"Where d'you think, moron? I'm tired of this kid's table shit."

Bobby started to his feet: "You'll freeze," he said, "before you make it to the spillway."

"I don't think so," John retorted.

"John, they told us to stay here," Rogue protested.

For a moment the two boys glared, ready to take out their tensions and frustrations on each other. Rogue wondered if Bobby really would use his ice power to stop John, and how hard John would use his flames to fight back.

"John!" she called, pleading, deliberately stepping between them.

That broke the moment. The look John gave Bobby was ugly and filled with warning, but what he offered Rogue was a grin, just like the Johnny of old, complete with a wink.

Then he was gone, at a trot across the hard-packed snow, defying the arctic temperatures. Rogue stepped past Bobby to the controls, but she made no move to raise the ramp. She knew how John felt, and a large part of her wanted to follow.

Jean descended the staircase at a run, hitting the floor in a roll that took her to cover amid the ranks of hulking, spinning generators, each the size of a modest one-story house.

She knew he'd be waiting and had an idea where he'd be. Most of all, she was fairly certain what he'd do.

He didn't disappoint.

There were two ways down to his level: either pitch herself over the balcony, as he'd done, or use the stairs. He'd want a position that gave him a ready line of sight of both options. Taking her on the fly was risky. Better to wait until she landed and was trying to get her bearings.

As she came up into a crouch, he fired, from off to her right. For anyone else, the time you saw his beam-moving at the speed of light-was the time it hit you. In Jean's case, her parry occurred at the speed of thought. Concept and execution happened instantaneously, so that Cyclops' optic blast crashed against the invisible barrier of her telekinesis.

The problem was, since his beam was trying its best to make like an irresistible force, she needed a way to brace the wall that protected her, to make herself the next best thing to an immovable object.

Didn't work. The telekinesis held, her feet didn't, and she felt herself slide backward along the floor.

Cyclops advanced on her, implacable as an automaton, adjusting his visor to hone his beam to maximum intensity.

The point of intersection where his energies met hers began to glow, like steel in a furnace, generating a radiance so bright Jean had to cover her eyes.

She was screaming, not in fear but in defiance, calling his name over and over again, trying every way she could imagine, with voice and thought, to reach him.

"Scott," she bellowed, as into the teeth of a hurricane, "please! Remember who you are! Who I am! Don't do this!"

She could feel his optic blast gnawing away at her shield, shattering the bonds of energy that kept her safe. There was a way to beat him, by splitting her teke and hurling it into him like worms, to burrow into the vulnerable places of his body. She was a doctor, she knew precisely where and how to do the most damage-to incapacitate or worse. She could block his airway or one of the valves of his heart or possibly interdict the smooth flow of neural transmissions along his central nervous system. But the initial attack had been too quick and too wild for her to make the attempt. She had had a chance when he came at her here on the floor, but she held back a fatal moment, afraid of her control-or lack of it. One thing to try this maneuver in the controlled conditions of the danger room, with sensors monitoring every conceivable aspect of the subjects' physiological condition and a full-spectrum medical facility only steps down the hall. Another to do it in the field, in a fight, where a single mistake could prove fatal.

She knew now how right that last was, only she was the proof, not Scott.

He'd upped the power ante faster and farther than she'd expected. She couldn't spare even one iota of teke to strike back at him, he'd break through her shields for sure. Yet doing nothing would have the same result.

She couldn't kill him.

She refused to be beaten.

And something awakened within her. A chord of celestial music that she'd always been aware of on the outermost edges of her being, from the moment she first used her powers, only now it wasn't a faint trill of notes but a full-throated symphony, a crescendo that rolled through her like a tsunami. She thought at first it would overwhelm her, but instead, with a joy so pure it could never be described or even remembered in full measure, she found herself riding the crest of this impossible wave, surfing creation the way she always yearned to do on water.

The air rippled around her as though it were a pool she'd just fallen into, and it began to glow, a roseate corona that flowed swiftly to her outstretched hand and beyond, to crash against the pinpoint needle of energy that was Cyclops' optic blast.

