I hopped back to ground level. Neena hadn’t woken the first time I’d shaken her. She did this time, and shoved my arm away like I was trying to get her to wake up and come to school. The second time, she punched me. Not very hard, but – still. Hurt my feelings a little. Also my nose. She kept stirring after that, though, so I moved on toward Black Widow, who was a little less ornery.

  By the time I helped Black Widow wobble to her feet, Neena was gone.

  My heart leapt to my throat. It didn’t take long to find her again. She was staggering down the canyon, toward the bottom of an old rockslide. It would have been as much a climb as a hike, but the rockslide gave her a slope she could use to get out again.

  I called, “Peaches!” She grumpily waved me off.

  I had other work at the moment. I hoped she knew what she was doing – or that her luck would look out for her if she didn’t.

  Black Widow leaned on my good shoulder – without trying to make it look like she was leaning on me – as we three-legged-walked back to Josh.

  Blood had soaked all the way through his impromptu bandage. It drooled over his side, into the sand. His eyes were open, but I wasn’t sure he saw me. His pupils were wide and black, though he was staring directly into the sky. His breathing was shallow and rapid, and his forehead covered in sweat.

  I kneeled beside him, and set my hands lightly on his shoulders.

  “I don’t know if he’s going to pull through,” Black Widow said. Even through the concussion-induced slur in her voice, I could tell that this was her trying to stay optimistic.

  I didn’t know Josh. Didn’t know anything about him except the ways he was hurting, and the ways he’d tried to help me. I didn’t care if he used to be with the Reavers. People can change.

  I remembered the strange, cool feeling of his hands on my skin, and my skin mending. He could heal other people. He could change his own body, remold his bones. I hoped that meant that he could heal himself. But he seemed to have run out of energy. I hoped – desperately hoped – he hadn’t spent the last of that energy on me.

  I don’t remember setting my forehead against his, but suddenly that was where I was. I kept remembering his body convulse against mine, that hateful moment of Wolfram’s bullet ripping up his insides. I’d been too slow. I’d been trying to force my body to move, but couldn’t make it happen in time.

  I hadn’t been good enough to stop it. I hadn’t been fast enough.

  If I survived this, I was going to leave this business. I couldn’t hack it anymore. Nothing but blood and heartbreak left in it for me.

  Combat used to come a lot more naturally to me. Right now, all I felt was lost and old. I couldn’t forget the way Dad had looked when he’d wandered the fields, trying to remember his horses’ names, or looking for a dog who’d died ten years ago. How sad he’d looked, how lost. Until now, I hadn’t known what it was like to feel that old. That useless. Out of my element in a place that used to be my home. He had his ranch – I had my fights.

  “He’s gone,” Black Widow slurred.

  I looked up sharply. It took me half a moment too long to realize she wasn’t talking about Josh.

  She meant Wolfram. He’d left a streak of drying blood across the rock he’d been leaning on, but the man himself was gone.

  “Huh,” Black Widow said, audibly trying to railroad one muzzy thought into the next. “I would have thought he… I could have sworn he’d been kidney-shot. Shouldn’t have been able to move far.”

  “He wouldn’t have been.” Not under his own conscious control. Not in as much pain as he should’ve been in. But Johnny Dee wouldn’t care.

  There was no sign of Wolfram in any direction along the canyon. If he’d started moving not long after the fight ended, and kept up a speed that paid no mind to either pain or exhaustion, he could have gotten just about anywhere.

  I supposed this business did have one thing left for me besides blood and heartbreak. It tasted more and more bitter with every hour. But it was still a prize I would fight for.

  Revenge was somewhere out there, if I could seize it.

  •••

  I found one of my revolvers – no idea what had happened to the other – with three bullets. And Black Widow had kept hold of Dad’s Beretta. It had bullets loaded, but I’d lost the spare magazines.

  Wolfram had left his Desert Eagle behind, half-hidden under a rock. Funny thing was, it had no ammo. Strange that Johnny Dee had taken the magazines but not the gun. There must’ve been a reason for that I didn’t understand. But it meant the Desert Eagle itself was useless to me.

