized it,” Monet said.

“Recognized it? She’s seen it before?”

‘ ‘No, I believe she recognized a thought pattern from it.”

“She told you she thought the glowing egg was a person?’ ’

“Not as such. She just said ‘Haroun,’ and then you showed up and she left.”

“Haroun?”

They came into the big hallway of the old building that was now their principal classroom. Xavier’s School occupied the grounds that used to belong to the Massachusetts Academy, one of the oldest private schools in the country. In fact, its existence predated the American Revolution by fifty years. When Emma was owner and sole headmistress of the Academy, she trained the Hellions here.

Then Jono remembered something. “Haroun was Jetstream’s name.”

“Jetstream? One of the Hellions. The Moroccan

guy”

“I don’t know. He was from one of those places. He could blow hot plasma blasts behind him and shoot himself up through the air. Better not stand underneath him, though.”

“He died, right?”

“Yeah,” Jono said, “with the other Hellions.” They both paused. “Happens,” Jono said.

“Who died?” asked Angelo, running down the big curving staircase, a pair of new thermal boots helping to hold his feet in shape so he didn’t trip over them. “You look like hell,” he noticed Monet’s dirt-caked face and clothes, “what happened?”

“You’re no Clark Gable yourself, Skin,” Monet said, and he wasn’t. Angelo grew epidermal tissue at an alarming rate and needed more practice at sucking it all tight around his body so he looked more like a human and less like a Chinese sharpe. “Did you see Emma?”

“Oh you’re a charmer today, M. She went up to Sean’s office and he closed the door.”

“He closed the door?” Jonothon repeated. The headmaster almost never closed the door.

“So what’s all the buzz?” from Angelo as Monet shoved open the hallway door to a bathroom with an elbow that seemed to be fairly dirt-free.

“We saw a glowing egg she thinks was a dead Moroccan,” from Monet.

“Well that doesn’t sound like you, M, if you don’t mind my saying,” Jonothon suggested. “Have you got something against Moroccans?”

“I’m Algerian.”

“What? Are you guys not getting along these days?” “Our countries get along fine. Good fences make good neighbors.” With that, she slammed the bathroom door in the two boys’ faces.

CHAPTER TWO

DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH

Sean Cassidy’s door stayed closed for about half an hour. Paige was the first to join Jono and Angelo’s vigil.

“What’s the buzz?” the girl with the breakaway body wanted to know.

Paige Guthrie was better known, if she was known at all, as Husk. “With a name like that,” she commented once, “I could go on American Gladiatorsbut Sean had given her the name and she was stuck with it.

Paige had the remarkable, if less than attractive, ability to transform her outer layer of skin to pretty much any material that was necessary to withstand whatever potential injury might accost her, and then to peel or crack or melt off that new layer, revealing the good-as-new, peaches-and-cream Paige underneath. Whenever she did this she felt a little tingly and raw for a few hours, but it was nowhere near as bad as a sunburn. Problem was, with a tendency to have the part of your body you greet the world with turning—sometimes spontaneously—into tree bark or manganese or phlegm, it was hell trying to meet guys.

“What did you see?” Paige asked Jono.

“He saw nothing,” Angelo popped in because he felt he should, “just some glowing something-or-other on the ground is all.”

“Jonothon?”

“I told you,” from Angelo again.

“Did I ask you?”

“Oh,” Angelo waggled his hands in the air near his

head, and the seams of his skin waggled in the opposite direction. “Sorry.”

“What did you see, Jono?” Paige asked.

“Matters more what Emma and M saw,” he said as Monet finally emerged from the bathroom and joined them.

“Remarkable,” Angelo said, looking Monet up and down as she approached.

“What’s remarkable, Skin?”

“You.”

“This is news to you?” she asked coolly as Paige rolled her eyes.

“Look at you. Chamber here said you were head-to-ankles in the dirt and it was caked all over you like white on rice. Now there’s not a trace. How do you do it?” “I have super-powers. I can scrub really hard.”

The door of the headmaster’s office opened a crack, and Sean Cassidy stuck his head out.

The first point of Sean’s authority' was his size. He thought it was his history, but these kids of whom he was in charge were beginning to grow an impressive history of their own. Sean had done things and seen things of which most people were not even capable of dreaming. He had battled villains, both as a member of Interpol and as an X-Man; combatted the forces of an ignorant hostile government; repeatedly helped save the world for those who hated him. He had a larynx that was unmapped by any known medical authority and a voice that he had trained to shatter steel.

He used that voice—in a more benevolent tone—to say, “Monet, would you come in here?”

“Of course, Sean,” she said smoothly, and vanished behind the closed door.

Here’s the way things go at a normal high school: Something innocuous happens. Mr. Carrington the French teacher comes in with a toupee over his goosegg skull and everybody acts as though he has been wearing it for years. Or Jimmy gives Tiffany his class ring. Or someone puts a graffito on the girls’ room wall that says, “Principal Skinner gets high on bananas.” And then the rumors grow. The word is that Mr. Carrington's had his head shaved for an imminent brain surgery procedure and that’s why he’s been mumbling under his breath using French words he’s never taught his classes. And suddenly everyone knows that Tiffany’s skipping town next semester so she can go to a clinic to give birth to Jimmy’s love child. That’s the basic dynamic of information in a conventional high school.

At Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, it went the same way, only faster.

Jono, Paige, and Angelo hung around the top of the stairs by the door to Sean’s office, as Monet and Emma talked with Sean inside about a manifestation in the biosphere. Jubilee—Jubilation Lee, the thirteen-year-old from the San Fernando Valley who actually had more time logged among the organized mutant establishment than her older schoolmates—appeared and wanted to know: “What’s the poop, guys?”

“Is that the same as the buzz?” from Chamber.

“Paige is looking for the buzz and you’re looking for the poop. What’ll it be, lassies?”

“Some big hoo-hah in Sean’s inner sanctum, Jube,” said Paige. “Looks heavy.”

“How heavy? It’s not about the new kid, is it?” “Much heavier than a new kid,” from Paige again. “More like crisis with the X-Men down in the city heavy, or that’s what it sounds like. There’s a new kid?” “That’s the buzz,” from Jubilee down below.

“I thought you were looking for poop,” from Jono. “Paige was looking for buzz.”

“And whatever happened to haps?” Angelo plugged in. “Back in the ’hood we used to look for haps all the time. Now I’m not even sure they still call it the ’hood.” “What’s the haps?” Everett asked as he joined the gathering.

Everett was Synch, who could cast an aura of syn-chronicity that allowed him to get on the physical vibratory wavelength of pretty much anything you can see, hear, touch, smell, or think about. He was like a matter-hacker, able to use his aura like a computer uses a modem to get into the system of objects outside himself and reprogram them at will. A smiley, self-contained black kid from St. Louis about a year or two younger than Jono, he was the one person in the building with the potential to end up more physically powerful than Jono.

“You’ve been hanging with Angelo too much,” Jubilee told him. “Looks like a big emergency brewing in the sanctum. We’re probably all going to New York to help the X-Men fight some super-duper bad guy. Maybe a time traveler, think so?”

“Who said anything about time travelers?” Jono poked in. “There’re no time travelers here.”

“Slippery little suckers, huh?” from Angelo. “Nudging their way in and out of the continuum like it’s Swiss cheese. Like to try that someday.”

