One step out of the portal from Limbo, and Tyson was back inside Rama-Tut's ship. Jessica came through at his shoulder, andthe portal sealed behind them. Amy had remained behind in Limbo, continuing Whiteclaw's directive to clear it of demons.
Tyson let the transition from timeless space to ship catch up with his body. No sulfur. No ozone. No metallic tang of angelic blood. His muscles were still braced for a fight that was already over. Beside him, Jessica exhaled slowly, and her hand found his wrist and held it. Not for comfort. For confirmation. They were here. They were alive. They'd done it. But they weren't done.
Johnny was mid-stride across the deck, one hand still raised in the gesture he'd been making when they left. He blinked at them. "Okay, that was fast. You literally just—" He pointed at the spot where the portal had been. "You stepped in. You stepped back out. Did you even go anywhere?"
"We went somewhere," Jessica said.
She said it the way you'd say it after a long, bad week, and Johnny's grin faltered. To everyone in this room, no time had passed at all. A portal had flickered open and shut, and the two of them had simply walked through it and back. But Limbo and Hell beyond it had no clock, and the two of them carried the hours in their faces and the dust of another world on their boots.
Sue crossed to them first. She looked at Tyson, at the long bundle in his arms, at the hollow set of Jessica's shoulders. "You're hurt."
"We're fine." Tyson set the bundle down on the deck and folded back the cloth to reveal the skeleton. "We got what we went for."
Reed was beside them before the cloth had fully settled. He didn't touch it; he simply leaned close. "Extraordinary. The metal has bonded straight through the structure; this isn't plating, it's integrated. Biological tissue and adamantium, indistinguishable." He glanced up.
"Adamantium can bond to the bones of mutants with healing factors, changing the structure of both becoming Adamantium-Beta. It's functionally as indestructible, but maintains its organic properties, ie it can regrow," Tyson said. "Don't ask me how it works."
From the far end of the deck, Ben Grimm asked. "How are you supposed to turn those bones into a body? Lemme guess. More magic mumbo-jumbo."
"More magic mumbo-jumbo," Tyson agreed.
"Knew it," Ben grunted. "You do your spooky stuff, Stretch and me'll get this bucket ready to fly home. Somebody around here oughta deal in things that make sense."
Jean had not said anything. She stood a little apart, Magneto's helmet bowed, looking down at the bones with an expression the iron half-hid. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet and even, aimed at no one but the skeleton. "And that's where you'd put her."
"That's where we'd put her," Tyson said gently. "Eventually. It'll be ready. This is just a start."
"The temporal envelope has to be recalibrated before we can make the jump forward," Reed said, already drifting back toward the central console. "Ben can manage the structural work, but I'd rather not leave the calculations. If something's off by a fraction we could arrive a century from where we mean to." He looked up, briefly present again. "Sue. Go with him. Whatever he's going to do, he shouldn't do it without people who can pull him out of a fire."
"I am the fire," Johnny said.
"Which is exactly why you're going too." Sue was already gathering herself, calm and decisive in the way that made her the real center of gravity on any team she stood in. "Reed and Ben have the ship. The rest of us go with Tyson." She turned to him. "What do you need?"
That was the question, wasn't it?
"Everything," Tyson admitted. "I left House of M with nothing… but the clothes I'm wearing, Mjolnir, a mutation-inhibitor collar, the Potion, and what's in my soul..." He drew Nexus from where it lived inside him, the ninjato materializing in his grip, Promethium light seeping through the seams in its adamantium. "Actually, that's a lot that I brought with me. But I don't have any chalk, no candles, no herbs, no consecrated anything. It's going to be difficult to work voodoo like this. Nexus is the only useful voodoo tool I brought, and that's because it's a piece of me. There's meaning in using my own soul as the blade. But everything else, I have to find."
Johnny squinted. "Find. In a desert. Thousands of years before anything is invented."
"In the richest place on Earth to find it." Tyson nodded toward the ramp, toward the great dark shape of the buried Sphinx above them and the river valley beyond. "Trust me."
They climbed the ramp out of the ship's belly and into the buried passage beneath the Sphinx, then up through the narrow corridor carved into the limestone, and out onto sand under a desert sky. The Sphinx crouched behind them. Somewhere to the east, the Nile cut its dark line through the valley, invisible from here but present in the faint smell that rode the air.
Tyson turned to Sue and Johnny. "First things first. Let's get you some armor."
He didn't wait for a response. The adamantium that plated his own armor began to move, liquid and alive, peeling away from his forearms and torso. The metal streamed through the air between them, splitting into two currents. One wrapped around Sue, the other around Johnny. In seconds the adamantium had woven itself into the fabric of their Phase 4 uniforms, reinforcing the material with a mesh so fine it looked like chainmail made for insects.
Johnny held up his arm and turned it, watching the metal settle into the blue-black weave of his suit. "This is wild. Does it come in chrome?"
"Sure, if that's what you want,'" Tyson said. "Shouldn't melt either."
Sue flexed her fingers, testing the weight. The adamantium added almost nothing; it moved with her like a second skin. She nodded once, satisfied, and that was all the commentary she needed.
He explained, "Ben won't need it, he's tough on his own. I can't make it stretch without actively being present to use my power on it, so Reed is out of luck."
Tyson lifted off the sand.
He rose ten feet, twenty, the air beneath him bending to the magnetic field he pulled around himself like a cloak. He could have used Maw's telekinesis to carry the others. It would have worked just as well. But magnetism was cleaner for this, more intuitive when the payload was metal-laced, and the adamantium he'd just threaded through their suits gave him something to grip. He extended the field outward, and one by one they rose with him: Sue steady and composed, Johnny whooping once before Sue shot him a look, Jean silent inside Magneto's helmet, Jessica tucking her legs beneath her with the reflex of someone used to being airborne.
They flew east. The desert scrolled beneath them, sand giving way to scrub, scrub giving way to the dark fertile ribbon of the floodplain, and then the Nile itself opened up below, wide and black and slow, throwing back the stars in long distorted ribbons. Tyson brought them down along the western bank where papyrus grew thick at the water's edge and the mud smelled like the beginning of the world.
The valley was lush, the river broad and slow and silver under the climbing sun, the floodplain to either side a deep fertile black giving way to gold desert and, beyond that, dead red sand. Reeds stood in ranks along the water.
"Okay," Johnny said, shading his eyes. "That's nicer than I figured."
"First thing." Tyson knelt and pressed his hand flat into the dark earth at the water's margin. "I need to explain how this works, because none of you are going to understand what I'm about to do, and I have no one else to bounce ideas off of that knows what they're doing."
"That would be a first," Jessica murmured, but she crouched beside him.
"Voodoo isn't a formula." He let the silt sift through his fingers. "When I learned it, I wanted recipes; this herb, that candle, these words, you get the idea. Calypso beat that out of me. The power doesn't live in the object. It lives in what the object means. Connection. To a place, to a history, to the work you're doing. A handful of ordinary dirt does nothing. But a handful of dirt that means life; that does plenty." He lifted the silt to where they could see it. "Every year this river floods. It comes up over the banks and lays this black mud across ground that's been cracked and dead all season, and a few weeks later, the whole valley is alive. This is earth that comes back from the dead on a schedule. There is no better ground on the planet to bury something in that I want to live again."
