A/N: Cramming the necessary quantity of plot into the key scenes here was beyond difficult. Again, comments on how well the exposition elements hold attention, and whether the relationship elements ring true, would be much appreciated.

"The thing about investigative news, Lois," Perry told me in my first month at the Planet, "is this. It's merciless on your moods. You don't control a moment of the day. You have to be single-minded at unhealthy times. You need to be a bit inhuman, really."

He was trying, at the time, to talk me out of it.

Perry himself had come up the ladder from International, and was sure I would love it, the pomp and color and glory of it, if I gave it the chance. And that I'd wither away in the solitary 3 a.m.'s and dripping alleyways of Investigative.

"But I had it backwards, didn't I, Lane?" he admitted later, one night around my kitchen table, while he beat Jimmy and me at poker. "Because for you, it's the glory and excitement you just endure. And those dark bookstacks and alleyways that you're made for." He looked up at me, over the next hand that was going to wipe us out. "More like the General every day."

Which was a ridiculous thing to call a career Army chaplain, who had fought all his battles for souls, over midnight cups of coffee at other men's kitchen tables. But over twenty years of their friendship, and across twenty countries, Dad had never been able to break him of calling him that.

What Perry had first said about Investigative, I thought of often in the months after J.J.'s breakthrough. Because it was far more true of felony. He was waking me with his latest break at 3 A.M. far more often than journalism ever had.

"Thanks again, J.J.," I would mumble, steeling myself to throw the covers back. "I'm definitely turning you in this time." And then the next thing I knew, I'd be out on my balcony, cinching up my bathrobe, muttering savagely to myself, and then turning my eyes to the sky. "Kal, if you're up, I've got another one."

Swift, quiet and always ready, he never seemed to have been sleeping. "I do sleep, though, Lois," he assured me once, as my bleary eyes met his still, dark ones in silent mutual amusement, over tea with two sugars. "Though sometimes I question whether your source does."

Every once in a while, we would talk about how the research was going. It was always the same. "Some interesting basic science has come out of it. Nothing useful yet." If he'd been testing that day, he moved a little stiffly. Once or twice, I'd see that telltale little tremble of his hand, on the balcony rail or the mug handle, and wonder what exactly he'd been sitting still for, an hour ago.

As disorienting as J.J.'s early morning calls were, at least they were easy to keep secret. It was the urgent afternoon calls that sent me to the roof of the Planet high-rise that were worrisome. Kal would circle for a bit overhead, as if flying patrol, before dropping to the rooftop with artful carelessness. I stood well back from the edge, where I couldn't be seen from the street, and gave him a rueful smile.

"Lois," he said by way of greeting one day, folding his arms across his brilliant crest, "we have to find another way. Three separate groups of people could come after you for this. I'm not even sure which would be worst."

"The feds, and the fallbait cults," I counted off, leaning back against the concrete stairway wall. "Who's the third?"

"My own enemies," he replied grimly. He looked down at me, his flawless face perfectly solemn, with a sudden gleam of black humor in his eyes. "The ones, you may recall, that are now out on parole."

I laughed and folded my arms behind my head, as he turned to look out over the rooftops with me. Then I sighed and rubbed my eyes. "Seven-thirty tonight. One of the West Side tenements."

Kal looked back at me sharply, his amusement forgotten, with a flash of the same disgust I'd seen in his eyes that first moment we met. "Children and single mothers. Who profits? Are their leaders as mad as their followers?"

I shook my head. My own increasingly obsessive work on the fallbait cults was leading me farther from all the standard reasons to explain their hits. The poor worldwide got the brunt, but never all, of the blows. Here, in the multiracial stew of Metropolis, no groups were singled out. There wasn't a clear pattern. But it didn't have the flailing, hysterical feel of true randomness to me, either.

And I was about to say something to that effect, when his head snapped up, and he turned it to peer into the concrete. His eyes took on that glassy glimmer of his deep vision. "Someone's coming. Middle-aged, in suspenders. He's three floors down."

I sighed. "Perry. He thinks I'm having a closet relapse, coming up here to smoke."

