“Oh, I wouldn’t renew it,” she said. “If I do it too often, that might also harm your brain. Or stunt your development.”

  “You know, you could use some lessons in delivering bad news to patients.”

  She smiled. A smile that wasn’t really a smile. “I’m not a doctor.”

  One other thing that made this office different than most others: the only chair was the one behind the desk, and it was already occupied. I had a mighty need to sit down. It was going to take me a long time to adjust to what I’d learned today. But I wasn’t going to slouch on the floor. “So, you really do think I have telepathic talent.”

  “The telepathic segments of your brain are very active,” Magik said. “What’s more, they’re trying to pull you in a specific direction.”

  I blinked. Triage and Tempus looked confused, too. I looked back to her. Magik said, “You have a strong psychic bond with a particular place, far from here. The telepathic parts of you are reaching out to it. That’s why you are expending so much energy.”

  “So once this barrier of yours wears off… it’s just going to keep happening.”

  “I suggested earlier that you might need to learn how to live with this,” Magik said. “It looks like you might also have some unresolved issues that your new abilities are trying to address.”

  “Can you tell me where?” I asked, my throat dry.

  Magik leaned back in her chair. She pressed her knuckles to her lips and studied me for too long a moment. I think she knew that I already had the answer. But she had the grace not to call me out this time.

  “Tell me,” she said, “what your dreams have been looking like.”

  Seven

  Triage followed me all the way back out to Shoon’kwa’s airship. It loomed over the Institute’s landing strip, shadowed against the gray evening sky and looking like a particularly ornery beetle. Its stick-thin landing struts looked ridiculous underneath it.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” Triage asked, as I stepped up the boarding ramp. “We don’t know what kind of side-effects a psionic block will have on you if you’ve never experienced one before. You shouldn’t go without a doctor.”

  “Don’t y’all have better things to do than follow me around?” I asked.

  “This is the kind of work I live for,” he said. “Honest. I want to help people.”

  The more I looked at him, the cuter he seemed. I hated to leave him like a lost puppy on the landing strip. But I really, really didn’t want anyone coming along with me for this.

  “Maybe next time,” I said. “But I’ll give you my number.”⁹

  9 For the adventures of Triage and Tempus, check out the Xavier’s Institute prose novels starting with Liberty & Justice for All by Carrie Harris! –Ed.

  I didn’t look back as the boarding ramp closed behind me. I wanted to think of him as I’d left him. Bright red in the cheeks.

  I had a mission. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, but once I made up my mind to do something unpleasant, I wanted to get it over fast. Ripping off that bandage was always going to be better than peeling it, or, worse, letting it fester.

  “Drop me off in El Paso,” I told Shoon’kwa. “I can get where I’m going from there.”

  She gave me a wary look. “You don’t want me to take you directly?” I knew what she was thinking. Neena must have given her a talking to about letting me go off on my own.

  “I appreciate it,” I said. “And all the time you’ve taken for me so far. But I’m headed to the Texas boonies. A big airship like this is likely to draw more attention than either of us wants.”

  She pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything as she ran through her preflight checklist. She was clearly weighing whether she trusted me more than Neena’s spoken (or unspoken) instructions.

  “I can handle this,” I said, a lot more bravely than I felt. “I’ll keep my phone on me. Let you know how I’m doing.”

  Shoon’kwa watched me for a moment. Then nodded. The airship’s engines roared.

  I didn’t mean to fall asleep on the trip back. My head was buzzing with whatever Magik had done to me, and I felt like I had the energy to wrestle the world, but as soon as I saw that bunk in the back, time vanished.

  When I woke up, I felt something I hadn’t in weeks. I felt refreshed. Like I’d actually gotten a good night’s sleep. The first in ages. When I was still on speaking terms with my relatives, and my older cousins with families told me how many times a baby could wake them up in the middle of the night, I imagined this was how they felt the first night they could get away with eight hours’ sleep.

  By the time I came out, night had scaled the sky. The cabin lights were out. Shoon’kwa sat where I’d left her, at her controls and still at full attention. Her seat hung just over the edge of the bubble windshield, so she looked like she was suspended over the dark, with only her reflection and the reflection of her instruments for company. The softly glowing displays gave her a deep orange tint. It was all very dramatic – an effect ruined by the bag of potato chips she was crunching her way through. An open energy drink can lay discarded in a deck-mounted recycling bin.

  “Tell me you usually eat better than that,” I said.

  “I don’t have time to cook,” she answered.

  Teenagers. “You’re gonna regret all that when you’re older.”

  She smiled thinly. “If I live to be old enough to regret that, I will consider it a win.”

  Knots of cloud whorled below us. Most were lit only in shades of reflected moonlight, but a few were painted in the orange of city lights. I had to step up to the edge of the bubble windshield, and look down, to see the street and building lights woven across the ground. From the fact that we were slowing, I guessed this was El Paso.

  “Learning how to cook is one of the best things I ever did,” I said. Dad helped teach me. To the extent I was ever reluctant to cook, it was because I knew I wouldn’t measure up.

