In the glimmer of his eyes, I caught glimpses of the person he saw me as. It was hard to make out any detail in such tiny windows, but the reflection of the kid’s blue skin was hard to miss.

  •••

  I came back to my other self, under the unearthly and riven Texas sky, one scrap of my senses at a time. The psychic tug-of-war was dragging in my direction.

  Johnny Dee gave me one last kick, square in the center of my forehead – and stopped.

  Sight came back to me in stinging, watery blurs. Green-black clouds and strobing yellow-white lightning. And the shape of figures. In this half of our shared nightmare, Johnny Dee was being held back, too. Unlike the other side, though, it wasn’t his figments and memories doing the work.

  Neena held one arm tight. Rachel did the same thing on his other side. They both looked at me, tight-lipped. Waiting. They paid Johnny Dee no mind as he thrashed.

  The twister howled behind them. It had crossed over our property line, and was impossibly huge – so big that I couldn’t see all of it at once. In a way that was only possible in dreams, it hadn’t touched us yet. The wind yanked on Rachel’s violet hair, and tossed Neena’s black and white mane all over, but that was all.

  Johnny Dee was no longer wearing my Dad’s guise. I was surprised by how bittersweet that felt. It had been good just to see him again.

  There was no sign of him anywhere around us now. He’d left me alone.

  Again.

  But I didn’t need him to figure out what the trick was. The secret that was starting to see me come out on top in the fight between Johnny Dee and me.

  He’d made an enemy of the world, and thought that made him stronger. I knew what strength actually was.

  I almost hadn’t. I’d been an idiot about it. Closed myself off. Tucked things away, dealt with them alone. I didn’t want the answer to be as sappy as it was – but there it was, here we were, and I still almost hadn’t made it.

  I still might not. I thought I’d been opening up in that hotel room, when I’d told Neena about my symptoms. But I’d only done that because my back was against the wall. I’d been afraid of being kicked out of her posse. Take away the pressure, and I never would have said or done anything. That hadn’t been opening up. That had been covering my ass.

  I was still so closed up that, when I’d been struggling to tell Neena I loved her, I still hadn’t been able to tell her I’d been thinking about leaving the posse. It seemed kinda pathetic, in retrospect.

  But I knew these things about myself now. I wasn’t sure that Johnny Dee ever would, or could, or wanted to.

  There was a scream inside my head, too. I just hadn’t heard it.

  Neena and Rachel looked at me expectantly. I shook my head.

  I didn’t need to kick Johnny Dee into the twister. That would have just been cruel. The truth was that he had always been headed there on his own anyway.

  They let go of his arms, and the dark wind took him.

  •••

  I was the stronger person – inside and out. I didn’t know if I had been before all this had started, or even before I’d gone inside his head, but I was now.

  Finding this out didn’t mean I was having any more fun than before, though.

  These things are supposed to end in comfort – with me waking up cozy in a hospital bed, riding the good painkillers. Someone shouting, “She’s coming around,” and all my friends gathered at my bedside. All the hard parts of post-battle cleanup and travel and medical care already done. Much as I hated doctors and hospitals, that would’ve been nice.

  I woke up bloodied, caked with dust and dirt and astonishingly itchy, on the floor of the cavern where I’d tangled with Johnny Dee.

  My arms and legs tingled like I’d been laying on them. That was all I could feel. My limbs felt like somebody else’s. I could only tell my fingers were moving when I looked at them. Whatever venom Johnny Dee had injected into me hadn’t been fatal, but hadn’t worn off, either.

  Maybe it was better that I couldn’t feel much: my right forearm, all the way up to my elbow, was coated in snotty yellow-white mucus. The skin underneath was scored with dozens of shallow cuts from the teeth of Johnny Dee’s maw.

  It would have been a hell of a thing if I were to have died of an infection after all this. But I wouldn’t mind that so much if I got to do one little thing first.

  I dragged myself to where Dad’s Beretta had fallen. I plucked it off the ground, and crawled back to Johnny Dee.

