Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The gravel on the rooftop is cold through my sneakers. 

It crunches when I shift my weight, the sound too loud in the quiet—like it tattles on me. The city below breathes in soft, yellow squares of light. Metropolis is never truly dark, not even at this hour. The streets wear their lamps like necklaces; traffic lights blink like tired eyes. I watch a bus float through the avenue, a silver fish gliding along a black river. From up here, everything looks smaller, slower, easier. Down there, people have destinations. Up here, it’s just wind and sky and the long, lonely thought that has been staring me down for weeks.

The parapet is waist-high, zipper-cold beneath my fingers. I keep telling myself I’m only looking. That I came up here to get air. That I wanted to see if the stars looked different above the city. But I know why I climbed the twelve flights. I know why my heart hasn’t decided whether it’s terrified or relieved. If I were a good person, I wouldn’t have this thought. That’s what I tell myself. Good people don’t make their moms cry. Good people don’t skip math class because the number of problems on the worksheet makes their skin crawl. Good people don’t lie awake at 3 a.m. every night, rehearsing how their friends will talk about them after.

A siren moans somewhere far away, dissolving into the air. The wind catches strands of my hair and tugs them across my mouth. I taste city dust, the ghost of rain that hasn’t fallen yet. I wouldn’t call it a plan, not exactly, just a direction that feels inevitable, like the way water finds the lowest point.

“You picked a good view,” a voice says, warm and quiet, right behind me.

My body stutters. I turn, and for a second I’m sure my brain is making it up because there’s no way he could arrive without a single tremor of air or scrape of boot. But he’s there. He’s really there. Blue suit, the kind of blue that makes you understand the word primary. Red cape that doesn’t flap so much as breathe. The symbol on his chest is brighter than the moon.

“Hi,” he says. Just that. Like we’re two people at a bus stop.

My mouth forgets how to work. “I—” My voice squeaks. “Am I in trouble?”

“No.” He lifts his hands, palms open, like he’s greeting a stray cat. He doesn’t come closer. He doesn’t block the edge. He just… exists, a few paces away, his cape laid out in the dark like a folded flag. “I was nearby. I heard you come up the stairs. I thought maybe you wanted company.”

“Company,” I repeat, as if the word is a puzzle. “From Superman.”

He smiles, and it’s the kind of smile that makes your breath unwind. Not the glossy magazine cover grin. It’s small, a little sad, like he knows a joke he isn’t going to tell. “I’m Kal-El,” he says. “But Superman works.”

I laugh, if you can call the noise that. It’s more like my lungs tripping. “Everyone down there thinks you’re perfect.”

“Everyone down there,” he says, tipping his chin toward the street, “hasn’t seen me try to cook.”

I almost smile. The wind lifts and lowers the hem of his cape. He lets the silence stand between us without trying to fill it. It’s unfamiliar, silence that isn’t heavy with expectation. And when he breaks it, he does it gently.

“Would it be okay if I ask your name?” he says.

I think of the last time I introduced myself to someone and how it felt like pushing a stone up a hill. But the question lands soft, like a hand on my shoulder in the dark. “Sofia,” I say.

“Sofia,” he says, like he’s tasting it. “Nice to meet you.”

He waits. Not the kind of waiting where someone is leaning in, ready to pounce with advice, or where they tilt their head in that counselor way that makes me want to scream. He waits like someone who could wait as long as the sky does.

“I didn’t come up here to jump,” I lied, too fast.

He nods, and it’s a nod that says he heard me and he also heard all the words behind the words. “Okay.”

“I just—” The sentence frays. My fingers are numb against the stone. “I’m tired. It’s like… everything is a backpack full of wet clothes. Homework. Texts I don’t answer because I don’t know what to say. Mom working late and pretending not to be disappointed in my grades. The way it felt when Dad left. I keep thinking if I could put the backpack down, I could breathe.”

He looks over the edge with me. From this height, the city’s hum is a lullaby. “Sometimes,” he says, “I wish I could put the cape down.”

I blink. “You?”

“Me,” he says. “The good days are very good. The bad days are loud. I’ve stood where you’re standing and watched everything look small, and it didn’t make me feel bigger. It made me feel… unnecessary.”

“I thought you were, I don’t know, immune to this.” I gesture at my chest, the tangle of thoughts, the scuffed places where sunlight doesn’t reach. “You’re Superman.”

“I’m a person who tries very hard,” he says. “Sometimes trying is heavy.”

My eyes sting. “People tell me to think positive. Or to be grateful. I don’t know how to do those things on command. It’s like telling a fish to walk.”

“I can fly,” he says, “but there are days it takes everything I have to get out of bed. On those days, I don’t make myself lift the moon. I just… put my feet on the floor, and then I see what the next small step is. Sometimes the next small step is brushing my teeth. Sometimes it’s talking to someone. Sometimes it’s admitting I need help.”

“You?” The word scrapes out of me. “Ask for help?”

“Often,” he says. “I have friends who listen. I have people I trust who remind me the cape can be folded and set aside, and I’ll still be me. I’ve had nights where I stood on a roof and waited until the sky changed color. The difference wasn’t that I became strong overnight. It was that I realized the night moves, even when I don’t. And that I didn’t have to be alone on the roof.”

The breath I’ve been holding for weeks leaks out of me. “I keep thinking I’m broken because I can’t fix this myself.”

“If a building’s foundation cracks,” he says, glancing toward the street, “you don’t yell at the building to be grateful it has windows. You bring in engineers. You brace it. You make a plan. You let experts help. Bracing isn't a weakness. It’s how things stand long enough to heal.”

“Everyone needs me to be okay,” I say, and the admission feels like a thin wire snapping. “I’m so tired of pretending. But if I stop pretending, I’m a problem, and people are busy, and I—” The rest of the sentence collapses into silence.

“I don’t need you to be okay,” he says. “I need you to be here. We can work on okay together.” He nods toward the edge. “And I need you to step back with me, just a little. Not because I don’t trust you, but because I do. I trust that part of you that climbed twelve flights carrying something heavy and still wanted the air.”

My knees unlock before my mind decides. I take a small step back, then another. The stone is no longer at my waist but at my thighs. The wind feels less like a tug and more like a hand sliding out of mine without taking me with it.

“Thank you,” he says, like I’ve done him a favor. He doesn’t close the distance. He doesn’t touch me. He just breathes, and I hear it, the quiet of someone letting themselves be fully present. “Would you like to tell me what the heaviest part of the backpack is tonight?”

The words aren’t a dam breaking—they’re seepage, slow and steady. I talk about the math worksheet and the way the numbers sway like a crowd when I look at them too long. I talk about the messages from friends that start with are you okay? and end with never mind. I talk about the way the apartment echoes since Dad moved out, and how Mom hums pop songs in the kitchen to fill the quiet, and how sometimes I want to scream at her to stop humming and sometimes I want to climb inside the humming like a blanket fort and never come out. I say I don’t know how to do life without feeling like I’m always one step from disappointing everyone, including myself.

He asks a question now and then, not the detective kind, the human kind. He says “what does that feel like?” and “where do you feel it in your body?” and “when did you first notice it got this loud?” I try to answer. Sometimes my answer is “I don’t know.” He takes “I don’t know” like it counts.

When the tide of my words recedes, he nods toward the horizon. “Dawn’s a few hours away,” he says. “It won’t fix anything by itself. But it’s good at reminding us that nothing stays in one color forever.” He looks at me, and his eyes are the same kind of blue as the suit, but softer around the edges. “I want to be very clear about something, Sofia. If you step off this roof, I will go after you. Not because I don’t respect your pain. Because I love this city, and you are part of it. Because saving people is what I do when they’re in physical danger. And because there are other heroes I can bring in to help with the kind of danger that doesn’t show up with x-ray vision.”

I swallow hard. “Other heroes?”

“Ones without capes,” he says. “Doctors, counselors, people who know how to help untangle heavy backpacks and fix cracked foundations. People who can sit with you in the middle of the night and build a plan for the morning. They can help with the feelings that feel like they never end. They’re good at it. It’s literally their superpower.”

“They’ll think I’m dramatic,” I say, suddenly small again.

“They’ll think you’re brave,” he says, and he doesn’t flinch. “Because you are.”

A cloud drifts across the moon, dimming the city like someone turned the lamp one notch lower. My fingers ache from how hard I’ve been holding the edge. I let go. I turn my palms up to the sky, as if it might rain something I can catch. The thought arrives then, plain and fragile: maybe there’s a version of tomorrow where the backpack is lighter because I let someone else carry a strap.

“I don’t know if I can do a whole week,” I say, “or even tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to,” he says. “How about we do the next ten minutes?”

“What happens in the next ten minutes?” I ask.

“We find you a hero,” he says. “A real one who wears a name tag.”

I laugh, this time for real, and it surprises me. It’s not a pretty laugh. It’s a startled animal turning into something less afraid. “Okay,” I say, the word landing on my tongue like a penny dropped into a glass. “Okay.”

He doesn’t scoop me up dramatically. He asks, “May I carry you?” like he’s asking if he can borrow a book. I nod. He lifts me the way you lift a sleeping child—careful of their head, careful of their dignity—and holds me like I might vanish if he’s not steady. The city tilts and pours itself beneath us. The air is colder up here, thinner, but inside his arms it’s warmer than I expect. The rooftops flow past like dark ships. I close my eyes and keep them closed because looking down isn’t the point anymore.

We landed in a quiet corner of a quiet street. A light glows behind frosted glass: an urgent care that keeps its doors open late for people with broken bones and hearts. He sets me down and reaches for the handle, then hesitates and looks at me. “Do you want me to come in with you,” he asks, “or would you prefer I make the introduction and let you and the doctor talk alone?”

“Could you… stay until I’m in a room?” I ask, embarrassed by how small my voice is again.

“Of course,” he says, and the words are so simple I want to cry. He holds the door and warmth slides over us, the smell of antiseptic and coffee and a printer that needs new toner. A nurse at the desk looks up; her eyes widen for half a second and then soften like she’s seen this before, just not with a cape. Superman—Kal-El—speaks quietly, gives my name when I nod, says there’s no physical injury but I need to talk to someone right now. The nurse’s voice is a blanket. We fill a couple of forms. My hand shakes. Superman doesn’t fill them for me. He stands nearby, a human lighthouse.

A doctor with tired eyes and kind posture appears. He offers his hand, says his name. He asks if I want Superman in the room. I look at Superman. He inclines his head—your call—and I realize that for the first time in a long time, something is completely my choice and completely safe. “Just for the beginning,” I say.

We sat down. We talk. The doctor doesn’t hurry me. He doesn’t look at the clock. He tells me about options: a safety plan, a number I can call even at three in the morning, an appointment tomorrow with someone who will listen for more than ten minutes. He mentions words I’ve heard before—depression, anxiety—and they don’t sound like accusations when he says them. They sound like weather, and weather can be prepared for.

After a while, Superman stands. “Would you like me to wait?” he asks.

“You’ve already waited a lot,” I say, and the gratitude hurts in my chest because it’s so big. “I’ll be okay here.”

He nods, and when he reaches out, he stops an inch from my shoulder, asking without words. I step forward. I hug him. It’s like hugging a statue that decided to be warm for my sake. His cape smells faintly of wind and something clean, like the inside of a cloud. “Thank you,” I say into the blue fabric, and I mean the thank you for this moment and also for the way he stood on the roof with me and made the sky feel less like an ultimatum.

“Take good care of my city,” he says, and there’s a smile in it. “You’re part of it.”

He steps back. The door opens. The night reaches in and then he’s a red thread vanishing into black cloth. The doctor sits. The nurse brings me water. I hold the paper cup with both hands because I need to hold something. Somewhere above the building, a man who can fly is folding his cape around the next emergency. I don’t need to be there. I need to be here, holding the water, making a plan for the next ten minutes.

The cup is warm against my fingers. It feels like proof. The backpack isn’t gone. But there are new hands on the straps.

Chapter Text

The city wakes in layers.

Street sweepers humming like bees, coffee carts hissing steam, the low thunder of trains nudging into their morning cadence. Metropolis is a metronome everyone agrees to keep time with. I fall in step because it’s easier to look like you belong to a rhythm than to admit you set your own.

Morning light glances off the Planet’s newsroom windows—the big front panes Lois calls “our cathedral glass.” The bronze globe above the entrance catches a piece of sun and throws it back at the sky. I tug my coat tighter, not because I’m cold, but because I like the pretense of being a man susceptible to wind.

“Clark! CK! Slow down, buddy!” The voice ricochets between cabs and coffee cups, buoyant as a tossed tennis ball.

Jimmy Olsen barrels toward me with a messenger bag flapping against his hip and a camera strap slashing diagonally across his chest like a bandolier. His hair is in that perpetual argument with gravity it always loses. He’s grinning—the sort of grin you get from sleep deprivation and the feeling you might have caught a comet on film.

“Morning, Jimmy,” I say, and step aside for a delivery cyclist who probably didn’t even see me.

Jimmy falls into stride beside me in the revolving door, our reflections shattered into thirds, then whole again. “You see it?” he asks. “You see the post? It’s blowing up.”

“What post?” I ask, as if I didn’t already hear the whispers on the wind three blocks away. As if I didn’t carry the night like a warm coin in my pocket.

“The urgent care story!” he says, pushing the door into the bullpen. “About Superman.” He lowers his voice when we cross the threshold into the Planet, but it doesn’t change the energy fizzing around him. “Guy walked a girl into Parkline Urgent Care at like, what, one-thirty a.m.? Stayed in the waiting room, talked to the nurse, sat in one of those awful vinyl chairs, and didn’t leave until she was in with a doctor. Witnesses say he just… sat there. Like a normal guy. Well, a normal guy in primary colors.” Jimmy can’t contain the breathless laugh that bubbles up. “I’m telling you, CK, that’s the panel. That’s the moment. It’s got everything. Street-level compassion. It’s… it’s human.”

I nod. I choose a nod that says, I’m hearing this for the first time. The Planet smells like burned coffee and old paper, like deadlines rubbing shoulders with last-minute fact checks. Phones ring. Someone curses at a printer that is jammed in exactly the way it always jams. The newsroom has its own weather: gusts of rumor, the occasional lightning strike of truth, barometric pressure systems of editors’ moods. The globe in the lobby is a promise; the bullpen is a battlefield.

“It’s something,” I say. “I’m glad… I’m glad she went in.”

“Same.” Jimmy fumbles his phone out of his pocket and swipes up a video. He held it so close I could read the pixels. Grainy footage: the urgent care’s front door, the red and blue silhouette looming larger than life, then bending to make room for a young woman with a hood up and shaking hands. There’s a beat where she looks at him like you look into a deep ocean and suspect you might drown, and then she nods and they go inside.

