Chapter 18

The sphere hissed as it slid open, the air pressure inside it dissipating into the less pressurized space of the Avalon landing bay. All around them, spheres were opening, mutant refugees clambering slowly out, passing backpacks and suitcases to one another and gazing around in awe and trepidation at the huge metal space.

The X-Men and the Brotherhood were there waiting. Kurt did a quick head count: Professor Xavier, was there, but there were no other teachers, no senior team members, no Amara. Magneto'd been right: they were spread pretty thin.

"Welcome to Avalon," Magneto's voice rang out. "You are safe here."

Bobby stepped forward. He was holding a clipboard and looked nervous. "Hey, um . . . hi, everybody. Welcome, I guess. Um . . . listen, there're rooms upstairs for everyone, so you can take your stuff up, but as you're going out we need to get kind of a sense of who-all is here. We're all kind of pitching in to keep things running while we wait out the action going down planet-side, so if anybody has powers or skills that would be useful, um, come by and let me know. Especially anybody who's good with electronics or computers, things like that, or anybody with medical training, or anybody whose powers generate power, like electricity or heat. Just come talk to me. My name's Bobby . . . Iceman."

Kurt scrambled out onto the floor and reached up to help Amanda down. Ray jogged over to help the other passengers from their sphere. "Crawler, what're you doing up here, man? Aren't you supposed to be with Rogue?"

"Change of plans," Kurt told him. "So now Bobby's in charge?"

"Beast got a whole system worked out. Chore rotation. He just left instructions for us, 'cause he needed to go help rescue Kitty."

"Why? Where's Kitty?"

"Yo, Amanda!" The sphere rattled; all three of them looked up to see Toad perched on top of it, fishing absently in his ear with a pinky finger. "Long time no see."

Amanda gave him an apologetic smile. "Not long enough, Toad. Sorry."

"Ouch. That's cold."

"You trashed my parents' house, remember?"

"Water under the bridge, right? I mean, you're up here, so I guess we all gotta be friends again. It ain't like you're a mutant."

Too late, Kurt remembered it was better to shut Toad up the second he started talking. He made a futile grab at Toad, who was still oblivious to the fact that he'd done anything wrong, but the words were out . . . and Magneto had heard them. Kurt saw his shadow fall across the side of the sphere.

He whipped around, pulling Amanda behind him. Ray stuck close, without any intention of leaving his teammate stuck between a villain and a hard place.

Magneto's voice was as cold as anything Bobby could conjure, but his gray eyes burned. "You brought one of them here."

"She's not 'one of them'," Kurt snapped back. "She's my girlfriend. And she needed help. The government vas vatching her. She was in danger for protecting us."

"That is not our concern."

"It's my concern!"

"Hardly mine." Magneto's eyes flicked to Amanda. Behind them, the sphere creaked. Two rings wrenched out of it and locked around her wrists, then pulled straight down. Amanda gave a startled little shriek as they wrenched her off balance and pinned her to the floor.

Kurt dropped with her and teleported, pulling the pair of them to a spot six inches away from where they'd been and leaving the cuffs behind. He was back on his feet in a second, and mad. And Kurt didn't get mad, usually. "Don't you touch her."

"She can't go back and she can't be allowed to wander free in here. I assumed you'd prefer her being imprisoned to my settling the issue more directly. This is my station, and I will protect it, whether you like it or not. You should not have brought her here." He shook his head, his lips pursed together in disgust and contempt. "You foolish, helpless, ignorant little children. First you can't see the war, and then you can't see the enemy."

"I can see ze enemy just fine," Kurt hissed back through clenched teeth. He was in Magneto's face now . . . shorter by a lot, but reckless and determined and gutsy. "Amanda's one of us. She's a friend of ze X-Men, and she just left her home and her family to keep from betraying us. Ve owe her our help. And if you don't think you owe her, then remember zat you owe me. You see this?" He extended his arm and grabbed at a handful of thick blue fur. "Zis is vhat you did to me. Your tests. Before I was a year old. It's because of you I never spent one day as a normal kid before I came to the Institute and met Professor Xavier!"

"Don't blame me for the way your X gene has manifested. Your mutation is your own problem."

"My mutation lets me teleport, and that hit when I vas thirteen just like anybody else's. Zis — the vay I look—vas your doing. It might never have happened if you hadn't decided to run tests on a kidnapped baby. So you owe me a favor, and I'm cashing it in."