  He was lying flat on his back, arms spread wide, like he’d been blown back by an explosion. His eyes were slitted open and unfocused. His breathing was labored. I planted the Beretta’s barrel on his temple.

  For a long time, I waited and watched. His breathing never changed. His forehead was clammy with sweat. What really caught my attention, though, were his maw and tentacles. They weren’t moving.

  From a scrap of memory I hadn’t even realized I’d stolen from him, I knew they always moved on their own, even when he was asleep. The maw hung half-open, its scabrous tongue limp. The tentacles flopped lifelessly over his belly.

  He looked like he was still in a dream. Trapped where I’d left him.

  Gradually, I let the Beretta drop.

  Twenty-Two

  The hospital room reunion had to wait. Survival came first. For a while, that was still pretty dicey.

  I forced myself to my feet, and out of the cavern. Judging from the position of the sun, I hadn’t been in the telepathic duel all that long. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until I came out. My tongue tasted like roadkill, a lizard left to desiccate in the desert sun. It was swollen and enormous in my mouth. I’d lost my canteens somewhere in the crash or the brawl afterward. It was a hard walk getting back to the canyon and the airship, but I made it.

  Shoon’kwa’s airship didn’t look as bad inside as it did outside. The deck was slanted, and a lot of the windows were broken, but the ventilation systems had cleared out the smoke. Moving was a challenge. Every surface was slick with fire suppressant foam. The mess hall cabin was, well, a mess, but the sinks’ water taps were still working. The water turned brown after only a second cupped in my dirty hands, but still – nothing had ever tasted so good. I must have sucked down half the ship’s water tanks.

  Then I helped my friends do the same. Some of them were in worse shape than others. Black Widow was her usual sharp-tongued self, except that she got dizzy when she helped me lift the others. White Fox had trouble speaking clearly, but she could move. Shoon’kwa and Rachel were deteriorating, though. They kept passing out. It was a full-time job just to keep them awake.

  We got Josh inside, too. To my surprise, he seemed to have stabilized. But it was too early to feel relief. He was the only one of them without a recent head injury, and he could talk coherently, if raggedly.

  Neena wasn’t there when I got back, which was worrying. Wheezer’s silhouette stood lonesome atop the canyon wall. But Neena found us not long after I arrived. She had the start of an awful sunburn, but, for someone as pale as her, it should have been a lot worse. I suspected that she’d found some shade to pass out in. Like Black Widow, she was doing better. Healing on her own. She spoke like herself.

  While Black Widow went around to check on the others, Neena and I went searching for the airship’s distress beacon. Shoon’kwa’s slurred directions were hard to follow, but for every instruction we couldn’t understand, Neena picked a random direction and it turned out to be the right one. I let Neena send the signal, in case her luck would help ensure that someone picked it up.

  The airship’s emergency beacon was housed in a compartment the size of a closet. Neena and I jarred elbows trying to get everything working.

  She read more in my silences and expression than I’d intended to reveal. “Hey,” she said, after the signal was sent. “We’re alive. The bad guys are dead. That’s a good day in the merc business.”

  I snorted, affecting a laugh. I couldn’t pretend any mirth in it.

  “We’re still doing good as a team,” Neena said. “Aren’t we?”

  The answer was the hardest one I’d ever had to give, and saying it was the worst thing to happen today or yesterday. That put it at the top of a mighty long list. “No,” I said. “We haven’t been fine for a long time.”

  •••

  Sometimes being lucky, finding the right coincidences, can be awkward as hell. Neena’s luck didn’t care if it embarrassed her or not. She just pulls the lever on the slot machine and waits for things to fall into place.

  Sometimes the symbols that come up are all butts. It just so happened that the first recipients of our distress beacon were Stark Industries surveillance drones.

  Within half an hour, the area was swarming with transports, rescue and repair drones, and gleaming armor-suited helpers. I couldn’t tell who was a robot and who wasn’t. I didn’t stay awake for the flight back to civilization. But I had enough energy to make sure that the rescuers sent someone for Wheezer, too.

