The Malaysian man kept quiet, but he carried himself confidently enough. I heard the name “Rayyan” muttered in his direction, and hazarded a guess that was him. Rayyan stood a step behind Wolfram, but I didn’t doubt that he would step up and take charge of anything he saw fit to. When you’ve been a merc for long enough, you get a sense for the type. He said something to Wolfram. Might’ve been instructions, or advice, or just a one-liner – I couldn’t tell.

  The other man was a little easier to read. He was scared. He’d walked at the same speed as them, but he was constantly looking at the rest, as if calculating how much distance he could safely put between himself and the group. He seemed more worried about his companions than about me, though I was the one pointing a Colt at him. The haze made it difficult to see his facial features, but his stark blond hair was plain enough. His skin complexion was hard to place. Not Caucasian, not Asian. Almost golden.

  A real diverse crew. I would say they were an equal opportunity gang of home invaders except, you know, no women. Funny how organized crime moves past some prejudices and not others.

  The last prejudice people like these would get over was that against mutants. I wondered if Johnny Dee knew that. I couldn’t forget the way Milos had spat the word mutie at me.

  “Promise we won’t shoot to kill,” Wolfram said. Not the same thing as a promise to hold fire. “To be perfectly level with you, you’re slightly more valuable to me alive.”

  “Yeah?” I called. “Why’s that?”

  Wolfram ignored my question. Too bad. I’d been trying to provoke him into giving away more information. “Either way’s fine by me,” he said. “I’ve been looking for an excuse to brain this twerp anyhow. You have thirty seconds to come down, or he dies.”

  If Elias died, Wolfram would go down next. He must have known it. He didn’t seem to care. Seconds ticked down.

  “Come on, Outlaw!” Johnny Dee called. “This is what you always dreamed of. A shootout against hardened desperadoes under a baking sun? Like right out of a Western! Isn’t this the feeling you spent your whole life chasing?”

  “Fifteen seconds,” Wolfram said.

  “I know you dream about it,” Johnny Dee said. I didn’t like the way he said that.

  “Ten seconds.”

  My damn eyes kept burning and watering. That blast had scratched them good. I had to keep blinking them clear. The bunch of them turned to haze on me and back, like heat mirages under a waterfall.

  In one of the moments of clarity, I drew as tight a bead as I could. The moment disappeared, but I held my aim steady.

  “Do you trust me?” I called to Elias.

  “Mostly,” he answered.

  Good enough.

  One thing I’d learned over the past couple weeks was that there were limits as to how far I could trust myself.

  But that didn’t mean I was going to stop now. Wasn’t in my nature.

  I fired.

  Johnny Dee cried out. In the same instant, Elias shoved away from him. That didn’t necessarily mean I’d done what I intended to – sharpshoot Johnny Dee’s gun right out of his hand – but I couldn’t spare the time to verify.

  I drew my best aim on the blur that was Wolfram and squeezed the trigger. And then again, firing at each of the men next to him.

  I must have hit somebody because I heard a pained yelp of surprise. My ears were ringing too much from the gunfire for me to be able to tell from who.

  That was where the good times ended. The rock right next to my face blasted apart – just split right in two in a shower of needle-sharp sprinkles. Deja vu made me flinch away, but no pain seared across my face this time. The unmistakable cannon shot boom of the Desert Eagle rolled across the horizon.

  By the time I blinked my eyes clear enough to see again, Elias and Johnny Dee were scuffling. The two men around them were down, either because I’d hit them, or they’d dived for cover. Johnny Dee held one hand to the side of his head. Even through the blurring, I saw the bright red all over it. It looked like I’d hit his ear.

  Elias should have gotten the better of him. He’d gotten into plenty enough fights as a kid (not as many as me). But he moved slow and shaky, like all of his muscles were cramped. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been bound for days. Johnny Dee raised a boot, kicked Elias hard in the chest. Elias stumbled.

  A flash of sunlight reflected off something in Johnny Dee’s good hand. Bastard had a knife.

  “No!”

