Half Lit World

by XanderDG

A falling hero. A forgotten goddess. A Crimson King. At the edge of history, the X-Men discover that the world they have worked so long to defend is a world half lit.

3. The Broken Surface

Synopsis: Events begin to converge as Logan mines the library's
secrets, Kitty has lunch with a familiar redhead and Xavier
receives an ominous warning.

Disclaimer: DC Comics, Marvel Comics and Stephen King own
and control many of the characters and situations below -- they
are used here solely for good clean fun. Due to violence,
language and mature themes, the project should be considered
PG-13. Feedback is my heroin, so drop me a line at
Xanderdg@hotmail.com and tell me what you think. Many thanks
to Penny Sue and Alex SisterWolf for editorial assistance.

The previous chapters are collected at the Fonts of Wisdom
(http://home.att.net/~lubakmetyk/), in the Prince of
Dreams archive (http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/AlexSisterWolf/)
and right here in the X-Men section of fanfiction.net.
___________________________________________________________________

X-Men: Half Lit World

by

Alexander Greenfield

Chapter II: The Broken Surface

1

He was not a dexterous boy even under the best
circumstances. At the tail end of a growth spurt that had taken
him to the towering height of five-foot-seven, Kenny Thompson
sometimes found it difficult to walk up stairs without tripping.
His knees and elbows were constantly scraped up, and his mother
covered the wounds in a thick goo of neosporin that caused his
clothes to adhere awkwardly to his skin. If he didn't know any
better, Kenny might think that his mother and father quietly
assisted in making him the laughingstock of Weschester High --
that they secretly enjoyed his social ostracization. Kenny
grimaced and continued his sewing. The outfit would soon be
done, and then we would see just who was dependent on whom.

Kenny's finger was cut by the sewing needle, but in truth,
he didn't mind the pain. He'd read about so-called "secret
cutting," about how some kids his age would carve on themselves
in order to feel something, to feel anything, but Kenny didn't
need that. He felt everything, constantly. More and more, his
emotions seemed to dominate every facet of his daily experience.
Weeks ago, just after the incident with Bruce Moyers in the hall,
he was sitting in the living room watching "Dawson's Creek" when
something on the show brought him to tears. His parents were
sitting as they always did, together but apart, one reading the
paper, the other's nose deep in a book when tears began flowing
out of their son's unnoticed eyes. They came harder and harder
as Joey and Dawson broke up or got back together, and it was all
Kenny could do to keep from bawling like a baby.

His parents only noticed when the power began to flicker.
The lights dimmed imperceptibly, and Kenny stood and departed
as quietly as he could. By the time he got to the hall, he was
crying desperately over the travail of the kids in Capeside, and
he heard a loud clank as the power in the house cut out. His
father cursed, and Kenny felt a surge of anger that the old man
cared more about his reading lamp than having a conversation with
his son. Then there was another, louder noise in the living room
and the lights in the house began to strobe in syncopated rhythm
with the boy's pulse. Something popped deep in the walls, and
glass broke violently. His mother screamed, and his father began
a low moaning that didn't stop until they arrived at the Salem
Center Presbyterian twenty minutes later. Kenny tried to hide
in the bathroom, to get away, to control himself, but his mother
charged in behind him. She grabbed a raft of towels from under
the sink and turned to look down at him. Kenny curled beside
the toilet.

"Get a hold of yourself. Your father's just had a little
accident and we have to get him to the hospital." Her face was
strange and ethereal in the flickering light. "Somebody's going
to be sued over this."

What frightened Kenny the most was not the blood
speckling his mother's shirt, nor the way she pulled towels
from the cupboard -- how many could she possibly need? What
scared the shivering boy the most was her coldly rational tone.
She acted as though she could apply some ointment to her
husband's wounds, give a perfunctory kiss and everything would
be fine. She finally got all of the towels together, and
she told Kenny to help carry them. When he got to the living
room, he saw why they needed so many.

Mother kept him home from school while father was in the
ICU. The light had exploded with such force and heat that the
glass was molten by the time it hit his face only feet away.
Kenny felt guilty that instead of any true concern for his old
man all he really hoped was that upon his return to Weschester he
would be given a free pass for at least a few weeks -- that the
taunts and the teasing would lessen out of respect for the
ordeal the boy had gotten through. Of course, nothing turned
out as he hoped.

The story of the accident had already festered and evolved
among the students. Kenny supposed that his mother must have
told Margaret Lancaster, who told Sara Moyers, and so on. The
beating Bruce and his buddies dished out was bad, equal parts
vengeance for the hallway incident and mindless sport. They did
not wait around a dark corner for the small boy. They beat
the hell out of him right in the cafeteria while the other kids
watched. Nobody tried to intervene, and Kenny even noticed
members of the faculty slink away, attempting to avoid notice.
They beat him from one end of the dining hall to the other, and
when Kenny finally crawled out the rear door, he heard someone
use the word for the first time.

"Fuck off and die, mutie!"

He did not. A week after the beating, he returned to
school. He kept his head down, did his homework, and did not
respond to any taunting. Kenny's own family regarded him with
suspicion, as though he were tainted by an indefinable scent. It
was only a short time before Kenny began his sewing project. The
die had been cast.

The boy looked at the cut on his finger and sighed. Now, at
the conclusion of the project, his fingers were covered in a
latticework of white scars. Kenny was not a stupid boy. He
skipped two grades over the years, and never saw anything other
than the letter "A" on his report cards. He knew full well what
was happening to him. The Dateline NBC special filled in the
blanks -- powers begin manifesting during puberty; there is
generally antisocial behavior; etcetera, etcetera; blah, blah.
The kids in school, his parents, everyone smelled it on him like
dogs in a pack. Kenny was different. Kenny was a mutant.

The bulb of the lamp on his desk was removed, and Kenny
held his bleeding index finger underneath the open socket. With a
smell of ozone and a flash of bluish light, a thin crackle of
current cauterized the laceration. Kenny went back to his sewing.
This was the last piece, and the timing couldn't be more perfect.
His father and mother would be sitting down at the breakfast table,
talking in the hushed tones they were using more and more often.
Kenny would finish his little bit of home economics homework
here, then he would try it on. He would go downstairs and give
mom and dad a piece of his mind about the way they had been
acting of late. He would remind them that parents had a
responsibility, no matter what Stone Philips said about the menace
in America's homes. He would make absolutely clear that they
would live up to their parental obligations from now on or there
would be hell to pay.

Then Kenny Thompson would go and meet the school bus.
Today, he had no intention of bringing his books.

2

Once one got down as far as the eight hundred block,
Graymalkin Lane became the land of the upwardly mobile. Gone
were the palatial estates. They were replaced by the peculiar and
random architecture of suburban New York. Colonials rested next
to Tudors which were adjacent to the odd Adobe. Junior execs
from the city bought these homes as an investment while they
climbed the corporate ladder. Turnover in the neighborhood was
high, and even today there were no less than two moving vans on
the street.

"Beamers and Volvos and Saabs, oh my," Kitty muttered.
She walked quickly down the road under the gray sky. Though it
was late this year, she could finally taste winter in the chilly air.
She pulled her parka close around her and smiled despite herself.
There was something delicious in a secret. Everyone was so close
to each other at Xavier's that Kitty often had the strange sensation
of losing herself in the crowd. She supposed that this was at least
partly the byproduct of living among the most concentrated group
of telepaths in the world. Though it was a bit more than two miles
into Salem Center proper, she hadn't asked for a car, preferring
instead to walk -- and to avoid any questions that her trip might
raise.

It's not that she would lie if any of her fellow X-Men asked
what she was doing, but she held no great desire to deal with the
question. Super hero groups other than the Fantastic Four or the
Avengers *had* to work in secret because their very existence
tended to violate dozens of laws. Sure, the Republicans wanted
you to keep and bear the biggest arms you could, but God forbid
you were born with an ability that set you apart and you wanted to
hang around with your peers. Subversive mutant militias, indeed.
Still, reality was what it was, and telling Ororo or Jean that she
planned to sit with a stranger and tell her life story would be met
with thorny silence at best. Of anyone, only Scott might
understand the desire for a connection beyond the claustrophobic
mansion, but even he would tell her that some reporter was not the
most pragmatic choice for a confidant. It had been awkward
enough when the young writer returned her call.

She had been standing in the shower following a
particularly strenuous training session in the Danger Room.
Professor X had recently become obsessed with team building
exercises, and Kitty found them exhausting both physically and
emotionally. There were too many lone wolfs in this incarnation
of the X-Men, too much history between the members. It seemed
to Kitty that they would never find any cohesion, but that is what
people always said about new groupings. Xavier had always made
them work before when push came to shove before. Still, Kitty
was weary. She hung her head low and let the scalding water
cascade over her.

"Phone call, Kitty," said an English accent inside her
Midwestern mind. Kitty jumped. Even after all these years,
someone else's thoughts flitting through her consciousness gave
her the heebie-geebies. It wasn't as though it were even a voice to
hear. Instead, it was a combination of spoken language colored by
the mental equivalent of Elizabeth Braddock's elegant speaking
voice, and misty shadow images no more substantial than the
steam from the shower. Kitty caught hints of the way the phone
felt in Betsy's hand, the way the hardwood smelled in the front
room. She received unfamiliar intonations of the caller's voice
asking for her, and even more opaque echoes of the everyday
things on Betsy's mind -- laundry day, ate too much, gotta work
out.

"Who is it?" Kitty asked aloud, finding it easier than trying
to project her thoughts. Everything was twisted in telepathic
communication. She was vaguely aware of the way Betsy's throat
felt when she asked the caller's identity, but she couldn't hear the
words. It occurred to her to wonder if Betsy also had a peripheral
awareness of her own physicality; could she feel the water running
down Kitty's face?

"It's a woman," came the response. "Her name is Rose
Walker. She's returning your call."

"Tell her just a sec," Kitty thought. She smiled broadly
and turned off the water, reaching to retrieve her towel. For only a
fraction of a second, she could feel Betsy's curiosity before the
older woman left her mind. Kitty dried off and took the call in the
small locker area off the showers.

The conversation itself was brief but easy. Kitty and Rose
struck an immediate and light rapport, both of them peppering
their repartee with sarcastic asides and ironic patter. They quickly
set a lunch for later in the week. Kitty began dressing and thought
about how long it had been since she just sat and talked with a
regular person -- with someone who did not don costume and try to
save the world every third day.

