This pause gave me a chance to focus on him. So far, he hadn’t seemed to notice me doing it.

  “I’m bored of this,” he complained.

  Somewhere, Wolfram growled, “Tough.”

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere. We need to go to ground, wait for her shield to fall, and then just kill her–”

  “No.”

  The afterimages were damned elusive. They vanished whenever I tried to look at them. My real sight overwhelmed what I was getting from him. Everything was hollow, unreal, and seemed to drift from me. If this was how Johnny Dee controlled his victims, it was a miracle he’d accomplished anything at all with them. Of course, he had had a lifetime of practice… but I suspected I was just receiving a shadow of what he did. He had more natural telepathic ability than me.

  “She’s dangerous,” Johnny Dee said. Then, more insistently: “She’s annoying.”

  “I don’t throw away assets because they’re annoying,” Wolfram said. “If I did, I would have chucked you to the curb long ago.”

  Johnny Dee fell silent. A sullen kind of silent.

  That was when I realized I could feel emotions over our link, too. Johnny Dee hated Wolfram. And he knew the feeling was mutual.

  The only reason they’d be working together was some greater cause… money, maybe. Anti-mutant rabblerousing. Or some plan I hadn’t gotten a whiff of yet. I had to find out.

  Johnny Dee turned his attention back to me. I had to pretend I hadn’t just seen and heard all that. “You’ve been thinking so much – and not at all defensively, oh no – about how you have hidden depths, cowgirl.” His voice sounded stronger when he meant to speak to me. “You really think you know who I am?”

  “Yeah,” I said, after only a moment’s consideration. “I really do. So how about it, Johnny Dee? What are you doing this for?”

  “Myself.”

  I blew air out my nose. “Come on. You’re in too deep for that.”

  “I mean it. Mutantkind has been nothing but hell for me, all my life. I’d be better off without you and, honestly, so would the world. M-Day almost made mutants extinct, but there are still too many of us left. People know all about us. They know enough to hate us. And especially now that they sense weakness, they’ll never leave the rest of us alone.”

  I’d felt more and more tired the longer I spoke with Johnny Dee, but nothing matched the exhaustion that swept over me now. “Do you mean to say that you don’t want there to be mutants… because people will judge you for being one?”

  “People are right to be afraid of mutants, Outlaw. That’s the thing. How many times have different mutants come close to destroying the Earth, or enslaving humanity, or both? Prison left me with nothing but time to think about this. I’m more sure about it than ever. People aren’t wrong to mistreat us, Outlaw. They treat us poorly because we deserve it. Mutants are a menace.”

  I’d never heard a mutant so calmly echo anti-mutant sentiment at me like it was the most natural thing in the world. If I hadn’t needed to keep my guard up, I would have sat against one of these rock walls.

  These were the same kind of things that bigots like the Reavers or the Sapien League said about us. Only Johnny Dee was talking about himself, too, when he castigated mutants. Even at the same time that he held himself above us.

  Johnny Dee said Josh had been in the Reavers, once. I wondered if that was how Josh and Johnny Dee had gotten together. Mutants who hate mutants. I’d have to find that out, if I ever got the chance.

  “If the rest of you weren’t around,” Johnny Dee said, “nobody would need to treat me like they do.”

  “You’d still be Johnny Dee,” I said. My voice tasted like ash. “Can’t escape that.”

  “Yeah, but I’m fighting for a future that can happen. You want a past that never existed. The world in westerns and country music and just… just really tacky things. I can’t even begin to express to you how tacky you are.”

  “Hey, blow off,” I told him, earnestly. At least I could get righteously angry about that rather than depressed-angry. Heck’s sake, everybody’s a critic.

  I could make out more of Johnny Dee’s surroundings. Colors came to me in flashes when I blinked. There was a cliff wall to one side, and an open drop to another. He was definitely sitting by a blackened firepit. Flakes of ash sat on the charred logs, light as snow. I’d never seen any smoke. But – of course Johnny Dee knew when I’d been sleeping, and also knew when it would have been safe to light a fire.

