Chapter 24

In her dream, Lois was at her Uncle Gabe's house, in the backyard - it was her cousin Chloe's eighth birthday and she and Lucy were visiting for the week. They were playing hide and seek.

Lois could hear Lucy and Chloe giggling behind the toolshed, and she was stalking slowly closer, pretending (loudly) to look for them under pot plants and behind shrubs. She was really too old for this game, but it made her sister and her cousin happy.

"Are they in the tool shed?" Lois called out, pulling the door open, peering into the darkness. Lucy let out a shriek of laughter that was muffled by her cousin's palm. Lois grinned – Lucy was terrible at hiding.

She closed the door, already calling out.

"aha! I know where they are! They must be behind the shed!" Lois sprang round the corner, intending to scare them, but they were gone.

Frowning, Lois sidled behind the shed and sized up the gap in the fence. They'd loosened a couple of slats in the old fence and slipped through them. It was a tight squeeze, and she scratched herself on a nail crawling through it. Ignoring the narrow trail of blood now dripping down her arm, Lois spotted her cousin and sister running towards the woods behind the row of houses.

"I seeeeee you!" she called, "I'm gonna catch you!"

Lucy squealed in terror and tripped over. Chloe stopped to pull her up, and they ran on hand in hand. Lois took off after them. Lois chased them into the trees, gaining rapidly thanks to her long limbs. A few metres in the trees became thicker blotting out the sun and forcing Lois to slow down.

She saw a flash of a blue party dress ahead – Chloe – and she darted after it.

"I see you Chloe and I'm gonna get you!" Lois called gleefully. No sooner had the words left her mouth than she had tripped over a tree root and landed face first in the snow.

"Ugh!" Lois exclaimed, before quickly looking up to check that no one had seen her accident.

Chloe was gone, still running or maybe hidden amongst the trees ahead. Lois frowned at the snow – where had it come from? It hadn't been snowing, but suddenly she was surrounded by it. Snow and darkness, no longer the dappled shade of a canopy of leaves, but the darkness of night.

"Chloe?" Lois called, "Come back, It's dark already!"

She started running again, hindered by the snow which caught at her feet and tripped her.

"Lucy?" she called out into the darkness as she ran after them, "Chloe?"

She hurtled through darkness and the cold, stumbling and tumbling until she woke.

Lois's eyes opened, the dream already slipping away from her.She rubbed her eyes and stared up at the ceiling for a while before deciding she wasn't going to get back to sleep, and besides, it was close enough to morning and she rolled out of the bed. Clark stirred at her movement, and she shushed him and told him to go back to sleep, she was fine. She crept quietly to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee, and took it to the living room.

Five minutes later Lois stood staring at the map on her apartment wall realising she was no closer to her goal. The excursion to Granville had really only raised more questions to add to an already exceedingly long list. It would have been simple if they'd found, say, a cache of illegal weapons. Empty labs and some rock samples weren't going to be anywhere near enough to take down a Luthor.

She recalled Clark's dark mood on the drive back to the city that afternoon. He seemed troubled by what they had found last night, and what it said about Lex Luthor. When she'd prodded him with questions, he told her he was thinking about his father. Jonathan Kent had apparently never been a fan of the Luthors.

He told her how, when he was younger Clark had criticised his father for being suspicious of Lex, for expecting him to turn out like his father. Now, Clark said, he was beginning to see that his father had been right after all, but it was too late for him to ever tell his father that.

She found her eyes wandering across the map to Europe, to Germany, in particular. It was the last place she'd known her sister to be. She hadn't heard from her in years, and even then it had only been because she needed someone to bail her out of her latest mess. Lucy was mess herself.

But then, wasn't everyone in their family a mess? Lois definitely was; she knew it. Their father never really got over losing their mother. Chloe was probably the only normal one in the bunch, thought Lois, and she felt the familiar sting as she remembered that Chloe was gone. Chloe was gone, her mom was gone… and she didn't even talk to the family she had left.

Lois dwelt on this for a while, and on the expression Clark wore when he spoke about his father that afternoon before she picked up the phone and, hesitatingly, dialled a number she had to check in her address book to be sure of. She hadn't used it in a long time; wasn't even entirely sure it was still correct.

It rang once, twice, three times. A few more times, then just as Lois was starting to hang up – what had possessed her anyway? – there was click as somebody picked up on the other end.

"Hello?"

Lois opened her mouth but couldn't seem to make a sound. She held the phone to her ear and listened to the young woman on the other end repeating her question, sounding slightly annoyed.

"Hey Lucy," Lois said softly.

"Lois?" Her sister's voice was surprised. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, just wanted to talk."

"Okkaayyy…" Lucy trailed, sounding confused.

Lois started off with some basic awkward chit-chat questions. At first the conversation was stilted, but gradually they became a little more relaxed and the conversation flowed more easily. Lucy, it seemed, was getting her life into some sort of order. She had a job, an apartment… as Lois listened, she noticed Lucy sounded so much more mature than she had last time they'd spoken. Still a little on the wild side, but more calm, less angry.

Lois mentioned Clark and Lucy asked her a few questions about him, and then threw in a few random topics before she said she had to go to work.

"Talk to you later?" Lucy said, the tentative lilt to her voice showing that she was not entirely sure whether it would be welcomed.

"Sure," Lois responded. "Catchya!"

"Bye Lo!" Lucy said, her voice more confident now.

After that Lois, hung up the phone and returned her attention to the pin-covered map, tapping her finger tips on the now half-empty mug in her hands.

She thought about Lex Luthor and the way he held people in his grasp, manipulating the world to his advantage. He had seemingly infinite resources and pulled more strings than a puppeteer. She couldn't beat him. Not alone.

Sitting there with her legs curled under her and her fingers wrapped around the mug, a thought came to Lois. She considered it carefully, rolling it around in her mind and adding more to it until it grew into an idea, and then it started looking more and more like a plan.

By the time Lois had finished her coffee, she was smirking into the shadows like a Cheshire cat.