The Everglades,
Six Years Ago
You expected me to maybe tell this story in order?
That’s not how I operate. Chaos and luck never take things in order. There is no order. Order is a narrative, a story people tell themselves afterward. It’s something people impose on events.5
When you flip a coin, don’t expect it to come up heads just because the last was tails. Not even when you can manipulate luck. Luck has always been generous to me, but luck has no memory, no narrative, no order. Even at its best, most generous, that’s just not what it is.
So that wasn’t the start of this story. But it was where I started to figure it out.
And nothing else I tell you is going to make as much sense without it.
You’re going to have to trust me.6
• • •
All my life, I’d been haunted by a face.
Someone I couldn’t place. Someone who, every time I thought of her, a weight settled on my back. Like a lead blanket. Smothering, but, in some strange sense, comforting. If there was a fire sweeping my way, or the roof was collapsing, I could toss it over myself and feel at least a little safer.
All of this was even stranger because I had no idea who she was. All I knew was the face, and how I felt when I thought about it.
I’d had a busy life. I’m not a super hero, but I’ve been super hero-adjacent. You probably know the names. Cable brought me into the merc life, taught me what I needed to know to get my start. I did some training with Professor X, but didn’t want to stay part of that organization, or any organization. And I’ve been on a lot of teams, even led some of them. X-Force, Six Pack – teams you’d know if you followed the right kind of news.
But, in this part of the story, I was working for myself. Inez and Rachel weren’t a part of my life yet. I was on my own for not the first, but certainly the longest, time in my life.
It was only after I’d gotten my feet under me as an independent operator that I felt like I was finally ready to chase that face down. Find that feeling. Make some kind of connection with it.
See, one thing I didn’t talk about – and tried not to think about – was that big chunks of my past were missing. My memory was punched full of holes. That much trauma will do that to a person. But trauma wasn’t the only thing that was back there. There was also that face. The sense of comfort that rode along with it.
I wasn’t a natural introvert. I’d learned how to be, over long and callous years out alone in the world. But it chafed. A big part of me wanted that sense of comfort, of connection. The longer I worked alone, the more I wanted to feel it again.
That was what brought me to one of the most miserable places I’ve been in my life. The Florida Everglades in summer.
The Everglades – where it rains every twenty minutes, the air is so humid it feels like you’re always under a waterfall anyway, and you sweat your body weight every day. Just imagine a bath where, every time you step in, you step out filthier.
I was sweating buckets now, and I wasn’t even going through the marsh the hard way. My contact Jonathan and I had rented a motorboat and cruised along the coast at an easy pace. Even with the breeze, my skin felt like I could peel it right off.
I had no clear idea what I was looking for. I was just looking. Counting on my luck to find it for me.
Every mutant’s unusual, but what I can do is more unusual than most. Unusual enough to make you question the nature of reality, or whether a God exists and just whose side She’s on. Real head-spinning stuff. I’ve had lab coats who, after they’ve met me and seen what I could do, wandered away muttering that they must be in a simulation – that a real universe could not possibly act like this.
See, what I do is luck.
I don’t mean to say my power is luck.
I mean – I do luck.
I can’t just let it happen. I have to be active, have to be doing something. When I am, things go well for me. It happens in ways that seem like coincidence. But the coincidences keep stacking up.
In a fight, my enemies’ guns will jam. All of them, one right after another. Or they’ll misaim and hit each other. I’ve taken shelter from a tornado in a house, had it collapse on me, and then, like Buster Keaton, stepped out unscathed from under an open window frame. I’ve been blown through a plate-glass window without suffering a cut. I’ve been twenty feet away from a frag grenade when it detonated, and been missed by all the shrapnel.
But there are some limits. It has to be a life-and-death situation, or at least I have to think it is. Or just as much high drama and emotion. Means no getting rich at roulette tables. I love my job, but, hell, even I wouldn’t be a merc if making money were that easy. I could get beat up just as much getting thrown out of every casino in Vegas, and in half the time, too.
I can’t fake the adrenaline or the high emotions that make my luck kick in. That means I’ve got to keep myself on the edge.
