Glow headed upstairs to walk the cobwebs out of her mind. She'd run into Storm almost immediately and the other mutant invited her to join the faculty in the dining room for a late dinner. Glow accepted readily. Logan and Cyclops were already there when she came in. As the sat down she listened to Storm talk about how happy the two teens had been on their day off despite the chores and shook herself out of her darker mood. Glow couldn't remember the last time she'd had so much fun in a single day. A day just for relaxing, shopping with the kids and Logan, having lunch out for a change, not being afraid of the surrounding crowd. She almost felt normal. Almost. If it hadn't been for the work she'd had to do with Jean once she'd gotten home with those horrible files that had upset them both she'd still be in a good mood. There'd also been no time to talk to Logan about what happened this afternoon at the record store. She brushed her fingers against her lips in the barest of memories.

She glanced across the dinner table at Logan and wondered again if she should have stayed this long. He caught her staring at him and smiled at her. She blushed and pulled a lock of her orange hair in front of her face so he couldn't see.

"So Glow, how have you been enjoying our hospitality?" Xavier asked as he advanced into the dining room.

"Oh, everything's been great. Especially since no one made me cook," she answered flippantly. "Which was very wise on Storm's part. I've been known to ruin cereal."

"You wouldn't think a woman who eats as much as you do wouldn't be able to cook," Cyclops noted.

Glow blushed again, not out of embarrassment, but the slight heat of defensiveness. "It takes a lot to fuel my power, whether or not I'm actively using it."

"So it would seem," Xavier said, maneuvering his wheel chair in at the head of the table the teachers were all gathered at.

Glow gave him a slightly puzzled look. At her raised eyebrow Xavier explained. "It would also seem that your mutant ability to control electricity is not your only gift."

"What do you mean?" Glow asked guardedly. She reviewed her actions mentally and realized her mistake. She'd left Jean with her computer before ending her program. It might still be possible to do damage control depending on how much they'd found out. Jean hadn't been left alone with the program for more then five minutes.

"Sara McLain, otherwise known as Glow, in the captive care of The Future of Technology Laboratories for twenty-three years, trained in computer manipulation- hacking - trained in strategic logic, trained in hand to hand combat, trained in field medical techniques, shall I go on?" Xavier announced in his ever-calm voice.

"Doesn't seem like you have to," Glow said as she pushed away her plate and folded her hands, resting her elbows on the table. She cursed herself and her own inattention. There would be no damage control now. "It seems you've got almost everything covered."

"What's he talking about, Sara?" Logan asked, staring at her with disbelieving eyes.

"Future Tech trained her to be a mercenary," Xavier answered for her. "And it would seem that even after her liberation from them she continues these activities. I believe you call yourselves the Future Tech Four?"

"Team. Future Tech Team," she corrected. "Why?"

"Why what?" Xavier feigned innocence.

"Why bring all this up now?" She started to crack her knuckles, keeping her eyes on her hands and refusing to meet Logan's brown eyes.

"It has come to my attention that you have been sending the files you and Jean have been working on to an unknown computer e-mail system," the professor said.

"You found my transmissions," she stated softly.

"Yes, but we're having a devil of a time tracking them," Xavier admitted with some chagrin.

"You're not likely to be able too. I'm a decent hacker. But I'm nowhere in the league of my team second. She's got those signals bouncing off of so many terminals, servers, and satellites that you aren't likely to find it." Glow rubbed her eyes and laughed into her hands. "And if you do, it'll probably look like everything got sent to the computer next to the one I was using. She's got an over-developed sense of humor. Trust me when I say you're wasting your time."

"Thanks for letting us know," Cyclops broke in. "Anything else you'd care to tell us?"

"Not really," she sighed and leaned back in her seat. "So what's the problem with me sending a few e-mails I want to keep private?"

"I know you've been looking for something specific in those disks," Jean said softly, entering the room behind the Professor. "We want to know exactly what you want with Dr. Maxwell DeLeon and what you intend to do with him when you find him."

Glow sat up stock straight and stared at Jean until the other woman looked away, uneasy. "Damn it. DAMN IT! Another two hours Xavier, I would have been gone with no one the wiser. Why NOW?" She stood up, knocking her chair over then kicking it viciously.

"Because it's my duty to make sure that my students and people are safe. Because it is my duty to insure that the human population we live with and in do not have reason to hate or fear us."

"Self-righteous bullshit," Glow hissed, slamming her hands down into the tabletop. "What's one man's life to you?"

"Depends on the man," Xavier retorted meeting her eyes with an unwavering gaze.

Everyone at the table rose on guard now, even Logan who'd extracted his claws. Glow stopped her temper-tantrum and looked intently at him. "Fine. If you're all going to hate me, then you're going to hate me for the right reasons. You got a place we can talk?"

"Jean, lead us to the Ready Room," Xavier instructed. "Logan, you bring up the rear with Scott."

"An escort?" Glow asked, her previously cheerful voice deadly serious now. "What's the matter? Don't trust me?"

