Voices called out of the dark. At least one – “Hey, Freak! Get back here!” – was some distance far above us.

  A pain-dulled horror settled over me. I was still mashed against my opponent.

  His breathing was ragged, but he was very much alive. I heard a steady click-click-click like knitting needles as his bones fused themselves back together.

  At the beginning of my career, I would’ve thought myself weak for sticking around with my attacker. But I wouldn’t have left him. At least, I don’t want to think I was ever the kind of person who would have left him. It took me quite a while of working as a merc to figure out that it took more strength to stay than to go. All my instincts, every bolt of fear in my body, wanted me to get the hell out of there.

  But they were calling for him. If Johnny Dee was still in control of him, they wouldn’t need to do that.

  The other reason why you never hire a heartless merc is that they rarely test their courage. Cowards, the lot of them. You have to have a conscience to stand your ground when every other part of you is screaming to run.

  I couldn’t leave the fear behind, though – no more than I could the pain in my head. Another thing that I learned pretty quick when I started working with Neena is that a joke can cover up a lot of emotion I’d rather not show.

  “So I’d call that a tie,” I told him.

  He was awake. “You’re atop me,” he pointed out. “Pretty sure the ref calls it for you.”

  I grinned, and some of the fear vanished. The rest of me hurt too much to laugh, though.

  “Feeling all right?” I hazarded. What had Johnny Dee called him? Josh?

  “Never better,” he said. But there was a slur in his voice.

  I was pretty sure I heard Johnny Dee’s voice calling with all the others. In a way, though, hearing him was a good thing. It didn’t seem likely that he could both search and telepathically control his puppet at once.

  Johnny Dee didn’t need to see his victims to control them. He saw through their eyes, heard through their ears – did everything but feel their pain. I had no doubt Johnny Dee would be controlling Josh right now if he could. Something was stopping him.

  “Very sleepy,” Josh said. “Would like you to get off me now.” He didn’t sound all that old. Late teens, maybe. Next to me, he was a kid. A tall kid, but a kid.

  “Did you hit your head, big guy?”

  “Mmhmm,” he said, dreamily. “On the way down. Bounced off the side of the cliff.”

  I doubted I’d actually broken his neck earlier. He had known that I was coming and must have remolded himself so that I hadn’t hit anything vital. Falling off the cliff hadn’t given him time. If I had to bet, based on everything I’d seen so far, his healing factor likely needed conscious control. And energy, too. The concussion had robbed him of both.

  The right side of my scalp felt warm. In the desert night chill, that probably meant blood. He seemed to have gotten it worse, though. The battered and shaken clockwork of my cognition was rattling back into order.

  “Whoa, there,” I told him. “Stay awake. I need you here.” When the only answer he gave was a muzzy mumble, I pinched his ear. Hard.

  “Owww,” he whined.

  I wanted to tell him to keep his voice down, but any quieter, and he might drift away. “Come on. Stay.” Trying to keep his mind on the situation, I asked, “Is that mangy-haired creep trying to control you right now?”

  “Ohhh yeah. What’s up with him, anyway? What’s his– what’s his problem?” He was fading away again, and so I pinched. His voice sharpened. “He’s trying to control me now. Can’t.”

  “Head injuries block him. Good to know.” I remembered the scans of my brain Triage and Tempus had shown me. The centers of telepathic ability were physical structures like anything else in the brain. They could be jarred or damaged.

  “He was bounced out pretty hard,” Josh said. “Usually… last thing he does before leaving me is erase my memories of what he did. Didn’t have time to… time… to… the time to have time…” He chuckled, finding something funny enough to hurt himself laughing. Then he winced.

  I didn’t have a moment to shudder at the idea that, whenever Johnny Dee had taken over my body, I’d been aware of it and not able to do anything about it. “Hurt much?” I asked.

  “Just my ear,” he slurred. “I’m good.”

