The first time Lois ever thought she really might go mad, it had nothing to do with music.
It had to do with the profound changes the last twenty-four hours had imposed on her sense of reality; the dim chances of living through the next twenty-four hours; and not knowing whether Superman was dead already.
Jimmy was sprawled out asleep on the concrete floor, in the corner of their bare little factory room prison, under the fitful yellow light of the ceiling bulb. Howie and Jason – unharmed, but filthy - were curled up around him in even deeper sleep, flinging an arm or leg out over him from time to time. Lois, sitting upright facing the door, with the chill seeping into her back from the wall and little Dawn snoring against her side, was sleeping no better than she did at home.
Her eyes dropped to the tiny body of the nameless fourth child, lying alone on her back in the middle of the floor, cuffed to a reinforcement pole. For all the sense that makes. Her dirty blond hair was matted down over her face, her body very still, except where her chest strained with each gasping, too-big breath. She was white, sweating, and clearly ill.
The little girl had never spoken. Mostly, she slept.
And whoever she was, she wasn't David Marshall.
And then Lois looked back at Jimmy, who, asleep, his pale face still, looked so much like a child himself.
Oh, Jimmy, what were you thinking, coming back to the Planet at 9 P.M.? Could you possibly have picked up your compulsive workaholism from me?
She glanced at her watch. It was after eleven, twenty-six hours since they had been taken.
And somewhere Superman was, or wasn't, dead.
Or mad?
That last possibility had occurred to her a few hours ago, from the way the weapon had been used on humans. Why it was still such a horror to her, compared with all the other incarnate nightmares that had been hinted about here, she wasn't sure.
It's still a range weapon. He might detect it long before it's dangerous - there are things about him no one knows, no one understands. Your judgment isn't good just now. Stop speculating.
She looked down at the little pager on her waist. A better heroine, she reflected, would have reassembled the pager into a beacon some time last night. She herself had mainly been pressing the recall button for the last two hours since Clark's page came in.
'He says don't forget his sweet sixteen tonight.' Sweet-hearted macho fools, both of them, when no one knew if a disguise would help at all. But what else had she expected Superman to do? Listen to her?
How effectively could he disguise himself?
'Don't worry - it'll go better than mine. Love you both.' She let herself read over that line a couple of times, and then it autocleared. She sighed, feeling too vaguely embarrassed to hit the recall yet again. She leaned her head back against the hard wall.
There in the stillness and the silence, all the unprocessed images of the past four days began to surface, each one invoking another, somehow related by the strange rules of memory. Starting with the looks on Clark's face four nights ago, in her lamplight in the newsroom.
First quiet, grave, gentle, laying down all his fronts for a moment, as he put what they both knew into words. And then - when her control slipped, when she broke for a moment the promise she had made herself six months before, and began to ask him for his secret – she had seen fear in his eyes. And something else, there, that she almost recognized.
She had known at that moment that if she finished asking, he might tell her. And from the look in his eyes, so had he. Holding it back had been the hardest thing she'd ever done.
And even after these last few days, it's still in the top three.
And then, as he was leaving a few moments later, and turned back to face her when she called him, and clearly thought she couldn't see him in the shadows - the stricken desolation in his eyes, as if he had just opened them on an alien world.
And then the frames shifted to the next day, in three separate little kitchens in the suburbs of Metropolis, to that same look in the eyes of all three sets of parents she had met with. Looking out on a world that the bottom had dropped from, that had become unrecognizable. And for the first time in a lifetime of interviewing strangers who had lost everything, after that evening with Clark, she had some understanding herself of what it felt like.
But she had not presumed at that time to compare her grief with theirs. For the love of God, he's in Smallville, not captivity.
And she had had no intention of giving time to hers until the job was done. She had felt and known since that night, wordlessly, that she was not able to meet it head-on as Clark had. He might be built to withstand it, but she wasn't. The important thing was to keep moving. She would have a few days of shock before it sank in, and she would have to use them.
But even while that deep, involuntary chord had sounded in her as she spoke that next day with three sets of parents, she had not entirely lost her instincts. Every one of them was also lying.
Every one of them was hiding something – doubtless the same thing – with their cookie-cutter stories about ransom notes. Clearly their silence was part of the ransom.
But silence about what? And what did it have to do with posting speakers near their homes to drive them mad six months ago?
Wondering if there was anything they might have mentioned, involuntarily, when under the influence of the music, she had widened her search to the neighbors. That was a relief, to deal with only the normal brew of wariness, curiosity and helpfulness that uninvolved sources always gave her. But no one could recall the parents involved babbling about anything.
One, however, had mowed the same patch of lawn for six hours. Another had apparently moved all his furniture out into the street to clean the house.
Behaviors which were, to her dim memories of college psychology, more obsessive-compulsive than confessional. Briefly inspired, she worked her contacts in the three Metropolis hospitals for thoroughly illegal copies of the parents' brain imaging, wondering which neurologic centers had been stimulated in them.
All of it was missing. She was grudgingly impressed.
Clark, she would have liked to ask him, what do you make of this? Tie it together for me. Break out those analytic powers.
And he would have looked up at her from his desk and smiled ruefully, with his dark eyes warm behind the glint of the fluorescents on his coke-bottle glasses, and said, You're getting eaten alive, too? If I can come up with something, are you ready to try for a month without a smoke?
On her third of four trips, weary and angry from avoiding her own thoughts and hitting walls in her case, she had grown exasperated and called the bluff on Paul Grant, Howie's father. Divorced, in his fifties, working a dead-end repairs job at the University of Metropolis, his bare apartment had three photos of Howie to brighten it, and nothing else.
"You forgot the bit where you found some toy of his left out on the lawn, Mr. Grant," she had said acidly, and she remembered it now with hot shame. "How about a tricycle? For the Montanos it was a skateboard, and for the Summers it was a scooter. Why do all you seem to think these guys will do anything differently if you cover for them? Whose son will be next because you were silent?"
"Get out," he snarled. "You think having you judge me matters a rat's ass to me now?" Paunchy and broken-down as he was, his answering rage had given him such a blazing intensity even Lois had been taken aback. He had looked in that moment as if he might strike her.
Lois took an involuntary half-step back, even while habit noted coolly that her words had struck not just grief but guilt. And there was something else odd in his eyes that, against all reason, reminded her of Clark's expression, when she had begun to ask him for his secret.
