Sentinels

Once upon a time, on a quiet autumn evening in Westchester, New York, the ground began to shake.

Not like an earthquake. Not a rumble from underground. More like something very heavy was walking. Something far too large to belong to the ordinary world.

The X-Men looked out the windows of the Xavier Institute and saw three enormous shapes moving between the clouds — purple and grey, each as tall as a ten-story building, their red eyes sweeping the darkening sky like searchlights. Sentinels. Robots built by people who were afraid of mutants — people who believed that anything different from themselves must be dangerous. The Sentinels had no feelings, no curiosity, no kindness. They had only their programming: find the mutant, capture the mutant, do not stop.

Tonight they had come for Storm.

She knew it when she felt the targeting signal — a faint mechanical hum in the electromagnetic field around her, like a finger tapping on glass. She was calm. She had faced Sentinels before, and she had learned that calm was the single most useful thing she could bring into a fight.

"I'll meet them in the air," she told Cyclops and Wolverine. "Get below. I'll tell you when."

Up she went.

The first Sentinel turned its enormous head and found her. Storm raised both arms and called the lightning from the purple-grey clouds above. CRACK. The bolt struck the machine's chest and left a scorch mark the size of a school bus. The Sentinel stumbled one step. Just one. She knew that striking it again in the same place would simply burn the same patch of metal.

She needed to think.

The second Sentinel fired a containment blast that caught the edge of her cape and spun her sideways. Storm tumbled, the ground far below wheeling past. For just a moment the fear was there — the sense of being out of control.

She breathed. She reached with her mind for the steady, patient air beneath her.

She found it. She spread her arms.

Steady.

Good. Now.

She called the fog. Not a little fog — a great rolling bank of it that poured down from the clouds and swallowed the valley whole. The Sentinels stopped. Their red eyes swept back and forth through the whiteness and found nothing.

"NOW," Storm called, her voice carried on the wind.

PEWWW — Cyclops's energy beam punched through the fog and struck the third Sentinel's right knee at exactly the angle Storm had demonstrated in training drills. The joint buckled. The Sentinel went down with a sound like a very large tree deciding to lie down and sleep.

And Wolverine — who had spent the last two minutes climbing the second Sentinel's leg in perfect silence, his metal claws finding handholds in the steel panels — reached the knee and went to work. SHING SHING SHING. The cables parted. That Sentinel folded too.

Two down.

The first Sentinel — the big one, the one Storm had scorched — turned its head back and forth in the fog. It could not see. It could not hear through the wind.

Storm rose up through the cloud layer into the clear sky above. The evening up there was a deep, soft violet, with the first stars just beginning to appear. She floated in that quiet space above the clouds and breathed — one long, unhurried breath.

She thought of the Serengeti. She thought of the way the sky felt before a great rain — that gathering, humming, building pressure, as though the whole world were holding its breath. She let that feeling come into her hands. She let it rise up her arms, through her shoulders, down through the soles of her feet. The clouds beneath her began to glow, lit from within, pulsing brighter and brighter.

Then she aimed with complete care.

KABOOOOOM. A single thunderbolt — perfectly placed — traveled down the first Sentinel's antenna, through its head, and into the circuits at its center. The machine's eyes went dark. Its arms dropped. It fell forward slowly, like a very tall building deciding, at last, to lie down and sleep.

Silence.

The fog began to clear. Cyclops stood in the meadow below, looking up, his visor glowing faintly red in the dusk.

Storm landed beside him, her white hair loose around her shoulders, the last traces of the storm crackling softly in the air around her.

"Eight minutes," Cyclops said quietly.

Storm smiled — small but warm. "We had good drills," she said.

Wolverine appeared from somewhere in the dark, utterly calm, brushing a Sentinel's servo cable off his shoulder as if it were simply a leaf.

The three of them walked back toward the warm lights of the Xavier Institute together, and above them the sky was clear and full of stars, and everything was still.