The trains had been twisted into pretzels. Magneto's magnetic field had commandeered the entire station.
Rails buckled and warped. Steel rebar ripped free from walls and ceilings, support columns buckled and fell. The main staircase in the waiting hall was nearly sheared in half. The crowd surged in blind panic—chaos in every direction.
"Move—we're helping people!" Captain America hit the ground running first, waving back at Daisy as he went, just in case anyone failed to notice that Director Daisy Johnson was the person in charge here.
She could still pursue Mystique and Rogue. Maybe. But Daisy was not the kind of person who could leave civilians to get crushed under stone columns. She dropped the chase.
"Rescue operations! Mockingbird—two squads to the main waiting hall, people are trapped inside."
"Third squad—platforms, with the man up front."
"Fourth squad—crowd control, keep the exits moving."
She deployed her people, then flagged down the panicked station workers and flashed her FBI Deputy Director credentials. The badge had a remarkable and immediate effect. Thirty-odd workers straightened up at once and dispersed to their assigned roles.
Police arrived. Firefighters came right behind them. Civilians joined the rescue effort. Inevitably, a reporter arrived who apparently had no self-preservation instinct and proceeded to interview Daisy in the middle of an active collapse.
She used gravitational manipulation covertly to assist rescue teams at multiple points throughout the wreckage, simultaneously managing the Daily Bugle journalist's questions with a straight face. In her account there were no S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, no FBI Deputy Director—she was simply a public-spirited passerby who happened to be first on scene. Why was everyone following her directions? Her genuinely magnetic personality.
Wolverine came around eventually and threw himself into the rescue effort. Adamantium claws turned out to be excellent tools for cutting through rubble to reach trapped people.
Her private prediction: the reporters would probably turn this into a heartwarming piece about a mutant, moved by humanity's compassion, renouncing evil and choosing redemption.
"Everyone out—this place is coming down!" The last civilian was clear. Between her extended senses and Wolverine's nose, no one had been missed. She called the retreat. Captain America helped Wolverine along, and a battered collection of heroes and agents stumbled out of Grand Central and into the open air.
Half an hour since the battle ended. Grand Central Terminal—landmark of Manhattan, the station the Vanderbilt family built—had lost a third of itself to collapse. Flames climbed from the wreckage, secondary explosions still cracking inside. The fire department was on it.
"Mystique was that good? You really didn't notice anything?" Baldy—Nick Fury—arrived on scene with a face full of questions.
"Genuinely nothing. If I ran into her again, I'd probably miss it again. Her ability makes her completely into another person—voice, scent, frequency. I can't think of a reliable countermeasure." Daisy was genuinely frustrated. For the first time she'd found a blind spot in her vibrational awareness—she'd been fooled by Mystique, who in any straight fight was barely a threat. That stung in a particular way.
Fury had too much on his plate to care about one abducted mutant girl. He turned and left.
She needed to even the score, but a shape-shifter had no fixed frequency, face, or scent. A conventional manhunt was useless. She'd need other methods.
Cap had tried talking to Wolverine, who was thoroughly confused. He had no idea who Cap was.
"Is this the man I remember?" Cap could only ask Daisy.
The full story would take too long. She gave him the two-word summary: "He forgot."
Cap accepted it.
She left Cap to help the wounded and teleported herself and Wolverine to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. She walked through the front gate—and found the school also in chaos.
The teachers were all absent. Eventually it was Iceman, one of the older students, who caught her up on events.
Professor X had been watching the battle on live television. He'd activated Cerebro to locate Magneto and Mystique—but Mystique had tampered with the machine in advance, and the old man had collapsed a second time, right before the fight.
With no teachers present, Xavier's students had no idea what to do.
Professor X's psychic power was immense. When he was unconscious, getting that power back on track took a very long time. Daisy wasn't going to attempt an intervention herself—she had no interest in getting pulled into that vortex.
"Get back here, forget Jean for now." She sent a car for Storm and Cyclops, who were still somewhere on the highway. They came back at a jog, breathless, and managed to stabilize the school's situation—but the actual problem remained entirely unsolved.
Professor X unconscious. Jean Grey missing. Magneto and Mystique loose with Rogue in hand. It was a crushing stack of crises.
Storm was capable but reactive—good at maintaining order, less clear on priorities. Cyclops was different. Even now, under pressure, he had the genuine quality of a leader. He sorted through the problems methodically.
"Jean is the key. Find Jean, she can heal the Professor. With Jean's psychic power and Cerebro, we can locate Mystique and Magneto."
Everyone agreed on the analysis. Where they disagreed was Cyclops's execution plan: send out all two and a half of their available teachers to search for Jean, leaving the senior students to guard the school.
Storm objected. The students weren't hothouse flowers, and Cyclops was firm. The school wasn't a military base, and Storm was equally firm.
As the half-teacher in the room, Wolverine wasted no time seeing himself as an outsider. He proposed going alone to search, leaving the other two to hold the school. Cyclops said no. Then Wolverine offered to stay and have them both go out. Cyclops said no to that too.
"You—!" Wolverine didn't have much patience under the best of circumstances, and right now he was increasingly certain Cyclops had it out for him specifically.
Whether that was actually true, even Cyclops probably couldn't say. But these two had never fit well together—that much was historical fact.
Three people, three irreconcilable positions, escalating tension. Daisy was speechless. This was exactly why heroes spent so much time getting beaten by villains. Villains used every manipulation and incentive available to hold their teams together. Heroes couldn't remember the word "teamwork" until they were completely out of options.
She stepped in before someone threw a punch.
"I broadly agree with Cyclops's approach. One addition—do any of you know Emma Frost? Powerful psychic, should be able to operate Cerebro and find everyone we need. Find Jean, we cure the Professor. Find Mystique, we free Rogue."
The famous White Queen. They all knew the name. High-powered mutants were a small enough world that prominent figures were known to each other.