“That frame,” Jimmy says, pinching and zooming until the girl’s face is a mosaic of squares. He stops himself, embarrassed. “I mean—not to exploit her, obviously. I’m not going to show her face. It’s just… the story. You know? We spend so much time on 3-alarm fires and Lex’s latest runway show disguised as a press conference that sometimes I forget—”

“That people live between the big events,” I finish quietly.

He looks at me, surprised. “Yeah. Exactly.” He laughs, rolling his shoulders like he can’t contain the feeling in his bones. “Man, if I could have been there with a long lens… superhero uses superpower of waiting room endurance. The headline writes itself.”

“Let’s… avoid ‘waiting room endurance’ in a headline,” I say, steering him toward the elevators with a gentle hand at his elbow. “And let’s not forget the doctor was the hero in that room.”

“Aw, c’mon, CK. Don’t give me nuance before nine A.M.”

“We could all stand to nuance before nine,” I say, and I can’t help it: I smile. Jimmy’s awe is a contagious thing; it makes even the fluorescent lights look warmer.

We step out on the newsroom floor and our metronome doubles. Copy editors click in staccato; sports argues with Business over who gets B1; the city desk, where Perry roosts like a hawk, has already stacked a small mountain range of coffee cups. I slide into my chair, a comfortable mess of notepads, press releases, and a sticky note that says “Garfield HS 10 A.M. confirm w/ Diaz—STAR Labs rep?” I reach for my tie clip and pause, the habit catching up with the man I’m supposed to be.

“Garfield High today?” Jimmy asks, reading the note upside down.

“Science fair,” I say. “S.T.A.R. Labs is sponsoring a citywide high school competition, trying to get kids interested in STEM before they’re old enough to decide science is boring.”

“Science is never boring,” Jimmy says solemnly. “It’s just under-photographed.”

“Then you should come,” I say. “Get pictures of homemade spectrometers and a robot that can stack cups while insulting its rivals.”

“You had me at insulting robot,” Jimmy says, already pulling up his calendar.

Before I can remind him we actually need approval to bill his time to Education, the door to the stairwell kicks open and in comes Lois Lane like a weather front that decided the room was too stale. She wears the look of someone who has been awake since headlines were rumors, and her hair is pulled back in a way that says it found the fight and the hair won. There’s a pen tucked behind her ear and a second one in her fist like a conductor’s baton. Lois doesn’t so much move through the newsroom as force it to accommodate her velocity.

“Morning, children,” she says without slowing. Papers drop on my desk—photocopies of something with a LexCorp masthead, key lines highlighted to within an inch of their lives. “Olsen, congrats on your viral vigilante hospital visit. Cute story. Feel-good. We’ll run it above the fold on C3 after we cut the city council budget piece down to a haiku. Clark, your byline on that science fair thing had better come with a sidebar explaining how, exactly, S.T.A.R. Labs gets the tax write-off for sponsoring geniuses while also paying interns in pizza.”

“That’s a lot for ‘good morning,’ Lois,” I say, but my face is already tilting toward her like a sunflower toward heat. She smells like coffee, ink, and the faint ozone of a woman who walks faster than electricity.

“Good morning, Smallville,” she says, and there it is—the note under the melody that she reserves for me. She leans an elbow on my desk, close enough that I can count the freckles at her collarbone. “Tell me you’re not going to turn in a puff piece. If S.T.A.R. Labs is laundering goodwill through teenagers, I want receipts.”

“Lois,” Jimmy says, forming his hands into a heart. “You’re the only person I know who can turn ‘kids build volcano’ into ‘follow the money.’”

“Kids don’t just build volcanoes anymore,” Lois says. “They build Magma-Adjacency Demonstration Platforms, courtesy of corporate sponsorship and a grant written in a font you can only download if you have an NDA.” She taps the LexCorp papers she’s dropped on my desk. “Meanwhile, our favorite bald futurist spent last night at a charity gala calling Superman ‘a symptom of civic complacency’ and a ‘biological unknown with unclear governance.’”

Jimmy whistles. “He actually said ‘biological unknown’ out loud?”

“Oh, he’s running a new playbook,” Lois says, squinting theatrically as if she can see Lex’s words drifting in front of her. “Less cape-shaming, more pseudo-academic concern. It’s subtle enough to sound reasonable to people who want to be lied to.”

“What’s the working lede?” I ask, because Lois Lane without a lede is like a shark without an ocean.

She drops her voice an inch lower and a degree warmer. “The richest man in Metropolis wants you to be afraid of the man who can’t be bought. Film at eleven.” She straightens, and there’s that flicker in her expression—the one that appears when she mentions him. Admiration, yes. But it’s a grown-up kind, the kind that sees flaws and still calls them worth wrestling with. “Honestly, I’d like him even without the cape. He shows up. That’s more than most.”

Jimmy does a little slow clap, then stops because Lois is looking at him like he has caught a disease called Earnestness. “Meanwhile,” he says, attempting deflection with a grin, “CK’s on kid-robots.”

“Don’t let the subject fool you,” Lois says, and she turns her attention fully on me. The room goes a half-shade quieter in my head, the way it always does when she decides to spend her focus like this. “The S.T.A.R. tie-in is interesting. They’ve been throwing money around like confetti. After what happened with that particle containment ‘incident’ last month, I think they’re trying to buy back the narrative. Get quotes from Principal Diaz. See if any parents mention strings attached. And for the love of all that is legible, make the kids sound like people, not a grant line item.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “I was planning on opening with a kid named Anya who built an air-quality monitor from salvaged parts and used it to map pollution along the Monorail’s north loop. She’s breathless about the dataset.”

Lois’s mouth tilts at one corner. “Breathless about data. Be still my heart.”

I feel heat in my ears that has nothing to do with sunlight. She catches it; of course she does. Lois collects tells like other people collect stamps. She leans in a fraction, and her voice drops to a private register. “You look good in that tie,” she says, like she’s recommending a book and daring me to disagree.

“Oh,” I say, brilliant bastion of verbal prowess that I am. “Thank you.” I try to look down at the tie as if it’s something I don’t know intimately, as if it’s not a prop in a play I’ve been acting since I learned to knot it in a mirror. My fingers tingle. I don’t fumble; I’ve practiced not fumbling more than anyone in this building.

She studies me the way she studies subjects she likes—fond, incisive. “Did you sleep last night?” she asks, and before I can assemble a denial, she adds, “Don’t lie to a reporter.”

I search for a steerable truth. “Enough,” I say. “You?”

“Sleep is a lifestyle I intend to try in my forties,” she says. “Right now I’m fuelled by spite and single-origin espresso.” She taps the LexCorp printout again. “I’ve got a quote from Luthor’s comms director on the books for eleven. I’m thinking we run his rhetorical slalom alongside Superman’s actions from last night and let readers draw the contrast with their own crayons.”

“Crayons?” Jimmy says. “I thought we were a serious newspaper.”

“We are,” Lois says. “But I’m not above kindergarten metaphors if it gets the job done.” She straightens and reaches for one of the pens on my desk, spins it between her fingers—her habits are their own little orbits. She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and glances up through her lashes—an unconscious gesture she’d deny if I called it what it is. “You’re coming to the staff thing tonight, right? O’Malley’s, after we put the paper to bed. Sports is promising to not talk about trades for at least twenty minutes.”

“I—” I start, and in the space where I might assemble an answer, she smiles at me that way, the one that tilts the room.

It’s flirtation like a paper cut: small, sharp, and you don’t feel it until it’s already there, and then you’re aware of the finger for the rest of the day. Lois isn’t coy. She’s… precise. She chooses moments. A compliment, a brush of a hand when we pass a file, a comment about a tie that becomes a map of possibilities. Every time, I feel like a man standing at the edge of a pool testing the water with his toes while also knowing he can swim better than anyone.

“I’ll try,” I say, and hate the hedge. “Garfield’s mid-afternoon; if I turn a copy in by six, I should make it.”

“Bring me something with teeth,” she says. “And, you know, feel free to smile at me in the meantime.” She winks so lightly you could miss it if you weren’t already looking for it—if you weren’t living half a life between the beats of her sentences. Then she’s gone, swept sideways to grab a call at her desk, headset on, voice smooth as a ribbon.

Jimmy watches her go, then looks at me with the empathy of someone who has watched tourists stand too close to a geyser. “You good, CK?”

“Fine,” I say. “We’re colleagues.”

“Uh-huh,” he says, camera already in his hands, like an involuntary muscle twitch. “And the sun is a desk lamp.”

I bump his shoulder with mine. “Get me a coffee?”

“On it.” He salutes, almost trips over a rolling chair, and disappears toward the break room.

I turn back to my notes. Garfield is circled in pencil. S.T.A.R. Labs underlined twice. I glance at the LexCorp sheet Lois dropped off. The quotes are highlighted: “Metropolis must ask who governs the ungovernable," “We can’t outsource civic courage to an alien intervention,” “An unknown variable is not a plan.” I can hear Lex’s voice between the lines: reasonable, measured, designed to flatter the listener into thinking they’ve thought of something themselves. He’s very good at doubt.

I rub a thumb across the page and think of the urgent care waiting room’s hum—fluorescent lights, soft-voiced intake nurses, the way the girl held the paper cup with both hands because she needed to hold something. Doubt is loud up close; it shrinks with company. The city hums through the windows and I let my hearing slip loose just a little. It catches on a hundred hooks: a cabbie humming show tunes off-key, the argument of pigeons on a cornice, Lois’s voice saying “Yes, I understand you can’t speak on the record, but let’s call this a guided tour of the truth,” and someone in the copy room muttering creative things about a toner cartridge. I pull it all back in. Clark is a man whose powers are patience and penmanship.

“Morning meeting in five!” Perry bellows from the city desk, and the room gathers itself like an accordion.

I’m about to stand when the air changes.

It’s subtle at first—like the city takes a collective breath. A tremble in the glass of my window. The hairs on my arms rise and the back of my neck hums. The world has its own low music and sometimes a note comes in that doesn’t belong, a dissonance that makes your bones pay attention.

I angle my head like I’m stretching a kink in my neck. Above us, through the cloud cover, something tears a new line into the morning. It’s tiny from here. To everyone else it’s nothing yet. To me it’s a fingernail scratching the sky. A disturbance, not an explosion—no sound of impact. Not yet. Trajectory southeast, velocity decelerating as it hits thicker air, thirty-seven degrees off vertical, mass… small. Too small to make the news unless it wants to. But it wants to. The heat signature spikes, then dips, then brightens like a lighthouse rotated toward us. Not debris from low orbit—composition different. Not an aircraft—wrong echo. A meteor. A small one. The kind that usually burns itself into mist and stories around a campfire.

This one isn’t burning out.

“Feel that?” Jimmy asks, frowning at his coffee.

“Earthquake?” someone says, half standing.

“Sit tight,” Perry says, and then the sky answers for all of us. A sound like a giant tearing canvas shrieks through the office acoustics as a bright wound opens in the clouds. Heads snap toward the windows. Chairs scrape. Conversations die mid-syllable. “What in Sam Hill,” Perry mutters, already in motion toward the glass.

A streak of light—no, not light, heat, a body—rips past the skyline, carving its line over the river and into the industrial district like a god took a chalk line to the map. Somewhere, a car alarm finds its voice three seconds early. The shockwave slaps the windows a heartbeat later, a palm against the pane. People gasp. Someone laughs, tight and panicked. Phones come out like a flock of startled birds.

“Is that—” Jimmy starts, face already and always turning toward a story. His camera is in his hand without him remembering to put it there.

“Industrial park,” Lois says flatly, at my shoulder like she teleported. She’s already dialing. “If that lands on a chemical storage yard, we’re going to have a very bad day. Perry!” she calls. “I’m heading down! Jimmy, with me!”

“I—” Jimmy looks at me, and in that look there’s a dozen stories we’ve told together, all of them ending with pictures that caught something true.

“Go,” I say. “I’ll… I’ll catch up. I have a source I should check with.” It’s not a lie, not exactly. I have a source in the sky.

The newsroom is moving, a tide pulled by a new moon. People run for the windows; someone turns on the TV mounted in the corner and lands on a weather update that rapidly becomes breaking news. From here, I can already map the landing site in my head: Warehouse Row, near the river. Steel, concrete, a little bit of forgotten city. Minimal foot traffic at this hour. Good. Good.

“Smallville?” Lois says, a hand flat on my desk, eyes scanning my face like a scanner searching for contraband. There’s that flicker again—the one that says she can sense lightning even if she can’t see it. “You with us?”

“Always,” I say. Then I let a grin flash, quick as a coin. “Try not to get scooped.”

“As if,” she says, but there’s warmth in it. “Don’t be late to O’Malley’s.”

She turns, pulls Jimmy in her wake, and the room buckles around their momentum. I stand, smooth my tie. It’s a nice tie. Lois likes it. I take a breath that looks like bracing and feels like letting go.

The elevator is too slow. The stairwell smells like old dust and ambition. I’m halfway down the first flight when I hear the next tremor echo through the building—no impact yet, just the city bristling at the intrusion, sirens waking like hounds. I loosen my tie as I push through the door onto the landing between floors. The knot slides like a held breath finally released. I shrug out of my coat, lay it neatly over the rail because I am the kind of man who hangs his coat even when the world is on fire. The glasses come off and the room sharpens; the city resolves into a symphony I can conduct with a thought.

I pause on the landing and for a second let the night from a few hours ago settle over my shoulders. A girl with shaking hands and a paper cup; a waiting room hum; a reminder that heroism is sometimes a chair you don’t abandon. The city is full of catastrophes we can see and catastrophes we can’t. Today’s is on the map. Last night was in my heart. They both count.

The newsroom above erupts in a chorus of “Did you see that?” and “Call me when you get eyes on it!” and “Perry, where do you want me?” I smile to myself because I know exactly where I need to be.

I tug the tie from my collar, roll my shoulders to let the costume of Clark Kent slip a half-inch. The world snaps into another focus entirely. Somewhere in the industrial district, a meteor writes a new sentence into the city’s morning. I step through the door to the stairwell, and the next thing I am is air.

Chapter Text

The shockwave is still dissolving over the river when I break the cloud deck. 

The city rolls out beneath me in grids of gray and red, and the smoke from the industrial district threads the morning like a warning in a letter. I accelerate, air shouldering aside, the low hum of reentry heat licking close to my skin. The wind tastes like iron before I even see the mill.