  “The hell you are.” Not two minutes before we’d fallen off that cliff, he’d sounded beyond scared. The only reason he wasn’t now was because his judgment had been knocked as senseless as the rest of him. “Is what Johnny Dee said true? Did you used to be with the Reavers?”

  “Could we not… talk about that right now?”

  For the first time since Wolfram had clubbed me, I had a bare second to think. Wolfram had been armed the last time I’d seen him. I doubt he’d lost his guns or run out of ammo. He could have shot me. From where he must’ve been standing, he would’ve had a good shot. I would have been silhouetted against the sky.

  He’d settled for cracking me over the head. Why? It certainly hadn’t been out of concern for my welfare.

  He’d wanted me for something. And I didn’t have to be healthy for it. “What do Wolfram and Johnny Dee want?” I asked.

  “Be evil.” I rolled my eyes, but he couldn’t see it. “Take over part– port– prominent mutants. Big names. Names people know, who assoth– associate with mutantkind. Commit crimes.” He shrugged. “And make money.”

  “Was that what they were doing with me? Just… commit crimes.”

  “No. Doing something special to you.”

  “Check down there!” called a commanding voice, high above us. Malaysian accent. Rayyan. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard us or just gotten lucky. Either way, time was short.

  The world spun as I stood. It tried to throw me off into the galaxy of pain whirling around me. I stayed upright.

  I put my good arm under Josh’s shoulder. I may have been battered and dizzy, but I still had my strength. I could’ve carried him. Heck, I could have juggled three of him. But when I stooped to lift him, he pushed me away, and strong enough to let me know he was serious.

  “He’s getting closer to stealing me again. I can feel him sinking his teeth into me.” I couldn’t see him smile, but I could hear it in his voice. “Good news, I guess, as it means I’m recovering. My healing ability’s coming back. Can’t really control it sometimes.”

  “In other circumstances, that’d be a real neat power.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  I couldn’t see much of him in the dark. But if I could have seen, I bet I would have seen his cuts and scrapes start to close, and bruises ooze back under his skin.

  Josh didn’t deserve any of what was happening to him. If Johnny Dee got his tentacles back into him, I didn’t know that I could save him. Another blow to the head might knock him out, but at the price of a life-threatening concussion.

  I felt terrible, and not just from the fall. I didn’t know what I could do for him. I was inadequate. If Neena were here, she could have thought of something.

  A bare handful of minutes ago, I’d snapped his neck. Now the thought of abandoning him to these vicious, lowdown, jumped-up goons felt like the most shameful thing I could have done.

  But he was right. I had to go. I couldn’t fight Johnny Dee using a living puppet as both combatant and hostage.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I really must have been getting old. I’d never failed at anything as hard as I’d failed tonight.

  “Stay strong,” I said. I brushed my hand across his forehead, hoping it wouldn’t be the last kind touch he’d ever feel.

  ’Course, he had to ruin the moment by saying, “Yes, Mom.” His voice was just slurred enough that I couldn’t tell if he was hallucinating or being sarcastic.

  Still, the irritation distracted me from the many pains, physical and otherwise, of running. For a while, anyway.

  •••

  When my body gave up on running, I staggered-walked a good distance – long enough for the sky to turn the wan gray color of the grave. Then my injuries caught up with me.

  Well – that wasn’t quite true. They’d always been with me. They made my head spin so much that I couldn’t move in a straight line. They jabbed spurs into my bones every time I took a step. But it wasn’t until that predawn, however many hours since I’d left Josh, that the rest of my body kindly tapped me on the shoulder to let me know I couldn’t go on.

  It wasn’t a feeling I got all that often. Last time had been… well, I don’t think it had ever happened before. I’d always been too cussed to quit.

  I wondered if that was one of the signs of growing old – losing your cussedness. That would have been one super-power down. The most important one.

  I’d stumbled from tragedy to disaster with nothing to show for it. Three months ago, I was fine. A week ago, I thought I was fine. Yesterday, I thought I was on my way to healing. Every time I’d set to climb myself out of a pit, I’d stumbled into a deeper, darker one. I’d landed knee-deep in a nest of snakes. I’d left a mutant hostage to murderers and monsters.

