"What people seem to forget is that mutation is evolution in action. In a sense, we're all mutants. If not for past mutations, for past evolution, chances are we'd all be sitting in trees, picking bugs from one another's hair!"

"Goddamn it, Lou," Laurio snarled, "turn that shit off. Bad enough I got the godfather of muties in my face the whole damn day long without I got this raining on my head after!"

"I'm sorry," he heard a woman say behind him, in a voice that went down his spine like a shock, "it's my fault. I asked Lou to turn the channel."

He rolled his stool around and found himself facing a woman who put the dogs who usually haunted this place to shame. She was no stick-figure woman, he had no taste for that, she had curves on her and then some, big rack, cute butt, and a waist that made his hands ache to enfold her. She had some mileage to her, but she had a look to the eye, a quirk to the mouth, and a way of looking him up and down that told him she knew how to use it. Her lips were liquid scarlet, sassy, her eyes so deeply shadowed that all he could see were some glints reflecting the neon behind the bar, which gave them a weird yellow cast. She was blond, and taller than he usually liked, but he figured that was due to her stilt stilettos, and as she strode closer he had to admit he loved what those shoes did for her walk.

"You sound like a man with a lot on his mind"-she paused to sneak a peek at his badge-"Mr. Laurio."

He smelled scotch on her breath and noted the half-full tumbler in her hand.

"I'm Grace," she said.

He didn't know what to say. Really, all he wanted to do was sit and stare. She let him. It was obvious that she enjoyed the attention.

"Want another beer, Mr. Laurio?" She didn't wait for him to answer. "Course you do."

"Mitch," he said. "My name's Mitch."

She gave him that dazzling smile again, shifting position beside him so that her skirt rode high enough on her thigh to flash some skin above the top of her stocking and her breasts brushed against his chest. She seemed to lose her balance just a little, forcing him to catch her with his arm suddenly tight around her waist, and she giggled like it was all a big joke and he laughed, too, because this was the kind of moment he only dreamed about.

He didn't see what her free hand was doing behind him as she gathered the beer mug close, dropping a pair of white pills into the foam, where they quickly dissolved.

After a couple more beers, it took only the vaguest hint to propel him off his stool and into the ladies' room. It wasn't much different from the men's room in layout and wasn't much cleaner besides. As they stumbled over the threshold, Laurio tried to take a swallow of beer and grab a kiss on her lips all at the same time and failed in both. That made them both laugh, especially since most of the beer had landed on him. He was stinko, a lot more than was usual after a few beers, but he didn't give it any thought.

"I never hooked up with anyone like you before," he told her, making like the guys on TV.

"I know," she said. "Your lucky night."

She gave a little push, and he dropped onto a toilet seat.

"Kinda dirty, ain't it," he said.

"That's the idea," she replied, leaning forward to tease him with a glimpse of her breasts before squatting down in front of him. Her legs were splayed wide apart, but there were too many shadows, his eyes wouldn't focus right, he couldn't see enough to make it worthwhile. Then, as she unbuckled his belt, he gave up trying to look. Tonight was getting better and better.

"Velcro," Grace muttered as she opened his pants. "Nice."

"Bottoms up," he toasted her, raising his beer high.

"I certainly hope so."

She smiled one last time, and the last of his beer cascaded out of the mug and across his face and chest. His mouth was open, but he made no attempt to drink. He was way beyond that. As his head lolled back against the tile behind him, his pupils dilating to their limits, his suddenly nerveless arm dropped, the mug falling from useless fingers to shatter on the floor.

Grace pressed two fingers to his carotid pulse, satisfying herself it was firm and regular, then used the tips of her fingers to close his mouth and stop the beginnings of a snore. There was no sloppiness any longer to either manner or movement as she snapped the lock shut on the door behind her, then reached down to grab Laurio around the waist and flip the big man over so that his head was somewhere behind the bowl and his butt poked up in the air.

She opened her purse and removed a syringe, tapping the barrel with a lacquered forefinger to clear any air bubbles. It wouldn't do to give the slug an embolism. She pulled down his boxers and pressed the plunger. As she did, the skin on her hand darkened to the same indigo shade as her nail polish. The transformation raced up her arm, across her body, which became longer and leaner, much less the kind of blowsy Reubens woman that Mitchell Laurio dreamed of in favor of someone much stronger and more sleekly muscular. Her hair became a dark autumnal russet shot through with midnight. Mystique bared teeth that were startlingly white against her blue-black skin and patted Laurio where she'd made the injection.