Then it’s there: Warehouse roofs aligned like teeth, conveyors glinting, towers and pipes stitched together in a geometry of heat and human intention. The meteor punched a hole through the high ridge of the melt shop, crumpling corrugated metal, slamming into a catwalk, and finally marrying the concrete floor hard enough to crack it like old ice. A flower of flame has opened where the impact kissed spatter from a ladle. Molten metal is pouring, lazy and lethal, over the lip of a slag pit, streams of orange-white that hiss when they touch anything with less conviction than themselves.

I take it in all at once—the way a doctor scans a room and knows who is bleeding, who is breathing, who has a chance. Sound first: the metallic shriek of a crane breaking, the panicked staccato of boots, someone coughing wetly, the different pitches of fire as it eats—grease, paint, wiring. Then the heartbeats, dozens of them retreating toward daylight, and five that are still inside where the heat paints everything a color it shouldn’t be.

“Back!” someone yells, and there’s the quake of a door being forced. The evacuation is underway; the living line moves.

I sink through the torn roof without touching it, heat seaming around me, and let the world shift into transparency. Bone and muscle ghost through machinery. The first trapped heartbeat is beneath a collapsed hoist beam near the east wall, pinned at the shin, pulse fast but strong, lungs fighting the air. Two more are holed up behind a tangle of conveyors on the mezzanine, one limping, one helping. The fourth is on the floor by the arc furnace controls, half-conscious, cradling his arm with a kind of stubborn quiet that reminds me of farmers after a storm—counting losses, too busy to scream. The fifth is behind the ladle car, cut off by a ribbon of liquid metal that has found a new path off the lip and is trying very hard to make it permanent.

“Got you,” I say, to no one and to all of them.

I angle toward the beam first. Heat slaps like a hand that doesn’t know its strength. The worker—middle-aged, steel dust stippling his hair, eyes too wide—stares up at me, uncomprehending, as I kneel. I press one palm to the beam, one to the floor. The steel wants to keep its shape; I ask it not to. I strain gently. It remembers it’s only metal. The beam lifts. His breath ricochets into a sob. He tries to pull his leg out and fails—the boot has committed to the situation. I split the leather with a fingernail and peel it back like an orange. His foot comes free. The skin is already ballooning in angry colors.

“Can you stand?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he lies, and pitches. I catch him and set him down beyond the spill’s reach. “Go,” he says, voice torn into strips. “Tony—”

“I’m on him,” I say, and I am.

The mezzanine is a crawled-up artery of platforms and railings. Flames snap along a grease-slick cable tray like a fuse. I blow—a controlled exhale that drops the air’s temperature past cooperative and into winter. Frost spiders from my breath along the tray and into the fire, whose protest is brief and ends in steam. The two men on the mezzanine look at me like I have come out of a television. One is favoring his left leg, his friend’s arm looped around his waist in the universal brace of the stubbornly loyal.

“Stairs are shot,” the helper says, pointing to where the impact twisted a run of metal into abstract art.

“Hang on,” I say. I slide an arm under each man, light as if I’m asking them to share a secret. “Close your eyes if you don’t like heights.” We drop and land softly on the floor, where I set them near a rolling door that is doing its best impression of an exit. Outside, sirens—plural now—are arriving, high and bright and urgent. I hear the fire department pulling lines, the short bark of orders, the staccato of hydrants coming alive.

The man by the arc furnace controls is next. He’s trying to hold still and breathe in the same movement; both tasks resent each other. The panel behind him pops and hisses, a punctured dragon. There’s a smell like burned pennies. I kneel, slide one arm around his back, and cradle the fractured arm into a sling with the other hand. “You’re going to be okay,” I tell him. He nods once, like a man agreeing to a thing he already knew he couldn’t stop. I carry him out into the light and into the chorus of red and white vehicles. EMTs move toward me without staring. Metropolis learns fast.

“One more inside,” I tell them, and I’m gone before gratitude or questions can pin me.

The last man is behind the ladle car. The river of metal in front of him is a foot wide and an inch deep, incandescent and alive, the kind of thing that turns curiosity into injury in less than a second. He’s crouched, shirt over his nose, eyes streaming, trapped not by distance but by impossibility. He looks up when I step into the corridor between two rolling mills, and the relief in his face is a kind of prayer.

“Don’t move,” I say. I draw in a breath that steals heat from the room. The air knifes through the channel; the liquid stream shudders, skins over, loses its argument with the phase diagram, and becomes a dull, brittle ribbon. I snap it with two fingers and lift the cooled section away, toss it against a dead wall where it lands and rings like a bell. The worker stumbles forward; I catch him when his lungs decide to cough all the fire out at once.

“You okay?” I ask.

He nods through tears. “I owe you a beer,” he manages.

“You can buy it for the crew outside,” I say, and guide him into the light.

The immediate rescues are done. The mill remains a map of small disasters. Fire licks up a paint line above a control booth. I flip my breath cold again and drag the temperature down until the flames starve. A freshening burst from a ruptured oxygen line turns sparks into appetite near the south wall; I narrow my eyes and shave heat from a wrecked girder until it is dull black and no longer interesting to fire. A slumped I-beam traps a rolling door halfway; I slice through it with a glance, heat vision paying out in a clean red seam, the smell of hot oxide baked onto my tongue. The door thunders down and the firefighters outside cheer—one short syllable that sounds like relief given a voice.

I check once more with X-ray vision: the human shapes are all outside or moving that way under their own power. The building’s skeleton complains where the meteor punched it, but the big failures have not begun a cascade. It will hold long enough for the professionals to map foam and water onto my first draft.

Outside the main bay, boots thunder. “Metropolis Fire!” a voice calls. “Anybody inside?”

“Coming out!” I shout back. “The main bay is clear of personnel.” I step through the rolling door into daylight, into the controlled chaos of a response doing its job. Engine companies lay lines; a ladder truck angles toward the wound in the roof; helmets glint; radios quote their overlapping scriptures. The men and women who run toward heat as a profession barely look at me except to gauge whether I am a hazard to their plan.

“You got accountability on everybody?” a captain asks me, visor up, eyes narrowed against the brightness.

“Five removed,” I say. “The rest evacuated. There are hot spots in the northeast quadrant; an oxygen line ruptured near the south wall, but I cooled nearby fuel sources. Structural integrity is compromised around the impact hole; I’d keep weight off that mezzanine.”

He nods, already translating my words into his language. “Copy that. We’ll take it from here.”

I nod back. It’s always a relief to hand a scene to people who know how to keep the world from getting smaller.

“Hey!” someone calls from the ladder truck, a firefighter with soot already tracing the sweat lines across his cheek. “You good in there? Anything else cooking?”

“One more thing,” I say, and step back inside.

The crater is a crumpled circle in the floor, a shallow bowl of cracked concrete and fused slag. At its center sits the meteor, the size of an exercise ball, its surface pitted and glassy. It still whispers heat into the air. Steam and smoke smear the light above it. Up close, I can see that the stone’s story is a short one: It came in hot, it loved friction and oxygen and lost to both, and now it is a husk with a secret voice inside.

I circle it once and let my senses lean in. The spectra coming off the surface say ordinary chondrite with a few impurities. The mass says otherwise: too dense for what it pretends to be. There’s a heartbeat in there—not a biological one, but a rhythm, a pulsed intention. A device. Encapsulated. Shielded to survive entry. Designed, not random.

“Show me,” I murmur, to the stone or to the person who sent it.

I slip my fingers into a shallow crack and worry the edges apart. The outer shell fractures reluctantly, flakes falling away in shimmering scales, heat licking my knuckles. Inside the husk, nested like a pearl in grit, is a cylinder of brushed metal and smoked crystal, smooth as if it learned what wind is by listening to it. It’s roughly the size of the cameras I’ve seen on sidelines and in pits, tight and purposeful, seam lines engineered to suggest no seams at all. A narrow barrel projects from one end, and along its body, etched with a precision that makes my chest seize, is a mark I know better than my own reflection.

The glyph is simple, the way a river is simple when you’re looking down from very high. Curving lines contain a diamond. A smaller diamond anchors the center. On Earth it’s been called a stylized S so often that I’ve sometimes found it easier to say yes than to explain the way names bend when they cross from one sun to another. It is not an S. It is a letter and a legacy. It is the crest of the House of El.

I exhale, and a sliver of frost spills from my mouth before control snaps tight again. The world around me narrows to a thimble. The noise of the mill steps back. For a heartbeat I am small again, and the sky over Kansas is wide and patient, and my father is holding a piece of metal that fell from the stars and saying we don’t have all the answers, son, but we can decide what to do with the ones we have.

I run a palm slowly over the device. The material isn’t anything I’ve found on Earth: a composite that answers heat with indifference and pressure with patience. It hums against my skin—a frequency that isn’t sound so much as permission. It is not a weapon. It feels… like a key, or a question.

“Superman!” a voice shouts from the bay door. The firefighter from the ladder truck, helmet tilted back, squinting into the dim. “We’ve got water on all visible fire. Everyone’s accounted for. You good?”

I turn, the device cradled against my forearm like a baby someone trusted me to hold. “We’re clear,” I call back. “Main fire’s out and hot spots are cooling. Stay off the mezzanine above the impact—you’ll want to shore it before you put boots up there. No hazardous materials breach that I can detect. The air's improving.”

He nods, relief loosening his shoulders. He takes a half-step forward, maybe to ask the question everyone asks when I show up at their job: what now? I offer him the easiest truth.

“Thank you,” I say. “For getting here fast.”

He grins, quick and unguarded. “Anytime, big guy.”

Outside, the sirens have modulated into their steadier, lower profile. I step into daylight once more. Cameras are arriving on the periphery, the slow roll of vans with logos, reporters shrugging into jackets and practicing faces. I could give them a sentence right now that would end up in quote boxes. Instead, I nod to the captain again, lift one hand in a short wave that says the thing with fewer words, and push off the ground.

Air detonates beneath me and then yields. The city falls away, the mill shrinking to a geometry lesson on a tabletop, the river a band of polished steel, the smoke a bruise that will fade. I climb above the skyscrapers, into the thinner blue where the plane routes thread white across the day. The device presses a gentle, steady weight into my palm.

The crest is not a coincidence. Someone sent this to me through the atmosphere of another world and the bureaucracy of this one. Someone who knows my name in the language it was born to have. The part of me that is Clark catalogues next steps—call Perry, file an incident report with the Planet, text Lois that I’ll have something for her about first responders and industrial safety, tell Jimmy to stay behind the tape and bring the firefighters bottled water if he wants interviews. The part of me that is Kal-El listens to the hum in the device and hears the Arctic call like a cathedral without walls.

Up here, the air is the cleanest thing I can think of. I flatten my trajectory and turn north. The city’s angles smooth out into the green and brown quilt of country, then into the cold silver of water, then the hard white geometry of ice. The world below simplifies, and my thoughts do too.

I hold the cylinder up, and the sun glances off the House of El like a promise. The device is a question. The Arctic has a way of making answers show themselves.

I fly toward the horizon that never quite lets you reach it, the cold reaching for me with both hands. The weight in my palm feels less like a burden and more like an arrow pointing home.

Chapter Text

The Arctic always answers before it welcomes. 

Wind meets me above the ice shelf like a wall moving at the speed of a thought. I angle my flight and let it shear past my shoulders; crystals bloom along my sleeves where the air tries to write winter onto me and gives up. The world here is reduced on purpose: white, blue, silence, the geometry of distance. Metropolis is a chorus; this place is a single held note. The cold would kill a man in minutes. It steadies me.

The Fortress of Solitude breaks the horizon the way a memory does—suddenly it’s there and you can’t imagine a time it wasn’t. It rises out of the ice as if the earth grew a cathedral and forgot to tell anyone. Ribs of alien metal vault into a spire, facets shimmering a color that isn’t quite steel. The hull of an ancient ship forms the spine, its skeletal remains woven into newer growth I coaxed from Kryptonian alloy. It’s never finished; it’s never started. It’s been growing with me since I found it, since I was a college kid who could bench-press a tractor and didn’t know how to tell anyone.

I set down on the tongue of ice that serves as a threshold. The wind dulls. The Fortress hums—just enough to make the hairs on my arms lift, like the way your name sounds across a crowded room when a friend says it. The doors unfurl with a hiss I still feel in my chest. Inside, the light is thinner, like water poured over a clean, white rock.

“Kal-El,” Kelex says, before I’ve finished crossing the atrium. As always, he pronounces the name like a blessing and a diagnostic. He descends from a service gantry with a fluidity no human machine has—no jitter, no extraneous gesture. He is tall, slim, his surface a brushed gunmetal in which the Fortress’s light writes delicate signatures. The crest of the House of El is etched into his breastplate. I traced it with a fingertip, once, when I was eighteen and desperate to be from somewhere.

“Kelex,” I say, and I hear the fatigue in my own voice. The last of the mill’s heat has finally bled out of me. The cylinder in my hand is colder now, as if it knows it’s home. “I brought you something.”

Kelex turns his head, optics dilating. “You are unharmed?”

“Everyone’s okay,” I say. “Small impact in the city’s industrial park. Fire crews had it under control by the time I left.” I hold up the device. “This, though.”

He glides closer, holds two slender hands out but doesn’t touch, the way a careful teacher waits for a student to finish deciding. “May I?”

“Please,” I say, and pass it to him.

His fingers cradle the cylinder with a gentleness that would surprise anyone who thinks machines are only their functions. The glyph glints where the light skims it. Kelex’s head inclines the smallest amount. A sound hums through him—not voice, exactly; more like a chord his body remembers. I’ve come to recognize it: reverence braided with calculation.

“This object is Kryptonian,” he says, which I knew, and then he adds, “and of House El,” which I felt like a touch on the back of my neck when I saw the crest in the mill.

“Do you know what it is?” I ask.

“I believe I do.” He steps into the central chamber without looking down, his footfalls aligning with the floor’s seams as if each panel rose to meet him. Around us, the Fortress wakes a little more: consoles rousing, filaments drawing light into galleries of memory. The wall we call the Archive peels open to reveal shelves of crystals that hold voices. College me spent entire nights here, chasing recorded lectures the way some kids chase starlight on a football field.

Kelex lays the device on a work dais. Interfaces flower around it—a halo of light that isn’t light. He extends a probe from his wrist, touches a seam, and something inside the cylinder unclenches like a fist deciding not to. The barrel telescopes by a centimeter. The hum resolves, becoming a pitch that stands my skin on end.

“Projector?” I say, the word arriving before its referent.

Kelex’s optics brighten. “Affirmative. This is the Phantom Zone Projector.”

I exhale. The name is a door cracking open onto a hallway I only partly know. “Jor-El,” I say. “My father.”