Almost in response to this last thought, Betsy came in
wearing her full regalia. She was a beautiful, exotic woman with
flowing purple hair and a tattooed face. Her costume left little to
the imagination, but few hero chicks' did these days for reasons
that Kitty could not fully explain. As Psylocke, Betsy was both
telepathic and an assassin of some considerable cunning. Kitty
had skills of her own in that regard, and in their respective
personas the women had tangled a time or two. Despite this, they
generally shared a respectful congeniality between them, the
byproduct of being outsiders even amongst outsiders.

The women nodded hello, and Psylocke went over to the
mats and began stretching out as Kitty finished dressing. She
tossed her towel into the overflowing linen basket. A sign hung
over it indicating who was on laundry rotation. Kitty read the
legend and groaned to herself.

"Gambit?" Betsy asked.

"Of course. 'Ain't a man's place ta be t'inking 'bout
washin' da cloves.'"

Psylocke laughed softly. "So . . . who was that, then?"

"Huh?"

"On the phone," she continued. Kitty arched her eyebrows,
and Betsy held up her hands in a non-confrontational gesture.
"Don't mean to be nosy. It's just that you got so excited when you
heard who it was."

"No big deal," she replied a bit too quickly. "Just a friend
from outside." Kitty left the room with Psylocke looking after her.

Graymalkin finally ran into Canal Street, and Kitty turned
toward town. She could see her breath in the frosty air, and the
sun seemed distant through naked trees. Early winter was one of
her favorite times of the year -- it was quiet even in superhero
circles. Kitty supposed that villains took vacations for Christmas,
Hanukkah or Kwanza just like everybody else. She giggled at her
image of Doctor Doom on vacation in Orlando wearing a pair of
Mickey's ears for a moment before she caught sight of a bright
yellow sign.

There were always lost pet notices on phone poles along
the sidewalk. "We Miss Charlie Very Much!" one declared above
a picture of a large and friendly looking orange cat. "Please Help
Us Find Him!" No matter how hard-hearted she thought she had
become, these always got to Kitty. They jolted her back to her
childhood outside of Chicago. Her father always took it as a
matter of pride that the family dog, Bogie never needed to wear a
leash. Despite Kitty and her mother constantly begging him to put
a collar on the big mutt, Mister Pryde was as good as his name.

One afternoon on a walk the inevitable happened. Another
dog whose arrogant owner thought of leashes as a weakness ran for
Bogie and the two animals tore each other apart. Her father stood
screaming futility, and in the years since Kitty realized that it was
the first time she saw her dad as fallible. That it was the first
time she felt contempt for him was something she still had not
completely admitted. All of the good training in the world did not
stop Bogie from limping away into the woods. Even at seven years
old Kitty knew that her best friend had gone away to die, but she
still helped her mother put signs up all over the neighborhood
begging for somebody, anybody to help find their pet. The Pryde
household never had another animal.

The sign that caught Kitty's attention now was the brightest
fluorescent yellow she had ever seen. It was just shy of painful to
look at, the glare made the words difficult to read. Indeed, there
was a moment of disconnection before she realized that the letters
(*symbols*) were upside down.

Kitty shook her head, trying to clear it. There was nothing
suspicious about the colorful poster. She tilted her head to read
the inverted lettering:

CARNEY IS MISSING. HE'S A HECKUVA DOG LIKE YOUR
KIND WON'T FIND AGAIN. CARNEY'S A GEM. IF YOU
SEE OUR RED DOG CARNEY DO CALL US HEAR?

There was a number below (above) the upside-down lettering.
Kitty stood looking at the announcement, captivated, but unsure
why. There was something to it, something unusual, but the
reasons why were just beyond her grasp. At last, she decided to
right the poster so that everyone could help to find that gem of a
dog, Carney.

She reached up to pull the paper off the pole and turn it
around, and the moment her fingers touched the leaflet, she felt
jarred, like there was an earthquake, a small one, perceptible only
to pets. Her eyes were not deceiving her. Kitty Pryde, mutant and
member of the X-Men was standing on a cold December day
pulling a yellow sheet of paper off a telephone pole. Yet her
fingers were telling her something entirely different. She was not
touching paper, she was touching something oily and old and
scented with damnation and wrongness. Kitty was nauseous and
the world wrinkled like paper around her while she touched the
rubbery yellow thing that was paper but not paper and Kitty
wanted to use her power to phase to escape to be free of this thing
this gate and the low men but the festering thing was a doorway
you didn't want to go through and you ought to beware to beware
to find the breaker you are the breaker Kitty the breaker to end all

"Are you all right, young lady?"

Kitty turned to look at an elderly woman in brightly
colored sweat pants. She had broken away from two friends
standing several feet away on the sidewalk, and she looked at the
young woman with deep concern. Kitty blinked and looked back at
the phone pole. She was holding the yellow paper, but it wasn't
any brighter than the typical legal pad. Truthfully, when she
looked around the neighborhood, the posters were everywhere.
Somebody just wanted their dog back. She let the poster go and
took a deep breath.

"Are you all right?" The old woman looked back at her
friends for a moment, then up at Kitty.

"Yes, ma'am. I'm fine. I'm okay." It sounded as though
she were convincing herself. The old woman smiled convivially.

"Good, good. You looked as though you were on a bit of a
vacation, my duck."

"I guess I'm back. Do you know the time?" The woman
looked at her watch and told Kitty, and the young woman was
stunned. She had left early, planning to do some shopping before
her lunch, now she had less than fifteen minutes left. She thanked
the woman and ran the rest of the way into Salem Center.

As she moved, she felt the first wet flakes of snow against
her face, and she smiled, quickly forgetting the experience at the
telephone pole. Besides, she was right, there were plenty of the
yellow signs all over the place now. Kitty never wondered why
they were all upside down.

3

The Initiate's lungs felt as though they were going to
explode. He scraped and clawed at the earth, using all of his
strength to climb upwards. He hadn't taken a breath in what felt
like an eternity, but his conditioning was the equal of any Olympic
athlete. He knew that he had easily another minute-and-a-half
before he was even in the territory of his own personal best.
Nonetheless, he dug through the earth at a pace that would have
been an expression of terror in another man. It pleased the Initiate
that he could hear panic deep in his own consciousness, back in
the lizard brain, but he had beaten it down. Discipline could do
that. Discipline and whispered promises in the dark.

Of course he knew what the third initiation of the Hellfire
Club was supposed to do for those who survived its petty rigors.
Lifting the veil of modern life was a noble enough endeavor, but
the Initiate knew far more than anything digging free from a hole
in the ground could teach. The third degree was only another
signpost on his broader quest. A small enemy to be defeated and
learned from. The Initiate kept his wits about him and dug his way
upwards, preparing to be reborn into blackest Hellfire.

There was a story that when Buddha was born, he stood
and looked around the grim delivery room. He smiled a wide and
toothless baby's grin and announced to all who had gathered that
this was the life and world in which he would become enlightened.
The Initiate knew nothing about enlightenment, but he did
comprehend something of purpose. The soothing voice he listened
to in the quiet darkness of his dreams told him things about the
world he would soon be born into. It told him that there were
words that must be spoken. The Initiate continued to dig upwards,
bourne on by the strength of a zealot.

It was cold in the Adirondacks at this time of year, and the
Inner Circle stood close together, watching the pit. It had been
used for this ritual since the Club first arrived in America in the
eighteenth century, but it was never meant to be utilized with the
temperature below freezing. Like any other material, dirt becomes
less malleable when frozen, and that could mean death to someone
attempting to dig through it. Sebastian Shaw nodded to himself
and drew the Black Queen closer, sharing her warmth. The third
degree was meant to test the mettle of those who attempted it, and
those who could not be reborn were doomed to one darkness or
another anyway. The Initiate showed courage when he insisted on
taking the test as soon as it was offered to him; now it was time to
see his determination bear fruit.

The frigid wind brought the scent of pine and soft maple
with it. Regardless of the outcome of the initiation, Shaw intended
to cut down a Christmas tree with his own two hands. The Black
Queen made endless fun of him for his insistence upon blanketing
the Club with the trappings of the season. He always responded
with the excuse that enough of the heavily contributing members
liked the decor that it was worth the organization's while to give
the people what they wanted. The truth of his reasoning was quite
different, though. Long after the red-haired beauty had drifted off
to sleep, Shaw would quietly admit to himself that he missed the
innocence that Christmas brought with it.

Innocence and belief. These were the very qualities that
the initiations of the Hellfire Club were meant to expose and
expel. As he watched the deep pit filled with black earth imported
from Malta, Shaw realized that the Initiate was giving up a great
deal for the Club. In some ways the rebirth his former enemy was
going through was more profound than his own had been. When
the time was right, the two might be brothers born of shared
crushing experience.

At last, the dirt pit moved, a subtle undulation blooming
from underneath. The Bishops sighed audibly in relief, and Shaw
even felt Madelyne relax a bit under his arm. The Black King
continued to look on with his studied countenance of indifference,
appearing to be no more involved with this initiation than he was
in a conversation with the architects and contractors building the
Club's new home, or perhaps a game of bridge. Inside, he was
elated if not entirely surprised by the success of the Initiate.

The pit rippled again, and a hand thrust up from the bitter
ground. A memory flitted across Shaw's mind. He was young, not
yet even a teenager when he and Roger Wilkins snuck into the
back of the Rialto in South Philly back in Sixty-Eight. All the
older kids had been talking about the picture for weeks, but
Sebastian and Roger could not find a way in to save their lives.
Finally they got in the back, and Shaw could see that it had been
worth the wait. In the decades since, the Black King had built and
lost several empires. He had seen things that would drive weaker
souls completely insane and shrugged them off like nothing. In all
that time, almost forty years now, there was still little that scared
him more than seeing "Night of the Living Dead" that first time.

Another arm burst forth, followed by the Initiate's torso.
The Knights surged forward to perform their appointed task, but
the shivering man waived them away. He stood naked in the
freezing night and strode to stand before Shaw and the Queens.

"You have died and been buried twelve feet and six below
the sacred earth of womb and heart. Now you stand reborn," said
the Black King of the Hellfire Club. "What say you?"

The Initiate stepped back and slowly looked at each
member of the Inner Circle in turn. Finally, his eyes settled on his
master and sponsor, Shaw. He smiled, caught up in events that
were inexorably in motion.

"I am Osiris, slain and risen," the Initiate said. "My time
has come at last."

4

The flare sparked to life, bathing the alcove in a pale,
incendiary glow. Over the centuries, millennia really, the sandstone
darkened and hard desert sand scoured pits into the rock even this
far beneath the ground. Despite the excoriation of age, though, the
seemingly delicate carving still stood out in sharp contrast with the
obsidian rear wall. There were even flakes of the silver used to
paint the carving in, though most of this had been lost to either time
or grave robbers. The ceaseless sounds of digging were distant in
the recess even though it was only set a few feet into the wall. In
addition to being wonderful craftsmen, the mathematicians who
built the library three thousand years before apparently knew a
thing or two about acoustics. Logan frowned.

