It’s a measure of my comfort with people in this profession if I think of them by their given names rather than their handles. Atlas Bear’s real name is Shoon’kwa. She joined the posse a while back, before Black Widow and White Fox. I’ve known Atlas Bear long enough that, honestly, I should’ve started to think of her as Shoon’kwa by now. I know Neena and Rachel both do.

  Maybe I resented new people coming onto the team. I missed the old days, when it was just Neena, Rachel and myself. Atlas Bear joining us had presaged the others, and all the changes they’d bring.

  But it wasn’t fair of me to hold that against Shoon’kwa.

  “I appreciate the ride,” I told her.

  “No airports where you’re going,” she said. “I don’t think anything but the X-Men’s ’copters and jets go near the Institute.”

  “Could we not call it the ‘Institute?’ It’s hard enough taking myself to see doctors without making it sound all ominous.”

  “The Institute,” she intoned, like she was shining a flashlight under her chin.

  “Aren’t you playful today.”

  “All my life, I’ve had to be a quick learner,” she said. “I learn from the people around me.”

  “Easy to forget sometimes that you’re a teenager.”

  “I didn’t used to have time to make jokes with people.”

  “You also didn’t have many people to make them with,” I pointed out.

  “Did you hear what I said to Tony Stark?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “So many bad futures stem from him,” she said. “Not just associated with him, mind you. Directly caused by him.” She took her eyes off the controls again to look toward me. She wasn’t smiling this time. “With that many of them – I would have been paralyzed by rage. By fear. I wouldn’t have been able to control it. I would have tried to kill him. Part of me is still convinced that would have been the right thing to do.”

  The first time the team had met Shoon’kwa, she’d hired Neena’s posse for hit jobs: to kill people she had perceived as threats to the world’s safety. Each time, we’d double-crossed her by saving the person she’d sent us to murder and found another way to defuse the crisis.⁷

  7 From a story starting in Domino #7. –Ed.

  Those crises had been real. Shoon’kwa’s precognition never lied to her about that. But it also never showed her any solutions. Just an endless cavalcade of world-ending disasters. Tough place for a kid to be. Tough place for anyone to be, really, but she was a teenager. Scared the common sense right out of her. In her terror, the only thing she could think to do was end each threat violently. Take whoever was responsible down and make sure they’d never get up again. That kind of thinking had gotten her exiled from Wakanda.

  “Glad you didn’t try it,” I said. Mr Stark had been wearing his Iron Man suit at the time. I appreciated not being vaporized.

  “It takes discipline,” she said. “Fear is a monster. And it makes us monsters.”

  “Or just makes us useless.” I chewed the inside of my lip.

  She glanced to her controls, just to check them, but otherwise kept her attention on me. “It’s a lot harder to manage yourself when you’re operating alone,” she said.

  “Believe me,” I said. “I know.”

  If Black Widow hadn’t gone after me as hard as she had, I’d probably still be trying to deal with everything alone.

  And if Shoon’kwa and I hadn’t talked, I’d be feeling a lot more miserable than I did now.

  I still didn’t feel great about where we were going, though. The Institute. Shoon’kwa had gotten the tone right.

  In a way, I hated going to the X-Men more than a non-mutant doctor. The last time I’d come to the X-Men, it was as a refugee.

  It’s a long story, and I’ll try to keep it short.

  The biggest hassle about being a mutant is that somewhere, someone is always hunting for your blood. It’s never not true. All kinds of human-firsters, super villains, super jerks, and just plain people with super chips on their super shoulders will come gunning for you. Even if you keep your guard up, even if you keep your identity as a mutant secret, and even if you think you know who your enemies are – you can always be blindsided.

  And that’s how it was for the majority of mutantkind, not all that long ago. Two alternate realities came crashing together, changing both of them, each of them yoked to a madwoman. People called it M-Day. I didn’t see it all go down. I had only left home a few years before, and was just getting my start in the mercing business. The only thing I knew for sure was that, afterward, there were a lot fewer mutants in the world than there used to be. The people were still around, still alive, but they’d been robbed of their identities. They’d been changed, against their will, to just being humans.