"And if I refuse?"

"You refuse," Ray cut in, "and you mess with all of us. You want to kill one human, go ahead . . . you'll just have to kill half a dozen mutants to get to her. Right, guys?"

"Dang straight," Bobby called. He, Roberto, Sam and Jamie had formed a ring around Magneto. All of them together were a joke next to the Omega, but it still filled Kurt with a flush of pride to see his teammates standing with him.

"How quickly you forget." Professor Xavier maneuvered his chair through the crowd of people who were watching with trepidation from what looked like a safe distance. "Have you forgotten after so few years, Eric, that your Magda was human, too?"

Kurt heard a quick intake of startled breath. His head, along with everyone else's, whipped around to locate it.

It had come from Pietro. He recoiled a little from the sudden focusing of everyone's attention on him, but he spoke straight to Kurt. "My mom," he explained. "Our mom."

Kurt had never given the slightest thought to Pietro's mom. He'd assumed he had one, the same way pretty much everybody did. But suddenly the resemblance between Magneto and Quicksilver, the fair coloring and aristocratic noses and chins, was glaringly obvious, while Wanda's dark brown hair and large eyes were blatantly incongruous. Who did Wanda resemble, then? There was some other player in this game, a brunette human woman who had given birth to the twins and then disappeared into history, that Professor Xavier was invoking now.

"Amanda is no more and no less than she was," Xavier pressed on. "A human, but the mother and grandmother of mutants yet unborn. Will you kill her just because Nightcrawler loves her?"

"Let her stay, Father," Wanda requested. Her voice shook, and the glittering of one of her bracelets betrayed that her hands were shaking too, but her tone was firm. "It doesn't matter. Just let her stay."

It was Wanda that tipped the scale. Everyone watching could see it. Magneto's eyes darted from his daughter to Xavier, Xavier to Amanda, from Amanda back to Kurt. "Keep her, then," he ordered, and turned and left the room.

The Blackbird had to fly a wide, high loop, every stealth feature fired up, to evade pursuit before swinging back to pick up Shadowcat and Colossus. Gambit used the precious few seconds to stumble to the aircraft lavatory and be sick.

"Are you all right?" Hank demanded.

"Yeah," Gambit insisted, wiping his mouth with the shoulder of his coat. "Ran too hard. I lost a couple seconds inside an' had t'make 'em up."

"And you're bleeding."

Gambit reached up and touched his ear. His fingers came away slimed with blood. "Bullet nicked me. Ain't bad." Leaning heavily on the sink, he looked up at his reflection in her mirror. There was white froth at the corners of his mouth, and the side of his head that wasn't black and blue from Colossus's fist was red from the still-bleeding wound in his ear. There were purple marks under his eyes.

The last time he'd seen his reflection looking this awful, Julian Boudreaux had been rapidly cooling on the billiard table in his family's house.

Hank put a huge, solid, comforting hand on his back. "You done good, Gambit. Take it easy. We're proud of you."

"Yeah," Gambit sighed. "Fo' now."

The Blackbird's engines changed note as it switched from horizontal flight to vertical. Gambit spat the last of the vomit from his mouth into the sink and stood up. "C'mon. Let's get our girl."

The second that the landing rap touched the earth, Piotr was on it, The slender, blue-gray body in his arms. She wasn't shivering.

The plane was already up and gone as Piotr laid her on the exam table. Hank put a hand on her forehead. "Sweet mother of Moses, she's freezing. Piotr, sit down and strip your shirt. We've got to get her warmed up."

Remy allowed only a second for Colossus to hesitate in mortification. "Lose de shirt, genius! I'd do it for her if I could, but . . ."

"I know you would," Piotr snarled, pulling the hem of his uniform shirt over his head. He sat on the floor with his back against the side of the plane and accepted Kitty's limp form onto his lap, her shoulders leaning back against his chest. Remy tossed the blanket over them both and grabbed a couple more from stowage.

Hank felt for Kitty's pulse. "I can barely feel anything," he muttered. "Gambit, sphygmomamometer."

"Here!" Gambit pitched it across the plane. "Stethoscope?"

"Yes." Hank's large, furry blue hands were quick with experience and urgency that stayed on the controlled side of panic. There was a moment of intense, breathless silence as he watched the gauge. "Oh, my goodness."

