What If . . . Loki Was Worthy?
What If . . . Wanda Maximo and Peter Parker Were Siblings?
What If . . . Marc Spector Was Host to Venom?
BY REBECCA PODOS
The Mystery of Hollow Places Like Water
The Wise and the Wicked From Dust, A Flame
Furious
Homegrown Magic
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To Books— the person, the friend, the legend, the fact-checker. Thank you for everything.
It isn’t the kind of flame that consumes flesh. Not yet. But she can feel it everywhere at once just the same. In fact, she can feel everything, from the birth of a star in some distant galaxy to the rapidly cooling dead body at her feet. She feels the sufferings and the secrets and the hopes of each soul that ever was, or is, or might someday be. All of it is contained within the fragile, inadequate shell of her.
This fire will devour her. Probably, she will deserve it.
The Phoenix Force was surely meant for a champion like Jean Grey to wield. Who else could possibly withstand it? It is power, raw and infinite, terrible and glorious. The power to burn a world, a dozen worlds, one thousand. To destroy and create and unmake. To collapse matter and defy time itself. Abilities like these would be an unfathomable burden on even the greatest of heroes.
And Betsy Braddock was right: Kitty was never a hero.
WELCOME TO THE LAST MOMENTS OF A YOUNG WOMAN’S LIFE. HER name is Jean Grey.
Breathless with fear on the flight deck of the Starcore One, she stares through the shuttle’s windshield. The solar flare ahead of them—a massive arc of electromagnetic radiation bursting from the sun’s atmosphere—makes for an impossible obstacle in their path back to Earth. Impossible for anyone but Jean . . . or so she promised her team. Promised that she alone could save them all and survive. Even in his steel-like Colossus form, Peter couldn’t have withstood the onslaught of radiation for this long. Regardless, he couldn’t have piloted the shuttle. And her teammates who know how to fly would’ve died quickly, horribly. Scott would have died. But not Jean. By sifting through the memories of Dr. Corbeau—the shuttle’s creator—she made herself a capable enough pilot to take the yoke and steer the damaged shuttle through the flare without the help of their malfunctioning flight control computer. Blocking the worst of the rays with her telekinetic powers, she would be able to keep herself alive. She swore this to the X-Men before they locked themselves safely (Lord, let them be safe) in the Starcore One’s shielded life-cell. She told them there was hope.
They saw through her, of course, none more than Scott. That man could have found his way to her in every world with his eyes
closed. Certainly, he could see her terror in their last moments together.
He’s just now waking up from her psychic blow, held back by Kurt and Peter, pleading to be let out of the cell to . . . what? To save Jean? It’s too late for that. He’d only doom the rest of their friends, who have no pressure suits to protect them. Kurt and Peter understand this, and Professor X, Ororo, Sean, Logan, and Dr. Corbeau as well. Thankfully, Scott’s giving in at last, falling apart. Jean can sense his pain from the flight deck and squeezes her own eyes shut against it, but she won’t let herself follow him. She can’t let herself fall apart so close to the end.
Someday he’ll understand that it had to be this way. That it was Jean, or it was all of them. Someday he won’t hate her for spending the last words they’ll ever say to each other on a lie as obvious as: “I’ll be all right.”
The spasming shuttle threatens to rattle her bones from her body as it plunges toward home, but they’re almost through, only twenty minutes from Earth’s atmosphere. The radiation sensors are at the top of their scales, and her powers are at their limits, a scream trapped behind her gritted teeth. But she can last, she can last, she can—
As if it were the shuttle’s battered windshield, her telekinetic shield cracks under the bombardment of the radiation. Then it shatters, and Jean Grey’s body begins unraveling too quickly for her mind to comprehend. SCOTT, she screams without words as her pale skin withers, her green eyes cloud over with cataracts, her blood boils. After all this, she won’t make it to reentry. None of them will. Dear Lord, hear my prayer and help me!
Jean Grey is dying.
She can tell because there’s light everywhere, not in the stars beyond the glass but behind her, all around her, never mind that she’s gone blind.
And then . . .
Be not afraid. A voice plays like music in her mind even as Jean is beyond hearing.