  “Tony Stark will never hire us again,” Rachel groused when she found out who’d rescued us. “We botch his job, and then the very next day he has to drag us out of our own airship.”

  It was finally time for that hospital scene. I hated finding myself under the care of strange doctors as much as I knew I would, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I needed help. These doctors weren’t so bad, all told. Not one question about me being a mutant. Maybe Neena or the Stark people had given them a talking to while I hadn’t been paying attention.

  I healed up a lot faster than the others. But I also wasn’t going to leave yet. Not while the rest of my team was here.

  My brother was recovering at a different hospital. He’d ended up with a nasty infection and fever that put him out of commission for another few days. Outside of a quick video chat check-in, we hadn’t spoken to each other much, but I knew that would be coming.

  I still had a lot to come to terms with. A lot that I’d run away from.

  But that particular thing was going to have to wait awhile. Neena and I were going around to see everybody. White Fox and Black Widow shared the room next door. Shoon’kwa and Rachel had this one.

  I’d been at Shoon’kwa’s and Rachel’s bedsides the minute they woke up. Neither of them could remember anything that happened after the crash. Their concussions knocked the memories right out of them. Shoon’kwa turned a red-purple shade when we told her about her airship and tried to force her way past Neena and me. She only relaxed, a bit, when we told her that Stark Industries repair bots were piecing the thing back together.²¹

  21 Wouldn’t be the first time. Shoon’kwa remembers Hotshots #3. –Ed.

  “We’ve lost plenty of employers before,” Neena told Rachel with a shrug. “That’s the merc business. If he’s smart, he’ll see how good we are.”

  “But… Tony Stark.” I didn’t know how she did it, but – despite her mussed hair, the bandage on her forehead, and the shadows under her eyes – Rachel made that hospital gown look good. Like she was lounging and would have been just as much at home beside a pool. Some folks just got it, I guess. “He has friends.”

  “You’re not trying to get back in with Captain America, are you?” Neena asked. Fun fact: Rachel and Captain America used to date. Funnier fact: it hadn’t ended well.

  “My thoughts are one hundred percent business,” Rachel said, indignantly. A pause. “Ninety-eight percent business.”

  Neena couldn’t keep her smile up for long. “We’ve all got to talk.”

  “I hate that tone,” Rachel muttered.

  I didn’t want to take my time telling the story of everything that had got me – and us – here. I would have knocked it out of the way and been done with it. But the fact was that it was a long story.

  By the time I was done explaining everything, I’d moved from the foot of Rachel’s bed to the window. I leaned against the pane, looking out. It was easier, at least for a while, to pretend I was talking to the El Paso streetlights.

  The Stark jets had flown us directly to El Paso, and the University Medical Center. It wasn’t all that far from the place I’d rented the Mustang. I didn’t want to think about the conversation I’d soon have with insurance agents. I would hate to ask the posse for help paying off the bill. Mr Stark was probably going to charge us for the rescue, anyway.

  These past few days had wiped out all the gains of the posse’s last few jobs and then some. It was all one big, money-losing fiasco.

  Johnny Dee was still holding onto life by a thread. If you could call it life. He’d never woken up, not once. The maw and tentacles remained dormant. The few doctors who knew anything about mutants thought the tentacles might have been dead. If so, it wouldn’t be long before they started rotting off. Johnny Dee wouldn’t survive the septic shock.

  That cruel, violent, idiot ball of anger. I wanted to pretend like I didn’t understand him.

  He was locked inside his own mind, an endless telepathic feedback loop. I didn’t think he had the tools to pull himself out.

  To do that, he’d have to face up to himself. See himself like he really was. I didn’t think he had the strength. If he ever did, he’d wake up a different person.

  Most of the time, though, I still think I should have shot him. Oh, well.

  Josh had been flown to this hospital, too, but he wasn’t here anymore. His healing factor meant his stay hadn’t had to be a long one. Now he was in police custody.

