I know what she wants me to do. Since the Professor died last year, it’s been on her mind. When something’s on her mind, she doesn’t talk to me about it. She just watches, sometimes, when I’m talking with them, in Mexico or at Sanctuary or on the island. She gets that distant look, her eyes shaded the color of burnished bronze, and she says nothing.


He’s fine, really. His hands are a little thinner, and he doesn’t take a turn throwing me at Aikido anymore, but he looks good for 78. Health, Kurt says, is a blessing, and I think to myself that he must have been born with the constitution of an ox to have made it this far. Hell, to have made it to 10. The other 68 years are all borrowed time.

Jean-Paul isn’t jealous, though he doesn’t come with me much. He’s still not sure about the Brotherhood. And I belong to the Brotherhood before I belong to him.

Kurt is the only one who talks about the future, and he talks about it relentlessly. With children, you’re always looking ahead – to the next milestone, the next grade in school, the next achievement. Katie is almost ten. What will she be able to do? How will she change? Will that long brown pony tail turn white? Her tanned skin turn blue? She bounces around the deck at the house in Mexico, speculating about what cool power she’ll have, and her father and her grandparents watch hopefully.

“I’d like to shoot lightening bolts like Mom,” she says, perching on the rail.

Kurt smiles. “That is very effective,” he says.

“Teleporting is cool too,” she says. “I’m glad I don’t have to pick.” She grabs a handful of tortilla chips out of the bowl on the table to fuel her restless energy. Katie never stops moving. Lately, it’s graceful. Maybe she’s been taking dance lessons or something. She moves like Mystique.

He is thinking the same thing. Sitting on the arm of his deck chair, I lean down, so that only Erik hears. “That’s what we did everything for.”

For a moment, he rests his face against my arm.

And she is watching. I know what she’s thinking.

It is his dignity she will wish to protect, even in death. That he will not, at last, become the specimen he escaped being seventy years ago, taken apart to understand how his powers work.

Tombs can be opened, graves exhumed, even years after the fact. Hidden bodies can be found.

Fire is final.

When the time come, I will do as she wants.