At least that dream had been better than the nightmares I’d had lately. They’d taken me back home to west Texas. A single-story, ranch-style home out in the middle of nowhere. Crinkled, rocky hills rumpling the horizon. A crimson dawn sky. Scraggly desert brush tangling around my feet. There were silhouettes of people everywhere. Dark, indistinct forms – every time I looked at one, it seemed to melt away into nothing, merge with the shadows of sunrise. I couldn’t find a single one of them. But I knew they were there.

  The nightmare was no less troubling after waking up. It made me think too much about home. After Dad died, my brother Elias was the only family I had left. And there were times when I didn’t care to think of him as family. Dad had split the property between us in his will, but I’d been happy to let Elias buy my share off me. Taking care of land wasn’t suited to my lifestyle. And the less time spent around Elias, the better.

  I’d promised myself I’d never return. There wasn’t much of a draw for me there. Just memories.

  I pulled my phone out of my backpack. I hadn’t turned it on since I’d gotten back from our mission. I braced myself for a million texts and voicemails.

  No messages at all. That felt much worse.

  Neena was at the top of my contacts list. Time to rip off the bandage.

  I didn’t know what time it was. I hadn’t looked when I’d turned my phone on. My mind had been elsewhere. But, when Neena answered, she sounded fresh as ever. I kinda knew she would. After every job, if it’s been anywhere close to success, she takes the rest of us out for a night on the town. If they’d done that this time, it would’ve been without me.

  “Yeah?” Neena asked.

  “You know who it is, Peaches,” I said. Neena had different ringtones for all of us. Mine was a snippet of Ennio Morricone’s score from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. (Do I have to tell you which part?)

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “So what do you want?”

  She was gonna make me say it. She could be like this when she wanted to punish someone. It was more than a trifle annoying, but, I had to admit, it was keeping me honest.

  “Look, you know what the hardest thing in the world for me to do is,” I said.

  “Admit that’s not your real hair color,” she said.

  “That’s a low-down, dirty blow,” I said. And worse because it was true. “And no.”

  “Walk on past an open bar.”

  She was having fun, but there was an edge to her voice. I groaned. “It’s ask for help.”

  A pause. When she spoke again, her voice was different. “Tell me where you are, and I’ll be there.”

  It took me a moment too long to remember the hotel’s name. That fog again. After we disconnected, I sat on one of the beds and willed my hat to dry faster. I was already cold, and it just made me colder, but I wasn’t taking it off. I didn’t want to suddenly find myself someplace without it. It was still pouring outside.

  I was getting tired again. Couldn’t let myself get tired. Last time I’d done that, well, apparently, I stopped being myself for a while. It made me think of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  In spite of my best efforts, I’d started to doze again before the knock at my door. I jerked upright and opened it. Neena was soaked through, too, and none too pleased about it. Unlike whoever I’d been when I’d walked outside, she’d been smart enough to bring an umbrella. It hadn’t helped. The wind was driving the rain sideways. She stalked inside, looking as stormy as the weather.

  Like me, she’d changed into something more like herself: a leather jacket with a buttoned vest underneath – plenty of pockets for hiding keys, gadgets, and small weapons.

  She looked at the rumbling AC unit, and then me, her eyebrows raised. No wonder I was so cold. I’d forgotten to turn the damn thing off. I really was falling apart. “I fell asleep with it on,” I said, lamely.

  “You’re not usually tired at this hour,” she said.

  “Yeah. Well. This hasn’t been a usual kind of day.”

  “No such thing in this business,” she said. “And we’ve had plenty of worse days. Just gotta get through them.”

  I went to the closest bed and sat, trying to play it nonchalant. “So – hit me with it. What’d the others say after I left?”

  She pulled out the desk chair, leaned against its back, and smirked. “I did drag an apology out of Black Widow.”

  “That must’ve taken some doing. Sorry I missed it. What’d she say?”

