Gifted (11 page)

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THE
security guards outside Benetech had had a busy evening. It had seemed as if every news media outlet in the world was present at the press conference, but apparently a metric ton of them hadn’t shown up, and now they were endeavoring to make up for lost time. But the guards were under strict instructions to let no one past the large, gated entrance, and they took their jobs very seriously. So all afternoon, well into the evening, they’d stood there with their rifles in evidence, watching an array of TV reporters do their stand-ups in front of the facility. The reporters had approached the subject matter in different ways, but all ultimately came to the same conclusion: The mutant menace was nearly at an end.

Doctor Rao had not emerged. She practically lived at the place, but usually by this point she would have finally gone home. Not tonight. It was easy to figure out why. Reporters had probably found out where she lived and were camped out, waiting for her to show. Smart lady, the guards believed, to keep a low profile. Then again, the fact that she was a smart lady was what had gotten her into this situation in the first place.

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Since she wasn’t coming out, and no one else was attempting to get in, it looked to be another quiet night. But the guards remained vigilant. They kept a wary eye on the entrance, silently daring anyone to approach them and try to get inside. There was no way they were going to allow that.

As it happened, none of them were looking up. If they had, they would have seen a dark, furred figure with a large yellow “X” festooned across its costume, leaping over their heads, highlighted against a full moon. They continued to stand guard, convinced they were doing their job and unaware that they had, in fact, failed spectacularly.

THE
Beast scaled the wall effortlessly. Benetech might have fancied itself a highly secure facility, but they had never prepared themselves for someone like him.
Perhaps I could pick up some extra cash this way. Secure facilities can hire me to try to break in to determine just how airtight their security is
. He considered it briefly, but then dismissed it. One never knew when a place just like this could wind up posing a threat, and he far preferred to be able to gain access at will.

He’d already managed to hack into the facility’s system and determine the location of Doctor Rao’s lab. His photographic memory kept the map securely in his head. Now it was just a matter of reaching the lab so that he could start looking around. It was late enough that he was certain he would be able to work undetected.

He made it to the roof and crossed it stealthily. There was no door, but there was a cat burglar’s best friend: a skylight. It was triple-ply thick, securely latched and alarmed.

Beast wondered why the skylight was there in the first place, but he
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thought:
Don’t knock it
. It was his way in.

He could have punched through it, but that would have triggered the wiring and sounded the alarm. Instead he pulled out a handy little instrument from the small knapsack he had slung over his shoulder. He secured the gadget’s suction cup against the glass and activated it. A tiny laser, secured to the suction cup by a small rod, flared to life and began to slice into the window. He eased the laser around; the result was a perfect circle, which he was then able to extract with no problem.

He could see the small box on the edge of the window’s inside that provided the connection to the alarm system. “Child’s play,” he muttered, extracting a screwdriver from the knapsack. He eased his arm through, holding the screwdriver, and managed to disconnect it from the rest of the system in less than a minute. Moments later he unlatched the skylight and eased himself through.

A large, dark room opened up beneath him. It was filled with intersecting red beams, which—were they broken by something such as, say, a blue-furred body—would sound any number of alarms.

“Hunh. That’s new,” Beast muttered.

He studied the array for a full minute, mentally charted a trajectory, and then launched himself into the air. He twisted and turned in midair as he fell, finding the gaps in the crossbeams, taking advantage of them. He landed silently on the floor in a crouch, realizing only belatedly that if the floor was pressure-sensitive, he was in trouble. But there was nothing, or at least nothing he could hear or detect.

He exited the room. There might have been important and useful things in there, but he had no interest in them. He was focused with precision, as laser-like as the beams he had just eluded.

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Moving through the empty corridors, sticking to the shadows, he made it to Doctor Rao’s lab. There was a security keypad outside, but he’d prepared for that as well. He extracted a blank security card attached to an electronic reader and slid it into the slot in the keypad. Seconds later the code numbers appeared on its screen and he tapped them into the pad. The keypad beeped at him welcomingly, and the door slid open.

Beast clambered upward, preferring to make his way across the ceiling in the darkened lab. His night vision was perfect. Even upside down, he was positive he’d be able to find what he was looking for. The only sound in the place was the soft clicking of his claws against the ceiling.

And then another click. The sound of a light switch, which was all the warning he had before the room was flooded with illumination. He squinted against it, his eyes hurting from the abrupt change.

“Doctor McCoy,” came a soft, accented, slightly mocking female voice.

He looked down. She was standing there calmly, looking up at him.

“Doctor Rao,” he replied. He dropped from the ceiling and landed on the floor. “It’s been a long time. Berlin, wasn’t it? The cloning seminar…?” He was endeavoring to sound casual. He knew perfectly well the last time they’d seen each other, and that she was aware of it as well.

“I seem to recall you were far less…furry…back then. Much more—”

“Human?” He shrugged. “Appearances can be deceiving, can’t they.”

“Yes, they can,” she said. “If I may ask: what happened?”

“An unfortunate experiment that tried to make me something other than what I was…and instead brought out my true nature. As I said, appearances…”

“Can be deceiving, yes. For instance, there are armed guards waiting
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outside the door, packing enough gas guns to put Galactus to sleep. Did you really think you could break in here?”

He was slightly annoyed by that, realizing there must have indeed been pressure alarms built into the floor. Apparently he’d been monitored all along. But he maintained an air of bravado. “Did you think I wouldn’t try?” He approached her, remaining in a defensive crouch. “You’ve thrown a bomb into the room, Doctor. People will die because of what you’ve done today.”

