Welcome to the Monkey House
Touchdown woke him, with a moment of panic before he remembered where he was. "Easy," came Nicole's voice. "Just another few minutes."
Clark (Kal-El, Kal-El, repeated the mantra in his mind) sighed and sat up, slumping. Who cared? What difference did it make? "Where's Lake?" he thought to ask, after a minute.
Nicole spared time from her instruments to give him a look he could not read. "On assignment," she said neutrally. "Nothing you need to be concerned about."
Clark felt a small and painful thrill of aliveness again. For it to be something they were keeping from HIM, it must have been nasty indeed. Then the feeling drained away. So what? Not his concern. Not his world. "I thought you two did everything together."
"Actually, only when the assignment calls for a team. We work solo as often as not. I'm just the only one who can stand her, and vice versa."
The only ones who could survive each other, Clark thought. Like being around me. He scrubbed his face in his hands. Maybe this was where he belonged. If they could survive people like Nicole and Lake, maybe they wouldn't be in too much danger from Kal-El.
Yeah, right. Kal-El belonged on another planet. A planet that was no longer there.
The plane stopped and shut down, taken over by mutterings on the radio. Nicole approached him with a grin. "Okay, now we have to blindfold you."
"What for?" Kal-El said tiredly, almost in self-loathing of his gifts. "It's not as if I can't see through it. Or set it on fire. Or rip it with my eyelids, if you tie it tight enough."
"It's a tradition," Nicole said, mock sternly. "Like crossing the equator. You don't think half the people who come through here couldn't get out of it? We have a pretty fair share of escape artists. No cheating, or it doesn't count."
"Oh, well then. In that case." Clark (Kal-El, his mind insisted, but with a little less conviction) closed his eyes, and wondered at the feel of spider-silk brushing gossamer across his face. This really was a game, he realized, in dawning wonder. Nicole, whose partner and friend was probably off doing something incredibly dangerous and maybe risking death (Lake? hah!) right now, had taken the time out to play a game. With him. For him.
The small tingle of aliveness came back, and this time, though still painful, it stayed.
He submitted himself to the blindfold's symbology of helplessness. For awhile, at least, he would abandon the hell that his life had become into someone else's hands.
The entry foyer, once Nicole ripped away the spidery silk, looked like any office building's, cool and tastefully appointed and completely, boringly impersonal. Nicole waved at the three receptionists, all of whom were multitasking with computers and telephones and headgear, and one took time out to call towards them in return, "Hey, Nikki! Hey, Clark! Welcome to the monkey house!" before she turned back to snarl something into her headpiece. Clark shook his head in surrender.
Around the corner, two elevators and a stairwell door. Clark (Kal-El?) blinked. From the air, the industrial-looking campus had all appeared to be only one or two stories. What would they need an elevator for? Nicole waved her hand over what looked like a plain ordinary beam sensor, which Clark was pretty sure it wasn't, and the doors opened.
There were only two buttons, one lit. But there were eight depressions below that, and Nicole stuck her finger in one on the second row. "It's keyed to you, too," Nicole said casually, "but even with x-ray vision, you'd get lost without a map down here."
The doors slid open to reveal a wall covered by the aforementioned map, ten rough circles laid out in order, left-to-right representing top to bottom. Clark studied it with more-or-less interest. In the underground levels, the separate buildings were all connected by tunnels -- safety precaution as well as convenience, Clark thought detachedly. Aboveground was all office buildings, though no doubt some were more limited-access than others. Below were more administrative areas, labs, dorms, food sections, large sectors marked simply "observation" or "training," a whole damn power plant. "You might want to wander around the grounds on the surface until you get a feel for the layout," Nicole said offhand. "Just ask anyone if you want an escort. Come on, let's get you settled in and take the dime tour."
An escort? Clark frowned at her. A bodyguard? For HIM? Or a spy?
Nicole met his look and shook her head, a carefully learned gesture. "We gotta do something about that suspicious nature of yours, kid. You're among friends here. Anything you want to know, just ask. I might have to clock you a good one every once in awhile if you get too uppity, but nobody is going to treat you like a dork or lie to you."
Clark managed a small smile, finally, at the threat of being punched out. "Am I that easy to read?"
"Like a cheap comic book. What the HELL...!"
Clark would have asked the same thing, but he settled for going into overdrive and shoving Nicole out of the way of the lightning bolt that split the air between them. It probably wouldn't have hurt her any more than it did him, but instinct and old reflexes die hard, and protecting others still came as first nature to him. He took a few hundred thousand volts across the shoulder and bounced off the wall, landing on top of Nicole in a tangle. "Ow."
Nicole shot to her feet and dragged him up with her, expression murderous. "DYLANA! KNOCK IT OFF BEFORE JOHN HAS YOU PUT IN A CAGE !"
A woman appeared at the doorway down the hall from the corner they had just turned, leaning casually against it. "Sorry. I was just giving Little Sky some pointers in lightning control. Didn't realize anyone was out here. Good thing it was just you two."
"You call THAT a lesson in CONTROL? And don't even TRY to tell me that you didn't know exactly who was out here and exactly where we were. The room's not THAT well shielded." Nicole was seething. Clark watched her open fury with undisguised interest. Artificial nuclear construct she may be, no such thing as adrenal glands, but she was capable of outright rage. Maybe he was, too? He'd never allowed himself the luxury. "One of these days, you'll pull one of your grandstanding stunts in front of Lake, and that will be the end of your welcome here, if you're very lucky."
Dylana raised her eyebrows. "I'll keep that in mind." She went back into the room.