I looked up at Kal; the anger in his dark eyes had simmered back down. There was a mild curiosity there, as he glanced down at me and then back through the walls, and didn't move to take flight right away.

I looked at him for a long moment. Then, on an impulse, I said, "He's much less confrontational than me. You'd like him."

The Man of Steel looked back down at me, with that hardly-perceptible amusement. In those long lamplit nights of planning interventions, he'd heard me mention the Planet staff time and again. Eventually, he'd asked me about them. And he had listened, with either real curiosity or truly excessive courtesy, to Jimmy's and Perry's stories. He was fascinated, especially, by Perry's battles with the powers for the soul of his paper in his graying middle age. He looked back up through the wall.

"I already like him," he said finally. He gave me a faint half-smile, with just a shade of apology. "Good night, Lois. Thank you, again." And then he was gone, as the door swung in, and I shook my head and turned to go down with Perry.

The rest of the time, I was so wrapped up in the story of the cults, I almost forgot there had been shatterfalls before them.

They were getting more explicit, and more public, about their beliefs. And among all their different flavors and degrees of pessimism, the same themes cropped up again and again. It was mostly pseudobiblical stuff about the coming harvest, and how those who hoped and waited for it would be spared, when the stubble was burned and the old world ended. If he'd lived to see it, Dad would have had seizures.

"It's more than a little creepy," I mentioned to Kal, out of nowhere, one of those late nights or early mornings. "The part about praying for the coming of the final Shatterfall."

He looked up from his tea at me, a little surprised. Then he looked pensive for a moment. "Like the folktales," he said finally, "in which the vampire can't cross the threshold, until it's invited in."

Yes, I thought, a little surprised myself. Exactly like that.

"No, Lois," J.J. disagreed cheerfully, when I mentioned that bit of dogma to him too, later on. "What's creepy is the place in hell they have reserved for guys like me."

We never needed much in the way of notice from him on a new fallbait; a few hours, for the Man of Steel to get his flight and hearing back, assuming the worst. And thanks to J.J.'s unresting skittering among the video feeds, his spiderlike sensitivity to the trembles of his borrowed web, we always had that.

And then, one day, we didn't.

J.J. had gone to one of their retreats. "I'll get the President's autograph for you there, Lois," he said blithely in one of our alleys on his way out, with the orange slant of the afternoon sun lighting his face.

"If you can get through security at the world leaders' table," I agreed blandly, and he rolled his eyes at me and turned to go.

"J.J.," I said softly to his back, and he paused. "Be careful."

God forgive me – as if that empty, costless little gesture were enough, and so my duty to him was done.

He contacted me a couple of times in the next few days, about the eeriness of four hundred voices raised in shatterfall chants all together, about the weird luxury and wide green grounds of their nameless place, and the money it all spoke of.

And then I came out of a city council conference to check my messages, and found J.J.'s cell on my call list. I remember the noon sun making the marble steps of the council building dazzlingly bright, as I stood in the shadow of one of the columns and dialed in to voice mail.

"Lois," the little earpiece hissed out, "it's Christmas in June."

The Christmas Day Montana massacre. My chest tightened.

"Six Mile, Colorado. Damn fools, trying it again, what's different this time?"

Does he know this line's safe? Does he know who's been spying? Why do it this way? Unless…

"Lois, this one's live. Goddamit, Lois, come on, where are you?" There was a thump in the background, with his swearing; I could almost see him slamming his hand against the wall. His voice shook at the end. "There's weird, weird stuff going on here. Call me back."

The time stamp was from twenty minutes ago.

I stood there a moment, thinking. And then I charged back in to the city council's office, and I made up something about my phone not getting service, to use their line to call him back. Of course, if anyone was watching his cell, the cat was well and truly out already.

No answer.

I barreled outside again, looking around ludicrously, there in the public square of Metropolis, for a private place to call for Superman. And then I thought, hell with it, and ducked back behind one of the columns.

"Kal," I whispered, up into the marble vaults of the entrance. "I need you. Now."

Silence.

"Six Mile, Colorado. They're going to try to bargain with you again. Now. I mean, now, they're trying it now!"

Nothing; the trees waved in the sun. In the cool stone shade of the building, I took a deep breath.

"Help, Superman!"

