"He's gone?"

Cyclops looked at his wife in stunned amazement and Jean nodded, as she looked at the X-Men in the damaged mansion. The news would get around soon enough, but she'd had to tell them first. Hank McCoy closed his eyes and muttered a silent prayer, and Iceman seemed to shrink back as the news sunk in. The original X-Men looked at each other in silence for a moment, nobody knowing quite what to say.

"I don't believe it," said Warren, breaking the silence and he looked at Jean, who was joined by Psylocke. "I know we never exactly got on... but... of all of us, I thought he was going to be around forever." He held the woman he loved tightly, knowing he'd meant a lot to her as well. "I mean... this sounds silly... but, you are sure?" Betsy nodded, saying nothing but looking at her fiancée, her eyes filled with sadness.

"Yes," said Jean, backing her up. "There was no psionic trace of either of them a the site, and Cerebro's found no sign of his mutant bio-signature on the planet. He's widening his search to the moon, just in case but we found something fused in the molten rock, something unmistakable. The area was too unstable, and we couldn't get it loose, but we have a photo." She showed it to them and as they passed it around they could scarcely believe what they saw - a metallic femur was sticking out of the rock. "SHIELD confirms it as adamantium."

"That's it, then" said Scott, his mouth dry and Jean could sense the sorrow in him, as the realisation came that they'd lost another X-Man. "Wolverine's dead."

"LOGAN!" Jean shouted as an explosion rocked the Helicarrier as Almagordo disintegrated, sending out a shockwave, the lights flickering for a moment, and it seemed as if the Helicarrier would fall from the sky but it stayed aloft.

"Did he get out?" Psylocke said, looking at Phoenix but Jean was pale.

"I don't know," she said, and she reached out with her mind as she spoke. "I felt him say they were out of time and..." She put her hand across her mouth.

"What?" Jean looked at them, a tear falling down her cheek.

"He told me to look after Jacob for him, and then he was gone... I can't find him."

"No," said Betsy, as one of the SHIELD agents took baby Jacob from her before she dropped him in shock. Logan had been one of the people who had endorsed her entry in to the X-Men, after the Morlock massacre. He had seen the way she had fought against Sabretooth, and he had become one of her friends. They had saved each other time and again, and he had freed her from the thrall of the Mandarin. He had also exposed her to the Crimson Dawn and ensured that she had lived after Creed escaped Xavier's custody. "He can't be gone..."

"I can't sense him," said Jean. "He's not there..."

The butterfly effect appeared around Elisabeth Braddock's face as she too tried to find Wolverine but Jean was correct. There was no sign of his mind, not even through the psionic rapport they'd once had, but she refused to give up knowing that if it were reversed he wouldn't give up on her. "He could be unconscious," she said, grasping at straws. He could be safe in there somewhere."

"Let's go," said Nate, as the X-Man stood up. "If he's down there, we'll find him."

"I am sorry," said the voice of Forge as a holographic image of the man appeared. "I cannot let you down there."

"But Forge..." Jean started.

"Apologies, Jean but I am not Forge. He sacrificed his soul during the battle with one of the Sons of Set, but he created me from an amalgam of Shrapnel and a portion of his soul. I am Genesis, and I cannot let you go down there."

"For... Genesis," Marcus corrected himself. "We gotta go down there, see if we can find him. If you've a piece of Forge's soul inside you, then you know Logan was your friend as well."

"I know, Marcus," Genesis replied, "but there is a significant level of radiation down there. Almagordo..."

"Was a nuclear research facility," said Jean, realising the problem. "It might be why we can't find him."

"But Martinique is down there," said Monet.

"And we could survive the radiation," the other Monet said.

"Miss Jason is on her own," Genesis said, "and I will not risk you down there. We are still determining what level of protective suit we need to go down there levels are, but if Wolverine did indeed survive the explosion, then we will find out how good his healing factor really is..."

"You think you can stop us going down there?" Nate said, thinking how different this version of Forge was to the man he had known and he wondered what the real Forge had been like.

"Probably not," said Genesis. "However I have no wish to see any of you die. You may survive down there for a short time, but you would suffer consequences because of it."

"He's right," Jean said to Nate, putting her hand on his shoulder. "But while there's life there's hope. Right?" Genesis nodded, then he looked to Marcus.

"I need to talk to you in private," Genesis said. "You need to know what's happened to Lydia." Marcus braced himself as Genesis took him to one side and briefed him on the battle that had taken place in Greenwich.

"What do we tell her?" asked Psylocke, looking at Jubilee, who was being treated for the poison that Viper had given her. The two Monets were standing over her. The real Monet knew her as a friend and fellow X-Man, the other one knew her from their time in Generation X and while they had not quite been friends, they had been colleagues and had been through so much together.

Jean followed her gaze, knowing that if Wolverine were dead it would break Jubilation's heart. She had lost her parents, she had been there for Illyana's death and she had lost a man she thought of as her grandfather when Xavier had died. Paige's death had scarred her, and the loss of Logan, a man she loved as much as she had her real father... Jean promised that Jubilee wouldn't be alone and then she looked at Psylocke. "We'll tell her the truth, when we find out what the truth is..."

Monet looked at Monet, the two of them able to face each other for the first time. It had been a long time since the original Monet became Penance and so much had happened since then for all of them. Now they were able to talk to each other with a little bit of privacy, made easier by the fact they conversed with each other telepathically.

"You're back," Monet said, looking at her older sister, a face she had seen in the mirror for years, but there was a question hanging over them. "What happened to Penance?"

"Yvette is gone," said Monet. "The X-Men restored me to my proper self, something I wasn't able to do before. Professor Xavier worked it out and he knew what needed to be done to bring me back. Cyclops used the information in his files and here I am. I have not been back long."