“You didn’t say anything about time travelers,” Paige asked, “did you Jonothon?”

“No I didn’t say anything of the—”

“Don’t get your floppy fingers caught in the time machine door, Skin,” Everett called up to Angelo. “Find yourself in the Middle Ages and your extremities dribbling off aboard the Starship Enterprise or something.” Paige looked Angelo up and down for a moment, at the skin that hung off his body like bobbling icicles from every eave and said, “That’d be a pretty good cure, huh?”

And Angelo put his face in Paige’s. “A cure?” he asked letting his jowls drip down below his shoulders. “So what’s the disease?”

Everett liked to call Sean Cassidy’s office the “Bill Room” behind the headmaster’s back. He said it looked like a place where Bill Blass installed the technological systems and Bill Gates did tire decorating. And behind his student’s back, Sean referred to Everett as “Wit.” Sean had private nicknames for all of his students to go with their public code names, which made intimacy with the headmaster on an intellectual level very confusing.

Everett Thomas—Synch—and his buddy Angelo Espinoza—Skin—were “Wit and Wart.” Jonothon Stars-more—Chamber-—was “Rock ’n Roll” and Jubilation Lee—Jubilee who shot blinding blasts of light from her hands—was “Fireworks.” Monet St. Croix—M who could fly and lift a tank—was, of course, “The Princess” and Paige Guthrie—Husk from Kentucky whose rosy face and blonde hair shone like the noonday sun over the American Midwest—was “Cornfield” or sometimes just “Corny.” Sean tended to know pretty much everything his students were saying and thinking about him because, after all, Emma Frost was one of the most powerful telepaths on the planet. The kids trusted her, probably more than they should and certainly more than they would have had they known that she told whatever she knew to the headmaster. Sean trusted her too, though he had not always. His nickname for her— which he came up with despite trying not to—was “Hellion.” He never used it and he knew she appreciated that. “What happens in your mind against your will,” she told him, “happens not out of venality but out of weakness,” and he realized this applied to her as much as it did to him. The kids’ latest nickname for Banshee was “Windy.”

“Did you get any particular feeling from this manifestation?” Sean asked, sweeping away a random pile of three-and-a-half-inch disks so he had room to put his elbows on his desk.

“It was kind of a—” Emma began but Sean interrupted.

“Actually I wonder if I could get M’s impressions first.” Emma certainly had come to conclusions about the emotional aura surrounding the big glowing egg they had seen in the biosphere, as telepaths do about pretty much everything. Sean wanted Monet’s uninfluenced ideas first.

“Feeling?” Monet wanted to know. “How do you mean?”

“Did it seem friendly?”

“No.”

“Unfriendly?”

“No, not at all.”

“Anything?”

The girl thought for a moment. “Nothing really. It was...”

“Was what, Monet?”

“Well, maybe sad.”

“Sad. Anything else?”

“No, 1 don’t think so. Look,” Monet changed her tone, “I’m not a telepath or anything. How would I get some mental impression or something?”

“We all have intuition, dear,” Emma said.

Sean dug a computer keyboard out from under a pile of journals and loose hanging folders and moved a pile of books from in front of his monitor. On top of the pile was a book called When Dreams and Heroes Died by Arthur E. Levine, a former college president, who theorized that the whole social breakdown in adolescent education of the past generation is the result of role models falling off their pedestals in a very public way. Levine thought heroes (and potential ones) ought to keep an aura of mystery around them, if not for their own protection, then for that of those who look up to them. In moving the books, Sean lost his page. He called up Monet’s file to punch some notes into it when Monet interrupted.

“Are you trying to be indulgent of us, sir? Because we actually saw this thing.”

“He knows that,” Emma said as Sean said simultaneously, “I know that,” and shot her an exasperated look. That happened a lot.

‘Tm not being in any way indulgent, Monet,” Sean went on. “To the contrary, I’m trying to be as supportive as I can. It’s all about teamwork, lass.”

“Okay,” said M, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m just a little touchy, I suppose.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not in the habit of seeing things.”

“I know,” from Sean, who also was not, and simultaneously, “I know,” from Emma, who was.

He took a breath and said, “So what about your impressions, Emma?”

“I thought of Haroun al-Rashid when I saw it. Jetstream, from the Hellions.”

“Lingering feelings of guilt?” Sean tiptoed.

She shot him a glare.

“I’m just asking. Lingering misplaced unjustified feelings of guilt on your part. It could be that, couldn’t it?”

She let out a breath, then, “I thought I sensed a little bit of resentment, actually.”

“Resentment. On the manifestation’s part?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You think so. Could that be on your part?”

“No,” she snapped. Then Emma thought a moment and said, ‘ ‘Actually, yes. It could. Quite the psychologist all of a sudden, Banshee.”

Sean motioned to some of the books and journals and reports on the shelves and the desk and the chairs and the cabinets and the floor. “I’ve been reading up.” Then they heard a noise from outside the door.

“What do you mean I’ve got no self-control?” Paige got even closer into Angelo’s face. She had gotten quite good at this gang-war style of interpersonal negotiation since enrolling here.

“I mean you can’t keep from dissing a man for his looks and you can’t even figure what you’re gonna turn into when you shed your skin.”

“What’s wrong with the way you look? I didn’t say anything’s wrong with the way you look.”

“You said I hadda get a cure. Do I look sick to you, chiquitaT’ Angelo couldn’t help but smile to see the lilly-white girl from horse country turn red in his face, but he let the skin of his jaws drop so no one would notice.

“Oh you don’t look that bad,” and for the first time Chamber looked up from his sullen rock-star snit on the top of the stairs to see her say, “You’re self-conscious is all.”

“Well at least I’m better-looking than he is,” Angelo pointed at Chamber’s cracked face and wrapped-to-the-nose bandages.

She started to say, “No, you’re not,” but thought better of it. “I just thought of it so I said it. No biggie.” “No self-control.”

“Really?” she said, throwing her head back and twisting her neck to the side. “Well I think I feel—” Then everybody looked at Paige when they heard the sickly ripping sound.

“•—like something really tough.”

And the ripping got louder and turned gutteral. Paige lowered her head; the back of it was torn in a jagged path down underneath her loose T-shirt. There was no blood, but a glinting shiny something under the shreds of the girl’s flesh. She shimmied under her clothes and twisted her right shoulder, holding her right hand down off the rail of the balcony. The casing of her arm all the way to the shoulder blade peeled off like snakeskin onto the floor.

“Euu, gross,” Jubilee shrieked.

Everett cackled with laughter because he thought it looked so cool.

Angelo kept a poker face, staring down Paige as she metamorphosed because he thought it was the proper thing to do and besides, it gave him an excuse to watch because he thought it was really cool too.

Paige was a sweet, innocent, decent child as far as

Jono was concerned: quite the finest person he had met in America, perhaps in all his life. She was a vast moor covered in perfect white snow without a flaw in its shining blue-white surface. He looked up at her ripping away her outer layer of skin to replace it with sheer reflecting crystal and would have smiled if he had a mouth. He wanted to run through that perfect field of snow in heavy thigh boots and roll around in it until it was chunky and worn and comfortable.

Paige clutched the flap of her shirt in a diamond crystal hand and pulled up on it, tearing the seams as she tried yanking it over her head. She shed her shoes and red spandex school uniform as destructively. What remained of her epidermis fell on the floor.