  My nerves were too shot. I couldn’t see anything more than smudges that blurred together. I drew my best aim, and fired.

  I heard a grunt of pain and surprise from Wolfram, but I didn’t even have the time to find it satisfying. Wrong target.

  Johnny Dee plunged his knife into my brother’s chest.

  Then a punch like a freight train crashed into my shoulder. It knocked me to my side.

  For an eternity of an instant, that shock was my whole world – all I could think, and all I could feel. My revolver dropped from fingers I couldn’t feel anymore. My vision flashed white. Everything else shrank to the size of a pinhead. The shock was so great that I hadn’t even heard Wolfram’s Desert Eagle go off.

  The shock didn’t have to be lonely too much longer after it. The pain came flooding in soon enough. Everything shifted into sensory overload, a mélange of heat, agony, and a dreadful kind of clenching in my chest – the kind you get when your heart skips a beat, and gives you just enough pause to wonder if it will ever start again.

  The pinhead shrank to nothing.

  Nine

  To my surprise, the world came back again.

  I was on my side, having rolled just a little bit away from my perch. My top was drenched in blood. Blood had spattered on and darkened the dirt all around me. Hurt like hell to breathe – but I could breathe. That monster had shot me in the shoulder. His gun hit like a mortar shell.

  The sun hadn’t moved across the sky, but I was confident I’d fainted long enough that Wolfram and Johnny Dee’s gang could have just walked up and shot me.

  I heard their voices. They were shouting, hoarsely. They sounded farther away, though. For whatever reason, they’d left me alone. Maybe they thought I was dead. But that thought didn’t sit right.

  To my continued surprise, I had the strength to lever myself up and look around. No sign of the gang. Only a single blurred form, lying still in the dirt.

  Elias.

  I only had the strength to cover half of the distance between us. But, since it was my brother, I took an overdraft on the rest.

  My mutant abilities weren’t as flashy as eyeball laser beams, or super luck, or weather control, or flying all the damn time to show off that I could – but, when I really need it, it’s my endurance and strength that gets me across the extra mile no one else can go.

  Still, it took every little bit of it to make myself sit next to Elias, rather than just collapse. He was still alive and breathing. Relief made me sag. He looked more surprised by all the blood than he did at the pain. Belatedly, I also realized that he was startled to see me. My shirt and vest were soaked through with blood. They were more red than tan.

  “Thought for sure they got you,” he croaked.

  “I had to leave a few pieces of me behind up there.” I didn’t say how desperately I wanted to make sure they hadn’t got him. I tugged at the slash Johnny Dee had made in Elias’s shirt, ripping it wider.

  From this close, the haze wasn’t as much of an issue. I gently peeled back his blood-soaked shirt to peek. His wound was bad – but it could have been worse. When Johnny Dee had shoved the blade into Elias’s chest, the tip had glanced off his ribs. The blade had gone in at a steep downward angle. Better that than straight in, though it still could have ruptured his spleen or pancreas. The wound looked bad, though. Johnny Dee probably thought he’d killed Elias. And he and the others had run away too fast to make sure.

  I thumbed the skin back to gauge the depth of the cut. Most mercs get used to the sight of blood before long – either that, or they quit, or die – but I’d been accustomed to it for a lot longer than I’d been on the job. Growing up around animals kept me from feeling sick about poking around in my brother’s wound, even as I watched the cavity I’d opened refill with blood. A fresh stream of it squeezed out onto his shirt.

  He’d lost a good amount of blood, but that probably wasn’t doing as much to keep him down as the damage Wolfram and Johnny Dee’s gang had done to him before now. I didn’t have to look hard to find the deep red scabs and welts crisscrossing his wrists and ankles.

  I didn’t want to ask how long they’d kept him like that. I was angry enough.

  Studying his injury kept my mind off my own. Contrary to what movies and TV will tell you, the shoulder is not a consequence-free place to get shot. I certainly wasn’t going to be over it after a scene or two. My left shoulder was in agony. There could not have been more pain if it had actually been on fire. I could still move that arm, but it felt like it was at a remove, not all there – a ghost of the limb it used to be. My fingers were clumsy, like I’d just pulled them out of an ice bank. It wasn’t going to be useful for shooting.