  My body was kind enough to give me time to find shelter, but its ultimatum stood.

  I had no idea how far I’d traveled, or in what direction. I was surrounded by strange land formations, half-eroded and punched through with uncannily smooth holes. They towered around me. The rest was flat desert. It was a contradiction of a landscape, lunar in theme if not in realism, like a matte-painted background from a 50s sci-fi movie. I had no doubt the rock was beautifully layered in red, orange, and yellow, telling tall tales of thousands of years, but all the predawn showed me was black and gray.

  I crawled a little bit up one of the taller of the spires, over the rim of an eons-old depression. It was more a bowl than a cave, but it was all I could manage. Its taller side was facing east, which was enough.

  I would have loved to catch some of the dawn’s rays, although not for long. If I fell asleep under the desert sun, I could wake up burnt so bad I had blisters. The air would warm soon enough anyway. I bundled my tattered and dust-smeared coat over me, and huddled at the bottom.

  If I’d been concussed, and I certainly hurt like I had been, the most dangerous thing for me to do was fall asleep. I should have been fighting against that as hard as I could, just like I’d made Josh stay awake.

  But I didn’t have that kind of fight in me anymore. I fell asleep immediately.

  One thing you should know about merc life: the moment you think things are at their worst, something even more awful comes along, just to prove you wrong. There’s nothing this lifestyle likes doing more than kicking you while you’re down.

  Icy tendrils pushed into the back of my sleep. I tossed and twisted. Even in my deadened, dreamless slumber, I knew the feeling.

  Johnny Dee’s clammy mental grasp, squeezing tight around the back of my brain.

  Thirteen

  I jolted awake. The feeling of Johnny Dee’s tentacles slipped away like worms sliding between my fingers. It was one of the most nauseating things I’d felt, and I would have thrown up right then if I’d had anything to eat in the past several hours.

  I’m no stranger to a good hangover. This was like that times ten. Midmorning sky pried through my eyelids even with my arm cast over my face. My throat was as parched as the rock I lay on. And my headache was an unholy synthesis of dehydration, concussion and the stress of prolonged terror.

  None of it had been as bad as those tentacles. They’d felt as real and slimy as the ones sprouting from Johnny Dee’s chest. I waited for the puppet strings to tighten around my limbs.

  Nothing happened. For the time being, I was still myself.

  But I sure hadn’t imagined that feeling.

  I woke up with my eyes irritated and wet, like they’d been watering all night. No surprise, given how scratched-up they’d gotten. But, to my relief, what I could see was clearer. Some of the grit still in my eyes must have shaken loose, and my eyes had healed around them. It wasn’t all gone, but it was better.

  In daylight, and with a little less fuzz in my eyes, the landscape no longer looked like an alien planet. Color flooded everywhere. Brown, burgundy, pale tan, and yellow-white limestone. Something about the rock towers tickled the back of my mind. I didn’t have the spare capacity to chase that thought, though.

  I squinted into the open sky. I hoped Elias was safe. I hoped, just as fervently, that he had gotten a message through – and that, sometime soon, I’d see Shoon’kwa’s airship up there.

  For now, I was alone.

  It belatedly occurred to me that I’d betrayed Wheezer. I was heading away from the direction I’d left her. Too late to change course now.

  I had no idea how long I had left to myself. Magik had said her shield would last three to four days, but Johnny Dee had talked about it like it would come down tomorrow. Magik was one of the best in her field… but she hadn’t known her barrier would need to defend me against concentrated attack. I had to assume Johnny Dee was right.

  I’d rested enough. No matter how much my body needed more sleep than the three to four hours it had gotten, it wasn’t going to crash on me as hard as it had last night.

  I still had some cussedness left after all.