“Your father built the prototype,” Kelex says. “He designed, calculated, tested. He mapped a realm outside our space-time manifold and fashioned a bridge. The Council made it a prison.” His head tips, the posture he uses when his words must navigate an old grief. “There are things even an advanced civilization does for which it later builds apologies. The Phantom Zone is among them.”

The air in the Fortress is crisp and dry. My breath fogs from habit more than chemistry. “Tell me everything,” I say.

Kelex’s long fingers dance across the dais. The room darkens at the edges and then fills—not with images, not exactly, but with the taste of them, the feeling of standing in a lecture hall where the chalkboard wraps around you. A map draws itself in light: a plain without horizon, gray upon gray, the kind of emptiness that only exists if someone made it that way. Points flare in that field: bright, dim, drifting. Each point moves without moving, like a thought you can’t finish but can’t forget.

“The Phantom Zone,” Kelex says, his voice pitched to the register he used when he taught me how to calculate orbital mechanics on the back of a napkin, “is a null-dimensional continuum whose temporal parameter is… nonlocal. For our purposes: timeless. No age, no decay, no conventional movement. Occupants do not metabolize, do not suffer physical needs as we understand them. They persist.”

“Persist,” I repeat. It sits heavy on my tongue.

“Jor-El sought places to send our people,” Kelex continues. “Pocket realms, hidden branes—refuges. Your father refused to send a world into stasis. He believed that survival without life is not survival. He cataloged the Phantom Zone with a scientist’s curiosity and a father’s revulsion. The Council took his bridge and made it into a door with only one side. They sent criminals through it, believing they had solved the problem of malice without twisting their own ethics.”

“Zod,” I say, because the ghost in the word has stood behind me since I learned there were other names besides mine that people on Krypton said out loud. “Ursa. Non.”

“General Dru-Zod and his co-conspirators,” Kelex affirms. The map brightens around three points, then dims. “I once carried a message from your father to the Council protesting the first sentencing. I returned to him with my voice recorder full of silence.”

I touch the edge of the worktable, grounding myself in the cold reality of alloy. “Could they still be there?”

Kelex looks at me. He does not answer immediately, because he has learned from me that silence can be a kindness as much as an answer. “There is no aging in the Phantom Zone,” he says at last. “No time. If a being is consigned there, that consignment continues until retrieval. Dru-Zod, Ursa, Non—if they were not removed by the Council before Krypton’s end, then yes. It is likely they persist.”

The word again. Persist—like frost on a window in February, like a thought you can’t sand down, like a question that has been waiting for you to ask it.

“How did this get to me?” I ask, looking at the device. “Who sent it?”

Kelex conducts a scan. “The casing shows ablation consistent with atmospheric entry. The seals are intact. Embedded in the casing is a transponder keyed to an El-family handshake. This device recognized you the moment you touched it.”

“Not exactly a return address,” I say. “But a signature.”

“Your father thought in signatures,” Kelex says. His tone warms. It always does when he says Jor-El’s name, as if that syllable is an operating system he can still boot up. “He believed the mark of a thing should tell you its intended purpose, not merely its owner.”

“The intended purpose of this object was originally to… access the Zone,” I say, fitting the words together like a set of weights on a scale. “And then to send people into it.”

“And to retrieve them,” Kelex says sharply. “Jor-El built retrieval first.”

I believe him because I need to and because it fits the man I’ve constructed from the recordings in the archives: the father who spoke about ethics like he was describing weather, the scientist who argued with the Council with an impatience that still makes me smile when I listen. He would have hated the idea of a door without a way back.

“Could it be used now?” I ask. “To look in? To… speak?” The last word comes from somewhere very young inside my chest.

Kelex’s fingers hover over the controls. “We would need to clean and re-calibrate. The Projector has been dormant. It must be brought back to configuration, its focusing lattice swept of microfractures. The Fortress can provide power and computational assistance. It is possible.” He pauses. “It is also not an operation to be undertaken lightly.”

“Because of what could come back through it,” I say.

“Because of what you might be tempted to pull,” he says, not unkindly. “Kal-El, the Phantom Zone is timeless. Its occupants experience persistence without change. You are not. You are a man. You have to sleep and eat and make choices. You must think of the consequences for this world if you open a door from another one.”

He doesn’t need to say: If Zod is still Zod, if he is suspended in the same second he was when he was sentenced, if his ambitions are held in amber, then opening that door would be like thawing something that evolved teeth for winter.

I rub my thumb over the table’s edge until the friction becomes an anchor. “He could tell me about Krypton,” I say, and in that confession is the weight that’s been hitching a ride in my lungs since I saw the crest at the mill. “Not as a recording. Not filtered through you.” I glance at Kelex, at the crest on his chest, at the fidelity with which he has kept my father’s name. “I don’t mean—”

“I know what you mean,” he says. “I am a custodian of memory and a tool of instruction. Dru-Zod is… was… a being who lived under Rao’s red light and walked in Kandor and spoke to your father as an equal and an adversary. He smelled the market dust when the winds shifted and argued about military budgets while sitting on the edge of a desk your father was trying to make room on for a microscope.”

The picture is so specific it steals my breath. “That’s from a recording?”

“A fragment,” Kelex says. “Jor-El’s office audio captured an argument in which Dru-Zod sat on a desk he was asked not to and refused to move. It is… vivid.”

I can see it now: a man in a uniform, charming and dangerous in the way of people who are used to rooms bending to them, arguing about the necessity of hard measures with a scientist who thinks every hard measure starts a clock you can’t stop. Somewhere else in the building, a younger scientist laughs at a joke in a cafeteria line. Somewhere else, a child learns a constellation by a name no one on Earth uses. Somewhere else, a Council votes to put off a decision because you can always put off decisions until you run out of time.

“I want to ask him what Kandor smelled like,” I say, barely aware I’m speaking until the words are air. “What did the countryside taste like after rain? Whether schoolchildren in the south learned different songs than the ones in the north. I want to ask someone what ordinary felt like.”

Kelex tilts his head. “You have made an extraordinary ordinary,” he says. “You built one between two identities and across a bridge that no one else knows how to cross.”

“It still feels like translation,” I say. “I want… I want something un-translated.”

He rests a hand—a machine’s hand, precise and impossible—on the dais near mine. “We will clean and ready the Projector,” he says. “We will not engage it without a plan. You will decide when and how to take that risk. That is not your father’s choice. It is yours.”

He could have said, You are not a boy anymore. He could have said, You are not just a son. He says neither, and I love him for it. A robot taught me how to hear what wasn’t said.

“Thank you,” I say. The words feel inadequate across two cultures, but they’re the best bridge between them.

Kelex lifts the device again, his movements now all procedure. “The focusing lattice will need to be re-tuned,” he narrates, half for me and half for his own logs. “The emitter is intact. The power coupling will accept Fortress current with an adapter. The crest engraving is… recent. It has not eroded.”

“Whoever sent it wanted me to see it,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “Possibly someone who wished to be seen by you in return.”

The Fortress hums around us, a sleeping animal shifting closer to wakefulness. The crystals in the Archive catch light and send it chasing itself. I check the time—not because I need to, but because Clark Kent’s life has obligations the Fortress can’t read. Lois will be at O’Malley’s later tonight, and she’ll have opinions about Luthor’s careful slander and about my shirt. She’ll tell me to bring her something with teeth and then flirt with me like it’s a dare. I promised I’d try to make it.

“I have to go,” I say.

Kelex nods, already opening a panel in the Projector with a tool that was recorded into his forearm before I was born. “I will purge dust and salt from the casing, perform microstructure scans, and return the device to calibrated tolerances. I will not initiate any function without your presence.”

“I know,” I say. “I trust you.”

He looks up at me, optics dilating. “I have been waiting a long time to hear you say that without the tone of a boy trying on a coat to see if it fits.”

I laugh, a small, surprised sound that fogs and then vanishes. “I should call Ma,” I say, half to myself. “She’ll tell me to eat. And to be careful around doors without labels.”

“Your mother is a woman of exemplary wisdom,” Kelex says primly, and returns to work.

I stand there a moment longer and watch him open my father’s machine. The crest glints. Somewhere inside the Fortress, a recording of Jor-El says my son as if the syllables are a planet. Somewhere outside, the ice settles and booms as temperature argues with pressure. Somewhere back in Metropolis, Lois is sharpening a sentence into something that will cut the air around Luthor’s face.

I step toward the exit and the doors unfurl again, surrendering me back to the cold. The sky is the color of aluminum. The wind takes my hair and tries to make it into a different man’s. I hold the Projector in my mind and Lois’s smile in my plan and the word persists like a weight in my pocket. The thought that there might be another living Kryptonian walking in a second that never ends—the thought that he could answer questions I’ve been asking into the air since I was ten—makes the air thinner and my chest heavier. Hope is a dangerous thing. It’s also the only engine I’ve ever trusted that doesn’t run out of fuel.

“Back soon,” I tell the Fortress, because I talk to buildings like they’re people, and because this one is. The hum answers. The doors close. The Arctic throws its challenge at me again and I dive up into it, arrowing south toward a bar with bad lighting and good fries and a reporter who can teach me as much about this world as any ghost from the last one.

If Zod is still out there, suspended over the fault line in Krypton’s last argument with itself, then someday I’ll have to face him. Maybe I’ll ask him about the way dust smells after rain. Maybe he’ll try to manufacture a war in a room with no time. Maybe both. For now, there’s a city that runs on deadlines and decency and a woman who believes in a man in a cape the way you believe in the right kind of politician—the kind you invent to have someone to vote for. For now, there is dinner and laughter and a story about kids who built something beautiful because someone gave them a table and told them it mattered.

I will open the door when I’m ready. I head south through clean, cold air and decide that tonight I will let myself be Clark, who knows how to arrive on time.

Chapter Text

O’Malley’s is louder than it needs to be and exactly as loud as we want it to be. 

The place is a paradox I love: chrome taps that have seen better days, flat-screens tuned to three different sports no one is exactly watching, an Irish flag with a sun-faded corner, and a chalkboard menu that still lists shepherd’s pie as “market price” like we live near an ocean of mashed potatoes. The door sighs when I push it open. The warmth hits like a blanket you forgot you owned.

“CK!” Jimmy’s voice rockets over the clink of glassware and the chorus of a hundred overlapping conversations. He’s staked out a section of high-tops near the dartboard and is currently holding court with a trio of twentysomethings who have made the mistake of asking which mirrorless body has better autofocus.

“Look,” he’s saying, gesturing with one camera in each hand like he’s defusing a bomb, “it’s not just about megapixels. It’s about the sensor readout speed—rolling shutter, right?—and this guy—”

He looks up, catches me, beams like a flash. I clap his shoulder as I pass, and he nearly drops the Canon.

“Hey, Jim,” I say. “Don’t scare them off their student loans.”

“Student loans are already scary,” one of the girls says, grinning. “We were promised adorable bartender banter and now we’re in a Ted Talk.”

“Photography is sexy,” Jimmy protests, mock-wounded. “Right, CK?”

“Only when you remember lens caps,” I say. “How’s the light in here?”

“Terrible,” he says, with joy. “I love a challenge.”

I squeeze his shoulder. “Don’t forget to eat something that isn’t nachos.”

He salutes with a lens cloth, then turns back to his audience. “Okay, so back-button focus changed my life—”

I cut through the bodies. The Planet’s constellation is scattered around the room: City desk at a banquette near the window, Sports arguing with themselves at a long table under the TV playing the Meteors game on delay, Copy like a quiet island that will get louder when the check comes. I get waylaid for a second by Steve Lombard, who wears the sports section like a varsity jacket and calls this bar his “second press box.”

“Smallville!” he booms, as if he’s announcing a kickoff. He claps me on the back with the enthusiasm of a man who thinks gentleness is for other people. “You see the Meteors last night?”

“Caught the highlights,” I say, which is both true and safe.

“Don’t get me started,” he says, already started. “We can’t keep a bullpen together to save our lives. And that new left fielder? Kid’s got a bat like a dinner plate. You get him a hitting coach who can actually parse a launch angle and we’re cooking with something other than despair.” He leans in. “But mark my words—wild card. If the universe finally pays me back for my tragic youth, maybe we won't blow it this year.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” I say.

“You do that,” he says, then squints. “You write about robot kids today?”

“Close,” I say. “Kids who built robots. Better stories. Fewer existential crises.”

“Speak for yourself,” he groans, and aims himself back at his table, already describing in glowing terms a double that should’ve been a triple if the runner’s hamstrings hadn’t been made of contract clauses.

I dodge a server carrying a precarious tower of onion rings and almost collide with Cat Grant, who adjusts her blouse like it’s a weapon and leans into my path like she owns the floor.

“Well, if it isn’t Kansas,” she purrs, her mouth doing that thing where it remembers a pout it wore in 2009. “You here to buy me a drink or are you just going to stand there looking like a Calvin Klein ad for flannel?”

I smile, because I like Cat and because ducking is a learned behavior. “Evening, Cat. I think you’re supposed to be buying me a drink. I read your column. That’s combat pay.”

She laughs, loud and delighted. “Flattery will get you a quote. Tell Lois she should let me style you for her next feature. The readers deserve to suffer.”

“I’ll pass that along,” I say.

“You do that.” Her eyes flick over my shoulder toward the bar. “She’s at ten o’clock, darling. Try not to trip over your principles on the way.”

She ghost-kisses the air near my cheek and drifts away, trailing perfume and innuendo like a contrail. I turn toward the bar.

Lois has claimed the far end, where the light is marginally less punitive and the bartenders will actually look you in the eye. She’s pulled her hair up in a way that exposes the line of her neck and makes me forget words I know. There’s a basket of fries between two sweating pint glasses, and she’s already stolen the crispest ones to build a tiny golden scaffold on her napkin, the way she always does, architecturally even in snacks.

“Hey,” I say, sliding onto the stool beside her.

“You’re late,” she says, but she’s smiling. “I was about to make Jimmy eat your fries.”

“Jimmy would have introduced them to a better dipping sauce,” I say. “I’m glad you saved them from that fate.”

She pushes the basket toward me in truce, then takes a sip of beer and tilts her head, studying me over the rim. “You look like a man who landed three stories and is still reading the first paragraph of the fourth.”

“I did write about a science fair today,” I say. “So there were a lot of paragraphs.”

She smirks. “Let’s start there. Garfield High—did they bribe you with brownies to make STEM sound like a rom-com?”

