Dylana
The next day, Wynter put Haldeman and Hambly on his required-reading list. Clark began to suspect an alphabetical pattern. Van Vogt was in the proscribed section.
If he had to go through Heinlein (and he hadn't finished Asimov or even half of Arthur C. Clarke), to get there, he'd be old and gray before he reached the proscribed section anyway. But it was Hambly's wizards that awoke a secret delight in writing for Clark. He taxed the computer at full speed with a fan-fiction story, and immediately erased it, not having a clue what kind of monitors and safeguards Wynter had put on the backups. Wynter howled and interrupted John to show him Clark writing about himself in a world of working magic.
It gave them both hope that maybe Clark was going to recover some of his old self.
Clark was in the common room with a book that he wasn't much paying attention to (Statistics for Dummies) when someone flopped down beside him uninvited. He was startled, and a little annoyed, until he realized, a second later, that it was Dylana. Oh.
"There's the kid from outer space himself," she said wearily. "At least you're not watching that corporate-crud dis-info excuse for news."
"You -- Wynter said you were helping the search and rescue people." Clark pushed away his own instinctive resentful reaction at her words. "I ... well, thank you. I looked for you. I wish I could have helped."
"If you had seen me, I would have been sorely disappointed in myself." Dylana raised her head and her voice to a corner in the room. "You hear that, Wynter? I am not THAT bad at subtlety. I can hide in plain sight when there's a reason to." She sat back, obviously exhausted. "Any chips and dip around here? I could use a beer."
Clark made prosaic use of superspeed, careful to stay just under the sound barrier while inside, to raid the junk food rooms. Six bowls of dip, three kinds of chips, and eleven seconds later, he paused to ask, "What kind of beer?"
"Anything dark and not in a can. Anyone ever tell you that you're cute, kid?"
Clark blushed, grateful that Dylana couldn't see it. Then the slow smile she turned on him reminded him that she could "see" the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including heat.
He blushed harder. She laughed, and ruffled his hair. "Go splash cold water on your face, kid. I imagine every girl and half the guys tell you that all the time. Me, I could give a hang what you actually look like. I'm older than either of your mothers, and more of a pain in the ass than both of them put together." His blush paled, and she obviously caught it. "Sorry, that was rude, and nothing you deserved. Go take a time-out, kid. And don't forget my beer!" she added as Clark took her advice at something more than normal human speed.
Clark broke into the liquor locker without too much trouble. Locked doors in the complex were considered tests, not blockades. He paused in front of the refrigerated section, and put his head against the cool metal, still hearing that offhand remark about two mothers.
He had cost one her only natural child. He had left the other behind to die. He could never repay either of them for what they had sacrificed to let him live.
Nicole had told him that no one would abandon him. Nicole could throw him through a wall (and had) with one hand. She had no reason to lie to him. Nicole could feel physical pain on a very, very limited basis, even less than he could. But she could be hurt by threats to her friends just as easily as he could. She had responded by retreating to this emotionally secure place (when she wasn't out interfering with the whole world), where her only close friend was another, even more dangerous, superhuman. Nicole's parents, such as they were, had been the lab technicians who made her.
No, these people would never abandon him. But they had willingly abandoned a great deal else, to save their own sanity. They had chosen not to be part of the outside world, to instead only occasionally touch on it. To work in the service of all mankind -- but never to have any friends among them, never to be one of them.
Clark. Kal-El. Yes, I can be both. I have to be. I can be a farm kid, and from another planet, because I am. I don't have any choice in the matter. That's what I am.
He procured four different beers and relocked the locker without too much damage. No doubt Wynter would make him fix or pay for the one latch he'd accidentally snapped.
"Wow," Dylana commented tiredly when he set the beer selection before her. "Service with a smile." She selected one, and waved at the rest. "Siddown, kid, unless you have anything better to do. Want one?"
"Um, I'm underage." Pure reflex.
Dylana's startled laugh made him cringe. "Does alcohol even affect you?"
"I'm not sure. Probably not much." Dylana seemed to elicit candidness, even more than Nicole did. Well, Clark reflected, it wasn't every day he was invited to sit down with a Nobel laureate. "I, uh, don't much care for the taste, anyway."
Dylana nodded. "It's an acquired pleasure. You wait, though, you'll get old too, someday." She swallowed a large gulp of beer, and waved the bottle at him. "Go get something you like, then. Give you something to fiddle with while we talk."
