The intercom buzzed at 2:26 in the morning, one night in early January. Jean-Paul heard himself cry out, but the dream he'd been having faded too quickly for him to remember it. Pale fluorescent light spilled in from the hallway—the policy was open-door whenever possible—and he caught a glimpse of Jim Hudson and Heather MacNeil striding past in uniform, knocking on the few doors that were closed.
Jean-Paul groped for the rubber-soled slippers he'd been given. The floors were cold here. Aurora poked her head in his room. "Some real action for once!" she said.
"What? What are we doing?"
She shrugged. "Monsieur Hudson said something about a power failure."
"They need a team of mutants from DND for a power failure?"
"A big one! Massive! Anyway, I don't know, I just heard him talking to Madame MacNeil. You look sick."
"I'm not sick. I just woke up. I'm not a cokehead like you."
"All the good genes went to me, I suppose." She gathered her long hair up behind her head. "I must to my boudoir make haste. Comb your hair, JP. There might be cameras."
Jean-Paul rolled his eyes, and closed the door while he got into uniform. Through the thick double-glass windows he could see that the sky was a gloomy orange-charcoal colour, the low clouds reflecting the light from the sodium streetlights. Probably snowing, although they were too high up for him to tell. He didn't like flying in the snow; the cold didn't bother him, but the lack of visibility certainly did. And the wetness, when they landed. Maybe there wouldn't be any need for flying tonight.
He almost forgot that they were going out on a real mission, and remembered as he was going out the door that they had to wear the body armour, which had only arrived in shipment a few days ago. The suit was heavy, and it had a strange smell, a mix of synthetics and the faintly musty smell of the Alpha Flight quartermasters in the basement. He picked at the gorget piece at his neck, trying to make it admit a bit of movement, and the image in the mirror suddenly gave him a shock. Jean-Paul Martin Beaubier (he still wasn't sure which name he wanted to use) had never in his life predicted this, that he would be in a federal government building adjusting his body armour and wondering if the higher-ups would consider Pinnacle Dragon Skin instead.
From elsewhere in the building, Jean-Paul could hear Walter Langkowski moaning in pain, a low basso profundo sound that always seemed at first like singing. The first time he'd heard it—no one had warned him—Jean-Paul had sped down the hall to Langkowski's room in less than half a second, thinking that the guy was having a heart attack. Did you yell during a heart attack? Something. Something life-threatening.
All he had found in the room was Langkowski laid out on the floor, body twisted and—and still twisting, stretching with awful bony pops and sounds of tissue straining. Long, shaggy fur the colour of a grizzly bear was sprouting all over the physicist's body. Jean-Paul took one look and the thought came to him that he needed to throw up, but he couldn't tear himself away from the sight. Some other eye inside his brain was completely undisturbed, determined to soak up everything there was to see, everything there was to hear.
His face red with the pain, fists balled up and tendons standing out in his neck, Langkowski was trying to breathe, and muttering snatches of a mantra. "Asato ma sat gamaya, tamaso ma jyotir gamaya, mrityor-ma amritam gamaya, om shanti shanti shantih..."
Even now, Jean-Paul could make out the words, the few words that carried through the halls. Shanti shanti shantih. The mantra helped with the pain, Langkowski said. Jean-Paul looked back over his room, wondering if perhaps some object was out of place, if the bed could be neater. Displaced, somehow, that was how he felt.
In the conference room, when the whole team was gathered together, including the lumbering presence of Sasquatch, Hudson read them some report in thin, telegraphed language.
"...reported to police from a payphone several miles from the perimeter of the area at twelve fifteen a.m. Power outage extends from southwestern Repentigny into parts of Terrebonne. Phone lines down, mobile phone signal from all carriers unavailable. Cause unknown."
"That's it?" Aurora said.
Hudson gave her a look. "Walter, explain to the young lady why this is significant."
Sasquatch cleared his throat, an intimidating noise. "An ordinary power outage wouldn't have any effect on mobile phone signals or land lines."
"And?" Hudson prompted.
"And," Sasquatch continued reluctantly, "Mobile phones communicate by radio waves."
Aurora bit her lip. "Prawn?"
"Dudley," Hudson confirmed. "The CRIM database doesn't know of any other mutants with that sort of power over the electromagnetic spectrum. A power outage with these features is either Francis Dudley or a very tiny nuclear attack."
Sasquatch added, "Or both."
"Do we know if he's aware of his upper limits?" Heather asked.
"No."