“They didn’t have to,” I say. “There’s this kid, Anya? Built an air-quality sensor from salvage and used it to map the Monorail’s north loop. She’s trying to leverage the data to get the city to plant trees in the gap between the freeway and her grandmother’s block. She speaks about PM2.5 like it’s a villain and she’s writing a third-act speech.”

Lois’s mouth curves. “I love a teenager who uses data like a crowbar. Please tell me you quoted her.”

“Led with her,” I say. “Then pivoted to the S.T.A.R. Labs grant. Flashed some healthy skepticism. They get their logo on the banner and some nice press, but Garfield gets a new roof and the kids get equipment that isn’t older than they are. It’s a trade I can live with as long as the strings are visible.”

“That’s my Smallville,” she says, approval like a hand resting briefly at the base of my neck. “Did you get Diaz to admit the board rubber-stamped the sponsorship without reading the fine print?”

“He called it ‘expedited approval under fiscal pressure,’ which is bureaucrat for ‘we were drowning and someone threw us a branded life raft.’” I reach into the basket. The fries are perfect: hot where the oil met the potato, salt waking up the tongue. I break one in half and pop both pieces like a kid caught with contraband.

“And the mill?” she asks, more serious now. “I know the scanners are reporting minimal injuries, but the fire looked ugly.”

“It was ugly,” I say, choosing adjectives that are true and safe. “Small meteor punched through the roof, kicked a few things loose, flirted with some molten metal. Fire crews were fast. Superman—” I stop just long enough to make it sound like a pause of thought, not origins. “—cleared the remaining workers and helped knock the fire back. He didn’t stick around for much more than that.”

“He never does,” she says, but there’s affection in it. “No grandstanding. No cape choreography for the cameras. He’s allergic to victory laps.” She plucks a fry, breaks it, dips both ends in the aioli Jimmy insisted the bar carry after a month in which he discovered Belgium. “He gets it done, gets it done right, and leaves. Thanks the firefighters and the EMTs and then—poof. On to the next. I admire that.”

“You admire a lot about him,” I say, and it comes out easy, not like a test.

“I admire that he knows what the job is,” she says. “Some people—men—” she corrects with a little shrug, “—require applause to function. He seems to require a crisis, a plan, and a set of humans to defer to when the capes-and-tights part is over. It’s… efficient. And humane.”

I duck my head to hide a smile. “You’re giving him a lot of credit.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says, stealing another fry from her own structure and wrecking its symmetry. “I’d write the hell out of a feature if he’d sit still for one. But as a citizen, I’ll take a guy who’s doing the work for the reward of lives saved over a guy who’s doing the work for a book deal any day.”

“It’s a low bar, but a meaningful one,” I say.

“Mm.” She takes a slow drink, watching me watch her. “So, your piece ran clean?”

“Perry only cut two sentences,” I say. “He called them ‘self-indulgent throat-clearing,’ and then he bought me this beer in the same breath.”

“Classic Perry,” she says. “He’d edit his own wedding vows down to a headline and a pull quote.” She nudges the second pint toward me with the back of her knuckles. “To kids who build better worlds in shop class.”

I tap my glass to hers. “To editors who let them.”

We drink. The noise around us recedes into texture: the jukebox switching to something with a harmonic chorus, the dartboard receiving the world’s most confident miss, Jimmy laughing like a burst tire. For a while we orbit the safe planets: the fact that Lombard swears the Meteors have a farm system now, the rumor that Cat’s new podcast is just her reading poisoned emails out loud, the eternal mystery of who keeps stealing pens from the city desk.

Then Lois sets her beer down and studies me over the rim in a way that means a story is about to be pulled, whether I want it to be or not.

“You’re not here,” she says.

“I’m right here,” I deflect, gesturing to the stool, the fries, my body.

“Your body is here. Your brain keeps jumping a step behind your eyes. I can hear the air rushing past when you come back.” She taps the table lightly, two fingers: wake up, Smallville. “Out with it.”

“It’s nothing,” I say, a reflex so old it has its own key on my internal typewriter.

“Mm-hmm,” she says, every syllable a filing cabinet moved an inch. “The last time you said ‘it’s nothing,’ you filed four hundred words about a zoning subcommittee and then showed up at my door with three bags of groceries and a look that could curdle milk.”

“I was making lasagna.”

“You were building a wall of ricotta to keep feelings out,” she says. “I ate it anyway.” She softens then, a little, the steel receding under the skin. “I’m not trying to pick a lock you’ve chained shut. I just—this is me. Being here. If you want to be somewhere else in your head, I’d rather you didn’t have to be alone there.”

It’s unfair, the way she’s good at this. It’s beautiful. It’s why I fell for her before I admitted I could.

I turn my glass on its coaster, watching the condensation make rings like tree age. The confession lines up like aircraft on a tarmac and refuses to land. I try to square the circle between what she deserves and what I can give and settle on the compromise I’ve mastered.

“I found something today,” I say. “From my past.”

Her eyebrows make a delicate movement. Not surprise, not exactly. Interest, trimmed neat. “From Smallville?”

“Further back,” I say, and it feels like the truth, because there is not a punctuation mark between farther and further that makes any difference to the part of me that remembers both suns. “It’s… a trail. I’m not sure where it goes.”

“Do you want to follow it?” she asks, and the question lands so softly I feel it only after it’s sat with me a beat.

“I don’t know,” I say, honest and small. “I don’t know what’s at the end of it. And there’s a version of me that—if I follow it and it’s not what I want, if it’s different, or worse, or… empty—I don’t know what that does to me. Or to the life I’ve built on not knowing.”

She turns her pint in her hands, considering. For once, she doesn’t fill the space immediately. I love her for that, too—the way she can use hush like a tool. When she speaks, her voice is clean and steady.

“I get that,” she says. “Truly. You make a home out of the unanswered questions. You hang pictures on the blank wall. You measure your days not by certainty but by usefulness. And then a door shows up where there wasn’t one. It’s scary.” Her mouth does a small sympathetic tilt that would ruin me if I weren’t careful. “There’s always the chance the end of the trail isn’t what you want it to be.”

I breathe. The room around us is warm and ridiculous and human. Someone at the dartboard whoops as if their last throw solved health care. The bartender is carving limes like a sculptor who has a deadline.

“But,” she says, and the word is gentle, not adversarial, “you’ll never know for sure unless you go and see. You can keep telling yourself stories about what may be there. You can make ten different versions and love or hate each one. None of them will be the truth. The only way you get the truth is by looking.”

“What if the truth hurts?” I ask, and it’s almost a whisper. It’s foolish, asking a woman who spends her life coaxing truth into daylight whether it will bite. But I ask anyway.

“It might,” she says, not flinching. “Truth often has teeth. But it also has edges you can hold onto. It’s easier to climb a cliff than quicksand. It’s easier to make choices when the floor doesn’t give. And if it hurts—” She picks up a fry, holds it midway to her mouth, lets it be a semaphore for her hands. “—you don’t have to be alone with that either.” She eats the fry. “You have people.”

“People,” I repeat, and mean it like a sacrament.

“Me,” she says, suddenly direct enough to make me blink. “Perry. Jimmy, if you can get him to stop talking about back-button focus. Your mother. People.” Her gaze softens, the worry under the teasing showing for a heartbeat. “Clark, if there’s something out there that belongs to you, you deserve to know it. If it’s ugly, we’ll call it ugly and figure out what to do. If it’s beautiful, you can stop pretending you don’t want beautiful things.”

I look down, then up. The blessing of being me is that I can hear a siren six boroughs away; the curse is that sometimes the sound in front of me is the one I need most. Lois Lane is not a siren. She is a lighthouse. I have been flying by her beam since the first day she told me to stop letting a school board spokesman “soft-shoe my copy.”

“Thank you,” I say, and the thanks is plural. It’s for this moment, and for all the earlier ones, and for the ones she’ll deliver when I’m not smart enough to know I need them.

“You’re welcome,” she says. Then, lighter: “Also, if you don’t tell me what this trail is in, like, vague nouns—object? person? folder of tax documents?—I will die and haunt you as a very naggy ghost.”

I smile. “Object,” I say. “From a very long way away.”

“Noted,” she says, eyes sparkling. “I’ll save my questions for a time when you’re not making the face of a man who wandered into a chapel by accident.”

“I’ll bring you what I can,” I say. “When I can.”

“Bring me fries,” she says, and plucks two from the basket, pops them like commas. “And the story when you have it.”

We let the subject shift, the way you let a boat adjust its angle after it clears the shoal. The rest of the night stretches and relaxes. We talk about nothing and everything: the copy desk’s secret slack channel where they rank typos by whether they look like medieval curses; Perry’s habit of sending motivational quotes at 5:42 a.m.; the fact that Metropolis’s best bagel is made by a man from Omaha, which I will defend with an essay if challenged. Lois tells me about the Lex piece and how Luthor’s comms director tried to pretend the phrase “biological unknown” had been taken out of context, and we spend ten minutes building increasingly ridiculous contexts in which it might be acceptable. (“At a pet store?” “If he was looking at a sourdough starter?” “When describing Steve Lombard’s breakfast smoothie?”)

We share the fries until the basket is a scaffold of salt and good intentions. We split a second beer, then a third, slow enough that time flattens out and everything becomes a glow. Jimmy zips by twice, once to brag about a photo where a dart in motion looks like a comet, once to steal a fry and almost lose a finger to Lois’s reflexes. Cat leads a toast at the bar to “questionable decisions made by people who should know better,” and the entire room cheers like it’s New Year’s at a reasonable hour.

At one point, Lois leans back on her stool, stretches, and looks at me like she’s taking a picture she intends to keep. “You okay?” she asks, not because she doubts it, but because it’s a habit she built and won’t break.

“I am,” I say, surprised to find it true. The weight is still there, but it’s shared weight. It rides differently when someone else is carrying one of the straps.

“Good,” she says. “Because I need you lucid for the part where we argue about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie.”

“It’s a movie about labor relations,” I say, deadpan.

She laughs. “God, marry me,” she says, like a joke tossed into a crowded room, and then she looks away the way you look away after setting off a small firework.

We close the place with the rest of the newsroom, the bartenders pointedly polishing glasses while we try to persuade them we’ll leave without being asked. Outside, Metropolis is a softer city, the wind fluting around corners, the cabs drifting like slow fish. Lois pulls on her coat and shoves her hands into her pockets, then takes them out again because she talks with her hands and can’t help it.

“Text me when you get home,” she says. “Even if you’re a block away when you send it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

“And Clark?” She waits until the streetlight hits her face just so, as if she can control the moon. “If you decide to follow that trail and you need someone to yell at you when you hesitate—”

“I know who to call,” I say.

“Good man,” she says, and nudges my arm with her shoulder, an affectionate collision.

We split at the corner: she goes west toward her apartment and a cat that doesn’t like anyone but her, and I go north toward a couch with a blanket Ma knitted and a window that faces the kind of quiet street you keep by making sure you share your fries. I walk for a while, because it’s nice to use my feet like they’re not capable of more. The night is cool enough to make a promise of fall. Above the skyline, stars burn at distances you can measure and not comprehend. Somewhere far north, a machine is being cleaned by a friend who calls me by a name that still tastes like a question.

There’s a door ahead. I don’t know what’s behind it. I don’t know what it will ask of me. But I know this: tonight I ate fries with Lois Lane and felt the world narrow to the width of a bar and widen to the size of a future at the same time. I can hold that. I can follow a trail with that in my pocket.

My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Lois: Home. Stop thinking in five-minute essays and go to sleep.

I smile at the screen, type back: Home too. No promises.

Then I put the phone away. The city breathes. I breathe with it. And for the first time since the symbol on the metal flashed like a heartbeat, I feel ready to find out what waits at the end of the path.

Chapter Text

The snowfields below me are a white sheet someone hasn’t finished folding. 

I cut through the clean, brittle air toward the line of spires that announce the Fortress—ice and alien alloy grown together until even I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Sleep didn’t bother visiting last night; it stood outside my window and watched me pace. Lois’s voice followed me like a patient metronome: you’ll never know unless you look. Kelex’s caution threaded through it: you must think of what comes back through any door you open.

The doors of the Fortress part on my approach with a sigh like a held breath. Inside, the temperature rises by degrees only my skin notices. I’m greeted by the peculiar stillness of this place: not silence, exactly, but the hum of a machine that’s listening. Light glances off the metal ribs with the color of melted cloud. Somewhere deeper in the structure, ice settles with a noise like a bass drum struck once and allowed to ring.

“Kal-El,” Kelex says, appearing from a service corridor as if the room has exhaled him. His optics dilate a fraction, reading posture, pulse, the weight I carry the way you can read weather in a field of wheat. “You did not sleep.”

“Not on purpose,” I admit, shrugging out of my coat. “I kept reaching for an answer and only found the question again, dressed in a different shirt.”

“This is common among your species,” he says with the gravity of a physician delivering a diagnosis. Then, softer, “And mine, when we are honest.”

He gestures me toward the central chamber. The Phantom Zone Projector sits on a dais under a transparent canopy—a cylinder of brushed metal and smoked crystal, seams mended to invisibility, the crest of the House of El catching the light like a heartbeat. Kelex has already done what he promised: scoured the casing of mill grit, run lattice checks, coaxed dormant redundancies to wake. It looks less like a relic today, more like a tool remembering it was made to be used.

“I’ve re-tuned the focusing lattice to original tolerances,” Kelex says, hands moving in tight, efficient arcs. “No function initiated. Diagnostics only. The power coupler accepts Fortress current through an adapter I printed last night.”

“Thank you,” I say, meaning more than the work. He tilts his head in that infinitesimal nod that says he heard both layers.

I circle the device, a planet skirting a pulled moon. The crest is small, almost modest, tucked beside a maintenance seam. I can’t stop looking at it. I wonder if my father’s hands put it there, if he insisted on the mark not as a signature but as a promise about intent.

“Before we do anything,” I say, “tell me more about Zod.”

Kelex stills. When he speaks, his voice lowers by a fraction—the register he uses for history that isn’t simply a record, but a wound cleanly kept. “General Dru-Zod,” he begins, “was the last, and in some ways the most accomplished, of a lineage bred for guardianship. The Zod line supplied Krypton’s military with officers for generations. Dru distinguished himself early: tactical brilliance combined with an unflinching appetite for the kind of decisions most beings outsource to night terrors.”

“Was he… cruel?” I ask, already bracing for the answer.

“Cruelty is a hobby,” Kelex says. “Dru-Zod was a practitioner of necessity. He believed in outcomes more than methods. To many, this is indistinguishable from cruelty. To Zod, it was clarity.”