  A lot fewer. Down from millions to hundreds. One hundred and ninety-eight, to be exact.

  There was no other way to say it than a genocide.

  By some combination of luck and circumstance, I was one of those one hundred and ninety-eight mutants to remain who I was.

  A lot of people who hated mutants, sensing the weakness of those of us who remained (and fearing we’d find some way to revitalize ourselves), closed in for the kill.

  I’d been working alone at the time. After three assassination attempts, I realized I had to run. And it seemed like there was only one place to run to. Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

  The X-Mansion advertised itself as a safe haven for all the remaining mutants. Refugees welcome. There was still protection in numbers. Most of the X-Men had retained their powers, and they were some of the canniest, most powerful mutants in the world.

  So they said. So I’d hoped. They could put us behind walls, but they couldn’t keep us safe.

  The X-Men had allied with government forces that, in the end, turned out just as eager to put us down as anyone outside the walls. Killers and assassins found us inside and outside the walls. The guards turned out to be there to pen us in as much as “protect” us. Hell, the government wanted to put chips in our bodies to track us if we ever left.

  It got so bad that the rest of us had to stage a breakout, just to get away from the people who’d pledged to protect us.

  The X-Men eventually came to their senses and rebelled against the snakes they’d let inside their walls. It took them a mighty long time to come around to what had happened. A lot of it wasn’t their fault. But a good part of it was.

  I never wanted to go back to them. Neena trusted them more than me. She was friends with lots of them. She had a long history, deep-knit ties, et cetera, et cetera. She rarely gave me specifics. As part of the X-Force, she did a lot of things she can’t talk about, and even more I was sure she didn’t want to.

  The last time I’d gone to them for help, though, I’d ended up having to break my way out. It’s hard to forgive that sense of betrayal. It didn’t matter that there were extenuating circumstances. They should have done better. Not just by me, but by everyone else who’d trusted them.

  I had nothing against the individual members of these organizations. Met plenty of them, before and after. Some good people, some not-so-good, just like everywhere else in the world. I didn’t have problems with any X-Man, but with The X-Men, so to speak. I didn’t believe that they could do what they’d promised: keep mutantkind safe. They just didn’t have it in them.

  They were too willing to trust. Too willing to give second chances, and to stake the lives of others on those chances.

  I wouldn’t have said this to Neena because she might have taken it personally, what with her being friends with lots of them. But, the truth was, I didn’t have much trust in my heart for their type. Not anymore.

  At my request, Atlas Bear hadn’t flown me to the place I’d been before. The Jean Grey School – formerly the X-Mansion – would’ve been a shorter trip, but it was tangled in all my bad memories. I wouldn’t have been able to look at it without seeing remnants of the refugee camp’s walls, or the empty yard where all our tents and housing had been set up.

  But the X-Men had split up – or were branching out, or schisming, or whatever. I didn’t stay up to date with the politics. There was more than one school for me to go to.

  So we were headed somewhere I’d never been before. The New Charles Xavier School for mutants, all the way up north in Canada – not as many people I had a bad history with there.

  The clouds had gotten thinner, icier, since we’d left Boston. There was no snow on the ground, not this early in autumn, but I didn’t need to be able to read Shoon’kwa’s holograms to know I’d get goosebumps stepping outside. We descended, spiraling toward a cluster of silver buildings. Solar panels glinted sunlight among the hills.

  “You sure you’re going to be fine outside in that?” Shoon’kwa asked, with a glance at my clothes.

  My outfit was not exactly subtle, nor suitable for cooler weather. I didn’t even like to button my vest, let alone wear something heavier than jeans. “I don’t get cold,” I lied. “It’s a mutant thing.”