She pursed her lips and looked up at Hudson. "I'm not sure the team's ready for this."
"We'd better be. There isn't anybody else."
"This is ridiculous," Aurora said. "Prawn wouldn't—he wouldn't nuke anybody. He—"
Sasquatch broke in. "He just destroyed every piece of equipment containing a computer chip within a radius of several miles. The people who live there are incommunicado. What if someone needs an ambulance? Which they might, if anyone there had a pacemaker. What if Dudley had slipped and flooded the whole town with lethal levels of radiation? Hell, maybe he did. We won't know until a few hours or days from now, when people start dropping like flies. Dudley just did the equivalent of spraying bullets in a shopping centre. If nobody dies, that'll be good luck, not good management. He deserves to be arrested."
"Does everyone know who this guy is but me?" Jean-Paul said.
"He's one of Joel McCree's crew," Sasquatch said. "Alias King Prawn, the skinny British kid with the horse face. We wanted him. I keep wondering what we could have offered him—this wouldn't have happened if we'd been able to keep a closer eye..."
Hudson sighed. "It doesn't matter now. I know why McCree engineered this, and I know we'll find him at the scene too. If we can get him as an accessory we'll certainly try. Not that anyone has the first clue about how to keep someone like McCree behind bars."
Even in the darkness, Kathleen could tell when the power went out.
The lights in the hallway burned out in silence, the radiators ceased their rattling, and a wail went up from one of the other wards—but what she noticed first was the sudden implosion of the boundaries. She could hear the minds of the guards and nurses again, felt worry trickling into her head from the switchboard operator two floors down (two floors! Her range was back!) because Neurocherche had a generator and what were the chances of both going down at once?
In the other bed, Ling gasped once. Everyone in the ward was waking up, hands to their heads. That same, human motion, as if some instinctual part of the mind still believed that thoughts were things, that you could press them away like air bubbles from under a wet cloth. It was worse than losing control in a mall or a classroom—there you would only hear the ordinary thoughts of ordinary people, but here at Neurocherche if you took down your walls you only saw an infinite field of mirrors, eyes staring into other eyes.
But somewhere in all the recursive internal noise and confusion, Kathleen heard minds that she recognised. She knew those images: the long-fingered hands struggling with the shirt buttons, the curls of the steam over the industrial pots on the stove. The Virgencita with her swollen eye looked down from the poster in the kitchen upon a headline in Le Devoir about police budgets. They'd all been trying to think of anything but this, and Paul had pointed out that it was about time they bought some serious flashlights. They were lucky there hadn't been another icestorm, that was all. It was worth the money to have something reliable. And the way it feels when you can't talk or think, you can't, everything is set in motion so you just pray. She knew how it felt to be certain, then, not of the outcome but of everything else. All will be well. Even if it won't. Thoughts in her head that she couldn't unthink, certainty so vulnerable to doubt that all objections washed straight through it. The same repeated murmur in the back of her head, the one she'd heard that first day he was in the clinic. Quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum. The words weren't even important. It was an orientation of the heart, like leaves towards the sun.
Kathleen knew why Ling was breathing hard. The autonomous nervous system got overloaded, when everything was loud like this. You could forget to breathe, forget to let your heart beat. There was no question of shielding, not when there was this much noise, not when you couldn't even find the borders of your own mind. Might as well try to block out neutrinos. Radio waves. No one thought to put their systems behind Faraday cages? They deserved what they got. These were dangerous days, and you couldn't rely on probabilities to keep you safe anymore. He refused to feel guilty. It felt good, a bit too good, letting that thick rich pulse of radio out on those noisy circuits. You had to be careful. Everything was so delicate, so fine like a spiderweb, not built to take a punch. Knocking out Hydro Quebec's power grid would not help the public's conception of mutants.
No. No. Kathleen pressed her hands to her face, trying to remind her brain where it ended. Her skin was cold. And in Four West the boys had well lost it.
Joel only began to have second thoughts when he appeared in the hallway of the Neurocherche building and heard, even muffled as his hearing was in the Aphanes, the screams. The telepaths were screaming, as if Prawn really had pulled the plug on some vital life support system. The moment in which the lights had gone out—it was too cinematic, too familiar, and Joel hadn't been particularly impressed or worried. He hadn't thought about the people with pacemakers, or even about the Neurocherche patients with their adapted neural implants. Hodya didn't think they all had implants; according to the stolen records, some of them were getting some other form of therapy. So she'd said. But when he heard the screams, Joel knew with a sickening wave of certainty that he might well have just killed people. He could have killed them.