Sue was watching him. "So it's symbolic. The meaning is the active ingredient."
"Right," Tyson said. "You don't have to believe it. You just have to help me find things that carry it."
"Then we make a list." Sue's mind had already engaged, and it was a relief to watch; whatever she didn't understand about the magic, she understood about method. "Tell me the functions you need filled. Forget what the ingredients usually are; tell me what each one is supposed to do. I'll help you find a local match."
"That," Tyson said, "isn't exactly how Calypso would've put it, but it's what she would've meant."
So they worked through it as they walked the riverbank, and he taught as he went.
He needed something to mark the sacred ground. Chalk would normally fill the role, ground eggshell, and cornmeal in the tradition. Sue stooped, scraped at a pale crust along a dry inlet, and held up a fistful of white. "Natron. Sodium carbonate, more or less. It's everywhere out here, it's bright white, it'll mark beautifully."
She frowned at the look on his face. "What?"
"Wrong meaning." Tyson shook his head. "Natron's the salt they'll dry the dead with. It pulls the water out of a body and keeps it from ever changing again. That's the opposite of what I'm doing. I don't want to preserve a corpse. I want to restore one." He pointed instead at the great pale flank of stone above them, the bedrock the Sphinx was carved from. "Limestone. Ground fine. The stone they build things meant to last forever out of. That carries the right idea. Permanence, foundation, something raised up to endure. Can you get me a powder off that?"
Sue considered the cliff, then raised one hand. A plane of invisible force sheared a slab free, and a second field ground it between two unseen surfaces with a sound like a mill, white dust drifting down into the cloth Jessica held out. "Like that?"
"Like that." Tyson smiled. "You're good at this."
"I read a lot."
For light at the cardinal points he had no candles, so they scooped shallow lamps from river clay and set reed wicks in pools of fat, and Johnny lit them with a fingertip and a smug little flourish. "Finally," he said. "Something I'm actually useful for."
"You're useful for a lot of things," Sue said.
"Name three."
"Later."
The hardest were the botanicals. He needed a plant of vitality, one of renewal, one of strength and protection, and none of the herbs Calypso favored grew here. But Egypt had buried its whole imagination in plants about coming back, and Tyson knew enough of it to choose well. From the shallows, he gathered blue lotus, the flower that closed and sank each night and rose and opened each dawn again, the bloom these people would make the very emblem of rebirth. From a stand of feathery trees near the bank, he cut sprigs of tamarisk, because if any plant on Earth meant resurrection, it was the one the old stories said had grown up around a murdered god's coffin and held his body whole until his wife could bring him back. And for strength and protection, he took a thorned branch of acacia, the tree they would one day call the tree of life.
Jean had walked the whole way in near silence, helping where her telekinesis made the gathering easier, lifting lotus from water too deep to wade, holding the cut stems steady against the breeze. It was only when he laid the three plants together that she finally spoke.
"Everything you're picking is about something dead coming back," she said. "But she's not dead. Madelyne never lived. Not on her own."
"I know." Tyson straightened. "That's the part I can't fix with a flower."
She knew what Tyson was doing. She understood the symbolism, the rebirth, the careful architecture of meaning he was building around a set of adamantium bones. But understanding it didn't quiet the strangeness of walking along a riverbank five thousand years before she'd been born, gathering flowers for a ritual that would give a body to the part of herself she'd spent her whole life being afraid of. Every lotus he pulled from the water was a quiet argument that Jean had been wrong. Every symbol of renewal was an assertion that the thing behind the walls was not a monster, not a disease, not the worst of her, but a person who had simply never been allowed to live. And if that was true, then Jean hadn't been protecting the world from her own darkness. She'd been punishing a piece of herself for wanting too much.
They chose the place where the dark earth was deepest, a low shelf of floodplain the river had been feeding, and the bulk of the work began there.
"This is what people get wrong about it," he said, walking the others through it while he paced out the dimensions. "They think the magic is the chant. The chant's nothing. The body has to be buried. It sits in consecrated earth, and the earth does to it what the river does to the valley; holds it, feeds it, turns it back toward life a little at a time. Calypso and I did this with the dead in the Alley under the city. You prepare the ground for days. You bury what you're restoring. And then you wait. The preparation is the spell. The grave is the spell."
"You want us to dig a grave," Johnny said flatly.
"I want Sue to dig a grave," Tyson said. "You and I are going to consecrate it."
Sue dug it, and it was a beautiful thing to watch. No spade, no sweat. She set her hands and a clean rectangular shaft of force pressed down into the earth and lifted it aside in a single neat mass, the walls smooth, the floor level, the corners square. "How deep?"
"Deeper. It needs to be wholly in the living earth, not the dry layer." He knelt at the lip and worked the consecration as the grave took shape, the way Calypso had taught him; turning the soil with Nile water until the scent of damp earth rose up rich and dark, mixing the crushed lotus and tamarisk and acacia through the floor of the pit, walking the rim with the ground limestone and tracing the veves into it. Johnny followed with the clay lamps and set them at the four points, their small flames steady in the still air. Jessica handed him what he needed.
Jean stood at the head of the grave with her arms wrapped around herself and watched a hole being dug for a piece of her own soul.
She did not know what she was supposed to feel, watching someone prepare a home for the part of yourself you had exiled so thoroughly it had become another person. Grief would have been wrong, because no one had died. Relief felt premature, because nothing had been born yet either. What she felt, standing at the lip of that dark rectangle with the helmet pressing warm against her skull, was the sense of standing at the edge of a height. Somewhere behind the walls Charles had built, behind the walls she herself had helped build, Madelyne waited. The passionate, wanting, furious piece of Jean that had been declared too much and locked away. And here they were, digging her a grave in river mud and meaning, as if she deserved a body. As if her excess could be a person worth saving rather than a symptom worth suppressing.
Jean tightened her arms around herself and watched Tyson trace the sacred symbols into the dirt, and wondered whether the part of her that was about to be set free would forgive the part that had locked her away.
When the ground was ready, he didn't lift the skeleton with his hands. He reached out with his ferrokinesis, and the adamantium answered, the whole frame rising smoothly off the cloth and floating across the floodplain in perfect formation, every bone holding its place, the clawed hands and the long spine and the staring skull. He lowered her into the prepared earth and arranged her there, straightening the limbs, folding the clawed hands at the sternum over the deepest of the lotus.
"Now the part I can't borrow from anyone," he said, and drew Nexus.
"Wait." Sue's voice had an edge of alarm. "What part?"
"The body needs life poured into it to take root. The earth will do the slow work, but it needs a seed. My blood runs thick with ashe; life-magic, more than my body has any business making. That's the seed." He looked at the four of them. "And normally, here, you'd call someone to oversee it. A loa, a spirit who governs the door between living and dead. But there's no spirit for this, because voodoo as a tradition doesn't exist, and so the spirits that govern it don't yet exist."
Johnny asked, "So what do we do?"
Tyson said, "I encountered Death. She said that all deities of Death serve her. Baron Samedhi did, when I summoned a spirit of the dead, Samedhi warned that Lady Death would come, and she did. Odin named me Valravn, and Death confirmed that I'm a deity of Life and Death. So I'll stand in the door myself."
