I lost track of time. Had my vision been better, I could have traced the stars across the sky, and told you how many minutes or hours I’d spent carefully pulling myself over the chalky rock wall. I may not have been moving very fast, but my mind was racing.

  There were so many things to focus on and consider with each step: the rock under my feet, the feel of the grit through my soles, how likely each footstep was to make noise, the shapes of the shadows around me, all the places where a person might have been hiding, and how visible my silhouette against the stars appeared from different vantage points.

  If there was anyone waiting in the shallow valley below, looking up at the right moment, they could have seen me outlined against the sky. I kept those moments to a minimum, and I doubted there was anybody down there anyway. The trap only made sense if they’d planned on luring me down that path and then taking advantage of the higher ground.

  All the aches in my body hated taking things slow even more than they’d hated riding Wheezer. The truth was, though, that I felt better than I had in ages – since before I’d started having my exhaustion and concentration problems. I was at the peak of my game. I was doing what I’d trained all my life to do. And I was about to make someone very, very sorry they had chosen me to mess with.

  Very gradually, I became aware that I was hearing more breathing than my own.

  There was someone just ahead. They were crouched against the lip of the canyon wall. No – laying prone. There was a long, lanky shadow hunched on the ground, shivering. A long, slender rifle barrel rested on the rock.

  The sniper’s breath was stilted, halting. Whoever they were, they were freezing their butt off and trying not to draw in too much air because of it. Their clothes rustled as they trembled.

  If I’d followed the obvious tracks, the shooter would have seen me stumbling into the valley. Easiest shot in the world.

  Except for the shot I could have made right then.

  I set my palm on my left-hand revolver. Reconsidered. If I took this man out, the shot would let all his partners know where I was.

  Frankly, there’s no point in having a cake if you can’t eat it, too. Sneaking up on someone and silently killing them was a lot more difficult than they make it seem in movies. But it was far from impossible. I’d done it before. It would have been nice to prove – to them, to myself, to the stars above – that I could do it again.

  But being a merc had trained me to always have a backup plan. I kept my hand on my revolver as I crept forward. I measured each step carefully, and placed my weight softly. Eventually, I was standing right above him. Despite the cold, I was slick with sweat. He could have jerked his elbow and hit my ankle, but he was too focused on the canyon.

  From this close, I recognized this man’s blond hair. This was the one who’d looked so pitifully timid next to his partners, with the golden complexion. His breath steamed in front of him.

  I flexed my fingers, held my own breath, and sized up the angles.

  Then, in one movement, I clamped my hand over his mouth and jaw, and, with all the mutant strength I could muster, jerked his head hard into a direction his neck couldn’t support. The snap came quick, easy, and satisfying.

  I breathed out.

  Pain exploded from the base of my skull. I careened forward with a gasp of surprise and colors kaleidoscoping across my vision.

  I hardly had time to realize what had happened – someone had clubbed me – when another set of hands grabbed the scruff of my jacket and yanked me back. My assailant had been waiting for me. They’d gotten as close to me as I’d gotten to the sniper lying beneath me. I’d never heard them.

  “First rule of a good con,” Wolfram hissed in my ear. “Always let the mark think they’re the smart one.”

  Eleven

  I didn’t know how Wolfram had gotten this over on me, and I didn’t have time to think about it. His taking the energy to speak was the first mistake I’d seen him make. It was a small one, but it gave me just enough time to twist left, before the next blow.

  His fist struck my shoulder rather than my head. My bad shoulder.

  For a moment, I lost track of where I was. I was adrift on a sea of starry haze and mind-shattering agony. It hurt so much I couldn’t tell which way was up, and for a lurching, nauseating moment, the dead-but-luminous sky was underneath me.

  I really was falling. By reflex, I’d pushed myself in what had seemed like the only safe direction: away from Wolfram. Over the cliff.

  It was a short fall. Only a second or so. I landed hard on my safe side. Good thing, too – even with mutant endurance, if I’d hit my wounded shoulder, I probably would have fainted. As it was, I got scraped up pretty bad. When my forehead cracked into the ground, for a moment I thought I could see clearly again – but, no, the stars dancing in front of me were just the after-effects of the blow. They were as sharply defined as the rest of the world was blurry.