Jean bared her teeth and pushed herself to her knees, bracing one foot under her as she struggled upright, the raw emotion on her face in stark contrast to the total absence of any on Scott's.

The nimbus around her changed aspect as she fought, creating a suggestion more of fire than light and the sense of wings flaring outward from her back-not so much like an angel, although that would be an easy and understandable mistake. This was more akin to some predatory bird, a raptor, rising to the attack.

Between them though, the very fabric of reality twisted under their combined onslaught. Cyclops' power was considerable, but ultimately it was tangible. He actually had limits. So did Jean, but where his were physical, hers were solely of her imagination and of her will.

She took a halting step forward, pushing with her thoughts as well as her body, and cheered to herself as she moved Scott's optic blasts back toward him.

Her triumph was short-lived. These two combatants weren't the only elements in this battle with limits. The same applied to the physical world that lay between them. They were battling each other on levels from the paranuclear to the subatomic, and as Jean's resistance surged to new and unexpected levels, as the energies employed increased exponentially, the heat and pressures they unleashed triggered an equal and opposite reaction.

In effect, they created a molecular protostar, a localized version of the Big Bang.

For a fraction of a nanosecond, a time so small it was virtually immeasurable, they had a taste of creation. Luckily for them and for their world, the fabric of reality-already weakened by their struggle-tore wide open under this incredible onslaught, allowing the bulk of the energies to vent into some other, wholly unfortunate plane of existence. All the two combatants were aware of was an impossible radiance that reduced the brightness of the noonday sun to the level of a very dim bulb, and an explosion more impressive in every respect than one of Storm's pet thunderclaps.

The concussion sent both of them flying. Scott, dazed and shaken, went skidding and tumbling along the floor for pretty much the length of the room. Jean wasn't so fortunate. Her flight was shorter, her landing harder, and she cried out as her leg caught on a corner of pipe and snapped like a dry branch.

The effects of the explosion radiated outward from the source, making themselves felt in every corner of the complex. The generator room itself shook like it was in the middle of an earthquake, the big machines rattling and groaning as they tried to cope with stresses that pushed the limits of their design specs. Dust and more fell from the ceiling, and off in the distance there was a resounding clang as a stretch of iron railing gave way.

High up in the shadows, unnoticed, a seam opened in the wall...

... and water began to leak through.

The shock knocked Stryker off his feet and would have left him bloody had Yuriko not been there to catch him. He muttered darkly as he brushed the dust from his clothes, then stopped cold as a drop of water splashed onto one lens of his glasses. He looked up to behold a spidery network of cracks in the ceiling, from which water was now falling in a steady drip. He actually shuddered at the sight.

A quick walk brought him and Yuriko to the one of the dam's monitor stations. A glance at the rusted, decaying, but still functional dials on the wall told him all he needed to know.

Early in his career, before Jason, before marriage, he'd been a field agent. Black ops. He'd attended a course in sabotage, a seminar on how to blow a dam. There were basically two ways to do it. You either dropped a really big bomb, or succession of bombs, in just the right place-as the British did to the Germans in World War II-or you set off a much smaller bomb, also in just the right place, and let the dam itself do the rest. The key to a dam is its structural integrity, because the pressure of the water it's restraining is relentless. That's why public safety mandates that all such structures be scrupulously maintained. The slightest flaw, if unchecked, could lead to disastrous consequences.

This dam had essentially been left to rot. No one was interested in dismantling it, so the secondary spillway had been left open to drain the lake. Over the subsequent years, in part to hide what had happened here, the dam had been filed and forgotten. No one came to check on its condition, no one realized-until Stryker arrived to reopen the facility-that the open spillway had become hopelessly clogged and Alkali Lake itself had gradually filled almost to overflowing.

Now this explosion, whatever its cause, had provided the final, fatal catalyst. Because of the weight of water pressing on the dam, these cracks that now appeared miniscule would quickly grow and spread until the entire structure collapsed.

