Clark sat on the front steps outside the Humanities Department enjoying the fresh air. Metropolis University's main campus was a small, green oasis in the city. Students walked back and forth to classes shielded from gloomy skies by lots of trees. If the day had been sunnier, those between classes would be lounging on the patches of grass that dotted the landscape.

"You're really becoming a pest, kid, you know that?"

Clark glanced over his shoulder, not surprised to see Jenna there, scowling at him. She seemed to have an uncanny ability to know when he was around.

"I didn't want to disrupt your class, so I thought I'd wait out here."

The woman glanced at her watch. "It's four o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday. Aren't you supposed to be in school or something?"

Clark grinned sheepishly. "Or something." As she descended the stairs next to him he stood. "Look, I don't want a repeat of the other night, so if I promise I just want to talk to you will you promise you'll stand still?"

Iverson glanced at the other students milling around them, and shot Clark a warning look.

"I'm through with classes for the day: why don't we take a walk."

Clark followed her as she strode quickly away from the main quad. When they reached a more isolated area of campus she wheeled on him.

"Look, kid, if you want to survive you're going to have to learn to be a lot more careful what you say around people."

"I am careful. And I have a name. It's Clark Kent."

"Whatever." She rubbed her eyes tiredly. "This is still about Garner, isn't it? I'm sorry about what happened to your friend, I really am, but there's nothing I can do about it."

"The other night, you said the city isn't safe for 'people like us.' You meant people with special abilities, right? My friend, Ryan, knew things about people, things no one else knew. That's why Garner was interested in him."

"A lot of people are interested in that kind of thing."

"Yeah, but Garner did something to him, ran some kind of tests on him."

"That damaged him physically," Jenna interrupted. "Yes, I know."

Clark looked at her suspiciously. "How do you know?"

But Jenna's attention seemed focused elsewhere. "The telepaths never come through that kind of thing very well," she murmured, more to herself than to him. "Something about the way they're wired, maybe."

She looked at Clark in surprise, as if she'd momentarily forgotten he was there.

"Look, I don't know what Garner does to them, exactly, but I think he's trying to figure out how their powers work. 'Unlocking the potential of the human mind', isn't that what he called it in his lecture? Well, to do that he needs subjects. Your friend wasn't his first subject, either. He was the second, or possibly even the third."

Clark took a deep breath. "What happened to the others?"

"Like I said, there's only one other that I'm sure of." She looked at Clark steadily for a long moment. "Are you sure you want to know?"

He swallowed, but nodded.

"Yes, I do."

To his surprise she shrugged. "Fine. But don't say I didn't warn you. Come with me."

He followed her across campus to the parking lot, where she unlocked the door of an old Jeep.

"It doesn't look like much, but it runs," she told him as she opened the passenger door for him. "Get in."

Clark did as he was told, hoping they'd be back in time for him to reclaim his parents' truck before the campus shut down for the night. He sat meekly silent while Jenna steered the car off campus and onto the main highway that bifurcated Metropolis into its east and west halves. A light ran began to fall, and the beginnings of rush hour traffic kept their progress slow. Clark tried to use the time to surreptitiously study Iverson out of the corner of his eye.

"This is kind of a personal question."

"You want to know how long I've been the way I am."

Clark raised his eyebrows. "Are you a telepath, too?"

Jenna chuckled slightly, the first time he'd ever seen her amused. "No, but it's the obvious question, isn't it? The answer is I was born like this. You?"

"Me, too. I'm adopted, so I think I inherited it from my birth parents." Clark didn't bother explaining he just hadn't been born on this planet.

"My mother died when I was a baby, but my dad says she couldn't do anything.unusual. He can't, either, so I'm not sure where my abilities came from."

Clark nodded. As they crawled through Metropolis' legendary traffic there was something oddly comforting about being able to discuss his powers so casually, without having to stop every ten seconds and explain something.

"You say you're not a telepath, but you affected my friends' memories. I saw you do it, at the lecture."

"That's different. I can only affect short-term memory. Not yours, obviously."

"But how?"

"I just can. Don't ask me how it works, but it does."

"That would come in handy," Clark offered.

"I don't use it if I don't have to. I didn't want any evidence that I was arguing with Garner, in case he used it against me."

