Clark had been doing one of his favourite things when he received the call that precipitated the end of the Kandorians; listening to Lois Lane murmuring positively indecent ideas in his ear. As much as he loved the sound of her voice, he also loved to distract her so thoroughly that she couldn't string a cogent sentence together. This was his best defence against her because Lois' idea of taking it slow he realised, was slow, exquisite torture. It was the most enjoyable kind of war of attrition.

"Lois…I should…I should answer that…"

"Ignore it Smallville, I'm making you an offer you can't refuse," and to reinforce her point she ran a hand up the inside of his leg. He moved back on the sofa, reaching inside his jeans pocket for his phone before she made it impossible for him to break away. Lois glared at him as he answered the call, clearly unimpressed he'd been able to resist her.

"Clark, you need to get down to the Met Gen mortuary now." It was Chloe.

Clark mouthed 'office' to Lois who rolled her eyes and reached for the bowl of popcorn in front of her. She decided to ignore him and turned her attention back to the giant squid on the television, muttering something about the monster being someone who knew how to get busy with his hands.

"I'm kind of in the middle of something."

"Lois updates me every time you leave the room Clark, I know exactly what you're in the middle of. I wouldn't call if it wasn't important. And it has something to do with your cousins from out of town. There's someone down here who want to talk to you."

"Okay, I'll be right over." He put the phone away, making an apologetic face at Lois. She hadn't said anything about it but he knew she was annoyed about his tendency to disappear during their dates. Once things with the Kandorians calmed down he'd be able to make it up to her. He couldn't afford to damage his relationship with her, it was what he'd been waiting for for so long. "I'm sorry, they want me to go back in, they've got a problem with my story."

"Sorry, can't hear you over the sound of screaming civilians being sucked down into the watery depths," she snapped as she turned up the volume. He took hold of her hand.

"I'm sorry. You know I was excited to spend time with you tonight." He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She turned her head towards him, her expression softening from annoyance to exasperation. "I'll make it up to you."

"Two words Clark: Rocky Road."

"How about…Back Rub?" She wrinkled her nose, considering the offer.

"Make it Strip Poker and we have a deal." She let out a snort of laughter. "Though given your bluffing abilities, it's going to be a bit one-sided."

"Given the right motivation, you'd be surprised what I can do." He kissed her forehead quickly and headed to the door. Minutes later he was in the sub-basement of Metropolis General. Despite the late hour, he would have expected to meet someone as he left the elevator. But the lights overhead were dimmed and the corridor was deserted. He approached the entrance to the medical examiner's office and when he knocked heard no answer. He pushed against the door and found the room inside dark except for a lamp at a desk. Emil sat there, his head in his hands. Chloe was leaning against the door to the mortuary, her face expressionless. She looked over at him and straightened. Emil didn't move.

"Good, we don't have much more time."

"Where are the staff?"

"Only two of them in tonight, and they're drinking in a bar down the street." His eyes jumped to Emil, who seemed to want no part of the conversation. "Come on."

"You said someone wanted to speak to me?"

"In here." She opened the door the mortuary. It was dark in there as well, with only the light over the closest examining table left on. Despite the dark, Clark could see there was no one in there. There was a quiet muffled knocking that he couldn't place. Chloe closed the door behind them. "He's totally freaked. You think you have all the answers and then…" She trailed off. He noticed then that though her face was blank, her whole body seemed to be jittery.

"Chloe, what's going on?" She jerked her head towards the wall where the refrigerated drawers were. He followed her reluctantly. It wasn't like her to play games like this and her mood was unnerving him. "There's no one here." She smiled jerkily.

"I wouldn't say that." She took hold of the handle on the front of the drawer next to her and pulled hard. Clark knew instantly this was the source of the sound he had heard. Noise coming from the fridge was ludicrous, which was why he had discounted it. But he knew now. As it slid out at a glacial pace he heard the noise more distinctly, free of the muffling effect of the steel. He could also see the source of the noise. The long black bag in front of him was in spasms, knocking against the drawer as it flailed around. He watched in horror as Chloe moved to unzip it.

A man's head burst out through the opening, flailing desperately. Clark could see the tubes running from the corpse's nose, his eyes thankfully taped down. He didn't want to see the eyes. The medical appendages suggested the man had died in surgery but then maybe died wasn't quite right. He wasn't breathing but a dry croaking sound was emerging from between the chapped, blue lips.

"Clark, little help here?" Chloe gasped as she leant over the body, trying to keep it pinned to the drawer. He shook off his shock and moved to the other side of the body, pressing gently down on the chest. The head snapped round to face him, the eyes still closed.

"You." The word didn't register at first, he needed to translate the strangled sounds that the body had produced. "You," he said again. Chloe grimaced and added,

"He started talking an hour ago. One of the guys called Emil and he called me. He was asking for you Clark. But not by your human name. The other one." Clark frowned, there weren't many people in Metropolis who knew his birth name. He thought he knew all of Zod's troops, and this man didn't look like a soldier. His slack skin hung around his jaw in jowls and his temples were greying.

