Charles
In one of his lucid moments, Charles realized he had picked the wrong animal for the man the technicians brought in at the beginning of every experiment. That single unshielded mind, a temptation he knew was forbidden even when he couldn’t remember why, wasn’t the guinea pig. Charles was the guinea pig. Those men were canaries, fluttering within his increasingly unstable mental coal mine while the technicians set off sticks of dynamite at periodic intervals and hoped for an avalanche. As an extended metaphor it left something to be desired, but then again formulating it had helped pass an extremely unpleasant afternoon on some unidentified opiate, so he was inclined to forgive himself any poetic shortcomings.
The comparison did come with one disturbing implication: canaries in coal mines were, by definition, expendable.
“What do you do with them?” he asked the General after yet another failed test. Vomit that consisted mostly of blood and stomach acid still dripped from the corner of his mouth, drying tacky on his neck, in his hair. His vision was too blurred to see more than the vague outlines of the two technicians hauling today’s canary away, the unconscious mind buzzing faintly like a radio tuned between stations. This one had been young, high-strung by nature and panicked by the situation, and after an hour of steeling himself against pain that never came his distress had reached a fever pitch approaching insanity. For the boy’s sake and for his own, Charles had gently pushed him into unconsciousness; the comfort of another mind vanished when that mind was essentially cannibalizing itself.
The General stood somewhere down by his feet, not that Charles could see what was happening very well, or feel it at all. Possibly he was just trying to stay away from the pools of vomit that had formed under and on the chair. There had been the slightest give in the restraints this time, just enough for Charles to lean to the side and aim away from his body, but eventually he had become too weak for even that, had concentrated only on not choking to death. The smell was overpowering, his mouth tasted foul, and his voice was barely a rasp.
“Tell me what happens, when they leave,” he said again, more insistently. All this time he had avoided thinking about it, telling himself there could be no good answer, and now suddenly he couldn’t bear the not knowing.
“Minor discoloration of skin in patches below the knees and elbows, excessive vomiting, slight worsening of fever…and from the way you keep squinting I assume blurred vision.” The sound of writing ceased, followed by the rhythmic tapping of a pen against a plastic surface. “We debrief them, of course. Some are more cooperative than others. Occasionally the process gets…complicated.”
“You torture them to find out if I tortured them?”
“We’d rather not, I assure you. It’s time-consuming and inconvenient for everyone, but we’d be tremendously negligent to allow any new information on telepathic contact to escape our notice just because we asked too nicely.”
Charles bared his bloody teeth, the closest he could manage to a smile. “Take off that helmet and I’ll give you all the new information you can handle.”
“I have no doubt you would,” the General said, flashing that false avuncular smile that Charles had so grown to loathe. “Well, after the debriefings we can hardly release them back into the general population, knowing what they know, can we? Besides, as I’m sure you’re aware, they’re all traitors, spies, war criminals, or degenerates of some sort. Not one life among them worth prolonging—I don’t know why you exert so much effort trying to protect them.”
“You kill them,” Charles translated. His stomach would have turned if it hadn’t already been empty, shrunken and heavy like a stone in his belly. “All of them? From the beginning?”
“Don’t be surprised if the symptoms persist for the next few hours. The radioactive material we injected into your bloodstream will take twenty-four hours for your body to process fully,” the General said instead of answering, which was answer enough. To match his helpful habit of explaining exactly what was going to happen to Charles before each experiment, he also liked to recap the day with all the detached courtesy of a medical professional while Charles was still restrained, sometimes still crying from the pain, sometimes bleeding or insensate or trapped in wild delusions. “When the restraints are removed try not to scratch, pick at, or otherwise irritate the radiation burns on your arms and legs. Have a good evening and I’ll see you tomorrow, Dr. Xavier.”
Dr. Xavier sounded like a stranger now. Someone with authority, someone these men would listen to when he said no, please, stop. No one listened to Charles, yet they still called him by that useless honorific, though he suspected there was more mockery than respect behind its use, now.
