The Blackbird peeled off to the left, pitching up and over into a barrel roll that allowed them to reverse direction without needing a wide turn. The missiles, closing on where the plane had been, triggered their own proximity sensors and detonated, creating a minor fireball too far behind the Blackbird to do any damage. In response, both pursuing fighters split in opposite directions to come in on them from either side.

Storm jinked them the other direction, turning headlong in the direction of one of the fighters and forcing both of them to maneuver to prevent a collision. Nightcrawler wedged himself into a corner, holding on with hands and feet and tail while praying for all he was worth. Aft, John Allardyce had no smart comments, just a lot of sweat as he grabbed for a barf bag.

"They're not backing off," Storm said. "And they're not giving me a decent opening to outrun them."

"Don't we have any damn weapons in this heap?" Logan demanded as the fighters struggled for position. The women were good, but these guys were trained professionals at the top of their game. No way would they lose a dogfight.

Jean shot a glance at Storm, who released hold of her controls. Jean had the aircraft now.

Storm's eyes burned white, occluding iris and pupil. The air around her became supercharged with electricity, and Jean flicked a line of switches to disengage the systems on her side of the panel. Even so, performance on the main displays began degrading markedly, the screens becoming more and more crowded with static.

Through the canopy, Logan saw clouds darkening the sky ahead as puffy cumulus crashed together and built themselves before his eyes into a towering series of thunderheads. Lightning announced the storm, and he knew down on the ground people would be picking up the pace, cursing the weatherman for getting the forecast wrong yet again, as they hurried toward shelter.

On the radar, despite the electronic interference Storm was creating, he could see the shape of the storm up ahead. To his uneducated eye, it looked nasty. Without hesitation, Jean sent the Blackbird rocketing into its heart.

The Falcon drivers couldn't know what to make of the freak weather. They didn't care. They followed.

On radar and to the naked eye, wisps of cloud began to swirl, faster and faster as Storm manipulated pressure gradients and temperature to create air effects within these clouds more common to the great plains than the northeast. Great rams of high-pressure cold bludgeoned hot low-pressure air, generating maelstroms of tremendous force that found expression as airborne tornados.

Aboard the Blackbird, despite the best efforts of both Jean and Storm, it was a rough and rocky ride, akin to thundering over potholes the size of New Jersey. Wind smashed at the hull; one minute they were in clear air, the next the canopy was covered with sheets of rain, the next, completely occluded by ice. The only constant was that visibility sucked and maneuverability was worse.

Hard as it was for them, though, Logan didn't want to imagine what it was like for their pursuers. He counted over a dozen whirlwinds, writhing impossibly across the sky both vertically and horizontally, creating an atmospheric gauntlet no aircraft could possibly survive.

Still, they tried, using every ounce of courage and skill to close to the point where they could establish a solid lock.

"We're marked," Jean cried out...

... and Storm responded by sandwiching the nearer fighter between a pair of tornados.

They literally tore the plane to bits, scattering wreckage across the sky in pieces no larger than a Zip disk. In the blink of an eye, the pilot found himself cast out of his vehicle and into the teeth of weather more ferocious than he could imagine, much less recall. He'd never had a plane disintegrate around him before, prayed never to endure the experience again. But most amazing of all to him was what happened afterward.

He thought for those first awful moments only of his wife and kids, but then it was as if the hand of God had reached out to enfold him. Yes, he was falling from miles in the air, but from the moment he separated from his aircraft, it was as if the storm had lost all interest in him. He might as well have been falling through a clear summer sky on some training exercise. Not a breath of wind touched him, nor rain, either, even though he fell for miles through the darkest and most terrifying pile of cumulo-nimbus thunderheads he'd ever seen. His parachute opened without a hitch, and he descended to a smooth landing somewhere close to Syracuse.

His wingman knew none of this. He only saw his fellow plane disintegrate, heard a final, frantic squawk of shock and terror over the radio before contact was lost. He made the logical assumption, and just like that the fight became personal.

