X-Men(tm) The Last Stand Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  Available from Titan Books…

  Also available from Del Rey Books

  Copyright Page

  The moment her best friend died, Jean Grey first dreamed of fire, and dancing among the stars.

  Neighbors since they were born, inseparable once they could crawl, she and Annie Malcolm shared toys and sandboxes, secrets and dreams, their parents, their entire lives. They had ten years together.

  They never saw the car that brought that to an end.

  Blind curve, guy’s in a hurry, Annie feeling competitive, totally focused on the Frisbee Jean had thrown. Reacting, not thinking, no consideration of anything but the prize, as a wayward breeze scooped the plastic disk up just beyond her reach. Tantalizing, infuriating, beyond wicked, to come so close and then fall short. For Annie, that was unacceptable.

  She made a spectacular catch. Jean cheered.

  Her smile was so special, a flash of pure delight that burned itself indelibly on Jean’s memory.

  Then she was gone, wiped away so suddenly, so completely, it was almost as though she’d never been, thrown aside like a sackcloth dummy. There was a flash of shape and color, something big and powerful moving too fast to properly register—afterwards, when Jean tried to describe the vehicle to the police, what came out was more monster than machine. It was the first time—the only time—that her perfect memory ever failed her.

  Or perhaps it was just that she didn’t care about the car.

  She heard a squeal as the driver fought for control, stomping on his brakes too late to make a difference, then the roar of an accelerating engine rapidly fading in the distance, as shock gave way to panic and he decided to save himself instead.

  Jean had eyes only for her friend, draped against the wall of piled fieldstone that formed the property line along River Road. Annie lay unmoving, all crumpled and bloody and broken.

  Sobbing, face twisted with denial, Jean dropped to her knees, hands trembling as she reached out, not a sound issuing from her lips save Annie’s name—although every family in the neighborhood claimed later that they heard her piercing scream of anguish and horror. She repeated the name over and over, like a mantra, as if simply by saying the word she could anchor spirit to flesh and keep her friend from slipping away.

  Then, she heard Annie call her name.

  Instinct guided her to take a hand in both of hers, and Jean cried out again, a hoarse coughing exclamation that gave voice to all the pain balled up inside her friend. There were bursts of ice and fire along one side, scrapes and busted ribs, and a burning within one arm that told Jean it too was broken, and more pain where Annie had cracked her skull against one of the stones. That was the source of a lot of the blood, painting her face and now Jean as well as she stroked Annie’s brow and tried to kiss the pain away. There was a dull ache near the bottom of her back, a gaping hollowness in the center of her chest. With a start, Jean realized she’d forgotten to breathe, and with a frantic gulp of air realized to her horror that Annie couldn’t.

  Her back was broken.

  She couldn’t bear to look anymore and closed her eyes—only that didn’t help. Instead, it simply took her somewhere else.

  Her own heart was a trip-hammer, pounding too hard and fast for her to separate the beats, her breath coming in shallow gasps that matched its cadence, like an animal in a terror trance, standing helpless before the predator who seeks its life. That made Jean angry; she hated being afraid and refused to be a victim, even of fate itself.

  She thought at first she’d blacked out, because around her all was darkness. And then, of course, she assumed hallucinations as images rolled towards her out of that darkness, blurry in the distance, resolving as they moved closer into visions of people and places. She saw herself, arms thrown straight up as though signaling a touchdown, thought (absurdly) how familiar those clothes looked, until she realized she was wearing them now and she was looking at herself only moments ago, celebrating Annie’s catch.

  Her mind took the connection a step further; she looked more closely at the other images floating past her and she knew that they were Annie’s memories.

  They seemed to be coming from a central source, like stars being spun clear of the core of a spiral galaxy. Without hesitation she plunged into the heart of that glorious radiance, face transfixed with awe and wonder at the unimaginable myriad of colors and shapes that represented all of her friend’s life-experience. She couldn’t help grinning at the recognition of how many of them seemed to relate to her, and how richly textured they were.

  She was still thinking in purely human terms and assumed that when she reached the heart of the radiance, she’d be this incredibly tiny dust mote facing some unimaginably huge representation of Annie. Instead, she came to her as an equal—only her body appeared wholly solid, whereas Annie’s was boiling away at the edges.

  Aghast, Jean watched a string of memories—some birthday or other, a trip to grandma’s, boring days at school—tumble off into the distance until they were gone, swallowed up in darkness. Again operating from an instinct she didn’t understand, Jean reached out to try to catch them, but she might as well have been a ghost herself, grabbing at the wind. They wouldn’t be snared, couldn’t be held.

  She heard Annie call her name.

  They both knew what was happening; neither dared say it aloud.

  “Don’t be scared, Annie,” Jean said.

  “Show me how, ’kay?”

  “You’ve got to hold on, Annie, you can’t give up.”

  “I’m broken, Jean. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Stop it! Don’t you dare talk like that, I won’t let you go!”