People halfway in and out of the building stopped to look at me; hot dog vendors at the base of the steps, a couple of passersby in business suits.

"Superman, help!"

"Ma'am," said one of the guards at the entrance, "what seems to be the problem?" She had that careful, neutral, nonthreatening tone one uses with the hysterical.

I turned and looked back at her, a stocky little woman in her officer's blue. And I've never, God help me, felt so doomed and so wrong already before choosing, knowing nothing, nothing I could do now would be right.

Because there were three beat cops in J.J.'s cell alone.

"He's not coming," I said softly, half to myself. "Is he?"

I don't know what she saw in my eyes. But as we looked at each other, hers widened a bit, and that careful air of harmlessness fell away. "Ma'am," she said back slowly, in a very different tone, reaching down for her intercom, "do you need to speak to my Chief?"

And so, of course, that's what I did.

I knew Chief Henderson. Not as well as I wished I did, in that moment. But as far as I knew him, I trusted him, and the skies were empty.

I told him what was coming. When we got in to the station, I dodged the source identity question at first, and in those first frantic moments, no one pursued it. And then I looked out from the chief's office, at the great G.M.P.D. machinery coming to life around me.

In those first moments I didn't call Perry. I was trying, there at Henderson's desk, in the scattered moments he was called away from taking my statement, to pull together the pieces that might help them find J.J.

If not today, or tomorrow, I'd be in prison by the end of the month, regardless. But right now I had everyone's ear. Right now, if I did it right, could I give them enough to launch a raid on the retreat, to bring J.J. home before his friends turned round on him like wolves?

Henderson knew there was more than I was telling. He kept glancing back at me from the chaos of the station. And you'll get what you want, I thought grimly. Just give me a minute, just a minute, to pull it together.

"Lois?"

Perry, grave and desolate in the doorway, had apparently found me anyway.

I stood, relieved and terrified, feeling sick. Having him there made it real. It was the moment this began to tip over, spill down and stain everything. I'd thought I might have a few hours before it happened.

"Perry –" I started. And then stopped, as he put his finger to his lips, crossed the room in three steps, and threw his arms around me.

"Just heard from a friend of yours," he whispered in my ear, patting my back. His voice was shaking, like mine felt in my throat. "Give them the anonymous caller story. Is it too late?"

I shook my head against him; I was shaking. "Almost, it was."

"Tell me what he needs to know to find your source."

I closed my eyes. "God, Perry, I'm so sorry."

"Not now, honey," he muttered back. "No time."

I swallowed. "Good weather. Hilly land, a five-hour drive from the city in a cargo van. One drawbridge toward the end, then a gravel road. Big grounds, and the mansion is stone. J.J's a skinny little blond kid, with blue eyes." I squeezed my eyes shut. "And terrible hair."

Perry breathed out, tightened his arms around me, and then let go and stepped back. "Don't worry, Lane," he said aloud. "They've got it all under control. I'm going to go call Lucy for you."

He gave me a little half-smile as he left; I didn't even try to return it.

Oh, God of my father, bring that boy back safely. Please.

In Colorado, the Six Mile P.D. first took to the streets with their sirens flashing, looking for God knew what. There were reports of guerrilla scuffles on the corners. The National Guard arrived, and then there was exchange of gunfire. By the end of the day, six national guard units had pinned down a little fifty-man army. If the plan had been to take the whole village, J.J. had saved five hundred and sixty lives.

Meanwhile, it took less than an hour for one faithful friend to carry my message, and another, trembling with kryptonite sickness, nearly falling from the air, to find the mansion.

And there, searching the halls and great rooms, he found food for an army, and a high-vaulted chapel full of recording equipment and tapes of the shatterfall chant. And not one of those five hundred foot soldiers who had come there for their faith was anywhere.

The police and the press were close behind him. I knew Kal had found nothing before I got home from the station. I wondered, dully, which of the companies of heroes – which P.D., or the National Guard - held the leak that had warned the organizers they had a turncoat.

Jimmy walked me home. He knew, I think, just enough not to ask questions. "Don't ever be a hero, Jimmy," I told him at the door, taking his shoulders, turning him to face me. "I couldn't take it." My throat was tight, but tears have never come easily for me; my body never seems to know when the crisis is over.