With all those things churning in her head, she left to check in at the Planet.
Inching along in rush-hour traffic on the overpass with the sun in her eyes as it dropped over the skyline, she had seen Superman circling over the downtown in the distance. He was flying slowly, on patrol, the orange sunlight glowing through his cape; he overflew the business district and peeled off towards Shadyside.
He often made those highly visible flights around sunset and, for all she knew, continued through the night – he did to claim to sleep, but had conveniently omitted to mention how much. Lois had long suspected he did the evening flyovers largely for their deterrence value. And lately, of course, in the hopes of maybe this time finding some sign of the missing children.
Unless he was needed, she had never seen him land.
Watching him this time, painfully aware of her own isolation, she thought consciously for the first time of his. Always looking out over the city from the skies or a rooftop, watching the lives of the people below. Always handing someone beloved by someone else out of danger, and then back into the arms they belonged to.
Just how differently from humans was he made? What thoughts crossed behind those alien, holy eyes, which saw through everything and looked on nothing of their own?
It's dangerous for you, for people to think you would make a good hostage to control me.
Back at the Planet, Paul Grant and his sudden fury had kept cropping up in her mind. She had been drawn to investigate his life a bit, while she sent Jimmy hacking through Luthorcorp internal sites to look for anything he could find about brain imaging.
Paul Grant had been a structural engineer. A grave miscalculation on his part had killed three construction workers and ended his career. A year later, his affair had ended his marriage. He had been seeing Howie on weekends – every weekend - for five years.
You think having you judge me – after my colleagues and my wife have found me worthless – matters a rat's ass to me now?
Enough load of guilt for anyone. But what exactly he was guilty of now, what he knew and wasn't telling, was anyone's guess. And what it was about this desperate, self-loathing man that reminded her of wise, gentle Clark, she couldn't imagine.
Weary and troubled in the Planet newsroom in that momentary pause, feeling the danger that that thought of Clark would bring others crashing out from the woodwork, Lois had thought for a moment about calling her sister to check up on her.
But Lucy would see through her before five sentences had passed, and make her deal with things she didn't want to face yet. There was one grieving parent yet to be tried before she could afford losing momentum.
Lois told Jimmy to finish and go home already. She was surprised to find herself smiling a bit involuntarily, as she looked at the young photographer with his eager eyes, ready to make it an all-nighter for no particular reason. She headed out again.
She had braced herself, knocking on the door of Abraham Marshall's home in the suburbs, for more of the same. The grief evoking her own grief, the anger welling up from the uneasy conscience of one who betrays a city for the sake of one desperately loved child.
He opened the door and she introduced herself, and he said all the right things back with the right expressions.
But the sense of grim kinship she had shared with the others was utterly absent. She had felt it like a pressure drop before a storm. In his blue eyes, in his artfully simple expressions of loss, there was none of the wordless rawness she knew now from Clark's eyes, and the other parents' eyes, and her own heart.
So when he stepped back politely and said, "Please, Miss Lane, come in and have coffee," with his face full of solemn sincerity, she had hesitated on the threshold.
What's wrong, Lois? Clark would have said. He seems like a decent guy.
Oh, Clark. The guy is obviously full of not grief but…anticipation. The kind of man who would invite me in and then feed me whatever line he's supposed to feed reporters. I should tell him what he can do with his coffee. Shouldn't I?
She could almost hear him chuckle. You shouldn't bottle everything up all the time like that, Lois. It's not healthy. No, sweetheart, don't tell him anything. One, you may be in danger already. And two, if he knows you're suspicious, what will his friends do to the children to cover their tracks? You've had a long apprenticeship in keeping secrets now. Keep this one, so you can walk out of here and the kids can still have a chance.
Okay, Clark. We'll try it your way.
It had been a painful and ludicrous façade, keeping her voice even, jotting down his minor variations on the same old story, trying to radiate total absorption to the perp sitting across from her playing a victim.
And for the moment, taking his hand in both of hers at the end of the interview and mouthing some comforting cliché as she stepped back out, she had succeeded.
Oh, Clark, be careful out there. Don't trust too easily. You'll get eaten alive.
All the way back to the Planet she had been trembling with disgust. Abraham Marshall hadn't lost his son. Oh, little David Marshall was real enough – he lived across town in a one-bedroom with his mother, and went to kindergarten. But wherever he was, his father wasn't worried. The boy was no doubt hidden somewhere till the purpose had been served. Because his father was a moll.
And his mom might want to start supervising their visitations. If she's not in on it.
But a moll for who?
Back at the Planet, she found that Jimmy had done a reasonable job of exploring the Luthorcorp internal websites. For all the good it had done them, which was none.
Three grieving sets of parents who knew more than they said, and one man pretending to grieve.
Clark, how many I's in 'hypocrisy'?
She had sighed and sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, irritated with herself. Enough of pretending that two days ago everything had been perfect between them. The tension building to unsustainable levels over the past few months, compared with the hopeless sense of loss now; which was better?
And with the half-guilty feeling she had had as a child when she scratched mosquito bites, Lois had closed her eyes for a moment and let herself think about that tension, about the night two months before when she had finally admitted to herself that something had to give.
She and Clark had been coming back from proving to themselves, with flashlights in a locked office in a most illegal manner, that Mayor DeSanto was not in fact in the Micelli family's pocket.
They had been shaking off the loss of their pet theory all the trip back to his apartment, where his fish were apparently in urgent need of feeding. Their framework would require drastic revision. Possibly a public – no, said Lois, but maybe a private – apology. But by the time they were back at his building they had thought of three other leads to chase down in the morning, and her stomach was starting to grumble.
In the bright hallway Clark turned the knob and turned around again, backing the door open. As usual, he reached out and took hold of her elbow, lightly, and pulled her inside. "Come on. You can catch the last half of your Law and Order."
Lois checked her watch. Only 9:30. There was the whole second episode still to come - time enough for delivery. She followed him in and picked up his takeout menus off the side table, as he flipped on the living room light and went into the kitchen.
She had dropped down on the couch, driving the cigarette lighter in her inside skirt pocket into her hip. She winced and shifted, rubbing the offended spot. It was a terrible place to carry a lighter, but the ones in her jacket pocket had an uncanny way of disappearing whenever Clark was around. It had been eight days since her last cigarette, but she still felt naked without the lighter.
"Soda, or decaf?" he called out from behind the refrigerator door.