  Wolfram sat hunched on the opposite side of the fire like an angry bobcat warding his territory. Blood marred his torn shirt sleeve. I’d hit him in the gunfight back at the ranch but, unfortunately, not severely. Rayyan looked significantly worse than the last time I’d seen him. Downright wretched, even. His neat hair disheveled, his clothes sand-coated and filthy. He stared dead-eyed at the ground. Wilderness survival didn’t agree with him – unlike Wolfram, who only looked a little more haggard than I’d seen him last. No sign of bedrolls or food waste. They hadn’t taken much with them. No wonder Rayyan looked so spent.

  Josh sat off to the side. For the first time, I got a good look at him. Blond hair, sharp chin, and still filthy from our fight.

  “It was always the plan that we wouldn’t keep her around forever,” Johnny Dee complained to Wolfram. “Why not just off her now?” Not that he would have volunteered to kill me. Something had happened with Milos, something at the very edge of my memory. But Magik’s psionic shield gave him a good excuse.

  “I don’t throw away a good hostage before their time,” Wolfram said.

  All of the others, even Josh, looked at him.

  He glanced back and forth between them. “What?”

  “Leaving aside what happened to Milos,” the Malaysian man said, and gently, as though speaking to an especially dangerous child, “you all told me Outlaw is a nobody. A merc. Hardly famous. That’s why you chose her.” I have to admit, that hurt.

  “Yeah, but she has friends,” Wolfram said. “And it’s the friends who’ll pay the most.”

  It took every ounce of self-control I had to not twitch a muscle, or do anything that would give away to Johnny Dee that I was listening.

  I knew their plan. The knowledge came not in a flash, but like a stray memory – like something I had known for so long I couldn’t even remember the moment I’d learned it.

  There was a place along the canyon floor that they could cover from sniper perches. By timing their ambush right, waiting until I’d gotten out in the open, they could force me to shelter behind a fallen rock, and pin me there. Then they could send in Josh. A hostage I wouldn’t hurt, to take me hostage.

  I tried to nab some clue about their bigger plans, but Johnny Dee’s mind was jumping in too many different directions. I couldn’t just pull out what I wanted.

  His fingers stung and tingled, like he’d just gotten an electrical shock. An unwelcome memory pulsed through me: Johnny Dee crouched over his doll of Milos, twisting its neck between his fingers. A short, sharp shock of telepathic feedback had nearly thrown him back. It made him toss the doll away.

  The moment of Milos’ death had sent a neural shock back into Johnny Dee. It hadn’t used to be like that. Johnny Dee had once killed his victims with impunity. He’d spent a lot of time in prison developing his telepathic talents, though – strengthening the bonds between him and his targets, learning to see and feel more through them. Those talents were a spigot he couldn’t turn off.

  His heart had raced for hours after killing Milos, and his fingers still hurt. They were symptoms of some kind of neurological shock he was trying his best to hide from the others.

  Josh sat farther from the old fire than the others, like he knew he wasn’t welcome there. I had a hard time making out his face, but he looked miserable. His cheeks were bruised blue and purple. My anger burned hotter. Hopefully the bruising was just from our fight – but that was still Johnny Dee and the others’ fault. They’d made him fight.

  Johnny Dee looked away. He had something in his hands. A tiny little figure. He idly played with it, like a doll. It was me.

  The doll’s skin felt real against his hands. Warm, like a living person’s.

  Every time he moved one of my limbs, I felt a small but insistent pressure on my arms and legs. It had been there all the time, lighter than wind – so small that I might have missed it if I hadn’t seen Johnny Dee play with that living marionette.

  Somehow there was worse. The more I became accustomed to Johnny Dee’s senses, the more I became aware of it.

  There was no other name for it. No other pronouns suited it. It was an it. A silky-wet, heavy presence above the core of Johnny Dee’s gut. A mass of diaphanous, wormy tentacles pressing into his shirt. They never stopped writhing. And between them–

  It felt like a hole in his chest, like a piece of him had been carved out. When he hunched, I felt the inner walls of the cavity press together. Then a scraping it took me too long to realize were razor spines of teeth. A hot, wet mass – a terrible, ropey tongue, thick as my wrist – slid along that maw.