"I don't know, Junie!" he shouted to his compatriot forty
feet below in the main gallery. "It's just like the others. Not a
'glyph or anything else I've ever seen!" Indeed, the carving before
him resembled nothing more than a gas mask. That was
impossible, of course -- there had been nothing of the kind in the
time of the pyramids.

Logan turned around and stepped onto the thick ebony beam
leading from the hollow to the gigantic dark tower dominating the
center of the room. The gargantuan space was alive below him as
diggers, students and contractors all worked under Juniper
Faraway's direction. The construction workers were building tall
wooden scaffolds abreast of each of the alcoves and the dark
column itself, reinforcing the decaying structures. Up to now, only
Logan himself had been able to amaze the others and climb up to
examine the intricacies above the center of the room. From there
he acted as Dr. Faraway's eyes, giving her every detail of the
ancient masterpiece that was the Library of Echoes. It had been
from the crow's nest of the tower itself that he had been able to
make the first breakthrough.

Even now the teams of grad students were systematically
moving across the floor with trace paper and charcoal pencils. The
flat surface of the room was completely covered by unusual
crosshatched pictograms of a kind neither Logan nor Faraway had
ever encountered in their travels. The kids from universities all
over Europe were spending their study abroad dollars for the great
experience of spending day after day on their hands and knees
laboriously taking impressions from each individual symbol and
noting its location by a point on a grid of the room. Then they filed
it to be scanned by other students into a database on the ancient
laptop that the University of Ontario had been coaxed into giving
Faraway for the dig. With twelve graduate archaeologists at their
disposal, they were nearing completion. A mathematical analysis of
the grid of the room indicated that there were just shy of one
million individual characters on the floor of the Library, and none
were ever repeated. Still, the final answer appeared to be right
around the bend.

Juniper stood by the computer gesticulating madly at the
poor student who had the misfortune to admit more than a passing
familiarity with information technology. Even above din and
distance, Logan's attenuated senses could hear her bitterly
complaining about the speed of the device. She demanded that the
student figure out a way to make it work faster. Now that progress
was being made, she was a shark to blood in the water.

He knew that Juniper was mildly annoyed that after almost
three years work, Logan had been the first one to begin an
understanding of the unique language. He had climbed the central
column to get a better view of the room as a whole. Time in
intelligence circles taught him that when it seemed that no further
information could be gathered from a scene, one only needed to
approach the problem from a different angle. Cliches were usually
cliches for a reason. It only took seconds of looking down at the
mosaic below to realize that the characters *were* related to one
another. Rather than what appeared on the ground to be thousands
of individual markings, there were actually only a few dozen base
symbols. These all had additional swirls and lines added, but the
language, whatever it was, had very clear root ideograms.

Juniper practically danced a jig at the discovery. Logan was
mainly pleased that she had given up on asking how it was possible
that he had noticed anything about the small writing on the floor
from nearly forty feet above. She would only accept his cavalier
response about "eatin' lot of carrots" for so long. She immediately
set the students to work mapping out the room. Even with the work
uncompleted, the computer identified distinct patterns in the
organization of the language on the floor. When each of the root
characters was assigned a color, what appeared to be a chaotic
hodge-podge of chicken scratches actually took on an astounding
order. Indeed, over yet another bottle of absinth, Juniper told
Logan that she thought that the entire room might actually impart a
single pictogram -- a divine letter, equal parts Pi and cipher.

"Perhaps it is the Alpha, Logan," she had said. "Or the
Omega. Maybe we have stumbled upon the word for the universe.
The very sound that God intoned to bring us all into being."

"You're talkin' crazy, darlin'. 'Sides, even if you were
right, what kinda fool would say it." They sat in her room for a
long time after that, listening to the quiet dark of the city. A single
cricket sang on some distant rooftop, and in the end, Juniper had no
response.

If she was excited by the prospect of a pattern in the
lightless chaos of her career-topping find, then she was perplexed
by the next wonder that Logan discovered. Only moments after
recognizing the language implicit in the markings on the floor, he
noticed an anomaly on the tower he stood on.

It was made of black obsidian, as were the thick spokes that
ran from it to the recesses in the wall. Thick as a redwood, the
apex of the column, a pyramidal structure, had been severed at
some distant time in the past and lay in pieces on the floor. Juniper
and Logan studied the broken portion carefully, but it made no
sense. It seemed as though the onyx had exploded from within.

Standing atop the broken tower, Logan kneeled down to run
his hands along the aberration. Inside the column itself were five
cylindrical cores of what appeared to be black quartz. They were
virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the broken and craggy
rock except for slight variation in pattern. Logan reached down to
examine them when he felt something. It was distant, and very
deep, like some ancient pneumatic machine. He looked down to
see if anyone else reacted to the deep sound, but everyone on the
floor went about their business oblivious to the low rumble he
detected in the base of his spine. At last, Logan felt the quartz, and
it was slightly warm to the touch. They ran down the tower in all
four corners and at the center, like the whole room in miniature.

When he told Juniper, she couldn't come up with any real
reason for the peculiar design. It was not something she had ever
heard of, but that did not make it impossible. "Remember, though,
that this room was meant to be active. It was not a library built for
quiet contemplation. Perhaps the column was some pseudo-
scientific tool used for magic." She said the last word with a
giggle, amused by the very idea, but Logan was less so. He
couldn't tell her about the rumbling or the warmth. These were
both well out of the realm of her perception.

"Did you hear me, Doc?" he shouted. Juniper continued to
holler at the poor computer operator, so Logan leapt from the tower
to the half-completed scaffold and scampered the rest of the way
down. Several of the students watched his dexterous flight and
applauded when he hit the ground. Logan grinned, tipping his hat,
then headed over to Juniper.

"Is there no way that this idiotic machine can be made to
work faster? We are too close to wait any more." Logan looked
around at the screen as she pleaded with the boy and saw that the
modeling of the room was almost completed. Whatever the
ultimate pattern was would soon be apparent.

"I'm sorry doctor, but it just can't go any faster. It's an old
computer."

"Young man that simply is not good enough! I will not be
held hostage here by . . ." Logan interceded, saving the boy from
any further wrath. He gently put his arm around his friend and
began leading her away.

"You hear me, Junie? I got a look at that last recess on the
wall." As they moved back toward the tower, Logan looked back
and winked at the relieved grad student. "Same as the others - no
relationship to any of the other writin'."

"Oh, Logan, we are so close. At any moment, the final
letter could be revealed and that damned machine is the only thing
that . . ."

"Come on, Juniper. These kids are working as fast as they
can. Take a break. Let me tell you about the alcoves."

"You've already told me everything, old friend. Seven
columns stem from the tower, leading to seven arbors in the wall.
In each hollow there is a symbol - a butterfly, a circle with a hook, a
papyrus scroll, an, uhm . . ." She turned her hand in the air,
conducting an invisible orchestra. Logan struck up the band.

"A spear and a heart, and I just found what looks like some
kinda mask in the last one. The only familiar symbol . . ."

"Is the ankh, yes. Clearly these are altars of some kind.
Worship of the seven heavens or some such nonsense. The keys are
the etchings below our feet, old friend. We are on the precipice of
a momentous discovery, and the Goddamned computer is right in
our way!"

"Look, Junie, I'm no archaeologist, but I do have ta
wonder."

"To wonder what?"

"Why the hell would somebody build an altar fifty feet
above the ground with no access?" They were standing at the foot
of the tower. Juniper looked up, studying the beams running from
the tower to the broken sandstone hollows.

"We'll take our mysteries one at a time, Logan."

"Fair enough. Let's grab some lunch."

***

Logan could not convince Juniper to leave the dig when the
answer to the riddle could appear at any moment. However, she did
ask him to grab humus and falafel from the market, bread from the
bakery. Archaeology was obsessive work; one tended to forget
everything outside of the march toward discovery. For his part
though, Logan was no professional digger, and the smells of
Alexandria rarely allowed him to forget about his rumbling
stomach, so he acted as an alarm clock for the others.

Mid-day was the best to be out walking. It was hot enough
that the majority of the people retreated to the interiors of their
homes, but still alive enough that Logan felt the electric pulse of the
city. It reminded him of Manhattan on Sundays. There were times
that he missed the camaraderie of Graymalkin back in the States,
but life was exhausting there. It was more than simply the
superheroing -- Logan was a man of action, and he still got a thrill
out of a good scrap -- it was the constant emotional drain of the
place. You couldn't put that many single men and women together
in a home without making a recipe for trouble. Of course, in
Logan's case, it was not a *single* woman who caused him all the
trouble. It was a married one. Worse than feeling things was the
constant pressure to *talk* about them. He strongly suspected that
the phrase most often uttered in the Graymalkin house was "are you
all right?"

It couldn't be more different staying with Juniper. She
spoke about work, or she did not speak at all. Logan respected that,
but it did make for some awkward moments. Since arriving in
Alexandria, Logan noticed more and more of the peculiar yellow
fliers attached to walls and telephone poles around the city. They
seemed concentrated around the dig site, and to Logan's untrained
eye, they all appeared to be upside down. His curiosity finally got
the better of him, and several days earlier he had asked Juniper
what they meant.


"I'm sorry?" She had looked at him curiously. Logan
pointed across the street from where they were sitting in the early
evening. Three of the leaflets were stapled to a stunted palm tree,
its browning leaves close to death. They rustled in the gentle
breeze, waving like little yellow flags.

"Those handbills. Seen'em everywhere." Juniper looked
over and a strange look crossed her face. To Logan, it appeared
that she disconnected for a moment. She was clearly looking at the
waving papers, but her eyes seemed far away at the same time.
"Juniper?"

"Hm? Oh, I hadn't noticed them before." Before he could
follow up she stood up and moved away at a brisk pace. Logan
dropped it and let the issue lay. If Juniper didn't care, why should
he? He hadn't thought about the ubiquitous leaflets since.

As he got closer to the market, Logan inhaled deeply,
eagerly anticipating the menagerie of meal time smells that every
breath provided him. Instead, he read something that nearly made
him gag. With his advanced senses, Logan had always been keenly
aware of his environment, and he had a great facility for
remembering the specificity of sensations he encountered. What he
smelled now was unlike anything he had ever experienced.

It was something like the sour, sweaty smell in the caverns
of the Morlocks beneath New York, and a bit like the grease cheese
would leave on your hands if you cooked with it. It was worse than
either of those, though. Coppery, like blood, only with sugary,
saccharine undertones. It was a smell very like gangrene, and it
was coming closer.