"She does that condescension thing on purpose too, you know," Nicole growled. "May as well introduce you properly, so you know to ignore her from now on. At least Little Sky isn't such a starts-with-a-capital-b." Bemused, Clark followed her into the room.
The other woman in the room turned as they came in, and Clark's breath caught. From the name "Little Sky," he'd been expecting a Native American, but the small, slender woman not much older than he was had the exotic beauty of a pan-Asian / Polynesian mix. Her eyes held mysteries, depths, promises. Her delicate yet self-assured smile was a siren song. Clark realized his mouth was hanging open when he gulped and found it dry.
She came over to them, hips swaying just suggestively enough, as if she were slow-dancing rather than walking. She held out a hand in languid invitation, more as if to stroke a pet than shake hands. "Pleased to finally meet you, Kal-El."
The slight accent made his alien name sing. Clark felt dizzy. "Um. You too." He took her hand as if it were a flower, feeling her fingertips brush across the inside of his wrist, his palm, tracing nerves that lit up at her touch. Clark fought very hard not to drool. Or faint.
"Now who's grandstanding?" came Dylana's bored voice, from very far away.
Nicole frowned. "Skylark, behave yourself. He's under a lot of stress right now, and he doesn't need you adding to it."
Little Sky gave him another secretive smile, and released him from her touch. Clark wondered if there were some new kind of kryptonite in the room, because he was definitely weak in the knees. "I could tell. I thought I might be able to help," she said softly.
"Yeah, right. Try that on John and see how far it gets you." Nicole was still mad, Clark realized, and still looking for someone to take it out on. "And Dylana, absolutely no playing with high frequencies while the kid is here. And cool it on the lightning."
Dylana's face swung towards Clark, and gave him a once-over, and it struck Clark suddenly that she was, at least in the eyes, blind. There was no focus at all in the light hazel-brown, and one pupil was noticeably larger than the other. But her attention on Clark was direct and unerring. She nodded. "I can tell which ones to stay away from."
"Yeah, and your control is so good that you fried every microwave transmitter for ten klicks around and blew two full-scale shielded UPSs trying to cook popcorn. I said no playing with frequencies at all, Dill-pickle, and I mean it. Or every single agent and operator will be instructed to call you dill-pickle in public for the rest of your life."
Dylana held up her hands in surrender. "Cheeze, just tell Lake, why don't you? I'm not going to hurt him, okay? But what's the point in being here if I can't experiment? It's not like I can do much in the way of lab work any more."
"Maybe you should take a vacation," Nicole said bluntly. "Get out of here for awhile." It was, Clark thought, about as rude an invitation to go away that he's ever heard.
Dylana's unseeing eyes narrowed. "Maybe I should," she returned in the same voice. "Come on, Skylark. We still have to work on your recognition of cloud-to-cloud potential paths, and for that we need to be outside." Over her shoulder, "If you will excuse us."
Nicole glared at her, then tightened her lips and motioned for Clark to head out too. Clark looked back, troubled. "That -- what was that all about?"
Nicole looked unhappy, almost defeated. "It's a running battle with Dylana. Doctor Dylana Cartak is not exactly a Special, but she is one of the most brilliant physicists in the history of technology. Also, dammit, one of the most careless. Thank the spirits of the Manhattan Project that she was working on remote diagnostic equipment when she screwed up, and not weapons. She could be channeling atomic explosions instead of just lightning."
Clark looked at her. "Huh?" Oh, wow, Clark thought, now that was really cool and composed for a Kryptonian who was supposed to rule the world.
Nicole hesitated, considering, not how much to tell him, but how. John's strict order were that no secrets be kept from the alien kid, because they could not afford to alienate him any further. They had already almost lost him. It would be walking on eggs to reconstruct his shattered teenage psyche, but nothing had ever been more worth the effort.
Carefully: "Dylana shorted an experimental instrument across her own body, working at unauthorized power levels and more than a little drunk. It didn't kill her -- it should have, but apparently she's got a trace of meta-genetics, that's the ability to mutate under stress, that kicked in for a last-ditch emergency survival. But it did blind her and fry half her nervous system. Now she 'sees' by electrical and magnetic fields, and she can access, and to a certain extent control, the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Unfortunately, being able to track radiation directly doesn't allow her to read books or computer screens, or to do much else of her former life's work any more. She's bored. Her control is slipping. And she just doesn't seem to give much of a damn about anything these days."
"So why did you tell her she couldn't do even that while -- " it sank in at that point, but he finished the sentence anyway. "While I was here?"
Nicole glanced at him sidewise, as if to say, I know you're not THAT stupid. "You heard what I said about her frying everything microwave-based for ten klicks around while making popcorn. Imagine if she went high-order out of control like that on oh, say, certain of the gamma frequencies."
The radiation equivalent, although without the attendant chemical poisoning, of kryptonite. At a power level that, as she put it, had fried a shielded UPS. Clark shuddered. He had figured as much, but it wasn't much reassuring to have it confirmed. "It's still not fair to her to -- what you said -- put her in a cage, just because I'm here."
Nicole made a chuckle. "A Faraday cage, Smallville. Look it up. And I have an ulterior motive. Call it fair turnabout. She did the high-frequency thing to me deliberately a few times." Catching the sudden loss of blood from his face, she added hastily, "With my permission, of course. Purely for scientific purposes, though I'm pretty sure she enjoyed it. I didn't, but it can't kill me, and Wynter's biophysics team had a high old time with the readouts from the few thousand machines they'd wired me to. All of which Dylana ended up frying, naturally. But we are flat out not going to risk that happening to you, even by accident."
"Maybe I should be the one to leave," Clark mumbled.
