The Ultimate X-Men Read Online Free Page B

space. A terrifying moment of free fall, and then the crossbar smacked into the palms of his calloused hands. He was glad he’d taken the time to apply the extra coat of rosin to his hands; it was August, and sweat and high-wire acts didn’t mix. He pulled himself up and over, taking a moment to steal a glance at the audience in the seats far below.
    The Big Apple Circus was one of the few tenting circuses still working. Five years ago Bobby Drake had signed up as a rigger. It was exciting to work a hundred feet above the ground, but Bobby craved excitement the way a couch potato craved junk food. He was always looking for the next thrill.
    Case in point. Bobby Drake, boy aerialist. He launched himself from the trapeze to the slack wire ten feet below. To the ringside audience, it looked as though he were jumping to his death. Angel bait, the others called him.
    Bobby Drake always worked without a net.
    * * *
    THE ULTIMATE Ml Ell
    It was the unexpectedness of the sound that made Cyclops turn toward it. What he saw made his eyes widen with disbelief behind their ruby-quartz firewall at the sheer . . . idiocy of it. Funny. I didn’t remember the swimming pool being on this side of the house, Cyclops thought inconsequentially. But if it hadn’t been, it was now; Scott could even see the place on the concrete lip where Wolverine had etched graffiti years before.
    But what was by far the most interesting thing about the swimming pool at the moment was the fact that every drop of water it contained had been turned into a filtered, pH-balanced, chlorinated block of solid ice. And Iceman was frozen into the middle of it, entombed like a fly in amber.
    Chipping him free would have been a delicate task at the best of times, but as Cyclops turned back from his split-second assessment, he realized that time had run out.
    He was alone, facing the Wheel of Fortune.
    And then he wasn’t there anymore.
    And the Wheel of Fortune was Spinning.
    I know every sound my ship makes. Scott Summers looked out across the bridge with the satisfaction that came from the awareness of being in his proper place. All around him, overlapping holographic screens showed him images of a starfield adjusted to compensate for redshift distortion and modified with the data feed from the navigational computers.
    What season was it at home? Scott shook his head, smiling at the foolishness of wondering about a homework! he’d left while still a child. The glory of that day was something that would burn in his memory like a nova until the day he died: Alex, the orphanage, the great golden god dressed in polychrome buccaneer’s leathers, striding in to claim them both, take them away. . .
    Christopher Summers. Their father.
    Still, Earth was his home; Scott had been born there, in the Midwestern United States. He might go back there someday. It was summer there now, he thought. What was the name of the month? August, that was it. . .
    “Shi’ar raiders detected by long-range sensors, Captain!” the helm said.
    Scott Summers brought his mind back to the present with a jolt.
    “Battle stations, everyone—go to Condition Red. Okay, Starjammers, it’s time to break up this little party—”
    A moment before, there had been five of them; now Phoenix was alone. She reached out for the mind of the intruder. A moment later she realized her chosen tactic was wrong, and four seconds after she began her intervention, Jean Grey knew that she’d just made a potentially fatal mistake.
    In her years as an X-Man, she had probed the minds of aliens, madmen, and demons, linked together members of the team across both years and light-years, travelled from the far side of the galaxy to a future that never was.
    This was different.
    This was like all of them at once.
    With a dim, fading part of her mind, Jean Grey could feel the earth beneath her feet, the warmth of the sunlight beating down on her shoulders, the roughness of the tree bark beneath her fingers. They were part