"I was fourteen," Kara said as she sat on the couch.

Tyler's head was in her lap as her hand moved slowly across the fur covered noggin, his face a picture of contentment. "Nothing special. Good at math, but not great. I'd gotten to forth sanctum in moeido-janzu. It's a form of martial art. I was getting ready to enter a tournament. The name translates to The Forgotten Pit of Storms. I played something not too different from a clarinet in medial phrontistery orchestra."

Their return to Beth's apartment had slowed as familiar faces stopped to pet Tyler and give to him what they both thought was the requisite allotment of affection. Kara had fallen in love with him again, and judging by his behavior towards her the feeling was mutual. The mid afternoon late November light was obscured by clouds, the temperature still in the upper forties when they stepped back inside Beth's home. Tyler gave each of them their silent marching orders after drinking half of the water in his bowl before proceeding into the living room and up onto the couch. He looked at each of them in turn, wondering what was taking them so long to join him.

"Medial phrontistery?"

"Middle school. Krypton had been having quakes for as long as I'd been alive They seemed to get worse every year. But I was a teenager. We, me and all my friends, were just regular teenagers. Except for our level of technology just like kids from Earth. What would teenagers from Earth have on their minds at that age? What was important to you at that age?"

Beth smiled before deciding that the blond woman next to her deserved the truth.

"When I was that age I had already been training as an assassin for a year. My sister and I were kidnapped. Kate got away. I didn't."

The shock on Kara's face was evident. "Gods."

She and Kate had never been close. Kara hadn't even known Kate had a sister until she'd met Beth. And for obvious reasons she'd never asked Aric for any personal information about his new girlfriend.

"But the people who took me, who killed my mother, wanted both of us. When all they had was me they passed me on to another group. The Daughters of Lilith raised me. They trained me to be a living weapon —which I was, for almost twenty years, before Kate rescued me, and Aric fixed me."

Kara knew Aric's abilities. She had seen them for herself as he mended bone and flesh. He had done exactly that for the brown haired woman sitting next to her. But Kara didn't think that was what Beth meant when she used that word.

"Dissociative identity disorder. Also known as split personalities. It's how they break you down before rebuilding you into what they want.

Kara's mind was still racing. Kidnapped. Her mother killed. Broken down. Rebuilt as a weapon. Kara wasn't sure she could have endured all that and remained sane. And unlike Beth, Aric would have not been able to help her.

Kara's fingers continued to stroke black and tan fur. "So he fixed you."

Beth nodded. "Good as new. More or less. But to answer your first question, earthquakes were never on my list of interests."

"Me neither," Kara said. "We'd laugh about whenever the ground shook. But I could tell that some of them were worried."

"Were you worried?"

"A little. My father and my uncle were both scientists. When I would ask them about the quakes they would tell me not to worry. Tectonic plate movement caused by convection currents in the molten rock in Krypton's mantle, they would say. Which wasn't a lie, not really. It was our sun Rao that we actually should have been worrying about. It was in the process of going supernova. My father and my uncle tried to warn the government about it, but they wouldn't listen. He asked them to build space arks, and they almost arrested him for treason. He and my uncle had to build small ones in secret because the government made them illegal."

"They were going to charge him with treason for trying to save people?"

"They were in denial. And they were worried about mass panic. They should have been worried about how they were going to save four billion people. Which by then wasn't going to happen. Quite a few of the politicians were doing what my family was doing: building small arcs in private. I still remember some of them visiting our house. Secret discussions with my father and uncle. They'd believed the reports that Rao was expanding. That once it went supernova we had about ten minutes before the planet would be blanketed in lethal radiation. And that by the time the shock wave ripped the planet apart four months later there wouldn't be anything left alive to feel it."

"So your dad and uncle knew that your sun's days were numbered."

"They set up a warning system—tachyon-based, faster than light. It gave us maybe five minutes. Not much, but enough to try." Kara shrugged, though her voice was tight. "My dad kept us at home so we'd be close to the ark."

Kara finished her sentence with a shrug of her shoulders.

"And that's what you were dealing with at fourteen?"

Kara simply nodded her head.

"Jesus, and I thought my teenage years were traumatic," Beth said. She considered what she'd just heard. She'd been through a lot of shit, things she wouldn't wish on anyone. But at the end of the day she still had her planet, the one she'd been born on. As well as her family. Most of it.