But Jimmy had tears in his eyes for us both. As he stood there in my grip, so fragile, like another sweet and frightened boy, he whispered back, "Don't worry, Lois. I won't." He looked down for a moment at the ground, poor man. How deeply had all this going over his head shaken him, and how would it touch his heart from now? "I don't think it's really in me, anyway," he added softly.

"I hope not," I answered. "Go home. It's almost curfew." He hesitated, looking back at me. "Go home, Jimmy. I'm not fit for company now. Go." He looked at me for another minute, his eyes bright with unshed tears in the stuttering hall light, and then decided that I meant it.

I lay down on the bed with the light off for a moment, looking up at the ceiling. My stomach was sick, or hungry; I couldn't tell.

Does anyone ever keep five hundred prisoners for long?

Don't be brave any more, J.J. Answer their questions. Tell them everything.

Then I swung my legs over the edge and booted up my laptop. What did I have to work with? A year of sociological reflections on the seduction methods of shatterfall cults. Enough evidence, from the clips J.J. had given me, to get maybe twenty peons arrested. The names of a few more important members, wirth no evidence at all - I could make a public scandal, but not a sting. It still wasn't illegal to belong, if there was no evidence you knew your cell was involved with fallbaiting.

But I had a location, now. Property records, I could start querying from here. In the morning I could get Jimmy to hound G.M.P.D. about fingerprinting results. I might have as much as a month before the feds came after me. Maybe he was still alive, maybe he was -

Don't be a child, Lane. You know what they do. Just let them have done it quickly. Let them not feel the need to make an example of him.

And then, alone with myself, I couldn't put if off any more. I laid my head in my hands and faced the truth.

No, let me go back, and not have sent him off into battle a hundred times this year, with a pat on the back. "Be careful, J.J."

What was his full name, anyway? I closed my eyes, sickened. I wasn't sure.

I shook my head and tried to get back to my data mining. If by some miracle of their foolishness he was still alive – stop it, Lane, you coward- it was all I could do for him. I sent off queries to all my web of underground contacts, each in his own code. First to the ones that could plausibly help, then to the ones that couldn't.

Someone fearless in the internet press had gotten hold of the last few moments of the shatterfall chant from the mansion, before the tapes were taken into custody and classified.

"We have our guidance now," said someone, edgy with some tension of ecstasy, or anger. "The world is still waiting for the day. But for us, the day is now." Bodies shifted and people murmured in the background. "All of us will be sifted. But only one of us has reason to fear."

That was where the tape was stopped.

Mass suicide? But who moved the bodies? Or, where did they go to die? How did they get there, by no path that left a scent, or a heat signature?

No doubt, the same way four hundred Montana hostages disappeared, and were never found.

What's 'creepy' is the place in hell they have reserved for guys like me.

I took a deep breath, went back to the bed, and looked at the floor, my head pounding.

Oh, J.J. I'm so sorry.

"Lois?"

Kal was framed in the bedroom doorway, backlit by my hall light, motionless.

The humid night air drafted in from behind him, with the warm pine smell of the woods. I turned in my chair, arms around my knees, and looked back at him, silent. It wasn't dark in the room, to his eyes. He'd see the redness in mine, and the lack of tear tracks.

"I knocked," he said, with an odd note of contrition in his voice. "But your heart was beating so fast. And my deep vision's still out. And after everything today…" He sighed. "I'll fix your door, I promise."

I gave him a ragged laugh, wondering how many doors torn off their hinges were a fit payment for a boy's life.

"Come and sit down," I said finally. "You must be sick as hell." I rubbed my eyes and reached for the bedside lamp, and the little knob slipped through my fingers; it took me three tries to turn it on. I hadn't realized my palms were sweating. "Thank you for trying so hard."

He gave me a soft laugh, as he sat himself beside me. Under his full weight, the bedside dipped and creaked. "I'm sorry about bringing Perry White into it. That was no favor to him." He paused. "But my going to the station would have turned every eye on you."

I shook my head. "No. You were right, the way you did it. You've bought me at least a month. I think. I hope." I closed my eyes. "You don't think the feds will go after Perry, when they come for me?"