  “She said she was trying to test you,” Neena said. The smile vanished. “See what you thought of your own performance in that mission.”

  “I’ve been in this group years before she came along,” I said. “I don’t need to pass any tests.”

  “She didn’t think you did pass.”

  I shouldn’t have needed to defend myself. One of the problems with talks like this is that I kept feeling like they were beneath me. I’ve been with Neena and Rachel since the start. I should’ve felt safer in this group than anywhere else.

  “Are you here to drag an apology out of me?” I asked.

  “No. I’m here because you said you needed help.”

  She said it looking squarely at me and didn’t give me any pause to look away. Not without looking like I was avoiding the question. Damn her.

  “Your hat’s all wet,” she said. “You go anywhere tonight?”

  “I don’t know where I’ve been tonight.”

  She frowned. She didn’t have anything to say to that. It had just made her plain worried.

  I had no choice. I had to spill it. I told her about my exhaustion. The bone-deep ache in my muscles. The fact that sometimes I couldn’t remember falling asleep and woke up in places I couldn’t remember getting to.

  I didn’t need to say I couldn’t go to a doctor. She knew it, too. Hell, she lived it. I didn’t trust doctors. Few mutants did.

  Once doctors found out you were one of them, things only went in a few directions. Some doctors said they couldn’t help you. Some said they didn’t know how to help you, but didn’t put much effort into trying to find out, either. Some were plain afraid of you, like being a mutant was contagious.

  Some would tell you that you should try to be normal, to fit in with ‘normal’ folk, and that the stress of being different was to blame for the way you felt. Some would treat you like a laboratory animal, poking and prodding at anything that made you different. Some would treat you like a criminal, ask you if you were there because you wanted to get drugs – and that was double true if you were looking for any kind of mental health care.

  Mutants have a long history of being wary of doctors, and for good reason. The doctors we deal with from the non-mutant world range from outright cruel to, at best, callous. We all remember experiments – government-sanctioned experiments – that exposed mutants to diseases just to see what happened next.

  I hadn’t been to a doctor regularly since I was a kid, before my dad or I really knew what I was. Since then, I’ve only ever gone for emergencies, like that time I got shot.⁴ And even then, it was deeply unpleasant. I got out of the ER as soon as I could. It was more my mutant endurance and over-the-counter antibiotics than any doctor that got me through that ordeal.

  4 Way back in Agent X #5! –Ed.

  Neena had been through the same things, but worse. She’d grown up in a cage, “raised” by doctors and scientists trying to understand mutants in any way they could except by treating them like human beings. She and I were the only mutants on our team. Most of the others were plenty different from the ‘human norm,’ but she was the only one who spoke my vocabulary.

  So I never mentioned doctors once to Neena, but they were part of the conversation all the same. These problems were like tonight’s rain – omnipresent, impossible to ignore, but not worth talking about at the same time. If that makes sense.

  Neena waited for me to finish. She didn’t ask anything asinine, like how long it had been since I’d had a vacation. (Only three weeks. We’d taken a week off after that thorny job in Chicago.) “How long has this been going on?” she asked.

  “A couple weeks now–” No, I couldn’t keep lying about it. I wouldn’t have just been lying to Neena, I’d have been lying to myself. Living in denial. “–A couple months. A little bit when we were in Chicago to find those missing twins.⁵ And then again when we went to New York for the Latverian Embassy job. And then… it was quiet for a bit. I thought it had gone away. Only it came back worse than ever when we got to Boston.”

  5 In Domino: Strays, a Marvel prose novel by the fine people behind this one. –Ed.

  Neena arched an eyebrow. “And you were just hoping it would stop happening?”

  I lowered the brim of my hat over my eyes, as though that would make this easier to talk about. “I didn’t know that there was anything else to do.”

  “What made you decide to say something now?”

  “What do you think? We got through that last assignment, but I screwed up bad.” I still didn’t know how that woman had sneaked up on me in the bridge. Whether she’d been there and hiding all along, or if she’d opened that heavy hatch without my noticing, it didn’t speak well of my abilities.