"Bottoms up, darling." And then she was gone.

Lyman met Stryker en route from the landing pad.

"The men are nearly finished, sir," he reported.

Stryker nodded approvingly. "Ahead of schedule," he noted approvingly. "Strip down at source, transport, and reconstruction. I am very impressed, Mr. Lyman. The crews are to be commended."

"You trained 'em, sir. They're just following your lead."

Stryker continued to nod. This was going better than he'd hoped. A good omen for what was to come, perhaps.

"How does it look?" he wondered.

"Flawless."

They passed a reception cubicle where Lyman saw one of the troopers tending to the prisoner Cyclops, fastening a metal band over the mutant's eyes.

"Good," Stryker said, meaning both what Lyman had just told him and what he saw in the cubicle. "Now for the main event."

When he woke, groggy and pummeled, as though every cell in his brain had been given its own personal, enthusiastic beating, Charles Xavier had no idea where he was. Far worse, he had no sense whatsoever of the thoughts around him. He couldn't help a moment's panic, finding himself imprisoned for the first time within the walls of his own skull. As a clinician he'd often used the term "headblind" to describe nontelepaths and had even fantasized about the sensation. Unfortunately it was like trying to imagine being dead; the act of imagination itself effectively invalidated the concept.

This was so much worse. He felt hollow and... alone. The background noise, the susurrus of other thoughts that was a constant presence and an occasional annoyance, was gone. His inner cries couldn't even provoke an echo. He could only perceive the world from a single perspective, his own, and it was unbearable.

He was bound into his chair, his wrists tied with duct tape to the armrests. He felt a dull burning pressure around his head and thought of the torture instruments of the Inquisition. One-particularly nasty-was strapped around the skull and gradually tightened until the bone shattered. From how he felt, Xavier assumed that had long since happened. If he let his head loll forward, perhaps he'd see his brain flop out onto the floor. At least that final oblivion would be better-anything would be better-than the gnawing emptiness that was consuming him.

He tried to take refuge from his misery by taking inventory of the purely physical. He wasn't in Mount Haven, that was a sure bet. The room was dark, as were some in the prison, but the walls were dank and pockmarked with age. The prison environment was strictly maintained; this was so chilly he was already starting to shiver, a damp cold that ate into his bones. This place had been abandoned long ago, and even though he could hear faint sounds of activity, it was clear to him that no one was planning a lengthy stay.

Reflexively, he stretched his thoughts toward the sounds outside. Big mistake. The Inquisition analogy suddenly took on an agonizing relevance as he felt as if barbed spikes were being driven into him. The sleet storm of pain doubled him over, pulling a hoarse grunt from the pit of his belly. Worse had happened; he could smell and feel the consequences as his body lost all control, and the beginnings of tears burned his eyes at the loss of his dignity.

"I just had to see that work for myself," said Stryker as he entered the room.

Xavier didn't bother to respond at first. Better to take as much time as possible, to gather what few resources remained to him before facing his adversary. He worked his tongue around his mouth, tasting the familiar gunmetal taste of adrenaline, remembering another time and place where his telepathy had been no use to him. A wayward step on a jungle trail, the shock of a land mine that, fortunately, was on the other side of a tree. The encounter had won him a Purple Heart and taught him a valuable lesson: Just because it doesn't have a brain doesn't mean it can't kill you.

Stryker was a patient man, especially when he was winning. He waited until Xavier was ready before continuing.

He hadn't come alone. Standing in the doorway, obviously a bodyguard, was a lovely young woman of Asian extraction. Something about her gaze caught Xavier's attention; there was animation in her eyes, but no sense of real life. She seemed awake, yet totally asleep.

"I call it the neural inhibitor," Stryker continued. "The more you think, the more you hurt. And"-he tapped his own forehead-"it keeps you out of here."

"William," Xavier said, and he wasn't surprised to how hard it was to speak even that single word. The inhibitor not only crippled his psychic functions but a degree of his basic cognitive ones as well.