  The back of my shirt was ragged, which at least meant the bullet had passed through. I’d never forget that punch, though – like being rammed by a semi-truck. The bullet had shed a great deal of energy on its way through. And all that energy had gone into shredding skin, flesh, and muscle.

  My deadened fingers fumbled on Elias’s shirt. I sure didn’t have the dexterity to mess with the buttons. Elias half-heartedly protested as I ripped his shirt down the front. Even without fine muscle control in my fingers, my mutant strength was still with me. His buttons went flying. Next, I tore down his sleeves.

  I lifted him just far enough to yank the remains of his shirt off his back. I wound the blood-drenched fabric around itself until it made a functional tourniquet, and then tied it tightly around his waist. To his credit, he only hollered in pain twice.

  I paused, waiting for the gang to react to his shouts. I couldn’t hear them anymore.

  “What would Dad think if he could see us now?” Elias asked, when he could speak again. “At least we’re getting along.”

  “I imagine what he’d say would depend on how we ended up here,” I said, looking at him. I wasn’t in the mood for subtlety.

  He actually looked hurt – er, more than physically hurt, that was. “I could say the same to you. They came here asking all kinds of questions about you. Said they’d help me out financially, save the ranch, if I answered. When I tried to run them off, that’s when they… well, you see what they did to me.”

  All the air came out of me. This wasn’t his fault. Somehow, it was mine. I knew, had known, that their being here wasn’t a coincidence. I hadn’t wanted to think about it, and I’d had too much else to worry about. I had no choice now.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to imply–”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “–that this was your fault.”

  “Yeah. Well. I heard what you meant. No takesie-backsies.”

  “You little sh–” I started, and stopped myself in time. Yeah, what if Dad could see us now? So much for getting along.

  I barked out a laugh. Elias grinned.

  “I really ain’t that bad anymore, Inez,” Elias said. “You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  “So what’d they want, besides answers?” I asked.

  “Bits of you,” Elias said. “Old clothes. Hairbrush. Scrapbook. Old envelopes–”

  “Anything that might have my DNA on it,” I said, sourly. Even with all the other pains wracking my body, the pit in my stomach stood out among them.

  Magik hadn’t been able to find the exact cause of my problems. She’d covered that up with a lot of vague and mystical-sounding words, like any good magician, but all she’d been able to suss out was the link between me and this place.

  It had been easy to assume I’d been the cause of my own troubles. Easier still, given the brain scans that Triage and Tempus had done, to believe I was developing mutant telepathic abilities. And that I had a sentimental complex pointing me back home. Even I’d started thinking the same.

  But Magik and I had taken the right puzzle pieces and fit them in the wrong order. The telepathic centers of my brain were active because I was receiving, not sending. I wasn’t the source of my telepathic link with home. I’d been under attack. From here.

  This house was a treasure trove of my DNA. Second best place in the world to go and get it. The best place in the world if you didn’t want to take any risk of alerting me. I’d left a lot of things behind, and Dad had been too sentimental to throw them out. By invading here rather than my apartments, Wolfram and Johnny Dee could catch me completely off guard. And they had.

  All those nights I’d felt like I’d gone sleepless. Or woken up in a place I couldn’t remember. The lapses of concentration… the feeling that my brain was falling apart, that I’d never gotten more than two hours of sleep a night for months…

  It had all stemmed from Johnny Dee.

  He’d gone into my body. Maybe into my mind. Johnny Dee had been controlling me. He’d fed those bits of DNA into the maw on his chest, and it had made a doll of me. He’d seized control of me.

  To do… what?

  There was a lot I had yet to de-tangle. But I was closer than I’d been even thirty minutes ago. I knew enough to be pissed. A real deep, dark, red-tinged anger like I’d never felt. And I’d been plenty angry before.