The spark answered in his chest as he finished saying it. His will pulled, and the gold rose behind his ribs. The authority of his own divine nature unfolded, taking the place where a god should stand. He turned his hand palm-up over the grave and drew Nexus's edge across the meat of his forearm.
The blood fell in a long ribbon down onto the bones.
He gave it freely, his life pouring out through the open door of the spark and down into the bones and the earth around it. The lamps guttered as the air thickened. The edges of the valley grayed and pulled away from him. A cold climbed his arm toward his heart, and beneath it his healing factor labored to keep pace and fell behind, and still he gave, because the earth was taking it, the silt drinking his blood the way it drank the river, and far down in the bones something already sleeping there stirred toward the offering. Sabertooth's healing factor, bound into her marrow with the metal, turning over slow and hungry. It knew what to do with life. It only needed to be given some.
He cut off the flow. "That's enough," he said, and went down hard onto one knee at the grave's edge. Jessica caught his shoulders. Jean was there too, suddenly, while his own factor surged up to seal the wound.
"You absolute idiot," Jessica breathed, holding him up.
"It worked, though," he managed. Gray and emptied and grinning faintly at the dirt. "Cover her."
"Wait."
Jean said before Sue could move. She stepped forward, knelt at the grave's edge, and held out her hand.
"Give me Nexus."
Tyson looked up at her from where Jessica still held him steady. He didn't argue. The ninjato left his grip and floated to Jean's outstretched palm; Promethium light pulsed faintly through the adamantium seams.
She pushed the sleeve of her suit back to the elbow and drew the monomolecular edge across the meat of her forearm. The same as Tyson. And like Tyson, the cut opened, and her blood fell in a dark line down onto the bones, onto the lotus petals folded between the clawed hands, into the earth that had already drunk its fill and now drank again.
"Jean!" Jessica started forward. "Why?"
"Because this is for me." Jean's jaw was set, her voice steady even as the color left her face. "This body is going to be mine. For my life. If the meaning matters, if that's what makes it work, then there has to be meaning in me giving my own life into it too."
She pulled her arm back after a long ten seconds and pressed her palm hard over the wound. Jessica and Sue both moved toward her, but Tyson got there first. He held out his hand, and the golden warmth of the Healer's power washed through his palm and into Jean's arm. The cut sealed itself.
But she could still feel where the blood had left her; a faint pull beneath the surface that the healing hadn't quite erased, and she understood now why Tyson had gone gray after his own offering. It wasn't the blood. It was the giving. Something had flowed out of her and into that ground that was more than blood. Some piece of willingness. Of the complicated, guilty, grief-soaked love she bore for a woman she'd buried inside herself. She had cut her own arm open and bled into a grave for Madelyne. And the part that frightened her wasn't the act itself. It was how right it had felt. How hungry the ground had been. How much she had wanted to give more, to pour everything through that cut until there was nothing left of the girl who'd built the walls and only the girl who'd been brave enough to bleed into the dirt for the prisoner on the other side.
Charles would have called that impulse dangerous. Charles would have been wrong.
Sue used her forcefields to cover the body. The earth folded down over the bones, over the lotus and the tamarisk, a smooth dark blanket pressed flat by an invisible hand, and Tyson drew the final veve into the surface in pale limestone, the sign that sealed the work and told the ground to begin.
Then it was just a low rectangle of turned earth on the floodplain, four small flames burning at its corners, and five tired people standing around it in the long Egyptian light.
"So now what?" Johnny asked quietly. The jokes had gone out of him somewhere back at the blood. "She just... cooks?"
"Pretty much." Tyson sat back on his heels.
He'd bled for rituals before. His body replaced what it lost almost as fast as he gave it.
This was different.
The cold hadn't left his chest. It sat behind his sternum, and his fingers, though warming, still felt distant from him. His legs ached. Not the muscles. The bones, which was strange because they were adamantium. A deep, marrow-level fatigue that had nothing to do with how much blood he'd put into the ground and everything to do with what he'd pushed through it.
The spark. He'd opened it wide, stood in the door between living and dead the way a loa would have, and poured his own divine authority into the working like fuel into a furnace. Had that made the blood cost more? Had channeling his nature as a death deity turned a manageable offering into something that pulled from deeper reserves, places his healing factor couldn't reach as easily?
He didn't know. Such a cost wasn't part of the knowledge Mephisto had unlocked in him. But he'd think about it. And he wouldn't mention it as long as it didn't become a problem.
"The earth and the ashe do the work. Honestly, with that healing factor in the bones, this might go faster." He looked at the dark mound and the small steady flames. "Give it some days. A few. Then we open the ground, and there'll be a body in it. Whole. Strong. Ageless."
"And empty," Jean said.
"And empty." He met her eyes. He owed her the rest of the truth of it, now, with his blood still drying on her gloves. "That's the part the river can't do, Jean. I can grow her a body out of dirt and bone and meaning. But Madelyne has no soul of her own to put in it. She never did. She isn't a separate woman; she's the part of you that got buried. The passion you didn't let yourself call yours, and the wanting, the power that was suppressed from you." He drew a slow breath. "To make her live in this body and not just move it around like a puppet, somebody has to give her a soul. A real one.
"So we need to sacrifice someone's soul for hers?" Johnny asked. "That's dark… I vote for that Apocalypse guy."
Tyson shook his head. "I'm going to give her a piece of mine. It sounds bad, but I've done it before. I gave a piece of myself to Nexus; it's how the weapon can be stored inside me. Just, the piece I'll give to Madelyn, it won't come home to me as Nexus does."
Jean stood over the grave of her soon-to-be other half for a long moment, the helmet bowed, the river running silver behind her.
"All those years I thought she was the worst of me," she said. "The thing I had to keep down." Her voice was very quiet. "And now I'm standing in the dirt watching you bleed yourself dry to give her a chance, and I don't even know if that's what it is. A chance." She looked up. "Or a grave I'm helping dig."
"We won't know," Tyson said, "until she opens her eyes."
— Rogue Redemption —
They gathered around the grave at dawn the next day.
Tyson had said it would take some days. It hadn't. He'd returned to the dark earth and pressed his palm flat against it, and the work was there beneath the surface, warmth where there'd been none. The four small lamps had burned out. The veve he'd sealed it with had faded into the soil. But the ground itself had stayed warm under his hand, warmer, and by dawn, the warmth had finally gone still and even.
So at dawn, he called them all out to the river.
Reed came, because the ship was ready and there was nothing left to recalibrate. Ben came with him, grumbling about sand in his rocky joints, even though he couldn't feel it, he complained all the same. Sue came, calm and watchful. Johnny came, unusually quiet, the jokes he'd been saving dying in his mouth when he saw Tyson's face. Jessica came and stood at his shoulder. And Jean came last, the helmet bowed, walking toward the grave of her own exiled half like a woman walking toward a mirror she wasn't sure she wanted to look into.
"It's done?" Sue asked.
"It's done." Tyson rose and brushed the earth from his knees. "Now we bring her up."
He didn't use a spade, and he didn't ask Sue for her fields. This part he wanted to do himself. He reached down through the soil with his ferrokinesis, found the adamantium woven all through the body's bones, and called it gently upward, and the earth shifted, and parted, and the floodplain gave up what it had been keeping.