  Turned out he had more than a few warrants out for him. Breaking and entering, intimidation, accessory to assault and battery – all from when he was a part of the Reavers. We couldn’t get much more information than that. The doctors kept the details private, as they should have. It was Josh’s call to make if he wanted to contact us. For the past week, he hadn’t seen fit to send us much. Seemed like he didn’t want to share much with us.

  His full name was Joshua Foley. The police had had to identify him from prints, and find out his story from Reavers already in custody.

  Joshua Foley was a full-on anti-mutant bigot, driving getaway cars for masked gangs ambushing suspected or former mutants. Or he had been, until his powers started manifesting.

  He was a healer. He could reconfigure the inner workings of a human body – his own, or another’s. It took energy, and, as I’d seen, he couldn’t do it for very long without fainting, but he was powerful. He had the potential to be one of the more powerful mutants I’d ever met.

  One day, he hadn’t been able to resist healing one of his friends after they’d been hurt in a fight, and it was over for him. His old friends beat the hell out of him and took him prisoner. They’d been close to killing him as a mutant infiltrator when Wolfram swooped in and “bought” him instead. He’d paid cash for Josh, like Josh was a thing. With Johnny Dee to control him if he got out of line, Josh had effectively been Wolfram’s slave.

  I had no idea what happened now. Or what he was going to do. Become another Johnny Dee, maybe. I wanted to believe that people could change that much. But after seeing what Johnny Dee had done with his second chance, I was feeling pretty low about everyone and everything.

  Rachel was a sharp cookie. When I finished telling the story, she asked, “So that’s it, then? You’re going to leave the posse?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m still trying to make up my mind.”

  I’d softened on this a little bit since the wreck of the airship, when I told Neena that I was for-sure leaving. But, after everything that had happened, I couldn’t just keep going on like I used to. Things had changed. I had changed. And one of the ways I’d changed was that I knew I needed to restock where I was going, what I’d done, and whether any of this was going to be worth it in the end.

  Shoon’kwa pursed her lips and said nothing. Just listened. Sooner rather than later, we were going to have to bring Black Widow and White Fox in on this, too. But they knew, like Shoon’kwa knew, that there was a different kind of bond between Neena, Rachel, and me. We’d been in the posse the longest. And we’d need to have this out among the three of us.

  “You have to admit I’ve caused a lot of disasters for you all,” I said. “I could have avoided them at any time.” Looking out the window really did help me say this. “Because I was too stuck-up on myself.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rachel said. “You were tired and worn down, and you slipped up. But that was because of Johnny Dee’s meddling. It’s over now.”

  “It’s also not the point,” Neena told Rachel.

  “It means you’re not a danger to us, darling,” Rachel said. “You’re just like you always were.”

  “Just like I always was isn’t good enough.” The person ‘I’d always been’ was the same one who’d refused to tell her friends anything about how she was feeling until she endangered them on a mission.

  “You talked to me,” Neena pointed out. “When you got so bad you couldn’t lie to yourself about what was happening.”

  “That’s the thing I haven’t been able to get across to you,” I said. “That wasn’t opening up. That was… desperation. When I knew I absolutely couldn’t have done anything else to save things.”

  It was actually worse. It was the kind of thing I had tricked myself into believing was opening up, but it wasn’t. It had been performance art. I was trying to escape the truth by giving away only a little part of it.

  The truth about what I had really been afraid of. About growing old. About Dad. About being tired, and slow, and lost.

  I wasn’t sure all these things weren’t true.

  “I saw a lot of myself in that fight with Johnny Dee,” I said. “And I really did not like what I saw.”

  “And you don’t think you can change that?” Neena asked.

  “Peaches,” I said, “I don’t think that’s the right kind of question. It’s not a question of change. It’s just that – sometimes people are what they are.”

  All my life, Dad had been a big part of me. The biggest part, maybe. And I’d always been proud of that. It had been a real shock, looking back through my memories, finding out how much harm he’d done me, too.