Nicole stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Clark. Kal-El. Did it ever occur to you that other people ought to take the blame for their own actions once in awhile? Dylana did something really, really stupid to get where she is now, powers and not. She's lucky she's not dead already. It's not YOUR fault, and don't you dare go trying to claim it. A fifty-year-old Nobel Laureate with three doctorates might be a little insulted by your, hm, presumption."
Well, put that way, he supposed that being Kryptonian might not be something to be so arrogant about. Clark stopped himself. Arrogant? Was that what Kal-El was? He hadn't thought so, but the pieces did seem to begin to fall into place. A society that thought itself superior. The tendency to believe that he not only COULD do anything, but had failed if he didn't do EVERYthing. He, Clark, remembered a terse lecture from the first time he had met Lake and Nicole. "We are not gods, and we must not ever try to play god." If anyone could play god, it was Special Operations, and they were adamant about refusing to do so.
Still. "I just hate her having to give up something, just because I'm here." Or to be the cause of such animosity as he had seen between Nicole and Dylana, though that, at least, probably wasn't ALL his fault. "Maybe we could just, you know, work out a schedule...."
Nicole heaved a huge, fake sigh. She looked around -- at x-ray, Clark realized, catching the slightly-distant focus that meant she was looking beyond the walls. He followed suit. No one within a hundred meters of them, and unless their Specials included people with better hearing than his, no one who could hear them.
"Actually, kid," she said in a low voice, starting down the hallway again, "you're an excuse, and one we welcome. You're not the cause of the limits we keep trying to put on her. We've been trying to get her to limit herself.
"In the first place, Dylana doesn't generate lighting out of atmospheric potential, the way our pretty little friend who was just uncouth enough to use her power of mother nature's temptations on you does. Doc Cartak steals it from whatever source is closest and most concentrated, which is why it's so much easier for her than for Skylark to make a lightning bolt. Our electric bill practically doubles whenever Dylana gets in a bad mood.
"In the second, for all her genius, she isn't actually very good at the extra-normal stuff. She wasn't born with it, and she wasn't physically meant to be able to do it. Mostly what she does -- when she's not blowing up our own equipment -- is piss off the National Weather Service and whatever power company has to be sent out to do repairs.
"And in the third place," Nicole glanced at him, gaging his reaction, "it's killing her."
Clark froze between steps. "...What?"
"I told you. The short-circuit activated some mutant gene, but it wasn't very much in the way of a mutation. Dylana has three kids by three different fathers, all of whom are brilliant in their own right -- and all of whom think she's a nut, with those white plastic and rubber sixties boots at her age -- so she had to have been pretty close to human normal.
"She's not bad at control because she doesn't know what she's doing, or just getting old. She's losing the ability to feel and control what she's doing because she's dying."
Clark closed his eyes, and fought the faintness again. So this was what it was like to feel really helpless. It wasn't enough to hurt the ones you cared for. You had to watch your friends hurting themselves, at their own will, and not be able to do a thing about it. Even he hadn't had much experience at that. (Though he probably would, his heritage taunted him.)
Was that the real source of the surface animosity between the invulnerable Nicole and the too-human, too-vulnerable doctor who played with lightning? That they were in fact friends, and one was watching the other destroy herself and couldn't do anything about it?
Nicole had found him practically in the middle of nowhere. So they had been watching him. They had known what he had done. Could they understand what it had cost him? Maybe.... He knew at least one of the Specials was an empath. And so Nicole had basically kidnapped him. What did they think they could do about the voice in his mind? Had they brought him here to try to protect him, or protect the rest of the world from him?
Dammit. He couldn't breathe. He suddenly sympathized all too much with Dylana. He couldn't just let himself be put completely in someone else's hands. But he didn't want to just push people away and be alone anymore. He couldn't take responsibility for everything and everyone, even if he wanted to. But he wasn't helpless. He wasn't dying. Dammit.
Doctor Dylana Cartak would probably say the same thing.
"Is there anything..." he managed.
"You can do? Yeah. Stay out of her way. Take care of yourself for a change. Get some rest. Talk to people. Wander around and think. Go work out on my weight machines. Read some books. Try to figure out where your head is at. Quit worrying about everybody and everything else. And remember that you're still a teenager, for pity's sake. All teenagers go through this crap, if they have half a brain. Except maybe Lake, and she's as crazy as they come. At least she admits it. Now come on. You haven't had anything to eat that even I would call food for three days, or any sleep for a week until you passed out on me, and even you aren't THAT indestructible."
Clark felt a small but real smile come tremblingly back. "Says who?"
"Sez me, and a few dozen others who have ways of knowing. Food first, or sleep? The spaghetti in the commons tonight has enough garlic that I can actually taste it."
Clark took a deep breath, and then realized that that had been a mistake. All of a sudden, he wanted nothing more to do than crash. "I'm -- a little tired."
Nicole looked at him with as much sympathy as her artificial skin could manage. She wasn't capable of getting tired herself, though she did use self-hypnosis for mental breaks, but the jury was still out on whether she was, in fact, a living being or not. Clark, extra-terrestrial though he was, was also most definitely still a teenage boy. "Yeah, I can just imagine."
The dorm room, four hallways and two levels down, was not, quite, sterile. The bathroom looked like a standard motel's, towels and such. The kitchenette had the bare minimum of utensils (all steel, no accidentally-meltable plastic). The dresser held t-shirts, jeans, workout shorts. Clark examined it by x-ray, bemused. "Somebody stocked up?"
Nicole shrugged dramatically. "Would you believe a precognetic with fashion sense?"
Clark managed a short laugh. "No. I believe spies, of course."