"I will not dignify that with an answer."

"You just did," Glow told him as she followed Xavier and Jean out of the dining room with the two men on her heels and Storm just off to her side.

"So talk," Storm instructed, waving Glow into the room ahead of her.

"I need the computer. I want to show you exactly what I'm talking about," Glow requested, her voice growing more and more solemn.

Scott moved to block her from it, but Xavier motioned him away.

"Thank you," she said, barely glancing at Scott as he moved. The tall woman sat down in front of the console and started typing in data at a furious rate. The lights in the room suddenly dimmed. "What the-?"

In the center of the room a beam of red light projected down from the ceiling. The light changed to blue and began projecting an image of a man. Glow stared at it for a while and shrugged. "I was just going to call something up on the screen, but this works too."

"The man you're looking at is Dr. Maxwell DeLeon, a mutant's worst nightmare. He's the man behind the science at Future Tech. Or at least he was up until the destruction of the F.T.L. headquarters in Maine, which my three teammates and myself were responsible for. He's been in hiding for the past decade and the four of us have been tracking him all that time."

"He is responsible for ordering the deaths of 154 mutants during the course of his experiments. We consider him to be a monster of the worst sort. You read his logs Jean. You know what he thinks of us. how he thinks of us." Glow's voice became slightly manic and haunted. "158 of us went into that laboratory. Only four of us came out alive. I was the first one in and the last one out."

She shook her head and drew herself back into the present, not noticing the shiver that swept through Jean and the pained look on Wolverine's face.

"We're not sure if he's still currently performing experiments on mutants although it's highly likely. It has come to our attention that he is no longer focusing his research on just biological subjects and DNA experiments but has expanded to include development of equipment that could possibly be harmful to human and mutant life."

Glow punched a few keys and called up a new image.

Wolverine stared at it, snarling. "That's the machine Magneto tried to kill us all with."

"Guess who built it?" Glow snorted derisively. "My team second intercepted a message from the mutant known as Magneto to DeLeon requesting that this machine be custom built to his design specifications. We almost seized DeLeon before he was able to complete delivery of the mutation machine to his client. Almost. We really fell through on that one. I am grateful to you for stopping Magneto before he could unleash the full power of that apparatus."

"I don't understand something," Jean shook her head. "If DeLeon experimented on mutants, why would he work with one to built that monstrosity?"

"Are you kidding? Magneto guaranteed him hundreds of thousands of new test subjects." Glow swallowed, as if nauseated. "He is just insane enough to consider this a giant science fair project. The Future Tech Team is getting very close to locating him. Thanks to Magneto's current news coverage we've had a better time of tracking his erstwhile associate."

"What are you going to do when you catch up with him?" Wolverine asked.

"Kill him," Glow answered calmly, meeting his gaze. "I have 158 lives to pay him back for. 154 that didn't make it out and four who did."

Glow typed a few more bars of data and turned back to the hologram projector to show them the new image.

"This is the F.T.L. compound where I met Logan. I was here to glean information about DeLeon's whereabouts. We had reason to believe that he may have used this lab within the past five years for some of his earlier tests of the Magneto machine's prototype. Hence the general state of disrepair the lab was in when we got there."

"This is some pretty heavy stuff. What I don't get is why you followed Wolverine back here," Scott said.

"We knew of the so-called X-Men's involvement in Magneto's capture despite the cover-ups," Glow explained, tracing one finger on the edge of the counter top. "We were curious about the connection between Magneto, the machine, DeLeon, and ourselves. Running into Logan was a spot of pure luck. I spent the entire night after I knocked him out in telepathic communication with my team working out the details for this plan. I would endear myself to him, get him to take me back here and do some reconnaissance on who you were and what side you're on."

She hung her head in honest shame. "If I hadn't run into you there, we would have arranged a 'chance meeting' with one of you sometime in the next few months. Logan showing up out of the blue like that just speed up our plan a bit, and gave us access to a superior computer on which to do our research."

"You used me," Wolverine whispered, half-dazed. He laughed, "What a freakin' sucker."

"Logan I." She looked at him for a long time and then sighed. "It doesn't matter now, does it? Whatever I say you're not going to believe now that you've made up your mind to hate me."

"It never mattered what I said from the beginning," Wolverine spat back. "Because you'd already made up your mind to betray me."

Glow bit her lip and blinked back what looked like tears. "That's okay. I understand. So Professor, now that you have this knowledge what do you intend to do?"

"I intend to digest it. You've filled in a lot of gaps in what we knew of Magneto's activities. It makes me worry," the professor answered.

"You're going to sit on your ass and do nothing while that doctor runs around free and dangerous to everyone, not just mutant kind." Glow sounded disgusted. "Even after all I've told you."

She sat back in her seat and rested her arms down the sides of the chair. Glow spoke to the air. "I consider this mission a scrap, Mez. Pull me out. I repeat, pull me out."

"Wait a minute! What the hell do you think." Scott didn't even have time to finish his sentence. There was a rush of wind and Glow was gone without a trace.