Despite his incredible hearing, Logan didn't hear the
screaming engine until it was almost too late. He had turned
around, facing back toward the dig site in trying to find the source
of the cloying smell. A horn as loud as a fire engine or a semi's
blasted out at him, and adrenaline spilled into Logan's stomach. He
jumped to the left just in time for a shimmering orange beast of a
car to roar by him, speeding toward the ruins outside of town. It
reminded him of the one he had seen weeks before. On first glance,
it appeared to be a gas guzzling piece of 1956 Detroit iron. Even
through the dust trail it left in its wake, though, Logan could see
that it wasn't quite right. Close, but no cigar, he thought. It was as
though a counterfeiter of intermediate skill had made the machine:
it was almost a classic Chevy, but the details were all wrong.

KACHUNK!

Logan looked over from where he was sitting on the side of
the road. The noxious smell had mostly left with the car, but traces
of it still wafted about, largely centered around the man in the
yellow coat.

Around Christmas, most of the white faces left Alexandria.
If one was going on vacation in the Middle East at this time of year,
one generally went to Israel or Cairo, not a backwater with
delusions of grandeur. For the month of December, Logan had
noticed every Caucasian face he had passed sticking out like a soar
thumb. He had never seen this man before, though, and he was glad
of it. Logan's lip rose in an involuntary snarl.

KACHUNK! The man in the coat slammed another staple
into one of the yellow fliers, attaching it to a withered palm. He
was very tall, maybe six-six, and looked to be very thin. He wore a
Stetson and cowboy boots with shiny spurs that seemed to twirl of
their own accord. The duster he wore could have come off a
plainsman in the 1870s except for one very substantial detail: it was
primary yellow. As yellow as the leaflet he stapled into the pole.
Logan stared unabashedly at the man, the grimace frozen on his
mouth.

The man tilted his head slightly, then turned around to face
Logan. The noon sun came straight down from above casting a
shadow from the man's hat and covering his eyes. He stood there,
his hands loosely at his side. Logan stood up, and they regarded
one another from across the street. Logan thought of the old Clint
Eastwood movies he and Scott liked to watch whenever the truce
was on, and he wished he had a six-shooter before remembering
that he knew a trick or two that could silence any clown with a gun.
The guy across the street did not wear greasepaint.

He smiled at Logan. His lips kept stretching; they stretched
beyond the place where even a person with a wide smile would
stop. He smiled, and Logan thought he could see the man's molars.
It seemed that there were dozens of teeth, rows of them, a shark on
two legs. Each and every one of them was silver, catching the light,
playing it like a mean cat with a tender mouse. Though he wasn't a
man given to fear, Logan found the smile unnerving. Then, without
a word, the man in the long yellow coat tipped his hat and turned to
walk down the street. Logan caught sight of the man's eyes. They
were too close together, small and mean beneath a thick, sloping
forehead.

Logan watched the man depart with his hands rolled into
fists so tight that his fingernails cut his palms. He stayed that way
even after the man disappeared around a corner. "Regulator,"
Logan muttered, without knowing exactly what the word meant. He
thought it was something from the Old West. "That was a by God
Regulator."

5

Even with skills honed by years of supersonic piloting
experience, Scott Summers could not defeat the New York
Throughway. He saw a small opening and hurtled the SUV in front
of a tractor-trailer with inches to spare. The driver of the semi laid
on his horn, and Scott clenched his jaw. Though he was normally a
patient man with a calm and measured demeanor, he was rapidly
gaining an appreciation for road rage. He looked over at his wife,
who sat in the passenger seat engrossed by some story in "The
Atlantic" -- it seemed that she was completely unfazed by either the
noise or the noxious exhaust fumes. The blaring horn droned on
and on.

"Jean?" Scott asked. She looked at him blankly for a
moment, then caught the meaning of his request. She smiled and
laughed.

"No way, Scott! You have got to be kidding me!"

"Come on. Just plant one little thought - see if he couldn't
find something more interesting than attacking my eardrums."

"'Mutant Menace Taking Over America's Interstates," she
said into an invisible microphone in her hand. "Film At Eleven!"

For the faintest fraction of a second, Jean was shocked to
feel a real wave of anger launch off her husband. It was almost
corporeal, a seething thing that caused her to widen her eyes and
shrink back in her seat toward the window. Before she could even
articulate the feeling to herself, though, Scott's brow furrowed in
concern and all thoughts of the blaring horn seemed to depart. He
reached over and touched her trembling chin.

"Jeannie? You okay?" As quickly as it had come, her
concerns were abated. There was no anger *in* this man. Not for
her anyway. There was only affection.

"Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm fine." She took his hand and smiled.
"Brain fart, that's all." He grinned that charming grin at her, the
roguish one that nobody else had ever seen, and turned back to look
out at the crawling traffic. Jean went back to the story she was
reading, continuing to hold his hand, secure in the telepathic
awareness of his love. The trucker kept honking, and behind his
glasses, Scott's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. He was so
focused on the eighteen-wheeler that he never noticed the driver of
the black sedan, or the hard attention that the pale man was paying
to them.

***

Everything was wonderful. Every year, Charles Xavier
threw two Holiday parties. The first was for neighbors and friends
in Salem Center. The second was a freer flowing affair with a
guest list that would bring out half the armies in the world, but that
wasn't until New Years. His students thought of the earlier party as
the Closet Ball, because all the residents of the Graymalkin House
spent the time pretending to be something they were not. For years
now, Scott and Jean had been the unofficial host and hostess of the
bash. They arranged the catering and prepared the public portions
of the house -- why the hell else would they be dealing with the
ridiculous mid-morning traffic out of the City in the middle of the
holiday crunch.

Jean enjoyed it in a house-playing sort of way. She liked
hosting the Closet Ball in the same way that she enjoyed decorating
the apartment she shared with her husband. It gave her a sense of
normalcy that she found appealing. The party was always on the
Friday when school let out in Weschester County so that local
families could bring their kids. They ran and jumped in the halls,
reveling in a way that adults had long since forgotten. For that brief
night, the Xavier School became a real social center for the
community, and Jean was the belle of the ball.

After what seemed like hours on the road, the couple finally
drove through the Salem Center town square and toward the house.
It was Thursday, and they had a great deal of work to do before the
next night's festivities. It was common enough for adults to child-
proof their houses before kids came over. In the Graymalkin house,
this was especially important. There had nearly been an incident
three years before. While the mansion was being rebuilt, security
was less tight than at any other time. Silby Monroe, the daughter of
the owner of a local hardware store almost stumbled into the
subterranean portion of the house, and only Logan's quick thinking
had spared Xavier a great deal of explaining.

Logan. There had been a confrontation before he left.
Recriminations. Shouting. She hoped he would come back from
wherever he went so that they could sort things out. Hurting friends
was never easy, and it seemed that lately, more and more of Jean's
ties to those she was closest to were becoming disconcertingly
insubstantial.

The SUV pulled up to the gate and it began opening even
before Scott could reach out and key in the code. The Professor
knew they had arrived. When a person with telepathic abilities
knew people for as long as the Professor had known Scott and Jean,
they gained an almost preternatural awareness of the other. Jean
thought that Xavier probably knew when they were on the way by
the time she and Scott crossed the George Washington Bridge.
Jean herself had the same sort of sense with Scott. Indeed, for
many years now they shared a more consciously created rapport -- a
psychic connection that what seemed to be a different Jean had
forged with Scott high in the mountains of New Mexico years
before.

It was amazing. Jean had a piece of Scott in her head all the
time, and he had some of her as well. It wasn't a telepathic
connection, exactly. Instead, it was really as though a shade of the
consciousness of one resided within the mind of the other. Their
connection had survived a great deal. It maintained itself across
space and time and dimension, their intense love surviving all
manner of heartbreak and sadness. Their awareness had even
survived Jean's death, from a certain point of view. As they drove
up the winding driveway, Jean frowned.

"Scott?"

"Mm-hm?"

"The other day in the diner, when I was choking?"

"Yeah?"

"I called out to you -- did you hear me?" Scott turned to her
and raised an eyebrow.

"Nope. I got the message when you started throwing dishes
around, though."

"I know, I know. But it's weird, don't you think? I feel like
we haven't been as connected for the last few weeks. Like our
rapport is . . ."

"Yeah," Scott said very enthusiastically. He pulled up in
front of the house and parked. "I thought I was the only one
noticing that. I wonder what's causing it?" Jean was a bit surprised
by the force of his response -- as though he had been waiting to say
exactly these words. Before she could answer, he went on.

"Maybe we ought to do something to try and firm it up, you
know. Try and reestablish the connection."

" I could . . ." Scott smiled and opened his door, cutting her
off as he stepped down onto the gravel.

"Definitely. We'll definitely figure out what to do real
soon." He shut the door and marched toward the house. Jean
watched as the front door opened and Xavier greeted her husband.
Scott's mood seemed light and happy, filled with holiday spirit.
Jean shook her head as she hopped out of the SUV and began
walking toward her two favorite guys. Everything was wonderful.

6

Barefoot was the nicest restaurant on the town square.
Despite Kitty's loss of time, she had only been a couple of minutes
late getting to the bistro. When she approached the maitre d, he
gave her the message that Miss Walker was running late, caught in
the Christmas traffic. Kitty chose a table under the heaters on the
patio, and the haughty man appraised her bedraggled appearance
as he led her through the faux-French interior to the outside.
Everyone else was dressed to the nines, and Kitty felt exposed.
Still, it was nice to be anywhere other than Harry's with a fake ID.

As she sat waiting, she looked up at the burner. Waves of
heat shimmered in the air around it, giving the sky beyond a
tremulous, illusory quality. As Kitty waited, the lunchtime crowd
began to arrive. She recognized two men at a nearby table: local
news reporters from the UPN affiliate. They sat talking about the
Presidential inauguration, and it bothered Kitty that she had paid
national affairs so little attention during the preceding year. The
future of their very existence hung in the balance, yet the super
heroes of Gramalkin Lane preferred to destroy buildings and blow
things up than work to get out the vote.

It was not the first time that Kitty thought that Warren
might have it right by coming out of the mutant closet and
declaring himself as Angel before the world. The pyrotechnic
battles between good and evil might make for great news, but they
did little to advance the cause of equality. If anything, saving the
planet only seemed to alienate the people more. The Friends of
Humanity would not exist if there weren't a very real set of fears
in the population. Her own family had been scared to death when
she was growing up, convinced that some nightmarish
Armageddon loomed right around the bend. Judging from the
conversations ebbing and flowing around her, local journalists and
barristers still held that belief.

