Cerebro Search

There are some nights when the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters becomes very quiet in a particular way.

Not peaceful-quiet. Focused-quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when Professor Xavier has been in the Cerebro chamber for a long time and everyone else is waiting to find out what he discovered.

This was one of those nights.

Twelve young mutants had vanished over three weeks. They had come from Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and one thing connected them: within hours of their new powers appearing, they were taken by a covert group called the Mutant Control Agency.

Xavier had asked Jean Grey to sit with him in the Cerebro chamber, because what he needed to find was farther away than Cerebro could usually reach alone. Jean sat beside him and placed her hands on the console, feeding her own telepathic signal into the machine's amplification. Together, they reached across thousands of miles of sleeping continent, past cities and highways and desert, looking for twelve frightened young minds.

They found them — in a facility buried in the Nevada desert beneath a building that looked from outside like an ordinary warehouse. Alive. Contained. Frightened.

Xavier came out of the Cerebro chamber pale and very still. Jean followed close behind, steadying herself on the doorframe.

"We go tonight," Xavier said.

The Blackbird carried all seven X-Men. Wolverine — Logan — had joined months ago, quiet and dependable. Rogue was nineteen, wearing long gloves always, her bare skin absorbing powers and memories on contact. Gambit — Remy LeBeau, from New Orleans — kept a deck of kinetically charged playing cards in his jacket pocket at all times.

The facility sat in a flat expanse of desert, floodlit and sensored. From the air, Beast read the blueprints on his screen and described what they were dealing with. Storm listened. Gambit shuffled three cards. Cyclops checked his visor.

They came in sequence, one continuous motion.

Storm called a targeted blackout over the facility's power grid — three seconds, surgically precise. In the darkness, Gambit sent three charged cards spinning toward the exterior camera array. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Three sensors, three precise detonations, no damage to anything else.

The moment the grid came back up, Cyclops and Wolverine were already through the front entrance. Cyclops had counted to six. Both were inside.

Jean moved ahead through the corridors with her telekinesis clearing the path — a door swinging aside here, a barrier sliding out of the way there. Hank was behind her, his large quiet footsteps impossibly soft. They found the containment wing: a row of sealed pods, green indicator lights blinking steadily.

At the control panel, Rogue stopped.

The panel was biometrically locked — keyed to the staff on duty. There was a technician standing three meters away, thoroughly surprised.

Rogue peeled off her right glove. She held it folded in her left hand. She looked at the technician calmly and said, "This will be brief." Then she touched the back of his wrist with two fingers for just a moment.

The access codes came into her like a flood — his memories rushing in with them, years of experience, the weight of another person's life for just a few seconds. She typed the codes with her other hand and heard every pod unlock in sequence. Then she stepped back and put the glove on.

She stood very still for a moment, eyes closed.

Gambit was beside her. "Take your time," he said quietly.

"I'm fine," she said. She breathed. She let the borrowed memories recede. She opened her eyes.

The twelve students were out of their pods. Some of them were crying, not from fear now but from relief. Jean walked with three of them. Ororo took the hands of two smaller ones. Hank moved to the back of the group, making sure no one was left behind.

They reached the Blackbird in eleven minutes.

Two hours later, they landed at Westchester in the small hours of the morning. Professor Xavier was on the tarmac. He had been there since before they landed. Behind him, through the mansion's lit windows, the kitchen was warm.

He stood at the foot of the ramp and met every student as they stepped down — twelve in total, tired and overwhelmed and blinking in the night air.

To each of them, he said the same thing: "Welcome. You are safe. You are not alone."

Later, after everyone was fed and settled and the mansion was quiet again, Cyclops found Jean sitting on the back steps, looking up at the stars. He sat down next to her.

"We got all twelve," he said.

"Yes," she said. "We got all twelve."

A meteor crossed the sky, a slow white scratch on the dark.

They sat and watched it together.

Goodnight. Some things are worth losing sleep for.