Marvel Novels--X-Men Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Novels of the Marvel Universe by Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  A NOVEL OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE

  DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

  NOVELS OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE BY TITAN BOOKS

  Ant-Man: Natural Enemy by Jason Starr

  Avengers: Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Dan Abnett

  Avengers: Infinity by James A. Moore

  Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther? by Jesse J. Holland

  Captain Marvel: Liberation Run by Tess Sharpe

  Civil War by Stuart Moore

  Deadpool: Paws by Stefan Petrucha

  Spider-Man: Forever Young by Stefan Petrucha

  Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt by Neil Kleid

  Thanos: Death Sentence by Stuart Moore

  Venom: Lethal Protector by James R. Tuck

  X-Men: Days of Future Past by Alex Irvine

  X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga by Stuart Moore

  ALSO FROM TITAN AND TITAN BOOKS

  Marvel Contest of Champions: The Art of the Battlerealm by Paul Davies

  Marvel’s Spider-Man: The Art of the Game by Paul Davies

  Obsessed with Marvel by Peter Sanderson and Marc Sumerak

  Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover by David Liss

  Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – The Art of the Movie by Ramin Zahed

  The Art of Iron Man (10th Anniversary Edition) by John Rhett Thomas

  The Marvel Vault by Matthew K. Manning, Peter Sanderson, and Roy Thomas

  Ant-Man and the Wasp: The Official Movie Special

  Avengers: Endgame – The Official Movie Special

  Avengers: Infinity War – The Official Movie Special

  Black Panther: The Official Movie Companion

  Black Panther: The Official Movie Special

  Captain Marvel: The Official Movie Special

  Marvel Studios: The First Ten Years

  Spider-Man: Far From Home – The Official Movie Special (July 2019)

  Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse – The Official Movie Special

  Thor: Ragnarok – The Official Movie Special

  X-Men: Days of Future Past

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789092493

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789092509

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First Titan edition: June 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  © 2019 MARVEL

  Editor: Stuart Moore

  Cover and Interior art: John Byrne and Terry Austin

  VP Production & Special Projects: Jeff Youngquist

  Assistant Editor: Caitlin O’Connell

  Associate Editor: Sarah Brunstad

  Director, Licensed Publishing: Sven Larsen

  SVP Print, Sales & Marketing: David Gabriel

  Editor in Chief: C. B. Cebulski

  Chief Creative Officer: Joe Quesada

  President: Dan Buckley

  Executive Producer: Alan Fine

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  A NOVEL OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE

  DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

  ONE

  COLD wind blew from the north down the deserted stretch of Park Avenue, somewhere in the East Seventies. Kate Pryde remembered walking these streets with the X-Men as a girl—she’d been, what, thirteen when she first joined up?

  A lot had changed in the last twenty years. Everything had started to fall apart so fast after she joined the X-Men. The Brotherhood had assassinated Senator Kelly, Charles Xavier and Moira MacTaggert had died not long after, and Project Wideawake had quickly set off the long tragic slide to the present.

  The past was past. There was no changing it. She—like every other mutant still living under Sentinel rule—couldn’t afford to look back or look forward. All they could do was try to survive every day.

  But maybe, just maybe, they were about to change that. She and Ororo and Peter, Franklin and Rachel and Magneto.

  And Logan. It all depended on Logan.

  Kate picked up her pace. She’d hurried through her delivery, trying to get ahead of schedule so the Sentinels wouldn’t be suspicious of her. They could track the location of her inhibitor collar, so she didn’t dare take the shortest route between Hunter College and the bus stop at Fifth and 79th, where she could board and ride back to the South Bronx. The buses didn’t stop on every block like they used to, and most of the subways weren’t running at all. It was a death sentence for mutants to travel alone through the disused tunnels—or most other places in the city. They were safer in the camp.

  This particular neighborhood was hardcore Rogue territory. The Rogues were a criminal Mafia now, more or less, but they had their beginnings in the organized anti-mutant militias of the 2020s. Of all the places in the city for Logan to want to meet, he had to pick Rogue territory. It made a kind of sense, since the Sentinels didn’t even bother monitoring this part of the city. The Rogues did their work for them here. New York was honeycombed with underground warrens and tunnel complexes—it always had been. And now, with the Sentinels patrolling the surface, underground pathways were even more important. The Rogues controlled many of the subterranean crossroads in this part of Manhattan. They didn’t like the Sentinels, but they liked mutants even less.

  Kate was breathing hard, having run for the past half-mile or more to get ahead of schedule so her planned stop wouldn’t make her late. This part of Park Avenue had been the scene of a number of guerrilla battles, back when people were still resisting the Sentinels. Now it was strewn with wreckage and rubble. Parts of the sidewalk were gone—the gaps overlaid with sheets of plywood, corrugated roofing, anything people could find. Kate crept along the edge of one of those sheets, testing each step as she went. New York City, once one of humankind’s great achievements, was now an endless series of lethal booby traps—especially for a mutant alone.