She looked back at him, his head buried in the fridge, silhouetted by the light inside it. "Regular, black, no sugar. Good try, though."
He poked his head up over the fridge door, wide-eyed, the inside light glinting off his glasses. "Lois, it's 9:30."
She had looked up at him across the living room and tried unsuccessfully not to smile, at that shocked farmboy look he could turn on like a faucet. God help her, if he ever figured out how hard it was to refuse him anything when he pulled it out.
"Go easy on me, Clark. One vice at a time." He laughed and dove back into the fridge. She looked back down over the takeout menus. "Chinese or pizza?"
"Either one. Kung pao chicken or pepperoni."
She laughed. Thirty meals at least, and his order had never varied. She wondered how many hundred times in his childhood he had made his poor parents read him the same bedtime story. "They make other dishes too, you know."
He poked his head up again and looked at her, with sincerity shining in his eyes. "Yes, why is that, do you think?"
Lois laughed. She made the phone order and flipped on his television, while he dug out the regular coffee and started brewing, having apparently decided to sacrifice the battle for the sake of the war.
But as she flipped down towards the network stations, she had to pass his special-order Monster Channel. And there, in all their campy glory, were the opening credits of Mothra.
Lois had closed her eyes in despair. She fought a brief but heroic internal battle, but finally decided she couldn't look in the mirror in the morning if she denied him the chance to see a giant caterpillar god rescue island natives from modern capitalism.
Clark dropped down beside her, making the couch springs squeal. She always forgot how big he was. He put up an honest fight for her Law and Order, but she saw the gleam in his eyes at the mention of Mothra and held firm.
But he was oddly silent for most of it. By thirty minutes in, as they dug into the delivery food, he apparently had other things on his mind.
"Lois," he said abruptly, raising his head, while Mothra was hatching, "why are you at the Planet? Instead of out marching on Congress about something?"
She looked over at him. Another oddly insightful Clark non sequitur. "Or maybe in a Greenpeace dinghy somewhere, standing between a whaling boat and a humpback? Is that what you mean?"
He had looked up from his food for just a moment and met her eyes, and they smiled.
"That's a long story," she said after a moment. "You don't want to wait till after Mothra saves the day?" She clapped her hand over her mouth. "I meant, till we find out what happens. Because it's not as if this were a forty-year-old movie."
"But Lois," he had said, lifting his eyebrows, "who knows what else could happen, before the movie ends?"
She dismissed the urge to ask if that meant he was going to charge off on another secret Clark mission halfway through.
He ran the volume partly down. Lois turned to face him and folded up cross-legged, sitting back against the armrest, and pondered for a moment.
He had put his finger on a train of thought she hadn't relived in years, and she was startled, for a moment, to remember how wholeheartedly she had once been headed in exactly that direction. When did that all become part of my past?
"So it was close," he had said softly, as if reading her mind.
She laughed a little and nodded. "Activism was the first way I planned to save the world. Although the environment was never the draw for me. It could have been land mines, or campaign reform."
"It was so hard to choose?"
She had smiled, thinking about the friendly cacophony of causes at the organizing meetings, like a rowdy family around a dinner table. That part had been good. "Back then, when I was trying to figure out what was worth fighting for, all these campus organizations were sub-divisions of the Activism Club."
He blinked.
"So there it was, this general, all-purpose club devoted to activism. Any activism. Just so long as you were an activist." She steepled her fingers, feeling the familiar touch of each of the mindsets she'd struggled through chase each other, like the seasons, across her mind. "When the glow of that wore off, I started to see…other things in the mix."
She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck. "I think for all of us, it was only partly a passion. It was also an identity and a community, and a lifestyle. With its own strain of self-righteousness." She paused, remembering slipping slowly into disappointment and then anger, finding human hypocrisy woven into the fiery rebel movements that were going to change the world. "You know… 'I'm more Vegan than you…'"
He chuckled. Then he glanced guiltily down at his kung pao chicken, and she laughed.
She rubbed her eyes and thought about the other realizations that had been so shattering at the time. Now she felt only a sort of affectionate regret. "But what's worse is this. When it's all for the cause, and the cause is also a club, people get…sloppy. They'll publicize facts from disreputable sources. Or…say, sell so much outrage about sweatshop conditions that the factories leave completely, and people are left jobless."
"Ah," he had said softly, with dawning understanding.
"The problem is that truth never…accommodates itself. Not even to passionate people with their hearts in the right place." Then she did hear the heat coming into her own voice, as the ghosts of her old battles were invoked. "It stays messy, and complex, and precise, and…dangerous. It won't be anyone's lapdog. And if you disrespect it, even with the best intentions, it's a devil's bargain."
Hearing herself waxing poetic, she felt silly the next moment and looked down at her hands. This stuff would make terrible copy.
But he had grown very still, and looked at her with a peculiar intensity. " 'Sir," he quoted softly, "my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side.' "
She looked up, surprised. "That's it. What, you're a closet Lincoln buff?"
He was visibly trying not to smile. "The only man from the entire nineteenth century you approve of? I read everything on him I could find."
She laughed and threw a fortune cookie at him; it hit his chest and shattered. He caught it on the rebound, and turned it over and over in his big hands.
"So, anyway," he prompted.
"Anyway, it frightened me." She sighed. "In part, sure, because I could see myself there too. Grabbing something and running with it, and ignoring the inconvenient details."
Wisely, Clark said nothing.
"So the only thing left that seemed…unambiguously right…was just that. Telling the truth. Laying things out for the court of the people, for them to pass judgment. So that's what I decided to go into." She looked up at him and shrugged. "What about you?"
Clark was silent for a moment, still back in her story. Then he leaned back against the couch backing, arms behind his head. "Well, you have to understand," he had said, with his perfect deadpan, "the whole Smallville area is beef country. There just wasn't much of a Vegan community."
She laughed helplessly. He looked over at her and his sweet smile flashed over his face for a moment. Then he looked more serious and was silent, staring at the mute pictures on the screen, clearly searching for words.
Abruptly he looked back at her. "You know evil in people when you see it, Lois. But…" his eyes twinkled a bit. "…you know it's never been that way for me. All I can see is Shadyside schools scraping by on Shadyside taxes, when under a third of the residents make enough to be taxed. First offenders who finish their sentences and get dumped outside the prison gates, with nowhere but their old…friends to go back to. Single mothers taking the subway home from their third jobs at 2 A.M., when there's one night guard on every four trains. So much of the setup for the final crime is the wrongness of the system."