  But I was still Inez Temple, and it was going to take more than that to drop me.

  My momentum kept me rolling when I hit the dirt. On the second roll, I braced my knee to stop myself, and pushed half-upright. One of my ammo pouches had caught on something and torn, and I was going to have some rifle-stock-shaped bruises on my back, but everything else had held. The first weapon my hands found was Dad’s self-defense Beretta.

  I’m a quick draw, but I have limits. I was still dizzy from the fall, and could only draw one-handed. It took me a second too long to aim.

  A tall silhouette stood atop the cliff. Not Wolfram. It was too thin. I boggled as I recognized the sound of the blond man’s wheezing breath. The breath he shouldn’t have been able to draw at all.

  With strange and drooping grace, like a melting candle, my target slipped from the wall. He didn’t so much jump as flow.

  I backpedaled. I had no choice but to put myself in the same spot that would have made me an easy target earlier. There was nowhere else to go.

  A grunt in the dark betrayed where he’d landed. I made a guess as to his position, and lashed out with my foot. I kicked him square in the chest. I’d been aiming for his face, expecting it to be low, but he hadn’t even crouched when he’d struck ground. He stepped back, but that was all. I didn’t hear an expulsion of air that would have meant I’d winded him.

  “Who are you?” I asked, backing away.

  My first thought had been that Johnny Dee had possessed this man. But that couldn’t be true. Johnny Dee couldn’t raise the dead, couldn’t do – whatever this man had done to himself to get here. And when he spoke, he didn’t have Johnny Dee’s cadence, either.

  “I was really, really hoping you wouldn’t come after us.” He sounded broken, upset.

  I would have sworn he was at least three arms’ lengths away from me, but his fist crashed into my face.

  The punch was nothing compared to what the fall had already done to me. It just made the dancing stars spin a little faster. I took a step back more from shock than pain.

  If I hadn’t seen him get back up after I was sure – beyond sure – that I had snapped his neck, I would have thought that, between my bad vision and the dark, I’d underestimated the distance between us. But I’d tangled with a lot of metahumans in my time. I knew for sure I was facing one now.

  So when he took a step forward, even though the distance between us didn’t seem like brawling range yet, I was ready. I bent backward, rolled my head so that his next blow glanced off my chin – and then I snapped my hand up and grabbed his wrist. I yanked him toward me.

  He stumbled, but only for half a second. Then his wrist shifted. With a dozen painful-sounding cracks and pops, the bones flexed and bent in directions that should have broken them, and maybe did.

  With nauseating fluidity, his tendons rippled under my fingers, and melted away, reforming in what had once been his palm. His fingers bent backwards and curled around my wrist. With his newly reversed hand, he grabbed mine, and tugged me off-balance.

  Now, I have a pretty strong stomach, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t horrified. My guts lurched. What he’d just done felt as painful as everything that had happened to me today, combined. The biggest snap had come from a clean, spontaneous fracture across his knuckles as his fingers had bent backwards. Now those same metacarpals felt as solid as my own. He hadn’t made a peep, not even a grunt. He was reconfiguring himself, his whole body. I’d only felt his bones do it, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if the rest of him could, too.

  Given this gang’s interest in me, I put nine out of ten odds on this man being a mutant, too.

  He hit me again, surprisingly lightly. The punch landed in the middle of my nose. I was already backpedaling from revulsion, but the blow wouldn’t have made me move on its own. The sweat on my hand let me slip free. Rather than press his advantage, he took a step back.

  From this angle, my opponent made a clearer silhouette. His leg shifted back, much farther than it should have. But it didn’t stretch, not exactly. He was no Mister Fantastic. His leg seemed to flow up his thigh – I winced at the sound of grinding femur – and his ankle and heel disjointed almost to a straight line. That plus his height gave him a step twice as far as I could have made.

