There wasn't anything left of the defenders worth looking at. Magneto paused a moment at the entrance, standing by a bloody mess that was unrecognizable as a man. Oddly, a photo had survived the slaughter, a little singed at the edges, a handsome woman of middle age and two bright-eyed dogs. Mystique kneeled for a closer look, but Magneto shook his head. He opened his hand, which was filled with the pins he'd pulled from the grenades, and let them fall, burying the photograph in steel.

Then his head jerked up and he staggered as if he'd just been physically struck, Mystique hissing in agony as a phantom ice pick went straight through her brain, as the hum radiating from inside the room got louder, grew deeper and more intense.

In front of Charles Xavier, a light appeared. In terms of the holographic globe being displayed by Cerebro, it was located at the core of the world. From that point, radiant spears stabbed outward to connect with each and every one of the scarlet dots that represented an active or potential mutant.

"Oh," Jean cried suddenly, and then she cried out in real pain as her concentration slipped and the teke splints vanished from around her broken leg. Psychically damping the pain didn't make it go away, it just made things feel worse every time she had to notice. But her injury was the least of her concern as her hand tightened on Scott's shoulder so tightly he winced, half wondering if she was going to crush his bones.

"Jean," he demanded, placing an arm around her waist, pulling one of her arms across his shoulder so he could better handle her weight, "what's wrong?"

"Voices," she gasped, "so many voices, can't you hear them, of course you can't what am I saying oh Charles oh Charles what have you done?"

"Jean!"

"Scott, it's Cerebro," she cried, and for the first time since he'd known her, Scott heard genuine terror in her voice. "We're too late!"

She screamed. He'd only heard its like once before, when he was young and hunting. It was one of the few memories that he knew dated from before the orphanage where he'd grown up. He was in mountains, so many they filled the horizon on every side, and though his dad carried a gun for protection, they were there to shoot pictures. Some poor fool in another hunting party had stumbled into a bear trap, and the metal jaws had nearly taken off his leg.

Jean collapsed to the floor, clutching at her head and howling. Scott knelt beside her, struck through the heart to see her in such pain, yet utterly helpless to alleviate it.

He heard a deep, basso profundo thrum that sounded to him like tectonic plates grinding, and then, just like that, he lost all ability for rational thought as his own head was overwhelmed by a sleet storm of pain. His eyes were burning and his brain with it, the fire coursing down his spine and along every path and linkage of his nervous system.

His last, desperate, marginally conscious act was to throw himself clear of Jean, to wrap his arms around his head and tuck his body in as tight upon itself as he could manage. His beams couldn't punch through his own flesh; this way, he hoped, he prayed, he wouldn't unleash them on anyone else. He wouldn't hurt Jean-any more than he already had.

Storm and the children were making good time through the bowels of the complex. For once, even Artie was behaving. No smart remarks, no haring off on his own, he held her hand tight and kept pace, even though her legs were twice the length of his and she was walking fast. Nightcrawler was on point and so far, thankfully, the way ahead was clear.

She sensed the psi wave before actually hearing it, in the same way she sensed changes in the weather. The shape of the air, the energies coursing through it, bulged and rippled as though they were being shunted aside by the approach of a power far more massive than themselves.

Nightcrawler felt it, too. He dropped from the ceiling, bracing a hand against the wall to steady himself. He looked dizzy and felt far worse. In his whole life he'd never suffered from vertigo and now, suddenly, he was glad for what he'd been spared all these years. He tried to focus his eyesight, and when that failed, he realized it was getting harder to form coherent thoughts as well. It was as though every cell in his body had acquired the ability to teleport independently of one another, and they'd all decided to go their separate ways.

He started to turn, to warn Storm, to cry out to her for help, but that simple action proved beyond his capability as he stumbled over his own feet and flailed desperately for a handhold to stop himself from falling.

"Storm!" he cried with the frantic desperation of a drowning man, but she was in no position to help.