  That was what Sentinel rule had done. Ruthlessly adhering to their mutant-control directive, they had crushed any and all resistance, destroying large swathes of cities to root out their enemies and leaving the rest lawless ruins. The majority of mutants were dead, and most of the rest had been relegated to the South Bronx internment camp Kate was returning to now. Only one, as far as she knew, was still at large, but how long would it be until the Sentinels rounded up Logan, too? There weren’t enough mutants left to make a difference to their own fate. At least that was how it seemed most of the time.

 
But maybe they were about to do something about that. She didn’t dare hope, exactly, but for the first time in years Kate Pryde could understand not being hopeless. Not everyone hated mutants. Not everyone believed in the Sentinels’ plan. Not everyone—

  Kate’s foot caught on a broken board, and she stumbled. The plywood sheet under her foot gave and tilted spilling her not into a hole, but down a steep ramp into darkness. She tumbled and landed hard, realizing that she’d walked into a trap. And in Rogue territory, that could mean only one thing:

  The three men looking at her from the other side of the room were Rogues, and she was in a lot of trouble.

  She was in some kind of living space, with filthy mattresses along the walls. The three men stood, looking at her with malevolent glee, around a tabletop covered with the remains of a thousand melted candles. The walls were lined with rusted and bent metal shelving units, some of which still had ancient canned goods on them. The toxins in those cans had probably mutated to the point where they could have joined the X-Men—had there still been X-Men to join.

  “Hey, look what we got here,” one of the men said. The Rogues were known to costume themselves in outrageous ways; this one wore a Mohawk, feathers in his hair, and face paint. He was flanked by a Mad Hatter and a bedraggled-looking frontier type, both with clubs. “Little mutie tripped and fell. What are you doing out of the camp, little mutie?”

  “Sentinel business,” she said, not that it would do any good.

  It was true. She was returning from a delivery. She had permission from the Sentinels.

  What she had delivered were samples of mutant tissue. Where she had delivered them to was an experimental facility built into what had once been a science lab at Hunter College. It was still a science lab, but the people working there now weren’t professors. They were handpicked by the Sentinels for two qualities: scientific expertise and implacable hostility toward mutants.

  The latter was a quality the Rogues shared. All three of them were looking at the inhibitor collar exposed when her coat had come open during her tumble down the ramp.

  “Inhibitor collar says you’re fair game, little mutie,” the Mad Hatter said. All three men stepped closer, closing the ring around Kate. “And even if you are on Sentinel business, we hate them almost as much as we hate you.”

  Mohawk took a step in front of the other two, leering at her. “Beg all you want, sweetheart. Scream all you want. Even if people hear, no one’s coming to help you.” He took another step. “You’re gonna be a long time dyin’, mutie.”

  Maybe so, Kate thought. But I’m not just going to let it happen.

  Expecting her to be cowed, Mohawk came a little too close. Kate—her long-ago Danger Room training still deep in her muscle memory—snapped a straight kick right up into his gut, aiming for the bundle of nerves at the solar plexus. She made solid contact; Mohawk whoofed out air and doubled over, dropping to his knees. A crash sounded from behind him, somewhere in the darkness beyond the reach of the candles on the table. Then a second sound, a meaty crunch she recognized all too well from the violence she’d witnessed in recent years. Were the other two fighting over something? Over her?

  Kate scrambled backward away from Mohawk. On his hands and knees, he growled, “Robbo, George—get her. Hold her. I’m gonna flay this mutie alive, and then the fun’s gonna start.”

  “No you’re not, bub,” came a new voice in the room, and from the darkness stepped Logan. He kicked aside the unconscious Mad Hatter’s top hat; it rolled around in a curve to bump up against the equally unconscious prospector. “You’re gonna step back from the lady or join your two pals here in the land of traumatic brain injuries.”

  Relief crashed over Kate when she saw Logan. He’d tracked her—he must have. But had the Sentinels tracked him? If he hadn’t used his claws, they wouldn’t have noticed any mutant activi—unless they’d developed some new surveillance tech. She didn’t know. They were always creating new ways to find and kill mutants…and mutant sympathizers, or anyone else they thought might oppose their plans.

  “You giving Big Alex orders? On his own turf? Is that what you’re doing, short stuff?” Mohawk drew a knife. “Cool. I like to earn my fun. You want the little mutie, old man, you come get her.”

  “If you say so,” Logan said. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He stepped forward to meet Big Alex.

  Kate’s heart jumped into her throat when she saw his hands drop to waist level and his fists turn over, just as he always had right before unsheathing his claws. No, Logan, she thought. Don’t do it. You’ll bring the Sentinels! But there was no snikt, and no claws. Old habits—in Logan’s case, nearly two hundred years old—were hard, but not impossible, to break.