"It never occurred to me that we wouldn't all fit in that little pod. I'd been staring at it for over a year. How stupid am I that I don't notice it isn't big enough for three people? We had five minutes warning, and we spent some of that arguing when my mom said she was staying, while I'm crying and screaming at them to get in. Then my dad activated the auto launch and the pod's canopy closes."

Beth sat in silence, watching Kara's shoulders shake as silent tears slipped down her cheeks. Tyler lifted his head, ears twitching at the sound, his big brown eyes filled with quiet concern. Kara wiped her face as dry as possible before continuing.

"After that it was all I could do to breath. It was a hard burn, made harder because he'd calculated for me and my mom. But it was just me. I blacked out at some point, but not for long. When I woke up the navcomp was green, the holo showing us on course directly away from Rao. When it figured we were clear of the local debris field it told medcomp to engage the stasis field and I was out like a light. Some time after that the HLD kicked it."

"HLD?" Beth asked.

"Hyper light drive. It was a small one, good for one burst at the beginning to speed you up, and one more at the end to slow you down. It was the only way to outrun the radiation from Rao that was coming at us, at me, at light speed. Kal and I talked about it a lot after we found each other. We did the math eventually. When I thought about it afterward it felt like an hour before the stasis kicked in, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes. When the drive engaged I was out of time, the radiation had almost reached me. If we'd argued for a few seconds more I would have gotten a lethal dose of radiation sitting helpless in that pod."

It was all way past Beth's ability to comprehend. She was left with on the most basic of questions. "Would the stasis field have saved you?"

"I don't know. Maybe I'd have woken up only to die from radiation poisoning later. Maybe the radiation from a yellow sun would have saved me no matter what. There's no way of knowing I guess."

"Your cousin's parents didn't try to leave with him?"

"He was the only one in the pod, that's all we know," Kara said before the tears returned. "Why didn't they just build bigger arks? Why didn't they build one really big one and take all of us together?"

"I am the last person to ask questions like that. Julia could probably give you an answer, but not me."

"Julia?"

"My roommate. She's the tech expert. My guess? Building illegal arks cannot be easy, or cheap. And you can't just leave it in your backyard and cover it with a tarp.

Beth knew what it was like to be ripped from your family. She and Kara had both been sent on journeys against their will.

That voyage had set each of them on paths that would eventually intersect in an apartment in Harlem.

Who would have ever guessed that Supergirl and I would have so much in common?

"I need to talk to you friend in the MI6," Laurel said as she read the notes on her pad.

"Why do you need to talk to Donna?" Renee asked.

"She's still with SIS, right?" Laurel asked rather than answer the question from her sometime boss.

"SIGINT Europe, yeah. You want to bug somebody's phone in Europe?"

"Not exactly. I want to find out who someone was talking to right before guys started showing up dead in the Chicago River."

"Why do I get the feeling that this is a whole lot larger than three dead men? This wouldn't have anything to do with a bunch of chatter about a shootout in the burbs, would it?"

"You heard about that?"

"Yes, I heard about it."

"You sure you want to know?"

"Why wouldn't I want to know?"

"Because three men who also knew ended up dead in the river. And someone tried to kill two of the cops who were investigating."

"So you're telling me that you know. Are you a target?"

"Kristen was. We're peeling away layers. The next one leads to the continent. We have a name. But we don't have anyone on the ground."

"Who is this we? It's not the Paragons. I'm pretty sure it's not the CPD or the State's Attorney. You working with another group I don't know about?"

"Nothing like that. More like a friendly collection of like minded individuals."

"Were some of these individuals recently protecting a CPD Captain?"

"No. Well, no-ish. The involvement of any hypothetical protection detail would have ended when they came up with the name of the person of interest."

"Meet me in my office if you want to talk about this, and your future with Paragon Security Services," Renee said before ending the call.

Laurel placed her phone on the couch next to her as Trish looked towards her but said nothing.

Looks like my dance card might have an opening coming up, Laurel thought.

"I need to tell you something, and I need you to not freak out," Kate said to her father as she sat on the grey leather sofa in his office.