She was already on her knees, hands clutched to her head, caught in her own whirlwind and shot through with lightning that exploded from her eyes and circled right around to strike her back. Always before she'd been immune to the elements she wielded, but that was no longer the case as wicked arcs of electricity exploded over and through her. She writhed with every impact, and while the winds attacking her swept away the smoke raised by these repeated attacks, they couldn't dispel the quickly rising stench of burned uniform. Or the certain knowledge that in very little time, her flesh would be burning, too.

The children were screaming now, howling like souls being tormented by demons, Nightcrawler's eyes going wide with horror, his mouth forming the words-part demand, part prayer-"Stop it! Please, stop it! For the love of God- stop!" But no sound emerged. He was beyond the ability to speak.

He knew, as Storm did, that this was just the leading edge of the nightmare coming for them, the merest prelude to what lay ahead. He prayed for mercy, not only for himself and his companions, but for the souls of those responsible.

He forced one hand in front of the other, climbing along the floor as he would up a vertical rock face, determined to reach Storm, to give her what shelter and comfort he could so that together they could try to protect the children. There'd been no one to protect him growing up. He'd learned early how to fight and, far more importantly, how to defuse a fight, and he'd sworn afterward he would never allow anyone to be without a protector.

He stretched his right arm forward, a distance that seemed to his disoriented eyes to be miles. It was so hard to move, to think, there was a tremendous numbing pressure right behind his eyes that threatened to pop them from their sockets and he was sure his brain was swelling from the onslaught of the energy pulse.

Then the hum enveloped them, and all that came before faded to insignificance.

Nightcrawler's last conscious thought was of wonderment. He'd always believed you had to be dead before you went to Hell.

Logan tried to snarl, but it came out more like a scream. Claws emerged from both his hands, but they extended no more than an inch before retracting. This time, though, Logan's healing factor didn't close the wounds behind them, and blood sprayed from the open cuts. Indeed, it appeared that all the wounds he'd ever endured were coming back to haunt him as a score of gashes opened across his flesh, splashing the floor around him scarlet. Some were random and messy, the legacy of knives or bullets or the cruel vagaries of nature, but many were neat and purposeful, the incisions of careful men who'd abandoned all allegiance to the Hippocratic oath they'd taken as medical students to do no harm. They'd laid Logan open to the bone and now, in the place Stryker implied he had been born, it was happening all over again.

Magneto staggered under the onslaught of the psychic pressure wave, standing against it as he would against the full force of a hurricane's winds. Step by determined step, he advanced on the doorway to Stryker's version of the Cerebro chamber.

"Eric," he heard from behind and to the side, Mystique's voice, shattering between one syllable of his name and the next, between that word and the one which followed." Hurry!" Feminine for one, masculine for another, plunging from soprano to bass and back again.

He didn't look back, he couldn't spare the effort-and besides, he could imagine what was happening. Somehow Cerebro was attacking them through their very powers, turning what made them unique against them and consuming them with it. Mystique was a metamorph, a shape-shifter, able to mimic any conceivable human form perfectly. Size, age, gender, none of these were obstacles.

Now, as with Logan, her past came back to torment her. Cerebro made her flesh pliable, like soft wax, and then like mercury, as she underwent change after involuntary change, revisiting every face and form she'd ever copied. Even though she made it seem easy, it really wasn't. Her apparent speed came with years of training, of practice, of preparation. Each transformation was an effort, and the more she executed, the faster she did them, the greater the toll. If she needed to grow taller, she had to bulk up to provide the raw material. Shorter required burning off mass. Flesh was comparatively easy to sculpt, bones less so, and internal organs the most demanding of all. That's why most gender shifts were cosmetic.