"Katherine?" Kitty looked up to see a red haired woman
who couldn't have been too much older than herself. She had a
single blond streak, and was dressed in jeans and a turtleneck
sweater. Any concerns Kitty had about being too casual for
Barefoot evaporated, and she waved at her lunch date. The woman
smiled and crossed the patio with a bookbag cavalierly slung over
one arm. She arrived at the table and held out her hand, beaming.
Kitty took it.

"I'm so sorry to be so late. I'm Rose Walker. It's great to
meet you!" Kitty grinned hugely at the adult treatment. Since
returning to the Graymalkin house, it seemed that everyone other
than Logan held the mental image of her as a thirteen-year-old
named Sprite in the front of their mind. Now there was a stranger
treating her as an equal. The women sat down.

***

After a brief conversation with Scott and Jean about the
guest list, Charles Xavier went into town to finish his Christmas
shopping. As he wheeled himself around the town square, he
grimaced at the changes that had come over the last several years.
Slowly but surely, the local businesses were being replaced by
national chains. John Monroe's hardware store had become an
Ace franchise, and Benjamin Haseed's electronics shop was
acquired by Best Buy. As more and more people used the county
as a suburb of New York City, it lost the very flavor that attracted
Charles to the locality. There were times when Emma Frost's
offer was more and more appealing. It would still be decades
before the outside world appeared on her rural Massachusetts
doorstep.

He wheeled himself into Storyopolis, a children's
bookstore that had been in existence even when he was a child.
Elspeth MacReady was behind the counter, and gave him a wave
when he entered. She gestured to the door into the stockroom. He
had been well acquainted with Elspeth's mother for a time, and the
daughter liver up to her legacy. When the local mothers first met
this prodigal upon her return to take over the store, they feared for
the direction the storytelling haven would take. Charles
remembered that the whole of Weschester was abuzz about the
pierced and tattooed young woman; it became a mental beehive.
Every time he came through, he would reach out to taste the town
with his mind, and he would find great amusement at the gossips
and their down home malice.

Naturally, Xavier quickly befriended the outsider. Mutant
outcasts were not the only ones he held an abiding affection for,
and he readily empathized with the young woman's dislocation.
Things had turned out for the best as Elspeth was every bit the
talented spinner of tales that her mother had been before her.
Every Thursday after school, the smaller children of the town (not
to speak of their parents) would sit on the floor of the shop in
spellbound attention as the raven haired young woman made the
Grimm Brothers sing. That she told the old versions of the stories,
the dark ones that gave parents pause, but they were held as fast by
the teller as their little ones. Whenever Charles was in town, he
tried to come in and listen.

Today, there would be no stories. This close to Christmas
and Hanukkah, the shop was incredibly busy, and it was all Elspeth
could do to keep up. There was a line at the desk of people
eagerly buying the latest Harry Potter adventure, so Xavier did not
intrude. He knew what he had come for, and required no
assistance. He wheeled through the door to the stockroom, and
inhaled the unique air perfumed with the scent of old books.

There were times Xavier felt a degree in library science
might be as valuable as telepathy. Though he could have found a
new edition of the book he was seeking at Amazon or Barnes &
Noble, what he required was older. As always, when he told
Elspeth, she responded with a wry smile and said she could get it
in a week. He knew that the only thing she prized as highly as the
telling of a good tale was the discovery of one.

An oaken table dominated the rear of the dusty room.
There were fewer books back here. These were the special orders,
the fruit of MacReady's quieter labors. Xavier knew that he was
not her only wealthy client. He wasn't the only person who called
her late at night seeking texts that a great many people in the
daylight might find objectionable. During the incident of the
inferno in New York, Xavier had required accounts of the
underworld more detailed than those that could be found in Dante,
and Elspeth had known just where to look. As he came to the shop
to retrieve his prize, Stephen Strange exited with a parcel under his
arm. The men said nothing as they passed, though they held no
special enmity for each other. It was simply understood -- this was
neutral turf.

He found the manuscript he had been seeking, twelve
vellum pages covered by a flowing script, corrections, scratches
and notes in the margin. Though rare, Charles did not think that
this writing was in any great need of secrecy, so he came in the
middle of the day. Indeed, he was not entirely sure why he had
been so compelled to find the poem. To find the very first
handwritten edition of the poem. He only knew that he had a
difficult time sleeping of late, and that the same images had come
to his mind time and again: a stranger in black, a figure in red, the
sound of boot heels on stone and two houses with two brothers.
The dreams had grown more and more disturbing, until one night
he awoke with a pressing need for the item in his hands.

The bell over the front door of the shop jangled in the
distance as customers exited. Xavier looked up, "hearing"
Elspeth's approach before she entered the stock room.

"'My first thought was, he lied in every word,'" she recited,
coming through the archway. "'That hoary cripple, with malicious
eye askance to watch the working of his lie.' Wasn't easy to come
by a handwritten manuscript, Dr. Xavier. 1835 is a bit old for
originals."

"I thank you very much, Elspeth." He turned his chair
around and regarded her. She was looking at him with something
like concern. After a moment she raised a thick parcel of
packages.

"I boxed up your other presents, too. The kids at the party
will enjoy their favors."

"Excellent. The Browning Poem, how did you find it."

"Weather's beginning to get cold, Charles," she said.
Elspeth never discussed how she uncovered the things she did.
Had he wanted, Charles might have found out for himself without
her ever even suspecting, but he had long since learned that some
secrets were better left untouched. "Seems like a storm's
coming."

"It might be." He made a decision on the spur of the
moment. "You are coming to the party tomorrow night?"

"Of course. I wouldn't miss it."

"You know, I throw another one. It's a smaller, more
rarified affair on New Years Eve."

"Mm," she acceded with a smile. "I've heard whispers."

"Would you like to come? I suspect it might be more to
your liking." She seemed to consider for a moment, sticking her
tongue into her cheek. Just as she began to reply, the bell above
the door rang. Elspeth looked toward the front, then took the
manuscript.

"Let's play it by ear. Have a look around for a couple
minutes, and I'll put this in with your other things. Remember to
keep it out of direct sunlight." She left the room.

Xavier looked at the other tomes on the "private" table for
a moment, tempted to see what the other exclusive clients were
buying. Appealing as the idea was, he somehow knew it would be
the wrong thing to do. Besides, he wanted to get home and study
the poem for clues to his dreams. "Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came." Charles went out among the children.

***

"I'd call it 'weird shit,' Katherine."

Kitty laughed at the description. Simple as hell, she
thought, but devastatingly accurate. She took a sip from her San
Pelligrino and listened as Rose continued. "Seriously. I have seen
things over the years that are way beyond impossible. I've been to
places that shouldn't exist."

"Like Vegas?" Kitty asked. This time it was Rose's turn to
laugh. The two women hit it off immediately, entering a relaxed
banter that was the farthest thing in the world from what Kitty
expected. She figured that it would be a more or less
straightforward interview -- a series of college essay questions for
a freak school. "How has being a mutant affected your life?"
Instead, they had not yet touched on the ostensible reason for their
visit, preferring to talk about the unusual world in which they
lived.

"Exactly like Vegas," Rose said. "I've only been there
once, and I totally lost my shirt. Not pretty. Want to know the sad
thing?"

"Pray tell?"

"I never left the airport. Really, lost everything to the slots
in terminal B."

"That's gotta hurt. I've been to Vegas one time, as well.
Me and some . . ." she thought for a moment. "Friends went there
for work, so I didn't get to do very much in the way of gambling."
One of the news guys at the next table answered the shrill musical
tone of his cell phone, and began talking in hushed and excited
tones. When his compatriot tried to ask what was going of, the
first man all but shushed him.

The waiter arrived with their meals. Kitty had tried to
order a soup and salad from the expensive menu, not wanting to
break Rose's bank. The other woman had laughed at this, insisting
that Kitty get whatever she wanted. "I may look like a starving
artist," she said, "but I'm actually filthy rich."

"I didn't realize that writing short stories was so lucrative."

"Old money," Rose had said, ordering a vegetarian entree
expensive enough to break Kitty's meager budget for a week. She
winked across the table, and Kitty decided to live it up. It might
be ramen noodles at Graymalkin whenever Ororo wasn't around,
but she would be a gourmet today.

She took a bite and the carrot ginger stew was everything
she expected. Rose continued. "You didn't miss much in the City
of Sin -- the only thing you'd want to see are the strippers anyway.
The point I was making is that the Big Scary Stuff, the super hero
battles and dimensional rifts and Galactus and all of that, none of
it has anything on Weird Shit. The creepy stuff you see from the
corner of your eye, you know? A closet door opening in the dead
of night."

"It was only the wind," Kitty said in a dramatic voice.

"Could be. But I always have the feeling that it could have
been something else. Something *Other,* you know?"

"I lived in Great Britain for a while, and one time my ex-
boyfriend and I made a trip down to London for the weekend."
Rose rolled her eyes heavenward, and Kitty paused.

"Don't even get me started on British guys. Open
wounds."

"I can dig it. Anyways, we'd seen a play down in the West
End and were walking back to the hotel when we came upon this
homeless guy who was crashed out on the curb. We sort of edged
away, instinctively. I know how bad it sounds, but you kind of
think . . ."

"Sure, you know somebody's going to spare change you, so
you keep your head down and try to go with the flow and avoid it."

"Exactly. Pete and I go by trying to ignore the guy, but in
my peripheral vision I'm giving him a full on read, and it was
scary. It was one of those foggy, rainy nights and the guy's clothes
were soaked and ripped all to hell. One of his legs had these metal
spokes coming out of the skin like he'd broken his leg.

"Gam . . . a friend of mine has one of those things on a leg
right now, and I'd seen them before, so I kind of know what they
are supposed to look like. This guy's was wrong. Just wrong. It
looked like the skin had receded around the posts, like the guy was
just mummifying around it. Like he'd been drained, somehow.
And here's the scariest part."

"Yeah?"

"I only saw them for a second, but I swear to God that this
guy's eyes are as white as my napkin." She reached into her lap
and held it up for emphasis. Rose nodded. "So we go on for a
block, maybe two. Pete's going on and on about how there's this
pub we have to check out and whatever, but all I'm doing is
thinking about the homeless guy. I'm more and more sure that we
just passed a dead man without even trying to do anything about it,
and we aren't the sort to wear blinders.

"Finally, I stop and tell Pete that we have to go back, and
he pisses and moans for a second before he sees how serious I am.
Finally, I drag his ass back and we go for, like, five blocks, almost
all the way back to the theatre. Then I make us turn around and
head back, totally freaking out."

