Josh was called in to tend to the wounded. Charles had a broken leg from his fall, fixed easily enough with half an hour of bio-manipulation. Cassandra and Tessa both had some minor cuts and scrapes, which faded within moments as he intuitively instructed the internal workings of their bodies.

The infirmary building was a pile of rubble. Cassandra ordered Jean, Nightcrawler and Tessa to get some rest. No one objected. Forge was busy, programming fabricator drones, the same ones that had constructed the Sphere, to reinforce its structural integrity. Software protocols were being rewritten to accommodate their guest and entirely new systems and tools were being invented in the back of his head as he worked. Kate helped him where she could, but mostly she kept him company.

Storm and Monet were assigned to look after Charles. The latter had never met him. As the youngest staff member of Site X, she had been recruited long after Xavier and Magneto had begun their grand work of creating their mutant state. Ororo had remained as friendly as she could have before Genosha went into a self-imposed period of political isolation and closed itself off to the rest of the world. She hadn't spoken to him in at least five years.

Monet and Storm shared a large house near the gardens. They set Charles up in the guest room on the ground floor. Ororo offered to cook, which he declined. She wondered if, like his sister, he didn't really need to eat. She had noticed that telepaths often shared the same physiological eccentricities, like an aversion to food and drink and reversed circadian rhythms. Still, she poured him a cup of tea, and he accepted it. She took a seat near him on one of Monet's precious Corbusiers.

"I've missed you, Storm, " he said. His face had less of the raw emotion on it, and he looked more himself. His skin seemed to be tightening back into its normal, restrained dignity.

"I've missed you too, Charles," Ororo replied, "though I'm sorry we had to see each other under such bizarre circumstances. I tried to send you a card when Eric passed. I know the pain of losing a dear friend." She winced internally at the memory of Betsy.

"I didn't receive anything. Towards the end there Eric and I were at odds about Genosha's future. At odds about everything, really. I was being pushed out of things. Silent coups, factional squabbles, that sort of thing." His voice seemed to be retreating into that distant tone that she remembered from her youth. His habit of speaking so detached about his life, of glossing over remarkable and interesting things as if they were mere trivialities, was as frustrating now as it always had been.

"We don't really keep that much of an eye on Genosha, Charles."

He nodded, his lips curving into a slight smile. "No one does. Your lot here seem to be going on as discretely as possible too."

"We try. How did you even get here?" She was genuinely curious.

"Blink," he said. "Clarice. She was one of yours. Emigrated a couple of years back, through one of our contacts in Jakarta. She remembered where you were."

Ororo tilted her head. "Well, that doesn't really explain how you managed to sneak into your sister's living room at one o'clock in the morning, does it? How you managed to circumvent our security, our telepaths, our biohacked pine trees, our mutant-engineered holography?"

His smile widened a bit. "Oh, come on now, Storm. You can't be as hopelessly naive as my sister. Your contraptions may fool humans but to a mutant of my caliber it's all just tissue paper over a landfill."

"You could have stopped the girl, couldn't you? You let her go on her little rampage back there?" For all of Charles' intellect, good manners, charm, charisma there was that ever-present endoskeleton of duplicity.

"I did, back in Genosha. Her first such incident. If I could show you the havoc she wrought back on the island..." Charles paused, as if to consider his words carefully. "Cassandra's skepticism is so consummate as to often turn into something else entirely. I needed her to see it and I needed it to put the fear of God in her. Yes, I was able to subdue her, but I'm not saying that it was easy. It wasn't."

Ororo took a sip of her tea, the lines of her shoulders straightening with frustration. "There are children here, Charles."

"I wouldn't have come here for help if I didn't think you all were capable of providing it. You endured a mere fraction of what Genosha has since her powers emerged. You all did fine."

Storm restrained the internal fury that was swelling internally. For all of Cassandra's excessive caution or disbelief, she had never been as reckless as Charles. That tenuous balance that made them so effective together was disastrous when they were apart.

When she didn't immediately respond, Charles continued. "This is serious, Ororo. You saw it. It took a loop of every telepath here to take her down. There's no one in Genosha, perhaps the world, that can do what Tessa can. She could be the key to figuring this whole thing out. I need her help. I need your help. Can I count on you, Ororo?"

"Yes," Ororo said, coolly. "If you can help me with something in turn."