Note: Franklin's parting words are from "Inside," a song by - of course! - Sting. The full line is, "Love is the fire at the end of the world." That song also includes the excellent line, "Inside my head's a box of stars I never dared to open."
There should be tombstones, Rachel thought. It was the only coherent thought she could really produce at the moment. Lightheaded from a long day with no food, little rest, and much confusion, she staggered along the corridors of one of the desert facility's buildings without so much as a token resistance. It seemed... natural, somehow, for armed human soldiers to be roughly parading her around. Natural that her hands should be restrained and her brain buzzing with exhaustion. Even the flashing red lights and persistant, nails-on-chalkboard screech of an alarm - which hadn't started until she'd been marched inside - fit in to her expectations with no problem.
But there ought to have been tombstones on the way in. That last stretch of ground before the massive, shielded doors - there should have been rows of tombstones stretching away on both sides.
"Don't try anything, freak," one of the soldiers warned her as they turned down a long, metal- paneled hallway that was identical to the one they'd just left - and the one before that, too. Rachel nodded weary assent. She wouldn't try anything. She was still trying to figure out who she was, for heaven's sake. At least the soldiers had given her her fill of water to drink.
They passed beneath another in an endless succession of security cameras, and she glanced up briefly before returning her focus to the floor. Who was watching? What was this place? Why had there been another girl skulking around outside, and why had that other girl attacked her and turned her over to the soldiers?
Too many questions. Her head ached with them. It was starting to feel as though other voices were whispering in her mind. Maybe she was having a nervous breakdown. That would cap off the day fairly nicely.
"Waiting room?" the soldier who'd called her a freak asked his partner. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the bleat of the alarm.
The other soldier, who was permanently glued to the walkie-talkie clipped to his jacket, shook his head with a laconic, "Negative. There's a visitor leaving. VIP."
"There aren't any other shielded rooms on this level," the first soldier said, plainly irritated. The other one, the one not shoving Rachel along, just made a noncommittal grunt. Rachel herself did not apparently get a vote.
"Take it up with the boss," the second soldier said. The walkie-talkie crackled to life again - the radio traffic was incessant - and he answered it swiftly. "Patrol Victor-319, go ahead."
Yet another garbled, staticky order came over the small communications device. Regardless of the alarm, Rachel didn't understand a word of it. In truth, she wasn't even trying. She felt like all the fight had been drained out of her, and a thick, heavy blanket of apathy had settled over her in its stead. What did it matter if she struggled or not? She'd still have to walk past the tombstones.
Franklin wouldn't approve of the apathy. He'd tell her to fight -
Franklin.
Rachel stopped breathing for a moment. The young man with blond hair. Franklin. Franklin Richards, brilliant and gentle and fiercely protective of the Dream. Tiny splinters of memory pierced the gray fog and jabbed at her heart. He had loved her; she had loved him more than anything. Franklin, Franklin...
He'd told her something, and she'd clasped the words to her soul. "The fire of the world." No. That wasn't it. The fire... The fire at the end of the world.
She heard Franklin whisper: "You're the fire at the end of the world."
"Collar's almost here," the second soldier announced to his partner, silencing his walkie-talkie. He stopped walking a few yards from a sealed blast door and Rachel, along with the other soldier, stopped too. "We wait."
"Those things don't work," the first soldier said, now disgusted as well as irritated. "Never have."
Rachel felt hollow inside; hollow but filled with a roaring, jumbled noise. She raised her head and looked around swiftly, breathing shallow and fast, trying to find the source of the chaos. The noise began to resolve itself into individual thoughts - not hers, no, not hers, but the mind-voices of the soldiers standing around her.
Franklin, she cried out in her own panicked thoughts, is this what I do? Could she hear thoughts? Could she control thoughts?
The answer came as soon as she asked her questions. "Yes," she breathed, panic forgotten under a soothing wash of calm. All was right, all was well; she knew what she could do. That was the way Franklin had always made her feel.
"Shut up, freak," the soldier said crossly, prodding her ungently with his gun. And then three things happened at once.
One: The blast door in front of them slid open and two huge men in black suits loomed in the doorway. One of them was carrying a chunky circular band with circuitry visible on the interior.
Two: Rachel finally isolated the thoughts of the soldier who kept calling her a freak and learned both that he was afraid of her, and that the collar in the big man's hand was meant for her neck.
And finally: She panicked.