He touches the dais. The air above it blooms into images—ghostly reconstructions from archived footage and Kelex’s own memory: a cadet standing straighter than sleep allows, a soldier barking a command without looking back to see if obedience follows, a young man kneeling on a training ground to tie the boot of another recruit whose hands won’t stop shaking. The images rotate and thin, tertiary shadows.

“At some point,” Kelex continues, “he befriended Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van.” My father’s name in his voice catches at something behind my ribs. “They were not obvious friends. Your father asked questions. Dru answered them with action. But they shared a conviction that Krypton must be defended—and saved from itself as much as from external threats. There are recordings in which Lara and Dru tease your father for scribbling equations on napkins; there are others in which Jor-El ridicules Dru’s parade-ground rhetoric. They enjoyed each other. There was, for a time, trust.”

He sweeps his hand. A new image resolves from light: a lab I’ve visited only in crystal voices—Jor-El’s office, the microscope moved aside to make room for something long and gleaming under a shroud. People stand at the edges like the beginnings of a constellation: Lara with her hair pinned into something functional, eyes bright; Dru in uniform, hands clasped behind his back to pin his restlessness to his spine; two junior scientists whispering bets about what the machine will do; Kelex, a younger casing and the same unblinking attention, hovering like an extra conscience built out of metal.

“Your father called it the Survival Zone,” Kelex says. “He believed he had finally mapped a safe pocket in the manifold—somewhere to move our people temporarily while we solved what the Council called ‘environmental irregularities’ and what Jor called ‘ellipsis-constrained disaster.’” Kelex’s optics flick to me. “You would have enjoyed his metaphors. He likened the Zone to a storm cellar.”

The image shifts: Jor-El touches controls; the shroud slides away. A barrel the size of a man’s arm extends from the machine’s belly. The air around it seems to tighten. Jor-El speaks—no sound in this reconstruction, but I know how he sounds from other recordings: calm rushing toward urgency like a river toward a fall. He lifts his hand, looks once at Lara, once at Zod, and presses a switch.

The room jerks, not physically, but morally. The projection conveys it despite its limitations: the way faces change when a fact takes the air out of a theory. For a hairline second, the space in front of the Projector looks like a mirage over desert asphalt—blurred heat pretending to be movement. Then clarity returns, but the air feels wrong. I can’t hear anything, and still I hear it: an absence shaped like a scream.

“Not a Survival Zone,” Kelex says. “The Phantom Zone. A null-dimensional expanse. A place outside time.”

“Did he send anything?” I ask quietly. “A probe?”

“A camera, initially,” Kelex says. “Images returned and did not return. He spoke of ‘frustrated light.’ A robot followed—one from a surplus of my line. It did not report back. Jor-El’s face afterward…” Kelex’s voice glitches minutely, a quaver you’d miss if you hadn’t learned him the way I have. “He told the Council the Zone was a mistake. He argued for decommissioning the Projector. The Council requested a full paper and three committees. Zod, by contrast, said aloud what several were already thinking quietly: even a void can be useful.”

“He suggested using it,” I say, already knowing the answer.

“He did,” Kelex says. “As a holding pen. Not for our people, initially. For those he called ‘actors against the common good.’ Jor-El refused. The word he used was ‘unethical.’ He said it would stain our law, and that the stain would spread until the law remembered only the stain.”

He shifts the projection forward. Time encodes in posture and uniform: Dru grows into his rank the way other men grow into their faces. He becomes head of planetary security. In the image, his shoulders are a broader argument; his gaze does not bounce off anything. Lara stands with her arms folded, her mouth wry; Jor-El’s desk is more crowded than before because Jor-El is always adding to the world and never subtracting.

“An assassin made an attempt on a Councilor,” Kelex says, his tone flattening into the recitation of a public record. “A foolish man, badly taught by cunning men. Dru used the Projector. It was the first sanctioned use. The Council called it exemplary. Your father called it a betrayal of science.”

“And that was it,” I murmur, watching Jor-El’s face harden in some remembered recording behind the light. “That’s when the crack widened.”

“Rifts seldom widen at once,” Kelex says. “But yes. Dru’s conviction that order must be compelled to be calcified. Jor’s conviction that choices have meanings beyond their outcomes intensified. The protests grew. Dru answered the protest with arrests. Prisons filled. The Council dithered. You would have recognized it; you have watched councils dither here.”

I want to smile, but the images keep my mouth disciplined. “And my father’s… warnings? His findings?”

Kelex closes the current projection and opens another, a cleaner archive: Jor-El standing before the Council circle, the floating glyphs of data arcing around him like a constellation he’s trying to teach to stubborn children. He is older here, the edges of his certainty sharpened by time. The models are unmistakable to me even if their units have the weight of another world: climate systems listing into collapse, core instabilities moving from hypothetical to imminent, energy budgets that don’t budget anymore. I can all but hear him: not apocalypse but arithmetic.

“The Council made him head of the Science Council,” Kelex says. “A compromise gesture with teeth too small to bite. Dru reviewed Jor-El’s full models in private, and then he came to him with a plan.”

Kelex dims the projections. The room is just us again. It feels wrong to watch what comes next even in reconstructed light.

“He proposed putting all of Krypton’s population into the Phantom Zone until a suitable world could be found,” I say before he does, because the only way to manage some sentences is to say them yourself.

“Yes,” Kelex says simply. “He called it a suspension, not a sentence. He spoke in terms of efficiency: no resource expenditure on interim habitats, no time lost to relocation; the Zone would bypass both logistics and panic. He spoke of awakening Krypton on a new morning under a new sun.”

“And my father?” I ask, already hearing the answer.

“Appalled,” Kelex says, and there is metal in his voice that has nothing to do with his casing. “He insisted that consigning an entire people to timelessness was annihilation by other means. He said living requires time. He said a universe that does not ripen is not a place for beings but for artifacts.”

“Did they fight?” I ask. I can see them: Jor-El’s delicate hands, the way he talks with them when equations get excited; Zod’s fists like the period at the end of a sentence that started as a question.

“Yes,” Kelex says. “First with words. Then with hands.” He pauses. “They were badly matched. Your father’s gifts were not kinetic. He grew up to wrestle with math and politics, not men. Dru trained to dismantle obstacles. Lara broke them apart and bruised her knuckles in the process.”

I close my eyes, and for a moment the Fortress tilts around the gravity well of that small domestic collision. Somewhere in a recording is the sound of something fragile breaking. Somewhere else is the silence that follows people who have realized they cannot share a room and keep their convictions.

“Zod moved forward anyway,” Kelex continues, and the word anyway scrapes as it passes. “He and his lieutenants—Ursa and Non—made preparations. Non had once been a scientist under Jor-El; a brilliant one. He suffered… correction under a security program that sought to make dissenters tractable. Ursa believed in Dru the way a star believes in gravity. They attempted to take control of the Projector arrays under the Hall of Judgment. Jor-El stopped them. Not alone. There were still people in the system who would put their bodies between an idea and a machine.”

“What did the Council do?” I ask, the answer already coiling.

“What Councils do when frightened,” Kelex says. “They were decisive at last.” The dais threads a final set of images: the Hall of Judgment, the circle of projection, the shimmering pane of the Zone’s threshold like a wound stitched with light. Zod stands very straight. Ursa’s mouth is a razor. Non’s eyes are far away, like a man looking up at a second, invisible sky. “They found the three guilty of treason and sentenced them to the Phantom Zone. Jor-El opposed the sentence. He argued for containment, for exile to an asteroid habitat, for anything that preserved time. The motion failed. Zod stepped into timelessness without flinching. It is the one action of his career I find it difficult not to admire.”

The images fade. We stand in the hush that follows a story that doesn’t know if it’s finished. The Fortress hums. Somewhere outside, the wind finds a new angle and tests it against the spires.

I lean my knuckles on the table and feel its cold through my skin. When I first saw the crest on the device, I thought the most dangerous part would be the mechanism—coil, lattice, emitters; the precision of calibration; the power it would ask of me and the Fortress. A problem of switches and equations. I did not imagine the man behind the door would be a figure who once sat on my father’s desk and argued for the abandonment of time. I did not imagine that the first voice to answer me could be one that knows the House of El with love and contempt braided so tightly I might not know which strand I was holding.

“I was hoping,” I say slowly, “that the danger was the act. That the risk would be in the opening, not in what the opening reveals.”

“Hope is seldom so tidy,” Kelex says, not unkindly.

I look at the Projector. The crest glints. The barrel is a question mark that refuses to curl any further. “If I open it,” I say, “and if he comes through… does the Zone change a person? Do they know? Are they—” I search for the right word and fail. “Are they awake in there?”

Kelex is very still. His optics contract and dilate. He folds his hands, a human gesture learned from long observation of hands that do this when truth must be delivered gently. “I do not know,” he says. “No one who has gone in has come out.” He pauses, because pauses are part of honesty. “Your father believed consciousness persists. The Zone was never meant to be death. It was meant to be not-time. But he did not enter it. He observed only edges. Jor-El wanted to retrieve before he sent. He was not afforded that order.”

“So I could be pulling someone who has been standing in a second that never ends,” I say, hearing the horror of it and knowing that it might also mean something else—endurance, a chance that a man can be pinched like a wick and still hold flame.

“Yes,” Kelex says. “Or someone who experienced persistence like a dreamless sleep. Or a kind of awareness that has no analogy here. My uncertainty is complete.”

I straighten. My body makes the decision before my mind writes it down. What Lois said last night settles into the space behind my sternum like a keystone: you’ll never know for sure unless you see. She didn’t promise I’d like what I found. She promised it would be the truth. Kelex promised nothing at all, which is a kind of love machines are better at than we are.

“If Zod is the man your records show,” I say, “then opening the door is dangerous. For me, for Metropolis, for everyone who has never been under a red sun and doesn’t know what it can make you. If he has changed, if the Zone did anything to him but preserve him—if he has… reconsidered—then I’m leaving a man alone in a second he can’t get out of because I’m scared of my own questions.”

Kelex tilts his head. “This is an accurate articulation of the problem.”

“I can’t live under these skies and preach about second chances and refuse one because it’s personally inconvenient,” I say. “And I can’t let my longing for the smell of Kandor’s markets turn me into the man who breaks the planet trying to get a souvenir.”

“You are not that man,” Kelex says. “If you were, the Fortress would not answer you.”

I let myself smile at that. “We do this carefully,” I say. “On our terms. Here, under ice, with redundancies stacked like sandbags. We prepare a containment. We alert no one yet. If he comes through full of teeth and old ambitions, I put him back or we find another way to keep the world safe. If he comes through… someone I can talk to, then we talk. And if he is neither—if he is broken in a way no ethics manual has room for—then we decide when faced with a person, not a theory.”

Kelex’s optics brighten by a measurable increment. “I will begin a containment lattice around the dais,” he says. “A negative-feedback loop keyed to your biometrics and mine. If the energy signature exceeds tolerances, the system will rebound the bridge.”

“How long?” I ask, already rolling up my sleeves though I don’t need sleeves to do any of this.

“An hour to fabricate and mount,” Kelex says. “I recommend you eat.”

“I’ll eat after,” I say, and he does not argue because he knows which lies are harmless.

We move. The Fortress wakes further. Panels flower open to reveal spools of materials that do not exist in any human toolkit. Kelex prints braces that grow from the dais like frost. I carry coils the size of train wheels as if they’re hoops in a children’s game. We work without music and still the room has a rhythm—his precise hands, my imprecise strength, the soft chime of a circuit completing. Between steps, my mind races and calms and races again. I keep seeing hands: Zod’s clenched; my father’s moving in the air; Lois’s open, steadying me without touching.

When the lattice is mounted and tested—Kelex looses a tiny pulse into the air; the lattice shivers, drinks it, and holds—I stand at the dais and rest my fingers on the Projector. The crest is cool under my skin. My heartbeat is very loud in my ears.

“You are not alone,” Kelex says, and it is not reassurance so much as inventory.

“I know,” I say. I look at him. “If I ask you to shut it down, do it even if I am arguing with you.”

“I will,” he says. “And if you hesitate in a way that endangers others, I will act without your request.”

“Good,” I say, and mean it. It is a relief to surrender a little of my own worst-case scenario to a friend who cannot be charmed.

I draw in a breath. The Fortress hums. The wind tests the spires. Far south, a city I love runs on the faith that mornings follow nights and fires end. I put one hand on the focusing ring and one on the power coupler and think of my father saying retrieval first, of my mother saying be brave but not reckless, of Lois saying look.

“Kelex,” I say, “initiate bridge at minimum amplitude. Target the last Council sentencing coordinates. We will see who answers.”

“Confirmed,” Kelex says, and his fingers hover over the air like a conductor about to find the downbeat. He looks at me. “Kal-El.”

“Yes?”

“You are your father’s son,” he says. “And also your mother’s. That combination has survived worse than this decision.”

I nod once. “Begin.”

The Projector wakes with a sound like a string being plucked—one, clear note that finds its echo everywhere at once. The air before the barrel tightens, warps, tries to decide not to be air. Light smears; shadow forgets its edges. The first veil appears, the thickness of a dragonfly’s wing and just as iridescent. Energy ripples into the lattice, meets itself, and settles into a steady thrum. The room is suddenly full of a smell I don’t have words for; if I had to choose, I’d call it the scent of a door that hasn’t been opened in a very long time.

“Amplitude holding,” Kelex intones. “Containment nominal. Bridge stable at five percent.”

In the shimmering plane, something moves—or the idea of movement does. Time presses its face to the glass, then lifts it again. I feel a flinch run through me and let it pass. My fingers tighten on the focusing ring.

“Dru-Zod,” I say into the not-time, into the scar in the air. My voice comes out soft because anything louder would feel like arrogance. “If you can hear me… if you can feel anything—this is Kal-El, son of Jor-El. I’m here.”

The shimmer deepens. The lattice hums. Kelex’s hands are steady in my peripheral vision, a metronome you could put a life to. I do not know if Zod is awake, or asleep, or something that shares features with both and neither. I do not know if he can hear me or if he will come through furious and perfect in his old convictions, or contrite, or cracked, or a man whose memories skitter like mercury and can never be gathered again.

But I have asked. I have opened the door the smallest, safest amount I know how. And I have decided that whatever waits at the end of this trail, I would rather meet it than keep walking circles around the map.

“Kelex,” I say, never taking my eyes off the veil, “increase amplitude to seven percent.”

“Seven percent,” he echoes. “Engaging.”

The air brightens. The plane thickens. Somewhere far away, a second that has not ended twitches like a muscle remembering it was used. I hold steady. I have made the decision to pull Dru-Zod from the Phantom Zone.

And whatever he brings with him, I will meet it as the son of the people who taught me how to choose.

