Storm cast her eyes over the girls, about forty of them, lying around the room. They had the smaller common room, there were more boys in the school than girls. It always was that way; fewer female mutants. Kitty was sitting at the far end of the room, by the window, knees drawn in to her chest. She was ashen. Storm had spoken to her earlier. She was just in shock. She hadn't killed tonight, she was the only one of them who hadn't. But she'd led men to Logan and, to her, that had been killing. She understood why they'd had to, she'd been able to explain it, but she was numb with it. Storm remembered the feeling. Kitty wouldn't sleep tonight. Storm was… Storm was hardened to killing now, maybe that should have frightened her. She was a mutant. She was always going to have to fight to survive, and to protect the children. Her genes had singled her out for a life of violence.

She looked out in to the corridor. Jean had a makeshift infirmary out there, she seemed to just be getting on as normal. Kurt and Logan were lying on improvised beds, Jean was crouched over Logan, who wasn't moving. Storm caught Kurt's eye.

"You okay?" She mouthed.

Kurt nodded silently. "No pain." He mouthed back.

Jean had her back to her. Storm got up and padded over. Jean glanced round as she drew near.

"Shock dose fluids." She said softly. She was holding a bag in her hand and squeezing it to force the fluid down the line in to Logan's arm. "He lost a lot of blood and he went really flat on the opioids so-" Jean glanced up at Storm and stopped. "I'm okay." She glanced up again. "Really, I am."

"Wasn't what I was going to ask." Storm said. She crouched down beside Jean. "Are you going to want me to watch them for a few hours so you can get some sleep? You must need it after that."

Jeans mouth twitched as though she'd tried to smile, then stopped trying. "I… I won't sleep." She glanced at Storm again. "Everything's on, everything's open." She glanced at Kurt. "I can't… my telepathy's dead. I can't feel anything from anyone, but…" A kid coughed in the boys' dorm. Jean jerked round. She turned back to Logan and sighed. "I'm… everything else is…" She swallowed. "I'm a bundle of raw nerves. I can hear electricity humming in the walls for God's sake. I'd need to be drugged to sleep. And I've got patients." She glanced up at Storm again. She looked… it was hard to articulate. But she didn't look right. She didn't even look tired or stressed or something any of them might reasonably have been. She looked back at Logan. "I'm fine." She said. "Or I will be."

Storm frowned. She…

"Okay." She said. "Wake me if you need me, I'm going to try to sleep." She wished she could believe Jean. But… If she had patients, if someone else was hurt, she'd soldier on through a lot. Surely after doing that much she'd need to sleep. Storm felt drained even after her efforts. But she might have felt better if they'd… if they hadn't lost Bobby and Rogue. Jean had repeated her assertion that they weren't dead, that it was the fight they'd put up that had got the mercs to give up trying to capture adults.

Storm went back to her dorm and sat down on the floor. Time was she'd have been able to sleep just like that. She'd been a street kid. She'd got the hang of sleeping anywhere that was dry by the time she was fourteen. Maybe tonight she was tired enough, and maybe tonight it was better for her not to sleep too deeply.

,

"Kurt, get back to bed!" Jean cried. Scott turned, lowering the barrow. Kurt had appeared in the middle of last night's killing ground in front of the south entrance. It was dawn. Scott, Jean, Storm… all the X-men who were still standing, were dragging the bodies of the forty or so men they'd killed last night off to a pit they were digging for them.

"There is no pain, Doctor Grey. I can help." Kurt said blithely.

"The reason-"

Kurt disappeared. Jean hissed in frustration. Scott went back to his barrow. He heard Kurt reappear.

"The reason there's no pain is that I filled your leg with bupivacaine this morning so you could sleep." Jean said, very fast. "If you do this now, you will pay for it later, I promise you. Go back to bed."

"There is a great deal I can do without using my leg at all."

"Do as she says, Kurt." Scott said over his shoulder. He saw Kurt sigh.

"Very well. If you change your mind, you know where I will be." He disappeared.

