The moment that thought occurred to me, a blur launched from the shadows between the tents. It crashed into me, knocking me into the dirt. Johnny Dee. He’d been waiting for me. His eyes blazed, and his lips were curled into the snarl of a dog about to snap. That was all I saw of his face before I raised my arm to defend myself.

  Johnny Dee was a lot bigger than I remembered him being. Stronger, too. But just as mean. He dug his fingers into my shoulder. That shoulder had been fine a minute ago, but now it was oozing blood. It bore the gunshot wound Wolfram had given me. The pain was paralyzing.

  I tried to get him off me, but I couldn’t find a good angle. I didn’t have the strength. It wouldn’t have gone like this in real life, but this, strangely, seemed more real to me than that. More honest.

  Too old. Too slow. Too weak.

  Until that moment, I’d thought that voice had been my own. Maybe most of it was. In the past, certainly, it had been.

  But now there was a strange reverb to it. An echo. When I lowered my forearm, I caught Johnny Dee mouthing the words.

  He was trying to tell me those things. Poison me with them.

  Strength surged through my muscles. I swung my elbow upward, smashed it into his nose. It landed with a satisfying crack of breaking bone. The world fell away underneath us.

  •••

  Dad and I had maybe a minute to ourselves, to contemplate what we had gotten into before the storm crashed down upon us. Again.

  It had reached us before, but something had happened – I had beaten it back – I couldn’t really remember. It wasn’t anything I could count on happening again. Every time the storm found us could have been the last.

  “When you got the diagnosis,” I asked, “how did you take it? How could you stand it?”

  I didn’t know. I hadn’t been living at home when he’d gotten it. True to his worst, most stubborn instincts, he hadn’t told me for months afterward. He hadn’t even told Elias, and Elias had been living with him at the time.

  He gave me a little shrug, warding off emotional turmoil. That let me know that he hadn’t been able to stand it. Not at first.

  “After a point,” he said, “there didn’t seem to be any reason to dwell on it. I’d made my arrangements. Gotten my affairs in order. Any other thought I gave to it would have been taking away from the now. What will come, will come.”

  “You hadn’t gotten your affairs in order if you hadn’t told us,” I muttered.

  He shrugged, evasive. I dropped it.

  “How could you go on with that looming over you?” I waved toward the storm as a convenient illustration. But what I meant was old age. Uselessness. Death.

  “That was the future. Keeping it at the top of my mind all the time would have been like living in it ahead of time.”

  “But what did you do when that future started to become now?”

  He chuckled, kindly. “Peaches,” he said, “you don’t think you’re getting old, do you?”

  “Well, like you’ve said, I’ve made a lot of my choices by now. There are lots of things I can’t take back.” I wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding how what he’d said in our last conversation had hurt me.

  He looked at me. For too long a moment, he said nothing. Then: “Like I said?”

  I didn’t have time to ask before the winds picked up, and the storm was upon us again.

  Twenty-One

  I had never not been in combat with Johnny Dee. My hand had been locked around his throat, holding him back far enough that his tentacles couldn’t reach me, for years. He’d been digging into the wound on my shoulder for longer. Any other kind of life was a distant memory.

  But it was one of those memories that we crashed into now – rolling from the matted grass of the refugee camp outside the X-Mansion and onto clean, plush red carpet.

  If I hadn’t been so focused on murdering Johnny Dee, I would have felt bad for tracking our blood and filth onto it.

  For the first time in eons, he forced himself away from me. I swiped at him, but he darted back. He paled. “No.”

  I didn’t see what there was to be panicked about (other than me, the woman trying to murder him). We’d landed in a fairly spacious living room, all nice and domestic-like. Tacky striped couch. Coffee table. Lamps. Big TV, a bigger picture window, and a beanbag chair.

  Johnny Dee seemed a lot smaller here. He was three-quarters my height, and slenderer than he had been.

  He gave me a look like I’d plugged in the game console underneath the TV, and deleted all his saved games while he watched. Pure anguish. With a full-throated child’s howl of rage, he threw himself at me.