"Um...." Clark dithered, trying to think of a way to get out of what he was pretty sure would be a much too intense conversation.
"Don't tell me you're so enthralled by Wynter's assignment in statistics that you can't spare a few minutes to talk." Her blind eyes and penetrating senses evaluated him. "Unless I make you uncomfortable?"
How had she known what his reading assignment had been? Was he talking to himself? "I -- actually, I didn't want to bother you. I thought you just might to, well, want to relax for awhile. After all you've been through." You took on the storm. For Lex. For me. At a cost to yourself that even I can't understand. You're killing yourself.
"I did not come in here to watch Moonie-owned talking-head propaganda," Dylana said sharply. She drank some more beer. "Nicole was right, you know," she sighed. "There are very few walls on this planet I can't "see" through. I knew where you were from half a state away." She brooded for a minute, very uncharacteristic of the worldly devil-may-care wielder of lightning. "I didn't come waltzing in while you were here by accident."
She picked up another beer, and flicked the cap off without touching it. "Lead doesn't block my altered senses the way it does yours. Even hard vacuum is a library to me. When the time comes, I'm going to fly as high as I can and see all there is to see." She drained the second beer. "Good choice of beers, kiddo. Thanks."
When the time comes...? "That sounds like a ... like ... um ... well...."
"Like what?" Dylana tilted her head at him. "Kid, you really need to work on your communications skills. There's a Toastmasters chapter here that meets on Saturday nights."
Clark took a slow, careful breath. (A Toastmasters chapter? He could only just barely imagine the practice speeches that Special agents would give.)
Dylana was waiting. "It sounds like, you, well, like you're planning on ... finality."
Dylana leaned back on the couch. She pointed her face at another beer, but didn't reach for it. "Child, I don't have more than another year left at best. Nicole didn't tell you? I thought it was common knowledge."
Nicole had given him the impression that Dylana herself didn't know. Clark stopped breathing. A sample from Lab 8 in his throat would not have hurt much more.
Dylana turned her face back to him. "Clark. Kal-El. The great new invention that I screwed up by sticking my head in the wrong place at the wrong time was a remote medical diagnostic instrument for astronauts. I'm a walking autodoc. You haven't gotten to Larry Niven yet? Never mind, you will." She lifted a finger at a beer bottle, and it rose and came towards her, drawn by the metal cap. She made the top fly across the room and caught the glass bottle as it fell, so fast he could barely follow. "I know exactly and to the cell how much of me is coming apart. The only thing I can't pinpoint to the minute is how much longer I'll be able to fly." She drained half the beer. "And dying slowly in bed just doesn't appeal to me."
Clark stared at the floor and swallowed. What, possibly, could you say to that? Sheer desperation allowed him to find a small version of his voice, blankly, a ridiculous but absolutely necessary change of subject. "Dr. Cartak ... why do you wear white boots?"
Dylana turned her face towards her legs. "They're white? Oh, for ... no wonder my kids think I'm insane. I just thought they were old lineman's work boots. You know, for the rubber sole, so I don't accidentally electrocute anybody. I'm going to fry Nicole for not telling me. I bet she's been laughing her plastic and metal head off."
"Well, I mean, there's no reason why you shouldn't wear white boots if you want to. Nicole's," his first impulse was to say "underwear," and he blushed at the thought, "Bodysuit isn't exactly subtle either, with all that red and black."
Dylana hooted. "Thanks for telling me, Kal. Gives me some ammunition for when she gets back." She sighed, almost contentedly, finished the third beer, and tossed the bottle over her shoulder. Startled, Clark started to catch it -- and saw it land dead center in the recycling receptacle. And Nicole had said she was losing control! Or maybe, since she knew she was dying, it really was all a game to her.... Was she trying to tell him something?
Dylana clarified it by waving her hand in the general direction of the other two empties, which she could "see" only because there was metal in the labels. "Your turn."
Clark realized that she was deliberately steering him away from the more difficult subjects. Turning his attention to something easy. Playing a game. With him. For him.
It would be a poor response on his part to refuse the offer.
"Hm." He gaged the distance and angles, turned his back, and tossed one in each hand. One made its target, the other bounced off the edge. Dylana doubled up in laughter. "Bad news, Clark. The chapters on ballistics tomorrow are going to be extra tough." Her mismatched eyes twinkled. "If you want, I can get my son to tutor you. He's working on the mission to Pluto launch right now, but he'd be perfectly happy to take time out to meet you."
