Sanctuary (3 page)

"Look, it may look all hunky dory down there, but there are fires burning, so obviously not everyone is meekly cooperating with this mutant terrorist's orders. I mean, the guy stole a city. We've got to cover it," she decided, and turned to Billy, the pilot.

"We go in," she ordered, and Billy nodded in response.

Immediately, the helicopter lurched as it rose quickly over the buildings. Seconds later, they were flying south over Manhattan's Upper West Side, trying to glimpse whatever activity might be taking place in the great steel canyons below. There were people milling about, but from what Trish could see, very little by way of chaos. It certainly wasn't any riot, or mass destruction.

As they approached the south end of Central Park, they saw the fire at the park's southeast corner. She was going to instruct Billy to head for it, but he was already maneuvering them in that direction.

"Ya gotta be kiddin' me," Kevin hissed, then uttered a small, incredulous laugh.

"What is it?" Trish asked, trying to figure out what it was that was burning.

"F.A.O. Schwartz," he responded, the disbelief evident in his voice. "Who the hell would want to burn down a toy store?"

"This is it," Trish said. "Billy, set it down in the park, over the skating rink."

"Set it down?"

"We're not going to get a story from up here, and the park's the only open space you're going to find," she reasoned. "Set it down and we'll find out what's happening here."

Billy shrugged, and Trish wished she could tell him how strongly she shared his reluctance. She was afraid. Not only of Magneto and the Acolytes and the Sentinels, but afraid of anarchy. If Magneto was truly in complete control, they might actually be safer than if there were resistance. And after all, this was New York City. Chances were pretty good that there would be heavy resistance, much of it armed.

Then there were the apathetic vultures who would use any situation to gain something, to pick off the corpse of a barely dead America. Trish figured that, somehow, looters and anarchists were responsible for the fire at F.A.O. Schwartz, and she wished she were far away from Manhattan. But she wasn't. if there was danger, that was part of the job. The only way to face it, she decided, was to wade right in.

She only hoped she wasn't going to get herself and her crew killed in the meantime.

• • •

The crowd in Washington Square Park was surprisingly orderly. A man dressed in preacher's garb addressed the people from atop a park bench not far from the park's familiar arch.

"Brother and sister humans, flee if you must," the man said with impassioned cadence. "But before you do, just think! Remember how the city was run when traditional bureaucracy was in charge! Were your needs attended to then? No!

"Perhaps the mutants are the next step in human evolution. If so, it is only right that they should rule. But even if they aren't, we're certain to get better treatment at their hands than at those or our previous leaders, whose only concerns were for their own pocketbooks, rather than their people's welfare.

"Go, if you must!" the preacher yelled, waving his hands in a grand gesture of suffering. "But if we stay, we become citizens of the most powerful sovereign state in the world!"

The preacher's audience mumbled against themselves, but there were none of the catcalls such an address normally drew. Amelia Voght was amazed. As one of Magneto's inner circle of Acolytes, perhaps the closest to a confidante the new emperor of Manhattan had, even she had not expected such a reaction.

Certainly, there had been those who resisted. hundreds of thousands, in fact. Most were in the midst of an orderly exodus from the city, across bridges and through tunnels, shepherded by Magneto's fleet of Sentinels. Still, there had been far more incidents of looting, pillaging, mass destruction, and violence than Magneto would have liked. But Voght thought it was going remarkably well.

There had been very few individuals willing to stand up to him. Certainly the mayor and the police commissioner had a problem, but Magneto had ordered Amelia to simply teleport them to New Jersey, and that's what she had done. She cherished the look on the mayor's face as he began to dematerialize.

It seemed that most New Yorkers were either so afraid they would not leave their homes, or else they simply didn't care. Magneto had guaranteed that, despite the changeover in sovereignty, business would continue to function. People would still have jobs and income, and be able to travel to the mainland when absolutely necessary. For a lot of humans, that was apparently all the reassurance they needed.