  “And that’s what made you decide this wasn’t going to go away?” Neena pressed.

  “No.” She was riding me hard because she knew she had to before I would admit this. “Deep down, I knew this wasn’t going away.”

  I’d just thought I could… well… cope with it. Like I’ve coped with everything else.

  A big hard-to-ignore part of me still wanted to do that.

  “What made you change your mind?” she asked.

  “This was the first time I’d screwed up in a big, bad way,” I said, spreading my arms.

  She tightened her lips. “Yeah, but you still didn’t talk about it until now.”

  A good best friend will know exactly how, and when, to get underneath your skin. That didn’t make it any less galling. “I can’t take the risk of it happening again and going worse, OK?” I said. “Especially now that you are all watching me for it. And Miss Cloak and Dagger, especially.”

  “So you’re talking about it because Black Widow went after you for it?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that–”

  “So it sounds like she did you a favor.”

  I was prickly as hell and counted it as a minor miracle that the only thing I said to that was, “Maybe.” If everybody did me favors like Black Widow’s, there wouldn’t have been anything left of me. I’d have been scraps of meat dangling from the tip of someone’s witty repartee.

  We were silent for a long moment. This whole damn thing was so ridiculous. I’d gotten everything tangled up. My health. My body and mind. My job. And now my relationships with my friends and partners. Until today, the problem had seemed so small.

  Then Neena grinned.

  She wasn’t doing it unkindly. I couldn’t help but do the same. I had no one but myself to blame for all this. How many hoops had I made us jump through just to get everything on the table? I could’ve opened up and talked about it weeks ago. I think she understood why I hadn’t, but… still…

  It was either laugh or do something worse, something I hadn’t done in ages. Not since Dad died.

  “Damn, Peaches,” I said. “What am I gonna do?”

  “You tell me.”

  I rubbed my hands together. “What if I’m too old to keep doing this?”

  “What kind of thinking is that? Especially since I’m pretty sure I’m older than you.”

  We didn’t know that for sure. The scientists who’d raised Neena never divulged her birthday.

  “Anybody who calls you old is calling me old.” She leaned over, gave my shoulder a hard poke. “So don’t do that. I’ll beat you up.”

  I swatted her finger away. “Fine. ‘Worn out,’ maybe.”

  “I’ll do the same thing. You’re avoiding the question, by the way. What are you gonna do about this?”

  “Yeah, I’m good at avoidance.”

  Neena wasn’t going to let me deflect again. “I think you already know what you have to do. It’s why you called me.”

  “I called because I wanted help,” I said.

  “I’m not equipped to help with something like this,” she said. “None of the posse are.”

  I shot her a dark look. I’d avoided the D-word so far. “I’m not going to see a doctor.”

  “There are people you could go to,” Neena said. “People who actually know a little bit about mutants.”

  “Yeah? Who knows a damn thing about us?”

  Neena just raised her eyebrow and waited for me to come to the obvious conclusion. “Other mutants,” I said. Of course.

  “Not just other mutants,” Neena said, waving to the window as if to remind me of the whole world out there. “The X organizations. I’ve got trustworthy contacts.”

  “I don’t like going to any doctor,” I grumbled.

  Neena wisely ignored me. “We’re not used to asking for help from them, but they’ve got no reason to turn us down.”

  “I’ve gone to them for help before,” I said. “Didn’t like the way that turned out.”⁶

  6 There will be more about this later so don’t feel like you’re missing out, but for those of you who like to read ahead, Inez is referring to the events of the X-Men: The 198 miniseries! –Ed.

  “Do you want to get help?” Neena asked. “Or not?”

  I have a pretty good stink eye, but Neena met it without flinching. Not her first time facing it down.

  “Or do you want to keep going forward like you are, hoping something’s going to change?” she asked.

