Chapter One

Chaz lowered his head into his hands. His knuckles protruded like a small mountain range. Everything had gone wrong. He couldn't fix anything, he thought to himself. In a sudden fury he wadded his papers into a ball and hurled it across his room. An engineer or architect would have recognised a truly revolutionary invention, but Chaz was a kid so bad with his hands he had failed shop class. He only sketched for the fun of it. He leaned back in his chair, rubbing at his eyes. A headache had developed a few days ago, throbbing somewhere just behind his forehead, and he couldn't shake it. It wasn't debilitating enough to be a migraine. He had tried antihistamines and there was no change, so it wasn't your average allergy headache. But the constant pressure was slowly driving him out of his mind.

He was days away from his 18th birthday, and it was almost certain he was the only person who knew or cared about that fact. He should never have 'come home' for the spring break. Faint shouting drifted through his bedroom wall. He had thought that his presence could keep the peace: they should have played nice in front of their own kid. If only the world worked like that. The Academy (he refused to think of it as 'Xavier's Institute for Gifted Youngsters') was a better place than this crowded, smelly apartment. He preferred the nightly routine of checking for Bobby's practical jokes to sliding his dresser in front of his bedroom door, 'just in case'.

The headache, the screaming drunks, and the sour, musty smell of the room were overwhelming. He needed his happy place. Slowly, he spread his knarled hands and searched inward for that familiar tingle, like powerful mouthwash. It came from his core, and slowly trickled through him. The tingle took the edge off his headache. Spreading out from his person, ripples like heat waves filled the room. It twisted and changed. And then there was no room.

There were trees, so many trees. He couldn't see the sky for the silvery greyish green of a thousand branches. He could hear the soft shushing sound of a faint drizzling rain, and the heavier sound of fat drops splashing from leaf to leaf. He could almost smell the wet earth. He was sat in a wood in the rain, sheltered under the branches of a huge tree, listening to the rain mute the world around him. The place under the boughs was like a cave, secluded. He could hear the occasional rustle of hedgehog and red squirrel, of birds darting through fallen leaves. The shush of rain was the white noise he needed to drown out the miserable reality of the so-called adults. Nothing was real but the woods and the rain. That glorious smell.

If anyone had been able to open the locked door and step into his room, they would have found themselves in a rainy forest instead of a teenager's bedroom. The illusion, seducing all five senses, remained steady until the skinny boy on the unmade bed slipped into a restless sleep. Then the trees and mist fell away, and all that was left was the teenager, his face taunt even in repose, wearing his jeans to bed with his sneakers close to hand. Happy birthday, Mirage… was his last thought as his own illusions lulled him asleep.

When Chaz woke up, the first thing he did was remove the earplugs and listen. His headache was still there, but it wasn't being antagonised. No sounds at all, no TV or fighting from below. It was Sunday. Probably his parents were both in a booze-secured coma. He came into the kitchen to scrounge for food. He found a carton of left over Chinese, not mouldy, and half a carton of apple juice. His dad was drooling in his sleep on the couch. Suddenly, something clicked in his mind, something that had been building in his head for almost a decade. The bloated creature on the couch meant nothing to him. Neither did the wasted woman passed out in the other bedroom. No fear or regret or anger or love. It clicked in his head that this morning, he was 18. Emancipated. He could join the army, vote, get arrested. The world suddenly opened before him. There was not just this shack and the Academy. There was the whole world.

The only thing he left in the apartment was a half used pad of graph paper.

Behind the squalid shack he grew up in, camouflaged by overgrown weeds and brambles, there was a dilapidated old shed, long bereft of window panes and a roof. A rusted chain swung from the old door, which Chaz pulled aside. Inside, he had hidden his treasures. His duffel bag landed with a thud in the dirt floor, and he dug out his few precious things from under bits of wood and old shovels. A silver dollar his grandfather Red Eagle had given him before he died, from the 1850s. Red Eagle said an ancestor had taken it from Custer's corpse, but he had said this with a wink and a grin. There was also a note written by a girl who liked him in the 5th grade. It was the only nice thing anyone had said about him between Red Eagle dying and finding the Academy. Jubilee said on the first day he was alright- which he later learned was, from her, very high praise.

Chaz draped an antique chain with a single pearl around his neck. It was his grandmother's. He had stolen it from her jewellery box during a visit to the old folks' home, because he had seen his mother doing the same. The things his mother had taken had gradually disappeared while the booze kept coming in, but Chaz had kept the pearl and when he looked at it, he remembered his grandmother remembering him.

Under a sheet of half-rusted corrugated tin was his pride and joy: his dirt bike. It was a faded canary yellow and very dirty but completely sound and he knew, thanks to Cyclops, how to drive it. He had helped fixed the engine himself (with a great deal of help and guidance from Beast and Cyclops), and hid it from his parents who would have sold it while he was away. He tried the ignition and it burst into life. The nasal roar of the engine wasn't going to help his headache but the wind in his hair would.

With his gym uniform looking conveniently like motorcycle leathers, he sealed his suitcase (actually an army issue duffel bag) and walked the dirt bike to the gravel road. The gravel led to town, which led to the highway, which led to the interstate. And who knew where that would lead?