That was about as far as the conversation could go, and Jean Grey didn’t push Magneto to change his mind on the spot.
If he were the kind of man who bent that easily, he wouldn’t be Magneto.
After everyone had sat in silence for a while, Erik Lehnsherr suddenly spoke up.
“Mercy… is she a mutant who only surfaced these last few years?”
It was, in truth, a pointless question.
Angela’s ability was simply too unusual; the moment she stepped into the open, there was no way she’d stay unknown.
So far there wasn’t a single legend about a “Mercy” circulating among mutants, which told him plainly enough that she’d only just appeared.
Still, something about it nagged at him.
As a rule, mutants awakened their powers in adolescence, and this woman was clearly well past that age.
Yet across all the years between her awakening and now, she had somehow remained a complete nobody.
Magneto could only assume that someone overly cautious had kept her locked away at a school the whole time.
A power like “resurrection,” if word of it ever got out, could give the military the excuse to manufacture ten more Sebastian Shaws and Strykers.
Jean nodded first, then added, “To be precise, she only arrived at the school the day before.”
Angela’s grand entrance—dropping out of the sky—had been far too conspicuous.
Everyone at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters knew about it, whether they’d witnessed it firsthand or had it retold to them in vivid detail by a classmate.
Even so, only Charles Xavier and Hank knew that Angela came from another world.
The explanation everyone else received from the Professor was that “Angela Ziegler made a mistake using her power and fell from a great height.” Nobody doubted the Professor, so they all simply assumed Angela was a mutant from somewhere else who’d ended up near Xavier’s by accident.
As for why she’d shown up and never left, the mutant students figured that was the most natural thing in the world.
Leaving would have been the strange part.
Something stirred in Erik Lehnsherr’s mind.
He hadn’t kept in touch with Charles for years, and before that he’d spent a long stretch leading the Brotherhood against the X-Men, so on the surface the two of them looked like bitter, irreconcilable enemies.
But when it came to truly understanding Charles Xavier, he privately reckoned he had the edge over these youngsters.
Charles was absolutely not the sort to hand someone an important task on the second day he’d met them.
If she weren’t a person he trusted, Charles never would have let her come to meet him in the first place—because no one could be sure that a mutant who’d appeared out of nowhere wasn’t a mole the military had planted in their ranks.
There was a hidden reason here somewhere.
But since she was someone Charles trusted, he couldn’t stand by and watch a clueless girl walk into trouble.
Erik Lehnsherr decided to offer the current leader of the X-Men a small warning.
“Do you know what Mercy’s ability actually is? You’d be wise not to let her go out alone. Some lunatic of a scientist could snatch her up at any moment.”
Scott looked puzzled.
“A spatial ability? It’s rare enough, but…”
“Understood.”
From that response, Erik knew at once that Cyclops hadn’t caught what had really happened back there.
“No, I’m not talking about a spatial ability.”
“Then what?” Scott was thoroughly lost.
Prompted by Magneto’s run of remarks, Jean cast her mind carefully back over everything that had happened.
Under the spread of the Phoenix Force, she had been able to feel the battlefield with perfect clarity.
A handful of men arriving with violence in their hearts.
A woman and a child under attack.
And Angela Ziegler, furious.
Think it through carefully—what had happened in the instant before Angela drew her gun?
For the briefest moment she had sensed a swell and shift in the life-signs around her.
She’d taken it for a wound dropping from grave to minor, but that hardly warranted such a grave warning from Magneto.
So what had really been going on…
At last Jean pulled out of the chaos that single cry Mercy had given in the heat of it.
“Heroes never die… never die…”
Her expression changed in a heartbeat.
If those words were meant literally, then what Angela had reversed wasn’t a “grave wound” at all.
It was death.
Erik Lehnsherr watched Jean’s expression and knew she’d finally found the right road.
He said nothing more, folded his arms, and went back to waiting for the surgery to finish.
Jean caught Scott by the arm and reached out to him telepathically.
The answer left Scott stunned.
He kept stealing glances toward Angela, hard at work on the operation inside.
Impossible.
How could a power like that even exist?!
Jean, of all people, took it more calmly.
The Phoenix Force nesting inside her was hardly within the bounds of the ordinary either—handled badly, its strength could unmake this entire world.
Measured against something like that, a power that could bring people back to life didn’t seem so jarring.
In a sense, if a force as ruinous as the Phoenix could exist, then it was only natural that a matching power of life and healing existed to balance it.
Jean even felt a little grateful that Angela had this ability.
In some worst-case future, perhaps Angela would be able to undo a mistake of her own making. This story is hosted at g.com.
Magneto, you, me—we all carry powers like these.
So why shouldn’t there be one like Angela’s?
Magneto’s right.
We need to keep Angela safe.
If she falls into the hands of those military madmen, there’s no telling what they’ll do.
Scott nodded, his face grim.
“Immortality” had driven people mad since the dawn of time, and “rising from the dead” needed no further comment.
A power this precious, surfacing in anyone at all, doomed that person to a life that would never be ordinary.
For Angela, the real difficulty of the surgery lay in the risk of nicking the surrounding organs while drawing out the arrows.
Back at Overwatch headquarters, with a surgical robot and nanomachines working in concert, she could have managed it with ease.
But how could she ever have guessed she’d “transmigrate” one day?
She’d packed a few surgical instruments, sure, yet she’d hardly had reason to crate up the bulky surgical robot on a whim, and the nanomachines were useless without an AI system to coordinate them.
So she was left to fall back on a more primitive method: parting the wound layer by layer, exposing it fully, then extracting the foreign object.
The anesthesia had taken well, so Angela set to work without hesitation.
As it turned out, her skills hadn’t gone rusty in the least.
The operation was a clean success, and the closing sutures were as neat as they’d always been.
Once the arrows had been removed from Nina, it was Magda’s turn.
This time the surgery ran longer, because Magda had taken several arrows, one of them lodged clean in the bone—which stirred in Angela a sudden, fierce urge to go back and beat the men’s corpses.
Raising a hand against unarmed women.
Did those men have a shred of humanity left in them?
A mother falling to shield her child—it was the one image Angela could least bear to look at.
It was a memory she couldn’t face, the cruel “beginning” that had torn every quiet thing in her life to pieces.
She held her anger down, finished the surgery calmly, handed the aftercare to Hank, and went out as a matter of routine to speak with the “patient’s family.”
Angela pulled off her cap and gloves and went to Magneto still in her white coat.
“Mr. Magneto, the surgery was a success.
They’ll wake in about two hours.
They should move as little as possible for now to avoid the wounds reopening, and in roughly four to six weeks they’ll have made a full recovery.”
Erik Lehnsherr let out a long breath, and from the bottom of his heart he said, “Thank you.”