"What?" Piotr demanded.

"Her blood pressure's so low I'm impressed her heart's still beating." He yanked the stethoscope from his ears and let it drop around his neck.

"When I found her, they were draining her blood from both arms," said Piotr, who seemed to be trying to arrange his arms so he could hold Kitty without actually touching her.

"Juicing her. With the right science, Kitty's DNA is potentially . . . well, it's the making of unstoppable armies. It's got to be worth more than the blood of Christ."

The com system flickered online, and Magneto's bass voice projected through it. "Blackbird, what is your status? Are you ready for pickup?"

"Not yet, Avalon," Storm answered. "We've got a problem."

"Magneto, do you have any blood packs up there in your medical bay?" Hank asked.

"No. There's saline."

"Not going to be nearly good enough. Kitty needs a blood transfusion, now."

"What's her blood type?" Gambit demanded. "Somebody up dere's gotta be a match."

Storm checked the computer. "B negative. Rare. O negative would work."

"No, it wouldn't, and neither would B negative," Hank snapped. "We've never tried a mutant-to-mutant blood transfusion. The X gene alters so much of the body so radically there's no telling what would happen if we put another mutant's blood in her, even someone with a minor power. Ten to one it would kill her."

"Is going without a transfusion more or less likely to kill her?" Magneto asked rhetorically from the comm.

"Turn around," Gambit ordered. "Drop me at a hospital an' swing back in twenty minutes."

"That's a cold job on a staffed building, Gambit," Storm shot at him. "And you can barely stand up!"

"I can do it."

"I'm B negative."

"We can't just land the Blackbird on top of a hospital," said Hank. "It's three times the size of a helicopter pad. Even if we could fit, and were in stealth mode, somebody will notice—and if they're trying to land a medivac chopper, we could end up killing somebody. We'll cause chaos, at best." He turned back to Piotr. "Colossus, watch her breathing. Tell me if she stops."

"Oh, believe me . . . I will tell you."

"I'm B negative."

"If we cannot risk a theft, we should take her back to Avalon and hope for the best," said Storm. "She may pull through."

"She'd have a lot better chance of pulling through if we hadn't had to leave her outside for fifteen minutes in the mountains in March at midnight."

"What are you, deaf? I'm B Negative!"

There was one second of silence.

"You want to see my Red Cross card?" said an annoyed girl's voice.

"Is that Amanda?" Gambit asked.

"Blackbird, we have a donor," Magneto announced. "Get up here."

"On our way. We will need a pickup in ten minutes."

"Understood."

Storm cut the comm and accelerated the plane.

Amanda Sefton, fully equipped with jeans, boots, warm jacket, and a little square of heavyweight paper with her name and blood type on it, faced off against the most powerful mutant super villain in the history of the world. And came very close to winning the glaring competition.

"So are we gonna stand here, or are we gonna save Kitty?" Amanda asked at last. She was planted in the doorway of the conference room, arms folded in belligerence, Kurt behind her with a hand on her shoulder.

"You don't have to do zis," Kurt insisted to her. "You don't have to prove anything."

"Kitty's my friend, too," she rebutted.

"Get downstairs to the medical lab," Magneto ordered Amanda. "Get rid of that coat, lie down on an exam table and prop up your feet. I'll be back with the plane."

Amanda nodded. "Cool. Come on, Kurt." She grabbed his arm and pulled him into the corridor.

"Vhere are you going?" Kurt demanded, allowing himself to be dragged more than keeping up with her. "You don't even know vhere ze medical bay is!"

"So show me!"

He dug his heels in and pulled her to a stop. "You're thinking like a human," he told her gently. "You're in Mutantville now."

There was a sudden, obscuring flume of thick gray smoke and a flash of heat. She stumbled and choked, waving a hand in front of her face to clear the air.

"Shortcut," said Kurt. "Medical bay."

"Wow," said Amanda, looking around at the gleaming steel facility. "That's so weird. Which way's north now?"

"We're on an asteroid. Zhere isn't any north. But we did a quarter-turn . . ." Kurt gestured with his body. "Like zis."

This information helped to dispel a little of her disorientation. "Okay." She shrugged out of her backpack and her coat. "Help me find a pillow or something for my feet."

"Okay." Kurt turned to look for a pillow, then turned back. "Amanda?"

"Yeah?"

"You're amazing."