The complex was doomed. The only question was how long they had. He did some fast calculations, couldn't quite make them fit. Too many unknowns. So he decided then, as an act of will, that it would last until his work was done. He'd come too far, worked too hard, to accept even the possibility of failure. Or of defeat. His cause was just, therefore he would prevail.

"Time to go," Stryker told Yuriko, and they did, quickly.

Jean heard him coming, boot heels striking the floor in a steady, robotic cadence that was totally unlike him, and she wailed silently to herself. He wasn't unconscious and he wasn't free and he was on his way to finish her off.

She tried to shift position, but her broken leg was agony. She couldn't muster concentration enough to neutralize the pain or to stop her lover.

Screw that, she thought, and tried again, marshaling her strength of body and will, first dampening the pain in her leg to a dull but manageable ache and then calling out to Scott, not with her voice, but with her mind.

She said his name, but what reached out to him was so much more. It was the sense of her, the emotions he stirred in her heart and those she sensed in turn from him. She took the world as it was when they were apart and then what it felt like when they were together, and it was the difference between a wasteland and a paradise. There was passion and comfort and need and joy, there was a strength that knew no boundaries, a sense of kindred souls made one, and that whole being far, far greater than the sum of its parts.

She opened her soul to him, holding back only that part of her that even now thought only of Logan, and realized as she did so that this was the part she would call upon if worst came to worst and she found herself with no other option but to kill.

Through the impenetrable fog of his mind she sensed him reaching for his visor and remembered absurdly the night they'd spent watching one of Scott's favorite movies, Robert Wise's classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. She remembered the climactic moment when Patricia Neal had been cornered by the robot Gort and how his visor glowed like Scott's as it opened to reveal the deadly beams within.

Scott, she called with her thoughts, please- Scott!

His hand trembled, his mouth working as he struggled to speak. His breathing quickened, his hands clenched to fists, and there were flashes of light within his mind as he fought his way through the fog, calling out himself in answer to her cries.

Then, suddenly, he was crying aloud, desperate incoherent sounds like a man might utter clawing his way up from some abyss of the spirit, culminating in a great and awful scream that made her own pain insignificant by comparison.

He collapsed to his knees and sobbed, taking in breaths of air in huge, noisy gulps, a drowning man who'd finally reached the surface long after he thought all was lost.

He flinched when she touched him, curling in on himself, startled and terrified, too much like a dog who expected nothing but beatings. That made her angry, because this was her man and he was none of those things.

She touched him lightly once more on the face, but with her thoughts she enfolded him in warmth, in strength, in passion. She let him see reflected in her vision of him the man she knew he was, who made her complete.

It's okay, Scott, she told him telepathically and said the same aloud: "It's okay, it's me. It's me!"

And as he looked up in relief, she took him in her arms, burying her face in the hollow between neck and shoulder so he couldn't see her. That made her smile inside, although there was no humor in it. It was easy to be strong for others but when it came to herself-well, that was a different chapter entirely. But she didn't want him to know what had happened, not yet. Let him heal just a little more, let him come a bit more wholly back to himself, then he could handle it.

"You're hurt," he said.

"You're right," she grimaced. "Help me up, please."

"I'll carry you."

"Like hell. I'm a telekinetic, remember? I can make myself a splint and crutches all in one."

"Really?"

"If I'm wrong, sweetie, you'll be the first to know."

"Jean," he said, and then, haltingly, "I-I'm sorry."

She kissed him on the edge of his mouth, glad that the difference in height between them allowed her to keep her face shadowed.

"It's okay. It's okay. I... I was so afraid I'd lost you."

"Thanks" was all he said, but she could see the emotions that went into that single word, and she hugged him for it.

A moment later, her expression changed and she looked around the room in alarm.

"Scott," she said urgently, frustrated that she couldn't tell him why, "something's wrong!"