  The passion surprised them both, a fierce rage that outlined Jean, just for a moment, in a corona of fire, like a star casting forth a solar flare. The fire plunged into Annie, making her gasp with surprise as her fading radiance glowed more brightly.

  “See,” Jean cried triumphantly. “See! I can help! I can save you!”

  But Annie knew better.

  “It isn’t making a difference, Jean, not so it matters.”

  “Shut up, I’m working here.”

  “Do you have a clue what you’re doing?” Annie asked.

  “Making it up as I go. What do you care, so long as you come out all right?”

  “Ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Watch me.”

  “No, Jean,” Annie said, “watch me.”

  Jean didn’t want to, but Annie was by far the more determined of the two, always had been, with a focus (stubbornness, some said) that was legendary. They were still of the same size, a pair of galaxies, islands of breathtaking light and color, all by themselves against the backdrop of infinity. Now though, while Jean remained essentially coherent, Annie had spun off so much quanta that she was translucent. Yet she was visibly the more dynamic of the two—the part of her that remained burned far more brightly than it should, because Jean was sustaining it with her own energies. The consequence was that Jean’s own life-glow had dimmed considerably.

  “Let me go,” Annie said quietly.

  “No.” Jean could be just as muleheaded.

  “Please.”

  “You’re my best friend.”

  “Can you make me better?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you f
ix the all of me that’s broken? Can you find the all of me that’s lost?” Annie waved a barely corporeal arm to indicate what remained of her body, the mass of imagery cascading ever faster into oblivion.

  Jean’s face twisted with a grief she’d never imagined, didn’t think could possibly be endured.

  “I. Don’t. Know. How!” And with that terrible admission, her face went still with resolve. She would find a way, no matter what it took. She refused to accept that she couldn’t.

  “You can’t stay,” Annie told her.

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “Do you want to die, too? Look at yourself, Jean.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I can barely see you. You’ve poured so much light into me, yours is almost gone. If you give me all your strength, how will you find your way home?”

  “We’re going home together.”

  “No.”

  With that, Annie lunged forward, catching Jean by surprise in an embrace that carried with it every bit of love and affection, every remaining aspect of their shared lives. She thrust both hands into the core of Jean’s being and returned the strength Jean had given her.

  Too much power, too fast! It burst outward like a star going supernova, impossibly—for that single flash of time—turning a totality of darkness into an absolute of light. Against such a display, Annie was too small to even quantify.

  For Jean, this was beyond revelation. She understood none of it, on any level. The emotions were too primal for a child’s mind to comprehend, and she had no resources of intellect or spirit that could give her even a hope of coping. She’d been cast into a maelstrom and knew only enough to hold fast to herself until it ran its course, praying fate was smiling on her enough to survive.

  She thought the darkness would return but the light remained, as though someone had just lit the match of Creation within her, intoned those fateful first words of Genesis. Around her, it seemed as if tangible shapes began to gradually assert themselves, although in reality only the merest fraction of a second had passed. She couldn’t help but be fascinated, as motes resolved themselves into electrons and protons and neutrons, as these various particles bound themselves into atoms and those atoms into molecules, growing ever larger and more wondrously complex as they evolved into increasingly intricate combinations. And then, with the blink of an inner eye, she found herself looking at a road, where a moment before had been a vast plain of scattered particles defined more by the subatomic spaces between them than the illusion of solidity they created.

  There was a sour smell to the air, the scorched residue of burned rubber, and a metallic taste in her mouth she knew was blood. Not her own; this was a sense memory of Annie’s, and with that realization came the bone-deep certainty that none of what she’d just experienced had been a dream. All of it had actually happened, and as if to add a stamp of authenticity to the thought, came that last, wondrous image of Annie’s grin.

  Jean’s tears burned scalding hot against her cheeks, scoring channels that would mark her always, of that she was sure. She couldn’t stop crying. In part it was because of her lost friend, lying so still in her arms, a look of peace on her face, replacing the one of shock and outraged disbelief that had been there before. But also, it was for what had happened to Jean herself, and for all that was to come.

  She heard more voices, cries and calls from the surrounding houses, but paid them no attention. What mattered so much more was the richer symphony inside her head, composed of not simply what was said aloud, but also what was thought and felt.

  Annie’s mother, gripped by a terror that would never leave her. Jean’s own mom, feeling that selfsame spike of anguish at the sight of her daughter’s bloody face, giving way immediately to a sense of heartfelt relief. That had been Jean’s doing, inadvertently. She’d wanted Mom to know she was all right and just like that, the message was sent, not so much as a string of words, like speech, but more a complete certainty.

  Hands took hold of her, gentle as could be, and she howled with what everyone assumed was anguish over her friend’s death. They couldn’t be more wrong. She was discovering that windows opened aren’t so easily closed, and that proximity and physical contact amplified the ambient psychic noise around her to an unbearable degree. Everywhere she turned, there was another life, in all its myriad textures, crashing down on her like a rogue wave, sucking her into a riptide undertow that refused to let her come up for air, threatening to overwhelm her own psyche—more fragile from this trauma than she could know—with all of theirs.