  The tentacles and maw were a part of him and apart from him. They were their own living things, an alien presence joined to his body. Johnny Dee couldn’t control them. He had no sense of taste in the maw.

  Even though I knew Johnny Dee was watching me, I couldn’t help shuddering. I’d seen a lot of different ways that the X-gene manifested in people, but this was one of the most sphincter-clenching. No wonder Johnny Dee hated being a mutant, if this was how he felt all the time.

  Two other things were always at the fringes of his attention. The first I immediately recognized as Dad’s old sewing kit. Scratched up transparent brown plastic cover, briefcase-style handle, multiple internal compartments. Bastards had stolen it. The sewing supplies had been emptied out, and replaced with bizarre odds and ends. An old comb of mine. Scraps of cloth. An old oral thermometer. Anything from Dad’s house that might have a scrap of my DNA on it.

  That was how Johnny Dee controlled people. He fed their DNA to that maw, and it… excreted… those dolls. They were focuses for his telepathic control. Johnny Dee’s dolls didn’t last forever. He needed a fresh supply of my DNA to make new ones, and so he’d brought it with him.

  To control Josh, though, Johnny Dee had something simpler. A little case, full of neatly arranged glass vials, sat by the old campfire. Blood. Once they’d had him prisoner, they must have forced him to submit to a blood draw.

  Josh pretended not to be looking at it, but he sat with it in the corner of his vision. It was the source of the gang’s power over him.

  Johnny Dee had promised to kill him if he got away. That would have been tough for him, though. He was afraid that more telepathic shocks like the one he’d gotten from Milos would kill him. Not that he would ever confess this weakness. He’d threatened to kill Josh again not half an hour ago.

  “You and I don’t want things that are all that different,” Johnny Dee told me. “We both want to belong to worlds that won’t have us. Only difference is, yours never existed.”

  “And what kind of world are you after?”

  “One without mutants,” he said. “Wasn’t all that long ago that there weren’t any.”

  “You’re wrong. There’s never been a world without mutants. We’ve always been there.”

  His voice turned hard as flint. “That’s a lie. Mutant propaganda. There are no mutants in history books. Not in prehistory, not in ancient Rome or China. None. We’re the products of a degenerate nuclear age.”

  He wasn’t reading the right kind of histories. “Doesn’t matter if they wrote us into books or not,” I said. I had the fire to match Johnny Dee’s flint. More fire than, until that moment, I’d known I’d still possessed. “We were there. Living with mutants is part of what it means to be human. And vice-versa.”

  “Never has been. And, soon enough, never going to be again. Your time is almost up. Your telepathic shield is almost down.”

  I felt Jonny Dee’s fingers all over me, while they played with that doll – giant-sized, clammy with sweat, rough-skinned and careless.

  But there was more. My foot was tapping the ground. Nervous energy. Johnny Dee’s was doing the same, I noticed. Same rhythm, too. I’d started first. He was taking after me.

  An idea started to percolate.

  “We’ll be seeing you, mutie cowgirl,” he said. “Real soon.”

  I’d been waiting for a long time to show my hand. And to say this. No better time. I’d probably only have one shot.

  Johnny Dee sat in easy reach of Dad’s old sewing kit. For a moment, I was tempted. But never more than tempted. I knew what the right choice was.

  “You can kiss my chapped mutie cowgirl ass,” I told him.

  I drew back Johnny Dee’s foot, and, with a swift, hard kick, booted the case of Josh’s blood samples over the cliff edge.

  I reached toward the sewing kit, but it was already too late. Johnny Dee’s muscles locked. Josh was the first to bolt upright. The others followed suit half a second after.

  Wolfram’s face was a mask of outrage, fixed on Johnny Dee. “What in Hell’s name are you doing?”

  Josh didn’t wait to ask questions. He bolted.