Amanda stopped in her tracks, an embarrassed smile spreading over her face. Kurt was looking at her as though she was the one with super powers, instead of him.

"Ready for anything," she joked, blushing. "Kurt?"

"Yeah?"

"You know I love your fur, right? I love it, and I love you, and it might be selfish, but . . . if I could change what Magneto did to you, I don't think I would. I wouldn't want to risk you turning out to be anybody but exactly who you are."

Kurt smiled . . . one of his slow, hesitant smiles that she loved watching. "Thanks."

Amanda forgot what they were doing for a second. Then, with the unpleasant jerk of someone who just realized they fell asleep again after turning off the alarm, she snapped back to the task at hand and resumed her search for a pillow.

By the time Magneto returned, Amanda was ready to rock and roll, with her feet up, her shirt sleeves rolled above her elbows, and her toes waving absently in the air. Magneto was carrying Kitty, wrapped in a rough beige blanket, her pale, naked head lolling against his shoulder. He was being followed by most of Kurt's house mates, Lance Alvers and a couple of his friends, and some people she didn't recognize.

He laid Kitty on the exam bed next to the one Amanda had claimed, then turned around with apocalyptic thunder in his bone-shaking bass voice. "OUT!"

Hank McCoy . . . whom she'd seen only a few times since he'd grown fur and quit teaching at Bayville High, but who had been one of her favorite teachers . . . had a more effective method of crowd control. "Colossus, clear the room, please."

Colossus manhandled everybody but Kurt out the door in record time.

"Him, too," Magneto snapped, jerking his head at Kurt and fishing two pre-packaged needles from a drawer.

"Waste of energy," Colossus observed, his level, measured tone daring Magneto to contradict him. Giving Jamie once last, extremely decisive shove, he closed the door of the medlab behind himself, leaving only Magneto, Hank, Kurt, and the two girls.

Magneto had torn open the needle packages, and both instruments were parked in the air next to his head. He attached one to a length of clear plastic tubing while Hank hooked Kitty up to a heart monitor.

Amanda had been faithfully donating blood since her sixteenth birthday, but she didn't have much idea of what usually happened to her blood after she donated it. She had a vague idea of it being spun into components, maybe cleaned or pasteurized somehow, but the only pieces of equipment she could see emerging were the plastic tubing and the two needles.

"So . . . we're doing this fast and dirty, huh?" she asked, trying to stay casual. She kept waving her toes, for good measure. Kurt slipped his hand into hers and held on.

"No time for anything else," said Hank. "Amanda, when was the last time you donated?"

Amanda squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out the overload of stimuli going on around her. "It was right after my first midterm for English . . . so two and a half, maybe three weeks ago?"

"She's not eligible to donate again yet," Hank said to Magneto.

"We're not playing by the rules," Magneto answered.

One of the needles dropped, angled itself properly, and stabbed into her arm. Amanda gasped at the sudden pain, but didn't let any muscles tense up except the ones in her left hand. Kurt squeezed back.

Magneto waited until the tubing filled with dark red blood, and a few drops of it had seeped from the other needle and fallen to the floor. Confident there were no air bubbles in the improvised rig, he directed it into a faint blue vein line in Kitty's arm. She didn't even twitch. Amanda squeezed her right hand into a fist to force blood through the tube. Her artery to Kitty's vein—one interconnected circulatory system.

"Good," Hank murmured. "Good, good. Amanda, tell us if you start feeling woozy. You're doing great."

"Yeah, all my phlebotomists say I'm a good bleeder," Amanda joked. "I fully expect a bottle of juice and a cookie, I hope you guys know."

"You vill be showered vith cookies, I promise," Kurt assured her.

Amanda let her head settle back against the bed and focused on pumping her fist.

"It's helping," Hank announced after a few minutes. "Her bp's up, color's better . . . getting some warmth back in her fingers and toes."

Amanda smiled and allowed herself a sigh of relief. Then she wished she hadn't. "Mr. McCoy?"

"Yes, Amanda?"

"I think I'm feeling woozy." She took a tighter grip on Kurt's hand. "Really woozy."

"Okay," said Hank. "Kurt, better go get her that juice."

Kurt was gone in an eyeblink.

Hank grabbed another pillow from the cabinet that Amanda had left open and used it to elevate her legs even further. "Does that help?"