  Time to take stock. To my immense relief, both of my water canteens were still with me. They had leather skins but steel backing. One of them had gotten banged up pretty bad (against my thigh, ow), but neither of them had breached. I couldn’t help myself – as soon as I tasted water, I guzzled the contents of one of the canteens in under a minute. Afterward, I felt like maybe a third of a human being again.

  My protein bars had been crushed into protein dust, but protein was the important word. So long as I didn’t think about it, the nausea of Johnny Dee’s touch didn’t come back. I squeezed the wrappers out over my mouth like a ketchup packet. Up to half of a human being.

  Then – weapons. My hunting knife had gotten dented in one of those falls. The tip had bent over ninety degrees inward, leaving it about as useful as a can opener. But the pocketknife was fine. More worrying was all the ammunition that had spilled last night. All I had left for Dad’s Beretta was what was loaded in it. I found two loose bullets for the rifle floating around in my other pocket. My revolvers were fine, miraculously.

  What shouldn’t have stung as much as it did was that I’d lost Dad’s hat. I hardly went anywhere without a hat, and I needed it out here. But it was gone. Dad would have said, kindly, that there was no use crying over something lost. And he would’ve been right. But I still didn’t feel like myself without it.

  My bandages were dry, at least. The wound hadn’t bled again. That was the end of the good news. My arm was now so stiff it felt like somebody had stolen it overnight and bolted a plank of wood onto my shoulder. It hurt worse than Thanos’s ego after that time Squirrel Girl beat him. Worse than Black Widow’s catsuit-chafe. Worse than that time I’d heard Tony Stark’s self-sealing armor had come down too close to his chest and pinched his nipple.¹⁵

  15 We can neither confirm nor deny that this happened. –Ed.

  That was something else that kept me from feeling like myself. I didn’t have anybody to share witty analogies with.

  I triple-checked my revolvers, made sure nothing had jostled loose in the chambers, and clicked their cylinders into place. I was a hunter again.

  A hunter chasing hunters. In my concussed stupor last night, I’d apparently retained enough sense to scramble over rocks, and to scuff my trail passing over sand… though I could remember doing either of those things.

  But I had not been retracing my steps for long before I found other bootprints passing over mine.

  There were four pairs of them. They included Josh’s… once again Johnny Dee’s hostage and puppet.

  A dim memory resurfaced. At one point last night, I’d left some obvious tracks as a feint. I’d gone into a dry creek bed leading toward a rocky gulch, and then scuffed out my backtracking. It had worked. The gang’s footprints led right toward the creek bed.

  They’d followed the creek bed for a while and then left, still heading toward the gulch. By the time they’d reached this point, they must have realized they’d lost my trail, but they neither stopped nor slowed. They just kept marching.

  Maybe they’d given up following me. They might have figured out that, if they made their tracks obvious enough, I’d be following them.

  They didn’t have to chase me. If they couldn’t find me, all they had to do was wait me out. Magik’s telepathic shield would die, and then Johnny Dee would have me.

  The desert morning was absolutely still. Yesterday, crawling along the top of that cliff, I’d imagined I could have heard anyone’s breath from fifty yards off. Today, unvarnished by the surety of my own superiority, I knew what the quiet meant. Anyone lying in wait would be able to hear me from even farther away. My heartbeat was a drumbeat in my ears.

  Worse, though, was a static that started to fill my ears. It was dreadful and pounding, like a headache if it were turned into a sound. Sometimes it was a car radio stuck between stations – I kept hearing fragments of voices caught between screeches and howls and harsh staccato pops.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out the static wasn’t natural.

  Johnny Dee’s voice said, “–have her.”

  I couldn’t help it. I froze in place. It was like the icicles sinking into my spine were real, and jamming my nerves.

  I recognized Josh’s voice: “–can’t be worth it to you guys–”

  Then there was a static pop harsher than all the others, as heavy as a physical blow. Wolfram. “Stay quiet, you little sh–”

  “I know where she is now,” Johnny Dee.

  Silence. A long silence, full of muted static.