The pain ends.
Everything is ending.
But something is with her now; a force lifting and holding the diminished form that Scott—the love of her life—would no longer recognize. Perhaps someone has heard her desperate prayer.
Who . . . what are you? Jean thinks, because she can no longer speak.
The sum and substance of life and hope and dreams, the voice answers. All that is, is known to me. I have known you, Jean Grey, from the moment of your conception, as I have known the universe. Out of the infinite whiteness, a figure begins to materialize; not a body, but the idea of a shape of a body, with multicolored light like an aura around it. Holding both arms out to her, it says, You cried out for aid. I heard. I came.
This is crazy. I’m crazy.
No more than any finite being confronted with the infinite. Your form, child, is so fragile. How can you possibly endure?
“I must,” she insists, words somehow finding their way out of her ruined throat.
To save the X-Men, the entity guesses. Its shape is clearer now, the idea crystallizing into execution. And most especially . . . Scott.
Then he’s with her in the whiteness, too. Her heart could shatter at the sight of him, and at the thought of all that almost was and never will be. Though she knows he’s only a memory dredged from her mind—the real Scott Summers would be beyond her reach even if her fingertips weren’t whittled down to bones—it’s good to see him one last time.
But she has to let him go now.
“What do you want?” Jean demands of the figure. You called, child of man. And I, mother of stars, answered. It is for you to name your heart’s desire.
She wishes she could see her friends one last time, too.
She wishes she could have kissed Scott goodbye. No, she wishes . . .
Jean forces herself to look the entity in the face, almost fully realized now. The halo of bright light outlines a body she knows as well as her own, because it is her own (or was, before she became a wreckage of herself). “To save the X-Men, I’d dance with the devil himself,” she grits out through crumbling teeth. “And . . . I want to live.”
All things are possible, child. The entity offers its hands made of light.
After a moment’s pause, Jean takes them, closing her eyes as the light flares and spreads to cocoon her desiccated body.
Something is beginning.
To anyone watching when the Starcore One slams down onto the runway at JFK, crashes through the barrier, and plunges into the waters of Jamaica Bay, it would seem impossible that anyone aboard could have survived. But the X-Men have always been notoriously hard to kill.
One by one they break the surface, gasping for air as they bob amid broken pieces of the shuttle like flotsam themselves.
“Cyclops! I was the last one out,” cries Peter, vulnerable for the moment in his human form.
“Then we are all safe,” says Ororo, the floating strands of her bone-white hair a stark contrast to the oil-slicked waters of the bay.
It isn’t true, though. Jean is down there somewhere, and Scott won’t be kept from her. “Get in my way this time, and I’ll kill you!” he growls as Kurt fights to stop him from diving down.
Scott will drown himself searching for what precious little remains of Jean Grey before he lets her go.
But as he tries to thrash himself free, something kindles below them, like coals glowing at the bottom of the bay where the wreckage of the shuttle now rests. The choppy surface grows more agitated still, steam rising to merge with the lingering, yellow-tinged smoke from their crash. It’s the only warning they get before great plumes of water shoot skyward, and Jean Grey explodes from the depths.
“HEAR ME, X-MEN,” she roars. “No longer am I the woman you knew.” Clothed in a green-and-gold suit they’ve never seen, fists raised and flame-red hair wild, it’s a claim they cannot help but believe. “I am fire, and life incarnate. Now and forever, I am the Phoenix!”
SUNRISE FINDS THEM ON CENTRAL AVENUE IN DEERFIELD, IN FRONT
of Kitty Pryde’s house. Though it certainly hasn’t changed in the past twenty-four hours—the same white picket fence, same neat walkway, same egg-yolk-yellow front door—it looks strange to her now. That’s because Kitty has changed. She’s no longer the thirteen-and-a-half-year-old who trudged home from ballet class yesterday with a skull-splitting headache and her parents’ impending divorce stuck like a splinter in her heart.
She’s a mutant. Just like the X-Men. Just like that horrible woman, Emma Frost, who called herself the White Queen.