"My name is Kal-El." He wasn't sure what else he could say. An offer of help? He knew the man's heart wasn't beating. Whatever was sustaining him was something he hadn't encountered before. He felt utterly powerless and despite himself he felt repulsed. His senses all told him this man was dead. Yet he wasn't.

"You."

"Emil checked. He has brainwaves but they're not normal brainwaves," Chloe said quietly. "His cells are decaying. He's not breathing. I don't know what this is."

"You…you."

"I'm here. What do you need?"

"You can set me free," the man rasped.

"Okay. How?"

"Find me. Find me."

"You're in Metropolis General, the hospital." He didn't want to mentioned the refrigerated drawer if he could help it.

"No. Find me. Find me."

"I don't understand. What's your name?"

"Anna. Turner."

"Are you sure she said Zod?"

"It's not one of those names it's easy to forget Chloe."

"Okay, okay. So Zod is…what, dead, alive? Did she clarify that at all?" Her tone remained sceptical.

"She was doped up to her eyeballs, should we really be taking anything she said as fact?" Oliver interjected

"She was cogent enough to have a conversation Ollie."

"That means she was cogent enough to lie," Chloe reasoned.

"I know Tess is as slippery as a greased up pig but she's not stupid. Someone's gunning for her and she has nowhere to turn. It's not in her interests to protect them. And she always covers her own ass." Lois looked speculatively at the pair of them. "Why are you so desperate for her to be wrong? What's the deal with this Zod?" Chloe looked down at the floor and Oliver cleared his throat uncomfortably.

"There was…a situation."

"Yeah, I figured that, something to do with the towers coming down and a whole bunch of aliens dying. What else do you need for a situation?"

"Look Zod is dead, there's no way back from that. And I don't understand who is left to follow him. All the Kandorians were there that day, they all followed him into the towers. They all fell in line." Oliver rubbed his face, the hours starting to catch up on him and Chloe looked even more beat than he did. She didn't feel it though; a flickering fear was licking at her skin, and every time she felt like she might start to drift into exhaustion it gave her a taste of the pain that wanted to consume her. She had to keep going. If she stopped, she might start to count up the minutes since Clark had been taken.

"So you're ruling it out on the grounds it's impossible," Lois scoffed. "Clark is a freaking cow-milking, hay-tossing, eye-lasering space alien okay? Nothing is impossible." She turned away for a moment as Chloe and Oliver discussed Tess. She just needed a moment to remember the thing she knew was important. It had been trying to nudge its way into her mind ever since she'd been pulled back into the chopper by the crazy in the black mask. Zod and the Kandorians had been taken off the board so what would it take to put them back on to it? What had she heard that meant…

When the dead rise out of their graves. How could she have forgotten Tom Jordan? He had spoken the truth that night he died. The dead had risen out of their graves, or one corpse in particular. Little Anna Turner. The girl who Styson had murdered.

"It's her, it's got to be her," she murmured. Rationally, there wasn't enough to connect them. But her instincts bubbled up from somewhere too deep for logic. She felt them, and that was enough truth. A little more gut feeling and a little less thinking might have helped with her two-sided love triangle as well. Though maybe her gut wasn't really the body part she should have been feeling.

But regrets had to wait. Right now, she just had to find a corpse, locate Clark and sort out some kind of alien conspiracy. Then the dating problems.

"Look up anything you might have on Anna Turner," she hurried up to one of Chloe's computer stations and gestured for her to begin her magic. "Come on, inspiration has struck!" Chloe's face had frozen, her features pinched as if Lois had just slapped her.

"Lois…" Oliver was looking at her cousin though, rather than her. He seemed scared of what the blonde woman was going to do next. He moved half a step closer towards her, his hands moving slightly away from his sides and then moving back down. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course I don't because you've been lying to me for years!" She shouted at them both. The words seemed to jolt them out of their paralysis. "Just thought that needed to be pointed out," she continued in a calmer voice. "I'm the weak link in the chain because you chose to let me be that. If I'm talking out of my ass, then illuminate me. Please." Her tone didn't make that sound like a request.

"Anna Turner was part of the…situation two years ago."

"Right, because someone dug up her corpse and her mom's." They both looked at her in surprise. "And they did it again three months ago. The guy at the cemetary told me about it. Cops wanted to know if Jordan and Weathers had made off with her coffin."

"No. No, they can't have," Chloe seemed stunned, her words coming out almost slurred. "I would have known. I would have…" Her eyes jumped to the metal box across the room. Lois didn't have the patience right now to try and understand what that might be about.

"Started seeing ghosts? Is that what's causing these hallucinations in Smallville, this girl's body? Was she some kind of meteor-infected ghost whisperer or what?"

"Chloe…tell her." Oliver's words were firm but the expression on his face was gentle, tender even. Chloe gave a small nod. She proceeded to give her a sketch of the events two years ago, her words spoken so plainly and matter of factly that Lois knew she was leaving things out.

They were still lying to her.

