The Ultimate X-Men (23 page)

To the chaos spirit, Jubilation Lee was nothing more than a stream of data that was to be moved to another section of the master equation. From the spirit’s purely mathematical point of view, she was a virus in the program of reality itself. The chaos spirit had only one goal—to rewrite the code of Jubilation Lee so that she would function, not as a living, breathing, active variable, but as a dead, cold zero.

“Cornin’ through!” Jubilee’s voice pierced the early-evening bustle in the hotel lobby. “Heads up!”

Heads obligingly turned as Jubilee, still clad in her oversized sweatshirt and firing barrage after barrage of fireworks

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behind her, blew into the main lobby, still pursued by the indistinct, globulous thing. The tourists and native Egyptians, seeing explosions and fearing terrorist gunplay, screamed and scattered or dropped down behind furniture.

Jubilee’s eyes had started to adjust to the thing’s energy signature; she could see it more easily now. She knew that it always coalesced back into its original single form no matter how many times she tried to blow it apart. And she knew that it was moving a lot faster, here in the open air, than it had been when trying to sift itself through the hotel room window.

It was faster than Jubilee, and she knew that too.

Her only chance was to somehow find Storm. Once Jubilee got outside, she could send up a fireworks flare as high as possible, and hope that Ororo saw it from wherever she was.

The thing touched Jubilee again, and the back of her neck erupted in pain—she could feel blood trickling down her neck and back. She instinctively threw
^T
herself forward onto the marble floor, rolled once, and fired back with her maximum-force fireworks. The detonation was deafening, like a small bomb. The thing was shredded-—along with most of the front lobby. Jubilee herself was blown backwards along the floor, toward the front doors. More screams from terrified tourists followed the still-echoing reverberations of the blast.

Jubilee, holding the back of her neck and applying pressure to stop the bleeding, staggered out through one of the hotel’s revolving front doors. Once outside, she risked a glance behind her, and saw that the thing was
again
reform-

ing itself. She had perhaps ten seconds before it would be back on her.

Gathering her strength, Jubilee raised both arms skyward and fired off one huge fireball toward the sky. She mentally willed it to keep rising as high as possible before detonating in a dazzling burst of color about two hundred feet in the air.

She looked back toward the hotel, and saw that the whatever-it-was had already reassembled itself, and was oozing through the cracks in a revolving door.

She staggered across the Corniche, dimly aware of the cars honking and steering crazily to avoid hitting her. She ducked into an alley, hoping it wasn’t a dead end.

The alley led onto a quiet side-street, but Jubilee knew she was running out of time. She didn’t even risk looking behind her, for fear it would slow her down. Instead, she left a trail of exploding fireworks behind her as she ran, hoping it would slow the pursuit, but knowing that the thing was recovering from the blasts at an ever-increasing rate.

“Storm!” Jubilee called hoarsely, dodging into another alley, emerging onto another road. “Storrrrm!” she screamed, not wanting to die alone on these unfamiliar streets, so far from home. Hearing no response, she risked a quick look over her shoulder, and noted with some satisfaction that it was still a good thirty feet behind her.

Jubilee suddenly cried out in pain as her shin smashed into a garbage can and she went sprawling onto the cobblestone sidewalk. The early evening sky whirled crazily above her as she rolled painfully onto her back. She tried to scrabble to her feet, already knowing that it was over, she was dead—

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—and then she noticed the hooded figure in white desert robes standing right next to her. But rather than run away from her as everyone else on the street had been doing, this person stepped between Jubilee and the rapidly approaching energy, as if to intervene.

“Wait, you don’t know what you’re doing—” Jubilee started to warn.

“Yes, I do, child,” a woman’s voice answered sternly from under the hood, in English laced with a slight Egyptian accent. “Now, stay down!”

Dumbfounded, Jubilee complied—not that she was in any shape to do much else—as the thing moved ever closer to them. The robed woman raised her right arm toward it, and Jubilee thought she might’ve been holding something in her hand.