Jacob Kane could recall several conversation that Kate had started with those exact words. The first that he could remember was when she'd told him that she was gay. The next one of any note was when she informed him that she was leaving the USMA and why. The biggest was when she informed him that Beth was alive.

There had been several since then, and as a result he thought that he was more than prepared for what would follow. On that point he was entirely mistaken.

"Beth's fine," Kate began. "Keep that in mind above everything else." It was then that she began to recount the events of the weekend. She could see the blood drain from her father's face when her tail reached the point were Beth was grievously injured, but he held his tongue and allowed her to finish in her own time. She ended her story with the same words she used to start it.

"She's fine. To look at her you would never know she'd been hurt at all."

Jacob Kane's shock at hearing that his daughter almost died was almost overwhelmed by his relief that she was healed and healthy, courtesy of the man she was dating. It took him a moment to be certain that he would not burst out crying.

"What about the man who shot her?" he asked eventually in a tone of voice that Kate knew all too well.

"He's dead. But the man they were protecting got away."

Jacob's face was a stone mask as he nodded slightly. "Leave that to me. I'll find him."

Kate reached over and placed her hand over his. Her voice was soft but firm. "You need to stay out of this. It goes way past him, and we don't know how far. But we're working on it. Your name can't be associated with it. Beth and I are already exposed. You need to stay safe."

Jacob's voice was also firm. "They tried to kill my daughters. I'm not staying out of this."

"They're not the first people who've tried to kill me or Beth. They won't be the last. Let us handle it."

Jacob had no intention of staying out of it. But it wasn't worth an argument now. "Fine. How about the others?"

"One was Babs. Two are CPD, the ones that Van Dyke tried to have killed. Two were associates of Laurel. They were hired to protect John Dorazio."

Her father had been taking mental notes while she was speaking. "I'll reach out. An NDA with a hefty tax free signing fee should cover it."

"I don't think it'll be necessary, but if you want I'll talk to Laurel who, by the way, also knows."

"Jesus, who doesn't know?"

"Fredo Giancona for one, Silence Fera for another. And I'd like to keep it that way."

While Kate and her father were finalizing their conversation, across town, Kristen Wolf was poring over pages of handwritten notes from Bill Van Dyke's safe. James Gordon, against department policy, examined the original copy.

"It's code, obviously; at least the identity of who's on the payroll. But the number of entries is constant, more or less," James said.

The earliest date in the black fake leather bound book dated back to Y2K, also known in some circles at the time as the end of the world. The fact that the world had not ended was at least partially responsible for the entries ex post facto. Over the course of the last twenty years five original entries were replaced by newer models.

"Twelve entries, monthly payments to each one. The highest being around 2K. The lowest around half that," Kristen said in summary of what they both were seeing.

"And we've taken..." James began before stopping for a mental count, "four of them off the board, and we know the names of two more. Half of his dirty cops are still in the wind, and Van Dyke is dead. What will they do, do you think?"

"They'll keep their heads down if they're smart. Except for the two that were the other half of the team sent after me. They're probably already gone. You should see if they actually showed up for their shifts."

"It's on my list. But it's these five entries that dropped out of the journal that have my attention. We know the month and year they were replaced. Figure they retired the month before that. I should be able to get a list of everyone who retired around then. You never know, might go somewhere."

"Speaking of going somewhere, how much longer do we wait before we go public with this? Crooked cops working for a mobster. We've been running an unofficial investigation up until now. We can't do this forever. At the very least we need a warrant to search Fredo's McMansion."

"We do that and everything else grinds to a halt. Are we ready to do that?"

"What's left for us to do? When we started we were just trying to identify three dead men. Then we wanted to figure out why they were killed. Then by whom. We've done all that. The rest of it, and I admit that there's quite a bit left over, is out of our jurisdiction. We don't have the resources to pursue this any further. We need to own up to our dirty laundry and let the federales take over."

"You're right, up to a point. We release a statement saying we've uncovered a ring of dirty cops. That they were working for Fredo, that Fredo escaped. That we're looking at Van Dyke's death as a homicide. But we have to consider how to handle the four men we have, and the other two we know about."

"How do you usually handle it when some vigilante type drops men in your lap?"

James Gordon sighed as he rubbed his temples. "Very carefully."