"Don't worry, the pictures are in safe hands."

"Guess I have to take your word on that, huh?"

"Guess so." Clark leaned forward slightly: they'd gotten through downtown, but he still wasn't sure where they were going. Finally, though the rain, he saw a sign on the side of the highway: Metropolis State Hospital, 5 miles. He looked over at Jenna.

"The State Hospital?"

She kept her eyes on the road. "Uh huh."

"That's the mental hospital, right?"

"Yes."

Clark sat back on the torn vinyl seat. The last he'd heard several of Smallville's meteor freaks had ended up here. He hoped he wasn't about to run into any of them. As they pulled off the highway he watched Jenna's expression closely, but she gave nothing away.

They drove silently through the open gates and pulled to a stop in front of the imposing Victorian building. Clark might have mistaken the hospital for a hotel or a school, if not for the bars on the windows.

Iverson stopped the car and glanced over at him.

"Well, are you coming, or aren't you?"

Clark nodded. He followed her out of the car, darting through the rain to the front doors. Stepping inside he found a cool, white-painted lobby. A nurse at the front desk glanced up them and smiled.

Jenna signed them both in on the visitors' log and handed him a pass.

"Here, clip that to your shirt." She glanced at the nurse. "How long do we have left for visiting hours?"

"About twenty minutes, dear."

"That should be fine. C'mon, Clark, there's someone I want you to meet."

They went up the main staircase. Clark had only seen mental hospitals in movies, so he was relieved to see neat, well-lit rooms down the hallways. The patients were dressed in white scrubs, as were the orderlies. Jenna led them to the third floor, where the main corridor ended in a locked gate. Clark swallowed nervously as an orderly unlocked the door and let them into the room.

There were only a handful of patients here, most staring off blankly into space. Iverson gently took hold of Clark's arm and led him to the chair closest to the windows. A young man sat slumped slightly to one side, his eyes focused intently on something outside.

Jenna knelt down next to the chair and motioned for Clark to come closer.

"Clark, this is my friend, Jack Williams. Jack, this is Clark Kent."

"Hi, Jack," Clark said awkwardly. Jack's eyes didn't move.

"He doesn't know we're here," Jenna explained quietly. "But you said you wanted to meet Dr. Garner's other patient."

Clark glanced over his shoulder: the orderly was on the other side of the room. Clark bent down closer to Jenna.

"What happened to him? Do you know?"

"Jack was a telepath, like your friend Ryan. Telekinetic and pyrokenetic, too."

"Wow." Clark looked respectfully at the other young man, wondering what it must have been like to have those kinds of abilities.

"Not anymore, though. He's catatonic." Jenna smiled warmly at the motionless form. "I met Jack when I first came to Metropolis U two years ago. He was an undergrad there. Jack grew up in some small town in Iowa; he'd never seen another person with abilities before. He knew what I was the first moment he saw me."

"So how did he end up here?"

Jenna looked to make sure the orderly wasn't listening before continuing.

"Jack always thought there must be something wrong with him, or he wouldn't be able to do what he could do. He quit going to classes, quit going out-I think he might have been having a nervous breakdown. Finally he checked himself into Metropolis General for an evaluation. Then he disappeared. The hospital told me he'd been transferred, but no one would tell me where."

Clark nodded. "But you think Dr. Garner had him."

"About eight months after that he reappeared here, the way you see him now. I was able to trace his movements as far as the Summerholt Institute. Garner denies everything, of course. The doctors here have done what they can, but." she trailed off.

"After Garner tested Ryan he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. That's what killed him." Clark looked again at Williams' empty eyes. "By trying to push his patients' abilities to their limits Garner causes physical damage to their bodies."

"And to their minds." Jenna laid a hand over one of her friend's, and looked seriously at Clark. "He must be looking for other people with special abilities so he can collect enough data. Now do you understand why he's so dangerous?"

"But there must be some way to stop him," Clark protested.

The woman stood. "How? Jack's in no shape to press charges, and, even if he could, we've got no proof of what happened. No one at the Institute will testify against him-they're all too well paid. Garner's as good as untouchable."