  He might have seemed physically smaller, but he had all his unearthly strength. In the real world, I could have handled him easily, but, here, he knocked me off my feet. We crashed through a wall of memory.

  I smashed shoulder-first into another carpet. A very different one. It was blue, short, and plainly hadn’t been vacuumed in a while. And covered in white cat hair.

  The shock of recognition was slow in coming. This place was the ramshackle headquarters of Agency X, the first real merc organization I’d joined. The apartment where Alex Hayden, Taskmaster, Sandi Brandenberg, and I had taken whatever work had come our way, and had much lower standards than I do now.

  (Hell, don’t tell anybody else this, but one of my first jobs with them had sent Alex and myself out to steal the Punisher’s sidearms. Yeah. That hadn’t ended well. Alex and I ended up crammed into a phone booth together, stripped to our underwear. Our employers, though, had their funerals the following week.²⁰)

  20 You can find the shameful details in Agent X #2. –Ed.

  All my old buddies were sitting around the kitchen table. Taskmaster, in his awful mask. Sandi, our agency’s founder, gave me a look like she’d always known it would come down to me busting through the walls of my own memory, locked in a telepathic duel with a stranger. Alex, bald and goofy-looking as ever, nodded sagely. Deadpool was with them, too. He was the first bigshot merc I’d met when I went into business for myself in New York.

  They’d been playing cards. All of them turned to stare at us, except Deadpool, who remained fixated on his cards and was somehow failing to pull a poker face through his mask.

  Johnny Dee’s fist slammed into my stomach with the force of a pile driver.

  He’d brought me here to distract me. Showing me my memories in revenge for seeing his. It worked.

  His tentacles coiled around my arm, and I felt the stingers drive deep. Then I couldn’t feel much besides pain.

  I collapsed and Johnny Dee kicked me, over and over. I couldn’t do anything. The floor quaked. Color bled from the walls. Everything became a little dimmer with each kick. Johnny Dee was dismantling me, blow by blow, thought by thought.

  Not for the first time, the only thing that saved me was my friends.

  One of Deadpool’s katanas sliced into Johnny Dee’s shoulder bone. The tip of the second emerged from his sternum. Brandi cracked a punch into the side of his face while he hung, suspended, from Deadpool’s blades. They were figments, but they were my figments, and they packed a punch.

  Damn, but I missed these folks. I didn’t always. Times had been more bad than good, honestly, and I had some emotional scars that would never heal. Dad died while I was working with them. I’d come back to find that Alex, my then-boyfriend, had slept with Brandi while I was gone.

  Right now, though? They were family. I hadn’t seen them in years.

  Those wounds looked vicious enough, but they weren’t bleeding. They’d distracted him, not hurt him. They didn’t have the emotional impact on him that they did on me.

  I wondered if his memories would treat him any kinder than mine.

  I grabbed his ankle and yanked. He fell forward, sliding off Deadpool’s blades. When he hit the ground, it was no longer carpet – but a hard cement floor. Grimy and gritty.

  Prison. His cell bars were painted bright red, but they were one of only two splashes of color in the place. The second was the dotted yellow line in the corridor outside, showing the guards just how far they needed to keep their distance from Johnny Dee.

  This was where Johnny Dee had ended up the last time he’d tried to mess with mutantkind. I felt the cold squeeze his heart as clearly as if it had been my own.

  He had no cellmates. He’d been deemed too much of a danger to – and in too much danger from – other prisoners. The guards never came near. Virtual solitary confinement. It was torture. He’d left it more unstable than when he’d gone in.

  It wasn’t the place itself that made him afraid, though. The cement floor and beige walls reminded him of something. Before he could recover his balance, I grabbed onto that dangling thought-thread and yanked. The cement floor cracked like eggshells underneath us, and we plunged into the darkness below.