It was a wild and primal reaction to a stimulus she had, until that moment, forgotten. She remembered the weight on her neck, the pain stabbing into her nervous system whenever a human soldier felt like pressing a button, the fear and hatred. Rachel jerked back and the collar inexplicably exploded, showering the men with sparks and burnt pieces of metal and plastic.
The two soldiers of Patrol Victor-319 reacted with admirable speed and decisiveness. They brought their weapons up and the second one barked, "Emergency assist!" into the walkie-talkie and to the big men, who brushed off their suits and began to stomp towards Rachel.
But before either soldier could aim, Rachel thought at them. She shoved against the fragile barriers of their artificial psychic shields, which shattered like spun sugar against her assault, and then she shoved at their minds. Defenseless, they cried out and clutched at their helmets.
Rachel tried to draw her thoughts back and found she couldn't untangle all the way from the soldiers'. She panicked for a moment, but then remembered in a rush of relief - it was so simple! - and pulled clear. She snapped back into herself with a sharp inhalation of breath.
The two soldiers were lying on the floor, curled into fetal positions, their fingers gripping their temples in a white-knuckled effort to stop the pain that was entirely and literally only in their minds.
She felt a moment of pity. Then the first of the two black suits reached her, and it was all she could do to dodge the surprisingly quick lunge of his meaty arm. If they caught her, she would probably be knocked out until they could lock a collar around her neck and short out her ability to see thoughts.
It was almost impossible to get out of a collar once it was locked on. She remembered. She also remembered Franklin's warm hands on her neck, gently smoothing the skin there that hadn't felt air or sun or touch since the collar had been locked into place a decade earlier.
The man made another grab for her, and Rachel scrambled backwards, stumbling over the fallen soldiers. She tripped on a protruding gun barrel and fell, hard, to the floor. Now she was trapped, lying on her side with her hands cuffed behind her back, and the two mountains of muscle evidently knew it, because they slowed their advance to an ominous, unstoppable pace.
It had worked pretty well on the soldiers, so Rachel took a deep breath and prepared to tear into the men's minds. She pushed out - and met a barrier, like an endless curving wall of smooth glass, absolutely impenetrable. She gathered up all her strength, imagined blasting the wall to pieces, imagined melting the glass beneath the fury of her assault, imagined destroying the minds that lay beyond.
Nothing happened.
The men exchanged glances and then continued their advance, completely unfazed.
It was almost as though they didn't have minds, but of course they did. She was just too weak to batter her way in. But that left her out of luck. Rachel's stomach lurched - how could she fight these men whose minds were beyond her reach? Her hands were tied behind her back, and it wasn't as though she had any other weapon -
But she did, she realized. The collar had exploded; that was her doing. She could do the same to her handcuffs. She could do the same to the men.
Now that she remembered how to, Rachel focused her thoughts to a narrow razor-edge and sliced them along the metal binding her wrists. The handcuffs fell to the floor with a loud, ringing clatter. She glanced down; she'd broken them in half.
"She's unrestrained," the man on the right said, as Rachel scrambled to her feet and rubbed vigorously at her sore and reddened wrists.
"Termination will be necessary," the man on the left said. They simultaneously stopped and reached into their suit jackets, pulling out compact, matte-black handguns that all but vanished in their ham fists.
"No!" Rachel shouted - not in fear, but defiance - and flung out her arms, fingers splayed.
The air around her seemed to ripple outward. She felt the mass of the men in the black suits as a weight against her mind, and then she pushed a little harder and they were knocked off their feet. One thudded into the wall with enough force to wrench the metal panels out of alignment.
Breathing hard, Rachel lowered her hands and stared at what she had done - at the armed and dangerous men she had flattened with a thought, with a gesture and a shout. The blood was a rushing tide in her ears that drowned out all the other noises, even the klaxons.
Not a tide. A song. Deep and thrumming, awakening an ancient fire in every cell of her body. It was a song that could crack the heavens. It was a song that would drive gods to madness with its lure of infinities.
It's the song of my power, she thought wildly. And her mother's power before her -
"Halt!" a soldier yelled, breaking Rachel off in mid-memory. She swung round to face him, bringing her hand up just in case, but he only had a walkie-talkie in his hands. The obligatory rifle was still slung over his back.
Spurred by instinct more than fear, Rachel turned and fled in the direction that her captors been going, leaving the soldiers and the big men to recover as best they might. The new soldier cried out again - a call to other comrades - but she turned a corner and was out of danger for a while. The corridors twisted around and back on themselves, making a maze. She picked a door at random and burst through it, then clattered down the narrow stairway on the other side. One floor, then another, then another...