"No way." The reporters at the next table suddenly exited
the restaurant, talking animatedly into their cell phones. They
practically ran. At the same time, a beeper went off at the table of
a pair of upscale business women. One of them looked at the
message, and hurriedly stood to go and use the phone inside.

"Yeah," Kitty went on. "The guy was just gone.
Disappeared into thin air in the space of maybe two minutes. I
always think to myself that if I'd have just shown a little more
courage, or curiosity or empathy or . . . whatever when we first
went by . . ."

"That something different might have happened. Apathy is
very seductive, Katherine. You're only human."

"But I'm not, Rose," Kitty said quietly. "That's why we're
here. Isn't it?" Walker nodded.

"That is why we're here, Katherine. Let me tell you about
my book." Rose's face took on a more serious cast, and she began
to say something when the alarms went off at the fire station
across the square. The fire trucks' sirens blared, and they tore
from the building, horns shouting imperatively that it was time to
move out of the way. After they had gone, Rose looked at her with
raised eyebrows. "Dramatic enough?" she asked.

Neither of them had any comprehension of how dramatic
things would truly become in the wake of those sirens.

***

Flipping through an edition of "Alice in Wonderland"
beautifully illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger, Xavier felt his patience
eroding when he heard the sirens. A steady stream of customers
had been coming into the store, and Elspeth hadn't begun putting
together his delicate parcel. Now his stomach was rumbling and
the day was slipping on toward afternoon. Children ran about,
some staring unabashedly at the man in the wheelchair, and though
the days of self-consciousness had passed long ago, he still
disliked being the center of attention. Simultaneously, he had a
pretty mean case of the holiday blues. A heavyset man walked
through the open space with his son seated high on his shoulders.
The boy clearly thought of his father as a deity, and Charles felt
some longing for the same type of relationship.

The shop was momentarily illuminated by the flashing
lights of two engines and an ambulance, and the customers looked
toward the front windows. It was rare in the quiet community for
a full station alarm to go out. Xavier felt a brief intuition of
trouble, and he felt around with his mind, seeking anything
anomalous. All he found were the vaguest of shadows --
*something* was going on, but Charles knew no more than anyone
else in the room.

Elspeth looked at him from behind the counter, as though
peripherally aware of his consternation. For just a moment,
Charles wondered if she might not have a bit of latent telepathic
ability herself. She told the customer in front of her that it would
be just a moment, and began wrapping his package. He wheeled
through the crowded store, momentarily pleased by the almost
subliminal way that people automatically cleared the lane for a
wheelchair. As he reached the counter, Charles stopped suddenly.

Without warning, he felt a musty wind pass through the
room. The odor was not unpleasant, exactly. It was just old and
unattended to. "Like the house," he thought. What was striking
was that though he perceived the phenomena as a gust of air, he
knew full well that it occurred only in his mind. A palpable,
tactile psychic draft.

Elspeth leaned down toward him, frowning. She put the
package on his lap and reached forward to put the back of her hand
on his forehead, checking for a fever. He heard her question echo
around her mind before she actually spoke the words.

"Are you all right, Doctor Xavier?" She asked. She
unconsciously pulled her black cardigan around her shoulders,
though the heat kept it warm in the store.

"I'm fine, Elspeth. Thank you again. Think about coming
to the party." Xavier smiled at her then wheeled himself to the
door. Elspeth watched him for only a moment before going back
to ring up another "Goblet of Fire." Somehow, her supply never
seemed to run out.

Xavier adjusted the package and reached forward and open
the door when the entryway obliged him and did the job on its
own. Charles looked up to see the chubby man with his son on his
shoulders holding the door open.

"Thank you very much," Charles said. "Merry Christmas."
He wheeled himself out onto the busy sidewalk and felt
snowflakes. Despite Al Roker's warnings, he hadn't dressed
warmly enough for the day. Still, he could get a bit more shopping
done before returning home to help Scott and Jean. He began
moving toward his next stop when he heard the voice behind him.

"Be, Be, Be, Beware," stuttered the baritone. Xavier
whirled, raising his psychic defenses. All he found was the fat
man in the doorway, his face far away. On his shoulders, the
man's son looked down with confusion. Why were they still
standing here? Xavier began to respond when the man spoke
again.

"Beware the Crimson King."

"What did you say?" Charles demanded, moving forward
in the chair. The man shook his head abruptly, and waved his
hand as though shooing some invisible fly. Once again, Xavier
detected the musty smell, and he telepathically lanced into the
man's consciousness. Presents, presents, I never get it done in
time, mile high debt getting hungry god little Stevie getting heavy
freaky guy in wheelchair looking at me freezing
outsidewinter'sheremerrymerry . . .

"Merry Christmas to you, too," the man said. He smiled
and stepped inside, allowing the door to shut behind him. Charles
stared after him for a moment, considering. In the distance, he
heard more sirens. The man had just been thinking normal
thoughts. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Charles moved
on down the walk, annoyed that the crowd was thickening.

"Crimson King?" he muttered.

The going was painfully slow amidst the throng of
shoppers. Indeed, the crowd was almost at a standstill. Xavier
looked up to see a large group clustering around a window, and he
ascertained the first recognizable signs of panic. Little indications
of it came off the people like sparks. A woman bolted from the
crowd, running toward her parking place and frantically dialing on
her cell phone. Though he did not like interfering in the minds of
others, he planted thoughts in the minds of the people in front of
him -- move left, step right - and the horde created an aisle.

Charles approached the window and immediately
understood both the sirens and the nauseating fear that kept
rippling through the mass. Though he could not hear through the
glass, the visuals broadcast by the televisions were more than
enough to tell the whole story.

A news anchor talked wordlessly with a graphic hovering
menacingly over his left shoulder. He was moderating the
comments of Ralph Reed, who had moved on from the Christian
Coalition to the even more conservative Friends of Humanity.
Though he could not read lips, Xavier could see the fury Reed was
spouting, and the subject was easy to place given the ever present
graphic; "MUTANT MENACE" dominated the screen, written in
letters meant to simulate blood. Reed finished his diatribe, then
the commentator spoke earnestly into the camera for only a few
seconds before the scene cut to an ariel view.

The assembled mob gasped, and one or two terrified
parents quickly departed. Xavier was rare to surprise, but even his
mouth opened slightly in wordless wonder. How? How could
something in his own backyard have escaped his notice? On the
screens of the TVs, there were easily a hundred law enforcement
officers in front of the Weschester Unified High School. They
ranged from local cops and New York State Police to the black
four-doors that screamed federal government more loudly than if
some insignia were emblazoned upon them. The school had been
taken over by what the press was now calling "hostile metahuman
elements."

Xavier telepathically contacted Rogue. She had driven him
into town, and he wanted the car immediately. He wheeled around
and parted the crowd again, pulling to the curb. His student
responded that it would only be a moment, and while he waited for
the black Mercedes, Charles reached out to the others. The X-Men
had work to do, and time was running dangerously short. With
this level of media scrutiny, the plan would have to be swift,
cunning and secretive.

As he considered his options, any thought of a "Crimson
King" vanished from Xavier's mind, and that was just fine.

***

Rose thanked the waiter and took a sip of her latte. She
took it vegan, made with soy milk instead of cream. Kitty liked
hers the same way, but this often earned her nothing but laughter
from her peers in the Graymalkin house. Superheroes tended to be
a meat and potatoes bunch despite the reality that they were hunted
with nearly as great a regularity as the animals they consumed.
Kitty dipped a sugar cube into her drink, fascinated by the way the
coffee infused the white sweetener with color, giving it life. Rose
watched from across the table and continued her story.

"For reasons that nobody can really discern, my kid brother
has turned into this huge baseball fan. He can go on and on for
hours about stats and batting averages and RBIs. He'll just drive
you crazy with it. There isn't any really obvious reason for Jed's
interest; he never played baseball growing up. He didn't get to
*play* at all.

"He had it really rough as a kid." She paused for a
moment. Kitty was about to say something to break the silence
when she finally went on. "But he seems to have made it through
all right."

"Maybe that's why he likes it."

"Hm?"

"Baseball isn't just baseball," Kitty said. "It's all bound up
with these long held notions of apple pie and mom and the shining
example of American Democracy. Maybe your brother, Jed likes
it because of what baseball represents." Rose nodded.

"That's very perceptive, Kitty. You could be right. It's as
good a reason to watch that boring shit as anything else, I guess,"
she grinned. "I don't watch that fake stuff myself. I like pro
wrestling."

The porch had virtually cleared over the last several
minutes, a rain of cell phones and beepers. Even the wait staff
huddled inside, gathered around the bar's TV like they were
converging around a fire for warmth. The two women had been so
involved in their own meandering conversation that they hadn't
really paid attention.

"I smell what the Rose is cookin'," Kitty answered.

"Nice." They laughed for a moment before the redhead
continued her story. "Anyway, about a year-and-a-half ago I got
him tickets to a World Series game in Atlanta . . ."

"Oh, don't tell me . . ."

"Yep. *That* game. Game six between the Braves and the
New York Yankees. The longest seventh inning stretch in the
history of the sport." Though she couldn't say it to Rose, Kitty
remembered the day well. Very well. She had almost died.
"There was a huge rumbling in Turner field and suddenly *he*
was there.

"I'd seen Magneto on the news, of course. But never in
person. Hell, I don't think I'd even seen a mutant in person before
-- plenty of weird shit, but never a mutant."

"Nice to know I'm in the same category."

"That's not what I . . ."

"Don't worry about it. Go on."

"Not much to tell that you didn't see repeated on the news
four hundred times. Magneto appears and crushed the jumbotrons
into little suitcases and tells the entire audience that 'these men
before you, the strongest your tired race has to offer," Rose used a
deep voice to emulate Erik. Kitty thought the impression pretty
good. "'They are nothing before the power of Homo-superior, yet
you continue to hound us across the earth! Well, no more!'"

"You know, he's wrong there, by the way."

"What?" Rose asked.

"It's not 'Homo superior.' It ought to be 'Homo novus'
'new man.' We'd make a lot more friends if we didn't have
people running around yelling about superiority"

"Fair enough," Rose said. "Like I said, there's not much to
tell that you didn't see. Magneto decides to hold the whole place
hostage to show the world that, I don't know, he has a big dick or
something. The X-Men show up and a battle royal ensues. Now
this is the thing that gets me." Rose leaned forward, looking Kitty
deep in the eye. "This is what got me thinking about writing a
book, about what it must be like to grow up a mutant in this
patently insane world. "

"Yeah?"

"It was the crowd. How they behaved. You'd expect a
panic or to get trampled or something. Sure, they were afraid
when Magneto was ranting, but once the X-Men got there, they
settled into their seats. They watched the whole thing like it was
just the bottom half of the seventh. You want to know the most
absurd part?"