“All right girl!” Everett howled and applauded.

She had said she felt like something really tough but she had never been this hard before. She felt like an athlete in the Zone as she twisted the hundred facets of her diamond mouth into the rictus of a smile. She turned her face so that her dense rock of a corn-fed tumed-up nose brushed Angelo’s floppy-skinned South-Central pug and scraped it across the bridge.

Softly, she said: “Boo!” swiping a diamond-edged set of fingernails across where Angelo’s chest had been a moment before.

Skin took a step back and vaulted the railing of the balcony, dropping the twenty-odd feet to the floor below. He wrapped five thick tendrils of flesh extended from the fingers of his left hand around the horizontal bannister. As he went over it, he swung in an arc.

But before Skin could light on the ground and retract his fingers, Paige flipped over the rail too, and hit the ground flat, landing on a diamond-hard butt. The hardwood floor cracked and poked up through the Oriental rug—that Professor Xavier had once told Sean he had picked up at an estate auction at a “steal away price” of forty-five hundred dollars—which tore in the center.

Everett, grinning, crooked his elbow and waved his fist like an umpire calling a runner out. “Husk! Husk! Husk!” he chanted.

Jubilee skittered over the back of the couch and joined him: “Husk! Husk! Husk! Husk!”

Angelo kicked off a shoe and threw a foot upward at a slow-moving ceiling fan and wrapped his ankle flesh around the fan’s post. He swung up toward the fan, avoiding a diamond-hard tackle from the girl as even Jono joined the refrain with Jubilee and Synch chanting, “Husk! Husk! Husk!”

As Skin retracted himself upward to hang by a leg below the fan, holding it still by blocking its rotation with his knee, Paige stood on the floor twenty-eight feet below him. She stood with her diamond hands on her diamond waist slowly blinking open-and-shut with her diamond eyelids making the slightest scraping noise along her tear ducts. She said, “You don’t think so, do you?”

And with that she began scaling the rough-sawn pine wall like Spider-Man, creeping up by digging fingers and toes ever so slightly into the wood panels to triangulate herself upward foot-by-foot, inch-by-inch toward the dangling Angelo.

The other mutants continued to cheer: “Husk! Husk! Husk! Husk!”

Then the door of the headmaster’s office flew open and out stomped Sean Cassidy followed by Monet St. Croix and Emma Frost. Everyone froze in place, waiting for the Banshee yell that could shatter diamond. Husk gulped.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Sean said in a voice that was not a Banshee scream but nonetheless quite loud, “Not in the house!”

“Sorry man,” said Angelo hanging from the ceiling fan.

“Uh ... uh ... sorry,” said Paige hanging off the wall.

“We all apologize, sir,” from Jono.

“Chamber,” Sean addressed Jonothon, “why don’t you fly on up to that fan and help your friend down?”

“Right away, sir.”

Jubilee especially was disappointed to learn that the student body were not going off after super-villains in a time warp. Jono was non-committal, Paige still contrite especially when she saw the little pockmarks she had left in the wall and the rips in the rug no one had yet mentioned. All Sean had ordered Paige to do was put on a hospital gown in case she had a sudden compulsion to shed her diamond skin for her more accustomed flesh.

Angelo and Everett thought it would be a good time to make themselves scarce, so without bringing it up in actual words they dropped a field trip request form in the slot outside Sean’s office door. Before the meeting started, they had optimistically packed a few clothes for a weekend trip to Boston.

“Everybody here?” Sean asked his evidently recovered students who draped themselves over assorted chairs and couches in the sitting room of the main building. “Almost everybody here?”

Everybody was here except for Penance, who made even Jonothon feel less of a misanthrope. Penance had the gravitational pull of a tiny piece of a neutron star; you could feel it when she entered a room.

‘ ‘Has anyone seen Penance today?’ ’ Sean asked. Nobody had.

“Two items on the agenda today, lads and lassies,” the headmaster continued. “A new student—”

Raised eyebrows and whispers among the half-dozen attending students of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

“—and an unidentified manifestation on our campus this morning.”

“Manifestation?” Jubilee asked.

“What went on in the biosphere this morning,” Jono told her.

“You said it was an alien invasion or something.” “No alien invasion. Just some kind of mirage or something. I was trying to tell you.”

“You weren’t trying very hard,” Jubilee sniffed. “What fun would that be?”

“I was hoping,” Banshee reclaimed the floor, “that we were about done with fun for today.”

The group was uncharacteristically well behaved this afternoon. The headmaster was not going to question his sudden good luck.

“Our new student is named Walter Nowland,” Sean said, “and he’s from a faraway and very flat land called Nebraska. I met and interviewed him and his family when I was in Chicago last month. Walter’s a good lad and I think he’ll fit in fine here. He’ll arrive sometime today. His code name’ll be Statis.”

“Sounds like he’s from like Beverly Hills or Scars-dale or something,” said Angelo.

“Statis with an T,” Sean corrected, “not Status with a ‘U’. Has to do with generating fields of static electricity.”

“Gotcha,” from Skin.

“Pretty original talent,” Jubilee suggested with some sarcasm.

“Not nearly as useful,” Paige cut in, hissing through diamond lips, “as, say, making fireworks out of your anxiety.”

Jubilee squinted at Husk like a diamond-cutter.

“We’ve all got the talents we were bom with,” Emma reminded her students, “same as homo sapiens.”

“Except we’re superior,” Monet pointed out, “technically speaking,” she added primly.

‘ ‘Let a Congressman hear you talking like that, young lassie,” Sean warned, “and we’ll be fighting off a whacko militia floating down the Mad River before you can say ‘cultural warfare’.”

Sean then related the story of the glowing egg in the biosphere, asking Emma and Monet to make any corrections if they felt any were necessary—which they did not. He said that long experience as a mutant had taught him and every X-Man the universal truth that big power attracts big trouble like tall trees attract lightning. He asked Jono if he had anything to add; Jono shrugged and said nothing.

“Is that it?” Jubilee asked impatiently. “I mean, I didn’t really think we were going after time travelers— at least I don’t think I really thought so—but I thought there was something worth going after. Not a cocka-mamie delusion.”

Monet glared across the room at Jubilee, about to say something, but Emma beat her to it. “It was not a ‘cock-amamie delusion,’ as you so tastelessly put it, Jubilation. I saw it, and I sensed it.”

“Do you all mean to tell me,” Sean walked around the room with his arms on his hips and his head shaking, “that you’re all so bloody bored and cabin fevered that you’re disappointed we only have mirages in the garden?”

General murmured agreement.

Sean looked around at his charges for a few more beats, then threw his head back and laughed like no one had heard him laugh in months. ‘ ‘Welcome to winter in New England, lads and lassies. Get used to it. We convene again tonight to meet our new classmate. You’ve all got major papers due in the next two weeks, I expect you’ll spend a good chunk of the rest of the day pounding them out. Except for you, Paige, you’re due in the infirmary for analysis. Anyone sees Penance, let me know as usual. Dismissed.”

Somewhere in the air, a consciousness rose. It wafted among the pines and snowy surfaces of the estate, through the water under the ice, across the frozen surface of the forest where hibernating life readied itself to bloom and stretch. It floated through the odd compound of flora where it had first met the female, Emma Frost, and over the short expanse into the warren where the beings congregated.

