Then: “Hi, Outlaw.”

  “Johnny Dee,” I said.

  He confirmed what I was afraid of, that he could hear me, when he said, “I’m… thrilled you remember me. Last time, we weren’t face-to-face all that long.”

  “Yeah, well. Just luck. As mutant-hating psychopaths go, you were pretty forgettable.” A little black lie. I never could have forgotten anyone who’d violated me like Johnny Dee had. My grudges were as immortal as the eons of fossils under my feet.

  But I wanted to piss him off. See if I could prompt some unforced errors. It wasn’t like he would do anything worse to me than he was already planning.

  “What’s your deal, anyway?” I asked him, echoing Josh. “I can make a guess. You hate yourself as much as the rest of us hate you, but you’ve convinced yourself the problem is that you’re mutant, not that you’re just a garden variety scumsucker.”

  He didn’t snap at the bait, but even through the telepathic static, I heard the anger mounting. “You really ought to be nice to me.”

  “Gonna wish me into the cornfield if I don’t, you overgrown, overpowered brat? You can’t control me right now, or you already would be.”

  I’d always felt a good offense made up for a weak defense. For a few seconds, he was quiet enough that I thought it had worked.

  Then he said, “I can feel how scared you are, Outlaw.”

  I blew air through my nose, but didn’t bother arguing it. If he really could sense my emotions, then denial would make me look worse. “What’ve you been up to, Johnny Dee? Your powers didn’t used to work like this.” I’d always thought of him as more of a puppeteer than a proper telepath.

  The moment I asked the question, though, I started second-guessing. Johnny Dee could puppet people from a distance, which meant he had to see through their eyes, and hear what they heard. Some kind of telepathy had to be involved.

  When I’d first realized that it was his pull that had pointed me home, not my own fatal nostalgia, I thought I’d had it all figured out: our telepathy was one-way, from him to me. He tried to puppet me, to give me commands, and I just received them.

  But I hadn’t been thinking about that carefully enough. I had to be sending something back if he were receiving sight and sound from me. At the New Charles Xavier Institute, Triage had looked at the scan of my brain confidently, like he’d seen this a dozen times before. He worked with telepaths; he knew what a fully-functioning telepath’s brain looked like. He’d thought I was developing telepathic abilities because he’d seen no reason why I couldn’t both send and receive.

  Two-way meant there was room for backwash. Feedback. Piggyback signals.

  Carefully, very carefully, I wormed my way toward him. I wanted to see what he saw. Hear what he heard.

  “I like to hold some things back, for surprises,” he was saying.

  “I’ve got some surprises, too. I’m looking forward to showing you.”

  “You know how this is going to end, Outlaw. You could be making things so much easier on yourself. We might hurt you a little less.”

  “You’re right. I have been thinking a lot about how this is going to end.”

  I tried to slam the metaphorical phone on the hook by imagining increasingly bloody and inventive ways to kill Johnny Dee.

  He didn’t speak for a long while after that, but I could sense his presence. It was dull static crackling in the back of my brain.

  God, but I hated telepathy. At least with smartphones, I could get the satisfaction of ending a call by smashing the damn thing against a rock. This was as awkward as a call that never ended. A real you hang up first, no you hang up first.

  The static in my head amplified, but not enough to obscure his words. “Bit by bit, your shield is falling… bit by bit.”

  Thus began an intermittent series of the most agonizing conference calls in my life.

  •••

  “Do you know you’re everything I can’t stand about mutants?” Johnny Dee asked.

  This was just an example of the scintillating conversations Johnny Dee treated me to as I tracked his gang.

  He kept me from thinking clearly about how I was going to keep myself from walking into a trap this time. No doubt that was what he wanted.

  “You try so hard to blend in with normal humans,” he said. “You’re so sure that you’re just like them underneath it all. You keep trying to fit in, and it never ever works. You can hardly survive out with the dregs.”

  “Talking about me or you?” I muttered.