  Well, not so much dark as poorly lit. Where we landed, the thickly painted beige brick walls were the same. So were the unswept cement floors. But the bars were gone. This room was full of chairs and simple wooden desks, all facing one direction. A blackboard on a wheeled wooden frame stood at the front of the room.

  One of the fluorescent lights over Johnny Dee’s desk flickered dully. The other had gone out. That was why he sat here. He didn’t need the other kids noticing him. He didn’t want their stares. No matter how many times he’d begged, the institution would not give him shirts loose enough to cover the bulge underneath them. Nothing hid the tentacles’ squirming.

  Though this place didn’t have guards or bars, it had the same aesthetics as Johnny Dee’s cell for a reason. This was a prison. It wasn’t fooling anybody, and never intended to.

  Johnny Dee flinched back like he’d been struck. There was no one around him, though, and I hadn’t hit him. Yet. When I listened to the roaring between his ears, I wasn’t sure he would have felt it if I had.

  He was in so much pain already. It boiled through his veins, into his head. It was a dull, constant background ache, leaving him both sensitive and lethargic. It curled in his stomach, turning it sour and clenched. He would have a stress ulcer at nineteen years old.

  Every day, he was in some kind of pain. A migraine pounding between his temples. The skin on his chest and gut stretching and tearing as that horrible alien maw and tentacles grew. Those tentacles had bright red lines where he’d started to slice them off, but the pain had stopped him from finishing the amputation. The tentacles waved about, and the maw opened and closed, of their own volition. But he felt everything.

  The healing scabs itched terribly. He couldn’t scratch. Not without drawing attention to them, and to himself. He’d been well-trained to avoid that.

  He hadn’t had the maw all his life. It had only started growing when he was eight, and become unmistakable for what it was two years later. He’d been old enough to understand the doctors when they told him the maw and tentacles couldn’t be removed without killing him (or rendering him quadriplegic and unable to digest his own food), but not old enough to believe them. He’d trusted his parents when, after the surgeons at the hospital had had that talk with them, they’d screamed and stomped and vowed to get a second opinion, and then a third, and so on.

  He still believed them even when his dad had a breakdown, started drinking again, and went away. His dad didn’t come back, didn’t even call. And he still believed them when even his mom stopped contesting his juvie sentences after all the fights he kept getting into. And he still believed even after his mom had sent him here, to the institution. She hadn’t visited in a month.

  And, just like with the surgeons, he was old enough to understand he was being abandoned, but not old enough to believe it.

  Until around age eight, he’d been, to all outside appearances, a normal suburban kid. Two parents. A cat. A dog. A video game console.

  The pain of seeing this place again was like a frozen steel dagger sliding between Johnny Dee’s ribs. I understood – almost agreed with – the fury in his yell when he charged and shoved me to the ground. His tentacles lashed at me. It took all my strength to hold him back while he snapped at me, trying to tear out my throat with his teeth.

  •••

  The storm danced, livid, across the Texas sky. It didn’t behave like any natural thing I’d ever experienced. It was not so much out of my memories as my nightmares.

  The flash and afterglow of the lightning showed a slender finger of cloud sliding along the farthest hills. The strobing light made it impossible to tell which direction the twister was heading, but I already knew. This was a nightmare, after all.

  Dad stared into the twister, unafraid. He let out a long breath like he’d been waiting for just this moment.

  I had a hunch. One I didn’t like very much.

  I said, “It feels like I’ve already made most of the decisions I’ll ever get a chance to. Like there are a lot more of them behind me than there are ahead.”

  “I think you’ve come to the crux of your problem,” he said. “Facing facts that you don’t want to.”

  A minute ago, he’d said he hadn’t remembered this thread of our conversation. “You’re not my dad.”

  He turned from the twister to look at me. His eyes were as dark and distant as the storm.

  I felt frozen cold despite the warmth of the wind. Maybe he had been my real memory of Dad at some point. When he’d tried to be funny. When he couldn’t remember the conversation where he’d essentially called me washed up. But it was plain that something awful had been worming its way into him, wearing his skin.

  He’d been trying to hurt me. And he’d succeeded.

