Subject: [OTL]: The Chosen Ones [3/12] Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 14:48:00 -0700 (PDT) From: D Benway The Chosen Ones, Part 3 of 12: Four Against The World Dr. Benway did this. ******************************************************************* This story is not intended for children of any age. It contains descriptions of human behaviour which many might find distressing. You have been warned. The characters belong to Marvel. The story is my own, and copyright to me. Many thanks for the editorial assistance of XXX. Other stories are archived at the website of Luba. ******************************************************************** She was cycling down the hill, back towards the school, on Rahne's old Raleigh. It had once belonged to Moira, and looked as if it would outlast all of them. When she lifted it, she half wondered if it was heavier than she was. It didn't have a cross-bar, of course, but it was the only bike in Patrick Henry House that she could comfortably ride while wearing a skirt. She hated the skirt, which was heavy wool and had to be worn in every damn season. The jacket wasn't much better, but at least you could take it off if there were no masters around. The tie always made her feel like she was choking, and she would have had to iron the fucking cotton blouse every night if Illyana didn't have some way of fixing it. It was bad enough wearing it every time she left the room (Sunday afternoons excepted), but having to wear it into town was embarrassing. It marked her out as one of the Elect, and so the locals either kissed her ass or spat at her the moment that she turned her back. Even so, she had to get out of that prison from time to time. She had no regular courses beyond History, Latin, and English on two mornings a week, and she made it a point to go into town for some reason or other every other day. The fact that her blouses fell apart every month due to Illyana's ministrations provided the excuse on this particular afternoon. She braked to a halt at a traffic light. As she waited, she watched a bus pass in front of her. It seemed to slow, then changed its hue. Everything blue vanished, and the world became muted greens and browns. The sound of the bus died away as it smeared to a stop. There was no sound at all, though she had not phased. A bolt of pain passed across her forehead. She closed her eyes and opened them again. Frost? It didn't feel like Frost. Frost's probes hurt at the back of the head, not the front. She gritted her teeth and made her way through the proof that there was an infinitude of prime numbers. The sound of the bus returned. She opened her eyes, and all was as it should have been, at least on the outside. The strength was gone from her, and she could barely hold the bicycle upright. Using what remained to her, she clumsily dismounted and made her way to the doughnut shop across the intersection. She almost blacked out locking the bike. She found her way to a booth near the door. She collapsed into the hard plastic seat, exhausted as if she had run a marathon. A large man, possibly an Arab, asked her if she was going to just sit there. She ordered a coffee. She could barely speak. He gave her a dubious glance. The only other people in the shop were a clutch of punkers huddled around a table. She counted five mohawks in the mass. They were looking at her from time to time, pointing and laughing. The arab man brought her a coffee, which proved to be ridiculously cheap and tasted better than anything she had ever had at the school. She closed her eyes and sipped it slowly. Logan always said that donut shops were good places to be anonymous in. She remembered him saying it, gesturing with a walnut cruller to make the point. The memory gave her some comfort. Whatever had happened out there, it had definitely been a telepathic attack, and a powerful one. It might have been Frost, but what about Selene? They might have another telepath in the Club, or it might even be an enemy of Frost, trying to attack the Bitch Queen indirectly. She opened her eyes and concentrated on the oily swirl on the surface of the coffee. She looked at the face reflected in the surface. It wasn't hers. She looked up. It was the face of the girl sitting across from her. There was no-one else in the donut shop. There was no-one else outside. There was nothing outside, only a gray fog. "Kate," the girl said, quietly. She was perhaps 18, and very pale. She had short red hair and green eyes. Her face was gaunt, but one that men would find more attractive than her own. She was tall, but her body was hidden by the ragged green Army parka and pants that she wore. She smelled appalling. "That better?" The smell had vanished. "Get the _fuck_ out of my head!" "I need to know," said the girl, as if she was asking the time of day. "About Xavier. I'm having trouble reading you." "Back _off_." She started recalling the digits of pi. Everything shimmered about her, and something real flashed in the grayness outside. "Stop. Fighting. Me. I need. To know. What. Happened. To." Everything was real for a fraction of a second, then they were standing in a gray nothingness. The ragged girl was glowing, with a golden light. "I can get you here, but I can't get inside. Kate, I'm your friend. Stop fighting me. I need to talk." The girl looked terrified. "I don't know who you are. Did Frost send you?" "Not directly. You sent me, with Emma's help. I'm from the future. It's hard to explain." "Get out. Frost made a deal with