As her pursuer approached within five feet, a series of bright white lines began forming in the air, all seemingly emanating from the woman’s right palm. More and more straight lines burned themselves into the air, forming a geometrically perfect spiderweblike pattern between the women and the indistinct energy form, which stopped its forward movement and hovered in the air before the growing web of light.

The lines continued to appear, now reaching up and around the thing to form a more three-dimensional pattern—like old-style computer graphics, Jubilee thought numbly. There were dozens of lines, then scores, then hundreds, creating a delicate-looking cage of light around the now-motionless phantom.

A tendril of energy extended from the creature between the “bars” of its rapidly forming cage, almost experimen-

tally—and was abrupdy recoiled. The light-cage continued to form around it. Then, finally complete in breathtakingly perfect symmetry, the cage began to shrink.

Jubilee slowly got to her feet, awed by the clashing of forces she did not comprehend. The cage’s rate of implosion seemed to increase exponentially, until it winked out of existence in a pinpoint of light, apparently taking its prisoner with it.

“Wicked,” Jubilee muttered, looking at the mysterious woman as she pulled back her hood to reveal a beautiful Egyptian with pitch-black eyes and matching long hair. “Thanks, I don’t know how you knew about—”

“I’m Ororo’s friend, Alia Taymur,” the woman answered solemnly. “You
must
be Jubilee. I had hoped we wouldn’t meet this way.”

“Hey, better this way than at the funeral parlor,” Jubilee answered ruefully, holding out her right hand to Alia, then pulling it back on finding that it was covered in her own blood, “(jeez.”

Alia held out in her right palm the object with which she had subdued the energy thing. Jubilee could now see that it was a flat stone disc, an ancient artifact of some kind inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics. It had four hooklike extensions that fit between the fingers of Alia’s hand, allowing her to hold on to it even when her palm was open.

Alia held the artifact close to Jubilee, who assumed the woman was simply showing it to her. But then Alia whispered something in a language Jubilee hadn’t heard before, not even in the cacophony of the bazaar. Jubilee pulled back slightiy as the enigmatic symbols on the disc’s face

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glowed with the same bright white intensity that the cage had emitted earlier—then faded back to ordinary stone.

Jubilee looked at her right hand again. It was clean. She felt the back of her neck, and found no trace of the wound that had been stinging only moments before. Her leg, too, had been miraculously healed, and her black tights had been repaired.

“What the—” Jubilee marveled. “How’d you do that? What’s goin’ on here?”

“The fractal disc can be used to retroactively alter very small, simple variables in the equation of reality—especially those that were artificially manipulated in the first place,” Alia answered. “Because the chaos spirit was unable to alter any major variables, I can cancel most of the minor ones out.”

“Right, should’ve known,” Jubilee said with mild sarcasm. “And as for w'hat’s going on . . . ?”

“We’ll go to the rendezvous point first,” Alia answered, taking Jubilee by the arm and leading her into a dark alley. “Once Ororo’s joined us, I’ll be able to tell you both why I need your help.”

“Why
you
need
our
help, huh?” Jubilee asked ironically, rubbing the back of her neck again.

Jubilee pulled her hands into the long sleeves of her sweatshirt and shivered a little, sitting cross-legged on the dock and looking out onto the Nile. She couldn’t believe how a city that was so hot by day could be so chilly by night; in this respect, Cairo was even worse than the Australian outback, where she had lived alongside the X-Men for a while. It was about ten-thirty at night, and Storm and Alia were just ending their trip down Memory Lane, and none too soon for Jubilee. She had listened at first to the street-urchin tales of wonder and woe, but talking over old times and old friends quickly loses its appeal if you weren’t actually there in the first place.

According to Storm, she had returned to the hotel and found no evidence of the damage caused by Jubilee’s encounter with the thing that Alia called a “chaos spirit”— just a missing Jubilee. Alia had apparently used that disc of hers to undo most of the aftereffects of the chase, and had also left a phone message at the front desk letting Storm know that Jubilee was safe.

