Remy leBeau was a thief. He made no apologies for it, nor did he attempt to disguise his pride in it. For him, it was as much of an art as painting or music. It was something he practised with consummate skill and with absolute dedication and love. If his team-mates suspected that he hadn’t left his life of crime behind completely, they said nothing. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement, because they couldn’t have persuaded him to give up thievery. He would have left the team before then. Now, he thought with pleasure, the high council had acknowledged his tears of achievement by bestowing the title of Grand Master on him. The first ever and the last, some wit had remarked.

He grinned, examining the thick gold ring he wore on his left hand as mark of his status.

When he had first seen it, Bobby had teasingly asked him who the special lady was. Remy had just laughed: elusive Lady Luck was the only woman he considered worth chasing.

Formed by two deep grooves that trisected the ring, the insignia of his home guild was carved into the soft metal. He appreciated the rationale behind the band - if a more junior thief was able to steal it, they deserved the title of Grand Master more than he did for being so careless.

Still, the fame of such a position was enough to have earned him some interesting employment opportunities, he mused as he scanned his e-mail. Apparently innocent flirtation from various women to the casual observer, names like Sukey, Cynthia and Brandi masked a veritable who’s-who of the criminal underworld, asking him to perform such diverse tasks as steal diamonds (too cliche, he decided, no style) or break into Interpol’s files and ‘correct certain misconceptions’ (He rejected it out of hand - a Grand Master wasn’t a janitor to clean up incautious messes).

Curious, he clicked on a mail from a Carol. He had never seen that name in his in-box:

Disbelievingly, Remy reread the message. ‘Carol’ couldn’t be asking him to . . . . He shook his head. He didn’t deal with terrorists or provide codes to bypass a military installation’s security, contrary to what ‘she’ seemed to believe. Clicking the reply button, he jotted off a quick response - friendly, casual, perfectly normal by e-mail standards - and sent it off to ‘her’.

That done, he leaned back in his chair and stared at the monitor for a long while. He doubted any other thief had the skills to break Valhalla’s security, or that they’d agree to help a terrorist. It wasn’t that they had some code of honour, necessarily, but terrorism always led to the economy taking a downswing and thieves were very protective of the economy for obvious reason. Hopefully, this would be an end to it, but he knew he had better investigate this ‘Carol Dee’ further, just in case . . . .

"You do know, sweetheart, that it is possible to detach yourself from that machine?" Jean Grey teased her husband as she stood behind him in the War Room. Scott Summers smiled sheepishly, his eyes fixed on the series of monitors that broadcast news reports from around the world twenty-four hours a day. In the midst of them, a map of the globe hovered, punctuated with red and gold pricks of light, representing latent and active alpha-class mutants respectively. Occasionally, in the world’s rotation, a green spark flared among the rest, indicating the rarest and most powerful kind of Homo Sapiens Superior - omega-class - who the Beast had ironically dubbed Homo Optimus.

"I’m sorry, Jeannie, but I can’t . . . . Not now. Cerebro detected something that could have . . . potentially deleterious consequences for us all."

"Deleterious? You’re becoming as bad as Hank," she moved closer to him, putting her arms around his waist and resting her head on his shoulder, "What’s wrong?"

"Magneto. His biosignature has just flickered out of existence. One minute, he’s there. . . . The next," he moved his hands apart, "Poof. He’s gone."

Jean’s forehead creased in concern, "Could he have learnt how to disguise his biosig?"

"Possibly," Cyclops sounded dubious, "And if he has, we have no way of keeping track of his movements. Damn. He could be anywhere from Antarctica to New York and we have no way of preempting him. SHIELD should be informed."

His wife nodded her head in agreement, feeling the tenseness of the muscles in his shoulders and side. When Forge had developed a seemingly infallible way of keeping tabs on the Master of Magnetism via one of the most complicated mutant tracking systems on Earth, they had all been relieved, seeing it as the end of the cat and mouse game they had always played with him. Assisted by the sizable Mutant Underground, it was possible for them to monitor his forays into various cities and to ascertain his intentions. From S± o Paulo to Stuttgard, people were watching him. Now, they were reduced again to following a trail of cheese into a certain trap and hoping that it would not snap shut. Jean sighed, feeling tears of disappointment prickle like tiny magnetic sparks in her eyes.