  Big Alex took a swipe with his knife, all ferocity and no skill. Logan angled his body just enough for the blade’s edge to pass an inch from his chin. His weight shifted to one leg and the other came up in a sweeping kick that knocked the knife from Big Alex’s hand. The Rogue’s momentum was still carrying him forward, and Logan treated him to an elbow on his way by. The impact on the back of Big Alex’s head made Kate a little sick to her stomach. As Big Alex went down, Logan turned, dropped to drive a knee into the small of his back, and delivered two more punches whose impact Kate couldn’t see but could hear all too clearly.

  Then he stood up, rolled his shoulders to loosen them up, and turned around. “You okay, Kate?”

  She stood. “I’m fine. But calls this close, I can live without.”

  “I know what you mean.” He looked up the ramp and listened for a moment. “Come on. Let’s roll.”

  When they were out on the street again, Kate started to relax—at least as much as a mutant in New York, under Sentinel control, could ever relax. “So tell me, Colonel Logan. How’s life in the Canadian Resistance Army?”

  “Thrill a minute, darlin’,” Logan said. “The word from London is that everything’s on automatic. The minute the Sentinels start to move out of North America, every nuclear power is going to launch a full-scale strike.”

  “Then it’s up to the X-Men,” Kate said. It felt good to say it, as if the words could give the X-Men the power they’d once had.

  “As always, right?” Logan held out his hand, palm up, displaying a small machined piece of metal. It was a short tube with a set of coils around its middle and a disc attached to one side of the coils. “Here you go. Last bit of the Jammer. The FCA eggheads made it out of an alloy that shouldn’t show up on Sentinel scanners. You oughta be able to walk right into the camp with it.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Sure is,” Logan agreed. “Phase Two begins at midnight sharp. You’ll see the sign I left. Be ready.”

  “We will.” She paused, not quite ready to leave him yet. Seeing a free mutant was wonderful, inspiring even, but knowing she would soon be walking back through the gates of the camp made Kate want to run away. Maybe to Canada. But she couldn’t leave her friends. As she had said, it was up to the X-Men.

  “You think this will work?” she asked, just to keep the conversation going a little longer.

  “It better,” Logan said. “There’re a thousand warheads pointed at us, and some itchy trigger fingers on their buttons. The second Europe thinks the Sentinels are moving out past North America, we’re gonna be so much ash up in the jetstream.”

  Something about this image struck Kate. It reminded her of her life before the inhibitor collar, when she had been able to phase. The feeling of individual molecules passing through her body, the incredible rush of knowing you could do something that maybe only one other person in the world could do.

  A lot had changed.

  Maybe they could change it back.

  “Get on home, little Kit,” Logan said. “You don’t want the Sentinels looking at you too close.”

  Kate zipped up her camp jumpsuit over the Jammer component, tucked into a tear in the inside lining. “We won’t get another chance, will we?”

  “Nope. If this
doesn’t work, we’re all gonna die, kid. Simple as that.”

  She nodded.

  “That’s why it has to work.” Logan climbed up onto the street and reached down to give Kate a hand up. “Catch you later,” he said. “You know when and where.”

  Again she nodded. She was dying to talk about it, but they’d already said more than was prudent, given the possibility of Sentinel surveillance.

  Kate felt Logan’s eyes on her as she walked the last few blocks to the bus station across Fifth Avenue from Central Park, where the 79th Street transverse road disappeared into the forest. It had been a long time, more than a decade, since New York City had last maintained the park. The buses themselves hadn’t run on diesel or natural gas or electricity for about that long. Now they were pulled by teams of horses.

  She boarded a bus and instinctively looked for a spot away from other passengers. She was keenly aware not just of her inhibitor collar, but also of her camp coverall which bore a large black M on the back branding her as a mutant. The Sentinels and their human abettors had issued classifications as part of the Mutant Control Act of 2019. “H” meant regular “Human,” free of active mutations or genetic predisposition to them. This group didn’t have to dress or conduct themselves in any particular way, but many of them wore a block H on their clothing as a mark of pride and genetic purity. “A” stood for “Anomalous,” a category of people whose genomes contained the potential for active mutations. As could not breed and were required to display their letter.

  And then there was “M.” The only time an M was seen in the general populace was when the Sentinels sent one on a specific errand, as they had Kate. She heard the remarks as she boarded; she found no seat because everyone on the bus, H and A alike, spread out to prevent her from sitting nearby. This was partly human cruelty, but it was also a protective act. The Sentinels monitored interactions between mutants and other people, and Sentinel suspicion was something to be avoided at all costs.

  So Kate stood watching the city go by at a horse’s walking pace, taking care to avoid eye contact with her fellow passengers. Attacks on mutants outside the camp were rare, but only because it was highly unusual for a mutant to be granted the privilege of exiting the base. Kate held that privilege dear, both because it was necessary to the plan and because it gave her a chance to see what was becoming of the United States of America. On the other hand, if that plan worked, she would never have need of her exit privileges again.