I’d said it without thinking about it, but I knew immediately that I was right. My instincts pointed the way, as usual. There was another person here. Overbearing. Thundering down.

  The storm. The form had taken shape from my memories and nightmares, but it had intent that didn’t come from me. It wore a cloak of my dreams, but it hid a very real threat. It was a stranger’s malice, boiling my way.

  I sat on my haunches and stared.

  The more I stared into the cloud, the more its contours unfolded. They expanded, enveloped me – became my world.

  All at once, I was no longer on the hilltop. The storm boiled through me. Bilious clouds poured through my ears, into my nose and throat, and then into my breath and blood.

  From inside, the cloud no longer looked like a cloud. It was just a dark, sullen mass of anger – all-encompassing and inescapable.

  Johnny Dee, inside my mind. Come to kill me.

  The storm boiled around me, but, somehow, I saw shapes in it. Figures. Figments, like my dad on the hilltop, but different forms. They resolved rapidly, gaining color and form.

  These were Johnny Dee’s memories.

  The last thing I wanted to do was touch even more of him, but I had no choice. I couldn’t let him keep crushing down on me. I had to push back.

  A whirlwind of images tugged at my clothes and hair. I grabbed at the first thing that looked familiar. To my shock, I found myself in the control cabin of Shoon’kwa’s airship.

  Everything was silver, shiny, and clean. Not wrecked. Not on fire. The clouds outside the domed windshield were just as tall and energetic as the one in my dream, but, at this altitude, they were harmless little cotton balls. Brown Texas desert stretched endlessly underneath them. Black Widow casually leaned against the glass, a yawning eternity underneath her.

  Johnny Dee was watching through Shoon’kwa’s eyes. Shoon’kwa glanced casually behind her. All of the others were there, too, standing or leaning. Extremely unsafe positions for a crash.

  At the moment he’d been doing this, his physical self had been safely hidden in the cavern while the rest of Wolfram’s gang ran to the canyon to deal with me.

  “Anonymous employers are always trouble,” Rachel was saying.

  “Not always,” Neena said.

  “Always,” Rachel answered.

  “How the hell were we supposed to know Gifted Mind Technologies was a front for the X-Men?” Black Widow said. “Charles Xavier did everything he could to cover up the fact that he was on the board of directors.”

  “They wanted to turn a team led by a mutant against other mutants,” Rachel said. “Damned anti-mutant fanatics. They figured if we could get in, mess up the company’s work, good. If any of us got hurt or killed doing it, even better.”

  I knew it was a memory, and that I couldn’t change things here any more than I could have made my twelve year-old self less of a brat, but none of that changed the flush of panic that surged through me. I had to warn them. Had to change things, if only in this dream.

  I opened my – Shoon’kwa’s – Johnny Dee’s – mouth, but I couldn’t make any sound. Everyone in the control cabin turned to look at me.

  The windows darkened. A howl of rage split the sky. Johnny Dee had sensed my intrusion. The deck ripped away underneath me, and I fell into the screaming expanse.

  Back into my own memories.

  •••

  Something had happened when I plunged our two hands into the maw on Johnny Dee’s chest. The maw had gotten a gullet-full of both of our DNA – the blood on my hand, the blood on his hand. Plus whatever recursive feedback had come from shoving that doll of me back where it had come from. The result had been… some kind of telepathic shock, or overload. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it.

  “It’s a psionic clash,” Dad said, standing next to me as I hunched on the hilltop. “A crossed circuit of telepathic impulses, struggling to control a newly formed pathway.”

  “Hush,” I said. “I’m not smart enough to piece that together.”

  “I’m a figment of your memory,” he pointed out. “The words came from you.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. He did have a point. Also, even though I knew he wasn’t real, it still hurt to hear him say so.

  “You paid more attention to Magik and Triage than your conscious mind thinks you were capable of,” Dad said. He sighed, wistful. “In a different lifetime, you could have been a doctor or a scientist.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re my dad,” I told him.

