5.

Alex was having a great dream. She was back at Paradise Valley, with Ray. They went to the Ice Cream Parlour down the street from Atron High School. It had started to rain on them, and Ray offered his umbrella.

Beep! Beep!

Suddenly cars were whizzing by them and somebody splashed them with a puddle water.

Beep! Beep!

"Alex get up! You're going to be late!"

Beep! Beep!

Dream-Alex looked around Paradise Valley's unusually busy main street in confusion. Late for what?

Beep-ep-ep-ep-ep-ep-ep-ep

Alex jumped up in her bed. She turned over to where her alarm clock should be. Instead of coming in contact with the small green clock, her hand came in contact with the cool surface of wall.

Random objects started to fall from where they were happily floating around in the dead space above boxes of other random objects.

"Shit!" She swore loudly trying to catch the breakable objects from hitting the ground. The less breakable objects were floated back to their happy little spots on the floor.

"I'm up!" She called loudly as she stood at the door. "Having a shower." She called again before going into the small upstairs bathroom.

Locking the door, Alex stood in front of the mirror and took the ponytail out of her hair.

Visualizing her target she felt her body turn to it's morphed form. In an ironic sense, she had missed the freedom that morphing had given her mind you freedom was a small price to pay for all of the times that she was almost caught coming back from being in puddle form. All the times that Annie had covered for her. Or Ray for that matter.

She began visualizing herself again, and was back to the way that she was. She was going to have a lot to work on again. Hiding from a whole new bunch of people. Her parents. Clark. Chloe.

Chloe seemed to be the hard part. She appeared to not take no for an answer. To look for the answer to any problem. Alex sighed. Back to the lying. Back to the hiding. At least now she knew what she was up against. She hoped.

Chloe sat in her car. She sighed. How long did it take one teenaged girl to throw on clothes, have breakfast and put shoes on? Then again, she did live with Lana Lang, queen of the pink, former head cheerleader, and all around 'princess of Smallville'. 'Just a not so subtle way of saying that she was a drama queen.' Chloe thought with a smile.

But she wasn't at home. She was at the old Potter house. Waiting for Alex Mack to leave her house, and explain herself. Because for once in her life Chloe Sullivan did not have an answer to the one question that kept her awake last night.

What is Alex Mack?

"What are you doing here?" Alex asked standing at Chloe's driver door. She watched the driver shrug.

"Figured that you wouldn't like to ride the stinky, smelly, loser-cruiser-bus." It was Alex's turn to shrug.

"Fair enough." She said into the window. She walked around the car, and took a seat.

Alex sat in silence. not wanting to open her mouth incase Chloe hadn't researched her. Alex couldn't risk it. It would just be bad if she expected Chloe to be so much like Annie that she had to look for the truth in what she was looking for. Had Chloe Sullivan done her homework?

They drove down the word until Alex got the answer to her question.

"So, Alex, would you like to tell me what exactly is GC-161?"

There it was. The answer to her question. The one question that she had been trying to answer since she was fourteen.

"I don't exactly know." Alex said quietly. "A chemical compound I suppose." Yes. That's it Alex. Play dumb.

"Don't lie. I hate it when people lie to me."

"I'm not lying to you, Chloe. I honestly don't know what it is."

Chloe's eyes remained on the road as she spoke. "Do you know what happened to David Watt's GC-161 load to the Paradise Valley Chemical Plant?"

How the hell does she get all of her information? And more importantly how does she pull all of it out of her head like that? The last person that Alex had seen do that was Annie, but even Annie had her charts. If Chloe was anything like Annie, she wouldn't stop until she found out the truth. Damn her.

"Yes." She hoped that Chloe couldn't hear her. She had though, and Alex inwardly scolded herself for answering honestly.

"Would you care to explain it to me."

"Stop the car." Alex said again.

"Why?"

"Just stop the car, put up the roof, and roll the windows up." Chloe pulled over, no questions asked, rolled up the roof and windows then she turned towards Alex with an expectant gaze.

"Well?"

"You have to promise not to tell a soul. Not to speak aloud what you hear from me to anyone."

"Alright, but I still don't see what this has to do with Watt's GC-161 load three and a half years ago." Chloe's eyebrow rose and she had an eager look on her face.

"When David was on his way to the plant, there was an accident."

"You aren't telling me anything I didn't already know."

"He almost hit me." Chloe gaped openly at her. "I was coated in the chemical. David thought that I was a boy. Lars Frederickson began to do illegal testing, and Vince Carter began to try and find me. One time he even stooped low enough to put a GC-161 scanner at the video store that I tried to work at."

"That's incredible. Not highly plausible but incredible. And it doesn't explain what I seen outside the school yesterday."

"Oh, that. Well you see, the chemicals reacted to my genetic make-up. This made me able to, well, do things. If that made any sense."

"Actually, it made more sense than you think it did. You see, the Wall of Weird, that wall in the Torch office," Alex nodded, "all of those people on there have come in contact with the meteors-"

"In the meteor shower."

"Yes. The meteors gave off radiation, which in their most popular case was that of Smallville's very own bald billionaire playboy."

"Who?"

"Lex Luthor." Chloe smiled widely.