Clark allowed himself to think-just for a split-second-about forcing a confession out of Garner. But of course he couldn't do that without revealing his own powers.

"It's 5PM--visiting time's over, folks," the burly orderly said from across the room.

"All right," Jenna nodded. She patted Williams' hand one more time before carefully laying it back in his lap. "I'll come back and see you next week, ok?"

As she stood, Clark wondered awkwardly what he should say.

"It was nice to meet you, Jack. I hope you get better," he finally said.

The orderly let them out through the gate, locking it firmly behind them.

Neither of them saw Jack's eyes shift ever so slightly to the right, watching them leave.

********************************************

As he pulled out of the university parking lot Clark drove as carefully as he could. The rain was coming down hard now. He had to keep wiping the frost off the inside of the windshield with a corner of his shirt. It had taken them an hour to make it back across town--the city was dark now, and the headlights of Jenna' car had already disappeared around the corner.

He tried to keep his mind focused on his driving, but every time he thought about Jack Williams' lifeless, doll-like eyes he shuddered involuntarily. He wasn't sure which was worse: to develop a fatal tumor, or to be trapped inside a mind that no longer worked.

And it certainly seemed now that Jenna was right about one thing. There probably had been other patients at the Summerholt Institute, patients who were now dead, or carefully tucked away in some secure facility where no one would know what had happened to them. First thing in the morning he would call Chloe and Pete, see if the three of them couldn't look deeper into the Institute. If they could locate even one more former patient, they might have enough to convince Metropolis police to re-open their investigation.

In front of him a sedan suddenly turned right, and Clark had to brake hard to keep from hitting it. On the slick pavement the truck fishtailed and skidded. For a moment Clark though he was going to hit a lamppost, but finally the brakes grabbed and brought the truck to a stop.

For a moment Clark left the engine running and took a deep breath. Through the cloudy windshield he could see that the right front end of the truck was up on the curb. Judging from the angle, though, he had a nasty suspicion he'd popped a tire.

He grabbed his brown jacket, tugging it on and pulling it slightly over his head as he got out. He was only a few blocks from the university, not far from the coffee shop where he'd first encountered Jenna Iverson. The streets were empty.

Sure enough the tire was flat. Clark sighed. He was definitely not having a good day. Thankfully his dad always carried a full-size spare in the bed of the truck, along with a jack, which of course Clark didn't need.

"Hey, pal, need a hand?"

Clark glanced up: a man was coming down the block toward him.

"No, thanks, just a flat. I'll fix it in a jiff." Clark hoped the guy wasn't going to hang around and try to be helpful-then he'd have to get out the jack and go through a whole performance to make changing a tire look difficult.

The other man smiled.

"You sure were lucky there. You could have gotten hurt."

"Yeah, but 'all's well that end's well,' right?" Clark felt a prick of uneasiness in his spine, but tried to smile.

"If you say so, Mr. Kent."

"How did you.?"

Suddenly Clark was struck with a blinding pain. He staggered back into the street and fell backwards. The air was being crushed out of his lungs; hot stabs of pain pierced every muscle in his body as he laid there, raindrops running into his eyes and mouth as he writhed in agony.

There was only one thing in the world that could cause him that kind of pain. As Clark looked up, his vision nearly double, he saw the man standing near him holding a small metal case, small enough to fit in his coat pocket, where he'd obviously been hiding it.

Nestled neatly inside, and now gleaming menacingly in the light, was a green meteor rock.

Clark tried to pull himself backwards, away from the source of his suffering, but there wasn't enough strength left in his arms to do so. He was completely helpless.

The man now stood over him, and Clark looked up. The streetlight created a halo around the stranger's head.

"What do you want from me?"

Reaching into his pocket again, the other man only smiled slightly. He withdrew a narrow cylinder, which opened to reveal a hypodermic needle.

"Me? I don't want anything from you. I'm just doing my job."

Clark could see the contents of the hypodermic glowing green, the same green as the chunk of meteorite in his assailant's other hand.

He knew what was coming, but he still couldn't help but scream when the needle swung downwards and punched through his shirt into the muscle tissue just below his shoulder.

Clark had thought he'd already experienced the worst torture exposure to the rocks could inflict.

He'd been wrong.