MANTIS SMILED. “Hello, Carol.” The woman’s black hair swung against her deep-green skin, her antennae sprouting from sharply cut bangs. Her dark clothes—a black T-shirt, a leather jacket in deep burgundy over that and darkwash jeans tucked into biker boots—were a stark contrast to the white of the med center’s halls. Every few seconds, muffled beeping from the machines inside the patients’ rooms would sound.
Carol hadn’t seen the empath in quite a while, but she’d always felt a sort of affinity with her. Mantis had her own history with the Kree—different than Carol’s, but she too had had her life changed because of them. They had wiped her mind after her training with the Priests of Pama, and Carol always felt a twinge of familiarity when Mantis spoke of it. Of that time of confusion, of not trusting one’s own mind or body or memories.
She remembered a time like that in her own life, those months after she’d emerged from the Psyche-Magnitron, where she didn’t understand what was happening to her. What she had become. Who she had been made. How she had been changed. It had been terrifying, and she hadn’t had to deal with unraveling false memories like Mantis had. Those Priests of Pama did not mess around. Carol had just blacked out all over the place as her powered personality took over. It had taken some sorting to get steady again, to bring the halves that made up Carol and Ms. Marvel together. But she’d made it work, just like Mantis had made it work.
“It’s been a while,” Carol said. “I didn’t realize you were on Earth, otherwise I would’ve called you up for dinner. Are the rest of the Guardians with you?”
“No. I’ve been traveling on my own.” Mantis turned back to the observation window cut in the wall.
The Inhuman was still unconscious—or doing a great acting job. They’d cleaned her up a bit—washed the dried blood from her face, and fresh bandages covered the arm wound and the cut on her head.
She seemed better. Still all harsh angles and skin that looked like it hadn’t seen the sun often, but her face was easier. Like somehow, she knew she was finally safe.
“I came because of her,” Mantis said. “My ship picked up her distress signal and when I went to investigate, her pain screamed to me across space. I had no choice but to follow and make sure she was given help.”
Carol looked at the girl, pale and gaunt against the dark sheets of the bed. The scars on her wrists were old—she’d been chained up for a long time. And if Mantis had felt such a strong connection with her, that meant some serious pain.
Carol had always had a great deal of respect for empaths—and maybe a little wariness, especially because Mantis in particular could read minds as well as feel and manipulate others’ emotions. But to feel what others were feeling, to experience pain and joy and grief that were not your own, seemed to Carol to be both a blessing and a curse.
She wanted to know what had happened to this girl, and where the rest of the Inhuman refugees were. And Carol worried if she didn’t wake up soon, Medusa might push her way in and try to control the situation.
Mantis might just be the ally Carol needed.
“She’s Inhuman,” Carol explained. “Or at least, that’s what we think because of the distress signal she used. Medusa’s upstairs, ready to tear me a new one for banning her from coming down here and questioning the kid. According to her, the girl comes from a group of Inhumans who left Attilan a decade ago, searching for a new world.”
Mantis pressed a hand against the glass, staring at the girl. “If her injuries and her fear are anything to go on, that new world wasn’t a good one.”
“Other than pain, did you glean any insight from her thoughts or emotions when you were up in space?”
Mantis sighed, ignoring her question. “She’s young.”
“I don’t follow.”
“To have that much pain in you, so young…” Mantis met Carol’s eyes, a leveling look that sent a chill through her. “Whatever happened to her, it’s very bad.”
“I think so, too,” Carol said, grateful for the backup.
“You spoke to her? The doctor said you brought her here.”
“She was really shaken up when she got out of her ship,” Carol explained. “She asked me if I was her. If she had found me.”
“So she’s looking for someone.”
“Seems so.”
“Medusa, perhaps?”
“I’m not sure.” Carol didn’t think so. If that were the case, wouldn’t she have used her name? She remembered the girl’s stunned expression as she said those words… as if she were seeing something imaginary suddenly become real. She knew the whole flying thing was impressive, but for some reason, the awe on her face as Carol floated above her twisted into her like a corkscrew. There had been something different in the girl’s eyes, a fear that wasn’t about being scared of Carol, but rather, being scared for her. It soured something in her stomach.
“The wound on her wrist, the shape of it, it looks like she might have dug something out of her skin.”
“Maybe a tracking device?” Mantis suggested. “She could be on the run.”
“Oh, she’s definitely on the run. That ship of hers wasn’t some dinky one-person shuttle; it wasn’t designed to be flown solo. I guarantee you she stole it.”
“So, a fugitive.” Mantis lightly drummed her fingers against the windowsill. “But from where?”