The other problem is that my luck has a sense of humor – and it can get awfully meanspirited. Some days, it doesn’t even feel like it’s on my side. That window I told you I got blasted through? I survived when anyone else should’ve been cut to ribbons, but, when I landed, I twisted both ankles in exactly the same place. Could hardly walk for a week. And that frag grenade? It didn’t so much miss me as hit the thousand year-old book I’d been hired to steal back from some museum burglars.
I’m not gonna lie – my luck is comforting. The time it was stolen from me was a nightmare that made my recurring losing-my-dog-in-downtown-San-Francisco nightmare seem cheerful and carefree.
But I can’t think of my luck as a friend. I can’t let myself think I can count on it.
Because thinking isn’t acting, and if I’m not acting, I lose it.
It also isn’t looking out for anyone other than me.
• • •
This was a mission where I didn’t feel comfortable bringing anyone else along with me. This was my concern, my fixation. No one else’s. And yet, somehow, one of my contacts had convinced me to let him tag along anyway.
He sat in the back of my boat. His name was Jonathan Shepherd, and he was somewhere between an old friend and an employer. An extremely dangerous combination for either of our well-beings. We’d worked together on enough jobs, and made enough money together, that I had gotten a little too comfortable around him. Called him by his first name. And even let him call me “Neena” sometimes.
I’d learned things about him I never should have learned about any employer – like that, as frail and self-serious as he looked, he was a surprisingly good lay. I’d promised myself at the time I wouldn’t regret that, but I made all kinds of promises to myself that I couldn’t keep. Without that sentimental bond, he probably wouldn’t have been able to talk me into doing what he had.
After what happened next, it would be a long time – not until I started working with Inez and Rachel – that I would let anyone else call me “Neena” rather than “Domino.”
If I hadn’t brought him in on this, I wouldn’t have found out anywhere near as much about that face I was chasing. But his presence still seemed like an intrusion. When he found out where our trail of breadcrumbs was leading, he insisted on seeing things through. He wouldn’t give me the last little crumb I needed to finish the trail until I vowed to take him along.
What a jerk, right?
But being a jerk is what you need in this business, because he got what he was looking for – a trip to the Everglades, tagging along with me – and he still wouldn’t say why. It was as irritating as all the bug bites I was collecting out here. Jonathan reclined in the back of our motorboat, his arms and walking cane propped up against the side, watching the marshy shoreline with a perpetual frown.
“There.” Abruptly, he pointed to a patch of coastline that looked no different than any other.
I gave him an appropriately withering look – for about the twentieth time that day – but he didn’t even glance my way. “That’s rough terrain,” I said. “You sure you’re going to be all right with your…?” I nodded at his cane.
“Just go,” he said, his voice tight. He’d been sitting in the back of the boat for half an hour. His bad leg must really have been starting to hurt.7
I mentally rehearsed one of the thousand questions I was going to ask him once we were ashore and he couldn’t pretend to be distracted any more, and aimed the boat toward a little marshy inlet. We could follow the waterway for a bit, but eventually we were going to have to get out and slog through the marsh.
Jonathan grimaced and levered himself backward. The back of the boat was loaded with armaments. He started picking through the weapons we’d brought, and selected a light pistol. Jonathan had refused to say what we might be facing, except that it would be a good idea to be ready.
It was luck – real luck, not my power – that saved my life here. And a little bit of stupidity.
They could’ve caught me completely off guard. If I’m not paying attention, my luck isn’t working for me. That’s the way I’m going to die someday – someone’s going to sneak up on me from behind and put a bullet in my head, or a semi’s going to plow into my motorcycle from my blind spot. My luck can’t defend me against what I can’t see. That’s fine. When it comes, I’d rather not see it coming, you know?
They must have been hiding in the marsh, wading waist deep. If they’d just opened fire from cover, that would have been it. Lights out.
Instead, they tried to get clever. “Identify yourself!” a voice called.
It wasn’t a genuine attempt to get me to surrender. They just wanted to distract me, get me to slow down. Make for an easier shot.
I turned and, just quickly enough, saw them. A blur of motion. A human-shaped figure, all in dark gray camouflage netting.