Kal looked over at me sharply for a moment, his dark eyes startled. Then he sighed. "No one's coming for you, Lois. Or for Perry White."

I opened my mouth to tell him he was being sweet, and naïve. And then I closed it again. A man who could get criminals sentenced to the fullest stretch of the law might just be able to turn the hounds aside as well.

Deep in the spread of that desolation, I felt a little stab of hope and relief. Maybe, maybe, I wasn't going to jail.

And then I thought of J.J., and hated myself. I buried my head in my hands.

Kal watched me wordlessly. The grief in his eyes answered mine. I wondered how God made us able to show such things, how they could be written on flesh and matter.

"You know, of course," he said softly, "that his cover was most likely broken as soon as he called you. It's unlikely any decision you made afterwards mattered, even if you'd had a choice. If I'd been whole again sooner, maybe. But I think he knew what he was doing when he did it."

As far as that went, it was true. But it was too simple. And I had had just the bitter foretaste of the shame I deserved. It was too soon for understanding, much too soon for forgiveness. The last thing I wanted was to feel better. It would be the last slap in the face of that skinny young man who might be dying by torture.

I looked up at him, at the lamplight shadows moving over his almost-human face as he spoke. I was too tired to say anything but the truth. "He was twenty-two. The biggest choice he'd ever made was between Harvard and U of Met." I turned, cross-legged on the bedside, facing him. "It wasn't today that I killed him."

Kal blinked, and looked at me for a long moment. I read there in his eyes the dawning of a too-perfect understanding. "Oh," he said softly, after a moment. "I see."

Do you? some part of me thought irrelevantly. Maybe you do.

Was it you alone, who decided to go out to save the world at seventeen? Or did someone look into the eyes of the brave, frightened boy you were then, and send you on your way with a pat on the shoulder, saying,"Oh, and be careful!"

Because I'd like to kill him. Or her.

"If there's any truth in that, Lois," he said finally, "I'd seen far more of their…capabilities than you ever did. We can carry that burden together."

I felt one tear gather, hot, in the corner of my eye, and track slowly down my cheek. I used to hate crying in front of people. It's laughable, what you think is shameful, till you have something to be truly ashamed of. But I did close my eyes, because the heat of the tears hurt. And after a moment, I felt him reach out and gather me in to his side.

The mass of his chest and arm was heavy and solid; he was fever-hot through the suit. I could feel the carefulness in his grip, and the faint after-trembles from that damned mineral that had never brought anyone any good. I wondered briefly if this was unnatural for him, if he'd had to learn that we took comfort from it, from a thousand thousand weeping survivors.

And if so, then thank you, at least, for trying.

"I love your heart, Kal," I said softly after a moment. "But it's not time for comfort yet, really. "

He gave an answering humorless chuckle. "The best I had hoped for," he agreed, his chest rumbling against my cheek, "was agreement in grief. Even," he added more quietly, "grief over things it would be even worse to go back and change."

I nodded my head against him. Those, especially.

I felt the slight shift of his balance, as he lifted his head and looked over me at my monitor. "Lois," he said after a moment, "were you thinking you might still find him?"

I blinked my eyes open and wiped the sitting tears away so I could see, and followed his gaze to the sites open there. No messages in my inbox.

I sighed; he dropped his arm and turned to look down at me. I looked back at the sorrow and hesitation in his eyes, watched him warring over how and whether to tell me I was wasting my time.

Had I really absorbed the language of his face so thoroughly, that it was all so clear now? Or was he, this one moment, really that unguarded?

"No," I answered, simply, to spare him making up his mind.

"But the thing is," I said after a moment, "that there might really be enough here, now, to act on, to bring them down."

He cocked his head and studied me for a long moment, more directly than before. "Do you need help?" he said finally. "Or do you need to not have help?"

I gave him a little half-smile. "It's not revenge, Kal. I don't need to pull the trigger." I leaned back on my hands behind me. "But it's all dark bookstacks and dripping alleyways. I think it's my world, not yours."

