They’d come back. This was just the first step. The next one would be worse.

  Dad didn’t say anything about it the next morning. But I could tell he was shaken. He spilled his coffee. He’d left an open bottle of ibuprofen on the counter. Usually, when he got migraines, they didn’t come until afternoon.

  I waited a couple days before telling Dad I was thinking of moving to Dallas after graduating in spring. The wait had been for plausible deniability, so I could pretend I hadn’t heard what I had. I think he knew anyway. He nodded, slowly, and cleared his throat. He took a long time figuring out how to answer. Then he told me that made sense, and that there were a lot more jobs in Dallas than here. That I could take my time working, and scout out different colleges when I was ready.

  When I was young, Dad and I kind of assumed I’d stay on at the ranch. It had been a number of years since either of us had brought that up. I think he only left me half the ranch in his will because he didn’t have the heart not to.

  After I left, I visited home as often as work allowed, and damn the neighbors. Let them complain. But starting as a merc, putting my mutant talents to work for me, had made things a little trickier. You never know which of your enemies are going to hold a grudge, track you back home, and take things out on your family. But life as a mutant was always dangerous, mercenary or not, and the same went for having a mutant in the family.

  I never told Dad what kind of work I’d found. He must have known, though, because he didn’t ask. He didn’t want me to lie to him. The feeling was mutual.

  Even if I’d told him, he wouldn’t have remembered for more than a few years. His memory was already starting to go, a bit.

  It was sweet, slow suffering to watch him lose himself. I’ve always had a healthy fear of Alzheimer’s and dementia after losing a granddad to them (and well before he actually died). If you’re not afraid of them, you should be. Dad’s life became one of constant disorientation. He became unmoored in time and space. I couldn’t be home for it. I hated that I couldn’t be, but it would just bring more trouble. And Dad would have hated being taken off the ranch, even more than he already hated not being able to work it.

  The only upside, if you can call anything that came from this an upside, is that it helped Elias get his life back together. He took on the responsibility, and took it seriously. He gave up alcohol, gave up the “friends” who kept landing him in jail, and took care of the ranch. He only ever asked me for money once. He got it.

  Elias lived with Dad and helped keep things together, even when Dad couldn’t remember when he was anymore. Dad would wander from room to room looking for pets that had died twenty years ago. He was sure that his sister – who lived in Georgia at the time – lived in a house just over the next hill, and that he could visit her anytime he wanted, and he didn’t understand why Elias stopped him from wandering that way. A lot of the time, he just watched TV. It was the only thing other than Elias that helped him get through the day.

  The last time I went home was right after Dad had a stroke. He clung on for a few weeks, long enough for me to spend time with what was left of him.

  After he died… well… I didn’t think I’d have any reason to ever go back. And I’d promised myself I wouldn’t have to.

  I didn’t want to dwell on grief. I didn’t want to think of the life that I could’ve had if I hadn’t been born who I was.

  I had work to do. Other peoples’ problems to solve.

  Only a big part of me had obviously never left. I was connected to this place in ways I didn’t understand, and didn’t want. But that didn’t change the fact of it.

  •••

  As the day wore on into afternoon, heat piled onto heat. The wind kept it off me throughout the morning, but eventually the sun started shining right down on me, and I couldn’t wear my hat to keep it off.

  I sighed, steeled myself, and started taking all the right turns for once.

  My phone sat on the passenger seat. I could have called Elias and let him know I was coming. When he saw my number, he probably wouldn’t have picked up, though. He’d been happy enough to buy my share of Dad’s property from me, but, when it came time for me to actually leave, he started dragging his feet on things, like he resented me going.

  I never understood why. He knew how much work the ranch could be, even with hired help. I’ve thought a lot of unkind things about him, but one thing I never thought is that he wasn’t up to the work. He’s got a natural touch with engines and motors, too. Not only could he manage all the equipment he needed but, by the time I left, he was bringing in some nice side work doing truck repairs for the neighbors. Those that would come around, anyway. I was sure business had only gotten better since I’d left. I only heard from him every Thanksgiving, when he texted to ask if I was coming to our great-aunt’s dinner this year.