According to Professor X, Emma Frost and her minions only managed to find Kitty because he and the X-Men tracked her down first. Emma had been spying on the professor, planning to peel away the young mutants he sought to protect, and recruit them instead for the Hellfire Club: a shadowy group of bigwigs scrambling for wealth and power in the world, and more than willing to use their mutant powers to get it. She’d beaten the professor and his students to Kitty’s house by mere moments, then laid a trap to wipe out the X-Men once and for all, thus eliminating the Hellfire Club’s competition. It was beginner’s luck that Kitty managed to sneak away and contact Jean Grey, who’d been on a mission elsewhere with the remainder of the team.
She supposes if the X-Men hadn’t come, she’d be asleep in her bedroom right now.
But then she’d be alone. And that sounds scarier than the night’s dangerous ordeal. Instead, she’s surrounded by people who see her for who she is, and accept all of her. People who risked their lives to protect her, and in turn, Kitty risked her life to save them from the White Queen, discovering that she was brave and capable in the process. Kitty-of-yesterday couldn’t have imagined a feeling like that, a friendship like that.
The lace curtains in the living room window twitch to the side, seconds before the front door bursts open and her parents come running across the lawn, still in yesterday’s clothing.
“Kitty!” her father bellows.
“Oh, baby, we were so worried!” her mother cries. “You were gone all night . . . We didn’t know what had happened. We called the police. Where were you?”
“Hi, Dad. Hi, Mom,” she mutters. Inadequate, and she knows it. Her mother collapses as she reaches Kitty, kneeling in the dewglazed grass to fling her arms around Kitty’s waist. Her tears soak into the clean shirt Ororo lent Kitty so she wouldn’t turn up on her doorstep in a soot-and-bloodstained top.
“Good morning, Mr. Pryde—” begins Professor X.
“Shove it, mister!” her father cuts in. “What have you been doing with my daughter? She goes off with your students and disappears—you disappear. The malt shop was burned to the ground! We thought she’d been killed till the police identified the bodies!”
Honestly, this is getting out of hand. But how can Kitty even begin to explain herself?
When her parents last saw her, she was headed out for an ice cream soda with student representatives from Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, leaving them to speak privately with the professor. They claimed they were considering boarding schools—Ms. Frost’s Massachusetts Academy among them—for the sake of Kitty’s education. It’s true that she’s top of her class at Deerfield Middle. But
Kitty guessed their true purpose weeks ago, and it isn’t because of her bright future. Her parents only want to shuffle her out of the way while they and their lawyers unravel their life together without distraction, dividing up their furniture, their dishes, their daughter. Then the White Queen had to go and blow up the malt shop. Did her parents hear the blast from eight blocks away? Did they spend the night on the living room couch together, closer than they’d been in years, eyes glued to the local news while calling anybody they could think of to try to find her?
This is hopeless.
They’ll never let her leave now, no matter how badly they wanted her out of the way yesterday. She’ll go back to Deerfield Middle, to ballet class, to synagogue, back to her same old life behind the eggyolk-yellow door. Only she won’t be the same. That moment yesterday afternoon when her powers first manifested—when she slipped right through her bed to find herself on the living room floor below, then lied to her parents to cover up what she couldn’t make sense of—that was when everything changed forever, though she didn’t know it yet. Maybe she hasn’t got blue fur and a tail like Nightcrawler, an impossible mutation to hide. But she’ll forever be terrified of being discovered. Kitty’s heard of anti-mutant groups, just as she’s heard of the X-Men. People who insist that the very existence of mutants means the downfall of humankind. Who go on television to shout about stopping mutants at any cost, squashing them out before they can overtake Homo sapiens. They held a march in Chicago last summer; Kitty saw it on the news.
Do her friends hate mutants? She never thought to ask. What about her teachers? What would those people who marched in black T-shirts with white crosses do to her if they found out, and would her parents protect her?
Kitty thinks so, but she can’t be sure. Not sure enough to tell them who she really is.
“I don’t know what your game is,” her dad is bellowing, redfaced, jabbing a finger at the professor. “But . . . it’s good to see you again!”