None of that applied now. The shifts came so fast that she presented herself as multiples. Her own coloring, Jean Grey's face, Robert Kelly's torso, Rogue's legs, Xavier's face, Rogue's hair, Jean's torso, Wolverine's hands, claws sprouting from fingers, from between her toes, Magneto's face rising from her belly, someone else's from each breast, arms becoming legs and feet growing fingers, all these mad alterations accompanied by a rising chorus of howls from mouths that popped into view all over her body, each capable of independent speech and all of them shrieking in agony under the relentless and crushing pressure of the wave.

Soon, terribly soon, the transformations would come so quickly, the pain would grow so great, that Mystique's consciousness-her sense of fundamental self-would shatter. In effect, on both a cerebral and a cellular level, she would forget who and what she was. Most likely, she would genetically discorporate into a muddle of mindless cells, and that would be the end of her.

Magneto knew all that, knew she was but one victim of far too many, knew something similar lay in store for him-unless he stopped it.

He lifted a hand and a new sound rose to challenge the hum of the Cerebro wave: the basso groan of metal finding itself subjected to stresses well beyond design tolerances. He couldn't do this at Mount Haven; the part of the complex where he'd been incarcerated had been constructed of nonferrous materials and revolutionary plastics. But Alkali was much older, built in a day when the likes of him hadn't been a factor. There was a lot of metal for him to play with, and even though the Cerebro wave presented a significant-for some, insurmountable-obstacle, he was determined to prevail.

He had survived Auschwitz. He had lived to see his captors in their graves, had helped deliver more than a few of them to that end by himself. This would be the same.

He flashed teeth with the effort, almost a snarl, and metal started to warp and tear around him. The timbre of the hum emanating from inside faded ever so slightly, and the pulse of the Cerebro wave... slowed.

Charles Xavier was aware of none of this. He stared up at the globe circling around him, transfixed by the firefly display of scarlet dots, paying not the slightest attention to the trickles of blood from nostrils and ears and the corners of his eyes as stress ruptured the pinpoint capillaries that fed his brain. These were the most minor manifestations of being at the wave's source, of being the focal point of the power being unleashed, and at this moment they represented no lasting physical trauma.

That wouldn't last, of course. Mutant 143 knew that, somewhere in the deepest recesses of his own twisted psyche. In short order, as the pulse built to its peak, the greater vessels would burst, and he would be consumed by a massive and all-encompassing cerebral hemorrhage. He would die from the ultimate stroke-but not before bearing witness to the brutal and merciless slaughter of every person on earth who Cerebro considered a mutant. This was Stryker's revenge-not only would Xavier himself die, and all his precious students, but the future they represented. The murder of his dream would be the death of him, and before his own end Mutant 143 would make sure that Xavier realized the full import of what he had done.

And then, of course, 143 would die. Stryker appreciated the neatness and elegance of this resolution; it was ideal for a covert operation, one of his hallmarks. He didn't like loose ends. In one stroke, this eliminated not only the threat to the world but the weapon used to deal with it. As for 143 himself, the realization of his fate didn't bother him. Partly, he didn't really believe it would happen to him. He still retained a child's absolute faith in his own immortality. He couldn't conceive of coming to an end. What mattered for him now, as always since the manifestation of his mutant powers, was playing with his toys. They were mortal, they were fragile. He was God. And He had work to do.

So 143's eyes pulsed, casting their demented light into the core of Xavier's being. Around them, what was normally heard as whispers, the background susurrus of all the myriad thoughts Cerebro allowed Xavier to perceive, rose to a chorus of screams.

Cyclops wrapped his hands as tight as he could across his eyes, but he was sick at heart at the realization that he couldn't hold back his optic blasts much longer. Already they were reaching the containment capacity of his ruby quartz visor and little flashes of energy were beginning to pop through the spaces between his fingers, too small to do much damage but serving as eloquent harbingers for the devastation soon to follow.

Jean wasn't doing any better as she clutched her hands to her ears in a vain attempt to block the same threnody of desolation that enveloped her teacher. She swung her broken leg against a stanchion, not caring about any lasting damage she might be doing, praying instead that the pain she caused herself might serve as a bulwark against the assault from outside.