  The answer was always no. Great-Aunt Cindy didn’t approve of me, and it had nothing to do with my being a mutant.

  Things started getting more and more familiar in shades. I already knew all these roads. Now I was recognizing landscape features. The shape of the mountains crumpling the horizon. The sinuous creases running down their foothills.

  About ten miles out from home, I slowed. I wasn’t hiding myself. I looked enough like my younger self that anybody who knew me then would recognize me now. But I didn’t want to draw attention, either. Last thing I wanted was trouble with the locals. I no longer thought of them as neighbors.

  If they wanted a good fist fight, I’d give them one, but they’d probably just make life hell for Elias afterward.

  I watched those mountains every day from the bus that took me to school. I’d sat alone, in the back. The other kids had learned well enough to leave me alone.

  I wondered if this was a little bit like how Dad had lived in his last days. His past and present blending together.

  That scared me the most. Dementia ran in the family. Dad had it. Granddad had it. Pretty sure some great-grandmothers, too. And nobody, not even the folks at Xavier’s Institute, had any idea how that kind of thing interacted with the X-gene. The X-gene could suppress it entirely. Or the disease could onset early instead, and with worse symptoms.

  I hadn’t been brave enough to tell this to Triage and Tempus. Or to think about it much myself, honestly. But my time alone in the car had left me too much time to do that. I would rather have kept living in denial.

  If the disease was onsetting early, I might experience symptoms like Dad had, right before his diagnosis. Flashes of disorientation. Inexplicable lapses of memory. Trouble sleeping, or just unexplainable tiredness.

  Different parts of my brain flickering on or off. Or a wild, undeveloped talent like telepathy manifesting as my neurons scrambled.

  It belatedly occurred to me that, with the state I was in yesterday, it wouldn’t have been safe for me to drive. Last thing I needed was a moment of disorientation on the highway, or lost time right before an intersection, or to look down and not know what the stick did.

  That lightness of being after Magik’s “treatment” hadn’t left me. I felt better than I had in months. But she wasn’t going to do it for me again. If I couldn’t fix this… I didn’t know whether I could trust myself to do anything else. This could have been one of the last times I’d let myself behind the wheel of a car, let alone work as a merc.

  I’d lose myself.

  Three or four days, Magik had said, and that was yesterday. Then her treatment would wear off. In the back of my head, the countdown was ticking.

  By the time I reached the long road that led nowhere but home, I had dropped down to thirty miles per hour. That must’ve been a first for me. Every time I drove as a teenager, I floored it all the way down the drive. It was the only place I knew there’d be no cops. And a good opportunity to annoy the obnoxious neighbors.

  The drive itself was half a mile long. To anyone else, it would’ve looked like a wasteland. It was full of fragments of my last life, memories twisted sideways. There were the desert willows my dad had planted when I was five. They’d been as tall as me when he got them. They’d kept pace for a while as I grew up. Today, they were far from the tallest trees I’ve ever seen – but, at the same time, impossibly huge. Like they didn’t really belong there. There was the creek bed that, for fourteen out of the eighteen years I’d lived at home, had run every spring, but for the past several years had been dry as salt. Here was the pothole the size of the Hulk’s fist, the one Dad had never quite gotten around to patching, and Elias still hadn’t. It was even bigger.

  The shape of the land was the same, even where the details were not. This area was a bad combination of rocky and hilly that had made it such a cheap buy for my great-grandparents. I didn’t see home until I was nearly there. It was an old, reasonably well-maintained single-story ranch house with broad picture windows, a front porch, and a stone chimney Dad had been especially proud of. In spite of everything, the sight of it took my breath away.

  Here was a mystery: somehow, in some way, my “telepathic ability” was connected to this place. That was all awfully vague.

