CHAPTER 157: NEON MIRAGE
New York City. Outside a crumbling disco with a name that used to mean something. Neon buzzed like a nest of angry bees; a line of club kids in shiny shirts snaked past a bored bouncer.
Scott parked the car with a sigh that might once have been a laugh. "We're recruiting at a disco," he muttered. "This is my life."
Jean smiled sidelong, the kind that warmed you and burned you. "Could be worse. Could be a mime convention."
"Don't joke," Scott said deadpan. "Not even you could save me from that."
Nightcrawler stretched in the backseat, tail lazily sketching a treble clef in the air. "I vill guard the car, ja? Someone must keep our chariot safe from… disco fever." He flicked on the radio. Funk spilled out, bassline warm as velvet.
Scott popped his door. "Good. If anything—"
"—happens, I call, I bamf, I save your lives. Is tradition," Kurt said, tipping an imaginary hat.
Inside, the disco was a living aquarium of light. Mirrors multiplied everything. Bodies moved like schools of glitter fish. The speakers hit you in the chest.
"Split up?" Jean asked, voice pitched just for Scott.
"Split up," he said. He tapped his watch, the rim unfurling into a tiny screen pulsing with Cerebro mini-readings. "I'll sweep the perimeter with this. You… do your thing."
"Always do," she said, eyes momentarily gold with a power most people would mistake for stage lights.
Jean stepped into the current of the dancefloor, letting crowd-sound wash through her mind. Thoughts thrummed by—thirsty, bored, horny, high, this beat slaps—she skimmed across them like a dragonfly, searching for the bright edge that meant mutation.
She felt it, like a bell.
Then a hand brushed her arm.
Jason Wyngarde.
Brown eyes. Courtly smile. A man who smelled like sandalwood and secrets. His presence hit her like a remembered life.
"Jean," he said softly. "My love."
The club dissolved. Sunlight poured through stained glass. An old church, candelight trembling. A dress of cream silk brushed her ankles. The air was clean and old and holy.
'Oh,' Jean thought, tears sudden and ridiculous. 'Oh, I remember this. I—how could I forget—'
Jason took her hands. "At last."
The priest spoke words she couldn't quite hear; happiness roared too loud. She said "I do," and it felt like truth cut from stone.
They kissed.
Somewhere outside the dream, a man in a visor looked up across a dancefloor and saw his girlfriend kissing a stranger in the middle of a disco like the world wasn't burning.
Scott didn't move for a heartbeat. Something in his chest tore neat and quiet.
'Not now. Not here. Mission first. Feel later.'
He pushed through the crowd.
Jean blinked, the church tearing like paper around the edges. The kiss was a kiss and not a sacrament. She pulled back, breathless, eyes clearing. "Scott—Scott, I can explain—"
"You will," he said, voice controlled like a pianist holding a note too long. "Later. Our target's here."
Onstage, a spotlight hit a woman with a microphone and a grin built for crowds. Blonde hair. Sequins. Boots that promised trouble. She opened her mouth, and the sound the band made became a lightshow that danced around her like it had been waiting its whole life to be born.
"Alison Blaire," Jean murmured. "DAZZLER."
Scott's watch pinged hard enough to tickle his skin. "Found her."
"Let her finish," Jean said, already feeling a flicker of protectiveness toward this human disco ball. "She deserves her stage."
Back at the car, Kurt had the seat reclined, radio low. He drummed a rhythm on the dash with two fingers.
The car phone rang. He blinked. "We have a phone? Of course ve have a phone." He snatched it up. "Hallo?"
"Is this—are you the X-Men?" a small voice said, breathless. "Please, please, I—this is Kitty, Kitty Pryde, and the others, they're—Ms. Frost took them—there were cages—"
"Kitty!" Kurt sat up, tail lashing. "Slow, slow, mein kind—tell me vhere—"
The passenger window exploded inward. A man in a suit reached through the glass and hauled Kurt out by the collar like a fisherman landing a blue devil.
Kurt dropped the phone, squirmed, and bamfed—
—and reappeared behind the man just in time to catch a fist that moved like it had been waiting for him. Pain sizzled up his arm.
"Ah. You know my trick," he hissed.
The man didn't answer. His fist did. Kurt flew, skidding across asphalt, world blinking black-white-black with each bamf as he tried to outpace pain and failed.