Chapter Text

The veil in the air thickens until it looks like heat has remembered how to have edges. 

The lattice hums around the dais—steady, disciplined, ready to rebound if anything in front of us decides to be more than a conversation. Kelex calls out tolerances with the calm of an anesthesiologist. My hand is on the focusing ring. The hairs on my arms are lifted by a breeze that doesn’t exist.

Something resolves inside the shimmer—an outline, then mass, then a man as the universe exhales and returns one of its arguments.

He staggers, not from gravity but from the shock of having it again. The bridge holds him like a hand under his ribs. He’s tall, compact—built not like a statue, but like a decision. His hair is close-cropped, his face spare in the way of people who have trained themselves to eat only what they need—food, sleep, distraction, regret. He turns his head like a predator waking from a dream he doesn’t admit he had.

He blinks against the light of the Fortress and the presence of time. His eyes find me and slide off; land on Kelex. When he speaks, the word is a rasp dragged over unused vocal cords and an accent I’ve only heard in recordings.

“Kelex,” he says, and my name in his mouth later will be a weight; Kelex’s name now is leverage. “Report.”

Kelex does not glance at me. He does not remind the general of orders. He inclines his head, the exact degree of respect due the last rank he knew this man to hold. “General Dru-Zod,” he replies. “You have been retrieved from the Phantom Zone. You are in the Fortress of Solitude, constructed from Kryptonian materials by Kal-El. You are on a planet called Earth.”

Zod’s gaze snaps to me and narrows, not in suspicion but calculation. He takes me in the way a surveyor takes in a landscape—line, elevation, load-bearing potential. He steps forward and the containment lattice sings softly, scattering the motion into compliance. He stops, instincts meeting an invisible perimeter he cannot yet read.

“You are… Jor-El’s son,” he says, the certainty coming out before the question as if the answer has been waiting at the back of his throat for longer than speech. “Kal-El.”

“Yes,” I say, and something inside me flinches at the way my father’s name rides along on mine. I straighten instinctively. “I am Kal-El. My Earth name is Clark.”

He tests the Earth name with his mouth, finds it inelegant, sets it aside. “And Krypton?” he asks, the question he had to have known to ask and still hoped not to hear the answer to.

My hand on the ring tightens without turning. I look Zod in the eye because anything else would be cruelty. “Gone,” I say. “Destroyed. Decades ago, by Earth time. I was sent away as an infant. I survived. Kelex survived because he was aboard a ship that crashed here. Lara and Jor-El—” The words thin. I swallow. “They didn’t.”

There is a moment—no more than a breath—when Zod’s face opens, not wide, not loudly—barely. But it’s enough. The soldier’s grief is not theatrical. It is a flicker of the animal that understands losing the ground under its feet. His jaw tightens immediately afterward, discipline sealing the breach. He looks down once, then up, and when his eyes come back to mine, they are as steady as a man standing in formation.

“I see,” he says. He looks again at Kelex, perhaps because Kelex is the artifact in the room that does not lie by accident. “Verified?”

“Verified,” Kelex says, and gentleness, which you’d think a machine would have difficulty with, enters his voice. “Our planet’s core instabilities culminated in catastrophic failure. Jor-El’s final warnings were accurate. The Council did not act in time.”

Zod’s gaze goes distant for a heartbeat—far beyond the room, beyond the ice, to a red sun he knows like I know the smell of Kansas after rain. He pulls himself back with visible effort. He catalogues the room: the spines of the ship grown into a cathedral, the crystals on the Archive wall, the Projector on its dais. His eyes return to the crest engraved into the device, to the one on my chest. Recognition slides into his posture like a blade finding its sheath.

“You look like him,” he says to me, tone devoid of flattery or accusation. “Your eyes are Lara’s. The set of your mouth—Jor-El when he was told to sit down and refused.”

“You knew them well,” I say, and the words ache because I want them, badly, from a living throat.

He nods. “We were… allied. Friends, for a time.” The pause around the word friend is where the wreckage is. “I was present at the first test of the Zone. And at the first misuse.”

His eyes skate toward the containment again, then away. He is at parade rest without meaning to be. The dignity is real; so are the dings where it has been dropped.

“I brought you out,” I say. “Carefully. There’s a containment lattice between you and the rest of the room. That’s not an insult. It’s prudence.”

“It is wisdom,” he says, and for the first time a fragment of something like respect reaches his face. “If I were you, I would do the same.”

We stand in the hum for a long breath. Outside, the wind rakes claws across the ice and then apologizes. The Fortress listens, ancient ship bones remembering trust.

“General,” I say, “I know who you are from records. I know what you argued for. I know what you did. I know what the Council did to you. I don’t know who you are today. The Zone—”

“Did not end,” he says, finishing a sentence he’s been inside of for a very long time. He rubs two fingers together, as if testing air for grit. “It is… a persistence. Imagine you stand at attention. Now imagine there is no parade to wait for and no ‘at ease’ to relieve you. There is only the moment of standing. You do not hunger. You do not tire. You do not age. You do not sleep. You do not move, except in the memory of movement a mind supplies itself to avoid annihilation. I counted strategies until numbers became a circle. I revisited decisions until the edges wore smooth and showed me the shapes underneath.” He looks straight at me. “A prison with no calendar breeds clarity. Or madness. I do not know which you will judge this to be.”

He has given me more than I expected this quickly. I meet him halfway.

“I activated the projector knowing the risk,” I say. “Not just of power and physics, but of… you. Of what you might bring through. If you are here to finish an old argument with my father on a new planet, I will stop you. If you are here to talk to me like a person, I will listen.”

“I do not finish old arguments,” he says, and something that might be humor—lean, desert-dry—touches the corner of his mouth and leaves. “I am not the man who walked into the Hall of Judgment and called a nation to sleep. I believed I was acting for Krypton’s survival. I was prepared to make history obey me. I understand now that history has conditions. I understand that the Zone I wanted to use as a tool is a punishment without a finish. I would not sentence a world to it.”

He says it without spectacle. If it is a performance, it is the best I’ve ever seen. My hearing leans in out of habit; truth has a different harmonics than lying. His breathing is even, but not detached; his heartbeat, steady; the muscles in his jaw relax when he says prepared and tighten when he says punishment. There’s no tell of rehearsed contrition. There is the tone of a man reporting to a superior or a conscience. He’s speaking as if the person he most needs to convince is himself and I am, at most, a witness.

“I believe you,” I say, because I do. I don’t say I want to. Both things are true.

He inclines his head, once. A soldier accepting a concession he didn’t ask for out loud.

“Did you ever see Krypton?” he asks, as if the question has been burning the back of his tongue since my first sentence.

“No,” I say. The word is a soft thing that still cuts. “Not with my own eyes. I’ve heard recordings. Seen images. Kelex has told me what he can. My parents on Earth—Jonathan and Martha—told me what they knew once I was old enough to hear it. But my body remembers only this sun.”

“This sun,” he repeats, as if tasting it. He looks toward the ceiling, toward the gathered light. He closes his eyes briefly, then opens them. “Then allow me to speak of home.”

He doesn’t ask my permission again. He speaks, and the room changes what kind of room it is.

“Kandor smelled different in the morning,” he says, voice flattening into narrative, not from disinterest, but to keep emotion from deciding the pace. “The market opened at dawn. There was a vendor who sold flatbread with spiced roots. Lara bought it from him even when she carried out experiments that consumed more hours than people have. She told me once that the first bite tasted like a station between problems.” His mouth almost smiles. “I refused to like it out of principle until I did. Jor-El said I was allergic to carbohydrates.” He glances at Kelex. “He was wrong. I was allergic to admitting when he was right.”

“I can show you streets,” Kelex offers gently, gesturing to the archive.

“In time,” Zod says. “For now—words are enough.” He looks at me. “The southern highlands. In winter the light is thinner. The snow does not fall often, but when it does, the red sun turns the air the color of old wine. You can see your breath in a way that makes men poets against their will. The spaceport at Val-Ron at midday—the smell of heated alloy and some spice a vendor burned that I never learned the name of. The way the mountains in the east change color five times between morning and night, and you swear they have moved because the shadows were lying to you all day. The ocean near Vathlo—blue that refuses to be written down.”

He pauses, eyes far, then returns to me with a softness that has steel under it. “Children in North Kandor learned a different song for the constellation humans call Orion. We named it the Hunter, too, but not because of the belt. Because of the dog that chased it. We taught our children to count using that tale. Lara thought the north’s song was prettier. I told her southerners lacked taste. She said the south had the food.”

My chest tightens and eases with every sentence. It’s not that the details are grand; it’s that they are ordinary in the exact way I wanted ordinary to be. Flatbread as a station between problems. Snow making poets. A planet weathered by memory into a home.

“Tell me about the halls,” I ask, the way you ask someone to keep talking so the world doesn’t collapse while they breathe. “The Council. The Academy. Anything.”

“The Halls of Science smelled like ozone and grief, in that order,” he says, without rancor. “Your father’s office always had more objects than surfaces. He collected useful things and never learned to throw anything away that might be needed later. He was arrogant and he was right more often than comfort should allow. He became head of the Science Council and it was like caging a thunderstorm—you are impressed with yourself until you realize the bars were only for show. Lara considered the bars optional.” Something like real warmth moves under the clipped lines. “She carved a petroglyph into a stairwell once with a laser scalpel because she liked the way the texture caught light.”

“I didn’t know that,” Kelex murmurs, almost to himself.

“I never told you,” Zod says. “There were things I kept then. It seems a waste now.”

We talk. Or rather, he talks and I join him, and the Fortress, which has heard my questions bounce off recorded answers for years, listens to living voice. He tells me about training grounds that baked under late-summer suns; about the way cadets scuffed their boots to look less new on the first day; about the cadence of commands you learn so deeply it becomes an extra skeleton under your skin; about the jokes you make at two in the morning in mess halls that belong to young men who don’t know dawn yet.

“Do you miss it?” I ask. “Krypton.”

He looks at me like I’ve asked whether he misses breathing. “Yes,” he says simply. “I miss the arguments I had with people who could outpace me. I miss the taste of water at the end of a training run when you can’t swallow because you’re laughing at something you shouldn’t repeat in front of Lara.” A shadow crosses his face. “I miss the choice to fight for a place and know it still existed.”

We reach a lull that feels like the first real one—like the tide has gone out enough to let us see what it left on the beach. I look at the lattice. It’s humming a little lower. Zod’s shoulders have eased without surrendering vigilance. His voice has turned hoarse from lack of use and abundance of memory. I glance at Kelex. His optics are bright in a way that, on anyone else, would look like tears.

“Kelex,” I say quietly.

“Yes, Kal-El,” he answers, already reading my posture.

“Drop the inner layer,” I say. “Keep the outer field in case we get… enthusiasm.”

“Understood.” His fingers move. The inner veil sighs away, the boundary becoming a suggestion. The air seems to relax. Zod exhales, not relief—just a recalibration into a new set of rules.

I step forward, closing the distance, not so close as to crowd him, close enough that the choice to shake hands would be simple. He does not offer his. It would be too much. I don’t, either. It would be a lie about who we are right now.

“Welcome to the Fortress,” I say instead, half formality, half reality.

He gives the room the once-over with fresh eligibility. “You built this,” he says. “From a ship that knew our language.”

“I grew it,” I say. “From bones that remembered how to hold weight. I found it when I was young. I learned to fly here. I learned not to break things here.”

“You learned restraint,” he says, correcting the word because that’s who he is. He looks toward the long windows where the light pools golden over ice. Something across his face eases and then tightens. “The sun,” he says, like he’s naming a stranger in a lineup.

“Yellow,” I say. “Different than Rao. It affects our biology. On Earth we call it a photonucleic effect. It—” I stop before I begin a lecture. “It makes us different from the humans here. Stronger. Faster. Tougher. I can show you the limits later. For now… think of it as a wind at your back. It takes time to feel it fully.”

He lifts his hand and holds it in the light like he’s checking a blade’s edge. The skin glows a little and returns to normal. His expression doesn’t change much; I’ve stopped expecting fireworks. But I can feel the awareness ignite in him, the way a trained body maps new strengths the way a tactician maps hills.

“Can they defend themselves?” he asks, eyes still on the light. “Humans.”

“Yes,” I say. “Better than you expect. Not against us, not if we choose badly. But against most things? Yes. They are… more resourceful than any Council report would teach you to respect. This is their planet. I live here. I keep faith with them. That is nonnegotiable.”

He looks at me at last and nods once, thinking it through, slotting it into the file marked Rules of Engagement. “I understand,” he says. “You are… their champion.” He does not make the word smaller than it is. “And you were mine, today.”

“You were my responsibility,” I say, and let the warmth riding under it show. “And my choice.”

He turns his head toward the Archive crystals. “You said Kelex told you our stories,” he says. “I am… surprised you wanted to hear mine after the part where I tried to write our people into a pause.”

“I needed to know from someone who’d actually breathed the air,” I say. “Kelex is more than a machine, but he did not walk those streets as a person. You did.”

He takes that in. His face lingers on a balance point between gratitude and the instinct to hold himself apart. Exhaustion reaches him the way winter does: slowly, then all at once. The moment you’re allowed to stop is the moment the body files its bill. The not-quite-color in his cheeks fades. His stance loosens in a way that is not strategic. He sways a half centimeter. He catches himself. He hates that I saw.

“You should rest,” I say, and when he opens his mouth to decline on reflex, I add, “A tactical decision. Bodies function better after recalibration.”

He huffs the ghost of a laugh. “You sound like Lara.”

“I’ll take that as the highest compliment you’re capable of right now,” I say. “Kelex?”

“I have prepared a recovery chamber,” Kelex says. “Temperature and pressure tuned for gradual adjustment. Quiet. No reflective surfaces.” He adds, with something like mischief, “And recordings of Kandor’s morning street sounds if desired.”

Zod’s head tilts at the last, and for the first time something like vulnerability escapes containment. “Not yet,” he says. “Later. I would like to hear bad jokes again before I hear good memories.”

“I’ll send Jimmy,” I say, too fast, because humor is a shield I wear comfortably. Zod frowns. I hold up a hand. “A friend. He’s… never mind. Bad joke. You’ll meet him when you’re ready to be overwhelmed by questions about cameras.”

“I look forward to learning what a camera is in this century,” he says, dry as the highlands.

“Kelex will see to your comfort,” I say. “I need to return to Metropolis. The city—my work—doesn’t pause. And I promised a friend I would bring her what I could when I could.” I hesitate, because there are ten things I want to ask and five thousand I’m not ready to. I settle for what fits through the door I have opened. “Thank you. For telling me about home.”