"I'm sorry we couldn't find you more... comfortable quarters," Stryker said. "My old home here is about to undergo some rather major renovations. Much like yours."

Xavier felt stupid, which made him feel angry. He couldn't make the connections, couldn't see the implications of what Stryker was saying, even though the other man was acting like they were blindingly obvious. He fastened on to the only one that came to mind.

"What have you done with Scott?"

"Don't worry, you'll be seeing him soon. I'm just giving the boy a little reeducation." He paused. "But you know all about that, don't you? Altering thoughts and perceptions must be as easy for you as rewriting codes of software."

"There's no need to involve anyone else!" Xavier protested desperately, with more vehemence than Stryker expected.

"No need to involve anyone else?" Stryker sounded genuinely incredulous. "You run a school for mutants, Professor! What on Earth do you teach those creatures?"

A question requiring a conceptual answer. That took effort, which brought him pain, but Xavier persevered nonetheless, calling on the same focus and discipline that had enabled him, self-taught, to master his burgeoning telepathy.

"To survive," he hissed through gritted teeth. "To coexist peacefully in a world that fears them."

"I've seen what's buried beneath your house, Xavier. It doesn't look very peaceful to me. I also know-firsthand-the kind of creatures you've gathered to live there. Some species can never coexist. I learned that from you," he finished offhandedly, turning away.

"You wanted me to cure your son. But, William, mutation is not a disease."

"Liar," he snapped. When Stryker looked around, his mask of affability was gone. The pain was real, the grief, the rage, and he used his words on his prisoner like a lash.

"You're lying, Xavier," Stryker said more slowly, more forcefully. "You were more afraid of him than I was! He was too powerful, and you couldn't control him."

The Asian woman laced her fingers together, cracked her knuckles. Stryker noticed more than Xavier did. The gesture amused him, but only for a moment that quickly passed, the feeling subsumed as always by his relentless fury.

"You know, just a year after Jason returned from your school, my wife..." Stryker's voice trailed off, and he stood up. His own right hand was clenched into so tight a fist the knuckles were white, and Xavier guessed from his posture that he wanted to use that fist, on Xavier himself. "He resented us, you see, he blamed us for his... condition. He was my son. I loved him more than my own life, we both did. How could he feel such things about us? How could he... do... such things?

"He would... toy with our minds, you see. He would project images and scenarios into our brains."

As he spoke, the woman's breathing became erratic. Her hands began to tremble enough to finally catch Xavier's notice. There was a gradual but growing look of confusion to her features, a distinct change to the quality of the animation he'd seen in her gaze. She was no longer placid; she was waking up.

Stryker paid her no attention. His focus remained entirely on Xavier.

"Unfortunately," he said, making an effort to hammer the emotion from his voice and thereby revealing the terrible, haunting depth of those feelings, "I had my work. I was overseas, serving my country." His subtext was plain. He hadn't been there to share his wife's ordeal; he couldn't do for her what he felt his job required him to do for the nation-save the day. He had survived and was glad and guilty of it.

"My wife couldn't escape. She was around him all the time. We had to keep him at home, you see. After you sent him away, we didn't dare risk allowing him to attend a school. Can you imagine what he'd have done to all those impressionable minds?"

"I... didn't know."

"How convenient for you. My wife, over time, she became easily influenced... unable to tell the difference between what was real and what was a part of his warped imagination. In the end..." he paused, confronting the memory like a warrior facing down an adversary. "She took a power drill to her left temple, in an attempt to bore the images out of her mind."

The woman swayed, shaking her head once or twice to clear it, reaching up with one hand to steady herself. Absently, Stryker stopped the gesture and lowered the arm back to her side. He was aware of what was happening to her and wasn't bothered in the slightest. Everything was under control.

"My... boy," and in that one word were all the dreams and heartbreak of a father's life. "The great illusionist."

"For someone who hates mutants, William, you certainly keep strange company."

"It has its uses," Stryker replied. "It serves a purpose. As do you."

In his hand he held an ampoule of yellow liquid. With the same gentle gesture, which reminded Xavier of the way a trainer might move a horse, he bent the woman forward from the waist until her head was on the same level as Xavier's. He swept her hair aside to bare the back of her neck, revealing a scar identical to the one Xavier had seen on Magneto.