It was the sort of thing he never would have trusted her with six months ago. She loved it. And then she raised one amused eyebrow, thinking of his other personal fixation, and Clark added quickly, laughing, "Lex Luthor not included."
Then he looked grave again. "So the crime looks sporadic, but it isn't. The…episode itself is usually the crack along the fault lines."
"Yes," she agreed softly. "So that's why you're in newspaper, specifically…"
"…where you can do that in-depth four-part series about the cause…" he agreed, nodding.
"…instead of thirty-second sound bites about the episodes," she finished.
He looked up at her in that peculiar, gentle but bottomless way she had first noticed in the newsroom four months before. As if half-doubtful of the wisdom of saying it, he added, "Even stopping the episode doesn't stop the next one."
It was the most direct reference to Superman's work he had made in a long time. And then he blinked again, as if it were somehow the sort of thing he still didn't say to her. Reflecting yet again that her closest friend remained one of the few people she couldn't read, Lois wondered for a moment if he thought the comment smacked of disloyalty. She wanted to say something to reassure him, something about all playing the hands they were dealt.
But then he dropped a forkful of chicken on his shirt. Rolling his eyes, he held up his hands to forestall her, protesting, "That one really was an accident." Lois laughed helplessly as he got up and went into the bedroom to change.
She sat back and ran up the volume again, to catch Mothra's first rampage against a cruise ship.
But when he stepped out, she sensed rather than saw the change in him, perhaps from the change in his footsteps. Oh, no.
She turned to look only to confirm it. She had seen it so many times already.
His hand fastening his last shirt button was effortlessly deft and quick. His eyes had undergone a sea change; all the self-deprecating humor was gone, and they were steady, determined, a thousand miles away.
Not to mention that the hard, precise musculature of his arms, never visible in his work suits, was disturbingly obvious in his shirtsleeves.
The first time she had seen this, seen him drop like empty wrappers the hundred little habits and mannerisms she had thought were him, she had been astonished almost to the point of fear. Until then, as now, he looked up at her, with a flash of genuine sorrow that came from even deeper, and said, "Lois, please forgive me. I have to go."
And for the hundredth time, she quashed every clamoring instinct in her body, feeling her toes touch the threshold of some mystery deep enough to drown in, and said, "Go on. Go, it's all right. Be careful."
After the door slammed behind him, she had run down the volume again and closed her eyes, and fought off the temptation to go hack into his pager log to see what had summoned him. She was surprised yet again at how uneasy these sudden disappearances made her feel.
Clark had wandered into her heart quietly, below her radar. She doubted he had any idea that he had slowly become the brightest spot in a life of hunting down shadows. It disturbed her to be aware of it herself.
And it made these brief reminders of the other life he had asked her to ignore affect her like feeling the ground beneath her wobble just slightly. It was hard to forget it just because it ended.
She was afraid she would never know his secret. And she was afraid that she would. That she would, by some mix of intention and instinct, fail in the one thing he had ever asked of her – to let it be.
And, she had realized, for the first time in her life, she wasn't sure she wanted to know.
There were already depths to him that were bottomless and disturbing enough. This mystery, that could make sweet-hearted Clark so altered he was almost intimidating, loomed all around her silent and just out of sight at times like this. Did she want to lift her eyes from her little world, her cardboard scene on a stage, and see for the first time the eyes of all the host of audience around her?
Of course she knew her work was suffering. But she couldn't pinpoint specific problems. Just as she had always been unable to pinpoint how her hunches came to her.
Something's going to give. One way or another, this won't last.
How it would break down, which way it would topple, she wasn't sure.
But I'd better start teaching him to manage on his own, she had thought at that moment. Because who knows how long we can do this? Who knows what else could happen, by the time the movie ends?
Back in the office, her replay of that night had been cut short by the phone ringing. Paul Grant and Abraham Marshall had flooded back into her mind, sparing her going down the rest of that road of memory. She shook her head and reached for the phone.
"Lois Lane, Daily Planet."
"Lois?" Lucy. Hearing her sister's voice, some little knot in her had unclenched.
But she was not going to cry during this conversation.
"Lu? How are you? How was the trees project?"
"We put sixty trees in twenty front yards in Shadyside. I like to think they'll block some drive-bys. Lois, what's wrong?"
She sighed. Lucy had her inside of four sentences this time. She was getting better.
"It's all dead ends here. There's no one left to bully. But I did find a moll."
There was a brief silence on the other end. She could almost see Lucy, her knockout beauty softened but not hidden by her nun's habit, lying on her back in her twin bed and curling the phone cord around her toe. She had long ago given up calling a cordless an unnecessary luxury and admitted that she just liked having the cord to play with.
"You have a very strange life, Lois."
"You understood me perfectly."
"I did at that. So what's wrong, with your friend?"
The hunches, Lois had known for a long time, were a family trait. She herself had them sporadically, about everyone around her; Lucy had them with terrifying regularity, about her mother and her sister alone. She sighed. "I was trying to avoid that one, Lu."
Another silence. "Lois, I can't believe you said that."
"What? You always think I'm avoiding dealing with something."
Lucy laughed. "I know, honey. I just can't believe you said it."
Lois had laughed a little, and then realized she didn't feel at all like laughing. Damn. Here it comes. She looked up, around the darkness of the empty newsroom around her, a ridiculous check when she knew it had been deserted for hours. And then she told Lucy everything.
Except, of course, for Clark's name, which she had kept out from the beginning in deference to his secret; and for the strange way he changed when he was serving it. But everything about their talk the night before, and the bleakness that had settled on her since.
And Lucy had sighed. "He's a Protestant, isn't he?"
Lois sputtered into her coffee. "Lu, I know I may have lost a bit of my edge, but I really don't think that's his dark secret."
Lucy laughed. "Oh, I like Protestants. They're just sheep from another fold. But I could never be one myself. I'm not strong enough. I need a chance for confession at least once a week. Often twice. And everyone who doesn't get that chance longs for it."
Lois, her mind full of kidnapped six-year-olds and Clark, and wolves smiling from their doorways and inviting her to coffee, was in no mood for being pulled into an hour of irrelevant theological intangibles. "Lu, you know I love you and I respect your beliefs, but I don't think everyone –"
"- And you know I respect your right to be a heathen and a reporter -" Lucy shot back.