  I’d spent so long working at getting back here, and trying not to think about getting back here, that it suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea what to do next. I hoped my subconscious wasn’t sending me out here to go on a journey of self-discovery or other horsecrap. Those things were never worth it.

  The thing with being a merc – or, heck, with being a mutant most of the time – was that you were never going to resolve your issues. You might as well get used to it. You could try, but those issues would be back again, year after next. The best you could do was trick yourself into a false epiphany every now and again.

  I was so caught up in ruminating that it took me longer than it should have to notice things were wrong.

  All the plants on the porch were dead. Dad had meticulously watered the ferns and potted cacti when he was alive. Elias had kept up the habit. He wouldn’t have dared disappoint the old man’s ghost. Even the Christmas cacti were dead, and those things could go weeks without water. Come to think of it, the desert willows on the drive had looked a little scragglier than usual. My family had never believed in lawns, not out here, but we provided water for the native plants.

  In the years since Dad died, Elias had built a standalone two-car garage. Both doors were open, but there was only a single vehicle inside: a 1980s Jaguar XJ-S my brother had been playing with off and on since before I’d left. The front two wheels were off, leaving the rims resting on concrete blocks. I knew for a fact that my brother had more cars than that, but none of them were here.

  Then I saw something worse. The fence gate hung limply open. There was no sign of the horses, though, admittedly, there were plenty of hills they could still have been hiding behind. A deep pit opened in my stomach. That enclosure was where Wheezer had been.

  I grabbed my hat and hopped out of the convertible, not bothering to open the door. Despite the missing cars, there were all kinds of tire tracks in the dirt. They were right where I’d seen that gang of townsfolk park the night they’d confronted Dad. Some of the tire tracks led around the side of the house and didn’t come back. As if they were trying to hide from anyone approaching from the drive.

  A crawling sensation on the back of my head turned to a sharp prickle.

  Something small clicked, very distantly. If it hadn’t been for the absolute stillness, I never would have heard it.

  I started to move just in time.

  The first shot took off my hat. Caught the rim and just blew it straight off me.

  If I hadn’t already been headed for the ground, I would have fallen anyway, just from the shock of it. My hat flew like a frisbee over the top of the car.

  For the first time, I cursed my choice of car. The Mustang was a low rider. There wasn’t enough space to take cover underneath. I scrambled on my hands and knees around the trunk. As I rounded the corner, another thunderous gunshot peeled off the hills. Spiderweb fissures split the windshield. Beads of glass sprinkled on my boots.

  There’s no cure for angst and dread like being shot at. If this hadn’t been happening at my childhood home, I might’ve even felt better than I had this morning.

  Whatever I was being shot at with was reasonably high caliber. A rifle, but not a sniper rifle. A military-grade sniper rifle shooting off my hat would’ve been like a punch to the temple. This had hurt, but mostly just from the shock.

  When I was a kid, I scrambled all over this property, pretending to be caught in an invasion of black-hat-wearing bandits and bad guys. I didn’t have to look to know where all the hills were, or what height they were, or which ditches were deep enough to hide in.

  My hat lay dejected on its side, a hole torn in its fraying rim. I whispered an apology, grabbed it, and tossed it around the back of the car – just high enough to look like someone hunched was dashing out. Another gunshot rang off the horizon. The instant I heard it, I was moving, darting around the Mustang’s hood, low as I could go while keeping a decent speed.

  I made it behind the nearest hill before I heard the next shot. I didn’t know where it landed, but it didn’t land on me. I dove behind that hill and landed hard on my belly.

  So. Those shots told me a couple things. My assailant should’ve known I wasn’t wearing my hat. They either weren’t all that bright, or were just plain nervous. They’d shot the first thing they’d seen moving.

  I hadn’t forgotten all the locals who’d come to intimidate my dad all those years ago. They hadn’t been terribly bright then, either.