"Hmph. Actually, Markov is a precog -- we have to put him to serious work to keep him from playing with the lottery every three days -- but he has no better fashion sense than you do. Everything in there is in your usual primary colors. If you want anything else, you'll have to ask the supply people. But don't try telling them you need a leather jacket. There aren't three people here who don't know your temperature tolerances, and the few who aren't vegans are that way because they have to eat animal flesh for metabolic purposes."
Crap. They weren't going to be real sympathetic with a farm boy, even if he was from another planet. Clark suddenly felt Kal-El's disgust at the thought of eating animals, too. Not because they were living beings with nervous systems and the ability to suffer, but because they were dirty, part of unsterilized, offensive, lower-level life-form environment.
Clark, who had grown up mucking out stalls, was suddenly angry at the nose-in-the-air attitude of himself (his other self?), and queasy over both the anger and the eating thing, and disoriented, all at once. Okay, so it hadn't entirely been the explosion, or the red ring. He really was seriously disconnected in his head over his dual heritage. Trying to be both at the same time, he had become neither one nor the other.
Clark sat down heavily, one hand going involuntarily to his head and the other across his stomach. "I think I just need a nap," he muttered.
It was a good thing, Nicole thought, that she had such a natural poker face. What she really wanted to do was shake Clark until his teeth rattled and yell at him for being too dumb to ask for help right up front. It was going to be a mess getting him to come to terms with himself over the mistakes he'd made trying to go it alone.
But the usual brutal frankness that most of the Specials were perfectly accustomed to wouldn't work here. Clark was not only in bad shape, but he still was, after all, only a child, as those who had been through what she and Lake had been reckoned things.
"Sure, kid," she said softly, sympathetically. "It's been a long day for you. And the red rock does take it out of you -- it causes damage, I know, even if the effects are different. Kick back and nap a little. I'll be back with some peanut butter sandwiches for a late lunch."
Clark all but fell back on the thick pillow. "Peanut butter sandwiches...?"
"Last I looked, growing boys needed protein." Nicole ruffled his hair, and let her hand (artificial, artificial) rest on his forehead. Protectively. "Clark...?"
"Kal-El," he corrected, sleepily, automatically, not really caring.
"Whatever. I just want to make sure you know -- we're here for you. I mean, I have an assignment, I have to leave here pretty soon. I HAVE to. It's what I do, kid, what I am, what I have to be if I can ever justify my own existence and earn my friends. But I'm not abandoning you. Please, Kal, believe that, no matter what. We will never abandon you."
Clark, Kal-El, looked up at her from his prone position, and the two people within him fought a violent but brief battle. His birth parents had sent him away. His adoptive parents had sent him away. The only ones willing to take him in were freaks themselves.
And they had other things to do. His breath let out on a tired sigh. "I believe you."
Nicole also let out a breath, one that she did not need to take except to talk with. Thank all the gods, was the thought she kept hidden behind the fake face. She stroked the inhumanly powerful child's forehead with a carefully gentle thumb. "Deep breaths. Doze off. I'll be back as soon as I can beat the chef into making peanut butter sandwiches without him demanding to put garlic and cloves and parsley and Emeril knows what else on it."
Clark's eyes closed, his breathing coming in almost a snore already. "Don', mm, beat up the, mm, chef...."
"Don't worry. He's a Special. He'd turn my bunk into a science project of slimy green growing things if I so much as interrupted his creation of a salad."
Clark sighed. She was right, the red rock had been slow poison. He felt sick, and exhausted, as the reaction caught up with him. "Can't stay," he murmured. "Dangerous...."
"No, it isn't. Anything that can get past John's security isn't worth worrying about. The whole planet will be destroyed first." Oh, dammit -- that was a very wrong thing to say. Clark probably believed he should be first in line against planet-destroying threats. Teaching the brat to play teamwork and quit taking point alone was going to take Wynter's entire psych team, and John's Martian counterpart's high-powered telepathy to boot.
"Dangerous to *you,*" Clark murmured. "To everyone I care about."
In her mind, Nicole said every obscenity that she'd ever heard from their retired SEAL team members. "I am not going to sing you a lullaby," Nicole said, voice breaking as her control over her purely voluntary air intake faltered. "But I'll be around. While I can."
"I know." Clark's voice was a whisper, but still all too much achingly aware.
Nicole placed her hands on either side of his head. She would never have dared do that with anyone else, unless she was trying to kill them slowly; her internal radiation levels would fry a geiger counter on contact. Clark just made a small sound, half acceptance, half withdrawal, all pain. Emotional overload. "It's okay, kid," she whispered, knowing that now she was lying, that for him, there never would be such thing as "okay" -- or "kid" -- again.
"If you say so." Clark's weary voice was all but gone. Nicole did not have hearing capabilities more than a normal perfect human's -- she couldn't be damaged, but she couldn't be improved upon. She moved a hand down to his, and gripped it, like small child's.
A small child who could shatter construction steel in his fingers, throw buildings over the horizon if the building would have the courtesy to stay in one piece. Nicole bowed her head over their paired folded hands. His sudden spastic insecure clutching in return would have crushed anyone else to bloody jelly. His stifled sobs were beyond even her ability to do anything about. She herself was incapable of tears, or any other emotions except the ones she'd been taught by having them shoved in her face during long patient practice.
Even Lake hadn't frightened her, at first. Even Kal-El hadn't impressed her, at first.
Now she knew that she might have to kill Lake someday, and that she might even manage it if she moved fast enough. And that she would oppose even John before she would hurt Clark, whatever it took. She would never be one of them, but she belonged to all of them, so alike in their difference, and so completely, irrevocably different from each other.
"I'll be back in a little while," she whispered. "Chunky or smooth?"