He found himself in Kathleen's room, although he didn't remember passing through the hall into the girls' ward. Kathleen was curled up in a ball with the heels of her hands driven into her eye sockets, as if she had a migraine. Joel came up beside her and let himself be seen—maybe it was just that she looked so much like his cousin, or maybe it was that she had been the one to manipulate Paul into a near-escape, but Joel felt closer to Kathleen, like she was an ally. She could lead them out. He knew they couldn't do it without at least one of the telepaths helping them.
She couldn't see him, though. Or rather, she didn't look up. Joel took a chance, a terrible chance, and became solid enough to touch her shoulder. "Kathleen."
"Stop, stop it, go back. Please." She hit him, not really meaning to. Too much adrenaline. He felt the blow in his mind like an elbow in the mouth, an accident that wasn't quite.
"Sorry," he said, when his thoughts swam back into focus, and he faded back into almost-nothingness. "Sorry. We're trying to get you out of here."
"I know."
"Of course. Of course you know. I'm sorry. Just—I'm going to need your help, but we can't hurt anybody. No matter what." The hall outside was in chaos. The guards were yelling at each other. "The disruptors are off. We just need to make them quiet. The other patients. Or make the guards think we're being quiet."
"I can't, I can't, I can hardly think..."
One of the guards outside was limned against the thin light from the window, showing a black box to the others. "Look at this," he was saying. "I pried the back off to check the battery and—can you even see it? The shit's melted together. Fused solid."
"Maybe someone should go check outside—"
"Who? Jesus fuck, we need every pair of hands in Four West. Things are getting hairy in there. Little freaks went insane the second the disruptors went offline."
Joel turned his attention back to Kathleen. "You can do this. You can."
"I can't."
Her fingers clenched and unclenched, bones locking under the skin. Handfuls of the blankets. Joel felt like cold hands were running up and down his back, and he knew it had to be worse for her, for anyone who could really feel the suffering of someone else. He was glad Paul was at home.
"Come back," she said to him after a moment. She held out her hand and waggled the fingers, as if she wanted him to hold it.
He became solid again, cautiously, and let her have his hand. "What do you need?"
She crashed into his mind like a car driving through a garage door, cutting into him until she found what she needed. A flipbook of memories flickered past, pausing on a waiting room in St Rita's, a motel room in Toronto with no air conditioning, a thickly dark state park in Vermont where nothing at all seemed to be alive but the trees, the quietest, the quietest—
Little starlings with bright yellow beaks, pecking in the new green grass of the side lawn. The twitterings echoed off the stone, loud enough that they seemed to be in the rafters of the church itself. The air smelled like stale water, a dusty smell, a whiff of frankincense now and then if you turned your head right. If you turned your head. St Joseph's, before the marauders took away the statues. Imperfect plaster statues, with children's pencil scrawls on the feet of St Patrick and a sickly pinkish cast to the snake under the Virgin's feet. Ugly and outdated. She didn't like it. But he did, which was all she needed. The light in the sanctuary lamp was so still, so red, and now the silence was big enough that it drowned out everything, even the squalling birds outside. All they could hear was the space between thoughts, the silence in which everything began.
Her hand loosened around his, and she licked her lips.
"Okay," whispered Joel, when he had his breath back. "You can stop this, Kathleen."
Yes, she could. He felt it, as she projected that stillness outwards, over the hall and the wards. Go down. Quiet. Bodies fell down, on the floor, on beds. Go to sleep.
A radio fell out of a guard's hand and skittered across the floor.
Kathleen opened her eyes. "Okay. Better."
Joel's head hurt. He was glad to fade back into the Aphanes, but he couldn't let himself fall too far. "All right." Could they hear him? He spoke first in French, then in English. "We're going down by the stairs. Elevators aren't working. There's a bus in the parking lot."
"It's a field trip," the Asian girl said, getting her shoes.
"It's a jailbreak," Kathleen corrected her.
Prawn was out in the hallway. "I thought you said there weren't more than thirty."
"I was guessing. What, you don't think we'll have room?"
"I don't know. Maybe not. The boys in the other ward have lost it completely, though—how are you going to get them out?"
Joel looked inside Four West, and instinctively drew back again, even though nothing could hurt him in this state. "Jesus."