I shook my head, wishing it would stop pounding. I was wishing I could be for just another day the twentysomething I'd been five years ago, shining like a blade with a single purpose. For just a couple of days, long enough to finish J.J.'s work for him. Then I'd do all my penance, uncomplaining, knowing it was nothing like enough.

As if he heard half my thoughts, Kal rose from the bed and turned to face me as I sat on the edge. "Lois," he said quietly, "what is it you need, now?"

Within the realm of possibility? I sighed. "A little borrowed time. A little peace. Focus." I thought of Perry, over the card table. "The thing about investigative news is, you need to be a bit inhuman to do it well."

He closed his eyes for a long moment, as if I'd said more than I meant to. I watched a strange, quiet tension build in him, that perfect stillness he fell into when he was weighing a hundred hundred issues at once. I wondered distantly what it was this time that he was trying to decide if he should tell me. And how many more secrets there were, and whether it mattered.

Then he looked back down at me. He took a breath. "Will you come with me? There's something I want to show you. I think, maybe, it will help."

I looked at him, standing in my room in the silent absoluteness of his glory, my gentle-hearted friend. "Help me think? Or sleep?"

"Both. And help you sleep, so you can think."

I cocked my head at him, thinking of a conversation on a different night, about where he went after things went badly.

Sometimes, to the Fortress. It's uniquely helpful.

I glanced back over at my laptop, checking patiently every five minutes for a hundred replies that might or might not come. It was one in the morning.

I looked back at him. "Okay."

He nodded. "You'll need a night bag."

I blinked.

"You'll be back by morning."

It was too late, and I was too tired and empty, to be very curious. I packed my satchel.

My balcony door was off its hinges, leaned up against the wall. One of its glass panels was cracked. That, I really didn't care about.

Out on the balcony, he took my satchel. "You're ready?"

I nodded. With the quiet matter-of-factness of one who had done it a thousand times, he stooped, one arm behind my back, and lifted the other behind my knees, raising me into his arms. "All right?"

I nodded. I wrapped my arms around his neck, there in the heat and stone strength of his body, thinking what a comfort that would be for a child's fear or a child's grief, something simple and guiltless. J.J., God, I'm so sorry.

His acceleration was smooth. There was only the warm wind, and the city dropped away below us. The lights were clustered and patchy, with great clumps of darkness between them. I wondered how the world had changed beneath him over the last fifteen years, the jeweled glory of the cities stuttering out bit by unrebuilt bit.

Those nameless cities bloomed, sped by in the distance, and dropped away behind us. After them came the dim quicksilver gleam of moonlight on the sea beneath us. And then sometime later, in a flicker, it all became white ice, stretched out flat below us to the horizon.

And then the Fortress sprang into life below us as its master approached, light flaring in the crystal walls that rose up sheer from the flat land.

The first thing I ever felt toward that nonhuman marvel, that last artifact of a race, wasn't awe. It was gratitude. Because the moment we stepped through the threshold, I realized why he'd brought me.

Like a switch had been flipped, the incoherent moan of my heart fell silent.

There was only calm, the relief of pain, and lucid quiet. I closed my eyes. I breathed. I stood, afraid to move for a moment, to do anything to jar it.

Behind me, Kal said, "It's all right, Lois."

I turned to face him, and saw the understanding in his eyes. "It's the same everywhere within the walls. You can explore, if you want to."

I looked at him for a long moment, as it sank in. He guessed my next thought. "And it's only temporary."

I gave him a little half-smile, at that.

"Go on."

I turned back to the Fortress and started forward, aimlessly, stretching my legs in this too-profound gift, this safe space. I tried to call up the same sickening chaos of the heart that I'd felt an hour ago, and couldn't. Just peace, and clarity.

He stayed back, moved, I think, by that same sense of privacy that had once made me step back after unmasking his childhood to his face.

Can't stay here long, I thought, as I passed by the dim doorways ringed around the great room to other otherworldly chambers. As my eyes and fingers traveled over things like consoles and screens, all of them dozing, waiting for his touch to wake them.

I noted, clinically, that there were keypads with forty-two symbol keys each. Written Kryptonian seemed to be a phonetic language like the English, not character-based like the Chinese. And his organs of communication are human, essentially…could a human pronounce this language? Could it be so difficult to make a translation?

