Dr. Gray walked into Xavier's office, which doubled as the staff room, to find her friends assembled and awaiting her. She instinctively walked to Scott's side even as Charles inquired "The girl?"

Cyclops casually lifted an arm so that Jean could slide under it. "Asleep in the guest room. Or more accurately, unconscious. She's so exhausted that I think she was out before her head hit the pillow."

Scott Summers knew his woman, and he could tell that Jean was significantly disturbed. "What's wrong? You're upset."

The telepath wrapped her arms around her chest and hugged herself reflexively. "I looked into her mind as soon as I felt she wasn't going to wake. God, the horrors that child has been through for the past few years; you wouldn't believe it. Nearly as bad as Logan."

Everyone in the room was startled; Wolverine had been put through what could only be called torture by men who had poured molten metal into his living body to reinforce his skeleton and give him retractable claws. His mind had nearly self-destructed in order to block out the memories. Steel tinged Xavier's voice as he commanded his protégé "Show me."

Jean shuddered automatically at the thought of examining those memories again, but she obediently linked her mind to the Professor's and began replaying what she had seen. Dr. Gray was an empath as well as a telepath, and she projected the emotional content of the scenes as well as the dry details. She felt Charles recoil in disgust and disbelief when the replay began – echo of her own response. It only strengthened as he absorbed the images from her mind. His reaction was so strong that it was physically visible to everyone in the room. "Oh my God…," he said quietly as the last of the scenes faded.

Cyclops voiced the concern that they all felt. "Professor?" he asked anxiously.

It took the normally imperturbable telepath a minute to get his wits back together. The father of the X-Men informed the group, "Every bit as bad as Jean said, if not worse. This is a very damaged young woman that we're dealing with."

Dejection swept the room, and bitterness swiftly followed it. Storm spat out "All because she's a mutant."

The normally amiable Beast swore and slammed a tightly held fist into his massive hand in a rare show of anger. "Damn them! Damn the bigotry that lets men attack a child for no cause!"

A steely shing filled the room. Wolverine had popped his claws, as enraged as the others. The only reason he was able to restrain himself from slashing the professor's furniture was because he had a more satisfying target in mind. "There was at least one shooter. He probably had a car -– we're too far out in the woods for him to have hiked in easily. I'll go out to where he was standing, see if I can pick up a trail. Maybe if we're lucky he's still around."

Xavier looked out the window and saw darkness beginning to blanket the grounds. "Scott, Jean, Storm, go with him. See if you can track him. If he had a car, he's long gone by now. If he isn't, if you find him, don't harm him. Bring him here." The professor spoke sternly to reinforce the order. Telling Logan to play nice when he was enraged was usually as effective as telling a hurricane to go away and expecting that it would listen. Without further ado, the team left the office.

Wolverine discovered that there had been not one man, but two. He had no trouble finding the shooter's position even in the gathering darkness; the smell of greasy sweat and the acrid smell of gunpowder were as obvious as neon billboards to his extraordinarily keen senses. Backtracking the man's trail led to an s-curve in the road, at which point it was obvious from scent alone that he had escaped by car. Logan scented another man – the getaway driver, most likely – at the very spot where the spoor left by the first man ended, at the edge of the tarmac.

Scott shone a high-power halogen flashlight up and down Greymalkin Lane in vain. "Well, no use. Like the Professor said, they're long gone."

Jean spoke up, having unsuccessfully tried to get a telepathic bearing on their quarry. "From the images in Jeryn's mind, I'd say they wouldn't have gone too far. They've been hunting her for months – I don't think they're going to just give up and go away now."

Logan vented his frustration by slashing down a good-sized sapling on the verge of the road. "Let 'em come. They won't be able to molest any more kids when I'm through with them."

They reported their lack of success to Xavier. "As I suspected," he commented. The father of the X-Men thoughtfully turned his attention to his protégé. "Jean, there's something about the child that disturbs me."

She nodded affirmation and stated, "Her shields." Her teammates were confused and she explained, "When I saw the memories she was reliving, I automatically reached out to divert them. I tried to touch her mind and ran into an unbelievably strong set of psychic shields."

Everyone else was startled. Storm asked, "She has psychic shields? Is she a telepath, then?"

Both Jean and the Professor shook their heads in negation. Jean explained, "She's definitely not a telepath. It's easy to tell if someone is one or not. It's like seeing whether a light bulb is on or off. Even if it has a lampshade over it, you can tell when it's lit."

Cyclops mused, "So you're saying that she's not a telepath, because you can sense that the light is off, but at the same time she's got one heck of a lampshade on."

Jean confirmed the truth of his analogy. "And because the light was off and the room was dark, I only found out about the lampshade by running into it."

Ororo expressed the puzzlement in the room. "So, how could she get psychic shields without being psychic?"

Scott looked at the Professor in query. "Is it possible that it's just a random fluke?"

Xavier firmly shook his head. "About as likely as the sands of the desert randomly arranging themselves into a replica of the Eiffel Tower, or the Great Wall of China. Psychic shields have to be set in place and maintained consciously. Even though it does become near-unconscious habit after a while. Jean," he directed Dr. Gray, "I'd like you to be her mentor. Show her around, introduce her, the usual. You'll be able to monitor her discreetly, even if she does have shields. As traumatized as she is, she's likely to need your assistance in any event, so we might as well anticipate. I want to know who is hunting her, and why." The group conferred for a few more minutes, and then dispersed for the night.

Jean and Scott went to their own quarters. Cyclops couldn't help but notice that the telepath clung to him more closely than usual in their bed. She'd done so before, whenever she'd experienced something horrifying. He'd spent many a sleepless night comforting and calming his lover after such events. Judging from the strength of her grasp, what she'd seen in the girl's mind might well give his woman nightmares this night. If the teen's past was enough to give someone else nightmares, he damned well didn't want to know what the girl herself felt.