  Thing was, he wasn’t particularly fast or strong. He probably relied on revulsion and surprise to carry him in combat. Those had worked on me – to a point.

  I danced closer to him, sidestepped the punch I knew was coming, spun on my heel, and landed a whirling kick in his gut.

  He might have had a healing factor, but it didn’t seem to be as fast as someone like Wolverine’s. I bet it needed conscious control to manage. If I moved fast, I might overwhelm it. I was rewarded with a pained whuff of air, and the feel of flesh underneath my heel.

  “No, please–” he started to say, with a strangely choked cry.

  I wound up for a punch, but then his fist cracked into my chin. This punch was much, much harder than the last. My momentum faltered.

  In astonishingly rapid succession, he landed hits on my forehead, the bridge of my nose, and my good shoulder. I braced that shoulder toward him to protect my weak side, and tried to hold my ground.

  The weak punches were all gone. He’d been holding back on me. These were full-powered MMA moves. If I’d been in peak shape, I could have fought punch for punch. My left shoulder and left arm were singing a symphony of agony just from what I’d done so far.

  The best I could do was the unexpected. I slammed forward, ramming my good shoulder just underneath his sternum. It knocked the wind out of him. I stepped back. He moved again to swing at me, but raw medical fact took over. He didn’t have the energy to keep going. He backed off to catch his breath.

  Something dangling from his belt, rounded and metal, caught the starlight. It made the sound of a chain clinking. Handcuffs, I realized. These men intended to capture me.

  I would have preferred that they just kill me.

  I didn’t want to show how badly I needed air, too, but I couldn’t help gulping for it. “You have a name, so I’ll have something to put on your tombstone?” I asked.

  “He’s just told us his name is Josh,” he said. “Haven’t been able to get anything else out of him.”

  My breath caught. That voice had come from him, but, at the same time, sounded nothing like he had just a moment ago.

  He came at me again: fast, hateful, and cruel. Punch to the jaw. Another blow at a physically impossible angle to my temple. He tried to grab my right arm, spin me around to get at my wounded side, but I slipped away just in time. That didn’t get me any respite, though. In my haste, I’d jerked my chin too high, and the next strike landed square in my neck.

  I’d written off Johnny Dee too early. He hadn’t been controlling this man at the start of this, but he sure was now.

  I choked, and nearly fell to my knees. The blond man hadn’t just become a vicious fighter, but a stiff one. He held his arms too straight, and didn’t make use of his uncanny skeleton as often as he might have. But he fought like exhaustion and muscle tolerance didn’t matter to him. And they wouldn’t have mattered to Johnny Dee. Just like Johnny Dee hadn’t had to feel Milos’ agony as he’d died.

  No, please, my opponent had said. He hadn’t been baiting me. He hadn’t even been talking to me.

  He didn’t want to be doing this. He was a hostage.

  I wasn’t a coward, but I was sensible. So I did the only sensible thing: I ran.

  I didn’t get as far as I’d hoped. I made it a hundred yards up the slope, where one of the rock walls fell away and opened into a deep, dark pit of a crevice. Then the fact that I couldn’t breathe well caught up with me. (Honestly, it should have felled me much earlier, but, well, mutant. It’s hard to tell the difference between super-endurance and super-stubbornness. Cussedness is a super-power.) But my pace finally flagged, just a little. It was enough for Johnny Dee’s vessel to catch up with me.

  He crashed into me, latching onto my back. A flurry of three or four elbows jabbed into my sides. I didn’t want to think too hard about how his body was contorting to make that possible. We tipped to the ground in a tangle of limbs. I tried to lever myself up, but for once Johnny Dee did something clever with his victim’s abilities. His leg snapped in so many places that it seemed to turn to jelly, wrapped around mine, and then resolidified as a tangled chain of bone.

  “Of course, we’re also thinking about naming him the Freak,” my attacker rasped. Johnny Dee’s words. “It’s what most of us call him anyway.”

  “You think your friends call you anything different?” I asked.

  “I am different,” he snarled. I couldn’t miss the sudden defensiveness.