“I don’t know,” Carol said. “Did you recognize the ship when you were up there? Because I went inside and I don’t know the tech. There were hand-shaped sensors all over the control panel—the setup must be bio-profile touch-activated. Same thing on the doors.”
“I’m not familiar with the ship. I scanned it and couldn’t find it in any database I have access to, either.”
“The mystery grows.”
“Well, we’re about to get some answers,” Mantis said, looking through the window. The girl was starting to stir. “She’s waking up.”
* * *
BY THE time the doctors had finished checking the girl another twenty minutes had passed, and Carol was trying not to feel impatient. But that went out the window when Medusa showed up, her locks writhing.
“Please tell me the security guards still have all their limbs intact,” Carol said.
“They’re fine. I can’t believe you told them to detain me.”
She took a step forward, but Carol planted herself firmly at the end of the hall in a wide stance, arms crossed, with Mantis right behind her.
“We had agreed you were going to stay upstairs.”
The queen’s eyebrows snapped together in annoyance. “She is one of my people. I have a right to be here.”
“If the story you told me is correct, her people renounced yours, and you kicked them out. So technically, she’s a refugee. And she came here. So you’re going to follow my rules, or I’m gonna get cranky and cause a galaxy-wide incident.”
“All I want is to be in the room when you speak with her,” Medusa said between gritted teeth. Her hair swayed back and forth, the tendrils twitching like they yearned to reach out and strangle Carol. “You should want that as well, since I have insights that she may not—she must have been a child when her family left Attilan.”
“Fine,” Carol said. “Stay in the background. Let me lead. And, Medusa? I will kick you out if you upset her.”
“And I will help,” Mantis piped up. “We must proceed cautiously.”
“Mantis is right,” Carol said. “She says the kid’s been through it, and she’s the one who would know, being an empath and all. We want answers, but we don’t want to traumatize her any further.”
“I am not a monster, Captain. I do not hate those who left Attilan,” Medusa said. “There were people I knew who left on that ship. People I loved. It was not an easy time in our history.”
“Then let me lead this and make it easier now.” Carol let her voice go gentle, just a little, but the hint of steel remained.
Finally, Medusa’s hair calmed down, and she relaxed visibly. “You have my word: I will listen more than I will speak.”
Behind her, Carol felt Mantis let out a little breath of relief as the tension in the hallway finally dispersed.
“Then let’s do this.”
The girl watched them warily as they entered the room. Medusa, to her credit, went to sit in the chair tucked in the far corner, while Mantis took the one directly next to the girl’s bed on the right. Which left Carol to approach from the foot.
“Hi.” She settled herself on the mattress, which squeaked as she sat. “You remember me?”
The girl nodded.
“I’m Carol. This is Mantis. What’s your name?”
“Rhi.” She glanced warily at Medusa, her fingers tightening on the blankets. “I know who you are.”
Medusa’s chin tilted up. “And I know you. You’re the Adella girl—Aya and Rhine’s daughter. Why aren’t your parents with you?”
“They were murdered,” Rhi said, her voice flat.
“By whom?” Medusa was up out of her seat at the news.
“Medusa, stop,” Carol ordered. “Consider this the only warning you’re gonna get.” She turned back to Rhi, whose eyes were round, taking in the two of them. “Rhi, the queen here tells me that you sent out a distress signal. Is that right?”
The girl nodded.
“And you’re part of this group of Inhumans who left Attilan years ago?”
“Yes, my parents wanted a different life for me and my brother. Especially since the Genetic Council planned to send my brother to the mines after undergoing the Terrigenesis because they deemed him unworthy.” The look she shot Medusa was pure disgust. Seemed like Rhi’s parents had raised a rebel. Good for them, Carol thought. “We left about ten years ago.”
“And where did you go?” Mantis asked.
“We were on track to a new world suited to our needs when something went wrong with our ship. We suffered severe damage in an asteroid belt and veered off course; vital supplies were auto-vented out into space to reduce energy consumption, and the ship couldn’t sustain all of us for long. We would have starved to death out there, in the nothingness.”
That was the kind of thing to drive a person to the brink. Carol wanted to ask her what happened next, but Mantis quelled her with a look that made her shut her mouth and wait.
“In desperation, our parents exposed the children who hadn’t yet gone through the Terrigenesis to the mists, hoping that one of us would develop a power that could save us all. And someone did.” Rhi gave a shaky shrug. “I did. Or we thought so, at first.”
“That tear in the sky your ship came out of,” Carol said. “Is that what you can do?”