  Her psyche did what it had to for its own survival. Yet as she collapsed into what was later described as a fugue state brought on by extreme trauma, the last image that came to her was a memory of her body in Annie’s soul, wreathed in flame, turning the darkness of forever into magnificent, glorious light, and the certainty that somehow she had touched the very stars.

  1985

  Jean was reading up in her room when she heard them talking. One of her favorite authors, one of her favorite books, one of her favorite scenes: the unveiling of the Overlords from Arthur C. Clarke’s classic Childhood’s End. Aliens who’d effectively ruled the Earth in peace and prosperity for a human generation while keeping their true features hidden behind space armor, deciding at long last that humanity had matured to the point where they could look upon their friends and not be afraid. The joke being, of course, that the Overlords turned out to be the spitting image (horned heads, skeletal wings, cloven hooves and tail) of the classic cultural depiction of Satan.

  Nice ride, she thought, seeing it through the mind’s eye of some neighbors, pulling a memory from one of them to more properly identify it as a Mercedes-Benz Maybach saloon car, evidently some kind of classic. She didn’t care much for cars. But she caught a resonance from one of the occupants that made her quirk an eyebrow in fascination, a surprisingly adult gesture for a girl of such ostensibly tender years. Given his history and the emotional memories held on a very tight leash, she wondered why he’d possess a German-made car. Spitting in the face of the past, perhaps? She considered probing further but even that cursory stroke of his thoughts had left her with a skull-splitting headache. Neither of the men, she realized, much liked psychic intruders.

  They were expected. She picked that up from her parents right away, bothered a little that she hadn’t noticed earlier. It was second nature to pry; minds for her had quickly become so transparent that it was like walking through a world made of glass. Almost nothing could be hidden from her, and so much of it was stuff that was so banal, so beyond boring—occasionally so disgusting—that she’d had to remind herself, then force herself, more and more often lately, to mind her own damn business.

  She put the novel back on its shelf, pausing a moment to caress the spine of the one beside it, James Blish’s equally classic A Case of Conscience, and beyond that Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy. She’d always enjoyed them; now, though, they had resonances that she found comforting while sending chills skittering through her heart at the same time.

  She heard a voice, in her thoughts, not her ears, although the man in the car spoke aloud.

  “I still don’t know why we’re here, Charles. Couldn’t you just make them say yes?”

  She didn’t much like that, and stepped to her window to see for herself who’d come to meet her parents.

  She saw a man, thirtysomething and prematurely bald, eminently respectable in a bespoke suit. Hawklike features, piercing eyes, a born hunter. He carried himself with the easy grace of an athlete, comfortable in his strength, confident of his abilities. There was a twist of sorrow to what little of his inner self she could divine, a sense around the edges that he had been places and done things substantially at odds with his upright demeanor. He’d been to war, she realized, when he was very young; he’d needed to prove something to himself, and it had left its mark. First impression, she liked him.

  His words cemented the feeling. “Of all people,” he said to his companion, “I
would expect you to understand my feelings about misuse of power.”

  The second man emerged and the contrast couldn’t have been more pronounced. Dress and manner, as well as accent, suggested a European background. The color of his suit made Jean smile. Not many men would dare to wear royal purple, but he made it work. It was like watching a pair of warrior princes take the field, and she had a sense that she was looking at two men who, in their own way, were as close as she’d been with Annie.

  “‘Power corrupts,’ and all that,” said the taller man, the European, with the air of someone who’d had this discussion too many times. “Yes, Charles, I know. When will you stop lecturing me?”

  “When you start listening?” Charles replied easily, using a very slight smile to take the edge off words that he meant seriously.

  “We’re not going to meet every one of them in person, are we?”

  “No, Erik. This one is special.”

  Jean didn’t like the sound of that either and decided to let her attention drift. Mr. Pash across the street was mowing his lawn, wrestling with a plot point of his latest novel, while next door Mr. Lee was watering his prize roses. The scene couldn’t be more normal, yet Jean hugged herself the way you do when you sense a big storm building off in the mountains, suddenly fearful that afternoon peace wouldn’t last.

  Ghosting her perceptions over to the periphery of her parents’, she caught all the appropriate introductions: the bald man was Charles Xavier; the other, his friend and colleague, Erik Lensherr. Mom ushered them into Dad’s study, where she’d already set out a fully laden tea tray.

  “It looks wonderful,” she said, once everyone was settled, gesturing towards the pile of brochures that had arrived much earlier. “What a beautiful campus. And Salem Center’s only an hour and change down the Taconic; it’s not like Jean’s going to the far side of the moon.”

  “The brochure is great,” her husband agreed. He was standing behind his desk, so that their guests couldn’t help seeing the wall of diplomas and awards that went with being a tenured professor at a major independent college. “But I’m concerned about Jean. What about her…illness?”