Some of the boys were sitting still on their beds, rocking back and forth or just sobbing. Others were—rioting was the word that came to mind, although there couldn't have been more than ten. They seemed like a much bigger crowd than they were, throwing chairs and pillows, wrestling with each other, yelling wordlessly. Two guards had fallen in here, and beside one guard's hand there lay a syringe.
None of the boys attempted to leave the ward, and none even ventured into the hall. They didn't even seem to be aware that the hall existed; none looked at Joel or Prawn, none glanced up when the flashlight's beam passed over them, none heard their voices.
Kathleen came up behind him. "Don't bother," she said.
"Why not? What's wrong with them?"
"They're a failed experiment. Or maybe an accident, a mistake. We don't know. There's nothing left to rescue there, no will to tap into. Like a boneless chicken, you know? Nothing to hold them up."
"Right." Prawn reached over and pulled the door shut, harder than he needed to. His hands were shaking.
"We're not leaving them here," Joel said, but he knew he wasn't fooling anyone. "Prawn!"
"No. Fuck off." His voice was oddly sober. He'd already turned back down the hall, towards the elevator.
The girls from Kathleen's ward had crept out into the hall. Twelve of them. Twelve little girls in two straight lines. Joel bit his lip. What do I do? What do I do?
No answer. No bubbling forth of intuition, no memory of good advice from Father Gilles or Professor Xavier or his father or anyone. He turned back to Kathleen. "You can't do anything with them? You can't just make them leave with us?"
"They're imprinted with a command to stay in the ward. It overrides everything else."
"But..."
"There's nothing left in there," Kathleen said again. "We can't. Or I would have, when I put the guards to sleep. Trust me, okay?"
There weren't enough hands to physically force the boys to leave. Joel knew he was doing something terrible, but he couldn't think of any other options. "All right. All right, we'll go."
And they took off for the stairs. Joel had never seriously run before, never for his life or for anyone else's. Only in dreams did he work up to this sort of speed, fuelled with adrenaline. Gym class. Why was he thinking of gym class now? Stephen telling him solemnly that he'd be in a lot of trouble when the apocalypse came and everyone would be living off the land. "You'll be one of the first ones to go," he'd said. "You've got fat reserves to live off, sure, but someone might kill you and eat you for that." Stephen just liked to be macabre, thought it impressed people. Joel wanted to throw up, but he knew the feeling was self-indulgent. There wasn't any time. The girls were following, their housecoats flapping like awkward wings, footsteps slapping on the concrete steps.
Neurocherche was not a tall building, luckily enough, but it was full of twisting corridors and odd architectural choices—hallways that looked promising but which led only to a supply closet and an alarm panel. None of them knew it well, particularly the patients, who had never been allowed off the ward. The Asian girl, with her remote viewing powers, knew the layout of the building but had a poor sense of direction. Joel wasn't sure how that was possible, but it was; she would direct them to go left instead of right at every opportunity. In the dark, with only one flashlight in Prawn's hand, they followed two dead ends before they found the way out. Even the red Sortie - Exit signs were unlit.
They were in the front lobby when things went to shit.
In the pale circle of the flashlight, Joel recognised Jeanne-Marie. Behind her stood the pale, strawblonde Niko and Jean-Paul, the boy they'd sprung from Mile End Safety Centre. Anne McKenzie was there as well, and several others. And—the flashlight's beam jerked wildly and fell to the floor.
"Holy fuck," Prawn said, his voice almost a squeak.
"Some mutant advocates you've got there, McCree," said the other figure dryly. He was enormous, perhaps eight feet tall, a muscular creature with fur the colour of a grizzly bear's. "Nice to finally meet you in person. Walter Langkowski, of Alpha Flight."
"Introductions can wait," said the leader, a man in a thick black bodysuit that looked like it was more than just fabric. Kathleen gave Joel a hard mental shove, and sent, I can't read him. He's got a disruptor on, somewhere.
"McCree, just what do you think you're doing?" the man demanded.
"The corporal works of mercy," Joel said, trying for bravado but merely sounding insane.
"Shall I inform you that we are a force affiliated with the Department of National Defence and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, that you are trespassing on these premises, that you are indirectly responsible for the destruction of quite a lot of property, and that you could very well be charged with kidnapping?"
"Yes, thank you."
"Does that mean you'll cooperate?"
"What does cooperation entail?"
"I'm afraid it's arrest and detainment, Mr McCree," the man said with an edge of sarcasm in his voice. "Or the best we can do. Your friends will all be held, even if you can't be. You're the sort of person that would bother, aren't you?"