And she succeeded, although not quite in the way she had planned. Her teke slugged into high gear, stealing a page from Logan's book as her body remembered on a cellular level what it was like to be whole and set her power to work bringing that about. All the shards of bones, large or small, visible or microscopic, were plucked from where they'd landed in her leg and pressed back into their proper position.

She thought she'd experienced pain in her life, either directly or vicariously as an aspect of her power, when she synced into the minds of patients to ease their suffering, but she realized now that she'd never even come close as all those pieces of bone tore their way through her flesh to set themselves. She howled, thankful for the respite from Cerebro, struggling to find a way to reach Charles through this nigh-unbearable sleet storm of acid, to join her own strength to his and together find a way to neutralize the wave.

There was a fire within her, and she assumed that it had to do with her leg, that her power was somehow finding a way to fuse the bone back together, but as it grew, as her thoughts splintered and the fear blossomed that she wouldn't be equal to the task before her, it became a radiance too astounding to be described, too powerful to be measured, as though she were witnessing within herself the primal moment of creation, the lighting of the first spark within the infinite firmament.

With a cry of joy and longing, Jean Grey spread wide the arms of imagination and reached out to embrace the stars.

She knew then she was mad, but she refused to yield, to the pain or the madness. If this fire represented power, then she would find a way to harness it, to use it to save those she loved. If she was truly dying, she would find a way back from the ashes. She would never go quietly into the dark night of eternity.

Aboard the Blackbird, Rogue was struggling to reach the controls, to do as Storm had told her, but she couldn't make it. She couldn't even rise from the deck where she'd collapsed. Tears on her face, she couldn't stop Bobby from grasping her by the hand-in a grip that froze her to the shoulder, as he'd coated every visible surface on the plane with a sheet of glittering hoarfrost. His skin was transparent, she could see right through him, with him looking like a three-dimensional X ray-only this one was made entirely of ice. She could see his skeleton, and faint hints of what must be his heart and lungs and other organs. No sense of blood, no visible nerves, and he crackled faintly with every move, with every breath. His voice was arctic, biting and cold and nothing like he usually sounded.

Ice shattered as he wrenched her glove off her arm, she begged him to stop-at least in her mind-but nothing emerged from her mouth, there was this huge crowd crushing in around her, all the people she'd ever imprinted rising up inside her skull in rage at what she'd done, ignoring her apologies, her attempted explanations, demanding instead that she yield control to them. She knew he was trying to save her, offering his strength to give her a better chance of surviving, no matter the cost to himself. She didn't want that, she couldn't bear her own survival at the cost of his, and she knew as well that he didn't care.

He held her bare hand in his, deliberately initiating contact-and imprinting-and her eyes bugged wide as it turned to ice the same as his, while his started to look more and more normally human.

"Bobby, stop it!" she shrieked, and from lips that tasted chill as the pole came a voice that was a match for his, cold and remote and unhuman as space itself.

And from her eyes, as she saw from his, fell tears that froze to both their cheeks.

Thunder rocked the tunnel around Storm, wind howled, rain fell, and lightning continued to strike. She wasn't moving, sprawled on her face as bolt after bolt crashed against her body. Nightcrawler, by contrast, couldn't stop as he teleported in place again and again and again, faster and faster and faster, until he flickered like a strobe image.

John Allardyce hadn't made it to the entrance of the complex, hadn't even come close, before the wave dropped him. He hadn't moved from where he fell as breath kept coming in an ever-greater rush. He was hyperventilating, gulping huge amounts of air to fuel the raging conflagration within him, so much so that his skin was glowing-and the snow around him quickly melting away.

Henry McCoy was in his lab, measuring coffee grounds into a beaker while a nearby Bunsen burner had the water merrily boiling. Using gloves, he added the water to the grounds and savored the heady smell. This was what made every morning worthwhile, because a superb cup of coffee was for him the precursor to a successful day of research.