The professor blinks up in surprise while her father beams back down at him, clasping his hand to shake it.
What’s going on?
Her mother climbs calmly to her feet, tears glittering and forgotten on her cheeks. “Let’s get your suitcases out of the attic, hmm, Kitty? We’ll pack you up together. I’ll sure miss my little girl, but we just know you’re going to shine at that school.” She drapes an arm around Kitty’s shoulders to lead her inside while Dad invites them all in for celebratory brunch.
Looking back over her shoulder, she scans the faces of her new friends: stunning Ororo, Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus (he’s so handsome, she can feel herself blushing to the tips of her ears), the professor. Among them all, only Jean Grey seems unfazed by her father’s sudden change of heart.
A change of mind, more like.
Well, Kitty will take the win. All that matters is that in the very moment Kitty’s life was falling apart, the X-Men have saved her again by offering her a new one. A new home, and a new family, even. It feels too good to be true, but with everything the X-Men are capable of—everything that she’s now capable of—Kitty Pryde will choose to believe in the unbelievable.
“WELCOME TO THE RED KEEP.” KITTY FLINGS HER ARMS WIDE AS SHE leads Rachel Summers and Betsy Braddock into the bedroom of her stronghold in Krakoa’s Hellfire Bay. With flowering vines climbing its stone walls, twined around the posts of her canopy bed, and pressed against the glass ceiling, the sunlit chamber is unlike any place on Earth. That’s because, like everything here, it was
created by Krakoa. A gift from a sentient island. Funny, considering that she and the island got off to such a rough start.
When Professor X first remade Krakoa into a sovereign nationstate for mutantkind, the X-Men planted Gateways across the planet to act as portals, accessible by all mutants. Or nearly all; Kitty was left off the guest list. A quirk of her powers, as best she can guess. Her ability to phase through solid matter somehow kept her from passing through the Gateways like the rest of them. Left to make her own way to the island, she didn’t take it well. She can admit that now. Between stealing a stranger’s boat to sail to the island and drinking half of the Canadian Club whiskey Logan requested from the mainland along the way, her bottom was starting to look pretty rocky. It was Emma Frost of all people who finally snapped her out of it, and that’s funny, too, since she and Kitty got off to a rough start of their own. But the White Queen offered Kitty a job, and a direction when she needed one most. Kitty would serve as the Red Queen of the Hellfire Club—their once-nemesis, now turned ally in the mutant cause—as well as captaining the Hellfire Trading Company’s massive ship. Tasked with sailing the globe in search of mutants who never made it to Krakoa, whether because of kleptocratic rulers or militarized governments, gene cults or anti-mutant organizations, she’s discovered her purpose again.
Just as the X-Men once did for her, she finds her people and brings them home.
Rachel crosses the bedroom to step out onto the balcony, nearly level with the pristine blue waters of the bay. “Love your view!” They both watch as, in the distance, the purple speck of Lockheed dives down to skim the surface of the waves, then rises again with a flash of silver, some fish clamped between his jaws. Rachel turns back to beam at Kitty, green eyes glittering in the reflected sunlight. She looks so much like her mother that Kitty has to catch her breath, though Rachel is a woman all her own, with a style all her own. She’s chopped her red hair into a pixie cut and wears a tailored red jumpsuit and jacket far cooler than the uniforms of their
childhood. She’s a little older now than Jean Grey was when Kitty first met the X-Men. Kitty had no clue at the time that Jean would soon prove to be the most powerful mutant on the planet. On any planet, possibly. Or that someday, her almost equally powerful daughter would become Kitty’s classmate at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, then her roommate, and then her best friend in the world.
Betsy joins her girlfriend on the balcony, where the sea breeze ripples her violet hair and the cape of the white, red, and blue uniform she wears as Captain Britain. Their days together on the X-Women—back when Kitty still went by Shadowcat, Betsy by Psylocke, and Rachel by Marvel Girl—were long ago now, and seem even longer. Yet time and again and despite death itself, they always find a way back to one another.
It feels a little like a miracle.