It was difficult to say. His grasp on tone and intent was nearly nonexistent—his focus too scattered, and the words that emerged from the technicians’ clay mouths hardly more than meaningless sounds. He knew they meant something the way he knew the odd sensations in certain parts of his body meant something—but instead of knowing what, he knew only suspicion mixed with dread, overshadowed by terrible uncertainty. Even after they freed him from the restraints, hosed him off in a wet room, and then brought him back to his cell, there was always a lingering sense of…damage. Several fingers he couldn’t move, an enduring pain his neck, hitches in his breathing. They had given him antibiotics when his UTI began to interfere with the tests, but not enough to cure it, just enough to alleviate the worst of the symptoms. And something squished when he touched a few of his ribs.
It was increasingly difficult to remember why that mattered. The only thing that mattered was keeping his telepathy under control, and the easiest way to do that was simply sleep. Go away from it all, for as long as he could.
That night was a bad one. The adrenaline rush that obscured the worst of the persistent pain faded; the radiation sickness didn’t. There was nothing left to throw up but that didn’t stop his body from trying, spasms and convulsions jerking him back to miserable alertness every time he began to succumb to exhaustion. None of his sleep that night was restorative, and when the technicians retrieved him the next morning he was already on the verge of tears. He drifted in and out of consciousness as they wheeled him back to the lab, his mind instinctively shying away from the syrupy hysteria that lurked on the far side of wakefulness.
“I’m beginning to doubt our central thesis, Dr. Xavier,” someone was saying.
Charles struggled to open eyelids that felt cemented shut, realized he couldn’t remember when he had been strapped back into the chair, or when the General had arrived. No new mind beat at his shields, so at least he knew he hadn’t been injected with anything yet.
“So far these tests have involved drugs that are primarily intended to disrupt the battle-readiness of enemy combatants. We had assumed that at a certain point of physical incapacitation, your telepathy would become compromised as well. But given your…preexisting condition, perhaps that was erroneous. If your physical health and your control over your powers aren’t necessarily correlated, we may do well to look in other directions. Up instead of down, for instance.”
A technician handed the General a syringe filled with liquid the color of brackish water, and following its movement was the first thing that alerted Charles to his comparative freedom. His head and neck weren’t restrained at all; his wrists were cuffed, but hastily, loosely. Hope for escape never even occurred to him—even if he could release the cuffs, he’d be free only to fall off the chair and sprawl in a useless heap in the floor—but the ability to turn his head, the knowledge he’d retain circulation in his hands by the end of the day—they were luxuries now.
“Wha’s’tha?” he managed, jerking his head toward the syringe.
“This,” the General said with ominous pride, “is phencyclidine. It’s been off the market for quite some time now, but we like to keep stashes of these things on hand.”
Charles had skimmed enough from the minds of various CIA officials and military types to know that drugs taken “off the market” for the general public often found new, less scrupulous uses, via the logic that if they were too hazardous for the health of American consumers, chances were they could be weaponized. Self-preservation as much as any moral rectitude had steered him clear of the details of those thoughts, like a baby convinced that anything out of sight didn’t exist; now, because he’d been such a coward, he would gain that knowledge first-hand.
“Nasty bit of business, phencyclidine. Hallucinogenic, like that disappointing LSD, but with a dissociative twist. Side effects can be difficult to predict, but at this dose we can safely anticipate aggression, paranoia, depersonalization and, if we’re very lucky, some euphoria and a feeling of invulnerability.”
Charles tried to laugh, though it sounded more like a wet, hacking cough. “Wind me up and watch me go, hmm?”
“Like a child’s toy,” the General agreed genially. “Ah, here’s the final member of our team.”
If he said anything after that, Charles missed it. The laboratory doors swung open and gurney wheels skittered on the floor, but the greatest distraction was the new mind that hurled itself against his shields. Instinctively he began to raise them, but there was still that impulse to reach out with his stifled telepathy, that desperate craving for any contact with another mind after endless hours of howling silence. He wasn’t fast enough, and his powers brushed across the surface of the stranger’s thoughts before his shields were fully locked in place.
This new mind was a cesspit, a swirling morass of dark, sticky thoughts that clung to the fragile strands of Charles’s telepathy, dragging him deeper. It felt like a bubbling tar pit, like a sickness under his skin, like a thousand cruel voices whispering vicious lies straight into his brain—
It felt familiar.