  “I mean it,” he said. “But you had to go a different course.”

  “Didn’t feel like I had much of a choice at the time.” Leave home, or let my family get hurt. Go into the merc business, or see my mutant abilities – and an identity I was proud of – matter less than nothing. The last thing I would ever let myself do was become just another anonymous Houston waitress.

  Not that there was anything wrong with Houston waitresses. Just – wasn’t me. Never had been.

  “Well, it’s too late now,” Dad said. “Even if you wanted to change.”

  The pain of hearing that was almost physical, like a body slam. I gave him a look I hope expressed all that. “Too late?”

  Before I could ask him what he’d meant, the wind picked up again. This time, I felt it.

  I’ve been in a hurricane or two in my time. Not back home – we were too far inland to get much but the dregs of the monster storms that sometimes battered the state’s coast. Some of my jobs had taken me into them, though.

  The thing that’s always hard to understand about these storms until you’ve lived through them is just how wrong they feel. The winds are warm in a way that few other storms are. It’s hard to capture. On camera, to people who’ve mostly experienced inland storms, a hurricane looks like it should be freezing cold. It’s not. It’s so warm it might have blown in from an alien planet. All that charged, humid air is like the breath of a dragon. Like Thor’s hammer is crashing down to Earth, but hasn’t quite picked where to land yet.

  Not to get all metal-album-cover on you, but that was how this wind felt. It bore down on us, mad as a cornered boar.

  Dad disappeared under a sheet of driving fog. I could hardly see the grass under my legs. I thought I was lost to it, but an abrupt flash of lightning showed me where I was. I saw the hilltop – and other things, too. Shapes in the storm, things that hadn’t been there before. Buildings. Smokestacks and streetlights. Just outlines at first – livid afterimages burned into my retina by lightning bolts. But they became more solid as I reached for them.

  I hurled myself into the storm, raging at it as hard as it raged at me. I grabbed those images, assembled them one by one into a more coherent reality:

  Cityscape. Nighttime. Bright yellow and orange streetlights, illuminated windows.

  That was all of the New York skyline I had time to see. Most of the view was blocked off by anonymous brick walls. I got to know those bricks real well, close and personal-like, when someone’s fist smashed into my face. The momentum of the blow wheeled me around and planted me lips-first into the masonry.

  Something wet and squishy on my gut squealed its pain.

  The maw. I was in Johnny Dee’s body.

  As soon as the thought occurred to me, my senses split from his, like a cell dividing. I was myself, in my own body and my own clothes, farther down the alley. But I could also feel everything the men who’d surrounded Johnny Dee did to him. The kick to his knee. The punch, aimed at his throat, striking his chin.

  The Bronx. Shortly after M-Day. The number of mutants in the world had been winnowed from millions to less than two hundred. Mutants worldwide had been depowered, stripped of their identities – but not Johnny Dee. He’d had no idea how these three had divined what he was, but they’d cornered him, forced him into this alley, and were smashing his teeth right out of him.

  All around the world, mutantkind’s enemies had rallied, sensing weakness, and aiming to eliminate us for good. These men were all in their twenties, versus a scrawny Johnny Dee in his late teens. One of them had a jacket with a stylized “S” sewn onto it. The symbol of the Sapien League, a bunch of anti-mutant agitators who’d just marched on Central Park the day before. And they would do worse things in the future.

  I hesitated, on the edge of intervening. Few people deserved what these toughs were dishing out, but maybe Johnny Dee did.

  At the end of the day, though, I was going to be damned if I did anything to side with bigots. Against all my other instincts, I started running, barreling in to help.

  Johnny Dee’s vision was stained by tears. I could trace his thoughts as clearly as I felt each punch land. Those tears weren’t tears of pain. They’d come from rage and betrayal, with a smidge of self-pity mixed in.

  Johnny Dee knew these men. He’d been in Central Park with them yesterday. He’d joined their march. Shouted slogans with them. And he’d meant them.

