X-Men: The Last Stand Read Free Page B

didn’t have one to offer, not that had any value. She suspected it was a question—a challenge—she’d hear often in the days ahead.
    She knew she’d attend his school. She’d learn from him all that he was prepared to teach—if only to be able to stand on her own two feet, free from
anyone’s
control.
     
     

     
     
    1995
     
     
    Father was at the bathroom door, knocking politely. Warren refused to listen.
    “Warren?” called Worthington Jr. Top tier of the Forbes 100, one of the few American billionaires who wasn’t head of a computer giant or a dot-com, one of those rarer still who’d taken the modest inheritance of his own father and built it into something of tangible and lasting value. “Son?” Pause, another knock. “Everything okay?” Another pause, another knock, voice creeping up a notch in the anxiety index. “What’s going on in here?”
    “Nothing, Dad,” called Worthington III, railing inside at the tremor in his voice. “Be right out!”
    He was twelve and had the features of an angel. Blond hair, face to die for, and a body of whipcord muscle, without a spare ounce; he was far stronger than you’d expect of a boy his age. He stood bare to the waist before the big mirror in his bathroom. In his left hand he held a boning knife, swiped from the kitchen just the other day, right after the cook had done the weekly sharpening. The blade was tungsten steel and sharper than a scalpel. There was blood on the blade, blood on the sink, blood on the floor. Warren knew he should have done this in the tub, where he could wash away all the evidence, but there was no view of the mirror from there and he had to be able to see what he was doing.
    Sweat coated his face, and he had to force himself to take deep, slow breaths in a vain attempt to calm his racing heart. His metabolism had always been hyper as far back as he could remember; he ate more at meals than most sumo wrestlers and had to struggle
not
to lose weight. Reactions were the same; that’s why he couldn’t play baseball anymore. Every at bat was an intentional walk, for his skill at making contact with the ball, if it was even marginally near the strike zone, was uncanny. Likewise his fielding. No matter how fast the play, for Warren everything happened in slow motion. And magnificent as his reflexes were, his eyesight eclipsed them. He drove his optometrist to distraction, because there wasn’t a test that could accurately measure his vision. He never told anyone of the test he’d tried on his own, slipping onto the open air observation deck of the World Trade Center and looking out towards Kennedy Airport, a dozen miles away. With the tourist binoculars, you could make out the planes taking off. Warren, with his naked eyes, could read the serial numbers on their fuselage. Looking across the East River towards the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, he could see the details of people’s faces and clothing as they strolled—he could even read the banner headlines on their newspapers.
    But that wasn’t why he kept the visit secret. While there, he had heard a high rising screech a little below and to the side, and looked down to see a red-tailed hawk soaring effortlessly on the thermals generated by the giant HVAC fans atop the Wall Street skyscrapers, cooling the offices within while creating a perpetual heat sink a thousand feet above Manhattan’s streets. It was the most wondrous sight he’d ever seen and, without thinking, his head and upper body began to move in tandem with the hawk, as though Warren could also feel the swirls and eddies of the atmosphere. He imagined what it must be like to feel the rush of air across its wings, to plunge headlong towards oblivion, only to snap the wings wide at precisely the right second to save itself and bag the prey. To Warren Worthington III that seemed like Heaven.
    And Heaven was likely where he’d have ended up had a woman’s strong hands not caught him by the shoulders and pulled him back