Betsy presses a kiss to the nape of Rachel’s neck above her jacket collar, and the softness of it would be unbearable if Kitty didn’t love them both so much. Then Betsy steps back into the bedroom. “I adore your . . . barrel full of swords.”
Kitty pats the full-sized cannon in the corner. “It’s a pirate’s life for me, all right.” Combined with the ship’s wheel mounted above the steamer trunk that holds her wardrobe and a framed Jolly Roger on the wall, it is a bit much. But no more than her own uniform: a red captain’s frock coat with gold-tasseled epaulets, sailor’s boots, and a cutlass strapped to her belt. She’s come a long way since roller skates and kitchen gloves.
“What do you think, Rach?” Betsy asks. “Should we abandon Braddock Isle and move the whole family to Krakoa? Plant a flower and see if the island grows us a nice little bungalow?”
Rachel laughs, leaning over the railing. “I’d love to see Brian’s face when you suggest that.”
Kitty turns three rocks glasses upright atop the barrel that serves as a makeshift bar cart. “How are things at the family manor?”
“Well enough. We moved the manor off the mainland just in
time, I swear—anti-mutant sentiment in Britain is running high these days, as you’re aware, no doubt.”
“And everywhere else.” Kitty frowns, pouring three generous servings of whiskey from her decanter. “You know it’s slim pickings in Krakoa when one of your few diplomatic allies is Latveria.”
“Speaking of Doom, his ex-lover’s been quite the thorn in my side lately. It turns out she’s behind the Furies who’ve been hunting down the Captain Britain Corpsmen. She meant to replace me with a corrupted captain who’d be more . . . amenable to her commands. Luckily, Morgan le Fay was no match for Rachel.” Betsy watches her girlfriend approach them with full-moon eyes.
Kitty hands them each a glass. “You two have been up to a lot while I’ve been maraudering.”
“Oh, no more than the usual.” Rachel shrugs. “Traveling the Multiverse by day, spooning by night.”
“Enough about us, though. We’re here to toast you.” Betsy raises her glass. “To the Red Queen!”
Rachel leans an elbow on Betsy’s shoulder. They’re so casual in their closeness that Kitty can tell they’d never stop touching by choice. “To the Red Queen.”
Kitty hoists her own glass, accepting this with a smile.
“Is this also a present from Krakoa?” Betsy asks after a sip. “I know it’s not Wolverine’s.”
“From Emma, actually.”
“You and Emma seem to have gotten close,” Rachel observes, more diplomatically than Kitty would have thought her capable. There never was any love lost between Rachel Summers and the woman her father was dating in place of her then-dead mother when Rachel first came to this world. Or rather, the variant of Rachel’s father and mother who exist in this world.
Complicated would be an understatement.
“We . . . understand each other,” Kitty replies carefully, matching her tone.
“Well, this is spectacular. The White Queen has taste. Another
of these”—Betsy waggles her glass in the air—“and Rach may finally get her wish. She’s been wanting to replay the timeline where I was a princess and she, my companion.”
“Betsy . . .” Rachel groans.
“Gross,” Kitty says cheerfully.
Her own love life may be dead as disco, but it’s impossible to feel bitter about it in her friends’ presence. And it’s impossible to feel alone on the island—even if it took what felt like a lifetime to get here—where she’s surrounded by the people who love her, the family that raised her. The X-Men.
Where—and who—would she possibly be right now without them?
VICTOR VON DOOM HAS COME HOME, IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING.
This isn’t the Latveria of his birth, which he left behind countless worlds ago. But some things remain constant across the Multiverse. The smell of the woods where he spent his childhood running wild: sharp and spicy pine, and damp earth after a welcome summertime rain, and the subtler traces of things both rotting and alive. The sounds of birdcalls and rustling boughs, all dampened by the thick layer of pine straw that carpets the forest floor. And the glorious sight, when he staggers past the tree line, of Castle Doom, a fortress perched upon a mountaintop. Once the seat of power for the Sabbat lineage in the capital city formerly known as Hassenstadt, it will have belonged to the Doom of this world since he overthrew its previous ruler, Baron Sabbat—the man responsible for the death and disassembly of Doom’s family, who had remade himself as King of Latveria. But king or baron, it mattered little in the end.