  Johnny Dee reached toward the waist of his shirt. He’d never killed anyone with his tentacles before. Not deliberately. But he’d dreamed of it. Made elaborate fantasies where he would have to. He’d just hoped for some different targets than his ideological brothers.

  My momentum faltered. I stopped just short of entering the fray. But the memory took over. I’d become someone else in his eyes. No longer running, but falling. I was a shadow falling from the rooftops. Sweeping in on an impossibly thin silken strand.

  Johnny Dee saw a blur of red and blue. The rearmost of his assailants went down.

  The next in line had just started to turn when my gloved fist cold-cocked him in the jaw. He went down with no more sound than a grunt.

  I fought to pull myself back into my own body, and shake off the twist of dream-logic that had made me someone else. It took effort to become Inez Temple again, but I managed. And just in time to get a better look at what was happening.

  Johnny Dee’s friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man looked to have about half the muscle mass of the last tough standing. That didn’t stop him from picking the man up, and falling lithely onto his back while spinning the tough between his feet. Then, with a playful balletic twirl of his legs that belied the incredible strength behind it, hurled him down the alley. The tough crunched into the wall and fell on his head, unmoving.

  I winced. But Spider-Man was a lot more adept than I was at making sure his opponents survived their vicious beat-downs. A lot kid-friendlier in general, really. A couple quick thwips of webbing stuck Johnny Dee’s attackers in place, waiting for capture.

  Spider-Man twisted onto his feet. “Usually you have to pay admission for a ride like that,” he said. That man just could not help himself.

  Johnny Dee was in no state to appreciate the line. He slumped toward the alley floor. Spider-Man caught him before he fell all the way over.

  “Hey, hey, hey – stay with me now. Focus. I got here as fast as I could and I’m really hoping that was fast enough. Give me some sign it’s safe to move you.”

  Johnny Dee was staring through those big, featureless white eyes, without seeing them. Blood streamed down his face. The pain had gone away, but not the rage. His world was rage and adrenaline. Johnny Dee’s whole life had been a scream, trapped in his throat.

  The scream was silent, but he couldn’t hear anything else.

  And he didn’t really want to.

  For years, he’d dreamed of getting this close to someone so powerful. Stealing a snip of their DNA. Now, in the moment, his plans evaporated.

  All he heard was the scream between his ears. The rage. The hate. The urge to kill and kill and kill, and bring the rest of the world down with him.

  His hand was still on the bottom of his shirt. Spider-Man was close enough for a sting.

  Flashing lights danced across the front of the alley – red and blue to match Spider-Man’s costume.¹⁹

  19 Johnny Dee is remembering things a little differently than they happened in Son of M #1, but that’s natural. Trauma fogs memory. –Ed.

  Johnny Dee’s tenuous courage evaporated.

  When the EMTs got him into the back of the ambulance, it did not take them long to discover what Johnny Dee was, and from there to backtrace his identity. Soon enough, the police officers who’d responded to the call bracketed the back of the ambulance.

  It wasn’t that Johnny Dee was under arrest, though he did have warrants. Police across the nation had standing orders to “protect” the remaining mutants. The same thing was happening to mutants across the world, to heroes and villains and folks just trying to live as “regular” a life as they could. M-Day had, for now, wiped their slates clean. Everyone had new priorities.

  Spider-Man lingered in the back of the ambulance, listening to the EMTs as they talked about this mutant refugee camp being set up at the X-Mansion. Johnny Dee hardly heard them. There was too much blood roaring in his ears.

  He was starting to realize this was a memory. We were somewhere between a dream, a shadow, and yesterday’s reality.

  That bolstered his courage where it had failed before. He shoved the EMTs aside and charged Spider-Man. It wasn’t Spider-Man’s arms that raised to block him, but my own.

  The two of us crashed through the ambulance’s back doors, my hand around his throat, and the tentacles from his exposed chest wrapped around my arm, stinging, stinging, stinging–

  •••

  The burn of the stings and the venom never quite went away, even back on the hilltop.