When the missile shot toward my boat like a dart from a blowgun, I had just enough time to realize what was happening. Enough to react. To jump.
There was no time to stop for Jonathan.
I hardly felt the scum of algae and mosquito eggs as I plunged through into the cloudy water underneath. Then the shockwave struck. Indistinguishable from a freight train. If I’d hit the water at a shallower angle, I would’ve gone skipping across it like a stone. As it was, the blast just knocked me down so hard that I felt like a swatted fly. The water might as well have been a brick wall.
But the shockwave didn’t crush my ribs like an aluminum can. Nor did any piece of the shrapnel do much more than nick me.
Lucky me.
My lungs burned. I hadn’t had time to take a breath before the impact. I’d been shoved under so hard that I didn’t know which way was up. The salty water was cloudy enough that, when I opened my eyes to look around (ouch), I couldn’t tell what direction the light was coming from.
I swam into a patch of marsh reeds whose stalks helped me reestablish up and down. When I broke through the surface, it still felt like the world had tilted sideways. My head spun. I spat out the water I’d inhaled, as quietly as possible, and tried to get my bearings.
I’d emerged among the reeds, half-hidden, but not hidden enough. If whoever had shot at me was looking, they could have found me, easy. But they weren’t looking.
The shrapnel from the blast hadn’t killed me like it should have. Instead of a sliced-up neck, I had ended up with almost symmetrical cuts on my arms. The salt water stung them viciously. The skin around them was already red. I brushed a film of algae off one, and grimaced. My medical kit had been in the boat.
With Jonathan.
My heart froze. There was no way he could have survived that missile hit. He just couldn’t have moved fast enough.
I tried to focus on the immediate. On myself, on my injuries. I was going to have to find some cleaner water, and ideally disinfectant, soon. My luck may step in to save my life, but it didn’t give one whit if I was in pain. I learned that well enough while I was still very young.
Every time I look into a mirror and see the brand on my eye is a reminder of that.
I spat out more foul-tasting water. Made a little fountain out of it. I couldn’t tell how much noise I was making. My ears were still ringing. Fortunately, I doubted my attacker could hear me either. He’d fired from short range.
A floret of smoke still hovered over the shoulder-mounted launcher he’d fired and discarded.8 Another hung over the remains of the motorboat. The shooter had taken cover in a circular frond of grass on a little hillock. A neat little hunter’s blind with command of the area. The inlet I’d driven down made the most natural approach into drier land, and this had been a reasonable place to guard. Something I would have paid attention to if I’d expected this much opposition. Which I hadn’t.
Not so soon, anyway.
The site I’d been heading towards was miles inland yet. As far as I knew, this part of the coast was a nature conservatory. Officially, it was.
My assailant was wading into the marsh, toward the wreckage of my boat. He wore heavy gray-and-brown camo. He’d ditched the one-shot shoulder-mounted launcher, which let me get a better look at it. An AT4 shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, a mainstay of the US armed forces. Interesting, that. Could mean nothing. Could mean a hell of a lot.
See, I didn’t have any idea who I’d come out here chasing.
Jonathan hadn’t told me anything. And now he’d never be able to.
That idiot. That stubborn, earwax-for-brains moron. It was easier to be enraged right now than distraught.
Mr Overkill was saying something I couldn’t hear over the ringing. He held his hand to his ear. Earpiece. He was speaking a lot louder than he needed to. Like me, he’d been partially deafened by the blast.
He wasn’t looking around. He hadn’t seen me escape the blast. And while he held his rifle – an M4 carbine – at the ready, his posture was that of a man who only expected something grisly, not something dangerous.
I sank deeper into cover, leaving just my nose above water, and waited.
The front half of the motorboat had been blown clean away, but the rest was, surprisingly, still in one piece. He grabbed the boat’s remains, pulled it closer to him.
Much as I would’ve loved creeping up on him, introducing myself, and then showing his nose to the back of his skull, there were more productive ways to spend my energy. Like trying to eavesdrop.
I had paid very, very dearly to get this far. And so had someone else. Jonathan hadn’t been the first to die.