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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/), and in the Prince of Dreams archive (https://www.angelfire.com/mn2/AlexSisterWolf/).

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X-Men: Half Lit World

by
Alexander Greenfield

Chapter II: The Broken Surface

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.

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 also 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 lettering 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.

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 a lesser 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."

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."

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.

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.

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