  “And just when I was starting to feel bad for you, Johnny Dee,” I said.

  “You’re such a cluster of neuroses I hardly needed to probe for them,” Dad said.

  “You’re one to talk.”

  I tackled him, swinging punches, aiming for his stomach and to drive the breath out of him. I had no idea how much physical combat mattered in the dream, but it shut him up, and so already I felt much stronger than I had. My full mutant strength surged into my arms. My next punch hit just below his sternum, hard enough to crack a rib.

  He shoved himself to the side. We tumbled down the hill, bouncing hard on our elbows and knees and asses, toward the tornado.

  Lightning cascaded down the twister’s face, and showed me Dad in flashes. I tried not to look at him. I didn’t want to see Dad in him. But I couldn’t help it. My head knocked against a rock. I let go of him and fell, dazed, into a heap. When I looked up, lightning sparked at just the right instant for me to see him striding toward me.

  And all I saw, all I wanted to see, was Dad. The strength sapped right back out of my arms.

  Dad’s foot cracked into my nose.

  •••

  At the same time I was losing the fight there, I fought on in his side of our dream.

  His body had shifted to fit the scene. He was a kid. Ten or eleven years old. His eyes were dark and sad as Dad’s had been. They glimmered with tears. But he fought with the power of an adult.

  My ribs were bruised. It hurt to breathe. He’d bent back three fingers on my left hand, nearly broken them. And I didn’t have my mutant strength here.

  He smashed a punch into the side of my head. More and more of me was going dark. Just like my other self, at the ranch.

  We weren’t alone. Students sat at the other desks, watching us. They hadn’t always been there, but they’d arrived without notice. There was a teacher, too – bald, silent, and judging.

  Unlike my old friends at Agency X, none of these figments moved to help Johnny Dee. He didn’t look to them for it, either. Even at this point in his memories, he’d been alone for a long, long time.

  Those memories percolated through me. Every part of him hurt – so much so that anything I could do to help felt like stage punches by comparison.

  He’d sat down with a dozen counselors over the years. None of them helped him find the words he’d needed to share that pain. He’d stopped trying. He was convinced that none of them would have listened if he’d found the words. All his anguish was trapped inside him. He couldn’t process it. It had had nowhere to go but inward, and nothing to become except rage.

  He couldn’t manage to aim that rage at his parents. A big part of him had become convinced they’d been right to leave him. He wouldn’t want to raise him. He’d turned the rage in the only direction he could: to the X-gene – to mutantkind at large – for taking away the life he’d thought he’d been given.

  The voiceless scream I’d heard earlier, the first time I’d touched his thoughts, was in this memory, too. It had never ended, just kept getting louder. And he’d never been able to let it out. All the adults around him, his teachers and the few administrators who knew his name, always talked about how quiet he was.

  As if summoned by my thinking of them, his teacher chose that moment to intervene.

  His leathery, skeletal hand clamped around Johnny Dee’s shoulder. He hadn’t come to help, like my friends had come to help me. He yanked Johnny Dee off me. But that was all.

  He did not act against me when I picked myself up, walked over to Johnny Dee, and slugged him in the jaw.

  Johnny Dee’s teacher just watched, owlishly, as I laid into Johnny Dee.

  In this nightmare, I was the same size as Johnny Dee, and much shorter than the teacher. Johnny Dee had stopped seeing me as me, I realized. I’d become one of his classmates – beating him down while the only adult in the room encouraged it.

  His tentacles hadn’t developed their stingers or venom yet, and good thing, too – there would have been a lot more dead kids now otherwise. And it would be several more years before he figured out the maw’s telepathic powers. But no one could deny what he was.

  This was just the world he inhabited. He hardly thought about it anymore. He’d convinced himself of two contradictory things – things that, taken together, went a long way toward explaining the kind of monster he was.

  The first was that he didn’t deserve this. The second, though, was that the world was still right to work like this. He didn’t deserve this treatment. But someone did. Mutants.