1
The safe house in Granville was dull and boring. Her uncle was a practical man and he hadn't bothered to spring for anything with air conditioning. Chloe was sweltering and it only amplified her boredom and the desperation.
She missed her life.
She missed Pete and his stupid jokes. She missed Lana's opinions on all things girly or Keanu-related, and God did she miss Clark.
She'd seen him last at the trial and of all her friends she thought that he could be the one above all of them to know. Lois, whom she loved dearly, couldn't keep a secret to save her soul, but Clark held deeply hidden truths. He could have handled knowing where she was truly going into hiding. He could have found a way to sneak in, even, as he seemed to do with The Torch office despite the fact she had the only key.
He should have been here now. They'd only started putting their friendship back together, and she was ashamed to admit that she didn't even think that the tentative friendship could survive the summer.
She'd messed it all up.
She only wanted to keep that chance to prove to him what a friend she was, how she could be trusted to help him.
"Fat chance now," she said, tapping her pencil on her desk. "I just wish I'd never taken the deal."
Chloe sighed. It was a moot point in some ways, Clark was gone and had been for months. Probably the stress of losing Lana or maybe that strange girl from California. No one had seen any sign of him.
She was getting worried.
In that vein was it that wrong she might have, kind of, accidentally hacked into his mom's email account.
She wasn't keeping files, just trying to figure out where he'd disappeared to. Tracking him down was what she did.
Chloe perused the screen, noting mostly e-mails back to the bank and to Martha's sister in Star City, things about Jonathan's health and then Chloe's eyes widened.
There were twenty emails in the last hour alone to Virgil Swann in New York. The same Swann Clark had originally claimed was nothing more than junk mail. All were urgent.
Chloe opened one and frowned, realizing that Martha was very clever. The text was encrypted. Chloe figured it was something Swann and Clark must have come up with for e-mailing each other.
She could crack a code.
Working feverishly, she deciphered most of it in an hour.
Martha was begging for help from the doctor because Clark had...
No.
That wasn't right.
No one could fly away. She'd misread it.
Except it was Clark and nothing about him had ever made sense.
"The Hell?" She said, biting her lip. Clark was gone and only this Swann knew anything about it.
And he was in New York.
Damn, Chloe hated doing this, but surely the U.S. government would forgive her.
Shaking her head, she went ahead and ordered her tickets over the computer, making sure to charge them to the General's discretionary credit card. It was time to use her faked passport and test out her new hair color. It was time to get all her questions answered.
It was time to save the boy Martha's letter called Kal-El.