The tornados came looking for him, and he skated around them with a daring and skill that pushed his interceptor well beyond the envelope of its flight and combat dynamics in his determination to nail them. He wouldn't give up, he wouldn't back off, and as the increasingly desperate maneuvers progressed, he gained height on them.

All Jean wanted was to break off the engagement, to use the Blackbird 's far superior power plant to put so much distance between them that he couldn't follow. But if she ducked to the side, if she turned tail, the Falcon would have a shot. If she bulled down his throat, he had a shot.

Storm let her temper get the better of her. Logan jumped as small flickers of lightning crackled from her eyes and the interior of the flight deck resounded to the kettledrum riff of thunder. Outside, all the subordinate funnels coalesced into one, that megatornado expanding until its cone engulfed first the Blackbird, and then the Falcon on its tail.

Quick as she was, the pilot got tone before she could grab him. This time, before his plane went the way of his wingman, he popped a pair of slammers: A IM-120 A MRAAM "fire-and-forget" air-to-air missiles. Even as he bailed, even as the storm around him abated to give him an equally smooth and safe descent to the ground, he knew he had the target nailed.

Explosions high in the atmosphere confirmed it. When he was picked up, over the Canadian border in the woods above Lake Huron, that's what he reported.

Jean kicked the Blackbird through the whole regime of missile avoidance maneuvers. She pulled a vertical rolling scissors, snapping back and forth across her base course violently enough and often enough to break the radar lock the slammers had on them. She tried a high-speed, high-G barrel roll to flip up and over the missiles and come in behind them. For all the good she did, the damn missiles might as well have been tied to the Blackbird with wire.

Without a word, using a slap to the arm to get the other woman's attention, she handed the controls back to Storm. They were leaving her storm well behind, although the air, and the ride, remained bumpy. The missiles were too small, too close, too fast for Storm's power to do any good. Their survival was Jean's to decide.

One small blessing: As Storm scaled back her power, the radar cleared up. Jean had a clear electronic view of their tormentors. All she had to do now was slide her consciousness down that invisible line connecting the Blackbird to the missiles...

Storm cleaned up the Blackbird 's flight profile, exchanging maneuverability for raw speed as the variable-geometry wings folded close to the hull, creating an airfoil ideal for high-mach hypersonic flight. Given a small fraction of a minute, they could outrun the damn missiles, stretching out the pursuit until the missiles ran out of fuel. But the missiles were already going hell for leather, far faster than the planes that launched them, and the time the Blackbird needed to accelerate was time they didn't have.

As the missiles struck the unseen barrier that she threw up in their flight path, Jean's body reacted to an invisible impact and she gritted her teeth, hurling another telekinetic boulder at them. Again and again they plowed through her obstacles, the impacts psychically translating themselves into physical terms so that each one felt like a heavyweight punch. But this succession of hammer blows only made Jean that much more determined to prevail. She wasn't trying to finesse the intercept by manipulating the missiles' flight-control surfaces or even just grabbing hold of them and throwing them away; there was too much risk of losing her telekinetic grip, and no time to recover if she did.

She vaguely registered a cry of elation from the seat beside her and felt a sudden, pronounced wobble on the trajectory of the nearest missile. She hit it again, and again, and again, cursing it in terms that would impress Logan, furious with herself for not having the raw power necessary to do the job in a single shot.

She felt her body flush with a heat unlike any she'd ever known, not a physical sensation at all so much as a... spiritual one. She heard something faint in the distance, like a carillon fanfare, a call to glory that made her ache to answer, a sense of a window opening onto possibilities beyond number. It registered to her as music, but she knew it was so much more. It spoke to her as fulfillment, but of what she did not know.

"Jean," she heard Storm call, from as great a distance one way as the fanfare was the other, and for that moment was torn between which one to answer. "How are you-"

The last shot did the trick, sending the missile straight up so that its proximity fuse, mistaking its fellow missile for the target, detonated. She was aiming for a twofer, a double kill.