With practiced ease, Stryker applied two drops. The effect was instantaneous. Her breathing returned to normal, she stopped trembling, and when she straightened once more to her full height, Xavier saw no more sign in her eyes of an independent personality.

Stryker whispered something in her ear. She nodded and left the room.

"It was you," Xavier said suddenly, in a burst of intuition that left him shocked. "You arranged the attack on the President!"

Stryker actually laughed out loud. "And you didn't even have to read my mind," he said approvingly.

"You know," he continued, "I believe I've been working with mutants almost as long as you have, but the final solution to the problem continued to evade me. So I guess I'm in your debt. I have to thank you, Xavier, because you gave me Magneto. And Magneto gave me the answer."

"You can't eradicate us, William. New mutants are born every day."

"And once I'm finished, they'll be born into a very different world. What are you thinking, that I'll end up like Rameses or Herod or poor old Heydrich? Nice try at genocide, but no cigar?

"Guess again. You see, in all my years of... research, the most frustrating thing I learned is that nobody really knows how many mutants exist in the world, or how to find them."

He leaned close, putting his face directly in front of Xavier's. "Except you."

He held up the vial of yellow liquid and waggled it before Xavier's eyes.

"Sadly, this little potion won't work on you, will it?"

He straightened himself, backed up a step, and returned the drug to his jacket pocket.

"Nope, you're far too powerful for that. Instead, we'll go right to the source."

With crisp, military moves that were almost a flourish in themselves, Stryker opened the door.

"Allow me to introduce Mutant 143."

Beyond was a chair, and in that chair sat something that could only charitably be called human. At first glance, because the body was so shriveled and emaciated, the presumption was that it was someone extremely old. The limbs were arranged so neatly that Xavier knew at once they couldn't move of their own volition; the way the head lolled to the side was further evidence of the lack of any effective musculature. There was a water tube close by his mouth, which he constantly licked, but that was just so he could keep tongue and lips from going dry. Fluids and nutrients flowed into him intravenously, through permanent junctions in the major blood vessels of the leg up close to his groin. The site was mercifully hidden beneath a blanket, but Xavier assumed that permanent catheters were likewise employed to deal with all his waste products.

The man's head itself was macrocephalic, swollen to half again normal dimensions, and marked with a cruel scar across the temple as though the skull itself had cracked apart under the pressure of the growing mass within. A grotesque array of tubes and connections sprouted from implants in the back and base of the skull, draining a continuous volume of what had to be cerebrospinal fluid into clear containers mounted on the back of the chair. The fluid was an electric chrome yellow, and Xavier knew at once it was the substance Stryker used to control the woman, and Magneto, and Lord knows who else.

The man in the chair had one eye of a brilliant robin's-egg blue, the other an equally rich shade of green, Xavier noted, as the Asian woman and another trooper wheeled the chair directly in front of him. It was what Xavier saw in those eyes that struck him like a body blow: a look of cruel and feral cunning, representing an intelligence worthy of respect. The man knew exactly what he was, and he hated it beyond all levels of sane comprehension.

Xavier, who thanks to his own gifts forgot nothing, knew the man at once, from the shape of the jaw and especially those unique eyes.

"Jason..." he breathed in a voice that barely registered as a whisper. And then, in that same hushed, horror-struck tone, to the father: "My God, William-what have you done to him? This is your son!"

"No, Charles. My son is dead."

The look Xavier received from Stryker's blue eyes was a match for the emotions that emanated from the young man.

"Just like the rest of you."

Chapter Nine.

Past Hartford, Logan abandoned the back roads for the interstate, figuring a sports car in the middle of nowhere would draw a lot more curiosity than one more amid the many that cruised between Boston and New York. For him, the perfect place to hide now was in plain sight. He timed it perfectly, joining the morning rush-hour crowd as it crawled through Connecticut's capital, thankful that Scott hadn't indulged in a stand-out color like canary yellow or Ferrari scarlet. To the casual eye, this seemed like just another generic speedster. Stay with the flow of traffic, stay close to the speed limit, there shouldn't be any trouble.

They made decent time and rolled into the Boston suburb of Quincy just past noon. Nice streets, respectable houses, the sidewalks shaded by trees that had been here since before the Revolution.