  The sands of the west Texas desert were never so loose that they fit what most folks imagined when they thought “desert.” What they had in mind was really more Saharan. There were no dunes here. This sand only got more tightly packed and brown as I went on. An anomalous rain must have spritzed through like a dog shaking off after a bath.

  I tried to put Johnny Dee out of my mind and focus on where I was going. The land had teeth. I knew what it was about these rock towers that had tickled my memory earlier. One of the many mistakes people make about me is to think I don’t like to learn, or that I know nothing. Dad had taken Elias and me out here plenty of times – not this area in particular, but the region. Dad had been a real naturalist. He lived out here because he loved the land as intellectually as he did emotionally. I took after him in my heart, if not my career path. Just because classrooms and I didn’t get along, that didn’t mean I couldn’t understand and appreciate.

  These jutting towers were remnants of prehistoric volcanism. Millions of years ago, this whole region had been underwater. Molten rock had squeezed up through cracks and crevices in the softer seabed. Then everything around them had weathered away. The igneous columns were all that was left.

  The towers were so old that they were pretty weathered themselves. They were like old tree trunks, knotted with holes. Piles of calved-off rock played the role of roots. They were a damn sight impressive up close.

  And they offered plenty of cover for just about anybody to hide behind.

  The gang’s bootprints were headed toward the gulch, but they could have doubled back around. I kept a careful eye on the towers as I passed and stepped carefully around their bases, letting one of my revolvers lead the way. My nerves were taut as an overdrawn bow. Sweat stung my eyes, which didn’t need help stinging, thank you very much.

  “Getting warmer,” Johnny Dee told me.

  It had been a long time since I’d been out this way. This part of my world hadn’t changed since the last time I’d looked at it, but, like the stars, it had… shifted. Or something inside me had changed. I didn’t see the same things I used to. There was danger here, now. Ambushes.

  “Colder,” Johnny Dee said.

  I’d lost count of the number of times my patience had snapped. “Will you shut the hell up?”

  “Coldest,” he said. “Damn, Outlaw. You might as well give up now.”

  Slowly, I let my gun drop. He was just messing with me, but, at the same time, I had to assume he saw everything I did. That may not have always been true, what with the way his voice sometimes faded out, but I had to proceed like he did.

  It was hard to hunt under these circumstances… but not impossible. Once I was confident I was close, I’d have to leave their trail, keep my eyes on the ground. Not show Johnny Dee any landmarks he could use to pinpoint my location.

  “Why’d you come to your old man’s house without backup, anyway?” he asked. And then: “You weren’t expecting to meet us there, were you?” As if he could sense that he was getting to me, he said, “I keep overestimating you, Outlaw. Expecting you to put two and two together. Or have any idea what you’re doing. But you just keep bumbling into trouble.”

  “Somehow, I’m still not as deep in it as you,” I said. “Your bosses hate you, you know. You should’ve heard what Milos had to say about ‘muties’ before he died.”

  “They’re not my bosses.” He sounded bitter. Good.

  “They sure aren’t your partners. They’re using you, Johnny Dee. I don’t know what for, but I bet you’ve seen enough that you could piece it together. Unless you’re living in denial.”

  Silence followed. He was having to talk aloud for me to hear him, I realized. He didn’t want to say too much in front of his partners.

  Maybe he’d said too much already.

  •••

  All the while, as he taunted me, I focused on trying to make out more from his side of the link. Shadows flitted across my vision.

  At first, I tried to ignore his voice, thinking it was drowning out everything else. But I couldn’t force it out. In the end, strangely, it was focusing on that voice that helped most. His voice gave me an anchor – something I could grab and hold onto, keep the rest of him from getting too far away. When I focused on his voice, the rest of his senses started to follow.

  Shadows swam beneath my eyelids like afterimages from a camera flash. Every time I blinked, the same afterimages formed. Gradually, they resolved into a landscape –high, rocky walls, a shaded dirt floor, and the pit of an old campfire. And the shapes of men.

  I was so caught up in this that I almost missed one of the more incredible things I ever found.