She rose out of the dark soil on a cushion of his power, turning slowly in the dawn light, and the gathered team went silent all at once.
The body was perfect.
Whatever the grave had done, it had done completely, returning something flawless. Skin unmarked, white hair spilling free of the soil, the clawed hands still folded at the sternum over the place where the lotus had been. A demon body, made to mimic Felicia's beauty.
Yet it was not alive.
That was the wrongness of it, the thing that made Johnny take a step back and Jessica's hand find Tyson's sleeve. The chest didn't rise. There was no flicker behind the closed eyelids, no warmth of breath. It was a body with all the hallmark appearance of life, but none of its traits. Beautiful, and as vacant as the desert past the green.
"Remarkable. The tissue is fully viable. By every metric I have, this is a living human body." Reed frowned. "Except that it isn't. There's no electrical activity. No autonomic function. It's a perfect instrument with no one playing it."
"That's exactly what it is," Tyson said quietly. He laid the body down on the bare flat stone he'd dragged up from the riverbed with his telekinesis. The closest thing to Calypso's slab he could improvise. "A house, finished and furnished, with the door standing open. Today we move someone in."
"And the house built itself," Sue said. It wasn't quite a question; she'd watched him bury a skeleton. "Out of bone. In the dirt."
"Out of bone, and meaning, and blood." Tyson crouched by the slab and, because he'd promised to explain everything, he explained this too. "The river earth was the womb; ground that comes back to life every flood, so it knows how. The lotus and the tamarisk and the acacia were the instructions written into it; rebirth, resurrection, the tree of life, the oldest ideas, ones that may exist now, in this country. My blood was the seed, because it runs thick with life-magic. But the laborer," he laid two fingers against the still sternum, over the adamantium under the flesh, "was already in here. Whiteclaw carried a healing factor because it was a mirror demon created from Felicia's reflection. I made a deal with a demon, the demon, to acquire this body. Felicia got her healing from the DNA of a clone of Sabertooth, a mutant. The same mutant whose life force I absorbed. I carry him within me, and I utilize the same power. The grave woke it up and fed it. It didn't just mend her. With that much life and meaning poured in, that's why it went faster than it had any right to."
Reed's eyes were bright. "You essentially ran an open-ended regeneration with an unlimited energy budget and a template that predates entropy's vote."
"If you say so, Reed."
"I do say so. It's beautiful, in a way that's going to keep me awake."
"Welcome to the club," Ben muttered.
Jean made a small sound behind the helmet.
Tyson looked at her, and then at all of them, and decided they'd earned the whole truth before he did any of it. "There are three things that have to happen, and they have to happen close to one another, in order, or none of it works."
"First. The body is ready, but a body alone is just meat. To live, it needs a soul, and Madelyne has none of her own. She never did. So I have to go and get her, and she's inside Jean's head, behind walls Charles Xavier built a long time ago to keep her in. Getting in there is the dangerous part, because Jean's power is the strongest psychic force any of us will ever stand next to, and right now it's all caged behind that helmet. The moment she takes it off, all of it comes out at once."
"That dangerous?" Sue asked.
"You've all seen the helmet," Tyson said. "It blocks psionics. But that's not why she wears it." He looked at Jean. "It works both ways. It makes a mind a sealed room, and a sealed room keeps things from getting out as well as in. It's been the only thing letting Jean walk around without the whole of her pouring off her every second. It holds her power in. The walls Charles built on the inside, the helmet on the outside. Two cages, one prisoner."
"And the prisoner," Reed said slowly, "is the woman you intend to extract."
"Madelyne is the prisoner the walls were built around. But the power's the wall and the warden both. They're tangled together. The excess of Jean's strength and the part of her that the excess became. You can't free the one without releasing the other. Which is the whole problem. I'm concerned that the instant that the helmet's off, every drop of power those cages were holding back comes out."
"So, I need all of you behind Sue's fields and a good distance away. There are maybe three people who could stand inside Jean's power. I'm not even sure I'm one of them. Which is why I'll absorb her first. I'll have her power with mine on top of that, which makes me a hair stronger but gives her home-field advantage. Regardless of what happens when Jean takes off that helmet, you stay away. If you try to help me, you'll die, and I'll feel it, and I'll put myself one step closer to losing Jean and Madelyne both if I'm distracted while I'm grieving you. So the bravest thing any of you can do today is stand still and let me walk into it alone."
"I hate this plan," Ben said.
"I'm not in love with it either."
"And the part where you absorb the most powerful psychic on Earth," Sue pressed. "You're certain you can hold it?"
"Yup. I did it on the ship, no problem, remember?" He smiled, thin. "I'm the only cup big enough to. I've done it many times before, and I did it when I first arrived at Xavier's Institute. Since then, I've spent years collecting other people's powers and other people's souls and learning how to carry that. If there's a vessel built to take Jean Grey's whole strength and not shatter, it's the one Sinister accidentally made when he cloned me." He shrugged.
"So that's the plan, plainly. Before I dive into your mind, I absorb you, Jean, take your power into me. As long as I hold it, I'll be the strongest telepath who's ever lived. Your gift, layered over the illusions I carry from Jason Stryker and the telekinesis I took from Ebony Maw. Enough strength to stand in your mind and find Madelyn. I can't make the door without it."
Jean's voice came carefully. "And when you take Madelyn. Do you take the power she has behind the walls with her?"
He didn't want to lie to her. "I don't know," Tyson said. "When I took Rogue from my mind and gave her her body back, it wasn't exactly the same. I retained Rogue's power, and she had her power, but that was putting a soul fragment back into the body it had come from. Madelyn would be going into a body that wasn't hers. And Madelyn isn't a soul fragment; she's a part of your mind. It isn't apples to oranges, but it isn't apples to apples either. More like apples to pears. You might not notice much of a difference with Madelyn gone, or I might take a power that's deep, and it stays taken. You'd be left without that part of it. Which might not be a bad thing." He looked her in the eye through the iron. "You've spent your whole life caged by this power. The helmet, the fear, the walls, all of it. This might be the solution. But I'm not going to pretend I'm certain it is, because I don't have a clue beyond a hope."
The river bubbled softly. A heron lifted off the reeds and beat away upstream.
"My whole life," Jean said slowly, "I've been told what I am is too much. By Charles. By myself. I built the walls right alongside him, in the end, because I believed it." Her hands rose to the helmet and rested there, not lifting it, not yet. "And the part of me I locked up deepest, the wanting, the heat, the power that always ran over the edges of what I could hold, I called it the worst of me, and I buried it so far down she became a whole separate person down there in the dark." Her voice cracked. "You're telling me I can let her out. Give her a life. And put the thing that frightened everyone into hands that can actually carry it."
"Yes."
"Then take it." Jean's hands tightened on the iron. "All of it. I'm so tired of being afraid of myself."
"Jean—" Sue started.
"Sue." Jean turned to her, and there was something almost peaceful under the fear now. "It's alright. Truly. Get the others back."
Tyson nodded once. "Everyone behind Sue's fields. As far as you can get and still see. Reed, Ben, the river won't be far enough, but the distance will help. Johnny, sometimes she does this thing with fire. If anything comes off her that I can't hold, you do what you can to mitigate it before it reaches the others, you understand me? Jessica—"
"Don't." Jessica's jaw was set. "Don't tell me to get back."