"Tell me."

"After a couple of minutes, one of the barkers began selling
beer again." Kitty shook her head in disbelief. Thousands of
people had nearly died that day, and people were selling hot dogs.

"Jesus."

"The worst thing was that I just sat there watching like
everyone else. We hound mutants, Magneto said. And I guess we
do, though it's not as bad as a few years ago when it looked like
the registration act might pass. At the same time that people call
for mutant blood, though, we watch the front page heroes and
villains with a weird kind of awe, like Michael Jordan.

"I have to write about that, Kitty. That's why I want to talk
to somebody like you. It's such a compelling story - to grow up in
a world prejudiced against you, but also unaware of your
individual existence. In the world, but not of it."

Kitty frowned at Rose's statement. It was close to
something she herself had thought only a few days before. In the
world? Not of the world? Hadn't she thought those very words?
And there was something else, something familiar and pre-
ordained, right at the periphery of her consciousness.

"Rose, I think something's happening here. With us
meeting." Rose looked at her curiously. "Something beyond the
ordinary. Weird shit. Something . . ."

Kitty suddenly looked up. She tilted her head as though
listening to somebody, but there was no voice on the air. Rose
immediately felt concern for her new friend and began to stand
and come around the table when Kitty held up a hand. The
younger woman stood so abruptly that her chair fell over behind
her. She began backing away from the table.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Kitty?"

"Thank you for lunch, Rose. I really had fun. I just . . ."
She turned and ran directly to the ivy covered brick wall that
separated the patio from the sidewalk beyond. Kitty turned back
one last time. "It's an emergency. I *have* to go."

She bolted right at the wall. Rose involuntarily gritted her
teeth, almost closing her eyes rather than witness the impact. The
girl would need a doctor. Her mind didn't really have time to
comprehend it when Kitty simply ran right through the barrier,
disappearing through the wall.

Rose sat for a moment, slack jawed. Adrenaline hit her
system, and she gasped and practically fell our of her seat, her eyes
wide in shock. She clutched at her stomach, standing alone on the
patio in the growing cold. At last, she stumbled toward the exit,
hurrying as fast as her watery legs could carry her.

7

The Library of Echoes was filled with more shadow than
light. The whistling of the heavy winds echoed nearly fifty yards
down the wide chimney from the ground above, and by the time
the sound reached the bottom it reminded Logan of a banshee
screaming. A dust storm was beginning to rise, and though they
were protected from any real danger due to their depth, eddies of
thick dust swirled through the cavernous room, playing in the
bright cones of light that the halogen lanterns cast. There was a
dangerous and hot smell on the air, smoke raised as the cool grit
sizzled when it touched the lamps. Worse, the light stands had
begun to list dangerously in the gale. Logan had convinced
Juniper to send the workers and students home for the night and
extinguish most of the flickering torches.

Now, Juniper stood in one of the shallow pools of
illumination looking for all the world like a bandito out of some
Mexican cowboy picture. She wore a red bandana over her face
with her safari hat pulled down tightly on her head. Despite the
multiple distractions of the coming storm, she had not moved a
muscle in nearly an hour. She sat on a stool unperturbed by the
sand that occasionally whipped around her, meditatively focused
on the computer slowly finishing its task. At any moment, it might
spit out the final color coded map of the room, exposing the
answer to the riddle of the ancient space. Logan felt admiration
for his friend, but also a tinge of worry at her obsession. He had
felt a focused preoccupation like that a time or two, and it rarely
ended well.

For his part, Logan was every bit the expectant father. He
paced in broad circles around the room, the soft soles of his boots
crunching on the fine layer of gravel covering the sandstone floor.
As the small generator chugged away, Logan looked up at the
scaffolding reinforcing the weaker, northernmost wall of the room.
Good thing that they had worked so hard to shore up the place; if
the storm got really bad, the displacement all the digging had
caused might test the stability of the giant room.

The more detail they gathered, the more unique the Library
of Echoes turned out to be. Its design seemed almost predisposed
to collapse; in some ways, it was miraculous that the whole place
had not simply crumbled before the millennia. There was a
massive pivot beneath the room, as though the floor of the space
could turn like a top. Stranger still, the segments above and below
the weird recesses in the wall were separated by a layer of earth
not native to this part of Egypt -- it was more like shells than sand,
serving to buffer the spokes from the solid sandstone. To Logan, it
seemed like a Ferris wheel with seven cars that had tumbled over
on its side.

He continued on his path, moving away from the light and
into the rear of the Library. Even in the dark, the blackness of the
tower stood out, almost seeming to radiate an inkier blackness
than night brought on its own account. The giant column and its
spokes appeared to be made of black volcanic glass, but the
material seemed almost *too* smooth and untouched. Except for
the exploded top section, the artifact was entirely untouched by the
ravages of time -- it did not bear even the slightest scouring from
three thousand years of dust, dirt or age. Had Logan been even a
bit more curious about this anomaly, he might have made a call to
the states and asked McCoy to come to Egypt with a thingamajig
or a whatzit to analyze the material. However, his curiosity did not
override his desire to distance himself from the New York Crowd.
Especially members of the crowd who might talk to Jean.

For a moment, the room was illuminated in a bright orange
glow as heat lightening torched the sky. The electric
incandescence was powerful enough that it even roused Juniper,
who looked up from the screen. The workstation was set up at one
side of the room, and Logan was a faint shadow at the other, barely
distinguishable from the darkness as he reached the half-way point
in his circumnavigation of the room.

"It is almost finished!" she called. The howling wind
snatched the sound of her voice away, and a man with any less
sense of hearing might not have heard her. As it was, Logan
nodded quietly, momentarily forgetful of the fact that there was no
way in hell that she could ever read his subtle movement. The
room flashed again, its air seeming alive with billions of particles
of dust in the lightening's dancing brilliance. Juniper stood,
wincing at the pins and needles in her feet. She began walking
toward her solitary friend as much for a leg stretch as anything
else.

Logan stared up at the spoke above him. It ran from the
tower into the flat face of the wall, but it wasn't really part of it.
The sky far above open up with electric light once again, and the
black surface reflected and refracted it in shifting patterns. For a
moment, the central column seemed to retain a residual glow from
the lightening even after it had dissipated, the dust swirling around
it in an eerie and artificial counter-clockwise pattern. Logan
watched the momentary phenomena and frowned. It reminded
him of the pigeons he and Jean were watching right before the
argument, the weaving, repetitive, impossible patterns pf their
flight.

They had been sitting on the roof of the apartment building
where Jean and her husband lived. Rooftops had become the only
isolation one could find in New York. Since moving in, Jean put a
great deal of work into her small rooftop garden. To her, it
brought a sense of normalcy into the very heart of the chaotic city.
It wasn't anything ostentatious, but there was grass, there were
bushes and a couple of small spotted trees. She could walk
barefoot, and this seemed very important to her. Logan was
barefoot, too, unconsciously wiggling his toes in the soft grass as
he and his friend sat on a park bench he had brought her from the
grounds at Xavier's.

"It's great, Logan," she said. "It fits perfectly."

"Thought you'd like it."

Despite the beauty of the place, there was nobody else on
the roof. He never asked, but Logan had the suspicion that Jean
had quietly planted a no trespassing sign in the minds of her fellow
tenants. Jean did that sometimes. Logan wondered if she was
even aware of it. They were looking across the street at the roof of
the adjacent building. A small group of happy twenty-somethings
were having an early summer barbecue, laughing and drinking
without a care in the world.

Jean and Logan had been eavesdropping on them -- nothing
malicious. Indeed, it was almost unconscious, a sort of vicarious
pleasure in the enjoyment of others. Logan could hear their
quietest conversations despite the sounds of city and distance, and
Jean's listening abilities were not limited to sounds. They were
not actively listening in. Instead, they only sat quietly, sharing the
silence that only years of familiarity could bring.

On one edge of the opposite roof, a blond girl named Sarah
drunkenly told her friend Denise that she was madly in love with
the dude who lives in 6-A. She was going to marry him, move to
Connecticut and have his babies. Just as soon as she learned his
name. Jean and Logan laughed, particularly amused that the man
Josh from 6-A was standing with at the grill was his lover.

"I think Sarah will survive," Jean said. Logan snorted. He
was searching for some retort when they both heard a gasp from
the opposite roof, coupled with the unmistakable whooshing sound
of a thousand birds taking flight. The pair looked to the next roof
over and saw the source of the neighbors' amazement. The whole
party gathered on one edge and pointed to the spectacle before
them, laughing and shouting. Even at a distance, it was easy to tell
that the jocularity was colored by more than wonder -- it was also
touched by fear.

Jean and Logan stood in amazement as well. They walked
to the edge and stared. A flock of pigeons had taken flight as one.
They moved so close together that it almost appeared as though the
air itself had come to life. In a thick line, the birds circled the
roof in a tight rotation. Clockwise, counter, and back again. They
moved in tight figure eights, a single living thing without so much
as a single bird breaking the column. The birds began to spiral
upwards, climbing away from the roofs that made up the East
Village city scape, higher and higher. Logan and Jean squinted,
fighting the glare. The birds ascended in a closer and closer group,
the mass making a dark silhouette against the sun. Then, with
arbitrary suddenness, the grouping scattered, each of the hundreds
of birds seeming to fly in a completely different direction.

With a musicality that never ceased to amaze Logan, Jean
tossed a full-throated laughed at the sky. She looked back at him
with that radiant smile, and it was so infectious that even Logan
broke his normally stoic expression to chuckle with her. She
looked back to where the birds were for a moment, then walked to
the center of her little garden. A warm breeze was blowing, but
somehow the rooftop was an oasis even from the normally toxic
smells of the city.

"Wow," Jean said. "That was pretty amazing."

"Yup." As he always did around Jean, he wished he had
poetry in him. Instead, all he could do was nod.

"Thanks for bringing the bench. It's great. It really
completes things."

"No one much uses it since you left, so I figured it'd be
better at your place. You've done a good job up here, Jeannie."

"Thanks. I want this place to become special, to really be a
place where you can take a respite from all the bullshit, you know?
Where you can just . . . It's not like I've had too much time to
really work on it yet." She smiled ruefully. "Gotta save the world
once a week."

Logan nodded. It had been a rough time for everyone,
pregnant with change. Kurt and Pete abandoned the cause,
Gambit, Psylocke and Jubilee arrived, old enemies had switched
sides at the same time that heroes had fallen. It was as though
some otherworldly force had decided to turn the world on its axis
as a kind of preternatural wake-up call. Little stability remained.
Jean had gotten married.