me. No interference from outside. I don't know where she found you, but I'm not giving up. Get out." "But you and Emma found me and rescued me. I love you." The girl was leaking. A wave of deep sexual desire passed over her. It was revolting. "I've never seen you before in my life," she managed to choke out. "But you will. You'll give me life. Let me show you." The greyness and the ragged girl disappeared. She was in Westchester, in the prof's study. A fire was burning. There was a small red-headed girl standing there, hiding behind a curtain. The Professor was there, in his chair. He was concentrating, as if to send. He exploded. Smoke, fire. Chaos. The little girl being pulled from the wreckage, bleeding, holding onto a severed arm. Then- A camp. A concentration camp. The prisoners all had collars. The guards were giant robots. Sentinels. Not all of them. There were men, who broke the little girl, because she was a mutant. It was Manhattan. They put all the mutants there. They trained the girl and made her a hound, to sniff out escaping mutants, so they could be killed. She saw how they trained her. She saw the hound rescued. She saw someone who looked like herself, older. Fighting all that time, and it still ended up a nightmare. She saw her older self and the attacker, talking, embracing, fucking, the only bright thing in a world full of pain- Back in reality, graying out. The pain was overwhelming. She put her hand to her head, to be sure that it hadn't split open. Her stomach flipped over. She staggered from her seat towards the bathroom. The stall was locked, so she fell against the sink, using it to hold her up. She swayed for a moment, then threw her tie over her shoulder and retched into the bowl. There was little to come up, as she had skipped breakfast. She heard a sound behind her and looked up. There was no mirror, only an empty metal frame screwed to the wall with obscenities written on the drywall inside of it. She turned slowly. It wasn't her attacker. It was a short punk with orange hair and eyes blackened by mascara and perhaps something else. "Don't have to do that shit," said the punker. She wondered if this was one of the ones that Frost hired to perform up at the school. They all had to watch through a one-way mirror. "They'll still treat you like shit, no matter how thin you are," said the girl. "No," she managed. "Some bad hooch? Helps to get it all out." "No," she said coldly. "You wouldn't understand." ******************************************************************* He was walking from the Old School to the gym when Dani came around the corner. It was definitely an ambush. There was no clear way to escape her without making it obvious. She was wearing sunglasses. The sun had not shone in over a week. "Guthrie." "Hi, Dani." "Anything new?" "No." She took off her glasses. She had a nasty black eye. He hadn't seen her since training a week before. The injury was obviously only a few days old. There was still blood in the white of her eye. "Have an accident?" Tears welled in her eyes. "You could say that," she said. "Tripped and fell Down Under, behind the boiler. Clumsy." "Not doing anything foolish, I hope," he said. It came out more coldly than he had intended. "I didn't think it was foolish. I bruised some other parts, too." She looked down at her left wrist. It was purpled and swollen, as if it had been partially caught in a vise. "Does it hurt?" It was a stupid thing to say, but it was the most neutral thing he could think of. "Course it fucking hurts. It hurts all the time." "Tylenol. Tylenol might help." She gave a bitter laugh, that sounded almost like a cough. "No drugs. That's what got me into this." That was almost too dangerous. This was not a safe location. They could be heard. "Just stay away from them, then," he said. "Far away. Don't do ... anything on your own. It's not safe." His mouth was dry. It was the wrong thing to say. An angry look flashed across her eyes, but then she dropped her head. "No. I won't. See you at the gym tomorrow." The gym that the other students didn't use. More of it might come out, if James was there. He had to stop himself from thinking of the things that he wanted to do to James. She turned and left without saying anything. He watched her from behind as she put the glasses back on and headed up the path towards the house. He remembered what she looked like when she could stand tall, and he wanted take them all, James, Haroun, Frost, Shaw, and Leland, to take them on a flight then just let go, see how tough they really were. He wondered how far they had gotten into him already. ****************************************************************** He sat on the bed, his back resting against the hard wood. The walls of Haroun's room had paneling from an English castle that had been imported illegally on Haroun's behalf. The paneling was uneven and uncomfortable, but comfort was the last thing he wanted now. He set to work rebuttoning his shirt and re-tying his tie. The first time, he hadn't taken his tie off, and somehow it had become stained. Someone had pointed out the stain at lunch, and he had explained it away as some of the egg from breakfast. He had taken the tie into the woods and burned it. The next morning, a stiff white envelope had arrived from the headmistress, in which detailed instructions were given regarding the removal of bodily fluids from silk. He supposed that she would have broad experience with that sort of thing. Haroun was sitting in a leather