“People will die? How can someone with the eyes of a cat be so blind? People
have
died. People
are
dying. You say people will die? I say innocent people will live. Will live decent, normal lives.”

Beast was now standing upright. “Yes, I saw you trundling out your poster child. Nice piece of publicity Tildie’s buying you. Well played.”

“I’m not playing, Doctor McCoy. There are people whose lives have been destroyed by unwanted mutation, and I will give my life to help them. Whatever you and your X-Men plan to do, I—”

Then she stopped and, to the Beast’s surprise, laughed softly.

“Do you find that funny?” he asked.

She didn’t answer immediately. When she did, she said, “During our time in Berlin, did I ever tell you about Harish?”

“Harish? No, the name doesn’t ring a bell.”

“He was my best friend when I was a child in India, in a small village you’ve never heard of. The sweetest boy. He was an artist. He was always sketching, always drawing. Still lifes. People. Me.”

“Are we about to get to the part where you posed naked for him wearing only the Heart of the Ocean? Because if so—”

“And then one morning,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken,
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“shortly after he’d turned fourteen, his parents ran screaming from their small house, which was barely more than four metal walls held together through sheer willpower. Their son, they screamed, had turned into a monster. Overnight he had developed horns and a green hue to his face. Can you guess what happened next?”

He didn’t have to. She told him anyway.

“They dragged him out into the street, which was little more than a dirt road, and declared that a demon had wandered into our midst. And in their fear and terror, they beat him, Doctor McCoy. They beat him to death in front of my eyes, and I stood there and did nothing because there were so many of them and I was just one girl. But there was more to it than that. I was afraid that if I acted on his behalf, they’d turn on me as well. So I stood there, a prisoner of my helplessness and cowardice, and Harish was soon nothing but a bloodied pulp on the ground. Even his parents joined in. Even his parents. He…”

Her eyes misted a moment, and then she reached deeply into herself to find the words she needed. “Never again. Never again am I going to do nothing to help poor, tortured people like Harish when I have the ability to—”

“Kavita,” he said, dropping the honorific, his voice soft. “Stop.” She did so. “I’m not here to discuss the ethics of your ‘mutant cure.’ And I’m not here to destroy it. I just…want to know if it works.”

She regarded him with open curiosity. “I…was not expecting you to say that, honestly. But in retrospect, I suppose I should not be surprised. All things considered…”

“All things, yes.” He nodded toward the door. “There aren’t really men with guns standing outside, are there? I’d have heard them.”

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“No, there aren’t. I was bluffing. How’d I do?”

“You were brilliant. I was completely taken in.”

“No, you weren’t. Wait here, please.”

He did as she requested. She disappeared into an adjoining room that he could only assume was another lab. It was entirely possible that she was genuinely summoning security, but for some reason he had a feeling she wasn’t going to do that. Then again, he’d been wrong before. He hoped this would not be one of those instances.

A long minute passed, and then Kavita Rao reemerged. She was holding a small metal box. She walked up to the Beast and opened it so he could see the contents. It was a test tube, filled with a milky liquid, nestled in a cushion of foam rubber.

“Do what you want with it,” she said. She closed the box and flipped shut a small latch.

“What’s the catch?”

“There’s no catch. I know you, Henry. You tend to get what you want. It either happens now, simply, without anyone getting hurt. Or it happens later after a lot of people get hurt, mostly Benetech employees just trying to do their jobs. I’d rather just cut to the chase, as it were.”

She handed it to him. For just a moment her finger brushed against his. A small jolt seemed to jump between them, and then he took the sample of the cure securely in his large hands. “Thank you,” he said.

“Not a problem. I assume I can count on your discretion? It’s only a single sample, but Benetech considers it proprietary material.”

“If you’re asking whether I’d turn around and give it to another
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think tank and let them horn in on your discovery, don’t concern yourself. The last thing I want to do is facilitate people making more of it.”

“Then that’s that. I assume you can see yourself out.”

“Absolutely.”

She turned and walked away from him, and then stopped. Her shoulders squared, she said quietly, “There’s been no one since you, Henry. No one even came close.”

And then she walked out the door.

“YOU
did what? Are you insane?
”

Tildie was sleeping soundly. A simple enough activity for normal people, which Tildie now blessedly was.

A far more abnormal individual loomed over her, filled with fury, watching her from inside the observation room that oversaw the entirety of her world. His head was visibly scarred from being lit on fire by a dragon, and his right eye was swollen shut.

“The casual observer,” said Kavita Rao calmly, “would perhaps not consider me the unbalanced one.”

“You gave the X-Men the serum.”

“I gave an old colleague a sample.”

“Where is he?” Ord snarled. “I want to have a consult with him.”

“Long gone. Do you think I’d mention it to you if there were the slightest chance you could turn this into an excuse for a brawl? Besides,” and she shrugged, “they were bound to get hold of it sooner or later.”

Ord didn’t seem impressed by her logic. “You know what the X-Men are to me.”

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“Besides an excuse to go around behaving like a super villain? I saw your ‘diversion’ on the news. Mercenaries. Hired thugs in a room full of innocent people. It’s inexcusable.”

“You,” said Ord, stabbing a finger at her, “should show respect, Earthspawn. Without my technologies, you would have no cure.”

“The technologies are of your
people
. Your own contributions have been a great deal more…ambiguous.”