"I’ll tell the others."

The girl swore as she read the mail, turning from the monitor to the pile of papers on the rough-hewn, stone desk. She rested her heavy head against the cool marble, her eyes closing almost by themselves. She had hoped leBeau would assist her in breaking Valhalla’s network of security, as complicated and deadly as an electronic spider’s web. The only grandmaster to date, he was notorious for his efficency and skill as much as his confidentiality. It would have made her job a whole lot easier.

No matter, she told herself, I don’t need him. Trained by one of the best, she would and could do it on her own with more difficulty, but she would need a computer slightly more powerful than anything Magneto had available in his technologically primitive base.

‘So much foh all the rumors ‘bout his Shi’ar tech,’ she thought disgustedly, ‘This stuff’s more Stone Age than Space Age. Else he’s hidden it somewhere where no-one’d be able ta find it . . . . Suspicious son of a bitch. . . . Now, who apart from Bill Gates’d have a computer that was sufficently powerful ta do more’n play Pong?’

Drumming her fingers against the desktop, the girl ran through a list of possible facilities, rejecting each of them as too low-tech or too secure to be successfully infiltrated. Absently, she scanned the room, as if hoping for inspiration. Her eyes paused on the row of shields on the wall.

"Gawd. O’course."

Her limp body, blue and pinched-lipped with cold. Golden hair, floating around her face like sea-weed. Chest trying breathing, but failing as the gasps became lighter. The camera focussed on her mercilessly, sparing the shocked audience no detail of the picture. The chic newscaster had no need to say that, if she survived, she would probably be brain-dead.

Suddenly, time stopped - the lips of the stylish woman stopped moving, the victim’s lungs were caught midbreath, the ambulance’s sirens were silenced - and moved backwards absurdly - her body was returned to the deep like a flawed pearl and the paramedics walked away from the tragedy. A calloused, hairy hand touched the screen. The other was poised on a remote control, endlessly rewinding and playing a cycle of pain.

"Ace."

With a gesture as close to tenderness as she got, Mystique pulled a rough, woollen blanket over her daughter’s shoulders. The girl’s head was resting on a heap of files, streaked chestnut hair falling down and puddling on the desk. Besides her, a screen indicated that a file had been uploaded into SHIELD’s extensive data-banks as well as those of sundry other international government facilities. Curiously, Mystique typed in a command for the computer to recall the last sent file.

Next to columns of personal information, the face of a lovely, young red-head appeared on the screen. Her grey eyes, luminous in her pale face, lessened her similarity to the sleeping girl, but did not disguise it completely. The header identified her as an Yvonne Montgomery, while the rest of the information indicated that she was an expert on terrorism and that she worked for the Western European Security Trust.

Mystique grinned appreciatively - that was typical of her daughter’s sense of humor, half-a-truth disguising an absolute lie.

Still, Rogue had been sloppy in places, giving information about ‘Montgomery’ that a somewhat inefficient government agency, such as WEST, would never know. Of course, the child couldn’t be blamed - Raven had trained her to assume that all security forces were as lean and deadly as she was, that they could see through any chink in a cover story as if it were cellophane over a gift.

She called up the file and quickly altered aspects of it, moulding it into something more plausible. She gave ‘Montgomery’ a few minor vices, blotted the exemplary academic record with the inability to do calculus, omitted all but the most obvious of personal information.

Finally, satisfied with her handy-work, Mystique sent it via Magneto’s satellites into the same computer systems where it appeared to have existed for years. She would tell her daughter the next day of the changes, she decided, unwilling to wake her. Together, she thought, they would practise every gesture and inflection until they became Rogue’s own. Until she was more Yvonne Montgomery than herself. Raven smiled, anticipating once more the forging of a weapon.