Sanctuary Read Online Free Page A

truth had come to light. Magneto was right all alone. He'd won.
    A low buzz like the distant shaking of a tambourine filled her ears, and Amelia looked over her left shoulder to see the shimmering holographic image of Scanner, a fellow Acolyte, appear behind her. Humans spread out, in fear of some attack, but Amelia raised her arms to calm them.
    "Please, citizens, relax. You have nothing to fear," she said. "I am Voght, and this is Scanner. We are Acolytes of Magneto. Go about your business and you will not be harmed."
    Amelia did not fail to register the terror that filled so many of the faces around her, but the humans did as they were instructed. For the majority of them, that was how it had always been. They merely answered to a different authority now.
    "Scanner," she snapped. "You frightened these people. What do you want?"
    "My apologies, Amelia," Scanner's image responded. "There is a disturbance on the Fifth Avenue at Central Park South. Lord Magneto has asked that you meet Senyaka there and attend to it."
    "It will be done," Amelia responded formally.
    As Scanner's image disappeared, leaving bright spots on her retina, Amelia sighed. Perhaps, she mused, she had been hasty in her optimism. After all, it would take quite some time to convince hardened criminals and opinionated cynics alike that there was no place in the new world for disobedience. Magneto's word was law, and the Acolytes were his punishing hand.
    In a brilliant flash, Amelia disappeared from Washington Square. Her teleportation was the duration of an eyeblink, and when it was through she was standing on Fifth Avenue in front of the Trump Towers, just south of Central Park.
    Smoke and flames shot high into the sky up ahead. The looters were everywhere. And why not? Fifth Avenue had all the most expensive stores, the best that Manhattan had to offer. Jewelry, fashion, furs. Yet, as Amelia walked further north, she realized what was burning. A toy store. Who, she wondered, would want to burn a toy store?
    A large crowd of humans had gathered in front of the burning store, and in the flickering firelight, even from two blocks away, she could see the fervor on their faces. Several of them were armed, and some actually had torches! Amelia almost laughed, thinking about the terrified villagers in the first Frankenstein movie.
    The she saw Senyaka. Her fellow Acolyte was doing his best to keep the crowd at bay, cracking his psionic energy whip at them like a lion tamer. But he wouldn't be able to keep it up for long. Not against those numbers. Not if bullets started to fly.
    "This is our city, mutie!" one man yelled, as he tossed an orange metal mesh city trash can in Senyaka's direction.
    "We don't want you here, mutant scum!" another man shouted. "Your kind got no place in a human city. An' we ain't takin' orders from your murderin' boss, Magneto, neither!"
    The man, a brawny thug with too much belly and not enough brains, was about to launch into a further tirade when Senyaka stepped forward and lashed his whip around the man's throat.
    "Back, human dog!" Senyaka screamed, even as the man choked and tried to pull the whip from his searing flesh. The man fell to the ground, and though they could have pressed an attack then, the crowd was too appalled by the agony of their comrade to move. In seconds, the man was dead.
    Amelia had never been taken by the near-religious fervor with which the other Acolytes followed Magneto. And so she could not withhold a shudder as the man expired. Needless death had always disturbed her.
    "You flatscans had better learn to live under mutant rule, or you will die under it!" Senyaka declared, and lifted his whip as an invitation to further challenge.
    It should have ended there, with Amelia just to one side of the crowd, unobtrusive in the night. But this was New York, a city whose people were known around the world for their hostility. Amelia had never believed it was worse in that respect than any other city, but there was