Clark started. "Your son? But I thought you didn't get along with...." His voice faltered, the last memory of the way his own parents (his, Clark's, not Kal-El's) had looked at him burning behind his fireproof eyes. "Your children...."
"Who told you that noise? They think I'm nuts, and I think they're taking themselves way too seriously, but we get along great when we all get together maybe once a year. When we're not yelling at each other and insulting each other's taste in food and pets and recreation and habitats. And when my ex-husbands remember to bring their own beer to the family reunions. And when Jeremy's cousins don't try to set new speed records with whatever hideous contraption they've built with parts stolen from Wright Patterson that week."
Family reunions? "Do they know about...."
"The mutation? Well, of course. I was sick for a month after going electric, it would have been pretty hard to cover up completely. Though John did pull me out of the hospital and into specialized rehab before I blew the wiring in the hospital, so they mostly don't know everything I can do. Killian does, because I had to move pretty fast to help get him and his buddies off the launch tower they blew up. And the family does have to know the medical consequences. But none of them much care that we turned out to have jumping genes."
She pointed at the last beer. "Sure you don't want it? Oh well, we can always make you a pina colada." She stuck her fingertip to the cap and lifted it with a magnetic twist. "We're still family, Kal-El, even if half of us are mutants -- you don't even want to imagine what Delores keeps in the petri dishes in the refrigerator -- no matter how little DNA we have in common. We watch each other's back's, even when we're watching out for each other. Hah, both of those lines could mean the opposite of what I meant. That's Anglic for you."
And then, she did something that shocked Clark almost as much as opening the vault in Lab 8 had done -- she repeated the phrase in pure, unambiguous Kryptonian. " 'The ones you care for the most can hurt you the most, the ones you care nothing for can only kill you.' "
She chuckled at his change in blood pressure, and went on as if nothing unusual had happened. "We fight like wildcats and wolverines as often as not. But anyone who tries to hurt any of us is in for, well," she tilted up the beer, "a surprise. And not just from me."
A "surprise." Well, Clark could empathize with that. His whole life had pretty much been an exercise in "surprises." Like being told that other people couldn't pick up ten times their own weight. Or finding out that there was a spaceship -- his -- in the storm cellar.
Like sitting around with a dying Nobel laureate who took time out to tell family stories and quote platitudes in a language from a dead planet. Like the idea that a family could be so ... diverse. And fight half the time. And still be a family. Still care.
What he'd meant to ask, though, was: do they know you're dying? If they do, why aren't they here? Why aren't they spending your last year with you? It would have surprised him greatly if someone as flamboyant as Dylana Cartak could keep the secret of her powers from her family, especially since the rest of her family sounded equally difficult to impress. But he had no intention of reopening the subject of how they felt about losing her.
"Well, then," Clark said carefully, "Yeah, I think I could use a tutor, if it's not an inconvenience. Wynter is a little -- insistent, about keeping up with the lessons."
Dylana laughed and threw her last beer bottle over her shoulder. Of course, her senses extended in a complete sphere, so it wasn't as if she weren't "looking."
"Isn't he, though. Wynt the twit had better learn to pace himself, or he'll burn out before he's old enough to vote. His metabolism is already overstressed." Dylana stood up. "Come on, Kal. Since you're going to be in detention tomorrow anyway, we may as well take a break and get some practical lessons in ballistics." She held out her hand, and Clark took it automatically, not knowing what else to do. "Let's go flying."
"What?" Clark froze. (Oh yeah, real superior race there.) "Oh, you mean, we can use the plane?"
"The plane!" Dylana scoffed. "You use that head of yours for anything except blushing, kid? How am I supposed to read the instruments? No, I mean FLYING."
Clark swallowed, stalling for time. Well, duh, of course Dr. Cartak would know what he could do. "I'm, I -- I don't know. Lake taught me to fly. A little. I'm not very good at it."
"Practice makes perfect." She gave his hand a short, impatient tug, knowing full well that she couldn't budge him, also knowing full well that his ingrained habit of deference to experience and authority made him putty under the weight of her reputation. Dylana grinned. She was not averse to cheating when it came to manipulating a Kryptonian. "Come on."
Clark followed.