Clark did not answer.
Touchdown woke him, with a moment of panic before he remembered where he was. "Easy," came Nicole's voice. "Just another few minutes."
Clark (Kal-El, Kal-El, repeated the mantra in his mind) sighed and sat up, slumping. Who cared? What difference did it make? "Where's Lake?" he thought to ask, after a minute.
Nicole spared time from her instruments to give him a look he could not read. "On assignment," she said neutrally. "Nothing you need to be concerned about."
Clark felt a small and painful thrill of aliveness again. For it to be something they were keeping from HIM, it must have been nasty indeed. Then the feeling drained away. So what? Not his concern. Not his world. "I thought you two did everything together."
"Actually, only when the assignment calls for a team. We work solo as often as not. I'm just the only one who can stand her, and vice versa."
The only ones who could survive each other, Clark thought. Like being around me. He scrubbed his face in his hands. Maybe this was where he belonged. If they could survive people like Nicole and Lake, maybe they wouldn't be in too much danger from Kal-El.
Yeah, right. Kal-El belonged on another planet. A planet that was no longer there.
The plane stopped and shut down, taken over by mutterings on the radio. Nicole approached him with a grin. "Okay, now we have to blindfold you."
"What for?" Kal-El said tiredly, almost in self-loathing of his gifts. "It's not as if I can't see through it. Or set it on fire. Or rip it with my eyelids, if you tie it tight enough."
"It's a tradition," Nicole said, mock sternly. "Like crossing the equator. You don't think half the people who come through here couldn't get out of it? We have a pretty fair share of escape artists. No cheating, or it doesn't count."
"Oh, well then. In that case." Clark (Kal-El, his mind insisted, but with a little less conviction) closed his eyes, and wondered at the feel of spider-silk brushing gossamer across his face. This really was a game, he realized, in dawning wonder. Nicole, whose partner and friend was probably off doing something incredibly dangerous and maybe risking death (Lake? hah!) right now, had taken the time out to play a game. With him. For him.
The small tingle of aliveness came back, and this time, though still painful, it stayed.
He submitted himself to the blindfold's symbology of helplessness. For awhile, at least, he would abandon the hell that his life had become into someone else's hands.
The entry foyer, once Nicole ripped away the spidery silk, looked like any office building's, cool and tastefully appointed and completely, boringly impersonal. Nicole waved at the three receptionists, all of whom were multitasking with computers and telephones and headgear, and one took time out to call towards them in return, "Hey, Nikki! Hey, Clark! Welcome to the monkey house!" before she turned back to snarl something into her headpiece. Clark shook his head in surrender.
Around the corner, two elevators and a stairwell door. Clark (Kal-El?) blinked. From the air, the industrial-looking campus had all appeared to be only one or two stories. What would they need an elevator for? Nicole waved her hand over what looked like a plain ordinary beam sensor, which Clark was pretty sure it wasn't, and the doors opened.
There were only two buttons, one lit. But there were eight depressions below that, and Nicole stuck her finger in one on the second row. "It's keyed to you, too," Nicole said casually, "but even with x-ray vision, you'd get lost without a map down here."
The doors slid open to reveal a wall covered by the aforementioned map, ten rough circles laid out in order, left-to-right representing top to bottom. Clark studied it with more-or-less interest. In the underground levels, the separate buildings were all connected by tunnels -- safety precaution as well as convenience, Clark thought detachedly. Aboveground was all office buildings, though no doubt some were more limited-access than others. Below were more administrative areas, labs, dorms, food sections, large sectors marked simply "observation" or "training," a whole damn power plant. "You might want to wander around the grounds on the surface until you get a feel for the layout," Nicole said offhand. "Just ask anyone if you want an escort. Come on, let's get you settled in and take the dime tour."
An escort? Clark frowned at her. A bodyguard? For HIM? Or a spy?
Nicole met his look and shook her head, a carefully learned gesture. "We gotta do something about that suspicious nature of yours, kid. You're among friends here. Anything you want to know, just ask. I might have to clock you a good one every once in awhile if you get too uppity, but nobody is going to treat you like a dork or lie to you."
Clark managed a small smile, finally, at the threat of being punched out. "Am I that easy to read?"
"Like a cheap comic book. What the HELL...!"
Clark would have asked the same thing, but he settled for going into overdrive and shoving Nicole out of the way of the lightning bolt that split the air between them. It probably wouldn't have hurt her any more than it did him, but instinct and old reflexes die hard, and protecting others still came as first nature to him. He took a few hundred thousand volts across the shoulder and bounced off the wall, landing on top of Nicole in a tangle. "Ow."
Nicole shot to her feet and dragged him up with her, expression murderous. "DYLANA! KNOCK IT OFF BEFORE JOHN HAS YOU PUT IN A CAGE !"
A woman appeared at the doorway down the hall from the corner they had just turned, leaning casually against it. "Sorry. I was just giving Little Sky some pointers in lightning control. Didn't realize anyone was out here. Good thing it was just you two."
"You call THAT a lesson in CONTROL? And don't even TRY to tell me that you didn't know exactly who was out here and exactly where we were. The room's not THAT well shielded." Nicole was seething. Clark watched her open fury with undisguised interest. Artificial nuclear construct she may be, no such thing as adrenal glands, but she was capable of outright rage. Maybe he was, too? He'd never allowed himself the luxury. "One of these days, you'll pull one of your grandstanding stunts in front of Lake, and that will be the end of your welcome here, if you're very lucky."
Dylana raised her eyebrows. "I'll keep that in mind." She went back into the room.
