In a fancy Chicago hotel, Richie Alegria holds a meeting between himself, his new bodyguards, Dani Moonstar, Bobby DaCosta and Tabitha Smith and the mobsters that are after him. But the mutants learn that Richie is not being shaken down by the mob, as he claimed, but instead owes them the balance on a loan. The mobsters give Richie two weeks to provide a return on their "investment". Feeling betrayed, the mutants quit, but reluctantly stay with Richie when he explains he's a filmmaker working on a movie, and begs for their help. In a Washington, D.C. bank, Domino accesses a safe deposit box, then walks into the middle of a robbery. With her powers off kilter due to the device implanted in her neck, she ponders her next move.Theresa Rourke and James Proudstar find the reporter Michael Whitecloud living drunk and scared in a squalid apartment in Salvation, Nebraska. Whitecloud explains the story behind James' tribe's massacre: he met Lucius DeWitt, a whistleblower exposing Project: Stepladder, an experimental genetics program acting on unsuspecting humans. The Project's superiors tracked DeWitt to the tribe's Camp Verde and sent a Death Squad to eliminate everyone. Whitecloud's been in hiding ever since. He tells James of a bus station locker where the evidence is hidden, but before the reporter can name those behind the project, his head explodes. Later, an agent named Martin Edwards follows James and Theresa's trail. In Minerva, Ohio, a mysterious figure seeks Bobby and the others.