Flying with Dylana, Clark thought in dazed excitement when the doctor dragged him up into the air, was nothing like learning to levitate under Lake's careful psycho-telekinetic touch. Being in contact with Dylana's wild talent, her body's almost furious argument with the magnetic and gravitational field of the planet, was like playing with lightning. Literally.
Passing through the cloud layer on their way to ten miles high, Dylana paused, stretching her arms and legs in sheer pleasure. Clark, hovering unsteadily beside her -- and Wynter was right, he wasn't very good at flying, and would have been even less balanced if Dylana hadn't been holding him in place with a magnetic field that had already ruined his zipper -- felt around uneasily. There was lightning in the clouds.
Dylana wasn't at all bothered by the electrical potentials. She was reaching out for it.
And the lightning answered.
The puny bolt she had annoyed Clark and Nicole with had, in fact, been an example of control. Here in the unfettered sky, ten million volts or more found a pathway and came together under her command. White fire exploded, cloud-strike to fingertip. Every hair on Kal-El's invulnerable body stood straight out in the burning bright. Dylana was laughing, head thrown back, as she took on the full power of nature in a contest of wills.
The image was seared onto Clark's invulnerable eyeballs for all time.
Dylana glowed, filled with power, a star unto herself. The roaring crackle exploding around her fed her, exalted her, worshiped her. The blazing force struck her and struck her and struck her, and she struck back, shouting, wielding the slashing electrons like a whip.
Clark cringed in his corner of the sky. Not from the lightning, which really couldn't hurt him all that much even at this power. But from the dying human woman transformed indisputably into a goddess, a being probably forever beyond his ability to comprehend.
When the time comes, she had said. This was what she had been talking about.
No, someone who had tasted the power of a goddess, who had matched herself against Zeus and Odin, would not be content with slow deterioration and death in bed.
Clark wondered -- if he had been born human, been altered by accident, would he have had the courage, or the need, to use the red stone? To let go of everything, and just do what he wanted with whatever life was left to him? Was that what Dylana was doing?
Or was she doing exactly the opposite? When the cloud's potential was finally exhausted, she turned to him, pure exultation and no questioning of her destiny. She reached for his hand, sending a tingle through him that was not just physical, and urged him higher.
Above the cloud layer, the sky was alive with stars. Clark forgot all about statistics.
The next day, Wynter put Haldeman and Hambly on his required-reading list. Clark began to suspect an alphabetical pattern. Van Vogt was in the proscribed section.
If he had to go through Heinlein (and he hadn't finished Asimov or even half of Arthur C. Clarke), to get there, he'd be old and gray before he reached the proscribed section anyway. But it was Hambly's wizards that awoke a secret delight in writing for Clark. He taxed the computer at full speed with a fan-fiction story, and immediately erased it, not having a clue what kind of monitors and safeguards Wynter had put on the backups. Wynter howled and interrupted John to show him Clark writing about himself in a world of working magic.
It gave them both hope that maybe Clark was going to recover some of his old self.
Clark was in the common room with a book that he wasn't much paying attention to (Statistics for Dummies) when someone flopped down beside him uninvited. He was startled, and a little annoyed, until he realized, a second later, that it was Dylana. Oh.
"There's the kid from outer space himself," she said wearily. "At least you're not watching that corporate-crud dis-info excuse for news."
"You -- Wynter said you were helping the search and rescue people." Clark pushed away his own instinctive resentful reaction at her words. "I ... well, thank you. I looked for you. I wish I could have helped."
"If you had seen me, I would have been sorely disappointed in myself." Dylana raised her head and her voice to a corner in the room. "You hear that, Wynter? I am not THAT bad at subtlety. I can hide in plain sight when there's a reason to." She sat back, obviously exhausted. "Any chips and dip around here? I could use a beer."
Clark made prosaic use of superspeed, careful to stay just under the sound barrier while inside, to raid the junk food rooms. Six bowls of dip, three kinds of chips, and eleven seconds later, he paused to ask, "What kind of beer?"
"Anything dark and not in a can. Anyone ever tell you that you're cute, kid?"
Clark blushed, grateful that Dylana couldn't see it. Then the slow smile she turned on him reminded him that she could "see" the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including heat.
He blushed harder. She laughed, and ruffled his hair. "Go splash cold water on your face, kid. I imagine every girl and half the guys tell you that all the time. Me, I could give a hang what you actually look like. I'm older than either of your mothers, and more of a pain in the ass than both of them put together." His blush paled, and she obviously caught it. "Sorry, that was rude, and nothing you deserved. Go take a time-out, kid. And don't forget my beer!" she added as Clark took her advice at something more than normal human speed.