"Thanks." Jean said. She looked exhausted. She'd said she hadn't slept at all, she must have been exhausted. He hadn't slept much and he was tired enough, and using his power didn't tire him. He'd been scared the mercs would come back. Though, according to The Professor, they wouldn't. They'd crossed over briefly this morning, The Professor had been on his way down to Cerebro.

"It's… it's hard to explain, Scott, but those men will never return to this place. If they return to their masters, they'll tell tales of monsters too terrifying to face, I'd been trying to graft that on to them when Jean… she drove the graft in to them with the force of a sledgehammer, and amplified it as she did. Those that were above ground fled in terror."

They were all tired, their tempers were all frayed. And they all had to remember that. They had to be gentle with each other.

Scott kept walking, he was just about aware of Jean behind him, she was too tired to want to talk, until he reached the pit in the woods. Kitty, Peter and Storm were digging. Scott ditched the dead man in his barrow unceremoniously on to the ground. They'd already stripped the bodies of anything useful. There was a man called Archie Duke who… he was like a sub-Magneto. He had the same sense of metal, the ability to tell exactly what the alloy behind a plastic coating was before he even touched it, but he couldn't throw it around like a telekinetic. They sold scrap metal to him. He'd been a student here, a year above Scott, so he knew what sort of things could happen to mutants. So he'd load up his trucks, pay The Professor, and ask no questions about why there were dozens of guns, some of them burned or cut in to bits, in a boarding school.

Jean offered a hand to Kitty to pull her out of the pit she was helping to dig. Kitty shook her head, barely even looking up.

"I'm okay digging." She said.

"The point of rotating is that nobody gets too worn out doing any one thing." Scott said. "They were a tenacious bunch, there's a lot of them to get through."

Kitty shook her head again. She hadn't stopped digging. "I'd prefer to stay here."

Storm drove her spade in to the earth. "You haven't handled bodies before, have you?" Scott saw Kitty tense. "Kitty, you know why we had to."

Kitty looked at Jean. "You said they didn't kill Bobby and Rogue."

Jean sighed. "I don't think they did. But after that, they used live rounds against everyone except you. What hit Kurt was a live round, they used lethal force on Logan probably eight or nine times over. He's still not up to much, and you know how fast he heals."

"They were solid rounds hitting me." Peter said. "They feel different to hollopoints or darts."

"It's…" Kitty set her jaw. "I'm being juvenile about it. I know I am. I know I just have to shut up and do as I'm told, I'm an X-man now."

"I've never said that." Scott said quietly. "Yeah, this stinks. It stinks that someone sent eighty mercs to attack a school. It stinks that they had us nine to one. It stinks that we were facing such bad odds we were using lethal force from the outset. It stinks that we lost Bobby and Rogue before we had the first idea what was happening."

"So why are we doing this?" Peter asked, setting down his spade. "Why are we not out there chasing them? They've been taken to be experimented on. Why are we not out there trying to get them back?"

Scott stared at Peter for a second. "Where would you suggest we look?" Only then did Peter seem to realize what he'd asked. "And what do you think The Professor's doing?" Peter looked down. "Until we have a location, we hold position. We have children to protect here." There was a long silence. Scott saw Kitty grit her teeth before she jumped to climb out of the pit. Jean helped her the rest of the way, then jumped down herself.

"Come on." Storm said to Peter, taking up her spade again. Peter did the same, Jean picked up Kitty's.

,

Charles Xavier dragged himself in to bed and turned the covers over himself. He was numb with exhaustion, but… Cerebro could do strange things to him. It could be very soporific or make it impossible for him to sleep. Today it had done the latter.

He'd not found them. He shouldn't have been surprised by that. Given a jet, Bobby and Rogue could have been anywhere on the continent by the time he started looking. In his thirties, he might have been able, but he was out of practice at this. He'd also tried to read Jean. Either he was too exhausted by Cerebro or her mind had been dramatically affected by her power surge. She'd been virtually unreadable, shifting like sand moment to moment, however hard she tried to keep still for him, and as at Alkali Lake, the power surge seemed to have completely destroyed her ability to form memory. He had no idea what had happened to her, or why, but she'd not felt particularly strong to him, just… skittish, disordered. Or had he just been too tired to get the measure of her? He didn't know. And that made him feel utterly powerless.