"She does that condescension thing on purpose too, you know," Nicole growled. "May as well introduce you properly, so you know to ignore her from now on. At least Little Sky isn't such a starts-with-a-capital-b." Bemused, Clark followed her into the room.
The other woman in the room turned as they came in, and Clark's breath caught. From the name "Little Sky," he'd been expecting a Native American, but the small, slender woman not much older than he was had the exotic beauty of a pan-Asian / Polynesian mix. Her eyes held mysteries, depths, promises. Her delicate yet self-assured smile was a siren song. Clark realized his mouth was hanging open when he gulped and found it dry.
She came over to them, hips swaying just suggestively enough, as if she were slow-dancing rather than walking. She held out a hand in languid invitation, more as if to stroke a pet than shake hands. "Pleased to finally meet you, Kal-El."
The slight accent made his alien name sing. Clark felt dizzy. "Um. You too." He took her hand as if it were a flower, feeling her fingertips brush across the inside of his wrist, his palm, tracing nerves that lit up at her touch. Clark fought very hard not to drool. Or faint.
"Now who's grandstanding?" came Dylana's bored voice, from very far away.
Nicole frowned. "Skylark, behave yourself. He's under a lot of stress right now, and he doesn't need you adding to it."
Little Sky gave him another secretive smile, and released him from her touch. Clark wondered if there were some new kind of kryptonite in the room, because he was definitely weak in the knees. "I could tell. I thought I might be able to help," she said softly.
"Yeah, right. Try that on John and see how far it gets you." Nicole was still mad, Clark realized, and still looking for someone to take it out on. "And Dylana, absolutely no playing with high frequencies while the kid is here. And cool it on the lightning."
Dylana's face swung towards Clark, and gave him a once-over, and it struck Clark suddenly that she was, at least in the eyes, blind. There was no focus at all in the light hazel-brown, and one pupil was noticeably larger than the other. But her attention on Clark was direct and unerring. She nodded. "I can tell which ones to stay away from."
"Yeah, and your control is so good that you fried every microwave transmitter for ten klicks around and blew two full-scale shielded UPSs trying to cook popcorn. I said no playing with frequencies at all, Dill-pickle, and I mean it. Or every single agent and operator will be instructed to call you dill-pickle in public for the rest of your life."
Dylana held up her hands in surrender. "Cheeze, just tell Lake, why don't you? I'm not going to hurt him, okay? But what's the point in being here if I can't experiment? It's not like I can do much in the way of lab work any more."
"Maybe you should take a vacation," Nicole said bluntly. "Get out of here for awhile." It was, Clark thought, about as rude an invitation to go away that he's ever heard.
Dylana's unseeing eyes narrowed. "Maybe I should," she returned in the same voice. "Come on, Skylark. We still have to work on your recognition of cloud-to-cloud potential paths, and for that we need to be outside." Over her shoulder, "If you will excuse us."
Nicole glared at her, then tightened her lips and motioned for Clark to head out too. Clark looked back, troubled. "That -- what was that all about?"
Nicole looked unhappy, almost defeated. "It's a running battle with Dylana. Doctor Dylana Cartak is not exactly a Special, but she is one of the most brilliant physicists in the history of technology. Also, dammit, one of the most careless. Thank the spirits of the Manhattan Project that she was working on remote diagnostic equipment when she screwed up, and not weapons. She could be channeling atomic explosions instead of just lightning."
Clark looked at her. "Huh?" Oh, wow, Clark thought, now that was really cool and composed for a Kryptonian who was supposed to rule the world.
Nicole hesitated, considering, not how much to tell him, but how. John's strict order were that no secrets be kept from the alien kid, because they could not afford to alienate him any further. They had already almost lost him. It would be walking on eggs to reconstruct his shattered teenage psyche, but nothing had ever been more worth the effort.
Carefully: "Dylana shorted an experimental instrument across her own body, working at unauthorized power levels and more than a little drunk. It didn't kill her -- it should have, but apparently she's got a trace of meta-genetics, that's the ability to mutate under stress, that kicked in for a last-ditch emergency survival. But it did blind her and fry half her nervous system. Now she 'sees' by electrical and magnetic fields, and she can access, and to a certain extent control, the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Unfortunately, being able to track radiation directly doesn't allow her to read books or computer screens, or to do much else of her former life's work any more. She's bored. Her control is slipping. And she just doesn't seem to give much of a damn about anything these days."
"So why did you tell her she couldn't do even that while -- " it sank in at that point, but he finished the sentence anyway. "While I was here?"
Nicole glanced at him sidewise, as if to say, I know you're not THAT stupid. "You heard what I said about her frying everything microwave-based for ten klicks around while making popcorn. Imagine if she went high-order out of control like that on oh, say, certain of the gamma frequencies."
The radiation equivalent, although without the attendant chemical poisoning, of kryptonite. At a power level that, as she put it, had fried a shielded UPS. Clark shuddered. He had figured as much, but it wasn't much reassuring to have it confirmed. "It's still not fair to her to -- what you said -- put her in a cage, just because I'm here."
Nicole made a chuckle. "A Faraday cage, Smallville. Look it up. And I have an ulterior motive. Call it fair turnabout. She did the high-frequency thing to me deliberately a few times." Catching the sudden loss of blood from his face, she added hastily, "With my permission, of course. Purely for scientific purposes, though I'm pretty sure she enjoyed it. I didn't, but it can't kill me, and Wynter's biophysics team had a high old time with the readouts from the few thousand machines they'd wired me to. All of which Dylana ended up frying, naturally. But we are flat out not going to risk that happening to you, even by accident."
"Maybe I should be the one to leave," Clark mumbled.