"I need you to be the thread," he said gently. "When I'm inside her head, the only thing that brings a man home from a place like that is something worth coming back to. You stand where you'll survive, so I can come back to you. That's the job. That's the most important job there is."
It was almost the truth. It was true enough.
She stared at him for a long, furious second, and then she nodded, because she understood, and she went to stand inside Sue's gathering field, as close as he'd let her, her arms crossed hard over the fear.
"Alright." Tyson rolled his shoulders, drew a breath, and the golden spark stirred low in his chest. He placed his hand on Jean's exposed wrist and counted to ten.
"Jean. When you're ready. Take it off."
Jean Grey lifted Magneto's helmet from her head.
For one held heartbeat, nothing. The red dawn, the river, the woman standing on the floodplain with iron in her hands, lowering it to her waist, and her eyes shut.
Ben asked, "That's it?"
Then the world came apart.
It went out from her in a single silent shockwave. The dawn light bent and reddened, the reeds along the bank tore loose and hung suspended, the surface of the Nile rose up off the river in a curtain of standing droplets that did not fall. Sand lifted from the floodplain in slow spirals. The stone slab beneath the body groaned. And around Jean, climbing up out of her like something that had been waiting to be born, the aura unfurled; vast and red and shaped, for an instant, like wings. Like a great bird of fire opening over the river, its head thrown back, its cry a pressure behind the eyes rather than a sound in the ears.
The Phoenix.
"GET BACK!" Tyson roared, and his voice was almost lost in the silence-that-wasn't.
Sue's fields slammed up, blue and shimmering, and the team went skidding backward behind them as the floodplain in front of Jean simply unmade; black soil rising and dispersing into nothing, the reeds gone to drifting motes. Sue had both arms thrown forward, and her teeth bared, her invisible walls bowing inward under a pressure none of them could see, lit from inside by the red glare as she fought to keep the dome whole; Tyson heard her grunt as a section buckled and snapped back. Johnny flamed on and threw a wall of fire across a spear of reeds that Sue's field had missed, the flame guttering sideways as the spear shredded it, and he poured more on, swearing. Ben hunched his rocky bulk over Reed and took a flying slab of dissolving stone across the shoulders without a sound. Reed stretched himself thin as a sail across the others, a man making his own body into one more wall. And Jessica stood at the field's bright edge with her hands pressed flat to the blue, screaming his name once, Tyson, and then making herself stop, making herself just stand there, the thread, the fixed point, the way he'd asked, while every instinct she had clawed at her to follow him into the fire rather than watch.
And Tyson walked into it.
He'd been launched back, away from her, when the aura manifested. He lowered his head, and he walked toward Jean through the disintegration, and the storm took him apart as he came. He used his magnetism and telekinesis to force himself forward, more than his muscles. He released the adamantium armor, sending it away from Jean, along with Mjolnir, away from the river. It was useless here. The Phoenix was pure destruction, something even adamantium couldn't withstand.
The skin stripped off his arms and chest in ribbons; he regenerated it and lost it again two steps later. The flesh peeled from his face, and the healing factor laid it back down raw and screaming, and the force tore it away again. His bones bared to the red light, knit, bared again. It was agony past the point where agony means anything, a single unbroken roar of being unmade and remade with every step, and the only reason he could take the next step at all was that no part of him was ever destroyed long enough to stop him. He was the one thing in the world the Phoenix could not finish killing. So he walked. One ruined step and then another, through the place where the ground used to be, toward the woman at the eye of it all.
She was weeping. He could see that much through the red. Jean was at the heart of her own apocalypse with her hands over her face, weeping, terrified of what she was doing, unable to stop, the power pouring out of her and the world dissolving and no way on earth to put any of it back.
He reached her. He took her wrists in his two regenerating hands and drew them down from her face, gently, the way you'd wake someone from a nightmare, and he looked into her streaming eyes at the center of the firestorm, and he didn't say anything wise or final. He didn't have anything wise. He just held on.
He pressed two fingers to her temple, gathered the ocean of power with him, her power, and dove in.
— Rogue Redemption —
Inside Jean's mind was a fortress, and the fortress was falling.
Tyson had been in his own mind before. The White Room. The basketball court at Xavier's Institute. Her mind was nothing like that. He stood in it as a man stands in a place, his bare feet on cold stone, and around him reared the ramparts Charles Xavier had built in the mind of a frightened girl. Huge. Wall behind wall behind wall, a citadel raised to keep one thing in and the world out.
And it was coming down.
The walls had lost their strength and were failing along their length. Great blocks of psychic stone groaned and toppled in slow silence into chasms of nothing. Dust that wasn't dust sifted from the high arches. The whole vast structure shuddered like an ancient fort with the sea finally getting under its foundations, like a thing that had stood a thousand years and had, in a single morning, run entirely out of years. Somewhere far off, a tower came down. He had to move. When the last wall fell, whatever was kept behind it would scatter into the collapsing mind. Both Jean and Madelyn would be lost. He hadn't crossed a storm that flayed him alive to lose either.
He ran through the falling fort. He passed memories shelved like books in the breaking walls and didn't read them, though they reached for him as he went.
A red-haired girl at a friend's deathbed feeling the dying happen inside her own skull and learning, in that instant, that her gift was a thing that hurt.
The same girl a little older, sitting very straight in a wood-paneled office while a kind, terrible, well-meaning man laid the first courses of stone in her mind and told her it was for her own protection.
He passed rooms where Jean had been taught, gently and relentlessly, to be afraid of herself, and he made himself not stop in any of them, because every one of them was a door he could fall into. The architecture of a whole life's fear, and all of it coming down at once now that the helmet that mortared it was gone. Blocks the size of houses toppled soundlessly into the dark.
Tyson followed the pull of the thing the walls had been built around, because every fortress has a heart, a keep at the center that the outer walls all serve, and he went inward and downward through the collapse toward it. Leaping the widening chasms on Maw's telekinesis. Catching a falling arch over his own head with a flexed thought and holding it just long enough to pass beneath. The dust-that-wasn't-dust stinging eyes that weren't truly his eyes in this place. Behind him, the way he'd come was already gone, swallowed, unmade. There would be no retracing it. The only way out would be down to her, then straight up and out, before the floor of the world followed the walls into nothing.
The keep stood at the lowest point of the mind, the last thing still whole, and it was the smallest cell of all, and she was in it.
Madelyne.
She was not a monster. That was the thing that stopped him at the threshold. He had braced for the Madelyn he'd seen within his own mind to be a fallacy, a deception. He thought he might find horror, rage, the worst of someone made flesh. Instead, curled in the lowest cell of Jean Grey's mind behind the last unfallen wall, was a presence that read to him as warmth, banked and starving. Passion with nowhere to go, hunger that had never once been fed, a great overflowing wanting-to-live that had been called shameful so long it had learned to make itself small. She called herself Madelyn, but she was Jean. The excess of Jean. The parts of herself she'd looked at and decided weren't her, until they had no choice but to become someone else, down here, alone, in the dark, for years.