  No matter. I had enough killing tools for my purposes.

  For a second, I’d debated taking Shoon’kwa’s ring blade with me. But it didn’t fit my grip and I hadn’t trained in it. Besides, I still had the flip pocketknife. A bruise on my keister let me know it was very much still in my back pocket, and had been bouncing and rolling around with me all this time.

  I left Black Widow with her stunner pistol. There was a good chance she’d need it. I didn’t know how much time my friends’ head trauma would buy. When Josh had hit his head earlier, Johnny Dee had gotten back into him after only a few minutes. But he’d had his healing factor, and I didn’t think he’d been concussed as bad as my friends here. Still, Johnny Dee would only need to get his tentacles into one of them to bring the others down.

  I told Black Widow what to watch for. She held her stunner ready, though her aim wavered. If Johnny Dee got into her… well… no use thinking about what would happen then.

  Black Widow knew the clock was ticking, too. She wasted no time. “We got your message,” she said. “From your brother.” Her voice was thick, like listening to a drunk. “Came after you to help. Sensors picked up a couple signals before we crashed. You, in this canyon. And something else. Body heat source. Cavern entrance.”

  At that point, her train of thought derailed. She blinked several times. It was all I could do to keep from grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. “Where?”

  She squinted into the sun, and then at the canyon walls. She started to wave to one of them, and then stopped and considered another. For a moment, I was afraid her injury hadn’t left her up to the task of squaring the sensor map in her memory with what she saw.

  But, even with her brain falling to pieces, she was still sharp. She wouldn’t have been Black Widow otherwise. She pointed toward the same rockslide Neena had climbed.

  “That way,” she said, decisively.

  I wasted no time on goodbyes, and started moving as fast as my battered bones would let me.

  The slope was rougher going than I’d thought, and I hadn’t expected it to be easy. Even the bottom was steep enough that I had to brace myself with my good hand to keep my balance. Cascades of sand trickled loose under my hand, falling into my boots. The top of the rockslide was part-climbing, part-slipping, and all-not-looking-down.

  I wasn’t the only person who’d been able to make it up. There was no sign of Neena on the way, and she’d had nowhere to go but up. Every once in a while, I came across a little splotch of blood. Something Wolfram had left behind him.

  I paused close to the top and looked back. The vantage left little to the imagination as to how smashed-up Shoon’kwa’s airship was. The ship’s backbone had snapped when the nose had crumpled against the cliff. At least the smoke had stopped. Shoon’kwa, Rachel, and White Fox all clustered together atop the wreck. Black Widow sat upright near Josh. Nobody, except possibly Josh, was dead yet. If I couldn’t finish this, it would only be a question of time.

  All of it had happened because of me. Because I’d kept to myself how poorly I’d been feeling. If I’d fessed up earlier – told them how weak I was feeling – we might have figured out what was going on before Johnny Dee controlled my whole team. We would still have been in for a fight, but we’d have been in a lot better shape for it.

  The last part of the climb was the hardest. I pulled myself over the lip, and onto my feet.

  Hills crumpled the horizon, approaching the canyon in odd streaks, like some enormous beast had clawed them into the earth. Or Galactus’s teeth had scraped the planet, given us a nibble. The terrain wasn’t all that rough. But it did offer plenty of cover. And lots of places to hide.

  Pillars of clouds towered over the western sky. The still air of morning had given way to a strange and intermittently wild breeze. It stirred the sand around my grit-filled boots.

  That wind had erased any hint of tracks I could’ve followed.

  I closed my eyes. I had been through too much recently to feel despair at this moment. But this was in the same zip code. They were unkind neighbors, eying each other through the window blinds. It left the same kind of hollowness in my chest.

  I couldn’t search this whole land. Hell, I probably didn’t have time to make a beeline to Johnny Dee, assuming I knew where he was.

