I didn’t even have to look to know which hills would hide me from which vantage points. I scrambled faster, and more quietly, than anyone except me or Elias would have believed. Elias and I, back when we could stand each other, played out here plenty.

  I came up on the back of my assailant’s outcropping in good time, with no sound of pursuit. I found the shooter right where I thought he’d be. He was a thin, reedy man laid flat up on the rock, his back to me. He had a dusty crop of brown hair that was part natural color, part actual dust. He had a rifle braced against the rock and was scanning across the hill I’d first disappeared behind.

  I had a clean shot at him from here. I could have killed him at any time. That wouldn’t have left me with anything but a corpse, though, and I needed answers.

  Plus, there were times when death wasn’t revenge enough. I needed him to understand how ticked off I was.

  I might have been away for years, but this was still home. Kinda. I hadn’t realized how protective of it I still was. And Elias, too.

  Just to keep me from feeling too superior, I made a mistake on my way up. I thought I had the rockface memorized, but my boot hit an angle I wasn’t expecting. I caught my balance easily, but the gunman heard the scuffing. He spun. His jaw dropped. A second later, he whirled his rifle around.

  I rushed him and grabbed the rifle’s barrel. He kept a grip on it, and I didn’t have a good enough angle to wrench it away from him. I acted like I was trying to pull it toward me. When he shifted his posture to try and fight that, I yanked upward instead – and clubbed him in the chin with the butt of his own rifle. The sound of that was satisfying as hell.

  His fingers loosened. The rifle slipped from him, and I tossed it away. It landed with a clatter. I couldn’t stay up here, exposed, and so I kicked him hard in the side of his ribs. Still stunned, he rolled off his perch.

  I grabbed his right arm and yanked it behind his back. “Next time you try shooting a person by surprise,” I hissed, “aim for center mass. Not the head. Much less chance of things going wrong that way.” I punctuated my advice with a punch. His head smacked into the rock.

  By the time I heard the footsteps of his accomplices, I’d gotten him upright and held in front of me, with one of my revolvers planted against his temple. The other two men rounded the corner, saw us, and slowed. They still held their guns.

  My captive spat blood onto the dirt. He must have bitten his tongue while we scuffled. I hoped it hurt. “You must be the mutie,” he told me.

  I was already holding his arm behind him so tightly that it was close to dislocating, but I gave it another little tweak upward. He gasped. Milos wasn’t a very common name. Polish or Serbian, I thought. And his accent said Polish.

  The others weren’t aiming their guns right at us, but they didn’t drop them, either. The man with the salt-and-pepper beard was shorter than the others, but older, well-muscled, and imposing. His younger partner glanced to him. It didn’t take much to figure that he was in charge here. He wore old jeans and a dark blue shirt, and something completely incongruous – a priest’s white collar, tucked around his neck so that just a white tab was visible. His skin was leathery, and he had a low cunning in his eyes that instantly made me wary. He looked irritated, not alarmed. Probably not a good sign.

  “Milos,” the man barked. “I expect you to make some mistakes, this being your first time out with us. This is too much.” His voice was deep, discomfortingly gravely and resonant. He had a preacher’s projection. I could hear him clearly from dozens of paces away, and he sounded like he was barely trying.

  “She’s a mutie, Wolfram,” Milos protested. “Wasn’t a fair fight.”

  I told my hostage, “You’re awfully mouthy for a man whose shoulder I could break at any moment.”

  “You’re a lookout,” the bearded man, Wolfram, told Milos, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Not a skirmisher. You don’t engage on your own. You needed backup.”

  “I should’ve been able to handle it,” Milos said, sullenly. “I’ll do better.”

  I really didn’t like how casual and confident the bearded man, Wolfram, seemed. I kept my gaze fixed on his eyes, watching them dart to the side, like they were watching someone sneaking up behind me.

  “Why the hell are you all here?” I asked. “Where’s Elias?”

  The man who’d come with Wolfram said, quietly, “Isn’t it time we finished this?” Hearing him speak gave me a chance to place his accent. Malaysian.