Aft, at the rear of the passenger cabin, John Allardyce had long since run out of barf bags, long since ruined his borrowed clothes. Bobby Drake didn't feel much better, although-since his uncle was a Gloucester man who made his living fishing the Grand Banks and enjoyed taking his favorite nephew for the occasional jaunt-he'd acquired a cast-iron stomach long ago.

Rogue, unfortunately, was in real trouble. The Blackbird didn't use standard seat belts; all the seats were fitted with four-point military-style restraints. Procedure mandated that passengers lock themselves in at takeoff, but she'd been talking with Bobby, who was really rocked by how wrong things had gone back at his house. He wasn't even sure anymore whether or not he could even go home again. In addition, she'd been so upset-still and probably for a while to come-with John for the stunts he'd pulled during the fight that she never got around to buckling herself in. Once the dogfight started, she found to her increasing dismay that she couldn't.

All the Blackbird 's wild and unpredictable moves forced her to spend most of the time just hanging on, to keep from making like a hockey puck against the walls and ceiling. Every time she got hold of a damn buckle, it wouldn't lock into the mechanism. She'd think one was anchored, but then when she tried to close another, the first would pop out. It happened so often-making her so frustrated she was ready to cry-that she believed the plane was doing this to her on purpose.

She knew she was getting upset, so she followed Jean's training. She forced herself to take big, slow, calming breaths. She was still scared but tried not to let that matter so much as, one by one, she gathered the buckles and slugged them into place.

This was going to work. She was going to be okay.

Up front, three pairs of eyes-green, brown, and blue-stared transfixed at the radar screen and the big blotch way less than a mile behind the Blackbird that represented the exploding missile. Things were looking good. They were going to be okay.

The panel beeped an alarm, and the second missile raced free of the debris field, locked and closing.

They had seconds to save themselves.

Jean threw everything she had into its path, focusing her concentration so tightly that the shape and fabric of the world around her began to fade. She didn't perceive herself anymore as being surrounded by the solid structure of the Blackbird; instead, she beheld the glittering atomic and molecular matrices that composed it. The world for her became a panoply of brilliant pinpoint lights and colors, shot through with vistas of unfathomable emptiness, almost as though reality was no more than an illusion, with all the tangible substance of a dream.

She closed her eyes, tasting the harsh gunmetal of blood from her nose.

The proximity beeps of the radar were coming closer together as the missile closed the range. She took a final roundhouse swing-and missed.

The missile's course never wavered.

"Oh, God," she breathed.

Inside the hull, it felt as though the Blackbird had just had its back broken by a baseball bat. The big plane bucked downward under the impact of the pressure wave. Shrieking metal matched shrieking voices as shrapnel punched a score of holes in the roof.

Decompression did the rest, blowing out a major section, the plane's own velocity wrenching the piece away. Instantly the cabin was swept by winds far greater than any hurricane. Rogue's harness held for all of a heartbeat, and then, to her absolute horror and disbelief, her buckles disengaged and she was swept screaming up and out the hole, into the sky.

Everyone saw what happened, only one was able to act on it.

Nightcrawler vanished in his distinctive bamf of imploding air and the faint stench of sulfur.

Rogue didn't know what to do or think. She'd never fallen out of a plane before; this was the kind of thing that only happened in movies. She remembered what she'd seen about skydiving and spread her arms and legs to try to stabilize herself. At the same time, she was laughing hysterically inside, demanding to know what the hell good that would do because she didn't have a parachute and sooner rather than later gravity was going to reintroduce her to the ground, the hard way. She doubted after that happy moment if even Logan's healing power would make much difference.

It was really cold, too. She'd hardly begun falling and already she couldn't breathe and she'd likely pass out and freeze to death before anything serious happened. It was so unfair.

That's when the demon caught her, indigo skin making him hard to see against the darkening sky that was left over from the storm. He rocketed out of nowhere with a grace and skill that told her he knew all about skydiving and wrapped himself around her, arms, legs, and tail. And teleported.