"Agnostic," Lois corrected under her breath, for the hundredth futile time.
" - but I can only give you what I do have, Lois, not what I don't. Slow down a minute. I'm getting there."
A little abashed, Lois fell silent.
"Isn't it funny to you, that when all those victims had their speech centers stimulated, when they could have gone on about anything, every last one of them talked about their sins and secrets? God only knows if that was the perps' original intention at all, or just the thing the victims all turned out to want most."
Lois was silent for a long moment, remembering the victims making their desperate, half-coherent cataloguings of their lives, to anyone who would listen. "All right. I'm listening."
"We long for confession like we long for air. Our sins and our secrets and our wounds, we want to tell them and be heard. And for most people, most of the time, all the world has not one safe place to do it."
Lois had thought for just a moment of the half-dark of the confession box at her confirmation fifteen years ago, fingering her rosary beads. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. She tried to remember if she had felt safe there.
Finally she sighed. "You think I'm too judgmental to be that place for him. And he's afraid of how I'd react."
It was Lucy's turn to be silent for a long moment. "I don't think you are, in your heart, Lois. But I don't know him. Most people have six reasons for everything they do. Is it possible that he thinks that?"
"I don't know," she admitted. Lucy was only infallible when it came to family. "Truly, I don't think it's the main reason." It could…expose people. "I mean, I don't think it's something shameful, precisely. But the fear of how I'd take it…that could be…one of six reasons. Or not be."
And then, a little reckless, thinking of all those thresholds she had already crossed, she had finally added aloud, "But whether he is or not, I'm a little afraid of how I'd take it. I'm not even always sure I want to know." She sighed. "That doesn't make much sense, does it, Lu?"
There was a long silence on the other end. Then Lucy said, softly, "Sure it does, honey. I've thought for a long time that it's not just machismo you're afraid of, when it comes to men. There's something else there, too. Something to do with…if you'll forgive the term…intimacy."
That was too outrageously, unbearably much.
"I'm sorry, Lu," she threw back, "but remind me, what do you do for a living again?"
"I'm not threatened by intimacy," Lucy replied, unruffled, sounding faintly amused. "I sampled it extensively from ages sixteen to thirty. I was just unimpressed by it. At the end of the day, I find grace much more impressive. And you know that's not the kind of intimacy I'm talking about. Though clearly I don't know what I'm talking about, because your emotional life is so much more stable and satisfying than mine."
Though she deserved it richly, that stung. "You know," Lois said after a moment, trying to keep her tone light while she got her equilibrium back, "for a nun, you're mean. What no one realizes about us is that I'm the nice one."
There was another pause. "Yes, Lois, you are," Lucy replied softly. "Which is part of why I need to be in here, and you don't. And if you really wanted to spend the rest of your life the way you've spent it till now, being afraid to hear someone's real secrets and, God forbid, tell him yours, we wouldn't be having this conversation." She paused. "Unless you still don't want to have this conversation."
Lois was silent for a long moment, thinking. Then she remembered Lucy was waiting. "Lu, I think at this point we've already had this conversation."
And Lucy, recognizing infallibly the ebb and flow of her sister's thoughts, and sensing that her point had gone home, had said simply, "I love you, Lois. Be safe."
"Love you, too," she said softly, and hung up.
She had known at that moment that she would, in fact, have to deal with it.
But not right away. Lois focused her thoughts on the first and less threatening half of their conversation.
We long for confession like we long for air.
And then, for some reason, that made her think of Superman.
The ultimate sheep from another fold, Lucy would call him. Our sins and our secrets and our wounds, we want to tell them and be heard. Who did he have, to make his own confessions to? Clark?
She wished suddenly she could have told the Man of Steel something, about finally understanding him just a bit. Maybe apologized, for the self-centered focus on her own awkwardness that had kept her from being a real friend to him. Or stood with him in the silence of her balcony and said nothing, just let him land for a few moments between his long flights. Maybe he could bring her news about Clark.
But there was something else there, too, in Lucy's words. The look in Clark's eyes, the same look in Paul Grant's eyes. Lucy had named it - the mutual longing for confession.
And most of the time, all the world has not one safe place to do it.
Her heart pounding, she had dialed Paul Grant's number. And against all odds, he answered.
He must not have caller ID, she thought ruefully.
"Mr. Grant?" she said softly, as gently as she could. "This is Lois Lane, from the Planet."
Silence. But he didn't hang up.
"Mr. Grant," she started, and then realized how unprepared she had charged in. My sister thinks we all want to confess things, and I figured we hit it off pretty well, so… She took a deep breath. "I had no right to pass judgment on you this morning at all. I…I do that to people frequently. But…I've never had a son."
Silence. No click.
She picked up a little courage. "I have…ideas of justice that no one can live up to. This was the wrong time to subject you to them."
"Nothing wrong with the ideas," he said softly.
Barely registering, she heard herself saying, in a tone she had never used before, "But from what I've seen, as much as it hurts me to say this, I truly believe these…people will do as they please with the children regardless. Superman does flyovers looking for them all the time, you know." She heard a catch in his breath. "And anything you or I can do, to help him narrow the field, could help Howie…more than…anything else a father might do to protect his son."
Paul Grant was silent again.
Hold back, Lois, Clark would have said. It's in his hands now. We have to respect his decision. So she waited.
And then, like a rock shattering, he gave her a bitter, broken laugh, as if she had said the final absurdity in the black comedy of his life. "Miss Lane," he said finally, "Superman is the last person who can help Howie."
The hair prickled on the back of her neck. "What do you mean?"
And then he told her everything.
About the strange and random compulsions that had seized him when he heard the siren music. About realizing afterwards that he had been affected differently from everyone else. And about the day he learned that it had been intentional, but had gone awry – when Howie disappeared, and strangers came to his home and told him that since the speaker effects were too nonspecific to control him as they'd hoped, they were forced to use cruder means to get his help.
His help in building a very, very large speaker. With strange dimensions and ratios and durability requirements, that no speaker ought to need. To be built with hand tools alone.
And about coming back in to the room for his tools sometimes, in those marathon and nightmare weeks of being taken blindfolded back and forth to work on it, to find objects on the floor that were strange, round, charred and unrecognizable. "Things I hadn't left there."