Without warning, his hand twitched so violently that the beaker went flying, shattering glass and steaming hot water across the worktable. McCoy convulsively threw himself back from the table with such force that his stool upended and he crashed head over heels against the wall. His body spasmed as though he'd plugged himself directly into an electrical outlet, and he cried out in horror and disbelief, and no little pain, as nails bulged from the tips of his fingers into cruelly hooked claws. His arms doubled in width, splitting the seams of shirt and lab coat, the pigmentation of his skin turning a deep blue as he sprouted hairs of the same color all over his body.

He tried to call for help, but what emerged from his mouth was a roar, like a lion's.

What he saw reflected in the polished steel of his refrigerator was no longer anything that resembled a man. Hank McCoy was now a beast.

Kitty and Siryn were shopping for food, as much as two kids could buy with the handful of bucks they had between them. In the blink of an eye, Kitty found herself at the far end of the aisle from her friend. Another blink, she was through a wall and across the street. Another blink, she was inside a tree and partially sunk into the ground. She tried to move, but hands and feet could find no purchase, and with a wail of horror she realized that she wasn't the one who was moving. She'd suddenly become so intangible that gravity itself had no more effect on her. The Earth was spinning on its axis and leaving her behind. Worse, it was also revolving in its orbit around the Sun. How long before she found herself floating in space, while the world that was her home went on its merry celestial way?

Siryn didn't know quite what had happened to her friend. She heard a yelp of surprise, caught a glimpse of Kitty disappearing ghostlike through the back wall of the store, and then she was shrieking across the full range of her accessible frequencies, calling forth a lunatic choir of howls from every dog within earshot as, at the same time, she managed to shatter every piece of glass in the store.

In a back room at Delamain's on the Rue Rogue in New Orleans' Vieux Carre-the French Quarter-the usual high-stakes game of poker was well under way, in defiance of the paddle-wheel casinos moored along the Riverwalk at the foot of Canal Street. The casinos had the flash, this game had substance, not so much because of the size of the bets but because of the quality of the players.

Remy LeBeau was a regular and one of the best. The cards, it was said, loved him the way he loved the women who invariably went out of their way to mix with his life, which could be a wild and risky thing. He was a thief by trade, and better at it than at cards, which was saying quite a lot. Stealing hearts was for him far more interesting and a whole lot more fun than stealing jewels or whatever, especially since the trick was always to make sure the stolen heart was never broken. In that regard, he had no equal. When the affair was over, his ladies loved him more than when they met.

This had been a fair night thus far in terms of winnings, but only because he'd been taking his measure of his fellow players. Now was the time to get down to business and make a killing.

Alas, this time, no joy. It was not to be.

He was dealer and from the deck came the joker, the jack of hearts, to complete his full house. But as he flicked it from his hands a spark popped between his fingertips, igniting the card not with fire but with some kind of energy that made it blaze brighter than a maritime searchlight and strike the table with force enough to split the thick wood right across the middle. At the same time, as the other players reeled back in shock and alarm, the other cards he held likewise ignited.

He had a split second to look at the others, his face marked with confusion, his free hand reaching out for help-but all they saw were his eyes blazing red as fresh blood, and so none of them reached back. Then his cards exploded, shattering the remains of the table to kindling and scattering everyone to the walls.

Mystique wasn't moving anymore. That wasn't a good thing. Like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz after Dorothy splashed her with water, she was melting. Flesh was liquefying, puddling beneath her, the shape of her skeleton starting to stand out in sharp relief. Soon, very soon, the bones would be exposed. Would she be aware of that? Would she be conscious to the end? She didn't believe that Stryker had an ounce of mercy in him, only that he was thorough. Whatever it felt like, the process would be final.

Magneto was still on his feet, glaring hawklike at the sealed door before him. He wasn't interested in the door any longer; he could breach it at his pleasure, with hardly any effort. His focus was on the configuration of the energy patterns that made up the Cerebro wave. Manipulating energy was what he did best. All he had to do was nail down the frequencies and signal characteristics of the wave...