Not in specifics—he didn’t know this man—but in type. He had felt a mind this nasty, this twisted, once before. Had buried the trauma of it deep, telepathic pain beneath physical pain, and even now he couldn’t place it, until those pitch-black thoughts dragged him into and through a memory—a laboratory like this one, steel everywhere, a child crying on a table, babbling apologies in German, and no remorse, just sadistic triumph—and then Charles remembered, and there was Cuban sand under his feet and a bullet in his back and a coin in his brain—
(Oh you poor, deluded boy, Shaw had hissed in his final seconds, you really thought you could save him, didn’t you? As if he could ever love anyone more than he hates me.)
Half his awareness still lost in that gutter of a mind, Charles gasped, “He’s a—a—”
“Don’t tell me you’re surprised,” the General said, amused. “What did you think happened to them after the war? Just because their particular…skill set…was outlawed in Germany doesn’t mean it wasn’t valuable elsewhere. We got several decades of good work out of this one, until he tried to turn traitor and work for the Reds instead.” Without warning, there was a sharp prick of pain in the bend of Charles’s elbow, and that sibilant voice whispering into his ear, “How he would have loved to get his hands on you. Thinks the only good mutant is a vivisected one. But by all means…protect him.”
Charles whimpered, too sick and disoriented to care how pathetic he sounded. Dignity was a distant dream and self-awareness only intermittent; what did they matter, when having them only made it worse?
No, the disdain he felt wasn’t his own. It belonged to the mind that even now churned with hatred and contempt, that sensed Charles’s telepathic presence—he’d long since lost the ability to move about a stranger’s head quietly, instead lurching through their thoughts like a drunkard—and loathed it. He didn’t mind dying but resented that it would be like this: killed by a mutant cripple half out of his mind, almost entirely out of control, weak and useless. A child with a gun, who couldn’t understand and didn’t deserve the power in his hands. Instead of pushing Charles out, that hatred clung to him, choking the strands of his telepathy like hands wrapped around his neck. At full strength, even half strength, Charles could have swatted him away easy as breathing, but now it was a struggle simply to stay above that churning morass of toxic fury. He couldn’t pull free and even if he could have his shields were failing too.
Distantly he felt his body seizing, hands holding him down, but in the next breath all awareness of his physical body faded as a wave of something foreign swept over him. It was strength rooted in pure rage; he was Erik facing down Shaw, lifting the coin, the moment before the helmet cut him off; he was Shaw thrashing against telepathic restraints as he died; he was this pathetic creature with delusions of grandeur whose anger was really just petty jealousy—
He was.
And canaries were expendable, after all.
And it was so easy to drop his shields and let his telepathy, aching from disuse, sink its hooks into the man’s brain. Wild and joyous, it curled around his cerebellum, took control of his limbs—ah, that was what it felt like, having legs—and moved them. Difficult at first, since it took a moment to register that the other man was restrained too, but then it was only the work of a few vicious yanks to free his wrists, to throw up a casual barrier against the pain as the bones snapped and the newly-flexible hands slid free. The screams distracted him so he silenced the vocal chords with a thought, then commanded the man to free his legs and stand. Time was short and there was a tremulous edge to this surge of strength already that Charles didn’t like. He kept the commands brief, sharp: Take the scalpel on the nearby tray. Defend against first two technicians with stabs to the neck. One hard twist of the head to take down the next. Undo Charles’s own restraints, ignore blows from behind, lift Charles’s limp body. Distribute weight on forearms, as hands now mostly useless.
Run.
They made it halfway to the door before the gunshots rang out. The man dropped him immediately and Charles hit the floor head-first with a sick, wet thunk that sounded more painful than it felt, mostly because he didn’t feel much of anything from his body at all. No physical stimuli but a vague sense of cold where his cheek was pressed against the floor. Stunned, he lay still, the strands of his telepathy snapped back into his own head like a thousand rubber bands stinging his already bruised mind.
And just in time: he felt the other’s cardiac arrest and death like the searing heat at the edge of an explosion, a shadow of the true violence and an awareness of narrow escape. Then he was gone, and Charles was alone in his head, the past few minutes a crimson-tinted blur and a horror that he didn’t quite understand chilling his blood.
A shadow fell over him and the warm barrel of a recently-fired pistol traced the line of his jaw.
“I knew you could do it,” the General said. “Well done, Dr. Xavier. I’m so proud.”