She had to fix something, Rachel realized as she ran. For Franklin - she had to fix it. But what was she supposed to fix? It was here, whatever it was. She'd been right, when she'd sent Albert Jethro away: It was no mistake that she was here, in this desert, in this facility. She could strike out with her thoughts and make steel handcuffs shatter at will. She was the one who was going to fix it. Whatever "it" was.
But then who was the other girl, and what was she here for?
She should have gone up, not down, she saw belatedly. But it was too late; already the stairwell above her was coming to noisy life with the stomping of soldier's boots, audible even over the shrill alarm. Her mistake would be compounded if she didn't get out of the stairway and find some place to take cover. She came to a halt at the next landing and tried to open the door.
It was locked.
Rachel hit her frustration limit abruptly. "Open, you stupid thing!" she snarled at it, and reached for the handle not with her hand, but her mind. The door was promptly yanked clean off its hinges and flung itself towards her. She barely sidestepped it - the edge nicked the sleeve of her jacket - and let the thing fall. The door mangled the relatively flimsy stairway and made a hellacious amount of noise on its crashing way down. But she was through the gaping doorway and running down the corridor beyond.
Breathing was like inhaling fire, and the muscles of her legs, already tired by a long desert hike, were protesting loudly. She gritted her teeth and pushed through it. The lights went out for a moment and she was running in pure ink, then came humming back on. The corridor was dimmer than it had been and she saw that only one in four lights was functioning. The noisy alarm was gone as well, and she found herself hugely grateful for the chance to think.
Then her vision wavered.
It was a bit like opening her eyes underwater: the world seemed to blur and melt away into indistinct shapes and colors. She blinked, and her sight returned, but she was no longer in the middle of a vast pseudo-military base.
Instead, she was running down a sunlit hallway with a wooden floor, running to a room at the end that smelled of lemons and old books, running to help - someone. It was a memory, she realized, and grabbed at it desperately. But the real world swam back into focus, replacing wood with metal, replacing sunshine with fluorescent bulbs, replacing lemons with motor oil.
The corridor abruptly gave way to a catwalk flung across a cavernous space. The room stretched away above and below her for a staggering distance. Rachel craned her neck upwards, trying to find the top. Then she looked down over the flimsy railing to see how far she could fall.
A long way. A long, long way.
"Subject acquired on level fifteen, repeat, level fifteen! Catwalk on the north end!"
She turned and saw a soldier with his walkie-talkie raised and his eyes wide in panic. Behind him were a dozen soldiers armed with rifles, not communications gear.
"We need a unit now!" he shouted into the walkie-talkie. The soldiers behind him brought their weapons to bear. A dozen red tracer beams centered on her torso.
But then Rachel was back in the palace of her memory. She saw a man in the sunlit room at the end of the hallway, sitting in a wheeled chair in front of a smashed wall, calling out with a calm voice to the army on the lawn. Asking them to please cease their needless hostilities. It was the man she'd come to help, the man she adored as a second father since her own father had gone away forever. Just like her mother.
And she saw the soldiers on the lawn aim, and red lights bloomed on the man's chest, and then the soldiers fired -
The rage was an explosive thing that threatened to devour her soul from within. Furious at the universe, she pushed out with her mind, as hard as she could - so hard that she hurt herself - and the soldiers clustered in the mouth of the corridor suddenly flew backwards a good fifty yards. The metal in her path warped and dented away from her with an agonized squeal, like a living thing. She lifted clear of the of the catwalk and balanced there on nothing but thoughts. Thoughts and anger. The fire of her heart.
For a moment she felt pure and invincible, a cosmic avenger shining with righteous fury, and then engines roared in the great void behind her. Rachel spun in mid-air to see a huge metal robot rising just beyond the catwalk.
It was a Sentinel.
She had only seconds before it acquired her as a target and proceeded to carry out its programming, which was to execute any mutant in its presence. She hadn't seen one yet, in this facility, but she knew exactly what it was, she knew exactly how it worked, she knew its weaknesses and what its voice would sound like if this early model had a voice.
She knew. She remembered, fully and completely. At the sight of the robot, the memories broke through the gray fog as though a dam had burst, burying her under a torrent of history that she marveled at - how could she have forgotten? She remembered her parents, her family, her friends, the camps, the escape, the Sentinels. She remembered the hours spent with her one true love. She remembered what and who she could become.
And over the roar of the Sentinel's engines came the sound of her exhilarated laughter.
The robots didn't stand a chance.