He set up a countervailing pulse and watched the two collide. Close, but not quite there.

He made the necessary modifications and repeated the process, creating in effect a wall of white noise around the entire chamber, a resonance field that utterly neutralized the Cerebro wave at its source.

Just like that, all around him, there was silence.

Blessed silence.

Chapter Sixteen.

Inside Stryker's Cerebro chamber, Charles Xavier sat straighter in his wheelchair as the globe around him stopped spinning and the entire system progressed through its shutdown cycle.

"That's strange," he muttered, and paused a moment to consider why that simple phrase seemed to have two meanings for him. The obvious related to what was happening around him and to why Cerebro suddenly seemed to acquire a mind of its own. The other, disturbingly, also seemed to relate to that nagging, persistent sense of wrongness that had plagued him ever since his escape from Alkali Lake.

He looked suddenly and sharply at the little girl, as though to catch her by surprise. She looked apprehensive, indicating that the shutdown wasn't what she'd expected, either. Xavier made a comforting gesture, spoke some comforting words, to reassure her that he was still in control, that everything would be all right. That appeared to help, although her mismatched eyes of green and blue still glowed disconcertingly bright.

To work, he decided. Identify the problem and resolve it, that was the ticket.

Still, as he reached for Cerebro's controls, he found himself hesitating, he found his eyes returning to the girl, his thoughts reaching out to her through the veil that surrounded him. Something about her... felt...

He shook his head, dazzled by the afterimage of her eyes like blinkers in his mind. He knew what had to be done, and his hands moved with practiced skill over the controls. Someone was jamming the scanning wave. He had his suspicions who was responsible and, from there, what was necessary to break free.

Seeing him hard at work, the girl looked away, toward the massive door at the end of the gallery. This wasn't part of the program, and she didn't like it.

Magneto needed a little time to gather his strength. The battle against the Cerebro wave had been as hard for him as for the others and, in its way, had taken as great a toll.

At last he turned, and because she couldn't see him, wasn't aware of anything beyond herself, he allowed his face to show the sorrow Mystique's pitiful condition brought forth in him. Over their time together, he'd grown used to having her by his side, strong and utterly fearless, indomitable in will and surprisingly indestructible in form. He hated to think of her being vulnerable, and hurt.

He knelt beside her, unsure of what he'd find. Her eyes were opaque, as blank and lifeless as a doll's. She looked like a wax figure who'd been exposed to raw flame, so much of her lay in congealed folds beneath her body.

Then an aspect of her eyes changed. Still opaque, but no longer blank or lifeless, they took on the otherworldly depths of a shark's eyes.

She blinked, and color returned to those eyes, as it did to the whole of her body.

She flexed her muscles and stretched, to remind herself of how the parts of her all properly fit together, and flowed upward to a sitting position to look her companion in the eye.

He didn't say a word, nor did she. There was no need.

He stepped over the threshold and along the gallery to the scanning platform, roving his gaze until he'd taken stock of every part of the huge, circular space, impressed at the degree of accuracy that Stryker had achieved.

Xavier sat on his dais, facing a creature that made Magneto's lip curl in reflexive disgust. It had nothing to do with outward appearance. In his time, Magneto had seen more than his share of mutants who did not conform to baseline norms of human physiognomy. In his time, Magneto had also come face-to-face with living embodiments of what he chose to call evil, and that was what he was responding to here. The creature in the other chair, whatever his origins or upbringing, would have been right at home working by the side of Josef Mengele.

Under the circumstances, given what he had in mind, Magneto thought that quite appropriate.

"Hello, Charles," he said companionably.

The celestial song had ended. Jean was herself once more. She was whole, she was alive, more fulfilled than she could ever remember, and yet hollow and aching with a need more keen and primal than she had ever known, without the slightest clue how to answer it.

Instead, she woke up.