About overhearing one of the men speaking with the mysterious dealer who provided the diaphragms, whose voice was somehow wrong; and entering the room to find only the other man inside, alone, looking shaken. Not normal.
Feeling again that deeply unsettling sense of the hugeness of the universe – if it held Superman, what other, less benevolent creatures could it hold? – Lois had typed some half-formed thought about other folds and sheep and wolves.
But Grant was still talking. And finally had he told her about the day he had opened a part of the speaker casing he had left closed, and found kryptonite nestled on the little shelf inside.
By then, he was weeping openly. Lois had been too horrified to do the same. What have you done, she wanted to say, but remembered the devastation in his eyes and couldn't.
The pieces came together, horribly, before her eyes. Lois typed her notes on the backup server as he spoke.
Dawn Summers' mother had a research office in the University of Metropolis building where a few fragments of kryptonite were kept for study. How she could have gotten them from there was a technicality. Summers – access.
Jason Montano's mother was a vocal performance master's student, and had perfect pitch. She had told Grant, on the rare occasions the parents bound by this dark secret spoke to each other, that they had needed her for tuning the diaphragm. Apparently electronic tuners worked no better near it than power tools. Montano – tuning.
But what was the point of planting a moll? Marshall - ?
"When were they going to activate it?"
"I don't know."
"What was its range?"
"I don't know."
"Does it just generate…a field?"
"They talked about aiming it. I don't know. I didn't design it. I didn't understand it."
No, you just built it.
You're being unreasonably hard on him, Lois, Clark would have said. What in all his life prepared him to be a hero?
And then too, too many things had happened at once.
Jimmy came pounding in through the back door, his eyes bright with no doubt a new idea about Luthorcorp internal sites. "Hey, Lois, guess…Oh, sorry, didn't see the phone."
And then the phone went dead.
And shapes moved in front of the frosted glass around the front door, and the locked latch began to jiggle.
And it had occurred to Lois that though she might have fooled Marshall about the state of her investigation that afternoon, an internal hit on Luthorcorp websites from her same office that same day might just have tipped him off. Jimmy tended to forget to cover his tracks when he got excited.
The pounding started.
She met Jimmy's eyes. "Run," she stage-whispered. And then she looked behind him to see a man's silhouette against the back door too.
And in those seconds before the wolves closed in, Lois had thought of the sheep from another fold. Alone against the sky in all his red and blue and his goodness and glory, and now a sitting duck. And she reached for her cell phone.
And now, coming abruptly out of her reverie and finding herself still dirty and cold and tired in their concrete room, with her cigarette lighter still shifting around to poke her, it occurred to her to wonder if she could have made their escape and then called to warn him.
Probably not.
Then the door opened, screeching on its track. Three – no, five – of the goons were there, with the hallway dark behind them.
Jimmy sat up, blinking.
Smart of them to bring five. Because if it was just four, of course, you and I and the kids could have taken them.
So low-budget.
She set Dawn aside and got up stiffly to stand between the men and the children, vaguely embarrassed to find she was trembling. Jimmy, gently untangling himself from the seas of arms and legs, did the same. The one in front motioned for them to come; she and Jimmy looked at each other, and shrugged.
One of the other men tossed something bright into Jimmy's hands; he caught it, instinctively, and held it up. It was a little key. He looked down at the nameless child.
"Bring her."
Jimmy's eyes met Lois' again. Then he knelt and unlocked the girl, and her cuffs clinked as they hit the floor. The other children were waking, rubbing their eyes, reaching nervously for her and Jimmy. But the little girl - were her gasping breaths getting slower, tiring? – never stirred. After a moment, Jimmy slid his arms under her and picked her up.
They followed them down the hall in silence, with the children clinging on to their clothes; two men led and three brought up the rear.
Why aren't they blindfolding us this time? Blindfolds were good. They meant you were expected to survive long enough to be a risk for telling what you saw.
They came out through a huge factory floor, where a few work lights flooded their small areas, little islands of light in the vast darkness. She could see stars through a few narrow windows, stories above their heads. The Shadyside factory district, maybe?
Does crime ever happen anywhere else? Clark, maybe our systemic solution is to burn the district down.
And then they stopped at a side door into a little workroom. A desk lamp lit a work desk piled with design papers, and Abraham Marshall sat there, rubbing his mustache, looking pensively into nowhere.
She wondered if it was still a good time to tell him what he could do with his coffee.
For the love of God, Lois, Clark would have said, can't you try to hold it in, till Superman gets there?
He shouldn't 'get here' at all, noble macho fool. But yes, I guess, I can try.
Marshall stood and walked around the desk to the doorway. As she had expected, in those brief steps it was clear he had shed like a snakeskin the character he'd assumed with her before, leaving nothing striking in its place. His blue eyes were very still.
"Miss Lane. And company."
"Mr. Marshall." Hold it in, like you promised. "Is this about bait? Do you really need all of us?" She paused and looked at him, looking for guilt, a hesitation, a handle. "Do you still need the children?"
Looking blandly back at her, utterly unfazed, he slid his hands into his pockets. She had the peculiar feeling that he was weary of bothering to gesture with them.
"Regrettably, no, yes, and yes. Though the suggestion is duly noted."
Even there, looking into his eyes, Lois found her thoughts going back to the lack of blindfolds. She had known for a long time, on some level, that villains were often careless with information when their plans hit the point they saw as unstoppable. Or when they see you as dead already.
She had long refused to consider that that might be why she got herself into those situations in the first place.
Since she hadn't made him angry yet, it was worth a shot.
"What are you really doing, Mr. Marshall?" Her voice was steady, almost to the end, and then she heard it tremble. She was mortified for a moment, and then it occurred to her that it might – why not? – be more effective that way.
He raised his eyebrows.
She kept her eyes on him, feeling like a man scrabbling for a foothold on a slick surface. "I know you want to kill him. I don't know what he ever did to you. Or…how you're going to…" Moved by some unconscious impulse – was she finding a foothold? – she let her voice trail off.
The kids, Jimmy, the goons behind her – all were still and silent.
And now for the kill, the one question that still mattered.
"How does it aim?"
He looked at her and raised his eyebrows just slightly. Another strange, minimalist gesture, as if none of the standard villain reactions were worth the effort.
"Miss Lane," he said mildly, "do you really live in a world where people answer those questions in situations like this?"
Damn, damn, damn. Too impatient, as always. Sorry, Clark, Superman, I'm sorry.