  Rage didn’t make the pain go away. Or all the other, more deep-down hurts. Or the sense of violation. But it gave me the strength to shelve them for now.

  “You hit two of them,” Elias said. “Wolfram and Johnny Dee. They ran off to bandage their wounds. Said something about just needing to wait. I don’t know if they’d thought they’d already gotten us.”

  “Nearly did,” I said, hoping I wasn’t jinxing us. With injuries like his, Elias wasn’t safe yet. Not until he got to a hospital. One thing he’d said earlier caught up to me. “Did you say, ‘save the ranch?’” I asked.

  “Somehow they figured out I was in trouble,” Elias said. “Must’ve looked up my record, figured I’d do anything to get out of the mortgages. Wolfram got real upset when I told him off.” He spat red-tinged spit. “Careful of him, Inez. I think he’s more dangerous than any of them.”

  “You were in trouble – and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to beg you for money again,” Elias said. “I figured you would think I wasn’t telling the truth about why I needed it, anyway.”

  I was in plenty of physical pain; I didn’t need any emotional pain to go with it. I sank my head down, touched my forehead to his. “Elias.”

  Distantly, I heard a car engine start.

  “No,” I breathed. I’d just destroyed their jeep. Elias’s Jaguar was up on blocks. I hadn’t seen anything else. I hadn’t had my Mustang all that long, but I knew it well enough to recognize its motor. The keys were still in my pocket. They must’ve hotwired the damn thing.

  I grunted with the strain of standing. I was about to whisper an apology to Elias, but he’d heard the engine, too. “Get them,” he said.

  I couldn’t manage a run. The faster I moved, the more intense the pain in my shoulder got. But I could handle something between a stagger and a jog.

  I rounded the house just in time to see the Mustang peel out across the drive. It didn’t actually go down the drive, back toward the road. No, they drove it across the open yard, right over brush. The low-riding Mustang wasn’t built for that.

  They drove it right along the side of the fence that had once held our horses. The car was a red blur. I couldn’t see who was driving it, or if they’d all gotten inside. My damn eyes hurt too much. The more I tried to focus, the more my scratched lenses stung and watered.

  I drew aim with my revolver. But I could only hold it in one hand. My left hand was too weak and shaky with spikes of pain. They had already made the kind of distance that even I would only want to make with a two-handed shot. And, by my count, my revolver only had one bullet left.

  I tracked them with the revolver’s barrel, white-hot rage tempting me to fire anyway. But for once I listened to my better instincts.

  I watched the Mustang melt into the blur of the horizon. They still weren’t headed for the main roads. All that lay in their direction were mountains and wasteland. The Mustang wouldn’t make it very far.

  They were up to something. They must have been heading that way for some reason. Damned if I knew what, though. There was nothing but wasteland in that direction. Hills, cliffs, and other rough terrain.

  By the time I got back to Elias, he was levering himself up. He moved like a man forty years older than I knew he was. His tourniquet didn’t look any redder, thankfully. He plainly wasn’t going to stay put, so I didn’t try to force him back down. I helped him to his feet, and to keep a shaky balance.

  “You look like roadkill that was hit by a car with ice spikes,” Elias told me.

  “Thanks for the metaphor,” I said. “Real literary.”

  “You look like you’ve been trampled on by a soccer team in cleats.”

  “OK, I get–”

  “You look like you just walked out of an accident at the broken glass factory.”

  “I get it,” I snapped. “My forehead’s bloodied. The cuts are shallow.”

  “It’s your eyes, too, Inez,” he said. “They’re all red.”

  All that pulverized rock shrapnel had made a hundred tiny lacerations all over my eyes. That was going to get worse before it got better. I knew, without looking in a mirror, that the kind of red he was talking about wasn’t just “bloodshot.” He meant solid red. Broken capillary red. The kind of red that made me look like a demon.

  And my eyes kept watering, too. I wiped them clear, irritated by how that must look. Like a demon who cried a lot.

  “We need to get you to a hospital,” I said.

  “I don’t have insurance,” he said.

  “Why the hell not?” I snapped.