Clark broke into the liquor locker without too much trouble. Locked doors in the complex were considered tests, not blockades. He paused in front of the refrigerated section, and put his head against the cool metal, still hearing that offhand remark about two mothers.
He had cost one her only natural child. He had left the other behind to die. He could never repay either of them for what they had sacrificed to let him live.
Nicole had told him that no one would abandon him. Nicole could throw him through a wall (and had) with one hand. She had no reason to lie to him. Nicole could feel physical pain on a very, very limited basis, even less than he could. But she could be hurt by threats to her friends just as easily as he could. She had responded by retreating to this emotionally secure place (when she wasn't out interfering with the whole world), where her only close friend was another, even more dangerous, superhuman. Nicole's parents, such as they were, had been the lab technicians who made her.
No, these people would never abandon him. But they had willingly abandoned a great deal else, to save their own sanity. They had chosen not to be part of the outside world, to instead only occasionally touch on it. To work in the service of all mankind -- but never to have any friends among them, never to be one of them.
Clark. Kal-El. Yes, I can be both. I have to be. I can be a farm kid, and from another planet, because I am. I don't have any choice in the matter. That's what I am.
He procured four different beers and relocked the locker without too much damage. No doubt Wynter would make him fix or pay for the one latch he'd accidentally snapped.
"Wow," Dylana commented tiredly when he set the beer selection before her. "Service with a smile." She selected one, and waved at the rest. "Siddown, kid, unless you have anything better to do. Want one?"
"Um, I'm underage." Pure reflex.
Dylana's startled laugh made him cringe. "Does alcohol even affect you?"
"I'm not sure. Probably not much." Dylana seemed to elicit candidness, even more than Nicole did. Well, Clark reflected, it wasn't every day he was invited to sit down with a Nobel laureate. "I, uh, don't much care for the taste, anyway."
Dylana nodded. "It's an acquired pleasure. You wait, though, you'll get old too, someday." She swallowed a large gulp of beer, and waved the bottle at him. "Go get something you like, then. Give you something to fiddle with while we talk."
"Um...." Clark dithered, trying to think of a way to get out of what he was pretty sure would be a much too intense conversation.
"Don't tell me you're so enthralled by Wynter's assignment in statistics that you can't spare a few minutes to talk." Her blind eyes and penetrating senses evaluated him. "Unless I make you uncomfortable?"
How had she known what his reading assignment had been? Was he talking to himself? "I -- actually, I didn't want to bother you. I thought you just might to, well, want to relax for awhile. After all you've been through." You took on the storm. For Lex. For me. At a cost to yourself that even I can't understand. You're killing yourself.
"I did not come in here to watch Moonie-owned talking-head propaganda," Dylana said sharply. She drank some more beer. "Nicole was right, you know," she sighed. "There are very few walls on this planet I can't "see" through. I knew where you were from half a state away." She brooded for a minute, very uncharacteristic of the worldly devil-may-care wielder of lightning. "I didn't come waltzing in while you were here by accident."
She picked up another beer, and flicked the cap off without touching it. "Lead doesn't block my altered senses the way it does yours. Even hard vacuum is a library to me. When the time comes, I'm going to fly as high as I can and see all there is to see." She drained the second beer. "Good choice of beers, kiddo. Thanks."
When the time comes...? "That sounds like a ... like ... um ... well...."
"Like what?" Dylana tilted her head at him. "Kid, you really need to work on your communications skills. There's a Toastmasters chapter here that meets on Saturday nights."
Clark took a slow, careful breath. (A Toastmasters chapter? He could only just barely imagine the practice speeches that Special agents would give.)
Dylana was waiting. "It sounds like, you, well, like you're planning on ... finality."
Dylana leaned back on the couch. She pointed her face at another beer, but didn't reach for it. "Child, I don't have more than another year left at best. Nicole didn't tell you? I thought it was common knowledge."
Nicole had given him the impression that Dylana herself didn't know. Clark stopped breathing. A sample from Lab 8 in his throat would not have hurt much more.