She didn't know where they went for the split instant they were in transit, and for as long as she planned to live she never wanted to find out. There was a cold that chilled her to the marrow, more completely than Bobby could. There was a silence that had nothing to do with the absence of sound. There was a raging disorientation that made her wonder if her insides and outsides had been transposed. There was an awful sense of nothing.

And then she was whole once more. And the pair of them were dropping the last couple of feet to the wind-ripped deck of the Blackbird's main cabin. Which, in Rogue's estimation, was not an improvement, because the plane was falling just as out of control as she had been.

Storm yelled their altitude, diminishing rapidly, as she and Jean fought to pull the plane out of a flat spin. The explosion had crippled the flight controls, they had minimal hydraulics, which made the act of turning the wheel or pulling on the yoke or pressing the rudder pedals akin to bench-pressing a fully loaded semitrailer. They had a flameout on one engine, possible shrapnel damage and a fire-warning light from the other, which they ignored as they rammed its throttle past the firewall in an attempt to stabilize their descent.

Logan braced himself in position and laid his hand beside Jean's on her yoke, using his strength to buttress hers. They were into the breathable atmosphere, that was good. But they were fast running out of sky, that was way bad.

Storm's eyes went white again as she fought to bring a wind into their path, to use it to check their headlong fall. But for all the passion of her indomitable will, she was still constrained by natural forces. She could generate a wind to cushion their landing, but not in the space they had left.

"You can fly," Jean told her. "Grab the kids, get them clear!"

As she spoke, Jean once more turned to her own teke, but that well was too dry to be of use. She had will to spare, but no strength to match the terrible momentum of their descent.

Without thinking, responding solely to a surge of emotion that caught them both by surprise, she placed a hand over Logan's. The look he saw when he met her eyes was a revelation that he knew would break both their hearts. And yet, it was a moment and a memory he'd carry with him to the grave.

Storm cleared her harness and shoved herself past Logan, calling to the kids.

Strangely, it was Nightcrawler, holding tight to Rogue, who responded.

"Uh... Storm?" He was pointing to the roof.

She followed his upraised finger and didn't bother hiding her astonishment as the fabric of the hull came alive before her eyes. Dark threads of metal alloy polymer laced their way across the hull spars as though they were being spun from a loom. The spars themselves that had been twisted and broken politely straightened themselves. The roar of wind through the hull gradually lessened to a whisper, then to silence.

Around them, the hull righted itself, returning to level flight.

Logan looked questioningly at Jean, wondering if this was her doing. As mystified as he, she shook her head, but she also didn't move her hand. Indeed, she tightened her grip, interlacing her fingers with his.

They were a couple of hundred feet in the air, but their velocity had dropped to less than a hundred knots. With each ten feet or so they lost another ten knots until, ten feet off the ground, they stopped.

They sat there, floating just above the ground, for maybe a minute before anyone had the presence of mind to mention the landing gear. That provoked more than a fair share of nervous chuckles as Jean broke contact with Logan to slap the big landing lever from the top to the bottom of its cradle. A quiet whine and a dull thunk told them what the status lights confirmed: gear down and locked.

The next sensation was an equally understated thump that told them they were once more on the ground.

The kids in the back, being kids, let out a cheer.

On the flight deck, the first flush of relief had been cast aside by the sight of what was waiting for them. They had descended into a forest clearing not much bigger than the Blackbird itself. On the edge of the clearing, parked under the sheltering evergreens, was a black limousine, not the sort of wheels normally used for a camping trip. But then, the couple using it wasn't the sort you'd expect to find out here roughing it, either.

Mystique gave Jean and Logan a wave from where they stood midway between the nose of the Blackbird and their car. Magneto, once again properly clothed in his signature black and gray, held out his hand in welcome. Mystique stood at his side.

"If I set you down gently," he offered in a pleasantly companionable voice, the kind you'd want in a favorite old-country uncle, "will you hear me out?"

Chapter Twelve.