  I was kind of glad I couldn’t see more than the lights. I had mixed feelings about seeing any landscape that reminded me of home. I’d planned to use the travel time to mentally prepare for that, but had fallen asleep instead.

  We’d left the Institute too fast to file a proper flight plan this time. I saw, from one of the few displays on Shoon’kwa’s controls I’d learned to read, that the airship’s radar-cloaking was on. Local air traffic control wouldn’t be giving us any problems.

  “You’re welcome to come with, if you’d like,” I said. I hoped I managed to keep my tone warm, and to hide how much I really, really wanted to do this alone.

  “Domino called while you were passed out,” she said. “We have a rush job. Our employer wants a bomber drone prototype stolen from an Air Force contractor. Gifted Mind Technologies in New Jersey. Employer says the contractor is using taxpayer money to build and design the thing, but is planning on selling it to Hydra. They want it destroyed tomorrow.”

  “I think my business is going to take a little longer than that.”

  “I figured,” Shoon’kwa said. “So did Domino.”

  I had nothing to say to that. It hurt, though, to know Neena didn’t want me along for this one.

  “I don’t like leaving my airship uncrewed in American territory,” Shoon’kwa said. “Your government might steal it.”

  “It’s all right. I understand.” She wasn’t going to step outside. “You’re gonna want to get some rest before you head out, too.” I folded my arms, took a deep breath of the cool, recirculated air. At least I was going to see Wheezer again. “Put me down at Eastwood Park. I can get where I’m headed from there.”

  When I was a kid, going into the city was billed as a major treat for Elias and me. Elias always enjoyed it. I never did. Going to the city was a pain in the ass. The trips usually came on the weekend and cut into my time playing outside. It meant hours in the car with nothing to do. It meant standing around while Dad did his shopping or haggling or whatever other business had brought him to El Paso. Getting to eat out wasn’t enough compensation, especially when I preferred Dad’s cooking, anyway.

  Things got a little better in early high school, when I had my own car and could plan out my trips however I wanted. But that phase in my life didn’t last very long.

  I had to leave home. Too many people knew who, and what, I was. There was a whole big world out there that needed a righteous kick in the ass, and I was in the mood to give it one.

  Elias had loved the city, though. One of the many things he and I never saw eye-to-eye on. He loved the people, and he loved the tall buildings (as tall as El Paso gets, anyway). He loved shoplifting small things, pieces of candy, like it was a game. He made sure I always saw him, just to prove to me that he could. He had bigtime Little Brother syndrome. He could never be stronger or faster than me. And so he had to show off in different ways, mostly by doing things that I wouldn’t do – at least, not very often. It was important to him, when he was younger, that I was impressed by him. Later on, he went to the city to get up to capital-letters No Good, but I was gone by then. I’d gotten up to my own brand of No Good, so I shouldn’t have judged, but… I still judged.

  So I’d been to El Paso enough to know my way around. A lot had changed – always more than I expected – but the streets were the same, most of the major businesses were the same, and my phone was enough to guide me around anything that I couldn’t remember. And I knew which rental agencies had the luxury cars.

  Coming straight from Boston and Canada, the dry air was a shock. The cold bit at me, too. The predawn was the coldest part of the desert night, and I had to keep moving just to keep some feeling in my arms and legs. It was a nice distraction from my troubles.

  I didn’t mind the cold. If I did, I wouldn’t have dressed the way I did.

  I wasn’t that far away from the jail where I’d bailed out Elias for the first time. It hadn’t been the last.

  Sirens and car alarms howled in the distance. Newspaper delivery drivers prowled the night, brake lights glowing. The clouds moved out from overhead. The air was crisp; even with all the city’s lights, I could still see more stars than in most other cities.

  I could’ve waited for the buses to start, but I wanted to walk. See what had changed. All the rental car dealerships weren’t open until long after bus services began, anyway. I watched the first glimmers of sunlight touch the mountains west of the airport.

  Two hours after the sun breached the eastern horizon, I was blazing out of the dealership in a bright red, current-year Ford Mustang. Convertible top down, sunshade down, new pair of sunglasses on. My car and I roared toward the sunrise.

  I’m not gonna lie. The car felt good.

  One of my rules of life, something that makes it so much better, is that whenever I’m having a terrible day, I’m that much more indulgent. Business with the gals had been good lately. I had the money for it. I wouldn’t if I kept spending like this and they didn’t take me back, but that wasn’t worth thinking about right then. There was just the road, the gas pedal, and the speedometer. And, soon enough, the open desert.

  The gas pedal got real well acquainted with the floor.

  •••

  Don’t get me wrong; I don’t stay away from Texas because I hate it. There’s a lot to love, and a lot in me that’s Texan that I’ll never give up no matter where I go.

  But there are some places in Texas where the most dangerous thing to be is different. And there was no more severe kind of difference than being a mutant. When you’re a mutant, people don’t just hate you. They’re afraid of you. And that means they won’t just come for you. They’ll come for your family, and do anything they think they have to, to get you out of their lives.