He died with Doom’s iron hands around his throat all the same. Doom stops a moment to brace himself against a tree trunk at the forest’s edge, taking inventory of himself while his ragged breath whistles out through his mask’s mouth plate. The mask— forged to withstand fire and acid and all manner of attacks—has nevertheless been degraded, melted away around the eyes to reveal burned flesh beneath. Scraps of the prize he sought in the last
world remain embedded like shrapnel in the titanium alloy of his armor. One of his gauntlets is crushed beyond use, and the combination of an adamantium crescent dart still piercing his chest through his breastplate, as well as the lingering poison in his system, has left him slowed and aching. Wrapping his intact gauntlet around the moon-shaped dart, he grits his teeth and rips it free with a spatter of dark blood. He throws it to the forest floor, sickened more by self-disgust than by the taint of poison. He failed to obtain the powers that would allow him to mold any reality into a shape of his choosing, powers he’s finally determined constitute the essence for which he’s been searching the Multiverse: nexus beings. And he’s been weakened in the bargain.
Yet Victor von Doom learns from his mistakes.
Any common scientist knows that in the acknowledgment and examination of one’s errors lies opportunity. And Doom is no common scientist. He is master of all—of the domains of both science and magic; the natural forces that drive the steady heartbeat of the world, and the supernatural forces capable of disrupting it. Hasn’t he conquered space and time themselves? With his stolen shard of the M’Kraan Crystal, he can access the nebulous corridors between realities, a thing precious few have managed. Failure has always been beneath him, but concession?
It’s his good fortune, then, that the Multiverse provides infinite chances to try again. To rise again.
Besides, those past worlds were nothing more than experiments. Each success or setback was merely a paving stone in the path that led him here, where he was always bound. Now he’s had enough of trifling with substandard outcasts and curiosities, none of whom would merit so much as a glance from him otherwise. This time, he is coming for Jean Grey, the greatest of all nexus beings in his estimation (and there is no keener estimation in the Multiverse than Doom’s). And this time, he will take the power he needs to seize reality by the throat until it, too, bows before Doom.
No one will deny him what’s his by right, not even the Multiverse itself.
Engaging the twin jetpacks mounted to his suit, he lifts off from the needle-strewn ground, rising up along the cliffside. If anyone is capable of breaching these castle walls by force or secrecy, it’s him, but that would be repeating past miscalculations. He has attempted in other worlds to manipulate his counterpart, to disastrous effect. What he requires now—besides the laboratories and resources to both repair and prepare himself—is an accomplice worthy of him. Doom touches down on the cobbled footbridge in front of the gatehouse and steps forward, tilting his ruined mask up to face the startled sentries on the battlements above. “I come bearing knowledge for the current master of Castle Doom,” he announces, his deep voice echoing off the roughly carved stones to be heard by all, “and great opportunity.”
AS THE STAR-SHAPED PORTAL CRACKLES CLOSED BEHIND HER AND the last world winks out, America Chavez stands on a street corner and contemplates this new world.
Coming out of a drugstore in front of her, an old white man in a white straw boater hat blinks at her sudden appearance, his mouth open wordlessly. He seems to be the only one who notices. A beautiful Persian woman with a cloud of brown curls practically floats by, grocery bags balanced on her shoulders, her marigoldorange kaftan streaming behind her. Sitting on milk crates outside of a place called Nick’s Luncheonette, a circle of young Black boys continue to trade baseball cards with one another. Spray-painted peace signs and slogans like FREE THE PANTHER 21 fade away on the brick façade behind them. The sultry air smells of onions and garlic from somebody’s kitchen, and cigar smoke, and everything that percolates in the dented metal trash can beside her. From the propped-open window of an apartment overhead, ranchera music drifts down.
She recognizes that voice, Juan Gabriel, crooning over the guitarrón and vihuela Mexicana, but not from the cosmic collection of Watcher’s memories to which she has a key, or is a key. Se Me Olvidó Otra Vez. It’s a memory that belongs to her. And this place—Washington Heights—she knows in her bones, if not this