It was a good place to hide, even without the stealth netting that Storm and Logan quickly spread across the hull. Jean wanted to help, but her psychic exertions in the air had taken a physical toll-which she'd discovered when she tried to climb out of her pilot's chair. The spirit was willing, the flesh had other ideas. She didn't have strength to move, and Logan had to carry her out.

Magneto had set the Blackbird down hard against a nice-sized escarpment, part of a line of large hills-baby mountains, really-that formed a valley with a mainly north-south orientation. It had been carved out of the landscape by the great ice ages, when the advancing glaciers had plowed troughs in the earth like a plow. This was still technically wilderness, with no roads to speak of for fifty miles in any direction, pretty rough going on foot through the forest. Magneto had brought his limo in the same way he saved the Blackbird, with his power.

For Storm and Jean, that had proved a daunting revelation. The plane had been designed with Magneto's abilities in mind, to make it as impervious to him as possible, and yet he'd grabbed hold of it and repaired it with frightening ease.

The cliff formed a wall at their back. Every other direction, they saw only trees. Old-growth forest, timber that had never been cut, thick stands of fir that towered thirty meters and more in height. This was rugged country that made no concession to modern man or the amenities of modern society, as the kids learned when they decided to go exploring and almost immediately got themselves lost. Logan found them without any trouble but wasn't happy about it, and he made it clear to them that next time they were on their own.

"Think they listened?" Jean asked him.

He snorted derisively. "That'll be the damn day. Especially John. He'll do it again just to spit in my eye." His expression sobered. "How you doin'?" he asked her.

"Pretty much fine, thank you," she replied, interlacing her fingers and stretching her arms till the joints cracked. "Just being lazy."

"You're entitled."

"Absent the circumstances, and the company," she added, with a pointed flick of the eyes toward the limo, "I'd agree with you. I've been monitoring GUARD." She meant the military command frequencies. "Both pilots are okay." Logan made a face. He understood her impulse to save the two men, but frankly he couldn't have cared less. Guy tries to kill him, the guy takes his chances. No bitching, no tears.

"The second pilot's reporting us as a probable kill," Jean finished.

"They buying it, the brass?"

"Well, Ororo didn't entirely disperse her storm. It's raining pretty hard over the probable crash site, zero-zero visibility, no hope of flight operations until it clears, which she assures me"-ghost of a grin-"won't be for a while. System seems to have stalled. Meteorologists are baffled."

"I'd keep looking if it was me, till I knew for sure."

"Hence our precautions," and she indicated the netting, shrouding the plane and the car. "Even enhanced imagery won't spot the plane, and our heat and electronic emissions are close to zero. By the time we finish setting up, we'll look like a camping party, nothing more. There should be nothing here to merit a second glance."

"Except for him," Logan noted, jutting his jaw in the general direction of Nightcrawler, who was carrying a tent pack over to where Mystique had begun to lay out their campsite.

"Whatever happens, Logan, we'll deal."

"So tell me, Jean, just how many people are there in the world with that color skin and those color eyes?"

She shrugged. "How many are blond and blue, or redheaded with green eyes?"

"I don't believe in coincidence."

Her tone sharpened. "And I don't believe in judging someone without giving them a fair chance. You of all people might appreciate that."

With a grunt of effort, deliberately ignoring, then waving away, his offer of help, Jean pushed herself to her feet and strode toward the open hatch of the Blackbird. Logan fumed as he watched her go, but he was mostly angry at himself. He had nothing against the German, couldn't help liking him in some ways. But the attack on the mansion, and now finding himself in close proximity with a man he'd cheerfully slaughter, had put all his combat instincts on high alert. Jean was too much like Xavier, always determined to see the brighter angles of human nature. Logan had walked too long, too far, with killers. Trust came hard for him because he knew, deep down to his soul, the cost of betrayal.

He felt as if he'd already failed once, by being caught by surprise at the mansion. He wasn't going to let that happen again.

Mystique was supervising the layout of the camp, and Logan had to admit the woman knew her stuff. She knew he was watching and if that bothered her, she didn't let it show. Quite the opposite, in fact; she seemed amused by his attention.