Mystique had printed out a map, showing the route to where the children were imprisoned. Storm and Nightcrawler covered the distance in record time. Nightcrawler was right at home, racing as easily along the walls and ceiling as the floor, as limber crouched on all fours as standing erect on both legs. Storm wasn't anywhere near as confident, physically or emotionally. She didn't like being underground or in confined spaces. She thought she'd put those childhood fears behind her long ago and didn't appreciate discovering she might have been wrong.

At last they came to a room that was essentially the lip of a broad and deep pit. Surveillance cameras were mounted at intervals around the circular ceiling, allowing an unrestricted view of the hole. She'd seen on the control room monitors that deep parallel slashes had been gouged in the walls, at a height that suggested a man Logan's size. Such a person couldn't climb out, he couldn't jump out, there were no doors to be seen; the only possible mean of ingress or egress to the pit was a hoist on a sliding boom set in the ceiling. The room itself had a single doorway, and it was ringed by the ruins of a rubber gasket, which meant that in better days the entrance could have been sealed airtight. Alternating with the camera mounts around the ceiling were ventilation grilles. It didn't take much imagination to realize that gas could be introduced to the room instead of air, to deal with any prisoners who decided to get rowdy.

If this was a holding pen, it was designed by people who took no chances.

Damn them, she thought with unusual vehemence. What did they want from him? What did they do to him?

And then, more ominously, What does Stryker intend with us?

"Who's down there?" she called.

"Jubilation Lee," came the immediate reply. "Is that you, Ororo? Can you help us?"

"Hey, would I have come all this way if I couldn't?" She looked sideways at Nightcrawler. "Kurt, could you-" She didn't have to finish, he was already gone.

The kids, of course, had no idea who he was. Two girls took one look at him and shrieked in terror, backing all the way across the pit while Jubilee and Artie, one of the boys, took station between them. The boy was ready to fight-he even stuck out his forked tongue to try to scare Nightcrawler, which he actually found quite amusing-but Jubilee looked more curious than defiant. She assumed that if Storm was up top, then this had to be one of the good guys. If it wasn't, since Stryker had given them some kind of drug to inhibit their powers temporarily, they were all pretty much screwed anyway.

Nightcrawler gently motioned her aside and spoke to the frightened pair of girls.

"My name's Kurt Wagner," he told them. "Although in the circus ring I'm better known as Nightcrawler. Perhaps you've heard of me?"

Blank looks all around.

"Ah, well. Some other time, perhaps. Come to me, please," and he waved his fingers to urge them closer. "It's all right. You've nothing to fear from me, I'm just going to take you for a little jaunt."

"Can't Storm do this?" one of the boys asked.

"Don't be an ass," Jubilee told him. "There isn't enough volume of air in here for her to generate sufficient wind. What're you going to do," she asked Nightcrawler, "climb the walls?"

"Not exactly," he replied. He wrapped arms and tails around one of the frightened girls, who'd responded to his call and stepped up close to him. "Now," he told her, "close your eyes."

Bamf.

He was gone.

And a moment later, with the girl's excited cries echoing down from the floor above, he was back.

Logan didn't need a map, he just followed his nose. He had Stryker's scent, and since she was the only woman in the place, aside from Mystique and his fellow X-Men, he had no problem isolating Yuriko's scent as well. He could follow and find them anywhere now, no matter how cold the trail.

Suddenly he stopped. Another scent, one he never thought anything about, because it was a part of him.

He turned and thought about his first visit and the wolf he'd followed downstairs. This was a whole different section of the base, and a lot deeper. Nothing about the surroundings was familiar, and yet...

Snikt!

There were three slash marks in the wall, at the top of a flight of stairs. They reminded him of a book he'd read wintering up North of Sixty, waiting out a storm in a trapper's cabin. Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. The explorers there had followed a trail left by their predecessor, a man named Arne Saknussemm, who'd blazed the way by leaving three parallel slashes in the rock.

He held up his claws. They fit as perfectly here as they had in the marks he'd found up top. He heard screams, but only in memory, and smelled blood that strangely seemed as fresh as if it had just been spilled. He'd fought his way out of here, of that he was certain.