  “It’s all right, Milos,” Wolfram said. “I forgive you.”

  Milos froze, like that was the worst thing he’d ever heard. Worse than anything I’d done to him.

  I drew Milos’ arm back a little farther just to remind someone I was here, and said, “I’m getting real tired of feeling invisible–”

  Wolfram leveled his pistol right at Milos’ gut.

  I just had time to see that Wolfram held a Desert Eagle with a ridged barrel. Probably .50. Extremely powerful.

  Powerful enough to pierce a body.

  I didn’t even see him pull the trigger. Just a flash of light, and a bolt of fiery pain ripping through my stomach. Milos jolted into me so hard that he knocked the air from my lungs.

  The two of us tumbled backward together and fell off the outcropping. I landed hard on my back, onto the packed dirt below. If the impact of the gunshot hadn’t already driven the air from me, that would have done it. I pushed Milos off and rolled to the side, hands scrambling over my belly, checking for the entrance wound.

  I’ve been shot before. Terrible experience. Would not recommend it. Obviously, I’d gotten better, at least physically. But I’ll always remember the shock, and the way it hadn’t even hurt at first. The feeling that stuck with me the most was that of hot blood spilling over my skin. It had been so warm it was almost comforting.

  It took me several agonizing seconds to realize that I wasn’t feeling the same thing this time. No blood. No gunshot wound. The impact had hurt plenty enough, like being shot while wearing a bulletproof vest. I’d have bruising up and down my ribs.

  I’d gotten lucky. The bullet must have struck bone, deflected away from me. With my mutant endurance, I could have recovered from a gunshot (if it hadn’t killed me outright), but getting shot would have left me down and vulnerable to a killing blow.

  It turns out that, when I’d started to think of my opponents as dim bulbs, I’d started to get overconfident. Nothing will get you in trouble faster, in this business or any other, than overconfidence.

  Above me, Wolfram’s footsteps crunched across the rockface. Coming towards us. He was only a few steps away from having a great shot. He walked like he was out on a stroll.

  Milos had landed at a bad angle. One of his legs had crumpled underneath him. He held his hands tight to his stomach, but blood flowed freely between his fingers. His face was screwed up, but he didn’t have the breath to scream.

  Even I felt bad for him. But I was out of time. I couldn’t breathe, but I pushed to my feet and started running. My vision fringed black. If I hadn’t been a mutant, I might not have had the strength to do it, and certainly not as fast as I had.

  Another gunshot boomed off the horizon right before I dived behind the next rock. If it hit me, at least I didn’t feel it. It took until I had a chance to check myself for gunshots that I knew for sure that Wolfram had missed.

  My breath came back to me in heaving gasps. Color flooded back into my vision.

  The shock had shaken my grip. My revolver had fallen loose. I drew the other one, cocked the hammer. I hadn’t spent all that time on the practice range – firing at night, from distance postures, drawing after a sprint – for nothing.

  The next time I heard the slightest sound, I zeroed in on it, snapped my arm out, and fired. I hadn’t meant to hit, but to frighten and to cover for what I did next, which was to lean out from behind cover and try to draw a bead on anyone I’d just forced down.

  All I saw was someone’s boot – I think the Malaysian man’s – disappearing behind a hill. He was a lot farther away than I’d thought he could have gotten. He must have started running the instant he could. I couldn’t see any trace of the bearded man–

  The rock face beside my cheek exploded. Red-hot pain punched into my face in five different places. Chips of rock, flecks of dirt, stabbed into me like pneumatic needles. All I saw was a flash of white.

  I ducked back. A moment later all turned to haze, a deep red-pink color the same shade as the inside of my eyelids. The pain was everywhere. I couldn’t tell which part of my face the fire was coming from, but the deepest sting came from my eyes.

  Then that old familiar feeling – blood running down my skin – was back again. It was all over my face. My nose, my lips – under my eyes–

  No. No, no, no, no. No.

  I pushed backward, moving by memory, and fell into a shallow rut just deep enough to hide me. I crawled along it as fast as I could while the world spun in a pink haze around me.