armchair on the other side of the room, wearing only a loosely fastened silk robe. He listened as Haroun butchered what might have been a beautiful poem in classical Arabic. The Al-Rashid family had exactly one asset, Haroun's aunt, who had married the brother of the Saudi oil minister and brought the family out from the sand. Haroun still spoke with an accent that made Sam's English sound refined. "Did you like it?" "Hm?" he said. "Wasn't listening." "It's one of the great poems in Arabic. From a caliph to a boy slave whom he loved. The slave loved him back but said nothing. They both died alone, unloved by anyone, ever again." "How tragic." "It is tragic," said Haroun, quietly. "It's very sad." "I'll bet the caliph wrote it." Haroun didn't respond, but a look of intense pain passed across his face. "I thought you read it very nicely," he said pleasantly, as Haroun climbed into bed beside him. Arms wrapped around his body. The scent almost choked him. Something wet crawled into his ear. He shuddered. "You want more, do you?" purred Haroun. "Yeah, but there's no time. I've got a class soon." "I dream about you." "Oh?" "The golden boy. I dreamed about you, all the time, when we lived in the desert. I would meet a blond boy and he would be the love of my life. When I found I could fly, I dreamed that he would fly with me, and we would come as we flew, together." "So it's Sam you want," he said, trying hard not to sound relieved. "Not any more," whispered Haroun. "I want you. I want to leave here with you." "What?" He started, and Haroun sat up, a puzzled look crossing his face. Haroun moved in close, holding him by the shoulders, and motioned that he should turn his head. Haroun knew about the range of the mikes in the rooms, too. Not surprising, since Haroun was a good enough hacker to break into the Inner Circle's private net by sheer luck using a part that could be purchased for 50 cents at a Radio Shack. "Let's run away," whispered Haroun breathlessly. "Go away. Live on the road." "And live on what?" he asked. Haroun and the other Hellions didn't know about the Compact or the hostages. Letting him know would be a killing offence. He began to sweat. "The kindness of others," said Haroun, managing what might have been a Vivian Leigh whisper if Vivian Leigh had spent her life mucking out camel pens in Jeddah. "Are you fucking nuts?" he whispered, barely remembering not to shout. "You'd get a disease. You'd die." "We'd die," said Haroun dreamily. "Both young and beautiful. Please. Oh, please, run away with me." "On the road, huh?" Outside this room, when others were around, he was lucky if Haroun ignored him. In this room, Haroun begged him to do things that he could not have imagined. He wasn't sure if he was more shocked by what Haroun asked of him, or by how easy he found it to do what he was asked. Haroun's hair was as thick and curly as Kitty's, after all. "Run away like Sharon did?" Haroun gasped. "How-" They had hostages too. He knew it, for certain. "I'm not just a pretty face," he muttered. "I know she's alive somewhere." "She was dying here." "So you all helped her escape." "Anne-Marie planned it." "Did the club find her?" "No. We put her in a container on a flight to Helsinki. She had a friend there, she said." "But the old bitch found out." "Yeah. Didn't stop us though." "You think she knew all along?" "Don't want to think about it." "Think she's listening now?" He could feel Haroun trembling. "I don't care ," Haroun said, loud enough for all to hear. "I want to leave with you." "Even if it means the deaths of others," he whispered. "Nothing would matter, as long as you loved me." He felt ill. "I've got a class," he said. "I have to go." Haroun lay back on the mattress. "She wouldn't harm us," said Haroun. "She'd let us go." "Why?" "She loves us. All the little mutant children." "Like you love me." "Yes," Haroun whispered, hollowly. "No." He left the room without looking back. ******************************************************************** She sat at the foot of her bed, massaging her friend's temples with slow circles of her strong fingers. This was important, since it would make Kitty feel better. She might have used a spell, but those could be unpredictable and taxing, and besides, Kitty had asked her not to. "Better?" "Mmm." She took that as an assent. She released the spell that she in reserve, and Kitty moaned softly. She would not tell Kitty of it, but as soon as she had seen Kitty return from her ride, she had known that something was wrong. Kitty often had migraines, but this time Kitty had almost collapsed before reaching the bed. She had been quick, and the cameras would have seen nothing different from what they usually saw. She wondered if the migraines were Kitty's way of mourning for Piotr. The three of them were a troika, an indivisible three. No. Not possible. Kitty would never give up. Ever. She shifted slightly. Kitty had fallen asleep, and she wanted a few moments to herself. Kitty would ask about spells upon awakening, and she would lie. Kitty had asked her not to lie, but she just couldn't manage it. It had something to do with trust, but then that had to be reciprocated. She hadn't lied to Kitty, not once, not about anything, until Kitty had told her of the old man's theory. Kitty had questioned the most important thing, and, for a moment, she had considered using Kitty's blood to conjure the last two bloodstones. If she had, she would have been rid of the pain of the world forever. It was a comforting