She had no soul. That was clear too, now, in a way he couldn't explain but could feel. She was a perfect, vivid, fully-realized person with nothing underneath to make her real, a flame with no candle. If he simply carried her presence out into the world, it would gutter and go out the moment it left the mind that dreamed it. She needed a soul, or she was nothing but a beautiful idea about to die with the fort.
He was ready for this. He was ready to give her part of his.
He turned his attention inward, and even here, standing in the ruin of someone else's mind, his own opened to him the way it always did, the borrowed lives arranged in their chambers like rooms in a house. He went past them quickly. Past Magneto's cottage. Past Healer's gardens and patient warmth. Past Sabertooth's animalistic drives pacing its forest, past Jason Stryker's room with floating illusions, past the White Room. Down, past all of it, to the warm turning core at the center of everything, the thing none of the others were. His own soul. A slow nexus of gold shot through with threads of blue and green and brown-amber and silver-gray, each strand a thing he was, all of them woven into the one light that was him. He had stood here once before, with a blade. He knew the weight of what he was about to do. Something the Ancient One warned him against.
He reached into the gold and took hold of a portion of the light. The last time had been for a binding, a tether meant to be a sword, one that would come home. This was a piece meant to leave, never return, and become someone.
It fought him. Every instinct he had screamed against it, a deep wordless refusal rising up out of the soul itself.
This does not come back, this is not a wound that closes, a man does not give his self away in pieces and remain a man.
The fragment clung to the whole, the filament between them stretching thinner and thinner, bright and resisting, the entire weight of his being pushing back against the loss. He thought of Nexus, of the piece he'd already spent and never missed because it always returned to his soul.
There was enough of him to go around.
He drew the fragment free. It came loose with a sensation he had no word for and would feel the absence of forever, a small fierce sun of gold pulsing in his cupped hands, still trailing its thinning thread back to the hollow it left behind. He carried it across the cell to where Madelyne's starving presence waited, and he wrapped his own soul around her like a man laying his coat over someone freezing in the snow.
She took to it instantly. The soul-light sank into her and lit her, and for the first time in the years of her dark existence, Madelyne was real. She became a person with a self underneath her, a flame that finally had a candle to burn on.
Her presence flared bright and whole.
The last wall fell.
Tyson gathered Madelyne's soul-bright presence against his chest, and clinging to it, drawn to the heat of her the way it had always been drawn, came the Phoenix, a coal of red fire wreathing the whole of her, hers and not his, following her home, and he turned and he climbed up out of the dying fortress with both arms full of fire, and he opened his eyes in the world.
— Rogue Redemption —
He came back to the world. His fingers were still at Jean's temple.
The aura around them guttered. The standing curtain of the river began, drop by drop, to fall. The storm folded inward toward Jean and then toward him, the disintegration stilling, the world remembering how to be solid, and thankfully, the great red bird, the Phoenix itself, did not pour into Tyson.
Tyson let Jean, still braced in one of his arms, down onto the ground, laid her gently on her side, and she flickered at the edge of consciousness, hollowed out and free and afraid. There was no time to comfort her. The door they'd opened wouldn't stay open long.
He pulled his fingers away from her temple, and with it came a glow. A soul-bright glow.
Jean slumped fully unconscious the moment the contact broke, the very last of the red aura sighing out of her and away, and she lay there small and ordinary and breathing in the dawn, emptied of power and of the thing she'd carried, more peaceful in her face than Tyson had ever seen her. Sue's fields came down. The river ran normally in its banks. The reeds settled. The world, which had nearly ended on this riverbank, continued.
And Tyson knelt there with his hand cupped to his own chest as though he were carrying something precious, because he was, and he was so tired he could barely hold his head up. Not the body-tiredness from the Phoenix's destructive storm; his regeneration had already mended every torn inch of him. This was the other thing. A deep low ache where a piece of him used to be, a hollow that no regeneration would ever fill because it wasn't a wound to the body. The missing place was like a tongue finding a gap where a tooth used to be, and on the far end of that hollow, faint and frightened and astonishingly warm, he could feel her.
"It's her?" Jessica was there, hands on his shoulders, her voice shaking with everything she'd held in for the last ten minutes. "Tyson. Is that— Are you holding her?"
"I'm holding her. And I have to finish this before I drop her, because right now she's a soul in my hand." He made himself stand, Sue helped. Jessica went to Jean. The team gathered close around him and the still, perfect body on the slab, all of them silent, all of them understanding that the strangest part was still to come. "Last step," he said. "The ritual. I put her in the house. Stay close, this time. I want her first sight of the world to be people who were here for her."
Tyson explained as he worked, because he'd said he would, and because Madelyne, pressed warm against his chest, was listening too, and he wanted her to know how she came to be. He re-cut the circle in the sand around the slab and the body. "The circle is a boundary that says this much is set apart, this much is sacred ground. Inside it, the rules are mine." He renewed the veves in powdered limestone, kneeling to draw each swirling figure fresh, naming them as he went.
"The doorway, the passage, the seat where a god should stand."
He set the clay lamps at the four points, and Johnny lit them with a touch. He laid the last of the lotus and the tamarisk across the body's folded hands. "Vitality at her hands, so the first thing the soul reaches for is the will to live. Resurrection over her heart, so the body remembers it was made to be lived in."
"In any ordinary working," Tyson said, "this is where you'd call a loa to oversee the passage of a soul." He drew Nexus, the soulblade, the only tool he'd brought because it was the only one that was already part of him. "But there's no loa for what this is. A soul moving into a body for the first time, a soul I made out of my own, that's not Death's work. There's no spirit whose office this falls under. So I stand in the door myself. My own spark in the seat of a god." The gold rose behind his ribs, weary and willing. He set the edge of Nexus to his palm and opened it, and let a few dark drops of his ashe-rich blood fall onto the body's breastbone. "Blood to open the door. Life calling to life, telling the house its tenant is coming. And then the soul through it."
He brought his hand down to the still chest of the woman the river had made.
And he let Madelyne go.
He poured her out of his hands and into the open house, the soul-bright presence sinking through skin and into the silent heart of the body, and for one breath it was beautiful. The vacant form drank in the soul, a faint glow blooming under the skin, the first true warmth off the body since the grave.
Then the Phoenix, there was still a flame within the soul, wreathed around her, touched the flesh, and the flesh began to burn.
That was not metaphor.
The demon-body Whiteclaw had worn, and Felicia before her, the perfect form the grave had grown, blackened and cracked and caught, red fire racing out from the heart along every limb, the beautiful symmetry crisping and curling like paper in a grate. Even Johnny flinched back from the heat. Sue's hand went to her mouth. The Phoenix that had clung to Madelyne all the way out of Jean was doing what the Phoenix has always done.
It was burning down what was.
And if Tyson did nothing, it would burn her body to ash with her brand-new soul still inside it.
So he did what Calypso had taught him and what Mephisto's primer told him he could do.
"It burns away the old form," he said through his teeth, dropping to his knees beside the burning body, plunging both bloodied hands into the fire, "so I rebuild it as it burns—" and he opened Healer's power into her, the power of restoration he'd taken by killing a gentle man, and poured it into the body as fast as the Phoenix consumed it.