I shook my head, surprised by the sudden cerebral agility of my thoughts here. I was momentarily ashamed by the clinical, academic tangent they had taken.

But then, it's the Fortress working, isn't it?

But not for long, J.J. I promise. Just long enough to bring them down. To find you, if you were still alive.

In the center of the great hall was a glassy chamber, clear and rectangular, about the size to hold a man, its door hanging open. I stepped closer, looking at the chaos of controls ringed around it, wondering what it was for.

"Lois," he said softly, coming forward. "Don't."

I looked back at him. Kal shook his head; he stepped, gently, between it and me. "That's the source of it; it diffuses out, to the rest of the Fortress, only if the door's open. As far as I can tell, nothing enters or leaves that chamber, when it's closed." He folded his arms across his chest. "And I'm not sure what the full force of it would do to you."

I looked up at him. My head was clearer, cleaner, than it had ever been in my ace reporter days. "Do you know how it works?"

Kal looked up, around the crystalline walls of this half-organic artifact of his race. "Only partially." He glanced back down at me, as if deciding whether to say something else. And then decided not to.

And I'll be curious what it was. When this wears off.

"Did you find the Fortress this way, at first?"

He gave me a minimal, rueful smile; he stepped back away from it and gestured for me to follow. As we stepped back to the hall's circumference, he shook his head. "The first time I came here, it was waiting to be told how to grow."

We stopped; he gestured me to sit, on one of the crystalline outcroppings of this strange home that was never made for furniture. Kal looked down at me, his dark eyes grave but calm in this alien air, clear of the rawness of grief I had seen there an hour ago. I wondered for the first time how often he had to come here.

"I was young," he said softly. "I'm grateful now that the best answer was clear even then. I could so easily have wound up with…a nerve center, from which to rule Earth. Or some other monstrosity."

A Fortress of Power, maybe, instead of Solitude. And as if from a distance, I noted the shade of fear in his voice, that followed him even here. Fear, by the sound of it, very nearly of himself.

I tilted my head. "What, exactly, did you ask it for?"

He was silent for a moment, as if trying to remember, or possibly translate. Finally, he said, "A way to silence the cries of the heart."

Yes, I thought clinically. That's it, exactly.

Questions for another day came to my mind to be filed. What was it exactly about the cries of the heart, that made you ask for that?

And is there an equalizing reaction, some chemical rebound, when the cries of the heart start up again? Or is that somehow contained here too? Chained in some metaphysical vault in the basement?

And, by the way, the density of information traffic it would take to carry the snooping J.J. stumbled on - it should stand out, by sheer volume, on the network records. It might be coded, piggybacked, and untraceable. But it would increase the average connection time for users on the same satellite. I could find them that way.

And, I'm exhausted.

I looked back up at him. "How long does it last, this effect?"

Kal turned and sat beside me, a few feet away, smoothing his cape beneath him. He looked back at me, with a distant irony twinkling in his eye. "It's not unlike kryptonite."

I blinked.

"The duration of exposure determines the duration of response."

I laughed a little, looking across at my little satchel - a beat-up, worn-out little bag on the white crystalline glory of the Fortress floor. "Thus the overnight bag."

Kal glanced back too, and then back at me. He stood again, and stepped back away from me, with that same curious gentleness in his eyes. He picked up my bag and held it out to me; I took it from his hands. He gestured behind me, to one dim doorway that looked just like all the others.

"Go to bed, Lois," he said softly. "Sleep here tonight." He glanced back at the chamber that was the fountain of it all, and then back at me. "You'll have one, maybe two, days before it all comes back. Bring down the men who killed your source, and then begin your grieving."

I nodded slowly. I felt, without thinking, that I might just be able to do that.

What sort of bed did a child of Krypton sleep in? But then, he'd have thought of that as well.

I looked back up at him. "Thank you." I hesitated just a moment. "You'll be here?"

"I'll be right outside. If I leave, it won't be long." He almost clasped my shoulder, and then thought better of it and dropped his hand. "Go on."