  Shoon’kwa looked appropriately skeptical, but she didn’t say anything else.

  Look, everyone in this business has their style. So did I. I can rattle the names of twenty people who wear more impractical costumes off the top of my head.

  “If you need me to go anywhere else,” Shoon’kwa said, “I’ll be here.”

  I looked at her a moment. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

  The airship’s boarding ramp struck dirt. Thanks to the all-encompassing bubble windshield, my eyes were already adjusted to the light outside. Two people were waiting for me. The first was a young man who looked like, if I reached behind his ears and rubbed, he’d squeak. He wore, incongruously for where I’d found him, a full suit and tie. His red goggles were a little more on-brand for an X-Man, though. He had them on his forehead, where they kept his locs at bay. And a woman not much older was with him. Dyed black and silver-white hair, same colors but a shorter style than Neena’s.

  Neena had called ahead. Let people here know I was coming. One less thing for me to do, or to find an excuse to wriggle out of.

  “You’re Outlaw?” The young man looked at his clipboard the way I’d seen doctors do before, as an excuse to keep from making eye contact with me. Great.

  “Not many other people likely to be dressed like that, don’t you think?” the woman beside him said, and then to me: “I’m Tempus.”

  “Triage,” her partner added.

  I raised my eyebrow. “Triage? Isn’t that a little on the nose?”

  “Hey, look in a mirror,” he said, surprising me. Maybe the kid had guts after all.

  At least I knew for sure what the kid wanted to do with his life, to give himself a callsign like that. I decided to tease him a little more. That was better than thinking about why I was here. “Are you both doctors?”

  “I’m the doctor,” Triage said.

  His partner didn’t speak. I gave her a pointed look.

  “I’m his friend,” Tempus said. “I’m tagging along. Learning medical skills. Every X-Man needs to be a polymath.”

  “I don’t need any tagalongs.” The fewer people involved in this, the more comfortable I would be.

  “She’s helping,” Triage said, firmly.

  Hearing his tone, I let it rest. These two were friends. I understood that. I’d been in similar enough positions when Neena or Rachel had brought me along on their jobs, or vice versa. I didn’t want to put effort into separating them.

  But then Tempus had to open her big mouth again. “Besides, trainees should always work in teams.” Triage winced and massaged his forehead.

  Trainees? I looked around. No one else had come out on the landing strip.

  “They’re handing me over to a student doctor?” I asked.

  “Hank McCoy’s busy saving the world,” he said, with a glare at Tempus. “And we’re just doing an intake evaluation.”

  “You don’t even have anybody with you to hold your hand.”

  “I’ve got more experience than you might think,” Triage said. He reached toward my hand, and then stopped. “May I?” he asked, as if he was still working on how to deal with patients.

  “When I talked about holding hands, that wasn’t an invitation.”

  The speed at which his cheeks reddened confirmed just about everything I was thinking about him. He had no idea how to deal with someone like me. At least if I was here, I was going to have a little fun.

  “I- I have a healing ability,” he stammered. “This is how it works.”

  “Out here? In the cold?” The air was crystal clear and sunny this morning, but that didn’t do anything to stifle the bite of the cold.

  “It’ll only take a moment,” he said. “Unless you’re uncomfortable…”

  Fast learner. He’d figured out how to press my buttons in record time. The last thing I wanted to do was show weakness to a stranger, let alone someone who was going to doctor me. He and Tempus were probably acclimated to this cold. “Try it,” I said.

  His touch was warmer than it should have been. Like there was energy passing between us. For a long, awkward moment, we were breathing in synch. In and out, at the same time. I wouldn’t have been surprised if our heartbeats were in rhythm.

  He let go. “I can’t feel anything obviously, um, not functioning. You’re exhausted. I can tell that. I can clear out some of the fatigue toxins, if you’d like.”

  Great. They’d sent the trainees out because they figured this would be easy. Or psychosomatic. All in my head. Just another strung-out mutant, pushed past her limits. “Is that your final diagnosis?”