thought. Kitty had sensed something and had told her that it was only a theory, giving her a winning smile and a hug. She knew where the edge of the precipice was now, and had turned from it. The rest could all go flaming into the pit, but that would make Kitty sad, and that could not be allowed. Kitty was the important thing in her life. Kitty Kitty Kitty Kitty Kitty- ****************************************************************** She reclined on her divan, as that was what one was supposed to do on a divan. She might have just sat upon it, but she would have looked ridiculous sitting on a divan. She would have been much more comfortable sitting, but one never knew who might come in. It was always good to imagine that someone was watching even if one believed that one was alone. She opened the small, delicately inlaid box and transferred a pellet of opium to the pipe from the box. She didn't need it. She knew that. She could stop any time that she wanted, it was a benefit of being the right type of telepath. It was so relaxing, and it didn't reduce one's barriers to being read. It did shred the barriers that kept the thoughts of others away, but by that time one hardly cared. If it had any drawbacks, there was the constipating effect that accompanied its use. She often wished that she had telekinetic abilities. Telekinetics never had that particular problem. It was relaxing to go away for a while, she decided, drawing on the pipe. Even with the first of it going to her head, she could not stop thinking of what Shaw had said. He would want a death, she knew it, but therein lay the problem. The obvious choice was Rahne, whose conversion would always be suspect, if it happened at all. Damned Christians. If they did Rahne, it would be like losing Sharon again, this time for real. If they did Rahne, Ramsey would collapse, and Shaw would be furious. Ramsey and Pryde were both needed, the only ones who truly mattered. No information store could stand against them, and only the hostages kept them out of her own systems. She had the awful feeling that Rasputin might not be easily killable, but then, there was always Guthrie. She bit the inside of her mouth, hard enough to draw blood. It didn't hurt as it should, she had taken too many draws on the pipe. Killing any of them would not be forgiven. She had given far too much away to Pryde with that damned Compact. Shaw hadn't come near her since then, and the temptation to read him was overwhelming. The Rigelian detectors were beyond her ability to evade, and Shaw would know in an instant. Pryde and Ramsey could probably disable them in an evening. She took another draw on the pipe. She was not reclining as much as sagging across the divan by now, still aware enough to sense it but far enough under not to care. The noise barriers were slipping now, and she slipped from mind to mind, picking up on the choicest emotions. This being a very proper boarding school filled with the children of the rich, she picked up mostly upon pain, loneliness, inadequacy. The full length mirrors and fluorescent lights that she had placed outside every shower in the girls' residence halls provided a delicious accompaniment to every breakfast. She was almost under when she picked up on a very sharp kernel of anger. It wasn't one that she had tasted before, so she put the pipe aside and tried to make a fix. She could not focus on it. This was annoying in the extreme. The one offence that one could not buy one's way out of at the Academy was being impervious to readings by the headmistress. She concentrated and caught the optical signal. She was looking through snow at what looked like the desktop of her own computer. Her heart skipped a beat. She had heard of this sort of time-memory problem before, in telepaths. It was often associated with brain tumours. No. She stimulated what should have been the frontal lobe of the brain to which she was attuned. The head turned. Hers did not. She seized on the optical signal. The head had turned back to the screen, but not before she caught a glance of Kitty's features in the mirror. She dropped the pipe. The tiny plug of burning opium fell out and rolled across the divan, leaving a trail of ash. She stamped it into the carpet, extinguishing it. It annoyed her. She would have to have the entire carpet out if the help couldn't remove the stain. No. She had to clear her head. She crawled to her desk and removed a small injector from a drawer. She stabbed it into the skin behind her ear, then toppled over as the rush hit. When she came to, she found the anger again. She concentrated on an image of Rasputin's brother. The mind responded with a memory of seeing a tall boy working in the yard, in one of the streets near the school. He looked similar to Piotr Rasputin. She recognized the street. It was the one Kitty traveled along when she left the grounds for the town. No-one had been able to explain that route before. She was in Kitty's Mind. She tried to read more, but encountered static and lost the connection. She scrambled to her feet and stood, gripping the edges of her desk in a death grip. They were in the inner system. This was a killing offence, no question. Pryde, who had once been as dead as a stone, was, with difficulty, readable. With a little subtle manipulation, she would be able to move the blocks and get in to see a lot more. She might even be able to write. She smiled to herself in the darkness, as she locked away the pipe and the elaborate wooden box. [Next: Either/Or]