"I want to know your names."
"I told you introductions can wait."
"I'm a Canadian citizen," Joel said, voice beginning to rise into the rather less manly registers, "And even mutants have a right to know who's arresting them. You'll tell me your names, and—and show some ID."
He was stalling, of course, but the man rolled his eyes and produced an ID card. Joel approached closer to read it. "James Hudson. All right. Are you aware that these people—minors, some of them—have been abused and interrogated against their will?"
Hudson frowned, the sort of frown that covers hopefulness. "You have proof of that?"
"I have thirty-some witnesses. Well—twelve."
"Huh. You didn't think you needed to call the authorities?"
"I played telephone tag for six hours with the Ministry and eventually got told that Neurocherche checked out okay with the ethics board. And that was it. The police said they'd look into it. What are you going to do for these people?"
"The law is the law, McCree. You can't just decide you don't like how the process works and run in and cause chaos in a private company. You certainly can't melt every computer chip in the building with an EMP. You've crossed the line."
Joel had opened his mouth to answer, although he wasn't sure what he was going to say, when suddenly the twins, the brown-haired girl, the blonde woman, and the huge hairy mutant all went down in a heap, unconscious. Hudson reacted automatically like a snake striking, leaping forward at the person closest to him—which, unfortunately, was Joel himself. Joel wasn't fully physical, and he felt Hudson fall through him with a shock like the bloodrush that follows standing up when you haven't been well.
Hudson hit the ground hard, elbows and skull on the tile. Prawn and the girls were at the door, and the glass shattered: Joel saw a shiver of heat in the air and heard a hiss as shards hit the snow outside. Even Prawn looked surprised, although clearly he'd been the one who had silently blasted the glass. He was bolder with using radiation lately.
As they fled, Joel helped Hudson to his feet. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
Hudson grabbed a handful of Joel's collar and dragged him down. He was strong, stronger than any normal person. "What's going on here, McCree?"
"I don't know." He did know. "The girls—one of them must have, have zapped the others. Your team. Or maybe they did it together, I don't know."
"You don't." Hudson's voice was sceptical. Joel felt blind in the darkness of his body, but he didn't want to retreat into the Aphanes again. He wanted trust.
"No, I don't know. Jesus. I'm not a telepath."
"So what did Neurocherche want you for?"
Joel stared at him. Hodya hadn't been able to figure that one out either, but Hudson—he knew something, yes, you could hear it just in the way he formed the words, the way he glided easily past them. "What are you saying?"
A slow breath. "I guess I can't tell you. Well. So you're claiming total innocence?"
"I didn't know they were going to do this. Although it's not that surprising."
"No shit. Get out of my sight, McCree. I can't keep you, so just bugger off and let me gather my thoughts here."
Joel swallowed. Now he felt the intuition bubbling up, although he didn't like what it was saying. Was this how it was for Paul? This knowing that simply descended upon you, falling like rain? He squatted down beside Jeanne-Marie and brushed a strand of hair away from her face. "I'm not going to go anywhere."
"Oh, aren't you noble." Hudson got to his feet. "Is this a manoeuvre to distract me? I can still stop your crew, you know. Your telepaths can't touch me. And I can outspeed your little Volvo pretty easily."
"Well, I'm staying right here. And if I'm not around and you start menacing my people—I'd like to think that Prawn wouldn't fry all your circuits or melt your brain in your head, but the whole nonviolence thing is a bit shaky. You know?"
"Don't you try to threaten me, McCree. You have no idea what, or who, you're dealing with."
"I'm not threatening. I'm saying. You can have me, trouble-free, or you can mess with a bunch of scared telepaths and probably the most massively lethal mutant in the province."
Hudson went to the door, through which a bitter wind was blowing. "It's not about what's easier. I'm amazed that the son of a great legal mind like your father's never seemed to get this basic fact about law enforcement. If someone's a danger to the public, we go after them. If my whole team's down for the count and it's just me, I go alone. And frankly, we all think that you have quite a bit of influence over your guys. Dudley's the least of my goddamn worries. I'm a lot more scared of what my superiors will say if I let them get away."
An awful scenario occurred to Joel. "Look, those girls—I don't know what you think I do to my friends at the house, sir, but I sure haven't had a chance to do it to the telepaths. And you have a disruptor on, sure, but Prawn doesn't."
Hudson turned around and looked down at Joel.
"I think you should stay here, sir. I'll stay."
Notes: I got nothin'.