Chapter 10
Sami stopped at the top of the steps and shivered, but not from the cold. Just as she had feared, the long dark hallway was the one from her dreams. She took a cautious look around and began to walk down the hallway. When she came to the room marked 22, the room from her dream, she took a deep breath and stepped inside. The room was empty but still she looked towards spot where the beds had been and half expected to see the two sleeping girls still there. A rat scuttled in the corner and she jumped and gave a small yelp. She laughed at her own nervousness and left the room. Further down the hallway she came to a halt in front of an all too familiar door marked 47. This had been her room, she thought to herself. Suddenly the memory of herself and another girl with red hair lounging on her bed and giggling over a teen pinup magazine flashed in her mind, startling her. And then just as unexpected a name, Kitty! "Kitty!" She laughed aloud as the memories of her best friend flowed into her mind from her subconscious. And suddenly she saw so many images of the two of them together that she was almost overwhelmed. Katherine Pryde, how had she forgotten the best friend she'd ever had? And then came another image, one that she was sure couldn't be real. Kitty was in their room laughing over something and then she turned and said goodbye and walked straight through the wooden door, the very closed wooden door. Sami slumped to the floor and shook her head. That couldn't have been real, she thought to herself, could it? But then came the very solid feeling that it was real and the knowledge that her best friend had been able to walk through a lot more than doors. And with that memory came a tumble of others. Memories of the students and the unusual school that Sami had been a part of. Memories of the strange abilities of her classmates. And finally came the memory that undid her, the memory of her brother Eric's abilities and her own. And suddenly everything around her turned very, very cold, as she looked down at where she was sitting and saw that the floor where she'd touched it had suddenly turned to ice.
The stunned group stared at Professor Charles Xavier as the horror of what he'd said seeped in. "What do you mean, you put the chip in Sami? John asked him as calmly as he could. "When I first learned of Sami and Eric they were small children," The professor began, "yet their unique abilities were very easy to detect and that is precisely why I tried to persuade you to enroll them in my school. You see Sami and Eric are each very special children, what some people might call Mutants. In each of us we have some undeveloped talent. In normal human beings it might be the ability to paint or to sing, but sometimes a persons ability is so far beyond the norm that we call it a mutation and the bearer a mutant. In Eric it was his ability to create and manipulate fire that was his own special talent. He could make a small spark or create a wildfire that went only where he directed it to. But in Sami, as in many mutants, there was more than one ability. In fact her abilities were so amazing to me that I took her under my wing personally. You're stepdaughter, Mr. Black is quite the most amazing student I've ever had. She has not only some psychic ability, but also the ability to manipulate her atmosphere to produce ice, the ability to heal and the ability to move objects with her mind, what some might call "telekinesis".