The immature ones would be easy. And they were powerful indeed. The older male was strong willed but without sufficient imagination. He would be unavailable, but he would not be an impediment. Not as long as he remained indulgent of the weakness of the Frost female.

The consciousness took a sense of the surroundings: bucolic, pastoral. These beings found it beautiful, especially in relation to the whiteness outside. The phrase “winter in New England” had sent shudders of varying degrees through the sensibilities of the immature ones.

That would be useful as well.

Paige hated the infirmary, but at least she was used to it. She had her own routine. Whenever she metamorphosed, either spontaneously or on a lark as she had this time, she had to take all sorts of readings of her vitals to help Sean—and the powers-that-be back at the Xavier Institute in New York—to figure out how Paige could control her special talent.

She started with blood pressure, almost undetectable in her current state. She supposed that not only was blood flowing more slowly, but also that the meter couldn’t get a reading through diamond-hard skin. And drawing her blood for testing was pretty much out of the question, she realized with relief. There were certainly a dozen other even grosser tests and samples she could take care of, though, and reluctantly she began to go about them.

Suddenly, she realized there was someone with her in the lab—a figure in shadow between a cabinet and the far wall. The shadow the cabinet cast seemed larger than before.

“Hello?” Paige called.

And Penance clattered out from the comer, dragging most of the shadow with her.

Penance had no other name that anyone was sure of, except Yvette, and that might have been something Em-plate made up. From what they could determine, she was perhaps fourteen years old. She had little history other than as a slave to Emplate, the tyrant who sucked on mutants’ life-force in order to live and found in Penance someone who could survive to be fed on another day.

Penance seemed bigger than she was; in fact she was smaller than Jubilee. But her mass was enormous. She was as dense as the compressed core of the Earth and her physiology reflected that: limbs and digits that were collapsed into long pointed tendrils; a face that was a gaunt death mask; ribbons of hair like the barbed coils that top electrified fences. Her very touch on normal flesh could be disastrous, like the hoof of a mule trying to touch a bead of dew on a rose petal. She was always in shadow. Light seemed not to reflect off her smooth features.

Emma stuck her head in the infirmary door. “Paige, did you call for—oh.” She stopped at the sight of the girl approaching Husk.

When Sean had first freed Penance from Emplate’s bondage and enrolled her at the school, she responded with hostility. She resisted any attempt he made to talk with her, realizing somehow that his voice was also his weapon. At one point, she nearly vivisected Sean with her fingertips. Since then, though she had been assigned a room, no one knew if she had ever stayed in it. In fact, no one knew where and how she spent most of her time. Every once in awhile one of the girls—Jubilee had been especially good that way—would just talk to her, without any idea whether she understood a word. Sometimes this seemed to comfort her a bit. Sometimes not.

Penance shuffled slowly toward the many-faceted Paige, leaving a trail of pockmarks on the tile infirmary floor as she moved.

“Sean,” Emma called down the hall as gently and quietly as she could and still have the sound travel, “it’s Penance. In the infirmary.”

“For heaven’s sake,” and the headmaster barrelled

down the hall into the entrance of the room.

“Wait/’ said Emma and put a hand on his beefy arm. And he did.

Half a dozen adolescent heads popped in behind Sean and Emma, wondering what was going on. As they all watched. Penance—her deadly arms extended—shambled toward Paige, in diamond skin and a hospital gown.

“What?’' Sean was apprehensive but Emma tightened her hand on his forearm.

And Penance wrapped her arms around the diamond-hard skin of Paige—who had never managed to turn to something this resilient before—and rested her head on the diamond shoulder. And Paige hugged Penance back.

With each squeeze, Paige’s diamond flesh began to crack and chip, but she did not break the embrace.

“What?” Sean said again, and noticed a smile on the White Queen’s face—but not her usual smile, the one that looked like a feral animal about to devour its prey. This was a genuine smile, and the beginnings of a tear started to pool in her ice-blue eyes—both were rare phenomena with Emma Frost.

“Do you have any idea,” Emma said, “how long it must be since that child has been hugged?”

And Penance and Paige held each other that way for many minutes, until a fissure appeared in Paige’s diamond surface to signal the return of the girl’s perfect soft skin. They all left to give Paige some privacy. Penance seemed reluctant to go.

After the transformation, Paige went to her room to dress. She ran back to the infirmary, but Penance was gone.

Sighing, she went out into the snow to jog along the riverbank, alone.

CHAPTER THREE

PUNCTUATED

EQUILIBRIUM

In Stockbridge, Harley Nowland had stopped for gas.

“Think we’re close, Wally?” he asked his son who huddled under a blanket in the from seat. “Dunno.”

“Maybe get directions, y’think?”

“’Kay.”

"Think I should tell them where we’re really going?'' “Dunno.”

Harley Nowland sat in the car at the self-serve pump for a moment, while his son Walter shivered in the blankets next to him. He should have put the boy on a plane for heaven’s sake like Dora said. A long road trip like this can only make things worse.

“Maybe I should just get a road map, y’think, Wally?”

“’Kay.”

“Sir. car. I help you with something?” The smiley young face hovered outside the window less than a foot from Harley's nose. “This is the self-serve pump.” '■Right'' Harley said, getting out of the old 1979 Delta 88. The boy wore a green jump suit, the name “Tim” embroidered in yellow thread over his pocket “Know how to use the pump, sir?” Tim asked.

“I guess I do, son,” Harley grinned. “You don't drive from Nebraska to Massachusetts in four days without knowing how to use a gas pump.”

“All the way from Nebraska in this old beauty?" “Beauty is right. She ain’t what she used to be. No

trouble these last four days, though. Highway driving blows those tubes right out, yessir.”

Tim smiled and turned to go back into the station but Harley stopped him.

“Hey fella, there is something you could do for me if you would.”

“Yes sir.”

“You guys sell maps?”

“Yes sir. Massachusetts and Connecticut, including metropolitan Boston, Hartford, and New Haven, New York State with metropolitan New York, and a detail of the upper Hudson River Valley, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and I think we’ve got a couple of Maines left with the Maritime Provinces.”

“Local,” Harley finally stopped him. “Local’s fine. We’re real local now, I think.”

“Straight up, sir.”

Tim hotfooted it into the station as Harley filled the tank with regular unleaded. They didn’t sell leaded gas much outside the Midwest any more. Harley’d blown his catalytic converter off with an acetylene torch years ago and put a wider funnel under his gas cap so he could get the cheaper fuel in. Didn’t do the air supply any good but it sure saved Harley a few bucks. This trip hadn’t, though. What with food on the road—Waiter was partial to fast food—motels every night because the kid got the chills, and all the cough medicine he had to buy along the way, these four days had cost easily as much as a plane ticket. And now he would have to drive back to Nebraska alone.

Harley paid Tim for the gas and the map and Tim sprayed and washed the Olds’ windshields as Harley puzzled over the arrangement of the roads before him. The hamlet of Snow Valley was a tiny open black circle to the north of Route 9. There was a little access road called Route 9A that jagged off the main thoroughfare to bisect the little circle and merge right back in, but there were no roads going in or out of Snow Valley anywhere else. That Cassidy fellow that Dora thought was such a trustworthy guy had clearly said ¹ ‘North of Snow Valley,” but there was nothing north of Snow Valley. The Mass Pike ran east and west a good seven or eight miles to the north, on the other side of what looked to be a wooded area with a few creeks and three or four small mountains. North of that was Route 20 heading west into New York state and east to Boston.