And then it came to her, like a gift, like a sister who knew what she needed when Lois herself only knew she was drowning.
All right, Lucy. Let's try it your way. Let's see if everyone really does long to tell their secrets when it's safe.
"I live in a world," she said levelly, letting the trembling feeling in her throat creep further into her voice, "where I want my last Confession to be coherent." Hold his eyes and keep your hands at your sides. Look like you see your death coming, and you're holding on to the last thing you have.
Which is basically accurate. God, I hate this.
"And I want to know, when you turn that thing on in a minute, to murder the greatest hope of our city and our world, if your machine will drive me mad before we all die in the wreckage."
He looked at her for a long moment, and she felt the familiar click of that mutual understanding, across the chasm of fury and fear and dark intention that stood between them, that the perp and the victim can share. He knew she knew there was no leaving this building.
Wait for it. Wait for it…
"The 'music' is only for targeting, Miss Lane," he said finally. "Only an object that resonates at the note's frequency receives the transmitted energy at that time."
Got it.
Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.
"We used, if you'll pardon the term, radioactive waste to power the human prototypes. And they were targeted – mostly - to the resonant frequencies of the human pineal gland and the speech centers. That was the music Metropolis heard. Though I admit we were hoping for more…directable, usable conversations. Account numbers, launch codes, et cetera. That was a side project that went poorly."
He barely raised his eyebrows again. Lois, processing the implications of his first sentence, was barely hearing him. "I gather you already know this one is powered with kryptonite. And, of course, it's targeted to him. And so unless your pineal gland has the same resonant frequency as Superman's skull – and you have an allergy to kryptonite – you'll be entirely sane when you die."
Oh, God. It doesn't matter if he comes in disguise, if no one even knows he's here. He's still a dead man. They just have to turn it on.
"In fact, it's been on for some hours, without any ill effects on us. Or you, I assume."
Or…leave it on.
"The diaphragms really are…a remarkable product," he said unexpectedly, as if it had just occurred to him. "It's not just energy they can transmit, as you'll see. And it's not just…physical, quantitative distances they can transmit over. Though, for what it's worth, I'm not at all glad that you'll have to see it."
That part made no sense; she was still back in the horror of the implications of his previous words. But he was still watching her, so she focused on being that girl who had spoken to him, who wanted more than anything not to die unforgiven by God. She nodded slowly and wondered if letting herself cry would be totally inappropriate.
Probably not. But she wouldn't give him the satisfaction.
He looked at his goons and inclined his head, and they marched them away again, to God knew what.
Oh, Superman, Clark, oh God, I'm so sorry.
And Lucy, too, I'm sorry, for spreading bad theology.
They came, finally, out of the dark hallways into another workroom. It was bigger than the last, lit with bare bulbs from above, with struts angling out from the walls, everything steel and concrete.
And there in black steel in its center, twenty feet long and ten feet high, subtly altered but unmistakable, was the same funnel-in-funnel shape she had last seen in miniature, turning over and over in Clark's big hands. Poor Paul Grant's final project, the speaker made for killing Superman.
On the floor around it, scattered carelessly, were maybe twenty of the charred and round and wrinkled things he had mentioned that he hadn't left there, some as big as her head. Lois was at a loss.
Jimmy muttered something behind her that sounded suspiciously like "eggs".
It occurred to her for the first time that here, in this room, all her investigative toolkit might be less relevant than his encyclopedic knowledge of monster movies.
And then the door closed behind them, with the goons all on the other side. The children seemed to relax. She and Jimmy, looking around the room and back at each other, didn't.
And then the speaker began to hum.
Without thinking, without talking, they pushed the children behind them and backed away. She looked over to one side. "Behind the strut," she said softly, pointing, and he nodded. They backed over there together, behind its dubious protection, pulling the children with them.
Howie, probably the brightest of them, started to cry softly, his little hand with its baby fat clutching Jimmy's finger till his knuckles turned white. And his guess at what happens now is as good as ours.
The note dropped, and rose, wailing, like an air siren for no war ever fought on earth. Lois wondered if she would be aware of going mad if it happened. Her palms on the strut were damp and she had to keep wiping them on her skirt. The lighter, as always, was digging into her thigh.
And then the pieces of the front of the speaker unfolded like a flower, and the diaphragm came forward from its center - pearly, gleaming, vibrating, reflecting a light that shone from no source in the room.
The wall seen through it on the other side was sickly altered, the straight lines curving wrongly, as if it were reflecting another room entirely – with some dark oblong object sitting in its center, where no object was.
Lois felt strangely nauseous, almost unsure which way was up, as she stared at it. She tore her eyes away and looked back at Jimmy. His face was bloodless; he looked as sick as she felt. She looked back.
The case is open, she noted peripherally. Could I reach the diaphragm?
And then the oblong thing that wasn't real, reflected in the diaphragm, began to take shape on the floor ten feet in front of them.
Marbled black and brown, cigar-shaped, wrinkled, twenty feet long, somehow organic, solidifying every moment, it was like nothing she had ever seen. How many I's in…Oh, God, never mind. Lois heard Jimmy make a choking sound behind her and suddenly wanted desperately not to hear what he thought it looked like.
It's not just energy they can transmit, as you'll see.
She closed her eyes for a moment and gripped the strut in her sweaty hands to shut out that dizzying diaphragm, to force her thoughts together. Whatever it was, the people who knew didn't want to be there when it finished. It would be fully present in the room in a moment. She only had a moment.
To do what?
The lighter was still digging into her thigh.
Lois opened her eyes.
"Jimmy," she got out in a low, steady tone, "keep hold of the kids." She pushed Dawn back against him, gently. She inched out from behind the strut, trying to keep the diaphragm in just the corner of her eye, to keep her balance.
And then she ran for it, around the wavering outlines of the thing on the floor, trying not to imagine what might snatch or snap at her ankle; headlong for the speaker casing.
She stopped short in front of the diaphragm and looked down at the floor, shielding her eyes. It was too bright, too big, too deep – it was the incarnation of that door to another world all around that she had been afraid would open on her for months.
Her sweaty fingers fumbled for the lighter; she almost couldn't get it out, almost dropped it; her thumb slipped on the wheel three times. And just as it occurred to her to wonder if a lighter could work where precision electronics wouldn't, the bright little flame sprang up on its tip.