Maybe it was simply for expediency's sake. They could spend months filling her in on everything she didn't know. But she was certain that wasn't the only reason she was being kept in the dark.

Once Chloe had completed her rundown of Zod and the Turner girl, they'd batted around ideas on what to do next. Chloe was still ripping through government servers trying to find dirt on Senator Shepherd so Lois decided to return to the Planet. Perry had been demanding an explanation of where she was and where the hell Clark was for hours. He was worried.

Oliver volunteered to take her back to the Planet in his chauffeured car and she didn't object. She wasn't sure she should be driving at the moment, after all, as Smallville was so quick to point out, she was a hazard behind the wheel even when she wasn't half out of her mind. Of course he'd say she was always half out of her mind. Thinking of his the customary smirk he wore as he teased her made her laugh out loud. Oliver looked over at her from his seat next to her. Until now, they'd travelled in silence.

"Something funny?"

"Just…it's nothing." Oliver would probably be happy for her to run down Smallville's greatest hits but right now she wanted to keep hold of the memory of a normal, smiling Clark to herself. If she talked about him out loud, maybe they'd look at her as if to say, 'stop kidding yourself Lane'. Rationally she knew there was a good chance he'd been killed and rationally she knew even a suggestion of that would incapacitate her. She needed to keep going. "I have some questions about this Anna Turner situation." Oliver sighed, looking less than keen to return to the subject. The story wasn't a particularly happy one to begin with.

The meteor strike on the Turner house had granted both Styson and Anna abilities. Styson's, she was all too familiar with. But Anna's was something entirely new. The Turner family had always had a reputation as being different, Chloe had explained. They kept to themselves, with Anna being taught at home. The women supported themselves as the family had for generations, by acting as spiritual advisors. Mediums. Though the town dismissed them as frauds, the fact that they were able to pay their way said there were plenty of believers.

Once her mother died, Anna had continued the business. If she'd had a skill before she the meteor hit her, then she definitely had one after, and it made itself known just as the local coroner had started up with the bone saw.

Chloe had thankfully not shown her the video clip she'd uncovered but a verbal description of it was enough. Anna Turner's body was dead but her mind, her soul, was still attached. She was stuck between life and death. And that didn't make for a happy Y incision

The Smallville coroner back then had been in the LutherCorps pocket so Anna's body had disappeared into the bowels of the company's research labs. Her coffin was buried with no one inside. While Lionel and Lex were pouring their energies into developing weapons, a team of scientists had been working on Anna. Sometimes with, if they could get her to co-operate. They eventually learnt how to communicate with her and discovered ways to augment her abilities. But after Tess had started running the show, the project had been mothballed.

Anna had been shut up in a freezer for almost a year, always drawn back to her physical remains, never able to break free. Until the Kandorians had come.

They'd raided LutherCorps' decades of cutting-edge research as part of their quest for their powers, and in the course of their search, they'd uncovered the girl. Unlike the Luthors, the aliens had seen the potential she offered. Because there was one Kryptonian mind who was sure to be able to help them with their problem. A man who had lived and died on Earth, a scientist called Dax-Ur. He'd spent his years on the planet learning about the effect this sun had on Kryptonian minerals and Kryptonian biology. Which made him the perfect person for Zod to interrogate about how they could transform this sun's radiation to grant them their powers.

"I get what happened. Zod uses Anna to hook him up with the know-how on how to get their powers back. The towers go up, and then everything goes to hell. You kind of glossed over that part." She fixed him with a glare. "You don't seem to get it, I can't find Clark if I don't know what went down last time. I need to know what Zod's deal is. What's this about?" That's when she realised. Once Oliver fell in love, he fell for good. Chloe was the one he was trying to shield and whatever had happened, it was so bad that it had caused the depression she had glimpsed on their holiday together. She had talked about the dead the same way Weathers had. The same person had been at the root of their bleak despair; Anna had been part of something ugly back then and she was part of something ugly in Smallville right now.

That also fit with her earlier suspicions about Chloe's behaviour because whatever had caused it, it must have happened fast. She'd been tied up with Clark and work before the towers went down but she couldn't believe she wouldn't have noticed Chloe in such a dark place.

But then they hid things from her. Davis was clearly a whole different story now. The Luthors, Lana, Clark's parents. She'd been watching the film on an old black and white T.V. while they'd been

Oliver was looking out of the window, his shoulders tight.

"Whatever happened, she's family. And he's Clark," she said in a low voice. "That's all that matters." Oliver nodded once.

"You're right. You don't know what it was like hearing Tess say that name and then you mentioned Anna Turner. I didn't want to ever think about that time again if I could help it."

"The timeline doesn't fit," she pressed. "Those towers came down two days before Anna's coffin and her mom's body were dug up. I checked with the groundsman before we left. How could the Kandorians have done that? You said it was a bribe, to make her co-operate. If she did what was asked, she got her final resting place. But who was left to bribe her?" He dipped his head and in that gesture she saw the truth, the very ugly truth.

"Chloe…Chloe stole Anna Turner's body."