Well, Harley supposed he would just go to Snow Valley and ask and hope for the best.

Outside, Tim finished spit-shining the windows and saluted smartly, stepping back to signal Harley on his way. Next to Harley, his son Walter shivered and coughed. It depressed him, and being depressed reminded Harley to lose the puzzled look and contrive a grin for the boy’s benefit. Harley went to start up the car and all the key in the ignition did was click.

Harley sighed despite himself. “We’re out of charge. Knew I shouldn’t’ve let you watch the TV plugged into the lighter. Ain’tcha had enough of Kathie Lee Gifford for one lifetime?”

Immediately Harley realized he’d blown the whole show of normalcy he was trying to create for the boy’s benefit. Certainly at sixteen, Walter Nowland had not had enough of anything for one lifetime.

After an uncomfortable beat Walter said, “Dunno.”

So here Harley was, stranded in a twenty-year-old car in a New England winter with a sick teenager. Good thing they were at a gas station. Harley figured that even if this “Tim” person couldn’t translate that grin into mechanical know-how he could at least let Harley use the tools in his garage and rig something up. But instead, Walter reached a tattooed left hand out from under his blanket toward the empty lighter socket on the dashboard.

“Leave the key in, Dad,” Walter said, and a tiny bolt of electricity from Walter’s long bony forefinger bathed the interior of the empty lighter cylinder in blinding white light and turned its surface black. The car shuddered. Harley, leaning his bare arm on the metal of the car door, felt the hair on his head and arms stiffen. Then the old car started up and purred like a kitten.

“Excuse me, sir?” Tim tapped on the window on Walter’s side as Harley was about to drive away.

Harley leaned over his son and rolled down the window a crack.

“Did you find what you were looking for on the map, sir?”

“Well close enough I suppose.”

“Don’t go anywhere,” and Tim ran back into the station to come right out with a rolled up tube of paper in his hand. “A little sideline of mine,” he said as he handed the tube of paper through Harley’s window.

Harley slid off the paper collar holding it together and unrolled a decorated tourist map of the Berkshire Hills Recreation Area. There was the Butternut Basin Ski Area, Tanglewood, the site of Alice’s Restaurant memorialized in the Arlo Guthrie song, and, straddling the banks of a narrow stream that came down from one of the Berkshires just north of Snow Valley, a little smudge of land the map called “Xavier’s School,” with a nameless dead end road leading into it from Route 9A.

“More like it,” Harley told Tim. “What do I owe you, pal?”

“On the house,” Tim said. “Maybe when the kid’s feeling better he can come help out in the garage.”

Even Walter managed a smile before they drove off.

Paige thought she could navigate the crooked banks of the Mad River blindfolded at a dead run. Sometimes, running around a blind comer through the woods, she closed her eyes as she pounded the dirt and rocks for as long as she could stand it, just to prove it to herself. She hadn’t tripped up yet. She had been here since the beginning of last summer and she thought she had seen all the moods of this quick, shallow river.

When she had first met this stream flowing down from the mountain it seemed rather lazy. It flowed in an even, steady rhythm under, over, around, and through the debris and undergrowth of the woods, down the occasional little cascade. It slowed over the months into a trickle. Then with the autumn rains, it grew again and even muddied its banks with overflow and seepage for days after a storm ended.

In November and December the forest gradually slowed and the river flow virtually stopped. It iced over, and a shifting blanket of snow covered the ice. And for months, only the face of the snow and the occasional falling tree trunk surrendered to the pressure of change.

Today, there was only a thin membrane of ice along the edges of the river; in the center, water flowed easily. Still, the forest was heavy with snow and great branches sagged under its weight.

The sound of the river, along with her familiarity with the twists and dips of this place, guided Paige as she jogged along the river with a three-pound weight in each fist. She kept her eyes shut longer than she ever had before. She was home, navigating the snowy forest as easily as a blind man finds his way among the furniture in his living room. Paige opened her eyes only when she heard a sound that didn’t belong here.

She heard purring.

A large boulder sat in the middle of the river, on which stood the hazy figure of a tall purple-haired woman in a red jump suit. She was hazy, indistinct. Her edges faded into the backdrop of the woods, but Paige could swear the girl had a tail snaking around behind her.

“You’re Catseye,” Paige said to the figure. One of the now-deceased Hellions, Paige remembered her both from the school’s files as well as the descriptions from her older brother Sam. Sam, aka Cannonball, was a member of the New Mutants, the previous group of trainee mutants at the Xavier Institute, at the same time that the Hellions were active.

The woman crouched on her haunches and began to transform. In a moment, radiating from her middle, her figure became that of an enormous cat; like a purple lynx with a bobbed tail and densely muscular haunches with which the creature sprung directly at Paige, claws extended, even as she transformed.

She was much more distinct as a cat. Seeing her transform was like adjusting the contrast on a television screen. The air tingled around Paige—or was it just the after-effects of her last transformation? She didn’t know, and she probably shouldn’t be thinking about it just now. What was all this jogging and training and conditioning for? What was the purpose of all these lectures from Banshee about being ready for any eventuality? It was all so that when a monster appeared out of the wilderness—as was monsters’ wont—Paige could deal with it.

Paige sprung out of the way with the cat-thing in midspring.

The creature flew claws-first right where Paige had stood. She could smell a wet fur smell as she flew by her, hissing, directly at the tree trunk. Then the cat vanished into the air as though going into an invisible door inches in front of the tree.

The dining hall, after the others had all finished dinner and cleared the big table:

“You’re stiH thinking about the Hellions,” Sean said, noticing Emma’s dark mood.

“Now you’re telepathic?” Emma chided.

“Doesn’t take a telepath.”

“They were too young.”

“We’re all too young,” Sean said. “George Burns was too young. Irving Berlin was too young. Grandma Moses was too young. Wolverine’s too young.”

“Philosophy doesn’t become you, Sean,” Emma said icily, “and your analogy doesn’t hold up. I wasn’t responsible for George Burns’s death.”

“Weren’t you, by your reasoning?” Sean posed. “George Burns died of old age a few weeks after his hundredth birthday.”

“You hustled to try to save the Hellions,” Sean said, “but you didn’t run off to Beverly Hills to feed George Burns hot chicken soup and take him for his daily walks when you heard he’d turned a hundred.”

“I wasn’t responsible for the life of George Burns!” Emma snapped. “I was responsible for the Hellions— for their lives, and for their deaths.”

Sean paused, realizing that his flippancy was ill-timed. He started to erect the logical roadblocks he would need to construct in the path of his colleague’s chronic selfflagellation. He did not get the chance, however, because Emma suddenly cocked her head, listening inside it, and said, “Our new student.”

She pushed aside her uneaten roughage. Sean heard a car pulling into the driveway, kicking up gravel and corn snow as it came.

* * *

Walter Nowland seemed reserved, contained—quite unlike the bubbling, outgoing young man Sean had interviewed in Chicago. Emma could offer no suggestions; evidently something about the powerful static charges he emitted blocked her. However, she did notice, as the young boy took off his heavy jacket, the tattoos that lined his arms. She raised her eyebrows. Sean noticed Emma’s expression and smiled.

Sean had discussed Walter’s tattoos with him when they had met several weeks ago. “My father once said that there are two kinds of folk in the world,” Sean had told Walter when they met back then. “There are people with tattoos and people who are afraid of being hit by people with tattoos.”