"A little," said Amanda, wanting to be positive. The feeling that she'd just stepped off a merry-go-round—disoriented, unbalanced, and a little nauseous—did recede noticeably. But only for a second. All too soon, it was back, and worse.

"She's probably given well over what she's used to," said Hank, partially to himself and partially to Magneto. "We should get that thing out."

"Shadowcat's blood pressure is still dangerously low," Magneto snapped back.

"It'll have to do. We don't need both of them in critical."

"I'm fine," Amanda insisted. She could hear her voice slurring. "Just kinda . . . spinny and . . ."

"Take the needle out, now!"

"Shadowcat is the priority."

"No, she isn't!"

"It's okay . . ." said Amanda. At least, she was moderately sure she said something like it. Her ears were ringing, and she was finding it hard to think in a straight line.

When her brain cleared, she found that her neck had gone slack and her head had fallen back and rolled sideways. Kurt was back, crouched next to her and slapping her cheek. "Amanda, vake up. You okay? Talk to me!"

"You blacked out. You scared me to death! How many fingers?"

"Two," guessed Amanda, not bothering to look at the blue-furred hand he was holding in front of her face. With hands like his, it wasn't like he had many options.

"Black spots? Nausea? Anysing?"

At her other side, Mr. McCoy pressed a piece of cotton wool against the wound at the bend of her elbow and lifted her arm above her head. "There we go. If you've got any blood left, we want to keep it inside."

She wobbled her head up to get a look at the room. "Where's purple cape guy?"

"Gone," Kurt told her. "He left. Don't worry. You're safe."

"Duh," said Amanda, with more vehemence than eloquence. "It's just a little blood. People black out doing this all the time. He wasn't gonna let anything serious happen to me."

Mr. McCoy and Kurt exchanged a look, one neither subtle nor comfortable.

"Kurt, makes sure she drinks all of that. Amanda, can you keep this arm up here for a couple of minutes? Just like that. Keep pressure on it. Good girl. I'm going to get Kitty on a saline drip."

"Is she gonna be okay?" Amanda asked, craning her over-wobbly head to try to see Kitty.

"As far as I can see, there's no reason she shouldn't live to fight another day. You saved her life, Amanda Sefton. Good work."

Amanda smiled. "I'm a superhero, too."

Kurt smiled at her. "Absolutely."

The ground shook. Amanda, forgetting for a second that she was supposed to be keeping her arm above her head, grabbed onto Kurt. "What was that?"

"Lance getting nervous." Hank turned to the door and yelled, "SHE'S OKAY!"

Amanda gulped down a deep breath and looked Kurt firmly in the eye. "I am gonna need some time to get adjusted to Mutantville," she announced, her voice deliberately calm.

Kurt returned her gaze for a minute, the muscles around his lips tensing a little under the skin. Then he made a bizarre, startling snorting noise through his nose, gave up, and started to laugh.

Amanda felt herself start to shake, then to giggle. She let her forehead rest against his and laughed and laughed.

From outside the medlab, she heard an angry voice snarl "Pour l'amour du ciel!"

"He's gonna start blowing things up," Mr. McCoy sighed. "Let him in, Colossus. That ear needs cleaning anyway."

The door opened just enough to let Gambit slither in. The side of his head was covered in blood, making him look like a distracted axe murderer. He tossed a greeting of "Hey, Brown Eyes," at Amanda on his way to Kitty's bedside. "She's good?" he demanded.

"Gonna be fine," Hank assured him.

"Blood pressure comin' up?"

"Yes."

"She gonna be . . . I dunno . . . brain-damaged, or . . ."

"Not likely. Piotr said she was conscious and coherent for a few minutes before we picked them up."

"An' fingers an' toes? Frostbite?"

"It wasn't even below freezing. Sit down." Hank put one huge hand on Gambit's shoulder and shoved him down onto the next exam bed. "Head wounds bleed a lot, so it's not as bad as it looks, but you are a mess."

"She's . . ."

"She's all right. Can you calm down?"

Gambit sighed, closed his eyes, and let himself fall sideways onto the bed, bad ear up. "She dies an' everyt'in' I have dies wid her."

"She's not going to die. Now stop being dramatic and find some alcohol wipes to clean your face off with. Gambit?"

He was already asleep.

Author's Notes:

I'm uploading this from someone else's computer . . . so I blame typos and other errors on the fact that this keyboard and I are not getting along so good.