“It’s not that simple,” Rhi said. “I—” Her brown eyes slid to Medusa again, and then to the door, where the security guards stood on the other side. “Can I ask you something?” she asked, her voice lowering to a whisper.
“Anything.”
“You’re not Inhuman.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You have powers, though.”
“I do.”
“But you’re a woman. They… they still don’t lock women up here?”
The way she asked it, with almost childlike wonder, was spooky. Carol frowned, glancing at Mantis, who looked equally confused.
“Do they lock up women with powers where you’ve been?” Mantis asked.
Rhi bit her lip, which was already reddened from the habit.
“You’re safe here, Rhi,” Carol said gently. “No one’s going to lock you up for having powers. Look.” Light sprouted along her fingers, a gentle crackle rather than the full-on blast. The heat buzzed beneath her skin, a familiar tingling she had never quite gotten used to. Captivated, Rhi’s eyes followed the energy dancing between Carol’s fingers.
“See? No one’s coming to get me. And if they did? Well, trust me—they’d be sorry.”
Mantis let out a huff of breath at Carol’s audacity, trying not to smile.
“So where did you land?” It was Medusa who asked the question everyone was wondering, and she asked it softly, with the sympathy it deserved. She’d returned to her seat in the corner.
“I found us a planet,” Rhi said, looking across the room warily at Medusa. “One we could live on. They call it Damaria. That’s what I do… I find things. Anything that’s lost or hidden, I can find it. Mostly, I create little rips, tears through time and space. A kind of channel that I can reach through to grab what I’m looking for. But I have to be specific, and when I was small, just starting out, I could barely create a rip bigger than my hand for more than twenty seconds. For sure not one large enough to send a ship through, like I did to escape. And opening a rip with just the thought of I need to find a habitable planet is, well, not very specific. When I reached inside the rip, I pulled out a set of coordinates, scribbled on a piece of paper by someone who lost it who knows how long ago.”
“And you went to those coordinates.”
“We ran out of options. We used the last of our fuel to make it out that far in space, but what we found…” Tears welled in her eyes for the first time. She pressed a shaky hand to her forehead, and then flinched when her fingers grazed the bump on her head. “We thought it was our salvation. Our scanners didn’t pick up any settlements, so it seemed like an empty planet, just waiting for us.”
“But it wasn’t empty,” Mantis said.
Rhi shook her head. “As soon as we hit the atmosphere, the Damarians attacked us. Hundreds of ships like the one I arrived in brought our ship down in minutes. Our parents tried to fight back on the ground, but that’s when we discovered they had more than just invisitech to mask their presence to anyone passing by. They have a weapon that sends out some sort of energy that suppresses certain powers—and enhances others out of control. It doesn’t affect any of the Damarians, but it affected us. We weren’t able to fight back properly, and they…”
The tears finally fell, silently, streaming down the girl’s cheeks. “They took us over within a week. And that’s when we discovered what kind of place I’d brought us to.”
“Why don’t we take a break?” Mantis said, reaching out and grabbing the pitcher of water set on the table next to the bed. She poured a glass of water and handed it to Rhi, who gulped it down. “Do you still have the coordinates to Damaria?”
Rhi nodded, rattling the numbers off from memory, and Mantis wrote them down. She got up. “Medusa, will you come with me? We’re going to go hunt down the maps of this star system. See what Alpha Flight and our ally’s collective knowledge says about it.”
“This is for the best,” Mantis said firmly. “Please trust me.”
For a moment, the two women just stared at each other, Medusa’s face pinched with frustration, Mantis’s calm and determined.
“It’s rude to invade people’s minds,” Medusa finally ground out, turning on her heel and following her out. As the door closed behind them, one of the tendrils of Medusa’s hair poked Mantis in the shoulder, and the empath swatted it away, shaking her head disapprovingly.
Carol turned back to Rhi, smiling. “That’s better,” she said. “Sorry about her. She’s just…”
“She didn’t expect any of us who left to ever return,” Rhi finished. She’d taken advantage of the distraction of Medusa and Mantis’s bickering to wipe her face free of tears and push her hair back behind her ears. Her ears were a little big for her head, like she hadn’t quite finished growing into them, and for some reason, it was this that made Carol’s do-gooder heart thump like she’d just seen a sad puppy in the rain.
God, she was turning into a softie.
“Do you want to talk about what happened after you were captured on the planet?” she asked. “Or do you want to take a breather?”
“If I stop now, I might not be able to start again,” Rhi confessed. “And telling it… it’s not as bad as living it.”
“Okay,” Carol leaned forward. “Then I’m here to listen.”