  I had to keep moving. Couldn’t let the enemy catch up to me. Had to push my knowledge of the land as far as it would go, and make a few educated guesses, too.

  It was not until half a minute had passed that I could spare a hand to wipe my face. I nearly wept with relief when I saw shapes and shadows moving when I pulled my hand away. At least one eye still worked. It took another few seconds of clearing the blood and grit off the other to verify that it did, too.

  It hurt too much for everything to be all right and normal. Everything seemed covered by a film of haze and itching, burning pain. Probably scratched the cornea, maybe the iris if I was unlucky. That was going to hurt a lot worse soon enough. But at least he hadn’t destroyed either eye.

  Wolfram had come a hair’s breadth of drilling me through the forehead. His aim had been stellar. And I had no idea where he was now.

  Or why he’d come here, or what he wanted – or where my brother was, or anything, really.

  I’d gotten a good distance from the house. I didn’t have any extra holes in my lungs yet, so I’d managed to lose Wolfram for the moment. If he’d found and caught up with me while I was still wiping blood out of my eyes, I would have made an easy target. Downside was, I had no idea where he – or any of his accomplices, other than Milos – were.

  Safest thing to do was stay put and keep my revolver ready. He was obviously a crack shot, and, with me half-blinded by the scratches on my eyes, he could outshoot even me. But a gunfight in this wasteland didn’t come down to just sharp aiming. It was also about cunning, about using cover, and about knowing the terrain and taking advantage of it. Wolfram had proved himself no slouch in the first two, and his companion was still out there, too. I wasn’t going to underestimate them again. I couldn’t sit still and let them develop a plan.

  I stayed crouched and low, ducking from hill to outcropping, and put more distance between me and my house. And then I circled around, toward the back – where all those tire tracks had gone.

  To my surprise, there was only one car. My eyes were still stinging, watering, and it took a while to blink enough of the fog away to see what it was: an open-topped jeep, covered in the dust of a long trip.

  There was also another person. With the haze in my eyes, I couldn’t see much more than a dark shirt, and a form that didn’t fit my brother’s. He, or she, or they, were hustling away from the jeep and into the house. That made at least four invaders total, including fallen Milos.

  There’d been more tire tracks out front than one jeep alone accounted for. But, now that I reflected, the treads all had the same prints. The jeep had come and gone several times.

  The question of why they’d come was just as much a mystery as why they’d stayed. Couldn’t think of anything here that a group of criminals would want. If they just wanted a remote hideout, there were a bunch of other places out in the desert that wasn’t a ranch with neighbors, business partners, clients, and debt collectors who would eventually come check up on them.

  The only person of interest out here was my brother.

  I’d been feeling pretty rotten about this before, but I was starting to get a real bad feeling about this now. I started to think about how many times I’d bailed my brother out of jail, or against my better instincts, sat as a character witness and lied for him in court. It had been over ten years since he’d gotten into that kind of trouble, though. Definitely not since Dad died.

  I thought he’d gotten over acting like that. Maybe he’d just gotten better at hiding it.

  But I put off thinking about that for a little bit longer. I was still being hunted. I was on my back foot and needed to get them on theirs, instead. The best way to get an enemy to make awful decisions is to get them thinking emotionally, not rationally (ask me how I know). If I was going to even the playing field, I needed to get them angry.

  This was a low, stubby hill, crowned with jutting rocks like teeth. There were enough plants and outcroppings to hide my head from a cursory glance. And, best yet, though the sun wasn’t near the horizon, it was still generally behind me. Better cover than I was liable to find anywhere else.

  I drew a careful aim on the jeep’s engine block. In this line of work, it pays to know the ins and outs of vehicles that see front-line military use.

  My gun wasn’t as powerful as Wolfram’s .50 Desert Eagle, but it packed enough of a punch that the recoil would have been hell on anyone without mutant strength. It would have been more ammo-efficient to sabotage the jeep up close, but that would have put me out in the open. Besides, I needed them to hear this.