Dylana turned her face back to him. "Clark. Kal-El. The great new invention that I screwed up by sticking my head in the wrong place at the wrong time was a remote medical diagnostic instrument for astronauts. I'm a walking autodoc. You haven't gotten to Larry Niven yet? Never mind, you will." She lifted a finger at a beer bottle, and it rose and came towards her, drawn by the metal cap. She made the top fly across the room and caught the glass bottle as it fell, so fast he could barely follow. "I know exactly and to the cell how much of me is coming apart. The only thing I can't pinpoint to the minute is how much longer I'll be able to fly." She drained half the beer. "And dying slowly in bed just doesn't appeal to me."
Clark stared at the floor and swallowed. What, possibly, could you say to that? Sheer desperation allowed him to find a small version of his voice, blankly, a ridiculous but absolutely necessary change of subject. "Dr. Cartak ... why do you wear white boots?"
Dylana turned her face towards her legs. "They're white? Oh, for ... no wonder my kids think I'm insane. I just thought they were old lineman's work boots. You know, for the rubber sole, so I don't accidentally electrocute anybody. I'm going to fry Nicole for not telling me. I bet she's been laughing her plastic and metal head off."
"Well, I mean, there's no reason why you shouldn't wear white boots if you want to. Nicole's," his first impulse was to say "underwear," and he blushed at the thought, "Bodysuit isn't exactly subtle either, with all that red and black."
Dylana hooted. "Thanks for telling me, Kal. Gives me some ammunition for when she gets back." She sighed, almost contentedly, finished the third beer, and tossed the bottle over her shoulder. Startled, Clark started to catch it -- and saw it land dead center in the recycling receptacle. And Nicole had said she was losing control! Or maybe, since she knew she was dying, it really was all a game to her.... Was she trying to tell him something?
Dylana clarified it by waving her hand in the general direction of the other two empties, which she could "see" only because there was metal in the labels. "Your turn."
Clark realized that she was deliberately steering him away from the more difficult subjects. Turning his attention to something easy. Playing a game. With him. For him.
It would be a poor response on his part to refuse the offer.
"Hm." He gaged the distance and angles, turned his back, and tossed one in each hand. One made its target, the other bounced off the edge. Dylana doubled up in laughter. "Bad news, Clark. The chapters on ballistics tomorrow are going to be extra tough." Her mismatched eyes twinkled. "If you want, I can get my son to tutor you. He's working on the mission to Pluto launch right now, but he'd be perfectly happy to take time out to meet you."
Clark started. "Your son? But I thought you didn't get along with...." His voice faltered, the last memory of the way his own parents (his, Clark's, not Kal-El's) had looked at him burning behind his fireproof eyes. "Your children...."
"Who told you that noise? They think I'm nuts, and I think they're taking themselves way too seriously, but we get along great when we all get together maybe once a year. When we're not yelling at each other and insulting each other's taste in food and pets and recreation and habitats. And when my ex-husbands remember to bring their own beer to the family reunions. And when Jeremy's cousins don't try to set new speed records with whatever hideous contraption they've built with parts stolen from Wright Patterson that week."
Family reunions? "Do they know about...."
"The mutation? Well, of course. I was sick for a month after going electric, it would have been pretty hard to cover up completely. Though John did pull me out of the hospital and into specialized rehab before I blew the wiring in the hospital, so they mostly don't know everything I can do. Killian does, because I had to move pretty fast to help get him and his buddies off the launch tower they blew up. And the family does have to know the medical consequences. But none of them much care that we turned out to have jumping genes."
She pointed at the last beer. "Sure you don't want it? Oh well, we can always make you a pina colada." She stuck her fingertip to the cap and lifted it with a magnetic twist. "We're still family, Kal-El, even if half of us are mutants -- you don't even want to imagine what Delores keeps in the petri dishes in the refrigerator -- no matter how little DNA we have in common. We watch each other's back's, even when we're watching out for each other. Hah, both of those lines could mean the opposite of what I meant. That's Anglic for you."
And then, she did something that shocked Clark almost as much as opening the vault in Lab 8 had done -- she repeated the phrase in pure, unambiguous Kryptonian. " 'The ones you care for the most can hurt you the most, the ones you care nothing for can only kill you.' "
She chuckled at his change in blood pressure, and went on as if nothing unusual had happened. "We fight like wildcats and wolverines as often as not. But anyone who tries to hurt any of us is in for, well," she tilted up the beer, "a surprise. And not just from me."
A "surprise." Well, Clark could empathize with that. His whole life had pretty much been an exercise in "surprises." Like being told that other people couldn't pick up ten times their own weight. Or finding out that there was a spaceship -- his -- in the storm cellar.