  Somebody nearby snorted.

  I cracked an eye open. I’d thought whoever snorted must have been right next to me, but this thing was still about a hundred feet away. I had to tilt my head before I saw, to my far left, a shape slide along the canyon rim.

  The snort should have settled the source’s identity. Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, I did not credit my eyes when Wheezer ambled up in front of me.

  She nickered as if making casual conversation. Good afternoon. How’ve you been? Nothing I had good answers for. By some lucky stroke, she looked as well-fed and watered as the hour I’d left her. I reached out and brushed my fingers across her mane, but she still didn’t seem real.

  It was not until my brain caught up with my eyes, and registered Neena slouched against Wheezer’s neck, that I started to believe it.

  Neena’s involvement helped the coincidence make a little more sense.

  “Hop on, bestie,” Neena said. “We’re going hunting.”

  Nineteen

  Even when Wheezer had been younger, she hadn’t been built for hauling. The two of us on her back was more weight than she wanted to carry. Because I asked nicely and she was feeling generous, she allowed it. We still moved a lot faster than I could have alone. Enough that I could almost believe we were going to make it in time to save our friends.

  Neena pointed the way forward. Like Black Widow, she’d seen the sensor screen right before the crash. There’d been a heat signature in a cavern somewhere ahead.

  “Did I tell you recently that I love you?” I asked, knowing full well that I had. Not sure if she’d heard me with everything else going on, though.

  “Not recently enough,” she said.

  My heart quailed as soon as I said it. I wanted to pull it back. I’ve never been good at confessing those kind of feelings. “I was talking to my horse.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I try not to mix work and romance.”

  “Like hell you do.” Not if even half the stories she told me were true.

  I couldn’t continue the conversation in this vein, not while she was struggling with a concussion. It wouldn’t have been fair. Nor could I tell her that, no matter how this ended, I didn’t figure I was going to be working with her much longer.

  Her voice was getting clearer. The fog of her concussion was lifting. She knew it, too.

  As soon as she saw our destination – a long horizontal scar of a shadow across the base of a steep hill – she looked like she made up her mind about something. She said, “I’m feeling better,” like she really wished she wasn’t. “I’m going to have to leave you here. I’ll be a liability if he gets hold of me again.”

  A tightness squeezed my heart. “I don’t know that I can do this alone.”

  “I know you can.” Neena said it with such surety that, for a moment, I believed it, too.

  I dropped off Wheezer’s back when we were about half a minute’s walk away from the cavern mouth. Wheezer blew air through her nose, as if in relief. I tried not to take that personally.

  Wheezer could be a bear to control even with her reins, but she played nice for us today. It was like she knew how serious this was. Neena kept Wheezer’s eyes off me. After a moment’s struggle, Wheezer moved away at a canter. I felt lonelier than I ever had lost in the desert.

  Hardly a few seconds after they were gone, a figure shambled out of the cavern mouth.

  I tensed my hands above my weapons, but whoever it was didn’t seem to be armed. The figure stumbled forward, one disjointed step at a time. Their heels dragged against the sand.

  It was Wolfram. He was in a bad way. Yellow, sweaty face. Deep red eyes. Those eyes didn’t look much different than mine had after they’d been stippled with debris from his gunshot. His clerical collar was smeared with blood where he must have touched it with his gunshot hand. More blood ran in a ‘T’ across his shirt, as if, in the last moment he could have, he’d marked himself with the sign of the cross.

  A dark streak ran down the inside seam of his jeans. At first, I took it to be something more embarrassing than it was. But it was blood. Blood from the bullet wound on his back had run down his pants.

  Johnny Dee couldn’t reanimate corpses. At least, I didn’t think so. We would have been in a whole lot more trouble if he could. So Wolfram was, in some sense, still alive. But I doubted he was shambling under his own power.

  At least while Wolfram was under Johnny Dee’s control, Johnny Dee couldn’t go after my friends. He could only puppet one person at a time. The clock, for now, wasn’t ticking.

