Gemini's twin was at the other end of the building, and had remained more or less unaffected by the third explosion. The force of the blast had shaken her for a moment, but she had regained her footing and redoubled her determination to complete her task. So there were more caches of explosives. That one had sounded much bigger than the previous two. The police bomb disposal team could be hours away for all she knew. Lives could depend on how quickly she managed to find and disarm more bombs.

Hurrying onwards, she approached the nearest structural join. If she were to plant a bomb, this was where she would put it. Her heart pounding, her mind desperately trying to focus on the task in hand and not worry about the larger scheme of things, she looked for anything that might be hiding an explosive device, anything that looked suspicious.

On the wall near her was an electric maintenance panel. She moved to examine it closer. It seemed as likely a place as any. She didn't have any tools to open it with, and while she didn't want to risk electrocuting herself, she knew there was no time. She would just have to pry it open. In the worst case scenario that her twin didn't survive, she would just have to endure the pain and send another one in.

There! She had managed to get a grip on the panel cover, and force it open. Ripping the rest of it away from the wall, she threw it aside and got her first look at the inside of the electrical unit.

"Oh, man..." she breathed.

She had been right. There was an explosive inside, a small device with two canisters of liquid and various wires hooked up to a timer. Binary liquids – as soon as it was triggered, they would mix and the explosion would result. She had no way of knowing what the chemicals were or how big the explosion would be. She just had to hope she could disarm it.

Forcing herself to stay calm, Gemini tried to reassure herself. It was OK. It was fine. She'd had loads of experience with explosives when she was in the Brotherhood. Pyro had taught her everything he had known. OK, that had mainly been experience of setting bombs and having them blow things up, rather than disarming them to stop things blowing up, but it was the same principle. And the X-Men had given her some basic training in bomb disposal.

It was OK. Everything would be fine. All she needed to do was remove the connection between the two canisters of liquid to prevent them from mixing. Easier said than done, of course – the connecting tube looked like it was right at the back of the device, flush against the wall. Reaching into the device with small, delicate fingers, she began to prise it apart.

Oh God, please help me, she prayed, please don't let anyone else die. Please help me to disarm this.

At first glance it looked as if there weren't going to be any nasty surprises. It was wired up in a fairly standard way, the way Pyro had always taught her to do it. Actually, it was kind of weird – it was wired up in exactly the way Pyro had always taught her to do it, step for step, piece by piece. Well, maybe that was just the best way. Normally there was some variation between the work of different bomb-makers, but – well, whatever. It didn't matter. All that mattered was disarming this bomb to stop any more people from dying. After that there would be time to try and figure out who had made it. Gemini forced her mind to concentrate on the task in hand.

Her communicator buzzed, "Gemini?"

"Can't talk just now," she snapped tersely. "Atlas, take over."

"Atlas here."

"It's Rogue. There's been another bomb at the front of the building. The emergency exits are now impassable. We're going to start evacuating people through the rear entrance. Get ready."

"Uh – OK. I'll need to clear the way first."

Gemini's heart quickened even faster. Now there was absolutely no margin for error. If she screwed this up and the bomb went off, everybody trying to leave the building by the back door would be blown to pieces. She took a deep breath, and forced herself to calm down. With a pounding heart and trembling fingers she wouldn't be able to do this.

Please help me to do this, she prayed again.

She had her hand on the connection tubing now. All that needed to be done was to cut it and seal up the ends so the two liquids would be unable to mix. A cut in the wrong place however, and she might accidentally cause the two liquids to start mixing prematurely! If that happened, hundreds of people would die. But it was OK. She knew how to do this. She knew how to put these bombs together and take them apart again. It was just that she'd never done it with so many lives at stake…

There! It was done. With a sigh of relief, she sealed the two ends of the severed tubing together to make it impossible for any mixing to take place. Now there was only one thing she needed to check. Depending on how thorough the bomb-maker had been, there might be some sort of back-up mechanism designed to take over if the mixing failed, perhaps a smaller explosive that would shatter the two canisters and allow the liquids to mix that way. Carefully guiding her hands even deeper into the wiring, she probed gently for anything suspicious.