Like sitting around with a dying Nobel laureate who took time out to tell family stories and quote platitudes in a language from a dead planet. Like the idea that a family could be so ... diverse. And fight half the time. And still be a family. Still care.
What he'd meant to ask, though, was: do they know you're dying? If they do, why aren't they here? Why aren't they spending your last year with you? It would have surprised him greatly if someone as flamboyant as Dylana Cartak could keep the secret of her powers from her family, especially since the rest of her family sounded equally difficult to impress. But he had no intention of reopening the subject of how they felt about losing her.
"Well, then," Clark said carefully, "Yeah, I think I could use a tutor, if it's not an inconvenience. Wynter is a little -- insistent, about keeping up with the lessons."
Dylana laughed and threw her last beer bottle over her shoulder. Of course, her senses extended in a complete sphere, so it wasn't as if she weren't "looking."
"Isn't he, though. Wynt the twit had better learn to pace himself, or he'll burn out before he's old enough to vote. His metabolism is already overstressed." Dylana stood up. "Come on, Kal. Since you're going to be in detention tomorrow anyway, we may as well take a break and get some practical lessons in ballistics." She held out her hand, and Clark took it automatically, not knowing what else to do. "Let's go flying."
"What?" Clark froze. (Oh yeah, real superior race there.) "Oh, you mean, we can use the plane?"
"The plane!" Dylana scoffed. "You use that head of yours for anything except blushing, kid? How am I supposed to read the instruments? No, I mean FLYING."
Clark swallowed, stalling for time. Well, duh, of course Dr. Cartak would know what he could do. "I'm, I -- I don't know. Lake taught me to fly. A little. I'm not very good at it."
"Practice makes perfect." She gave his hand a short, impatient tug, knowing full well that she couldn't budge him, also knowing full well that his ingrained habit of deference to experience and authority made him putty under the weight of her reputation. Dylana grinned. She was not averse to cheating when it came to manipulating a Kryptonian. "Come on."
Clark followed.
Flying with Dylana, Clark thought in dazed excitement when the doctor dragged him up into the air, was nothing like learning to levitate under Lake's careful psycho-telekinetic touch. Being in contact with Dylana's wild talent, her body's almost furious argument with the magnetic and gravitational field of the planet, was like playing with lightning. Literally.
Passing through the cloud layer on their way to ten miles high, Dylana paused, stretching her arms and legs in sheer pleasure. Clark, hovering unsteadily beside her -- and Wynter was right, he wasn't very good at flying, and would have been even less balanced if Dylana hadn't been holding him in place with a magnetic field that had already ruined his zipper -- felt around uneasily. There was lightning in the clouds.
Dylana wasn't at all bothered by the electrical potentials. She was reaching out for it.
And the lightning answered.
The puny bolt she had annoyed Clark and Nicole with had, in fact, been an example of control. Here in the unfettered sky, ten million volts or more found a pathway and came together under her command. White fire exploded, cloud-strike to fingertip. Every hair on Kal-El's invulnerable body stood straight out in the burning bright. Dylana was laughing, head thrown back, as she took on the full power of nature in a contest of wills.
The image was seared onto Clark's invulnerable eyeballs for all time.
Dylana glowed, filled with power, a star unto herself. The roaring crackle exploding around her fed her, exalted her, worshiped her. The blazing force struck her and struck her and struck her, and she struck back, shouting, wielding the slashing electrons like a whip.
Clark cringed in his corner of the sky. Not from the lightning, which really couldn't hurt him all that much even at this power. But from the dying human woman transformed indisputably into a goddess, a being probably forever beyond his ability to comprehend.
When the time comes, she had said. This was what she had been talking about.
No, someone who had tasted the power of a goddess, who had matched herself against Zeus and Odin, would not be content with slow deterioration and death in bed.
Clark wondered -- if he had been born human, been altered by accident, would he have had the courage, or the need, to use the red stone? To let go of everything, and just do what he wanted with whatever life was left to him? Was that what Dylana was doing?
Or was she doing exactly the opposite? When the cloud's potential was finally exhausted, she turned to him, pure exultation and no questioning of her destiny. She reached for his hand, sending a tingle through him that was not just physical, and urged him higher.
Above the cloud layer, the sky was alive with stars. Clark forgot all about statistics.