Nicole stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Clark. Kal-El. Did it ever occur to you that other people ought to take the blame for their own actions once in awhile? Dylana did something really, really stupid to get where she is now, powers and not. She's lucky she's not dead already. It's not YOUR fault, and don't you dare go trying to claim it. A fifty-year-old Nobel Laureate with three doctorates might be a little insulted by your, hm, presumption."
Well, put that way, he supposed that being Kryptonian might not be something to be so arrogant about. Clark stopped himself. Arrogant? Was that what Kal-El was? He hadn't thought so, but the pieces did seem to begin to fall into place. A society that thought itself superior. The tendency to believe that he not only COULD do anything, but had failed if he didn't do EVERYthing. He, Clark, remembered a terse lecture from the first time he had met Lake and Nicole. "We are not gods, and we must not ever try to play god." If anyone could play god, it was Special Operations, and they were adamant about refusing to do so.
Still. "I just hate her having to give up something, just because I'm here." Or to be the cause of such animosity as he had seen between Nicole and Dylana, though that, at least, probably wasn't ALL his fault. "Maybe we could just, you know, work out a schedule...."
Nicole heaved a huge, fake sigh. She looked around -- at x-ray, Clark realized, catching the slightly-distant focus that meant she was looking beyond the walls. He followed suit. No one within a hundred meters of them, and unless their Specials included people with better hearing than his, no one who could hear them.
"Actually, kid," she said in a low voice, starting down the hallway again, "you're an excuse, and one we welcome. You're not the cause of the limits we keep trying to put on her. We've been trying to get her to limit herself.
"In the first place, Dylana doesn't generate lighting out of atmospheric potential, the way our pretty little friend who was just uncouth enough to use her power of mother nature's temptations on you does. Doc Cartak steals it from whatever source is closest and most concentrated, which is why it's so much easier for her than for Skylark to make a lightning bolt. Our electric bill practically doubles whenever Dylana gets in a bad mood.
"In the second, for all her genius, she isn't actually very good at the extra-normal stuff. She wasn't born with it, and she wasn't physically meant to be able to do it. Mostly what she does -- when she's not blowing up our own equipment -- is piss off the National Weather Service and whatever power company has to be sent out to do repairs.
"And in the third place," Nicole glanced at him, gaging his reaction, "it's killing her."
Clark froze between steps. "...What?"
"I told you. The short-circuit activated some mutant gene, but it wasn't very much in the way of a mutation. Dylana has three kids by three different fathers, all of whom are brilliant in their own right -- and all of whom think she's a nut, with those white plastic and rubber sixties boots at her age -- so she had to have been pretty close to human normal.
"She's not bad at control because she doesn't know what she's doing, or just getting old. She's losing the ability to feel and control what she's doing because she's dying."
Clark closed his eyes, and fought the faintness again. So this was what it was like to feel really helpless. It wasn't enough to hurt the ones you cared for. You had to watch your friends hurting themselves, at their own will, and not be able to do a thing about it. Even he hadn't had much experience at that. (Though he probably would, his heritage taunted him.)
Was that the real source of the surface animosity between the invulnerable Nicole and the too-human, too-vulnerable doctor who played with lightning? That they were in fact friends, and one was watching the other destroy herself and couldn't do anything about it?
Nicole had found him practically in the middle of nowhere. So they had been watching him. They had known what he had done. Could they understand what it had cost him? Maybe.... He knew at least one of the Specials was an empath. And so Nicole had basically kidnapped him. What did they think they could do about the voice in his mind? Had they brought him here to try to protect him, or protect the rest of the world from him?
Dammit. He couldn't breathe. He suddenly sympathized all too much with Dylana. He couldn't just let himself be put completely in someone else's hands. But he didn't want to just push people away and be alone anymore. He couldn't take responsibility for everything and everyone, even if he wanted to. But he wasn't helpless. He wasn't dying. Dammit.
Doctor Dylana Cartak would probably say the same thing.
"Is there anything..." he managed.
"You can do? Yeah. Stay out of her way. Take care of yourself for a change. Get some rest. Talk to people. Wander around and think. Go work out on my weight machines. Read some books. Try to figure out where your head is at. Quit worrying about everybody and everything else. And remember that you're still a teenager, for pity's sake. All teenagers go through this crap, if they have half a brain. Except maybe Lake, and she's as crazy as they come. At least she admits it. Now come on. You haven't had anything to eat that even I would call food for three days, or any sleep for a week until you passed out on me, and even you aren't THAT indestructible."
Clark felt a small but real smile come tremblingly back. "Says who?"
"Sez me, and a few dozen others who have ways of knowing. Food first, or sleep? The spaghetti in the commons tonight has enough garlic that I can actually taste it."
Clark took a deep breath, and then realized that that had been a mistake. All of a sudden, he wanted nothing more to do than crash. "I'm -- a little tired."
Nicole looked at him with as much sympathy as her artificial skin could manage. She wasn't capable of getting tired herself, though she did use self-hypnosis for mental breaks, but the jury was still out on whether she was, in fact, a living being or not. Clark, extra-terrestrial though he was, was also most definitely still a teenage boy. "Yeah, I can just imagine."
The dorm room, four hallways and two levels down, was not, quite, sterile. The bathroom looked like a standard motel's, towels and such. The kitchenette had the bare minimum of utensils (all steel, no accidentally-meltable plastic). The dresser held t-shirts, jeans, workout shorts. Clark examined it by x-ray, bemused. "Somebody stocked up?"
Nicole shrugged dramatically. "Would you believe a precognetic with fashion sense?"
Clark managed a short laugh. "No. I believe spies, of course."