“Your father must’ve been a Dick Van Dyke fan,” the kid told him.

“My dad never heard of Dick Van Dyke as far as I know. We never had television in Ireland until I was about your age.”

“Bet the first thing you got was American reruns.” “Yeah, that’s right.”

“I remember one episode of that show,” the tattooed boy said. “Laura once got her big toe stuck in the bathtub faucet and Rob had to get a guy with a hacksaw to—”

“Yes!” Sean suddenly reunited with an episode of his childhood. “All you saw through the whole show was her head peeking out behind the shower curtain. Dad loved that show!”

From then on Walter and Sean got on famously. Walter then confided that he’d gotten his first tattoo when he was nine and his mother fainted. After that, dealing with his mutant power to generate electrical fields and burn rubber with his bare hands was not such a big deal.

Now Sean studied Walter carefully to see what had changed. He looked like the same boy Sean had sparred and laughed with in Chicago those weeks ago. He just didn’t carry himself the same way. He was fairly tall, with long hair that hung around his shoulder tops.

Harley, Walter’s father, was long, narrow, and weathered, like a Nebraska highway. His hair was as blond as his son’s, but there was only a fringe of it left along the borders of his scalp.

“Your room’s the second door on the left up this hall. It’s all yours,” Sean said to Walter, “no roommates.” “Thank you very much,” Harley said as Walter absently ran his hands along the wall as he floated toward the room.

“Ms. Frost and I can help you get settled if you—” “Ain’t got much stuff,” Harley said. “Just a satchel of dirty clothes. We’ll take care of it ourselves if you don’t mind.”

“Y’know, Mr. Nowland,” Sean grinned, “I was just going to order a load of clothes for the kids. Seems somebody left a bucketful of diamond chips all over the infirmary floor. Found money for the school. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“Diamond chips?” asked Harley. “You serious, Cassidy?”

“Actually, yes. Transmutation accident.”

Walter disappeared into his room with Harley behind him. “Whatever,” Harley said as he shut the door.

“Different lad, he seems,” Sean confided to Emma outside the house on the path to the biosphere. Despite the snow, the day was too warm to see their breaths.

“You mean unusual?” she asked.

‘ ‘No more than any adolescent mutant. He just seems more self-involved and quiet now.”

“I can’t get through to him either for some reason.” Then Emma stopped. “Wait a minute.”

“What?”

“I’m getting something. There’s something wrong.” “With Walter?”

“I think—”

And before she could finish, a branch of the snow-encrusted Scotch pine under which they stood tumbled out of the sky. Crusted crystals of settled snow whipped down from it around Sean’s cheeks for just an instant less than the time it would have taken for Banshee’s reflexes to have catapulted him out of the way of the dense, ice-logged branch that clapped him on the skull and threw him off his feet.

“No, I guess it was something else,” Emma said drily as she helped Sean back to his feet.

Then they heard a deep belly laugh from somewhere above.

High in the tree, in a black and purple haze, was the figure of a man as dense and thick as the branch he’d

apparently tumbled down on Banshee’s head.

“Beef?” Emma whispered and the figure faded away.

“Another one of your late charges?” Banshee asked, blinking.

“Yes. Did you see him?”

“I’m not sure.”

Banshee felt a rhythmic clapping underneath his feet. Instinctively, he rattled his head and stretched his throat, ready to loose a holler that could turn the iron core of the Earth.

Along the footpath by the side of the frozen river, Paige ran toward home with her weights in her fists. Banshee and the White Queen stepped from behind their tree, Sean still picking pine needles out from under the collar of his shirt.

“Hey you guys,” Paige called, excited, “guess what I saw?”

“A dead Hellion?” asked Sean. Emma shot him a look to rebuke his insensitivity, which he declined to notice.

“Yeah, Catseye. She nearly clawed me to ribbons. Isn’t it awful?” Her tone clearly said, Isn’t it cool?

Harley Nowland took off, telling only his son that he was leaving. Walter showed for the evening meeting just long enough to be introduced, and then Sean let it out early. He glossed over the encounters that he, Emma, and Paige had with what seemed to be the ghosts of the lost Hellions. He also agreed to Everett and Angelo’s request for a Boston excursion.

The kids all tore off to their rooms and Sean excavated his office for the keyboard to his computer. He whipped out his web browser, tapped out the URL for L.L. Bean, and hit enter.

With the expansion of the Internet, Banshee had discovered a new passion. As long as he could do it sitting in his big comfortable office chair in front of a web browser, he loved to shop. No trying stuff on. No waiting around for some salesperson to tell him what he or she thought. No bopping around from store to store looking over a million pairs of shoes just to make sure the first pair you saw was really what you wanted.

Sean punched in the secret code that activated the school’s credit card account and threw papers from his second desk drawer onto the floor until he found a list of all of his students’ clothing sizes. He ordered two dozen chamois shirts and ten pairs of leather ankle boots. He ordered all sorts of fleece stuff including an annload of new sweat suits and a couple of pairs of hiking boots for Jubilee and Husk. He got in-line skates, pads, and half-a-dozen helmets for Synch and new lightweight mountain bikes for M and the White Queen. He got a few heavy thermal outfits for Skin who could use the extra support and liked everything about New England but the climate. For Penance he thought a minute and ordered a pair of Rossignol cross-country skis, a few extra pairs of poles, and a geodesic one-person tent; if he kept getting her stuff, there was always hope the girl would develop an interest in something. For Chamber he pulled down another backcountry one-person tent, some winter hiking gear, and the fattest Swiss army knife they made, the one with the little needle woven into the corkscrew. And finally, he hauled in a truckload of fly-fishing gear for Statis, the new kid: rods, reels, boxes full of gear, and one of those floppy hats in which to stick all of his hooks and lures.

Federal Express would deliver his merchandise bright and early Monday morning. Banshee loved to shop.

‘ ‘Perhaps now would be a good time to speak to Walter.” Emma appeared behind him. It was not a question.

“Is that a telepathic thing?”

“No, it’s a woman thing.”

Sean didn’t much like it when his headmistress finished conversations he was having with his unconscious, but he agreed. He spent the next three or four hours in Walter’s room listening and talking about the boy’s secret.

A little after midnight the rain started.

A few minutes before dawn, a black-clad figure rode a pillar of white heat through the storming skies. Jono wore a harness and an aluminum cone from his chest to his ankles. He could direct the psionic energy out the bottom of his chamber in a jetstream. With this rig he could actually fly, albeit slowly and for short distances. If he tried to go much farther or any faster than a person could walk, he would bum his own feet. He found a perch high in a good solid oak with a long view of the Mad River raging downstream. Here, Chamber sat and watched an annual event.

One day a year—every single year—the river broke and the face of the land changed. Under the first good rain of March, the ice at the tops of two mountains that formed the source of the Mad River cracks, pretty much simultaneously. That cracked ice weighs against the ice downriver. Eventually, a tiny floe of melting ice drops against a slightly bigger loosening floe at the intersection of two little trickles. The weight of it all builds up speed until a bundle of cracked ice tumbles through the point where the stream down one mountain meets the stream down the other. Then river run starts in earnest. The ice starts picking up gravel and stones and moves a little faster. A rock hits an unmelted chunk of ice that breaks in a clean chunk and tumbles up and onto a cracking spot and picks up speed. The pressure of breaking up melts the ice and pushes a little harder. By the time the cracking ice under the first spring rain reaches the point where the Mad River widens enough to look like a river, water and ice and tumbling debris are screaming along at breakneck speed and the very land is subject to the vicious moods of the bending river.