  I couldn’t do anything more for him. Johnny Dee froze me out. He’d figured out I was there. I couldn’t control his body through the link – not really. What I had done was send an impulse, and he hadn’t been on guard against it. Now he was. I couldn’t do it again.

  Wolfram drew on Josh, but half a second too late. Josh had broken his spine into a C-shape and was running low to the ground like a cheetah, his hands almost touching dirt. Wolfram’s aim was too high.

  Then the doll of me slipped from Johnny Dee’s fingers. The telepathic bond broke. I lurched back into my body.

  Coming back to myself felt good and awful at the same time – like the relief you get after throwing up, or the hollowness from a migraine finally surrendering to pain-killers.

  As far as ending long-distance conversations went, it was a trifle bit more satisfying than slamming a phone on its receiver.

  I didn’t have time to appreciate it. A gunshot echoed through the canyon. Unmistakably the heavy boom of Wolfram’s pistol.

  I hadn’t seen the landscape around Johnny Dee clearly. Everything had all been blotches and ghostly afterimages. It had been all I could to do make out faces among those purple shadows. I didn’t know if there had been cover for Josh to run to. I hoped so, but hope was all I could do.

  I listened for another shot. None followed.

  Fifteen

  I’d lost the gang’s tracks while I’d checked the corners and shadows of the cliff side village but picked them up again easy enough. They’d left a wide path, heading out on a downward slope. They hadn’t bothered to hide themselves. They’d wanted me to know where they headed: down, down, down, to the lower levels of the canyon, with all its shadows, caves, and crevices.

  They’d been confident. I broke into a run. I had to move fast, while they were startled and discombobulated. I chased the sound of the gunshot. The canyon didn’t leave me many other directions to go.

  Fast as I went, I couldn’t go fast enough.

  I was only minutes out from the cliffside village, on a descending escarpment a couple dozen feet off the canyon floor, when the rock wall behind me exploded in a cloud of dust and shards. I felt a needle-spray of limestone chips strike before I heard the crack of the rifle shot.

  I jumped.

  My legs stung when they struck the sand, but that and the adrenaline was just enough to let me know I was alive. Almost felt good.

  I landed behind a broken-off chunk of a boulder. A deep scour in the earth behind it showed where it had fallen and scraped a trail, and pretty recently – “recently” here meaning the past century or so. I nestled into the divot it had carved out.

  This wasn’t their planned ambush site, not as Johnny Dee had pictured it. They’d had plenty of time to scout the area beforehand, though. And maybe Johnny Dee had figured out their first plan was compromised. I couldn’t risk poking my head above cover just to look around. There’d been too many places where somebody could have shot at me from. The rim of the canyon, the caves in the wall, even the calved rock strewn about the bottom. But just before I jumped, I thought I’d seen motion around the shadows of the next bend in the canyon’s path.

  The shot I’d heard a few minutes ago had sounded farther away. My attacker must have run toward me as fast as I’d gone at them.

  I shrugged off my rifle’s shoulder strap and then my jacket. Then I waved the jacket over my head, above cover. A gunshot swiftly followed. I’d used this trick once before, but that had been on Milos, and the others hadn’t seen it. Someone’s nerves were high-strung – or they had eyesight just as bad as mine.

  I didn’t think high-strung or poor eyesight described Wolfram. Johnny Dee didn’t fight with guns. That left Rayyan.

  “Made you shoot,” I shouted, gleefully.

  OK, adrenaline might have been making me a little giddy.

  That second shot had come from a different place than the first. I thought I had a pretty good mental map of the battlefield now.

  Wolfram had been pretty competent so far, but he made the mistake of talking. “Outlaw!” he called. “Throw out your weapons, and I’ll let you talk–”

  Wolfram had a weakness for talking when he shouldn’t have. His voice helped me figure out where he was. That meant Rayyan was probably in the other position.

  And I had one more advantage – I knew that, at least as of a few minutes ago, Wolfram hadn’t committed to killing me. He also had a steady aim, which meant that I had to worry most about Rayyan. He was freaking out, and the most unpredictable.