Amelia had lived in Manhattan for a time, and she though she could see a pattern in who stayed and who went. The majority of the city's transplants were moving out. But native New Yorkers, and the very wealthy, weren't going anywhere. Both groups thought of the island as "their" city. Which worked fine for Magneto's purposes. Not only had he created a sovereign state from nothing, but it had come complete with subjects.

Magneto had had them working all night. It was nearly dawn now, and things were starting to calm down. There had been an armed insurrection on the Upper West Side, and a spate of looting in the fashion and diamond districts, but the Acolytes had ended them all promptly.

Amelia was certain things would get a bit hairier once the mutants began to show up. Magneto had issued an open invitation. That meant that the immigrants to Manhattan would include mutants who truly needed a place to go, but also every lowlife loser and scum looking for a way to escape authorities. Not to mention a place where they were guaranteed the status of feudal lords.

Things may have been going smoothly, but the plan definitely had its drawbacks. Still, when it came down to it, Amelia had to admit Magneto had scored a huge victory for mutantkind. There had been a time, in her younger days, when Amelia Voght took Charles Xavier as her lover. Xavier was the founder of the X-Men. he was both Magneto's oldest friend and his greatest enemy. The two men were on opposite sides of a war with the same goal: peace. Magneto felt that it could only be achieved if mutants ruled humanity. Xavier felt the two human races could live in harmony.

Even though she long ago left her feelings for Xavier behind, and despite that she had become on of Magneto's Acolytes, Amelia had often wondered if either man was correct. Now, it seemed, the truth had come to light. Magneto was right all alone. He'd won.

A low buzz like the distant shaking of a tambourine filled her ears, and Amelia looked over her left shoulder to see the shimmering holographic image of Scanner, a fellow Acolyte, appear behind her. Humans spread out, in fear of some attack, but Amelia raised her arms to calm them.

"Please, citizens, relax. You have nothing to fear," she said. "I am Voght, and this is Scanner. We are Acolytes of Magneto. Go about your business and you will not be harmed."

Amelia did not fail to register the terror that filled so many of the faces around her, but the humans did as they were instructed. For the majority of them, that was how it had always been. They merely answered to a different authority now.

"Scanner," she snapped. "You frightened these people. What do you want?"

"My apologies, Amelia," Scanner's image responded. "There is a disturbance on the Fifth Avenue at Central Park South. Lord Magneto has asked that you meet Senyaka there and attend to it."

"It will be done," Amelia responded formally.

As Scanner's image disappeared, leaving bright spots on her retina, Amelia sighed. Perhaps, she mused, she had been hasty in her optimism. After all, it would take quite some time to convince hardened criminals and opinionated cynics alike that there was no place in the new world for disobedience. Magneto's word was law, and the Acolytes were his punishing hand.

In a brilliant flash, Amelia disappeared from Washington Square. Her teleportation was the duration of an eyeblink, and when it was through she was standing on Fifth Avenue in front of the Trump Towers, just south of Central Park.

Smoke and flames shot high into the sky up ahead. The looters were everywhere. And why not? Fifth Avenue had all the most expensive stores, the best that Manhattan had to offer. Jewelry, fashion, furs. Yet, as Amelia walked further north, she realized what was burning. A toy store. Who, she wondered, would want to burn a toy store?

A large crowd of humans had gathered in front of the burning store, and in the flickering firelight, even from two blocks away, she could see the fervor on their faces. Several of them were armed, and some actually had torches! Amelia almost laughed, thinking about the terrified villagers in the first
Frankenstein
movie.

The she saw Senyaka. Her fellow Acolyte was doing his best to keep the crowd at bay, cracking his psionic energy whip at them like a lion tamer. But he wouldn't be able to keep it up for long. Not against those numbers. Not if bullets started to fly.

"This is our city, mutie!" one man yelled, as he tossed an orange metal mesh city trash can in Senyaka's direction.

"We don't want you here, mutant scum!" another man shouted. "Your kind got no place in a human city. An' we ain't takin' orders from your murderin' boss, Magneto, neither!"

The man, a brawny thug with too much belly and not enough brains, was about to launch into a further tirade when Senyaka stepped forward and lashed his whip around the man's throat.

