Marvel Novels--X-Men by Alex Irvine

Author:Alex Irvine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

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“WHAT a fascinating and inflammatory question, Senator,” Moira said.

Kelly’s smile grew just the slightest bit more predatory. “Inflammatory? The presence of costumed vigilantes in our midst—who can fly or turn to steel, who look like blue demons or clawed monsters—that’s not inflammatory? It has certainly inflamed the good people of the gallery, who have turned out in such numbers to express their uncertainties. Which, Doctor MacTaggert, are my uncertainties as well.”

He paused. “Professor Xavier, where have your X-Men gone? Are they afraid of a little public scrutiny?”

“Perhaps,” Xavier said with a tight smile, “they were called away to fulfill an important task.”

“No more mutants!” someone yelled from the gallery. Others picked it up, and it grew into a chant of more than a hundred people. Kelly looked around, half-heartedly gesturing for the committee chair to gavel the proceedings back to order. Cameras pushed in on him. NO MORE MUTANTS. NO MORE MUTANTS.

Kelly was trying not to smile.

People in the gallery started to stomp their feet. The balconies thumped and rocked. Even those not close to the anti-mutant protesters looked around, some up at the ceiling, as the vibrations grew stronger. Senate bailiffs and Capitol police made their way to the protesters, motioning for silence.

Meanwhile, TV cameras drank it all in and sent it out on a thousand feeds to millions of people. The feeds grew jerky as the shaking from the gallery increased. Throughout the hearing chamber, the faces of senators and spectators alike grew fearful as they started to realize that this much motion, this much noise, couldn’t just be coming from people stomping their feet up in the balcony. This was something different.

As that thought took hold in the minds of everyone present, the vibration peaked. Cracks appeared along one wall of the hearing chamber. “Get out of here, everyone! Run!” a Capitol policeman shouted.

Then the wall collapsed. The sound of it boomed through the chamber, punctuated by the screams of spectators and those injured by flying debris. Sunlight flooded in, briefly blinding most of those present—except the senators themselves and Xavier and MacTaggert. They had been under the glare of TV lights, so their eyes to adjusted quickly to the sight of five figures standing in the rubble of the collapse.

“You will forgive the interruption, Senator Kelly,” said the figure in the center. The cameras loved her: tight white dress over athletic curves, red hair setting off deep blue skin. “But I found your question particularly apt, for we all know what the first Cro-Magnons did to the last Neanderthals.”

She stepped forward, basking in the panic as hundreds of spectators—including the protesters, scrambling to get off the balcony before it collapsed—trampled each other on their way to the doors. “I am Mystique!” she announced. “My colleagues and I comprise the Brotherhood of Mutants. We are your future, humans. Resist us at your peril.”

Mystique! The name went out to the millions—forever to be associated with the rumble of the collapsed wall, the screams of the injured and afraid, the shocked senators gaping from behind their table in a swirl of dust.

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