And I did. Crawling between sheets that were smoother than mine, but warmer than silk, I first thought I might lie awake for hours, staring up at refracted starlight through the translucent vault of the ceiling. Listening to the half-organic sounds of the Fortress around me, the movements of things deep inside it, I wondered if the place itself spoke the dead language of his people.

I think I was out the next minute. I don't know if he slept that night, or if he left, or how many times. I didn't dream.

The next morning I woke feeling twenty times stronger, my mind bright with clean white silence. I had thought of twelve separate next steps in sniffing down J.J's old cell.

He was there on one of the crystalline seats when I came out, bent over a book, with his back mostly turned to me. I watched him there for a moment.

Without turning, Kal said, "How do you feel?"

I came up behind him. The book was the Institutes, the masterwork of John Calvin, that sixteenth-century man of God who was the Reformation's mind and backbone, who had suffered, tortured, and ruled Geneva, all for the love of God.

Dad, a Wesleyan, always had an unreasonable hatred for that book. The doctrine of total depravity alone could set him off for hours. When I was back to normal, I'd probably think about that more.

"I want to stay," I said finally.

He turned his head to look at me, all his discipline back in place. But I knew better now than to think of it as coldness.

"I know," he said quietly. "But that's all the more reason to go."

I nodded. "I know."

At my balcony, he set me down and glanced behind me at the door, where a sheet of sunlight reflected off half that cracked glass panel.

"Don't," I said gently. "I think I might leave it."

He stepped back. "Call if you need me."

I nodded. "And I'll tell you when it's ready."

He crouched to go. All his strength was back; he looked a hundred times better than the night before.

I realized I'd been thinking of his cool discipline as something to be regretted. If not a sin, then at least a tragedy. But really, there was no begrudging him that silence of the heart, that gift of his Fortress. Most humans are born with that gift, of some numbness when it's needed. It was good, that there should be something for a man who wasn't.

Then he paused, and seemed to think for a moment.

"Lois," he said finally, "Don't rewrite the past completely."

I blinked.

"The risks you took, measured against any standard but his, were enormous. He made most of his choices without your input. And I doubt he would undo them, if he could."

And then something else flashed for a moment in his eyes, and he added, "And he was, whatever you think, a man already when he met you."

He was twenty-two, I thought irrelevantly. Not, for example, seventeen.

More to think about, when my own heart woke, when it came time to face my own shame and sorrow. And eventually, farther down that road, to come to some peace, on some terms that would make J.J. proud. Softly, I answered, "Thank you, my friend."

One last thought occurred to me. "Kal," I said, as he crouched again. He stood and turned back to me.

"Yesterday, when they were at work on you."

He nodded.

"Did they find anything to copy, in your hearing? Is there any end to these sessions in sight?"

His face softened again for a moment. He took a breath. "In a manner of speaking."

I raised my eyebrows.

"It's clear, now, that it's not possible. It lies in structures too small – too necessarily small – for me, or any means we have, to duplicate."

"Oh," I said dully. In a day or two, that's really going to hurt.

He hesitated again, searching my face. He closed his eyes, seeing, I think, our world spread out below him, in its patchy, crumbling glory.

"Don't worry, Lois," he said finally. "There may be another way. Bring down this cult, if you can. And I…I'll do what I can."

Another time, I doubt I would have left it there. But I let him go. Time enough to speculate, in a day or two. For now, there was work to be done, and quickly.

It took me two days exactly. And then the Planet published the story of J.J.'s cult, both the ways they wooed their converts and the ways they made human sacrifice of strangers. And that many-rooted monster, the oldest, deepest fallbait cult on the East Coast, came crashing down like Satan out of heaven. I never found a trace of J.J. in any of their haunts.

That same day, our science page went public that the shatterfall destruction radii were shrinking, as their frequency increased. What that might mean, of course, God only knew.

And in the months that followed, the long-rising swell of shatterfall cult popularity began finally, like a miracle, to turn. I don't know whether it had more to do with the damning story of the East Coast arm, or with seeing that the law could still bring them to their knees. But the way people talked about that path began to change. It started to look to me like we were still a clearer-headed people than I'd thought. J.J. would have been thrilled beyond words.

Because if our world was going to end in the Shatterfall, at least we weren't about to say we liked it.