"Back, human dog!" Senyaka screamed, even as the man choked and tried to pull the whip from his searing flesh. The man fell to the ground, and though they could have pressed an attack then, the crowd was too appalled by the agony of their comrade to move. In seconds, the man was dead.

Amelia had never been taken by the near-religious fervor with which the other Acolytes followed Magneto. And so she could not withhold a shudder as the man expired. Needless death had always disturbed her.

"You flatscans had better learn to live under mutant rule, or you will die under it!" Senyaka declared, and lifted his whip as an invitation to further challenge.

It should have ended there, with Amelia just to one side of the crowd, unobtrusive in the night. But this was New York, a city whose people were known around the world for their hostility. Amelia had never believed it was worse in that respect than any other city, but there was no questioning the fury of the gathered crowd. The taunts had ended. In angry silence, they advanced upon Senyaka. Then, finally, one young woman snarled, "C'mon, guys, he can't take us all."

Even as the crowd surged forward, Amelia 'ported the few feet to Senyaka's side.

"Enough!" she commanded, and her sudden appearance was enough to startle the crowd to a momentary stop.

"Another mutie!" someone yelled.

"So? We can take her down, too! We gotta take 'em all down!"

"Your arrival is well timed, Amelia," Senyaka said, his expression hidden behind the linen cowl that covered his face. Still, she thought he meant it. Unusual, for one so proud.

"I try," she said quietly, then turned to the crowd. "Apparently, many of you have failed to grasp your new situation as citizens of the new sovereign state of Manhattan," she announced. "Perhaps you feel that because the Sentinels patrol the shores of this island, and Magneto can only be in one place at a time, that you are still free to do as you please.

"You are wrong."

"Mutie freak!" a man screamed, then jumped into a crouch, pistol leveled at Amelia and Senyaka.

Before either of them could move, he squeezed off several rounds. Her reaction was immediate and instinctive, self-preservation skills she had honed over years as the object of humanity's hatred. Without conscious thought, Amelia teleported the bullets away, then brough them back headed in the opposite direction. The gunman did a little three-step jig as his own bullets caught him in the chest and abdomen.

The crowd gasped in horror and astonishment, and drew more tightly together, an unconscious defense mechanism.

"You're nothing but monsters!" the same young woman shouted. "This is our city, and we don't want your kind here."

"Your city, is it?" Amelia said acidly. "It's so nice to see how well you take care of what is yours."

With the fire, and the looting, all around them, Amelia was still uncertain if the people would understand the irony of the situation. She did not regret the death of the gunman. That, after all, had been self defense. But if they did not disperse immediately, she knew she would have to do something that she would regret.

"Return to your homes," Amelia said loudly. "If you wish to leave, pack your things and go. There is still time. If you want to stay, you must live by Magneto's law. For as of now, there is no other."

"We're not going anywhere, bitch," the young woman said, then stepped to the fore of the crowd and produced a long knife from within the folders of her knee length leather jacket.

"That will do," Amelia said, exasperate. They could not play at this all night. She had no choice.

Amelia lifted her right hand and made a gesture which helped focus her mind. The young woman dematerialized instantly, her knife clattering to the pavement. Someone in the crowd whispered a prayer.

"Bring her back, mutie," a wiry dark-skinned man said ominously. "Bring her back or you're dead."

"If you could have killed me," Amelia responded. "I'm quite sure you would have done so already. But, you wish me to bring back the shrill harpy who was standing here threatening me with a blade? Indeed, if that is your wish, I will be happy to oblige.

"Look up, if you will," Amelia said, and pointed to a spot in the sky.

At first, though she knew precisely what she was doing, even Amelia could not see through the blanket of darkness that hung over the city. Then the woman started screaming, several hundred feet above them. It was easy to spot her after that, plummeting through the air, firelight flickering of her black leather jacket, and her pale terrified face. She screamed all the way down, and when she struck the pavement, nobody looked. Not even Senyaka.

But Amelia watched. it was her doing. Her responsibility. She would have to live with what she had done. Though she knew that her cause was just, and that this one death might save dozens of other lives, it would haunt her. Killing always did.