"So what about us?" Monet asked her. "What do you want us to do?" The elder of them looked at her, considering it carefully. She had been Nicole and Claudette had been Monet for a long time, was it fair to ask her to go back to being who she had been. Perhaps it wasn't fair, but in truth there was only one real choice.

"I think it's time that you two came back. I know that Father misses you both and I do not think it would be very wise for two of us to be running around. It would be interesting but it could also get very confusing."

"We know," the younger Monet replied. "It broke our hearts, but we had to. He would not have been able to live without you in his life."

"I am not sure I agree," Monet said, "but the decision was made. It's time we told Father the truth of what happened - to us, to Marius and to Mother." It was

"Yes," said Monet, "you are right."

"I usually am," her sister said and gave her a smile, and then they hugged each other. "It is good to be able to do that, and to tell you that I love you. I hated not being able to do that."

"It has been too long," she answered. "Shall we change her, or back at the Institute?"

"I think it would be better back at Xavier's," Monet said. "They have the facilities there to deal with things like that." She turned her attention back to the stricken Jubilee. "And this."

"She'll be fine," said Monet. "Jubilee is a fighter, she has too much to live for. Gateway chose her, he told me so when I went to the Massachusetts Academy, he was training me to keep the autism in check as best I could."

"Following on from his training of me in the use of my powers," Monet said. "Such a shame he was bound to the Reavers for so long."

"He regretted it," Monet answered, "but he had a duty, a debt that needed paying."

"Everything has it's price," Monet said, hoping and praying that Jubilation Lee would wake up soon. First Jared, now her. Was this the cost of being an X-Man?

"Okay," said Nate, as he zipped up the radiation suit. "Let's find the old man." He and Jean were going down there, as the two of them were best equipped to deal with whatever they found down there using their telekinetics to dig through the rubble. The Helicarrier's sensors were working through the residual electromagnetic disruption to assist them, but they were having a hard time. HAZMAT teams were working on containing the radiation spread and thankfully this was a quite remote part of New Mexico, but it would be a long time before it was truly habitable.

"Let's go," Phoenix answered and the two of them flew down to the crater that remained. Bits of rubble, rock and other materials had been fused together by the intense heat and there didn't seem to be any signs at all of human life in the place. No bones, no scraps of material, nothing. There was only silence, with the light hum of the Helicarrier engines and the breathing of the two mutants. "God," Jean said. In all her many years as an X-Man she had not seen anything quite like this.

"I don't think God's got anything to do with this place," Nate answered. "Raven, you see anything yet?"

"Not yet," said Marcus from the X-Force office aboard the Helicarrier, Psylocke waiting with him. "We're... wait a second, we got a trace. Not too far from you, five meters north of you and twenty, thirty metres below you. Ah can't get a better lock than that."

"On it," said Jean and she used the might of the Phoenix to tear up the ground, looking for whatever they were after, while Nate made sure that there were no explosions of anything else. Jean lifted a great chuck of the Earth in to the air but there seemed to be something in the atmosphere that was interfering with her hold and her telekinetics failed and the rock fell to the ground breaking up.

"What happened?" Nate asked.

"I don't know," Jean said. "But I'll worry about it later. See what we can find in the rubble." They scoured the place and then Nate called out to her and Jean hurried over. Sticking out from a rock was a piece of metal, in the shape of a leg bone. There was no foot or anything attached to the leg, but perhaps it had simply fallen away with nothing to hold it in place.

"I'll pull it free," Nate said, and he tried to remove it from the rock, but he couldn't seem to get a grip on it with his telekinetics. "This isn't right."

"There has to be something in the radiation," Jean said. "I don't know how, or what, but we're not getting it free. Marcus, what can you tell?"

"It's adamantium," Marcus voice's answered, crackling over the radio. "It's confirmed."

"Thanks, Marcus," Jean said, her voice laden with sadness, because there was only one plausible outcome left. "We need a lift back to the Institute. We need to tell the others that Logan's dead."

"We're not doing too well, are we?" said Jared as he looked at Jubilee, who had responded well to the drugs that the SHIELD doctors had given her and the poison had been negated. What she'd been hit with had been designed to take Wolverine down, according to Genesis, and it had been her sheer force of will that had kept her alive.

"We're alive," said Magma. "We take a beating but come back. That's what being an X-Man is all about. You were stuck too long with Alpha Flight to get that."

"What about Wolverine?" asked Radius. "He's not coming back, is he? Now there's someone who was supposed to."

"A nuclear blast and several tons of rock?" said Emma Frost, entering the room. "Logan was good, but he wasn't that good."

"So there's no way he could have survived?" Magma asked and Ice shook her head.

"Cerebro just confirmed it - there is no trace of Wolverine on the planet, or the moon or anywhere at all. We were able to track him before, so the only reason he's not being found now…

"Is if he's dead," Radius answered, finishing her sentence, and he knew it was what everyone was now thinking. "If you two will excuse me, I've gotta make a call to Department H. Someone has to tell the Hudsons, and the rest of Alpha Flight."

Magma watched him go and she could see in the way he moved that he'd lost someone as well. Wolverine was a part of Canadian super-hero folklore. It was plausible that Radius had just lost a hero of his own. Every time she thought she knew him, she found another side to him. It was infuriating and she went after him. She wasn't going to leave him alone - she'd not grown that heartless, and Emma was alone with her former student.

"Well, Jubilation," she said, her voice soft, "how will the death of Wolverine affect you? And what will it mean for us?" She thought to the disks she had discovered and how it was just a matter of time before she gained a measure of revenge on Cyclops and the rest. With the death of Wolverine distracting them, it would make it all the easier…