Inside the club, Dazzler hit her chorus and the floor went wild. Jean caught the first ripple a heartbeat too late.
Attackers—three men in suits, boring as tax season until you noticed the tech. One raised a shoulder-mounted rig that hummed wrong. The other flicked his wrist and a capsule popped, blooming midair like a ruby flower before snapping shut around Scott's head.
Cyclops' world went red. He grabbed the sphere, too smooth to grip. "They put a quartz hood on me," he said, voice flat with disbelief and fury.
The third leveled a device that whined; a beam lanced invisible into Jean's skull. Her powers guttered like a candle in a wind tunnel.
She staggered. "Psi—cut—off—"
The crowd screamed, then cheered, because from thirty feet away, danger looks like just another part of the show.
Scott braced, calculating angles he couldn't see through the red tomb around his head. "Stay behind me, Jean—"
"Behind you where?" she snapped, and even through pain there was a laugh tucked into it.
Onstage, Alison faltered. The light tried to dance without her. She saw the beam guy, the woman in the red bubble, the man with nothing but fists trying to be a wall, and made a choice she'd never made before.
"Hey," she said into the mic, voice shaking just a hair. "Pick on someone with better lighting."
She turned the song into a scream of sound and fed it to the place in her bones that had always known it was a transformer. Light erupted from her like a star learned how to sing.
It hit the brainwave gunner square in the chest. He shrieked, the device spasming, the beam cutting off. Jean's mind gulped air.
Dazzler stared down at her own hands, terrified and thrilled. "Oh my God," she whispered. "I just—I hurt him."
Jean wiped her mouth and grinned feral. "Thank you, Alison." One thought, one twist, and the ruby shell around Scott's head phased apart at the edges under a telekinetic nudge, then shattered like sugar glass.
Scott inhaled like a drowning man finding shore. "On three," he said.
"Always," Jean said.
"One," Scott murmured, stepping left, presenting a clean line.
"Two," Jean breathed, already lifting debris into a storm with a flick of thought.
"Three," Scott snapped, visor slitting open in a tight beam that took the first attacker off his feet, sent him cartwheeling into a mirror that exploded into a thousand stunned faces. Jean hurled tables into the second, then pinned him there, pressure precise and ugly. The third reached for his gun and Dazzler slammed him with a strobe so vicious he vomited light and bile on the spot.
The club shut up real quick.
The far wall ruptured and Nightcrawler shot through it like a blue cannonball, skipping once on the dancefloor and colliding with Scott's legs. He lay there panting, a dark bruise blooming along his jaw.
"Hi," he said weakly. "Bad news."
Scott caught him and hauled him upright. "What happened?"
Kurt winced. "Phone. Girl. Kitty. The others—captured. Chicago. Hellfire Club. I vas—how do you say—punched a lot."
Jean's face changed the way weather changes: the warmth went out of it; the air pressure dropped.
Dazzler looked between them, breath rushing. "Is this—did I just—am I in a superhero thing right now?"
Scott snapped the cuffs on the least concussed attacker and tossed Jean a look. It said everything: Kitty's voice. Logan in a cage. Charles on a cold table. Choices. Time burning.
He turned to Alison. "Alison Blaire. You're a mutant. You can help us save friends who will die if we don't move."
Alison stared at her glitter-slick reflection in a cracked mirror, then back at the strangers who somehow felt more real than the crowd that had chanted her name ten minutes ago.
She swallowed. Lifted her chin. "I don't know how to fight," she said, honest as a bassline. "But I can light the way."
Kurt leaned heavier on Scott's shoulder and managed a crooked smile. "Welcome to the X-Men, fraulein."
Jean squeezed Alison's hand and didn't pretend she wasn't shaking. "You did good. You did brave."
The club's lights flickered, suddenly cheap compared to the woman who had just turned a song into a weapon.
Scott looked at the three of them—Jean with anger bright behind her eyes, Kurt bleeding but grinning, Alison standing on trembling legs—and made the call.
"We move now," he said. "Chicago. Hellfire. We get our family back."
"Family," Jean echoed, and felt the word settle like armor over the raw places.
Kurt wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand. "Someone is going to have to drive. The car is… less window than it used to be."
Alison laughed once, shaky. "I know a shortcut," she lied, and grinned when they looked at her like they believed she really did.
Jean thought, and beneath the thought something vast and hungry purred. 'Hold on, Charles. I'm coming.'