  The storm stretched across the horizon, so close that the front was almost a straight line. But it had gotten here already, hadn’t it? Or had I beaten it back?

  No – that was nonsense. I couldn’t have pushed back a storm.

  “I reckon we should mosey inside,” Dad said, overdoing the folksiness, as usual.

  “We’ll never get back before the rain.” Though I didn’t actually see any rain under that storm.

  No. Not a storm. Johnny Dee. I had to remember that. The knowledge kept slipping from me. In the centrifuge of this nightmare, I was losing everything but my center. Soon enough, even that would fly apart.

  Johnny Dee kept battering me, over and over. I was losing to him.

  Was this symbolism? I hated symbolism.

  “Think you’re right,” Dad said, heedless. “We lost our chance a while ago.”

  I stood, having second thoughts. “Maybe if we run.”

  “No. We really are too late.”

  There was a sweetness and a sadness to him that I didn’t think I’d seen before. Dad had not been the kind of man to broadcast his pain. Not even when we’d lost Mom.

  Maybe, in this dream, he was becoming more like the man I always knew was there, rather than the one I saw most of the time.

  Or maybe I was falling apart faster than I realized.

  I didn’t run. We waited to get rained on. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him how he felt before the storm swept over us, and everything went dark.

  •••

  The thing that stood out to me most in my memories of the mutant refugee camp were the high walls. Same thing in Johnny Dee’s memory, too. They were the first thing to form out of the lightning and figments.

  Enormously tall beige walls, and metal-skinned guards at their gates. We saw the same thing through different eyes.

  We’d both been there. It was the first time we’d met. Though it would be a while, yet, before I discovered what a monster he was.

  I wasn’t going to let it happen the same way again.

  As soon as I recognized the walls, I started running. I bolted past tents, past guards, and past mutants’ startled faces – blue faces, violet faces, faces wreathed by fire.

  I tried not to care about any of them. I had to find Johnny Dee. Had to stop him.

  Something in the back of my head shouted that this was a memory inside a dream, that I couldn’t change it in any way that mattered, but that voice had been growing increasingly distant. One of the many pieces of me that had spun away. What mattered was here, and now. And here and now I had a good idea where Johnny Dee was. I still remembered where his tent had been.

  The towering walls were said to have been built to protect us. You didn’t have to look closely, though, to see that the walls were sloped inward – to make them more difficult to scale on this side. The cannons on the walls could shred anything trying to get in, but they could also “deter” anyone flying, hovering, or floating out.

  We were an endangered species. “For our security,” it was important that we remained where we could be protected. And since this refuge had started under the aegis of the X-Men, we’d trusted them, the first few times they’d said that. By this point, it had been plain for a while that things were getting away from the X-Men. Unlike Johnny Dee, I hadn’t needed to be coerced here. I’d come willingly. More fool me.

  Our trust was exhausted by now. Jazz flinched as I ran past. Peepers and Mammomax, the squirt and the elephantine giant, had set up a table to play cards. Mammomax hunched over the table like he was having a tea party with a fairy. Half a second after I burst into view, Peepers had upended the table, and taken cover behind it. Everybody’s nerves were keyed up, waiting for trouble to explode.

  Everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people I hadn’t seen in years. Some folks I would have given anything to catch up with. And plenty more I never wanted to see again.

  In the back of my mind, I knew these people had never been farther away from me than they were right now. Some of them, like Mammomax and Jazz, were dead. But they felt real. I could look over and see them. Touch them. In Mammomax’s case, smell him.

  This must have been what Dad’s life had been like right around his diagnosis, when he had still been himself enough to know what was happening. When, one minute, he thought he could walk down the hall and find his brother in his bedroom – and, the next, remembering that his brother had moved to New Jersey and had been dead for five years anyway. Oscillating between different frames of reality.

  I knew this wasn’t real. At the same time, I believed they were. The voice that said they weren’t real kept getting smaller.