She leaned forward, opened her eyes and took in that sick bottomless reflection of another world. She saw heights, spires, and things with wings and gleaming eyes.
And they saw her.
Was this the world of the dealer? Or a different one, among how many millions? It occurred to her, irrelevantly, to wonder on what terms the diaphragm had been provided. What coin do you pay to another world?
She swallowed. If You listen, if You notice, this is for Your sheep from another fold
And then she reached forward and set light to the diaphragm.
The flame licked up the side; Lois smelled the char before she saw the smoky blackness start to creep around the edges. She just saw an answering churn and turmoil, a chaos of movement, on the other side of the diaphragm, and it occurred to her to be grateful that no sound passed over.
Then, as the flame crept around and the edges blackened and curled, she stopped her staring and turned and ran back.
The alien object was still there in the room, solid, slick, and brooding. It had made it through. She pelted around it and back behind the strut. Then she realized she was sobbing. Then she realized Jimmy was, too.
The speaker casing was closing – all preprogrammed, she thought clinically, as she gasped and hiccuped for breath, as Jimmy clutched her shoulders, saying something incoherent.
And the door was opening behind them. It occurred to her that whatever their captors had expected, from the other side, must not have happened quite as planned.
And the diaphragm, still charring and smoking, would still be visible until the case closed. Still, maybe, salvageable.
Lois swung around and launched herself at the nearest form in the doorway; she hurtled into him, jarring her shoulder, and he stumbled back a step before catching himself on the doorframe. She kicked without aiming, and the side of her foot caught his shin a glancing blow, rattling her leg. He shoved her back with one arm, still reflexively, and she stumbled back three, four steps and barely caught herself, as she heard the speaker casing thud closed behind her.
She froze, her heart pounding, staring at him, no idea in the world what they would do next. Or if her distraction had barely, barely been enough.
Abraham Marshall came up behind him and waved him aside. Lois straightened up, her hair stringy with sweat, hanging down in her face.
She was gasping, her heart pounding in her ears, but maybe it was enough after all. There was no light of understanding in his eyes. And looking at him, for the first time she could remember, she felt no need at all to make a sharp remark.
She was dimly aware that little Jimmy, coming from the side, was trying to get between them; he had set down the girl, but the other three children clung to him like ducklings and he couldn't shake them off, couldn't get them to stay back.
While he was trying, Marshall closed the distance between Lois and himself in three unhurried steps, and smoothly raised his right arm, with a pistol in his hand, to her temple.
Jimmy froze.
Lois closed her eyes.
Clark, if I'd had the chance -
The muzzle struck her a dazzling blow on the jaw. She staggered to the side, the shock flashing through her skull, and then the next instant the pain registered – oh, God, please – and her legs buckled and she did fall.
Dimly, through the ringing in her ears, she heard Jimmy raging, "You son of a bitch! Are you ever brave enough to beat up girls without a gun?"
Not a bad approach, Jimmy, she thought distantly, trying to figure out which way was up. But I'm not sure these are the kind of guys who will respect him less for that. It might work better on the Mafia. She tried to get to her hands and knees, but gravity pulled her the wrong way, and she fell down and hit the floor at an unexpected angle. There was blood in her mouth.
On second thought, Jimmy, why don't you handle things for a while?
Nothing was working right; her ears kept ringing and her vision kept blacking in and out; someone dragged her to her feet, and they were moving. As if from far away, she heard a man's voice talking about how they had never expected it to come over still as a chrysalis; she tried to file that away to think of later, but it slipped away from her. And then some time later she was dropped down sitting again.
When they cuffed her to the pole back in their old room, that she felt.
Don't make them too tight again, she tried to say, but she couldn't hear herself over the ringing in her ears. But thanks for doing it in front this time. That's classy. Then she remembered it had been different guys the last time, a different Shadyside factory. Clark had been there.
She did hear the door slam, and there in the sitting position, her vision cleared a little as the blood went back to her head. She saw Jimmy's face, twisted up wrong, sobbing, tears running down his cheeks, and felt his hands on her shoulders.
"Lois! Lois, please, stay awake, Lois, please! Oh, god, Lois."
She blinked and swallowed the blood in her mouth, and then wished she hadn't.
"Can you see my fingers? How many fingers?"
She tried sincerely to focus, and sluggishly, it happened; his two fingers in front of her face swam around a bit and then grew clear. "Eleven, at least."
He laughed, but it was a sob, too. "Son of bitch, I'll kill him, Lois, I'll kill him, I swear."
Not in front of the kids, she meant to say, but she wasn't quite up to it.
Then her head did clear, and she remembered the last half hour and why she had done it.
"Oh, God, Jimmy. Get away from me. Get the kids and get in the corner."
He stared at her, uncomprehending.
"The next time they open the case," – her jaw felt thick, trying to talk – "they'll find the diaphragm. You can't be between me and the door when he comes back."
His face hardened. "I'll stand behind the door. I'll kill him."
The world still swimming in front of her, she focused on his eyes and tried to summon up the look that had always sent him scurrying before. "And who will watch over the children, then?"
He looked back at her, grave, heartbroken. She wasn't sure how long he had been a man and not a boy. She wouldn't mistake him again. But he had to listen.
"Damn it, Jimmy, don't you understand? It's going to be any minute now. He was almost ready to kill me then, over attacking his goon. Do you think he'll care who's in the way, when he figures it out?" Feeling cruel, she turned and pointed her finger at each of the children in turn, as they huddled against the wall, crying silently, staring at the two of them. "Bang. Bang. Bang."
Jimmy swallowed. He choked out, "God, Lois."
He got up, defeated, and went back to the corner and gathered the kids together. She noticed out of the corner of her eye that the nameless child was chained back up again, and she wondered irrelevantly yet again why she was cuffed.
Jimmy had moved not a moment too soon, she thought, nauseous, head spinning again, as heavy footsteps came up to the doors again. He made a strangled sound and started up, but she glared him down.
The door opened. She closed her eyes again and wondered if it would hurt much, and if Jimmy would think to cover the children's eyes.
Someone stumbled in, and the door squealed shut and locked behind him.
Lois opened her eyes, and there was Clark, straightening up slowly, leaning on the doorframe for support.
Her jaw was starting to swell, her mouth was full of blood, and her head was throbbing; but Lois reflected dimly, as their eyes met across the room, that she couldn't possibly look as bad as he did.