"Hmph. Actually, Markov is a precog -- we have to put him to serious work to keep him from playing with the lottery every three days -- but he has no better fashion sense than you do. Everything in there is in your usual primary colors. If you want anything else, you'll have to ask the supply people. But don't try telling them you need a leather jacket. There aren't three people here who don't know your temperature tolerances, and the few who aren't vegans are that way because they have to eat animal flesh for metabolic purposes."
Crap. They weren't going to be real sympathetic with a farm boy, even if he was from another planet. Clark suddenly felt Kal-El's disgust at the thought of eating animals, too. Not because they were living beings with nervous systems and the ability to suffer, but because they were dirty, part of unsterilized, offensive, lower-level life-form environment.
Clark, who had grown up mucking out stalls, was suddenly angry at the nose-in-the-air attitude of himself (his other self?), and queasy over both the anger and the eating thing, and disoriented, all at once. Okay, so it hadn't entirely been the explosion, or the red ring. He really was seriously disconnected in his head over his dual heritage. Trying to be both at the same time, he had become neither one nor the other.
Clark sat down heavily, one hand going involuntarily to his head and the other across his stomach. "I think I just need a nap," he muttered.
It was a good thing, Nicole thought, that she had such a natural poker face. What she really wanted to do was shake Clark until his teeth rattled and yell at him for being too dumb to ask for help right up front. It was going to be a mess getting him to come to terms with himself over the mistakes he'd made trying to go it alone.
But the usual brutal frankness that most of the Specials were perfectly accustomed to wouldn't work here. Clark was not only in bad shape, but he still was, after all, only a child, as those who had been through what she and Lake had been reckoned things.
"Sure, kid," she said softly, sympathetically. "It's been a long day for you. And the red rock does take it out of you -- it causes damage, I know, even if the effects are different. Kick back and nap a little. I'll be back with some peanut butter sandwiches for a late lunch."
Clark all but fell back on the thick pillow. "Peanut butter sandwiches...?"
"Last I looked, growing boys needed protein." Nicole ruffled his hair, and let her hand (artificial, artificial) rest on his forehead. Protectively. "Clark...?"
"Kal-El," he corrected, sleepily, automatically, not really caring.
"Whatever. I just want to make sure you know -- we're here for you. I mean, I have an assignment, I have to leave here pretty soon. I HAVE to. It's what I do, kid, what I am, what I have to be if I can ever justify my own existence and earn my friends. But I'm not abandoning you. Please, Kal, believe that, no matter what. We will never abandon you."
Clark, Kal-El, looked up at her from his prone position, and the two people within him fought a violent but brief battle. His birth parents had sent him away. His adoptive parents had sent him away. The only ones willing to take him in were freaks themselves.
And they had other things to do. His breath let out on a tired sigh. "I believe you."
Nicole also let out a breath, one that she did not need to take except to talk with. Thank all the gods, was the thought she kept hidden behind the fake face. She stroked the inhumanly powerful child's forehead with a carefully gentle thumb. "Deep breaths. Doze off. I'll be back as soon as I can beat the chef into making peanut butter sandwiches without him demanding to put garlic and cloves and parsley and Emeril knows what else on it."
Clark's eyes closed, his breathing coming in almost a snore already. "Don', mm, beat up the, mm, chef...."
"Don't worry. He's a Special. He'd turn my bunk into a science project of slimy green growing things if I so much as interrupted his creation of a salad."
Clark sighed. She was right, the red rock had been slow poison. He felt sick, and exhausted, as the reaction caught up with him. "Can't stay," he murmured. "Dangerous...."
"No, it isn't. Anything that can get past John's security isn't worth worrying about. The whole planet will be destroyed first." Oh, dammit -- that was a very wrong thing to say. Clark probably believed he should be first in line against planet-destroying threats. Teaching the brat to play teamwork and quit taking point alone was going to take Wynter's entire psych team, and John's Martian counterpart's high-powered telepathy to boot.
"Dangerous to *you,*" Clark murmured. "To everyone I care about."
In her mind, Nicole said every obscenity that she'd ever heard from their retired SEAL team members. "I am not going to sing you a lullaby," Nicole said, voice breaking as her control over her purely voluntary air intake faltered. "But I'll be around. While I can."
"I know." Clark's voice was a whisper, but still all too much achingly aware.
Nicole placed her hands on either side of his head. She would never have dared do that with anyone else, unless she was trying to kill them slowly; her internal radiation levels would fry a geiger counter on contact. Clark just made a small sound, half acceptance, half withdrawal, all pain. Emotional overload. "It's okay, kid," she whispered, knowing that now she was lying, that for him, there never would be such thing as "okay" -- or "kid" -- again.
"If you say so." Clark's weary voice was all but gone. Nicole did not have hearing capabilities more than a normal perfect human's -- she couldn't be damaged, but she couldn't be improved upon. She moved a hand down to his, and gripped it, like small child's.
A small child who could shatter construction steel in his fingers, throw buildings over the horizon if the building would have the courtesy to stay in one piece. Nicole bowed her head over their paired folded hands. His sudden spastic insecure clutching in return would have crushed anyone else to bloody jelly. His stifled sobs were beyond even her ability to do anything about. She herself was incapable of tears, or any other emotions except the ones she'd been taught by having them shoved in her face during long patient practice.
Even Lake hadn't frightened her, at first. Even Kal-El hadn't impressed her, at first.
Now she knew that she might have to kill Lake someday, and that she might even manage it if she moved fast enough. And that she would oppose even John before she would hurt Clark, whatever it took. She would never be one of them, but she belonged to all of them, so alike in their difference, and so completely, irrevocably different from each other.
"I'll be back in a little while," she whispered. "Chunky or smooth?"
Clark did not answer.