  “I should have taken over that Domino earlier in the fight,” Wolfram said, with Johnny Dee’s sneer. “I didn’t realize how dynamic that power of hers really was.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I learn from mine. It’s only a question of time before everything falls back into place.”

  “What the hell was your plan here, Johnny Dee? You obviously had DNA samples of your friends ready to go, no matter how careful they thought they’d been around you. How long were you figuring on betraying them?”

  Wolfram scowled. “I knew what I wanted. I knew I’d need help to get there. I didn’t figure I’d have to throw them away this soon.”

  “What you ‘wanted’ was to take some of the big names, the mutants most people would recognize, and use them to do terrible things. But why?”

  “Mutants only survive because normal humans put up with us, Outlaw. The sooner more of them see that they’d be better off in a world without mutants… the sooner the world’s going to come around.”

  The rage kindling inside me stoked hotter. “That’s not true. On any count.”

  He hadn’t just intended to kill the people whose bodies he stole, or use them to commit petty crimes. He wanted to do so publicly. The bigger the name, the better. Mutantkind was in bad enough shape already. Discredit the last few names that people unambiguously thought of as heroes, and mutantkind would lose our last protections against a hostile world. We’d survive, but… a lot more of us would get hurt and killed than needed to, and for what? Johnny Dee’s bigotry? Making a little money off us? I ground my teeth.

  “These idiots I was working with…” Wolfram said, and then trailed off, as if an idea had occurred to him. He held up his hand, as if to consider it.

  As casually as if he were plucking a flower, he pulled his pinkie finger back until something in the knuckle snapped. Even I winced at the sound. Wolfram’s mind was probably still in there, feeling everything. “They were thinking small. Banks. Fraud. Money. I needed their help to get started, get in with some organizations.” He smirked. “They thought they were using me.”

  “Looks like all your plans crashed against each other. Now everybody’s dead, and here you are… all on your pitiful lonesome again.”

  “Wolfram betrayed me, too, you know,” Wolfram said. “Hid his gun right before I took him over. He knew. He knew I’d stolen some of his DNA. And he tried to get one over on me, right at the very end.”

  “Johnny Dee, if you actually manage to discredit mutantkind–” discredit us more, that was, “– then ordinary folk are just going to come down on you that much harder.”

  He looked at me dead in the eyes, and said the worst thing I think I’d ever heard him say: “We all have to make sacrifices to do the right thing, Outlaw.”

  He wasn’t acting like a man with his back to a wall. That worried me. Wolfram had called Johnny Dee right earlier: he was a coward. That was why he’d belatedly tried to get back in Wolfram’s good graces after trying to kill him. Like a coward, he was always second-guessing. Only he was acting pretty sure of himself now. Either it was just that, acting, or he knew something I didn’t.

  He wasn’t moving to attack. He was content to trade barbs, trying to delay me. Maybe I’d been wrong about that clock not ticking.

  I watched Wolfram’s eyes carefully, looked one last time for the real Wolfram inside them. The cold, vicious criminal. The man who’d held Josh prisoner for days or weeks or months, forcing him to be Johnny Dee’s puppet. The man who’d orchestrated, or thought he’d orchestrated, my own repeated bodysnatching.

  He deserved every ounce of pain Johnny Dee was inflicting on him now, no matter if he’d tried to help me near the end. I didn’t know that I could forgive him enough to spare him this.

  But I supposed I was going to have to forgive him. The same way he did.

  Johnny Dee still thought I was listening. Wolfram said, “That’s why I’m still going to get in good with the Blackguard Network, or something like it. They’ll cover–”

  I drew my revolver and shot him through the face.

  I’d started running before Wolfram’s body folded to the ground. I was past him before the pieces of his head had stopped skittering and dancing on the rocks. No more delays. No more stalling. Whatever Johnny Dee was trying to do, I’d given him too much time already. And now I was going to show him why, if he couldn’t respect the rest of mutantkind, he would be better off fearing us instead.