  The second option was what I was accustomed to doing. Frankly, the urge was so great that, even after screwing up on this last job, I’m not sure I could’ve fought it. If Black Widow hadn’t said what she had, I would’ve tried to keep plowing forward. But I’ll give Black Widow this: she’d made it clear I couldn’t go on ignoring it.

  “I’ll go,” I said, miserably.

  Neena cracked another smile. This time, though, it was from relief. I wondered what she would have done if I hadn’t agreed.

  To this day, I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.

  “We’ll do better than that,” she said. “Atlas Bear can take you right to the New Charles Xavier Institute.”

  “That your way of making sure I go?”

  She shook her head. “You’ve given your word. You’ve done so much work for this team. This is the least we can do for you. And I promise that, no matter what else happens, it’s not going to be the last.”

  I’d actually been counting on a nice, long solo trip to get my head in order. I massaged my forehead. “Just… give me time, Peaches. I’m not set to leave right away.”

  I hate doctors. Always have. Even if they’re people I trust, I don’t want to be examined. I don’t want to be poked and prodded at and dissected on someone’s clipboard.

  I’d committed myself now, though. I’d looked Neena square in the eye and told her that I would do it. I couldn’t back down from that.

  But I also didn’t know when – and if – I came back to her, I’d be the same person I always was. Or if the doctors would take more from me than I’d already lost.

  Five

  Once you travel Wakandan air, it’s hard to go back to anything else. Even as the atmosphere boiled and roiled around us, Atlas Bear’s airship slipped through the air as smooth as syrup.

  I stayed in the back most of the time, on the pretext of sleeping. I hadn’t planned on actually dozing, but somehow, I managed it. I set a glass of water on the table beside my bunk and by the time I woke, not a single drop had spilled. I spent some of my time in the cabin staring at the surface of the water, looking for the slightest vibration. Nothing.

  I wished traveling with Atlas Bear was so easy.

  I couldn’t stay in my sleeping quarters all the time. That would’ve looked like I was avoiding her. Which I was, but I always try to work some plausible deniability into my excuses. So I headed out.

  She was up in the control cabin, ensconced in a cocoon of control consoles and holograms. This five-hour flight was supposed to be boring – we got it cleared with all the normal air traffic authorities for once – but she kept her eyes rooted on all the sensor and threat detection displays. I didn’t think she’d moved a muscle, except to look from one hologram to another, while I was in the back. A talent like hers makes it easy to always be thinking of the ways in which things could go wrong.

  The two of us were alone. This was my medical leave; I didn’t want any of the others tagging along. All I needed was Shoon’kwa, our pilot. I sat in the seat next to hers. A co-pilot’s, I guessed – though I’d never seen anyone other than Atlas Bear handle this craft. All its consoles were dark, deactivated.

  Up here, the windshield was a bubble, surrounding us. Cirrus clouds billowed their icy breath across the glass. I planted my hand against it, expecting to feel a chill. I hardly felt anything.

  “Please don’t do that,” Atlas Bear told me.

  I pulled my hand back. Honest, the fingerprint smudges were hardly noticeable.

  Atlas Bear let out a long-suffering sigh.

  “Don’t you have, I don’t know, cleaning robots to take care of things like that?” I asked.

  “I have Windex,” Atlas Bear said.

  “Oh.”

  After another moment, I sighed. “Tell me where it is. I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’re my guest. It wouldn’t be right of me to let you do housecleaning.”

  A groan escaped my throat. I massaged my forehead. “Just let me do something right.”

  To my surprise, Atlas Bear looked over at me with a little smile on the corner of her lips.

  “I get it,” I said. “You’re teasing me.”

  “You seemed like you needed it.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” I folded my arms behind my head, leaned back in the co-pilot’s seat. “I can tell you one thing I don’t need right now is to be knocked down another peg.”

  Atlas Bear returned her attention to her controls. She didn’t ever relax her vigilance for long. I felt a little privileged that I’d seen even a bit of that. “Yes, well. We all have to stay on our toes,” she told me.