The nosebleeds and nausea had started three months ago, when she was alone in the summer home of Alexis Trechsenko, oil billionaire and her boyfriend of the past year. Alexis had been increasingly busy in Moscow, with his new political ambitions and the coming elections making it inconvenient for him to be seen with her. Lana had been banished to the mountains over the summer, a situation she did not mind very much as she was tired of the frantic pace of life she had endured for the past few years.

She remembered the diamond bright dawns in the mountains, with the peaks around the villa barely visible behind the veils of early-morning mist, and the silence that enveloped everything like a cocoon of peace. Now she thinks that silence was rather in the nature of a shroud, and the lack of noise ominous. Where were the birds, her mind frets, and the hum of bees and the crickets at night? Lana is a small town girl, and knows the sounds of nature and she agonizes in frustration now that she did not suspect the silence before. She cannot recall, despite flitting over countless mornings of golden sun and blue sky, a single awakening to birdsong, and now as she frantically looks up information on Chernobyl on the net, she is aware that if it is cancer she must battle with, she has even lesser time than she had thought previously.

As she emails the Chernobyl Interinform Agency in Kiev, she knows one thing with immense clarity. She needs a better Luthor.