Alia’s stern manner was replaced by childlike giddiness when Storm showed up at the preappointed meeting place on the docks of the river. Storm, too, let a good portion of her guard down upon seeing her childhood friend. They had written each other a few letters over the years, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of catching up to be done. And that’s what the two old pickpocket partners had been doing for the past half hour, talking and laughing while Jubilee pretended to listen and stared out at the dark surface of the river.

She wished she had had such a girlfriend when she had been younger—or even now, for that matter. It seemed like such a special kind of friendship, but female bonding was something that Jubilee’s childhood as a homeless mutant orphan in Beverly Hills hadn’t lent itself to. Even now, the only person who seemed to really understand Jubilee was Logan, the berserker mutant who called himself Wolverine. And what did that say about Jubilee?

“All right, enough old stories, Alia,” Storm decided, no-

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ticing Jubilee’s uncharacteristically quiet demeanor. “We need to talk about why you asked me out here.”

“You’re right,” Alia admitted, the smile fading from her face and her big dark eyes looking down almost in shame. “It’s just—I’ve been facing this alone for so long, it’s so nice to have someone to talk to.”

Jubilee looked over at Alia again. Maybe they were more alike than Jubes had realized.

“It’s all right, Alia,” Storm comforted her. “But I don’t want to wait for another of those so-called ‘chaos spirits’ to come looking for us.”

“There are far worse things that could come looking, believe me,” Alia answered, meeting her friend’s eyes again with her own. “Over the past three months, I’ve fought off a bizarre array of these ‘mathemagical’ creatures, as I call them. In fact, I had to delay our meeting tonight in order to deal with one of them. And they’re all after this,” she added, holding out the fractal disc she had used to save Jubilee.

“Can you tell us what that thing is, now?” Jubilee asked, not unkindly but a little impatiently. She didn’t want to wait for another creature to show up, either.

“I’ve had this artifact for nearly twenty years,” Alia told them while running her fingers over the disc’s engraved hieroglyphics. “I lifted it off a man who must’ve been an archaeologist. When I first saw it, I figured it was just some kind of souvenir. I knew el-Gibar would have no use for it, and I thought it might come in handy as a concealed weapon,” she said, palming the disc and swinging her open hand in the air to demonstrate its damage potential.

“Sensible,” Ororo commented, to Jubilee’s surprise.

She still wasn’t used to seeing this side of Storm. “Almost invisible until it’s being used.”

“Exacdy,” Alia agreed. “It was only later, when I was studying the physics of chaotic systems, that I saw an article theorizing that the ancient Egyptians had dabbled in some kind of supernatural approach to chaos theory.”

“I’ve heard of that, but I never really got it,” Jubilee broke in. “Fractals and stuff like that, right? What is chaos theory, anyway?”

“It’s a new kind of science that helps us understand the properties of irregular fluctuations in nature,” Alia told her, as if reading from a mathematics texts. ‘ A chaotic system is simply one that’s sensitive to initial conditions. For example, the Earth’s weather systems are chaotic—that’s why they’re so hard to predict.”

“Because there are so many variables?” Storm asked, also curious.

“That, and the fact that even the slightest miscalculation at the outset will lead to results that diverge farther and farther from what you predicted,” Alia explained. “For example, a butterfly flapping its wings on the United States’ west coast might have what appears to be an infinitesimally small effect on the weather system there, correct?”

“A butterfly?” Jubilee asked, chuckling despite herself. “Yeah, I think you could pretty much count that effect as being zero.”

“Ah, but you can’t,” Alia told her with a smile. “The effect might be
almost
zero, and totally negligible for all intents and purposes right there and then. But the slight breeze from its wings would affect the air molecules around it, which would in turn slightly alter the courses of the air

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molecules next to them, and so on. By the time a month had passed and the weather system had made its way around the world and back, that slight change in initial conditions could’ve helped cause a thunderstorm that would otherwise never have happened.”

“Whoa,” Jubilee said. “Heaviness.”

“That’s why, despite all our recent advances with satellites and radar technologies, weather prediction beyond a day or two will never be one hundred percent accurate, nor even come close. It’s impossible to know all the starting variables to an infinite degree—and even the slightest miscalculation on Monday can grow to a huge miscalculation by Friday.”