Sanctuary Read Online Free

the park's familiar arch.
    "Brother and sister humans, flee if you must," the man said with impassioned cadence. "But before you do, just think! Remember how the city was run when traditional bureaucracy was in charge! Were your needs attended to then? No!
    "Perhaps the mutants are the next step in human evolution. If so, it is only right that they should rule. But even if they aren't, we're certain to get better treatment at their hands than at those or our previous leaders, whose only concerns were for their own pocketbooks, rather than their people's welfare.
    "Go, if you must!" the preacher yelled, waving his hands in a grand gesture of suffering. "But if we stay, we become citizens of the most powerful sovereign state in the world!"
    The preacher's audience mumbled against themselves, but there were none of the catcalls such an address normally drew. Amelia Voght was amazed. As one of Magneto's inner circle of Acolytes, perhaps the closest to a confidante the new emperor of Manhattan had, even she had not expected such a reaction.
    Certainly, there had been those who resisted. hundreds of thousands, in fact. Most were in the midst of an orderly exodus from the city, across bridges and through tunnels, shepherded by Magneto's fleet of Sentinels. Still, there had been far more incidents of looting, pillaging, mass destruction, and violence than Magneto would have liked. But Voght thought it was going remarkably well.
    There had been very few individuals willing to stand up to him. Certainly the mayor and the police commissioner had a problem, but Magneto had ordered Amelia to simply teleport them to New Jersey, and that's what she had done. She cherished the look on the mayor's face as he began to dematerialize.
    It seemed that most New Yorkers were either so afraid they would not leave their homes, or else they simply didn't care. Magneto had guaranteed that, despite the changeover in sovereignty, business would continue to function. People would still have jobs and income, and be able to travel to the mainland when absolutely necessary. For a lot of humans, that was apparently all the reassurance they needed.
    Amelia had lived in Manhattan for a time, and she though she could see a pattern in who stayed and who went. The majority of the city's transplants were moving out. But native New Yorkers, and the very wealthy, weren't going anywhere. Both groups thought of the island as "their" city. Which worked fine for Magneto's purposes. Not only had he created a sovereign state from nothing, but it had come complete with subjects.
    Magneto had had them working all night. It was nearly dawn now, and things were starting to calm down. There had been an armed insurrection on the Upper West Side, and a spate of looting in the fashion and diamond districts, but the Acolytes had ended them all promptly.
    Amelia was certain things would get a bit hairier once the mutants began to show up. Magneto had issued an open invitation. That meant that the immigrants to Manhattan would include mutants who truly needed a place to go, but also every lowlife loser and scum looking for a way to escape authorities. Not to mention a place where they were guaranteed the status of feudal lords.
    Things may have been going smoothly, but the plan definitely had its drawbacks. Still, when it came down to it, Amelia had to admit Magneto had scored a huge victory for mutantkind. There had been a time, in her younger days, when Amelia Voght took Charles Xavier as her lover. Xavier was the founder of the X-Men. he was both Magneto's oldest friend and his greatest enemy. The two men were on opposite sides of a war with the same goal: peace. Magneto felt that it could only be achieved if mutants ruled humanity. Xavier felt the two human races could live in harmony.
    Even though she long ago left her feelings for Xavier behind, and despite that she had become on of Magneto's Acolytes, Amelia had often wondered if either man was correct. Now, it seemed, the