The two forces met in the flesh and warred and married, and it was the hardest thing he had ever done with a power that wasn't even meant for fighting. He fought, and it led to a sort of balance, destruction and restoration in the same square inch of flesh at the same instant, the Phoenix stripping away what Whiteclaw had been and Healer's gift laying down what Madelyne would be in the half-second of wake the flame left behind it. The heat blistered his hands and the healing mended them and the heat blistered them again. And through it all, Madelyne's terror.
It hurts, what's happening, am I dying before I've even—
Tyson sent back the only thing he had, wordlessly.
No. You're being born.
Old form to ash, ash to new form, in the same breath, the burning and the building chasing each other up the body limb by limb. It was like the story. The story the bird was named for.
And in the fire, the shape of her changed.
The demon's terrible beauty burned off, and the healing did not put it back. What rose in its place, knitting itself together inside the dying flame, was a woman built to the pattern of the soul now living in her. Jean's pattern, because Madelyne had always been Jean, the disowned and overflowing heart of her. The white hair burned away, and what grew back in its place came in red, the deep arterial red of the bird that was making her. The clawed hands gentled into a woman's hands. The features resolved into a face Tyson knew and didn't, Jean's face and not Jean's. The red fire sank lower and lower as it spent itself, drawn down into her, consumed entirely in the work of her making, until it was not an aura around her at all but a banked coal somewhere deep inside the new red-haired woman on the slab. It was hers now, inherited, the Phoenix passing from the half of Jean that had caged it to the half of Jean born to carry it. When the last of the flame guttered out, what lay in the dawn light was a woman with red hair and unburned skin and a chest that slowly, for the very first time, rose, and fell, and rose again.
Madelyne took her first breath, and opened her eyes, and they were green. She woke into a circle of strangers and two who were familiar, and she reached for the familiar first.
Her green eyes found Tyson before they found anyone, and the look she gave him was not a stranger's. You. I know you. You're the reason I'm here. She lifted one hand and looked at it as though she'd never had one, turned it over in the light, and laughed, a small disbelieving sound, the first noise she had ever made with a throat of her own. Her joy landed in his chest like sunlight, and despite everything, despite the weariness in his soul, he smiled.
Then she spoke. Her voice was Jean's timbre, roughened by the newness of her throat and the newness of being a person with a throat at all.
"It's warm," she said. She pressed her palm flat against the stone beneath her, then against her own sternum, then held it up to the dawn light and watched the sun hit her skin. "Everything is warm."
It was the simplest thing anyone had ever said about being alive. His eyes stung, and he wasn't sure whether the feeling came from his own soul or from the fragment of it that now lived inside her, feeling everything for the first time.
She sat up slowly, her body figuring out how muscles worked, and the motion itself seemed to astonish her.
"I can feel you," she said. Her eyes hadn't left his. "The piece you gave me. It's right here." She pressed her hand to her chest, fingers spread. "It's the only part of me that isn't afraid."
Tyson swallowed hard. The hollow in his soul ached, and on the far side of it, she looked back at him.
"I always thought having a body would make me smaller. But it doesn't." A slow, incredulous smile broke across her face, Jean's features lit by a fire Jean had never quite allowed herself. "It feels like being real."
Jean stirred awake in Jessica's arms a few feet away, and the two of them saw each other for the first time.
It was the strangest thing any of them would ever witness. Jean Grey propped herself up on shaking arms and looked at the woman wearing her face, and her hair and her green eyes, the part of herself she had exiled into the dark for so long that it had grown into a whole separate person, and the woman looked back at her, and neither of them said anything, because there were no words to describe it. Two halves of one girl, regarding each other across a stretch of dark Egyptian earth. Grief and recognition and a terrible, dawning relief moved over both faces at once, the same expression on two different women, and Jean began, very quietly, to cry. Not from loss. From release. From finally, finally setting something down.
Jessica stood at Tyson's side and watched the red-haired woman breathe, and Tyson could feel the question in her before she asked it.
He had poured a piece of his own soul into making this woman; that piece would never come home; and now there was a living person made partly of him. He didn't know yet what that would mean for any of them, and neither did Jessica, and he could see her working through it as she looked at a woman he had quite literally given part of his soul to create. She slid her hand into his and held on. We'll figure it out, the grip said. Whatever this is. Together.
And Tyson still felt a hollow in his soul, a quiet permanent absence where a piece of him used to be, aching low and steady beneath his ribs. He had given it gladly, but the absence was not empty, not entirely; on the far end of it, warm and astonished and alive, Madelyne breathed, and laughed again. He felt her wonder at simply being, and he understood that this was the shape the cost would always take now. There wasn't nothing where the piece had been. There was someone. He drew a long breath of Nile air, and let it out, and went to help Jean up, so that the two of them could finally meet.
— Rogue Redemption —
The morning sun baked the sand around the Great Sphinx, and the shadow it cast stretched long and cool over the place where they'd gathered. Rama-Tut's ship sat behind them, sleek and almost alien-looking, though it was from the far future, not a different planet. As far as he knew.
The Fantastic Four and Jean were ready to load on. Tyson stood with Madelyne on one side and Jessica on the other. Madelyne kept touching things. The fabric of the cloak someone had draped over her shoulders. The ends of her own red hair. Her own collarbone. Every few seconds, her fingers would find something, and she'd press into it like she was making sure it wouldn't disappear. As the Fantastic Four approached, she walked off to speak with her… sister. Jessica had not let go of Tyson's hand since the riverbank.
Ben Grimm stopped at the foot of the ship's ramp and turned around. He planted his massive orange feet in the sand and crossed his arms. "You sure about this, kid? Five thousand years is a long time. And we'll be jumping into a fight on the other end."
"It has to be this way. If I don't succeed, half of everyone is dead. Not just on Earth. Across the universe."
Johnny dropped down from the ramp, landing lightly. "Can't argue with that." He stuck out his hand. "Good luck."
Tyson took it. Johnny's grip was warm, firm, and brief. Then he stepped past him and pulled Sue into a hug. She held on a beat longer than she needed to, one hand pressed flat against his back, and he let her, because Sue Storm had earned the right to worry about him and he wasn't going to rush her through it.
He turned to Reed last. Richards stood with his arms at his sides and that particular look on his face, the one that meant half of him was already somewhere else running calculations.
"You don't have to go back to immediately after you left," Tyson said. "But the battle is on the fifth. You can't appear before we've nearly lost." He held up a hand, ticking off the sequence. "Look for the portal in the sky. It'll be closed, but then it'll reopen, and angels will pour out."
He caught Amy watching him, a small crease between her brows, and turned to her. "They're not real angels. They're from a realm that Asgard cut off from the rest of the galaxy." She nodded once, and he turned back to Reed. "Once they come through and reach the ground, that's when I'll be sent back in time. That's when you can make your appearance without changing anything. But I know you're coming, I'll try to make contact with you if I can."
Reed absorbed the plan without visible effort. "I understand. Rama-Tut's ship had cloaking technology. We'll be able to keep from being detected." He extended his hand. "Good luck, Tyson. We'll see you in a few minutes. One way or another."
Tyson laughed. "Sure will."
Jean had been standing apart with Madelyne for the last several minutes, the two of them a few yards from the group, speaking telepathically.
Jean held both of Madelyne's hands in hers, and Madelyne's face did something complicated, grief and gratitude and the raw overwhelm of someone else's memories. Then Jean pulled her close, and Madelyne let her, and they stood like that for a long moment, two identical red-haired women holding each other in the Egyptian sun, one saying goodbye to the part of herself she'd finally set free, the other saying hello to the world she'd finally been given.