Once upon a time, when Jonothon was a little boy he read a thrilling story about a man who was so powerful he could “change the course of mighty rivers.” It happened here every year.

Boulders traveled downriver bouncing against the banks, widening them. A tree clapped at the base of its trunk by a wad of frozen dirt leapt up into the air and left an enormous hole where its root had been for a hundred and sixty years. The river clambered hard into the hole and pressed against it with spume after spume of torrential waters until its course changed. Before the day and the storm were done, the course of this river would move half a mile to the east.

Sometime around a hundred thousand years ago, homo sapiens supplanted Cro Magnon and Neanderthal and every other competing hominid race on the planet and it seems to have happened in just a few generations. Human genes had not changed one whit in that time. True, people were nearly a foot taller now than they were five hundred years ago, but twenty-thousand years ago humans averaged five-feet-eleven and then lost more than a foot when they stopped being hunter-gatherers and started farming the land and eating too many carbohydrates. It has taken a thousand generations to get that foot back, and human DNA still has not changed its essential nature.

Until the twentieth century.

Now homo sapiens were spontaneously giving birth to homo superior and the races had to learn to live together or it could all happen again.

There were groups of dunderheads popping up in all the major cities who called themselves “Friends of Humanity.” They were an anti-mutant hate organization. They had meetings and rallies and wrote letters to newspapers and magazines and trained in the woods with automatic ordnance and occasionally got someone elected to something. Their consciousnesses knew nothing but resentment and fear—but the perception in the depths of their souls that gave birth to that resentment and fear told them that they were doomed. They were people out of their depth in a shallow gene pool.

Inevitably, homo superior would win out, one way or another. But the generation of whom Jonothon Stars-more and his schoolmates were a member were the pioneers. They were the ones who had to deal with the Friends of Humanity and the hostile governments and the apocalyptic pseudoscientists. Jonothon’s generation were the ones who had to try to make peace because, as the world stood today, it belonged to humanity. Jono hated being a pioneer. And unlike homo sapiens of a hundred thousand years ago, Jono and his generation of mutants could not, in this world, go off in a quiet secret cave and give birth to an army in the dark.

No matter how inviting that image was.

A big old tree came rolling downriver roots and all, caught in a jam between two boulders and water started rolling up and over it like a spout. The Mad River had crested its banks hours ago and the ground below the oak where Chamber perched and all the ground for a quarter-mile to either side of him was awash in angry Mad River and melting snowpack. It was all Jono could do to take it all in.

“I love that river,” Paige had told him once. “I’ve seen the Mad River in all its moods.” The girl was a love but she wouldn’t recognize a cliche if it bit her on the butt. He should go back to the main building and get her and show her this mood.

It was easy for Jono to think about Paige. Her florid

cheeks. Her wild flaxen hair. The roll of her shoulders.

Then that tree that was wedged in those boulders was suddenly free and flying violently through the storm— through the air toward Jono in his tree—roots-first. And perched atop the flying roots, riding it and hollering like Slim Pickens on the shaft of the H-bomb in the last scene of Dr. Strangelove, was a woman in purple and black and wavy blonde hair that the rain didn’t faze. And she was tossing little black and white disks at him one after the other that faded into nothingness before they reached him. But the tree....

It was too close. It was in his face. He could blow it from the sky and himself to Kingdom Come, but instead he could—

—snatch it!

He rode the root of the enormous missile up into the sky. He had to shed his flying mechanism by hugging the flying tree with one arm and loosing the harness from the other, then repeating the process with the other arm. By the time he clambered up over the soaking filthy roots to the upper side of it the thing had crashed through the roof of the woods and reached the top of its arc. And the blonde woman was gone.

He got his balance, kicked off upward and fired up his Chamber.

Up, up through the storm he rose out of control like a balloon losing its air as the tree came flopping down through the sopping forest, tossing aside branches and twigs as it fell, dismembering a couple of cords of hardwood before it clattered across the raging river and settled in a ditch of its own making. Jono came down like a rock but softened his fall by shooting out spits of psionic force at the ground, bouncing in ever-shorter bumps until he touched down on a rock outcropping just upriver of the tumbled old tree.

By tomorrow afternoon when the waters recede, Jonothon thought, that sucker’ll make a fine sturdy bridge. The tree had reached an equilibrium with its environment. Soon the rest of the forest would follow, at least for another year. Then he noticed the time. He could not forget morning roll call—that always made Sean aggravated for the rest of the day.

Everett and Angelo came down to breakfast with their bags packed. They traveled light: Everett had a satchel full of clothes and a pair of Nikes laced together through the handles, Angelo carried only a hip-pack stuffed with his wallet and seven changes of underwear.

“I’m starting to feel seriously stifled around here,” Angelo whispered to Everett as they came down the stairs to the main room.

“You too?” said Everett. “Cabin fever, huh?”

“Could be. Everywhere but here, spring’s breaking out. You hear it hit seventy in Boston yesterday?”

“I’m there, brother mine.”

They spoke softly. Only Emma could hear them and she was not listening to much of anything.

The Hellions were calling her to muster. Nothing else mattered.

Emma couldn’t focus. That was one of her best things, focus. Other than her hair and her collection of shoes. She had great shoes. Lots of them. But other than that one of her best things was ...

What was she thinking about?

One of her best things.

What were her best things?

Her money? Lots of money. Where did she keep that now?

And her hair and her shoes.

Emma looked down at her shoes. Tan and navy wa-

terproof Gore-Tex dayhikers. Eighty-five dollars. What the well-dressed telepath will wear. Especially in mud season in rural New England,

Emma stood up to look at her hair in the big mirror over the fireplace in the meeting room. Not bad. She ought to get out more often. She probably wouldn’t.

“Well we’re almost all here,” Sean said. Walter hadn’t arrived, and Sean wanted to wait until he showed.

Each morning, the students convened in the living room. First came the daily gab session. Sean always steered the conversation around to what the students had learned the previous day. He found mornings the best time to examine each student’s activities so they could receive constructive criticism on their actions. What with M’s aloofness, Skin’s sarcasm, Chamber’s general depression, and Jubilee’s attitude, it never seemed to work out that way. But he could always hope.

After the conversation talked itself out, the students got into their red uniforms and went to the biosphere for their workout. Sometimes he’d work with the whole group, sometimes with individuals. Always trying to hone their strengths, always trying to eliminate their weaknesses. Those not active would, presumably, concentrate on their homework. Then after the biosphere session came four hours of classes in history, the arts, and science.

Sean Cassidy was proud of his students. He knew they worked harder, both physically and mentally, than other students.

Today, however, there were more immediate problems to discuss. His train of thought was interrupted by a shuffling noise from the hallway. Chamber vaulted over the back of the couch where he sat to throw open the hallway door. There stood Walter, leaning against a wall catching his breath. Jono assisted him into the room.

“Always the hero, huh?” Walter smiled, standing erect again.

“Force of habit,” said Chamber.