  I followed the gang’s bootprints into the rocky gulch. It was a big gash in the ground, following the course of an ancient waterway that no longer existed. The closer I got, the bigger the gulch seemed. A combination of my bad eyesight and close-to-the-ground perspective had kept me from gauging the size of it.

  As the day became hotter, a breeze had drifted in. It was the kind that was just strong enough to move tumbleweeds. Not enough to cool my forehead, but enough to kick up a curtain of dust. As it lifted, I halted in my tracks, certain I was hallucinating.

  I was looking down on a stone city.

  Fourteen

  I rubbed my eyes, looked again. The city was still there. But the perspective was off. For a moment, I thought I was looking at it from very far above. I swayed dizzily before I realized what I was seeing. The buildings were a lot smaller than I was accustomed to.

  Some of them were carved right out of the cliff face, and others were made from quarried rock. Long, dusty years had painted them the same knobbly texture as the limestone around them. Some were missing roofs or walls. It was ancient, and gorgeous.

  I couldn’t find my breath. I had severely underestimated the size of this depression. From a distance, it had looked like a faceless gulch. But “gulch” wasn’t the right word. It was actually part of a deeper, more complex system, the true extent of which the horizon still hid from me.

  For a moment I forgot all my aches and pains. I stood there, dust swirling around my ankles, in awe. Then I saw all the shadows and blind corners. Lots of hiding places.

  An escarpment path led downward. The bootprints tracked down it. I had to follow them into what I now realized was a canyon. Sidetracking would have taken hours that I didn’t have.

  With one hand on a revolver and the other held out to steady myself, I started downward.

  The stone dwellings weren’t on the canyon floor. They perched in the middle, on a shelf overlooking the rest of the canyon. A nice and defensible position. Anyone attacking whoever had lived here could only have entered from a handful of directions, each of which involved a precarious climb. This was the easiest-looking path, and I still had to fight for balance.

  A high and sturdy rock wall, hardly touched by time, guarded the path. It had a single carved entrance. Gun ready, checking each corner as I passed, I found nothing but shadows.

  Before colonization, this area had been inhabited by a whole bunch of different indigenous people. A lot of Mogollon and Pueblo peoples built cliff dwellings like this. I didn’t remember any being discovered around here, but, hell, I didn’t stay up-to-date on archaeological digs. Just because I liked to learn, that didn’t mean I was an encyclopedia.

  Some of the shock of the beauty was wearing away. This whole place had a stink of invasion. It would’ve been hard for anyone to eke out a living up here. No space for pasture or crops, and poor hunting above. This was a redoubt. A place where people came to shelter during a storm, or where invaders might retreat to while waiting for reinforcements against hostile locals.

  Someone had set up plastic placards inside most of the structures. I picked one up. It declared that this “archaeological site was left preserved for future investigation” and promised retribution by some state code or other if the site was disturbed.

  I set it carefully back in place. Hey, I can be respectful.

  In the next dwelling over, an identical placard lay upside-down in the corner. Someone must have picked it up to read, as I had, and then tossed it away.

  Dad would have loved to see this place. He’d taken Elias and me all the way out to see Mesa Verde once. And while this place was nowhere near as big as those castles, it still would have left him floored, and spending hours filling up the memory on his camera.

  “Who was he?” Johnny Dee asked, so suddenly that I whirled around with my gun already in hand.

  Nobody. Johnny Dee’s mocking chuckle echoed through our telepathic link.

  “You must’ve loved him quite a bit if you’re feeling that way about him,” he said.

  I didn’t like what this implied. It was more than my senses that he’d gotten into. He was poking through my thoughts. He’d traced them far enough down their rabbit holes to realize I’d been thinking of a specific person, a man.

  My heart had skipped several beats. I felt like I needed to sit down, and for once it didn’t have anything to do with the physical abuse I’d suffered. Of all the things I needed, this was the last. I stayed on my feet, just to prove to me – and to him – that I could.

  “Your daddy died ugly, didn’t he?” he asked.