  Where I grew up, you had to walk up and down hills for miles before you could even see my neighbors, let alone the crossroads, hotels, and gas stations that substituted for a town. Our school was in the next town over, and it was a forty-minute bus ride to get there.

  But it was a life my dad loved and therefore, for a while, so did I. I learned about the world from decade-old textbooks, from staticky and unreliable satellite TV and Internet, from the comic books our one convenience store got in every once in a while, and from exploring and doing things for myself. And fighting. I learned lots of things from fighting.

  You might think that putting so much distance between you and your neighbors would help you avoid them when they got judgmental about the whole mutant thing. You’d be wrong. What that really meant was fewer people to turn to for help when things went sour. It meant there was no safe place to run to. No good ways out. And no help.

  When I was young, I knew that, in other places, mutants had banded together. It seemed like all that was happening on another planet. I had no way to get to them. (Probably a good thing, too; they would have just disappointed me earlier than they had.)

  It’s a weird thing to be me. I love Texas, love this land. I do more than cling to it. I broadcast it to everyone I meet, from the way I dress to the accent I’ve trained myself to keep.

  But it was no coincidence that, the first time I could, I moved a long way away. I only came back to visit my family – well, Dad, really. And once he died, I didn’t even have that.

  No matter how long it had been since I’d been here, it would never stop seeming familiar. It was like eating a meal you haven’t tasted since you were twelve. Even if you tried to forget, you couldn’t. And I never really wanted to forget. I just didn’t want to come back.

  Every season is road construction season in this part of Texas. I got lucky this time, though. No stops. Outside of the usual morning weekday traffic coming into El Paso, the roads were open. I stopped paying attention to the speedometer. I drove by what felt right. Nothing was fast enough. I tucked my hat under my seat because I would have lost it otherwise. The wind played havoc with my hair, made me feel like cold fire was running across my scalp.

  I left the freeway as soon as I could. I knew the state and county roads without having to try especially hard to remember.

  It also meant it would take me longer to get back home. That was a feature, not a flaw.

  •••

  People back home had suspected I was a mutant since I was a kid, when I had punched my fist through a tree trunk in front of half a dozen other kids. I wasn’t as careful about hiding myself as I otherwise might have been. That wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to be.

  Dad, to his credit, recognized that early. He never tried to make me conceal who I was.

  I can’t even remember when we found out I was a mutant. From as young as I could remember, Dad was making sure that I was careful with my strength, both with how I displayed it and how I showed it. He was a smart cookie. His contacts with the outside world were just as limited as mine. Unreliable TV, convenience store newspapers that didn’t always reach us, and chats with neighbors. And, every once in a while, when there was something he needed to look up for work or animal care, he went to the library a town over. Somehow, from all of that, he puzzled together that I was a mutant.

  Not just a metahuman. Not just someone with special abilities. A mutant, specifically. Maybe he knew the X-gene ran in the family, even though I was the only one, that I knew of, that it had activated for. Dad and my brother both seemed ordinary.

  It didn’t matter. It didn’t change the way he treated me one bit. He loved me just the same. I know mutants whose families rejected them, threw them out, or kept them in but treated them in insidiously awful, abusive ways. Or people like Neena, who never had parents in any sense of the word.

  Even when I was young, I knew how lucky I was. And I treasured that. But Dad couldn’t protect me forever.

  It was the outside world, not anything I did in particular, that made my neighbors take their stand against me. Folk like my rancher neighbors could only hear so many second-hand news reports and propaganda about mutant plots to take over the world, plus the very real reports about the folks like the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and the many ways in which mutants had been involved in near-world-ending cataclysms, before they decided that I was going to bring all these scary news stories to their doorsteps.

  When I was seventeen, five cars came to our home one night after midnight. They pulled up with their headlights off. I heard them, though I was supposed to be asleep. Dad went out to meet them, like he was expecting company. They must’ve called him in advance.

  They had no cause to come at night, not unless they were ashamed of what they were about to do. People in the country will sometimes say that the country’s safer than the city, and I don’t think that that’s true even in the day. At night, though, the only reason people come out is for parties or for cold and ugly violence.

  I listened from a cracked-open bedroom window. All my muscles were bundled up knots of tension, ready to leap out and fight. I nearly did. But they stayed near enough to the porchlight that I could see they weren’t armed. They’d come for violence, all right, but it wasn’t the clubbing or shooting kind. They told my dad that the whole town was ready to stop doing business with him. Neighbors. Grocers. Gas stations. Truckers. They were going to cut him off unless “something changed.” They didn’t have to say what that was.

  There wasn’t anything I could’ve done to convince them. I could have been the nicest, most heroic mutant that ever walked the Earth, rather than the teenage powder-keg that I was. I could have saved their sons, daughters, sisters, and brothers from burning buildings twenty different times. It wouldn’t have made a difference.

  They were scared, they were angry, and, in the face of everything else happening in the world, they felt powerless. They’d made up their minds to lash out.

  Dad made me proud. In a voice as calm as if he was asking them what the weather was going to be like, he told them off. I learned plenty of new cuss words that night. Our guests didn’t have anything to say to that. They just went back to their cars, glumly, as though their spouses had called them all home.