When they separated, Jean came to Jessica. She hugged her tight.
"Keep him safe," Jean said. "And sane. Five thousand years, Jess."
"I know."
"Don't let him disappear into it."
Jessica pulled back and looked Jean in the eye. "He won't. I promise."
Jean nodded. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, squared her shoulders, and walked up the ramp without looking back, because if she looked back, she wouldn't go.
Ben Grimm held out a fist for a fistbump. Tyson looked at it, then stepped inside the big man's arm length and wrapped him up in a hug, lifting all however-many-thousand pounds of orange rock clean off the sand. Ben made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a laugh, his stone arms coming up awkwardly to pat Tyson's back.
"Even with superstrength," Tyson said, setting him down, "you're a big boy."
"Yeah, yeah. Don't make it weird."
"See y'all in a few."
Ben jabbed a thick finger at him. "You better mean that." Then he turned and walked up the ramp, his footsteps clanging against the metal.
The Fantastic Four filed aboard with Jean behind them. At the top of the ramp, each of them turned for one last look at the three figures standing in the sand below. Johnny raised two fingers in a lazy salute. Sue pressed her lips together and nodded once. Reed was already moving toward the cockpit. Jean stood at the threshold longest, looking down at them, then the ramp sealed shut behind her.
Reed settled into the pilot's seat and began running prejump diagnostics, his fingers stretching across three separate consoles simultaneously.
"Temporal drive is stable," he said, mostly to himself. "Navigation matrix is calibrated to the modern calendar. Power reserves at ninety-seven percent." He pulled up a translucent timeline, a single bright dot marking their position in the deep past and a second dot, blinking, marking the date they needed to reach. The gap between them was enormous.
Sue stood behind him, one hand on the back of his chair. "So in a few minutes, we'll be fighting the battle of our lives."
"For the universe," Johnny said from where he'd sprawled across two seats. "No pressure."
"We don't have to," Sue said hesitantly.
Everyone looked at her.
"Tyson said we could arrive at any point beforehand. We just can't be seen, and we can't interfere before the moment he specified."
Johnny sat up. "He meant like after we left. But you're saying we could arrive a year early. Live in a different country. Maybe spend a few months at the beach, just in case." He spread his hands. "I'm just saying. If the world might end, I'd like a tan first."
Sue looked at him the way she'd been looking at him since he was fourteen.
"I'm serious," Johnny said, though he clearly wasn't. Entirely.
Jean had taken a seat near the back of the cockpit. "Five thousand years is a long time."
"It is," Sue said quietly. She turned to Reed. "Is there a limit to how many jumps this ship can make?"
Reed considered. "The ship won't last forever. But the construction is remarkably durable, and the power source appears to be a self-sustaining fusion reactor of a design I've never encountered. We could make many jumps. Rama-Tut clearly did."
Sue nodded slowly. "Then what if we don't go all the way to the future? We'd be leaving Tyson here, in ancient Egypt, under the control of a powerful mutant. Alone, except for Jessica and a woman who's been alive for an hour."
"The Convergence," Reed said. He pulled up astronomical data he'd compiled from the ship's records. "The alignment Tyson described. It occurs in approximately ten years from this point in the timeline. What if we waited only that long? Jump forward ten years, assess the situation."
Johnny leaned forward. "Is that really a good idea? Tyson's going for an Infinity Stone. He seemed pretty confident he could get it. If we show up in the middle of that..."
"Johnny's right," Jean said. "Tyson has a plan. If we show up unexpectedly, we might interfere. Or worse, we become a liability he has to protect. He'd do it, too. He'd burn himself out keeping us safe, distracting him from what he needs to do. Tyson will try to save everyone, and he'll risk everything to save us."
Reed scrolled through centuries on the timeline. "Then perhaps a shorter trip. Five hundred years. That gives us enough time to determine whether Tyson survived the initial period. There's no crisis we'd be interfering in at that point. And if something happened to him..." He paused, choosing his words with the care of a man who understood exactly how they'd sound. "We go back to help. Or we make a plan for how to handle Thanos ourselves, taking up his mission."
Jean's mouth thinned. A cold way to frame it. Tyson's survival reduced to a variable in a contingency plan, his death a branching point on a decision tree. But the reasoning was sound, and she knew it.
Reed pulled up a navigation subroutine buried in the ship's operating system. A cascade of coordinate sets filled the screen, each one tagged with temporal markers.
"There's something else," he said. "Rama-Tut didn't just have a destination programmed. He had a series of them." He expanded the view so the others could see. Dozens of coordinate pairs hung in the air, each one pinned to a specific point in time and space, scattered across millennia like waypoints on a map that spanned all of recorded history. "Pre-loaded into the navigation matrix. Significant events, locations, most of them centered on this region of the world."
Sue leaned closer. "He was tracking Apocalypse."
"That's my assumption. Intercept points. Moments where En Sabah Nur would surface, or where his influence could be detected." Reed isolated one set of coordinates. "This one is particularly interesting. 2620 BC. It's a few hundred years, a considerably shorter jump than five thousand."
"A few hundred years," Sue repeated. She looked around the cockpit. "We jump forward. We find out if he's alive. We go from there."
A few hundred years. Tyson and Jessica would live every one of those years, or they wouldn't, and the people in this cockpit would skip the gap knowing nothing about what had filled the centuries between. Sue thought of the young man who had peeled the adamantium off his own armor to create theirs, who had walked into a firestorm that stripped his skin to the bone, who had given a piece of his soul to a stranger and stood up smiling with the hollow still fresh in his chest. She wondered what centuries alone in the ancient world would do to someone who carried that much willingness to burn for other people. She wondered whether the man they found on the other side, if they found him, would still be the one they'd left standing in the sand. The same one she'd connected with at Project PEGASUS.
Ben grunted from the co-pilot's seat. "Works for me."
Johnny nodded.
Jean uncurled her hands from her knees and laid them flat on her thighs. "Agreed."
She said the word as if it were a vote on a mission briefing and not a decision to leave behind the man who had changed her life from the moment they met. She could still feel the absence where Madelyne had lived; the quiet, newly empty room in her mind, swept clean for the first time since childhood, and in that silence Jean could hear herself more clearly than she had in years.
Reed entered the coordinates. The timeline contracted, the blinking dot sliding from the far future to a point a few centuries ahead, and the ship's hum deepened as the temporal drive began to charge.
His hand hovered over the activation sequence. The drive's hum had climbed to a frequency they could feel in their teeth, in the soles of their feet, in the marrow of their bones. Sue moved her hand from the back of Reed's chair to his shoulder. He covered it with his own, briefly, then returned his fingers to the console.
"Initiating temporal jump," he said.
The ship lurched; not the way a plane hits turbulence or a car strikes a pothole, but every surface in the cockpit seemed to stretch and compress at once, the displays smearing into ribbons of light before snapping back into focus. Jean gripped the armrests of her seat. Ben's rocky fingers dug grooves into the co-pilot's armrest.
Then the ship settled. The hum dropped back to its baseline. The screens recalibrated, new data flooding across them, and Reed began reading it immediately.