OK. Now this was really spooky. There was a back-up mechanism, a small chunk of plastic explosive, and it was in exactly the place Dad had always taught her to hide one. Most bomb disposal experts wouldn't think to look for it there, he had always said. Gemini was very confused now. As far as she'd known, that had always been Dad's own personal technique, something he had invented himself, his signature touch when building an explosive device.

Well, maybe she had been wrong. Maybe it wasn't quite so unique. Maybe other people used it too. With the utmost of care and delicacy, she disconnected the plastic explosive and set it down harmlessly on the floor beside her. Then she let herself relax.

"Hey guys," Atlas reported. "The first of the, uh, evacuees are coming out of the back door!"

Gemini had relaxed for all of two seconds when suddenly something moved in front of her. Her heart rose into her mouth. The detonator switch had just been activated! The bomb had just been triggered remotely! If she had missed anything, if the liquids mixed together, then the bomb was about to explode in her twin's face, killing all those who were trying to evacuate the building on the floor below!

She held her breath, and the seconds went by with the two liquids remaining trapped in their individual canisters. No mixing. No explosion. A few more seconds, and still nothing. The back-up had failed too.

Thank you, she prayed.

"Bomb deactivated," the exhausted girl whispered into her communicator.

"Great work, Alex!" came Rogue's voice. "You've just saved hundreds of people's lives! I knew we could count on you! OK, get yourself outside and to safety. The police bomb squad has just arrived – they'll want to take it from here."

"Will do."

Gemini was about to rise to her feet and head for the exit, when something caught her eye. There was something else inside the electric maintenance panel. She panicked for a second that it might be another explosive device, but it wasn't. It was a shiny metal object, and the light glinting off it was what had caught her attention. Curious, she leaned closer, and reached in to pick up the object that had reflected the light. Then she got her first look at what it was.

Her eyes widened and her heart started pounding once more. This was not good. This was seriously, enormously, not good. There was no way this could be here – it was impossible! She hurried back to the exit. She had to show this to the X-Men.

The X-Men had still been desperately pulling the wounded and unconscious people free from under the collapsing building, knowing that literally every moment counted, knowing that every second Bobby's ice structure managed to slow the building's fall was another body pulled to safety. It was impossible to tell how many were still alive. And when the building finally fell and those remaining were crushed to pulp, it would be impossible to ever know how many still alive had been left behind.

However, they weren't alone. Police, fire services and ambulance workers newly arrived on the scene, plus several humans from the watching crowds, were now helping too.

But it wasn't enough. When the ice shield finally gave way and the police chief gave the order for everyone to retreat, there were still a lot of people lying underneath the building's front edifice as it crashed into the concrete surface.

They'd done everything they could. There was nothing more that could have been done. There had been no warning of the explosions, no reason to think that the standard evacuation procedure should not be followed. But if the X-Men had been at full strength; if Scott, Storm and Logan had been here – and where the hell were they, exactly? – it could have been different. It would have been different.

Something was wrong, something besides what was going on here. Something must have happened at the school. Everybody who was supposed to be there was out of contact. Was this just an attack on the conference, or were the X-Men themselves being targeted as well?

Still, it had not ended in complete tragedy or disaster. The four teenagers assigned to guard the back of the building had done fantastically well, taking the initiative to save lives and to go far beyond the call of duty. Gemini in particular had distinguished herself, and the X-Men would have offered her full and immediate membership there on the spot if the present emergency hadn't made it necessary to postpone any decisions of that nature.

The mutants' involvement in risking themselves to save lives had also not gone unnoticed by the police or by the media crews in the vicinity. While the conference itself was now in ruins, things had not gone entirely badly from a PR perspective.

But it was still a huge backwards step. There had been so many hopes and dreams riding on the success of the conference, on forging a new foundation for relations between humans and mutants not just in the US but worldwide...and all of it had come to a crashing halt with the destruction of most of the conference centre and the deaths of many of those involved.

It had not been a good day. And what Gemini was about to tell them was going to make it an even worse one.