  I couldn’t help it. At the mention of Dad, a hundred little flashbacks of the way he’d died played out in the back of my mind. Dad stumbling to remember my name. Getting lost in his own field, and admitting later that he’d gone out to work because he hadn’t wanted to feel useless.

  But there were new memories tangled up in those. Things had become entwined. Talking to Neena in that hotel room. Confessing to her. The way my friends – and everyone else – had looked at me in Tony Stark’s debriefing room. How I’d felt when Triage and Tempus had pulled me over to look at that brain scan.

  “You’re right to be afraid of getting old,” Johnny Dee said. “A mutant like you is just good for fighting. Who’s gonna want you around when you can’t even do that?”

  “I’ve never been the type of gal to have a retirement plan.” For as long as I’d known what I was, I didn’t figure that I would be able to settle down somewhere.

  “Give up while you still have some dignity left, Outlaw. Don’t make us search for you like you’re a lost toddler. Or like you’re your old man.”

  He was tired of talking. He wasn’t saying this because he wanted to. The cruelty was all his – but our mental link was showing me some of his fears, too. Wolfram’s eyes were hot lead weights. Johnny Dee squirmed under them. Wolfram must have ordered him to keep up contact with me.

  I thought about mentioning it, but that would have given away the game. I didn’t think Johnny Dee knew I could see the ghosts of what he did.

  “Let me share with you a little bit about things, as I see them,” he said. “You’re trying so hard to be part of a world that would never have you. I don’t know how you haven’t figured out that there’s no more hateful, anti-mutie people on Earth than salt-of-the-earth rural folk. Especially out here. Hell, they make me look tolerant, and I think the world would be better off without us.”

  “You know, that’s the first time I’ve heard you talk about mutants as an us. Your friends been reminding you how different you are?”

  He wouldn’t let me change the subject, so I figured I was right. “I’ve caught your memories about your neighbors. You think people like that would ever have you? That they’d ever let you make nice and live next to them, knowing what you are?”

  “I happen to believe people can get better, if they want to.” Even Magneto, former leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants – one of the mutants who’d made regular folks so frightened of us – had switched sides. “It’s why I don’t hold out much hope for you.”

  “They’ve never been the people you want them to be, Outlaw,” he said. “Your style, the way you dress, the way you talk, your whole shtick about the Old West… the ‘Old West’ never existed. It’s just a TV fantasy. The people who actually moved out here, the settlers and the outcasts, were even more hateful and violent than your neighbors. They would have killed you even faster. Just like they slaughtered the people who were living out here before them.”

  I tapped the tip of my boot against the side of one of the rock structures, just to feel it. It was plain to me now that Johnny Dee wasn’t here. Neither was his gang. I was alone with the stone and the shadows.

  I didn’t want to have this argument with him. In large part, he wasn’t wrong.

  “At least I have my ideals,” I said, my throat dry. Foolish or not, they were part of me. I’d even tried to talk myself out of them, more than once, but hadn’t been able to do it. That was how strong they’d stuck.

  They felt pretty foolish here, standing among the bones of a displaced civilization. The only comfort was that it probably hadn’t been my ancestors who’d forced this village’s inhabitants away. These walls had been set up to defend against attackers without gunpowder, which suggested they predated white settlement by centuries. Not that that changed the broader story.

  “I’d feel bad for you if we weren’t trying to kill each other, Outlaw.”

  I was still mostly sure he had to speak aloud to talk to me. I couldn’t hear him outside this telepathic link. Either he wasn’t here, or my real ears were getting their signals crossed with his telepathy. His voice sounded like he was right next to me.

  Johnny Dee fell silent. I got the distinct impression, though it was hard to pin from what, that he was focused on something other than me.

  I breathed out. I was going to have to watch my thoughts carefully. The last thing I needed was him figuring out that Elias was still alive. But not thinking of Elias was like not thinking of a pink Hulk. Couldn’t be done. I’d done a good job of keeping Johnny Dee distracted then, but I’d need to figure out a way to keep him out of my head for good. Or make him want to stay out for good.