She looked over at him sadly, and he knew that on some
level he broadcast that last thought. Jean shook her head and
walked over to him, putting her hand on his cheek. She smiled.

"I love my husband, Logan."

"I know ya do, Jeannie," he said. "He's a good man."

A cricket called out on the roof, singing a song in the store
bought foliage. Jean looked over at it and smiled. Logan frowned
and shook his head.

"You got crickets in the middle of the village?"

"I know. Weird, huh? They just came out of the blue a
week or two ago. You ought to hear it at night, there must be
thousands."

"You guys must come out here every night, eh?"

"Not so much." She shrugged. "Scott's pretty busy these
days. Teaching at the Professor's, helping out up in Mass. We see
each other less now than before we got hitched."

"Where is he now?" Logan concentrated on keeping his
thoughts down deep. He was pretty good, or at least Jean was very
polite.

"He and Rory Flannigan are doing a Habitat for Humanity
thing."

"Rory . . ."

"A friend of his."

"Oh. Okay." He stopped, listening to the cricket for a
moment. The insects on the roof might have been telepathic
themselves, because several more joined in the singing. Logan
thought carefully about his next words, and Jean clearly felt them
coming. She folded her arms across her chest and moved away
from him. Logan slumped his broad shoulders and spoke.

"Look, Jeannie, I'm not sure how to say this, but . . ."

"Then don't, Logan. Don't say it. Don't ask me."

Of course, he had asked her. It was one thing to have your
thoughts overheard. It was quite another to speak them aloud.
There was an irrevocable quality to hard words spoken between
close friends -- once uttered, they could not be taken back. They
could not be ignored. As the afternoon faded into evening, two old
friends argued on the roof even as the neighbors partied the day
away. In the end, there were recriminations and denials and real,
cold anger. After he was gone, Jean sat alone in her garden
listening to the crickets sing to her all night.

By dawn the next day, Logan was bound for the Middle
East.

"You all right?" Juniper asked in the dark. The noise from
the storm above them was loud enough that she nearly had to shout
to be heard above the gale. Logan looked over at his friend and
grinned. He pulled a cigar from the inside of his jacket and
cupped his hand to strike a match and light it.

"Fine, darlin'," he said. He puffed on the cigar and looked
back up at the spoke. "I been thinkin' about this room. You think
that it could be more than just some big algebra equation or
church?"

"What are you getting at?"

"A fulcrum below the floor, spokes to a disconnected basin
in the wall; it's like a wagon wheel. A machine."

Juniper looked up and around the space. The lightening
above was now so frequent that the room was practically strobing
with dusty light. Slowly, she nodded. "It's possible, Loagn. It is
definitely possible that they were trying to build some kind of
device.

"It would make since given their mythology. These
weren't priests or magicians, they were scientists looking to find
the nature of the universe. Maybe this was some kind of . . . I
don't know. A telescope?"

"Could be. But it was below ground even then, right?"

"Yes."

"What did they believe? What were they looking for?"
They began walking across the Library, back to the computer. The
electric storm above was so violent that the shadows in the space
seemed alive, dancing with a consciousness of their own.

"We think that Hypatia believed that our world was only a
reflection of the perfect world, that it was striving toward
perfection. She got this from Plato's idea of the forms. The
earlier mathematicians, though, the ones before her believed that
there was even more to it than that."

"Like what?"

"They believed that there was a perfect world, too. That
there was a place that the earth was aspiring to be. But they
believed that ours was not the only world aspiring to this
perfection. The ancient Algebraians thought that there was a near
infinitum of places just like our own, whole universes almost
exactly like our's continually aspiring toward perfection. They
thought that if only the right formula were found, we could ascend
to becoming this ultimate place that all of the others wanted to be.
Until then, we were on equal footing with everyone else."

"Maybe this *is* the equation, Junie. Maybe the room
itself is the engine to drive the world up the ladder . . ." They
arrived at the computer station Logan saw the message flashing on
the screen. He ran forward, and Juniper bolted after him.

"What is it!?!"

"It's finished.!" Logan stopped before the old laptop. He
reached forward, then pulled his hand back. Juniper ran up next to
him and looked at the flashing dialogue box on the screen:

RENDERING COMPLETED

Her lips parted, and Logan thought that she was going to say
something, but nothing came out. She reached toward the "enter"
key with a trembling hand, then drew it back, putting her fingers
against her mouth. She giggled girlishly and looked at her
companion.

"I'm so nervous," she said.

"Go on, Juniper. This is your moment." She took a deep
and shaky breath, than reached forward and tapped the key. The
screen on the PC went blank, and the shadows in the room
continued to dance of their own accord despite the fact that the
lightening had slackened. The air smelled of ozone and
caramelized sugar.

Logan began to worry when the screen popped back up. At
first, it was a black and white overhead view of the library, crudely
drawn. The individual colors of every root character began filling
in. An orange square in the bottom, a purple one at the top, a
green one, red, purple again, yellow. They picked up speed,
rapidly filling the screen. The light gave Juniper's face a ghostly
quality, her smile wide and amazed. It only took seconds for the
image to begin to coalesce from a random selection of thousands
of colored pixels into an image.

Juniper made an unhappy noise as the image clarified
itself. Logan looked over at her, and realized that the more fully
resolved the image became, the more the look on the
archaeologist's face darkened. She straightened up and began to
back away from the screen.

"What is it?"

"My God, Logan. I think you were right." The screen was
readable now. There was a pattern, a very clear one. The builders
of the Library of Echoes had laid the symbols on the floor in such
a way that the three root groupings twined around each other to
form a complicated patters. Circling the tower in the center of the
room there was a serpent eating its own tail. Next to the walls of
the room, right beneath the spokes, there were seven more snakes.
From the view above, they appeared to be devouring the seven
altars recessed into the wall. The total effect was that the central
column was surrounded and the recesses were under siege.

"The Ourboros," Juniper whispered.

"What does it mean?" The lights dimmed, and the
computer's screen flickered. Juniper looked truly scared.

"New age spiritualists and hackneyed historians will tell
you pretty stories about how the Ourboros is a symbol for infinity.
The it's indicative of everlasting life, the symbol of the Roman
god, Janus and a great deal of other bunk. But it is not those
things, Logan. It is so much worse. Especially here."

The image on the screen finished forming, and for a
moment it was clear. Countless thousands of individual etchings
secretly representing a beast who strangled the terminus of the
whole space. The generator coughed weakly, then with a loud pop
it stopped. The screen went blank and the lights died, causing
Juniper Faraway to gasp. Logan's eyes were good, and he could
see how scared his friend was even in the darkness. The howling
of the wind was terrible.

"What does it really mean, Juniper?"

"What have I done," she whispered, more to herself than
anyone else. Logan realized that it wasn't only his excellent sight
that allowed him to see her. He looked back toward the center of
the room and saw that the tower itself was emitting a faint, anemic
glow from deep in its core. The spokes likewise hummed with
internal illumination. Logan softly took Juniper's shoulders in his
hands and looked deeply into her face.

"It's all right, Junie. Now tell me what's going on."

"It is not infinity, Logan. The snake is devouring itself,"
she finally said. "The Ourboros is entropy. It is the conclusion of
all things. If this is a machine, it was not constructed to answer
the questions of the universe. It was built to tear it all down."

Logan went back to the desk and picked up a flare. The
wind from above died out suddenly. He struck it, the sputtering
flame brightly lighting the area around him. It made him squint
for a moment while his eyes adjusted. He turned his attention
back to Juniper, who was all but shaking. The only sound was her
breathing and the hiss of the flare.

"So what, Junie? Write an article and move on to the next
thing."

"Don't you see? The tower is the universe itself. All of the
universes, the top upon which everything turns. I've just found the
key to a machine that was built to destroy the universe."

"Get a hold of yourself here! The machine doesn't work!"
He pointed his flare toward where the top of the tower had
shattered on the ground, continuing to look at his panic stricken
friend. If anything, she looked even more frightened. "And even
if it did, it is broken!"

"That's only cause those dumb sons of bitches used the
wrong key, Ole Hoss." Juniper screamed and Logan whirled to
face the new arrivals.

The tall man in the bright yellow duster walked out of the
darkness, his boot heels clopping on the sandstone. He had not
come alone. Four others walked loosely behind him, all dressed
like desperados from a second rate western. In each and every
case, there was something wrong, some bit of the paraphernalia
that took the usual imagery of the period just a bit too far. One of
the strangers wore a hat with a bright green brim, another's boots
had spurs so long that they dragged on the ground.

With a flip of his wrist, Logan tossed the flare between him
and the approaching men. He widened the stance of his feet,
bending his knees slightly while his mouth turned into a snarl. The
man in yellow stopped, and once again, he and Logan stared at
each other from across a gulf. This time, though, Logan was
clearly outgunned. The regulator spat a thick wad of tobacco juice
on the floor in front of him, the shifting light of the flare
momentarily reflecting off his silver teeth. The juice seemed to
sizzle on the ground.

"But the doc here found the right one," he said.

"Thanks for the info, bub," Logan growled. "Now that you
and your buddies answered our trivia question, you best clear
out."

"'Fraid not, friend. Tak! We got orders to bring that pretty
little filly back home to build the boss a new 'gin with a good key.
You just stand aside and you won't get hurt none."

The man in the yellow coat took a step forward and his
buddies followed. Logan smiled, barring his canines like a rabid
animal. Juniper stepped forward behind him, ready to offer some
kind of compromise when the impossible happened.

*SNIKT!*

"Logan!" Juniper screamed, hopping backwards. Three
gleaming blades popped from the back of his right hand with a
metallic clang. They were each nearly a foot long, and they looked
sharp. The man in the yellow coat stopped his advance, tilting his
head to regard his opponent's newly discovered ability.

"You boys sure you wanna dance with me?"

"Son, your lady friend comes back to New York with us.
Whether you go home or not is your call." The regulator
turned slightly and nodded at his posse, and they fanned out beside
him, forming a wide, thin line. "Around you or through you, Hoss.
Tak! You decide."

"Logan!" Juniper whispered imperatively. She was ready
to try and run for it; he could hear it in her voice. The cowboys
began to walk forward, their hands at their sides, fingers twitching
as though they were ready to draw six-shooters. The light
reflected off the teeth of the man in the yellow coat as he
approached, bloodlust in his grinning eyes.

"Stay behind me, Juniper," growled Wolverine, extending
the claws in his left hand. "Stay behind me. And you better cover
your eyes."

___________________________________________________________________

To Be Continued

NEXT: Separated by over ten thousand miles, members of the X-
Men face enemies from both without and within. Forget what you
expect and come back to read . . .

X-Men: Half Lit World

Chapter III: Hell in Small Places