  A flash of red burned across my vision. I hadn’t been here in years. They had no reason to cause trouble. Not unless they wanted to chase Elias out, too. Maybe they’d already hurt or killed him.

  I carried my Colt revolvers everywhere I could. One holstered on each side. The last time I’d taken them off had been to get in Triage and Tempus’s scanner. I hadn’t even unstrapped them when I was napping in Shoon’kwa’s airship. I drew the righthand gun, and pressed my thumb to the hammer.

  If people around here wanted to hate and fear mutants, then I was going to give them good reason.

  Eight

  With one hand holding my gun and the other hand braced on the ground, I stayed low, slipped around the side of the hill, and looked for a better vantage.

  Outside the car, and with all my senses hyper-alert, I could more easily see things that were wrong. There were bootprints on the drive. Some of them followed the tire tracks, but others cut across them, heading right out. Several pairs of them overlapped in different places, and some of them were more wind-scuffed than others. Footsteps visibly of different ages went right by each other. Like whoever had made them were going out on regular patrols.

  A quick peek around the side of the hill didn’t find any shooters, but it also didn’t get me shot at, either.

  I was pretty sure where I had been shot at from. If the intruders went out on regular patrols, they probably also had a guard or two posted. Someone who’d seen me coming down the drive could have scrambled to a higher vantage to identify me and then take me out (or skip step one and go straight to two).

  The best place to do that would have been the roof of the house. I hadn’t seen anyone there when I’d peeked, though. The flat lines would have made it easy to spot anyone against the sky. The next best place for a shooter would have been the rocky outcropping to the front and left of the house. When I’d been younger, I’d climbed all over that rock. It had seemed like a mountain. And now that I was an adult, it was… still pretty damn big, to be honest. Plenty of hiding places.

  This past day had been the first time in weeks I’d been able to think clearly, and now my brain was working in overdrive. This timing was too coincidental. Unless they’d camped out here for years and Elias had never mentioned them, I’d come back home at the same time that these people, whoever they were, were invading. Looks like I’d gotten my wish: whatever had drawn me back here wasn’t a journey of self-discovery, after all.

  I tried to remember if I hadn’t been holding a monkey’s paw when I’d wished that, but, nope. It was just free-floating irony. Self-discovery didn’t seem as bad as it had a moment ago.

  Someone inside the house was shouting. Another voice answered out back. The porch screen door clapped open, and two men dashed out. Neither were Elias. One – older, white, and salt-and-pepper-haired – held a rifle. He had the muscles of an old-timey railcar coal shoveler: overemphasized in the shoulders. The other was younger, East Asian, and unarmed. That was all I saw before I ducked back down.

  This sent a trill of alarm up my back. I didn’t recognize them. I’d been afraid these were my neighbors, come to punish Elias for some reason – maybe being related to a mutant, fear that he had a latent X-gene himself. These weren’t my neighbors. I doubted they’d all moved in since I’d left, either. People out here tended to grow roots. This was good land to come to if you wanted to get stuck in a rut.

  If any of them had hurt Elias, I’d crack their heads open with my fists. And if Elias had gotten himself into trouble, I’d do even worse to him.

  The men who’d just come out were calling a name: “Milos.” A reedy voice, probably Milos’, shouted back. I heard “the hill” and “armed!” And then footsteps crunching on dirt. They were running down the drive, toward me.

  I had extra ammo in the car. In this business, always travel prepared. That said, I hadn’t quite been prepared enough – I hadn’t grabbed the ammo belt when I’d hopped out. Too dangerous to go back for it now. Between my two revolvers, I had twelve shots on me. I’d have to make sure they’d count.

  The pair running in my direction were just far enough away that I had time to get lost. I crawled through a short, dry ditch, and scrambled behind a low hill. I didn’t have the time to cover my tracks. If my pursuers had eyes and two brain cells to spark together between them, they’d find my trail. But I didn’t need to keep them off me forever. In fact, what I was planning would work better if they came after me and saved me the trouble.