Sean assessed the room. Everyone seemed kind of draped over the furniture, rather than sitting in it. Sean never felt that it was his job to teach these kids manners. That was their parents’ job, or the job of their earlier teachers. Still, a little decorum might be in order.

Oh, what did it matter?

“Well now we’re really almost all here,” Sean went on, “and most likely Penance is somewhere within earshot. I’d like to discuss the ghost-like manifestations most of us have been exposed to lately.”

“Is that really why we’re here?” Monet wanted to know. It was unlike her of all people, Sean thought, to interrupt and belittle an idea even before anyone had fully expressed it. “You want us to talk about ghosts?” “Well, actually, yes Monet. I do.”

“’Smatter, chiquita," Angelo said, “got a hot date?” “Keep your blowhard mouth to yourself, wart-face!” Jubilee snapped at Angelo, who in response grabbed his lips, pulled them far from the rest of his face, waving them up and down at Jubilation like a fleshy jump rope.

“Euu, gross!” she said and blew a flare in front of his face that might have blinded him for a few moments if his flapping lips had not covered his eyes.

Sean shouted from deep in his sonic gut and the walls rattled and the furniture clattered across the floor with the kids in it. After that, it was quiet again. “Thank you,” he said in a normal voice.

Monet said, “I was just suggesting that our time might be better spent if—”

“Your time will be better spent,” Sean said sternly, “if you follow your headmaster’s agenda before you present unwarranted conclusions of your own.”

Except for Walter, everyone had seen a dead Hellion. Just today, Paige had come across Jetstream sitting in the big walk-in refrigerator. Paige squealed and ran from the room, leaving the refrigerator door hanging open. She immediately came back in and saw that there was in fact no human projectile sitting anywhere near here.

Jubilee found Tarot sitting by the artesian well. The Hellion who made images on tarot cards come alive tossed one of a naked woman pouring water into a well—the “Star” card from the Major Arcana—at her when she went to wash her muddied feet in the outdoor spigot after bouncing on the trampoline for forty-five minutes. For a moment the card floating through the air became three-dimensional, like a hologram. Then both Tarot and her naked water woman disappeared. Jubilee almost believed they had never been there and turned on the spigot. When she put one bare foot under the flow of water it was scalding hot and she tumbled onto the ground holding her toes.

Everett came across Bevatron at the old granite quarry out between the woods and the Mass Pike. He had gone there earlier, he said, to sit and wait for the morning to blow over.

“What do you mean by that?” Chamber snapped.

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” Everett asked back.

“What needs to be blowing over, is what I mean.”

“Your cruddy mood.”

“All right, all right,” Sean interrupted. “Did the manifestation do any lasting damage?’ ’

“No,” Everett said. “Blew a couple of big granite rocks apart. One of them ricocheted and hit me in the throat, but I healed it with willpower.”

“You can heal yourself with willpower now?” Monet asked, condescendingly.

“Yeah, I can do a lot of things nobody knows about yet,” Everett snapped back. “Want to see me fix your tongue after some well-meaning suitor rips it out of its socket just to get some relief?”

“Oh, you’re so vile.” M turned her head away.

“Cut it out, you guys.” That came from Walter whom, after all, nobody here really knew very well.

They all looked at him, as though expecting he had more to say.

He obliged them with a terse, “What?”

* * *

They were fighting, Emma knew. Arguing, really, over whatever they felt like arguing about. It doesn ’t matter, she supposed. We’d all be landfill pretty soon anyway. Maybe she would go up to her room and read some Sartre until the young Hellions she had fed to the wolves came and carried her away with them where she belonged.

What’s with Emma? Sean wondered. Not a word from the woman through all this. He would ponder this circumstance awhile longer until he realized he was not intervening either.

Some adult supervision, he mused, and failed to intervene some more.

The discussion had deteriorated from half a dozen reports of supposed Hellion-sightings to a series of nasty contradictions over what was behind them:

“—ghosts are haunting the old place—”

“—there’s no such thing as ghosts—”

“—this isn’t worth our attention—”

“—we’ve got better things to do—”

“—if they’re ghosts, then they can’t do anything to us anyway—”

And so forth.

Finally Walter said, “You’re wrong, all of you.” “What are we wrong about, electro-boy?” Angelo wanted to know.

Walter said, “All of the above. There are no ghosts here, but there’s something. Something certainly worth your time. I’ve felt it since I got here. Been resisting it, but I don’t have the energy for it much longer. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it before it gets to the bottom of us.”

“What are you talking about?” Everett wanted to know. “What do you know about ghosts?”

“I know a lot about ghosts.”

“Well I know a lot about dark sinister forces, Statis. I’ve seen them since I was a kid,” the thirteen-year-old Jubilee insisted. “When I was with the X-Men—” “No,” Walter put up his hand. Everyone was shocked at how thin and bony his wrist was. No one had noticed that before. “No,” he said, “you don’t.”

“So what if it is ghosts?” from Chamber. “So they throw tree limbs and tarot cards at us. So what?” “There’s a force here,” Walter said. “I know because it’s something I feel and I’ve never felt before.”

“Sounds like ghosts to me,” Chamber said. “Out on the moors back home there are all sorts of stories about—”

“I’m not talking about stories,” Walter interrupted. “Sorry.” Jono was the only one in the room who had thought to apologize about anything this day.

“I know what ghosts feel like and this isn’t it.” “Really?” from four kids simultaneously.

“I knew a ghost,” Walter said. “His name was Hiram. Now he’s disappointed in me.”

“Hiram, the friendly ghost, the friendliest ghost you know,” Jubilee suddenly started to sing until she realized nobody thought it was funny. Then she went back

to sulking and disagreeing in general some more. “Disappointed?” Paige asked. “How? Why?”

“I’ve got the Legacy Virus,” Walter said, as though he had meant to say it casually. “Don’t have a clue how I came down with it, but there it is. Screws up all Hiram’s hard work, too.”

Everyone was silent for a moment. Jubilation said, “Bummer.” Monet flashed her a dirty look, mistakenly thinking the younger girl was making light of it. Jube couldn’t help the way she talked; she had grown up in Encino, after all. But she’d already lost one friend, II-lyana Rasputin, to the virus.

“Are you certain?” Jono wanted to know.

“I confirmed it last night with Hank McCoy.” Sean spoke for the first time since the conversation had deteriorated. “He hasn’t got much time, but he’s chosen to spend it with us.”

No one had anything they could think of to say after that.

Sean decided that tempers were too high for the usual daily sessions, so he dismissed the students for the weekend. Ten minutes later, Everett and Angelo found the oldest, rattliest of the half-dozen Jeep Wranglers that Sean kept in the converted carriage house by the gate. Their moods seemed to lift even as they tossed their light luggage into the back and piled themselves into the front seat. Everett turned the key in the ignition.

“What was that about, bro’?” Angelo asked.

“I don’t know,” Everett said as he punched the key code into the gate control. “Ghosts got the school or something. And that mutant virus again, hey?”

The gate swung open and the old heap rattled out with the two boys aboard.

“Bummer,” one of them said, and by the time they hit Route 9A neither could remember which of them had said it.

Just leaving was like lifting an enormous weight off both their souls. By the time they got to Sturbridge they thought of calling home to tell the rest of the gang to take a few days away. But even that idea melted off like the last corn snow of spring.

CHAPTER FIVE

• STATIS
• THE BEAST
• SPIDER WEB
• FIGHTING BACK