  Bang.

  Even with blood and crud and haze in my eyes, don’t doubt my shooting. Something in the engine block hissed and gurgled. As if for good measure, the front left tire popped and deflated. I hadn’t even meant for that to happen. The bullet must have fragmented.

  Sure enough, I heard shouts from the direction of my house, and around it. The man I’d spotted just a minute ago darted outside. I couldn’t see much more of him this time around, except that he had dark enough skin and hair to match his clothes. He was sharp enough to realize that I was drawing him out. With a shout, he disappeared back behind the door before I could draw a bead on him. He sounded young. Too young for this.

  I hunkered down and waited.

  It was like I’d called a meeting. They all came filing out of the house in a group, neat and orderly. Five of them, walking tight together. Damn. More than I’d counted on. I drew aim and almost fired, but something made me hesitate. They were walking too casually. Confidently.

  One of them wasn’t walking like the others. I wiped more blood out of my eyes, squinted through the stubborn haze. That person at the center of the group was being forced along. The man behind him had an arm squeezed over his shoulder and a gun to his head.

  I didn’t need sharp vision to recognize my brother.

  Elias didn’t look good. He was thinner than I remembered. He used to have a reasonable gut on him. It was caved in now. Worse, though, was the blood on his forehead, and caked in his hair. It was hard to be sure through the haze, but only some of it looked new. Elias had been mistreated for quite a while.

  Wolfram stood off to the side. The man in dark clothing held up the far side of the group. Between them was the Malaysian man. And the person pressing the gun to my brother’s forehead–

  My vision blurred. I tried to blink through it, to focus on that mop of brown hair. Clarity only came to me briefly, and with effort. But I saw enough.

  The fifth person looked like the kind of guy who cut his own hair. It was an awful, unruly brown mop. The effect was too familiar. And so was the sullen, overgrown-teenager’s face underneath it.

  Johnny Dee.

  He liked to hide what he was. He wore a bulky white shirt to cover the gaping mouth and tentacles underneath. There was always a sign, though, if you knew what to look for. My brother jerked forward, even at the risk of incurring the wrath of the man with the gun to his head. There was something brushing his back that scared him even more.

  Johnny Dee scowled and jammed his gun tighter into Elias’s head, but even that couldn’t make Elias stop squirming.

  “Little snake-spit,” I hissed.

  I hadn’t laid eyes on Johnny Dee since the X-Men’s M-Day refugee camp. I hadn’t actually seen him in person when he’d tried to kill half the world’s remaining mutant population, not to mention puppeteered my body and tried to make me shoot Neena. That was lucky for him. I would have staved his skull in. The other men, I noticed, kept their distance from him.

  Johnny Dee’s free hand clenched. I felt a strange tingling looking at it – and knew beyond a shade of a doubt that he held a little doll of me. The same type he used to puppet and kill people.

  Only he wasn’t controlling me. Magik’s psionic shield was blocking him. But the barrier must not have been perfect, because I still sensed the tingling. Somehow, he was behind what had been happening. Had to be. But I didn’t have time to think about it.

  Johnny Dee looked straight ahead. Then, he raised his chin, turned, and looked straight to my perch. For a couple seconds, the air was so still I could hear all of them breathing.

  “It says she’s up there,” Johnny Dee said, loud enough for me to hear.

  Wolfram turned to me. I couldn’t see his expression through the haze, but his voice left no doubt about the nasty grin he wore. “How about it, Outlaw?” he shouted. “I tried to shoot through your hostage. You want to see if you have better luck with mine?”

  I could have blown his head off right there. As if sensing me think that, Johnny Dee cocked his gun’s hammer.

  “What do you want?” I called.

  “You, Outlaw,” he answered. “Out in the open. No weapons. We’ll take the rest from there.”

  “Don’t do it, Inez,” Elias said. “They’ll do worse than kill us.”

  I waited for Johnny Dee’s bunch to hit or shoot him or something in retaliation for saying that, but they ignored him. Maybe they took what he said as too obvious. Something that I should have already known, anyway.