  My bad arm was caught painfully underneath me. He grabbed my other wrist, and tried to keep me pinned long enough to take one of his hands off. I tried to buck him off, but I didn’t have a good angle, and the pain from my shoulder was sapping my strength.

  “You know we found him working with the Reavers,” Johnny Dee said, as if he was making casual conversation. I knew about the Reavers. One of many organized anti-mutant groups. “He hates muties just as much as I do. Kinda makes us one of a kind, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t have the breath to answer. Then I heard the clink of those handcuffs. A bolt of terror coursed through me. I wasn’t going to become Johnny Dee’s prisoner. I tried again to throw him off me, but succeeded only in dislodging his grip. The spiked bone corkscrew stayed tight around my leg.

  My free hand scrabbled over to open air. We had landed close to the open ledge. I couldn’t see how far down it went.

  I didn’t know my attacker. He was a mask Johnny Dee wore. But I’d seen glimpses of the person underneath. I couldn’t forget the way those dishes back home had been washed and stacked. Someone had been trying to carve out their own little corner there, find a little bit of peace. Someone who really hadn’t wanted to be there. The first punches he’d thrown at me tonight had been soft as kisses, like he’d been performing for an audience watching us from above… or trying to warn me off.

  I didn’t know that man very well. But if he felt anything like I did at this moment, he would rather die than let Johnny Dee keep having his way with him.

  It was all I had to go on.

  “Sorry,” I told him, “but not sorry.”

  I grabbed the vertical face of the cliff, and, with my last burst of energy and for the second time that night, I pushed myself toward the void. Johnny Dee, his puppet still clambered onto my back, didn’t seem to realize what was happening until the darkness swallowed us both.

  The second fall of the night turned out to be a lot longer than the first.

  Twelve

  I hadn’t been in great shape when I’d joined Neena’s posse – physically, spiritually, or morally. She’d found me in some godforsaken Oklahoma-bordering hellhole, the kind of small town where people mistake drinking for culture. When I’d been younger, I’d thought that was everything I’d ever wanted from the outside world.

  I’d blown into town as a bodyguard-for-hire for a man who, as it turned out, hadn’t intended to pay me afterward. Neena – funny coincidence! – was there to kill him. After Neena showed me proof of his ill intent, we put both of our heads together to resolve this impasse and, why, what do you know, the numbers worked out better for the both of us if I betrayed my employer. I started working with her.¹⁴

  14 You can read more about Outlaw, Domino, and Diamondback’s first meeting, and showdown with the despicable Professor Salvage, in Domino Annual #1! –Ed.

  I understand now that she was trying to take me under her wing. She wasn’t that much older than me, but she had ten times the mercing experience. I would have resented her tutelage if I’d figured out what she was doing but, for someone who cusses and kills as much as she does, she can be surprisingly tactful.

  Before then, I’d always felt the best mercs were cold and hardhearted. That was who I’d tried to be. That was, at first blush, who I’d thought Neena was. But she’d taught me a few more things besides being more discerning about who I hired on with. Even in a profession like ours, conscience is essential. Without conscience, you’re something less than a merc. You’re a monster. Or just a henchman with delusions of grandeur.

  Never hire a heartless merc unless you’re in the market for either of those. In which case, there are more efficient ways to get them.

  •••

  I’d blacked out. Suffered a flashback. Never a good sign. Honestly, I’d taken so much head trauma in this business, I was surprised my brain hadn’t liquefied and poured out my ears.

  I’d had enough sense to toss him over me, to try to arrange things so that I’d fall on him. He wouldn’t have been much of a cushion, but he would have been better than nothing. His bones could obviously take punishment mine couldn’t.

  I didn’t have the time to complete my last-minute maneuver. We crashed to the ground.

  I woke with a mouth full of dust and grit mixed with blood. I spat the grit out, but fresh blood came right back in. When I opened my eyes, I saw only black. Bad sign. Then I craned my head back, and the nacreous haze of stars blurred into being. That was a better sign. Then a thunderous headache followed my moving. Bad sign again.