  “No,” he stammered. “Let’s get you inside so I can get a better look at you.”

  I wish I knew how much he and Tempus believed me. But the last thing I was ever going to do was ask. They wouldn’t have told me the truth, anyway.

  Six

  What was left of my sense of humor shriveled up the moment I saw what he wanted to do with me. “Oh, no you aren’t,” I said.

  He and Tempus stood in front of a heavy, room-sized beige machine with a hatch on one end that reminded me of a submarine’s torpedo tube. I’d seen devices like this before, though I’d never had to get in one. It was a full-body scanner.

  “Claustrophobic?” Tempus asked.

  “It’s not an irrational fear if it’s entirely justified,” I told her. “Not letting anybody trap me.”

  Triage was trying to hide his impatience. “The hatch won’t be shut while you’re in,” he said. “You can come out at any time. Not that you should, but you could.”

  “Aren’t you, you know, gonna put a stethoscope on my back and listen to me breathe, or something?”

  “We already went over your symptoms,” Triage said. “It took us ten minutes to learn three things about them. I’m not letting you drag this out any longer.”

  “I’m just helping you develop your bedside manner. Working with difficult patients.” Putting off the inevitable.

  “I’ve had plenty of difficult patients,” Triage muttered. He ran his hand across the side of the machine lovingly, like it was a pet. He had his natural healing ability but was receiving plenty of conventional medical training, too. “This is important. I helped develop it. It’s a multifunction vascular, muscular, and neurological scanner specifically tailored for the most common physiologies exhibited by mutants.”

  “I’m learning it, too!” Tempus piped in.

  “Wow,” I drawled. “You must be real proud.”

  “The more mutants we can get in the scanner, the more we can learn about all the different ways the X-gene can express itself,” Triage said. “We can learn more about, and maybe develop cures for, all kinds of disorders that affect mutants but not humans.”

  “Mutants love to be scanned and prodded and studied.” I folded my arms and felt a lot smaller than I should have.

  “Do you need some time?” Tempus asked. All the playfulness had left her voice, but then she said, “I can give you time. That’s my mutant ability, you know. Freezing time.”

  If there was one thing I wanted to do less than get examined, it was be frozen and helpless while they did it. Even if I wouldn’t be aware of the time passing. “Let’s just get it over with,” I said.

  They had me lie on a foam-cushioned tray, with a little rise on one end to suggest, but be nowhere near as comfortable as, a pillow. It was reminiscent of comfort without actually being comfortable. I sighed, laid down, and let them slide me into the machine, head first.

  The scanning chamber was at least brightly lit. Strips of light ran along the top and bottom corners, while tinted black glass hid most of the scanning equipment from me.

  I’ve never been in a CT scanner or anything like it, but I imagined they were a lot more claustrophobic than what I had to get through now. This chamber was huge. It would have had to be, if it was going to cater to mutants. This machine could fit anybody up to the size of Colossus. Even then, it wouldn’t work for every mutant.

  They still made me take my hat off to get inside. I had to repress my urge to debate this, get argumentative. That wasn’t going to make me feel any better. I reclined my head onto the cushion and tried not to think. I couldn’t keep that up for very long, though.

  “Is my insurance gonna cover this?”

  “You have insurance?” Triage asked.

  Of course I didn’t. Not many mutants did. Not many companies would take us. Even if you lied and said you weren’t, you were just begging one of them to find out and disqualify you when you needed it.

  “We’re in Canada,” Tempus said. “Things are a little more enlightened here.”

  That prompted another eyebrow rise. I knew plenty of mutants who came from Canada, and I hadn’t had to pry much to find out how Canada had treated them.

  “About most things,” Tempus added. I wondered if she wasn’t watching me on camera, hadn’t seen my expression.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “The scan won’t work if you’re talking all the time,” Triage said. “Just lie back and keep quiet.”