He studies me. “Thank you for the choice you made,” he says.

Kelex gestures him toward the corridor that curves toward the recovery rooms. Zod nods to me—no salute, no theater. He moves like a soldier who has been allowed to stop drilling and doesn’t yet know what to do with his hands. Before he follows Kelex, he pauses at the edge of the light, tilts his face up as if to mark where this sun sits in the sky, learns it for later, and then steps into shadow.

I stand a while after they go. The Projector sits on the dais, inert and somehow heavier now that it has done what it was built to do. The containment lattice cycles down with a soft, satisfied thrum. The Fortress hums differently—like a room after a long conversation has finally said what it needed to.

I text Ma—just a heart and a “will call later” because I’m still someone’s son even when I’m not sure which world that word belongs to. I almost text Lois and stop myself because all I can think to write is “it’s good,” and that’s not a story yet. I’ll bring her the pieces when they’re ready to be turned into sentences.

At the door, I look back. There is a man here who knew my parents and spoke their names with the kind of intimacy recordings can’t fake. He could be lying to me. He could be plotting in the space Kelex cannot see. He could be both grieving and dangerous, both sincere and shaped by a lifetime of habits that serve him better than they will serve this world.

I feel the warm, unmistakable lift in my chest anyway—the feeling I was scared to hope for when I stared at the crest etched on the device in the mill. The end of the trail wasn’t a cliff. It was a door. Behind it is a man who told me about flatbread and winter light and the laughter in a lab where my father refused to sit. That’s not everything. But it’s something.

The doors unfurl. The Arctic wind meets me with its old bluntness and I let it push the heat from my cheeks. I rise into the thin air with the ease that is either a blessing or a responsibility depending on the hour. Below, the Fortress folds itself back into the ice and waits for the next question. Above, the sun does what it has always done for me—lays a hand on my shoulder and says: go on.

I head south toward Metropolis, toward a city that believes in deadlines and second chances, toward a woman who will ask the exact right questions with the exact right amount of mercy. The warm feeling in my chest stays, steady as a pilot light. I do not trust it blindly. But I keep it. It will help me carry whatever comes next.

Chapter Text

Two weeks is a long time when you’re splitting yourself between two suns.

By day I keep Metropolis hours: coffee that hits at the right temperature, crowded sidewalks that feel like a conversation, deadlines that turn the newsroom into a beehive. By night—and in every pocket between—I keep a different clock. I fly north and the world simplifies: white and blue, wind and stone, the Fortress built out of bones that remember gravity differently. In the beginning I told myself I was checking on a guest; by the end of the first week I knew I was visiting a man who carried pieces of a life I’d only heard in past tense.

Zod learns the Fortress quickly. He walks like he’s auditing a perimeter, but he pauses for things that are not part of a patrol: the way the light refracts through the Archive crystals at a certain hour, the not-quite-sound the hull makes when the ice settles, the mural of star charts Lara etched along a corridor when—Kelex tells us—she got tired of asking for more wall space in Jor-El’s office and simply made her own. Kelex watches without hovering, which is impressive for someone who can be in three places at once. He narrates as needed—“That conduit feeds the auxiliary power lattice; please don’t break it”—and withdraws when we talk about memory.

We set rules, quietly and early: I don’t remove the external containment field around the Projector unless I’m there; Zod doesn’t touch ship systems marked with the crest of the House of El without asking; Kelex records everything the Projector does, nothing Zod says unless Zod wants it saved. Zod accepts the rules like someone grateful to have rules again. He tests their edges once or twice, just to see if the shape is real, and then he inhabits them with the kind of poise you learn when you’ve had rank and lost it and understand both states.

We talk.

At first I feed him Earth in careful, clean bites: oceans salted differently than Vathlo’s; birds that ride thermals over the river and look like scraps of burned paper until they turn and become eagles; the way a city sounds through glass at 3 A.M. when the wind has blown the last siren down a corridor of streets and left everything humming. I tell him about journalism as a civic engine and he listens like I’m describing an artillery piece we use for consensus instead of compliance. I do not say “Lois” or “Jimmy” or “Ma.” He doesn’t ask for names. He has the instincts of a man who knows how leverage is made.

In return he gives me Krypton as a city you could walk, a sky you could predict, a habit you could keep. He draws a map I can carry even when I’m not in the Fortress. He tells me about a winter festival in North Kandor where children make lanterns out of spun glass, and how the light casts little constellations onto stone, and how if you stand in the square and look down you can see a galaxy under your feet. He tells me about the taste of ceremonial tea that hadn’t changed its recipe in a thousand years and how Jor-El always pretended to like it and never did. He tells me about Lara’s laugh that got sharper when she was concentrating because she realized humor was a tool and used it like one. He tells me about the south—always a little warmer, a little louder—and how soldiers from the north used to tell jokes about southerners that weren’t really jokes and how he learned to stop telling them.

I don’t ask about the Hall of Judgment the first week. I don’t need to; he brings it up on day nine without theatrics. We’re standing near the viewing window where the ice field cuts away and the ocean heaves blue under light the color of forged steel.

“I have thought,” he says, not looking at me, “about what it means to love a place so much you are willing to harm it to save it. I believed I could endure that paradox and come out on the other side clean. I could not. I carry it.” He touches his chest with two fingers, very lightly, like a man checking a scar that healed but changed the line of a muscle forever. “If I ever forget, remind me.”

“I will,” I say, and mean that too many ways to count.

Between visits north I keep my other life in motion. The city changes by inches and in leaps. I write about a tenants’ union that organized on a block where landlords think laws are suggestions; about an unlicensed clinic that quietly saved a dozen lives at a heat shelter during a blackout; about the city council passing a bill that looked like help until you read the third clause and realized it was a gift to a donor. Perry sends me two-word emails that somehow convey entire stories. The copy desk edits with the precision of a neurosurgeon and the bedside manner of a librarian who likes you. I am Clark Kent with ink on his fingers and a tie that earns a compliment from exactly one person who matters.

Lois. The conversation at O’Malley’s opened a door I’d been circling for years. In the newsroom, the ground we walk feels a shade different, not like new territory but like a map finally labeled. She gives me looks over the tops of file folders that say she remembers what I told her without asking for more than I can bring. When I get tongue-tied, she bails me out with a joke and a nudge and a question that lets me land. When she gets too sharp with a source and the source hangs up, I slide a cup of tea onto her desk with honey she’ll pretend she doesn’t like. We orbit closer because that’s what bodies do when the math makes it safe.

Jimmy notices. Of course he does. He’s a camera with legs and feelings.

First it’s gentle commentary. “CK, you’re humming,” he says, passing my desk with a tray of photos that look like art school fell in love with a fire escape. “You only hum when you’ve either filed a banger or Lois smiled at you. Today is Tuesday; ergo, Lois smiled at you.”

“Logical fallacy,” I say. “You’re assuming those two events are mutually exclusive.”

“God, you two are foreplay in dialogue,” he groans, but he’s grinning, and when I throw a paper clip at him, he catches it like it’s a pop fly.

Later it’s nudges that might move tectonic plates. “Ask her out,” he stage-whispers when we’re three feet from Lois. She raises an eyebrow without looking up from her notes. I stammer something about schedules and he rolls his eyes so hard you can hear it.

By the end of the second week I’m out of excuses that aren’t lies. Zod has given me back a corner of myself I didn’t know how to name; I’m steadier in a way that shows even when I’m trying to be ordinary. The part of me that was always braced for a bad answer is lighter. The trail didn’t end in a cliff. It ended at a door with a man behind it who told me the south’s food was better and that my father would steal my fries.

So I ask Lois to get ice cream with me. I pick “ice cream” because it’s small enough not to scare the part of me that thinks hope is a thing to be suspicious of, and because the place is called Sweet Justice and I like when a city has a sense of humor.

Sweet Justice sits where a different ice cream shop used to stand before becoming collateral in a distraction for a bank heist. The night it burned, sirens made a necklace around the block while half the precinct sprinted toward the bank. I put out the fire with lungs and hands, and then I helped a manager carry out tubs of what would have been soup. There’s a photo on the wall near the register now: the old owner—Mrs. Saldana—cutting a ribbon with a pair of novelty scissors, grinning like she’d won a bet with time. Jimmy took the photo. He made sure the scorch mark that still shadows the brick over the doorway made it into the frame. We don’t always hide our scars in this city. Sometimes they’re the thing that keeps the story true.

The night we go, the air is warm and the street is loud in a happy way. Lois arrives in a jacket the color of late tomatoes and a skirt that makes me forget the beginning of the sentence I had planned. She looks around with a grin that is both nostalgia and reportorial curiosity.

“You picked a place with a pun,” she says. “I approve.”

“I hear the banana split is a civic duty,” I say.

We order one because sharing a ridiculous dessert is a contract nobody in this place would let you break. The server brings it in a dish shaped like a boat that could cross a small river if you gave it a current. Three scoops—vanilla, chocolate, strawberry—lined up like a traffic light that always says go; two bananas arced like parentheses; hot fudge drawn in zigzags that make me think of a seismograph; whipped cream piled like optimism; a cherry teetering like an editorial decision that could go either way. We sit in a booth near the window. Fairy lights make the glass look like it’s caught stars and forgotten to let them go.

We talk about work first because that’s how we know we’re safe. Lois is chasing a tip that LexCorp intends to “consolidate” a set of community clinics by “partnering” them into a “new era.” Every quotation mark is a knife. I tell her about a piece I’m writing on the city’s noise ordinance—how it’s enforced on street musicians and ignored for construction crews near certain donors’ developments—and we try to figure out if we can tie the two things together without breaking an ethical rule.

She tells me about a woman in her building who writes letters to the editor in green pen on lavender stationery and includes recipes in the margins. I tell her about a kid I met on a rooftop who likes clouds because they “change without asking permission.” We eat banana and ice cream and whipped cream and wound up strands of conversation, and the whole time my shoulders feel like they’ve been moved half an inch down from my ears.

At some point she sets her spoon down and looks at me over the wreck we’ve made of the whipped cream. Her eyes say this is the part where a story thread gets tied off or knotted to another.

“So,” she says. “The trail.”

I play dumb long enough to stall for a breath. “Which trail?”

“Please,” she says, smiling. “The one you were afraid to go down, the one I told you to go down, the one you clearly went down because you’ve been five degrees sunnier than usual for two weeks.

“Only five?” I ask. “I’ll consult the sun.”

“Don’t you dare,” she says. “I have to share this city with people who wear sunglasses at night.” She leans forward, elbows on the table, chin tucked into her hands, conspirator in a booth. “Tell me whatever you can. I won’t push for more.”

I take a breath and pick the nouns that fit the promise I made to myself: protect what must be protected; be honest where you can. “It was… an old question. I followed it to an old answer I’d hoped for and didn’t trust. It turned out—the path ended where I thought it might. Better than I deserved. Not without complications. But—good.”

She watches me the way she watches a source she respects: quiet, intent, letting the silences do part of the work. “I figured,” she says finally. “You’ve been more… you. Not performing it, just being it. Like you put a heavy box down and forgot to pick it back up.”

“That’s close,” I say. “It’s still in the room. I just don’t have to carry it everywhere.”

She smiles, not smug, satisfied. “If I had known that sending you down a trail would make you confident enough to ask me out, I’d have left breadcrumbs months ago.”

“I—” The sound that comes out of me is not dignified. I attempt a recovery. “I like to think I would’ve gotten there on my own.”

“You would have,” she says, generous. “Eventually. After writing three personal essays disguised as zoning board coverage and making me an elaborate lasagna that was twelve percent ricotta and eighty-eight percent deflection.”

“Harsh but fair,” I say. “I’ll bring the lasagna to the second date.”

“Oh, is there a second date?” she asks, eyebrows up, teasing wrapped around a check-in.

“There is if you want one,” I say, and I manage not to sound like the sentence is balancing on a tightrope. It’s just a sentence. It has feet.

“I want one,” she says, like she’s ordering a sandwich: direct and deeply pleasing. “Also, we have to finish this cherry or the server will judge us.”

“We can’t have that,” I say, and we both go for it at once and end up laughing at ourselves until the sugar makes our ribs hurt.

On the way out we stand under the photo of Mrs. Saldana cutting the ribbon. Lois studies it like she’s writing a caption in her head. “That scorch mark,” she says. “It makes the whole story land.”

“Scars are evidence,” I say.

“And sometimes decoration,” she says, shrugging out of her jacket and draping it over her arm like she’s just solved a case.

We walk. The city is in summer night mode: stoops turned into living rooms; music leaking from fourth-floor windows; the monorail a silver thing that forgets to whisper when it’s happy. Lois’s stride matches mine because we’ve been doing this so long without saying it that our bodies learned the math. She tells me about a book she’s pretending not to like because the last chapter made her cry; I tell her about a documentary Jimmy wants to make that is essentially “the city’s pigeons and why they matter.” We argue about toppings for pizza and end up compromising on mushrooms—her pick—if I shut up about the virtue of olives—my mistake.

At her building we pause under the awning that thinks it’s nicer than it is. The light is the kind that makes everything look like a little bit of a movie. She turns to face me and suddenly the city falls away into a smaller set of coordinates: the line of her mouth; the way her hair has escaped its pins; the fact that this is not a rehearsal.

“Thank you for ice cream,” she says. “And for… whatever you did on that trail. I’m glad it brought you here.”

“Me too,” I say. It is the simplest truth I have.

She says, “Goodnight, Smallville,” and steps in like it was always going to happen and like she decided it just then—a kiss that is direct, warm, precise, like Lois in every way I love. It isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t need to be. It is a punctuation mark that lets the sentence keep going, stronger than the words that came before it.

She pulls back first because she’s the one who knows how to make a scene play. “Text me when you get home,” she says. “Even if home is up.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, breathless enough to embarrass Clark Kent and Superman in equal measure.

She backs toward the door, waves with two fingers, disappears into the building like she has an appointment with the rest of her life. I stand there long enough to look like a man who’s allowed to be happy in public and then I walk.

I don’t fly. The night is too good to skip. The city smells like garlic and heat and rain that hasn’t made up its mind yet. I take the long way around the block because long ways now feel like choices instead of delays. I pass a bodega where the owner is arguing with a teenager about the right price for a mango; I pass a laundromat where a woman is dancing with her toddler between rows of machines; I pass a man on a stoop strumming a guitar so softly it sounds like the building is humming to keep the bricks warm.

My phone buzzes. Jimmy: did u do it did u ask did u survive

I type back, Yes/Yes/Working on it.

Three dots. bring me the documentary rights to this romance.

Denied.

coward. 

proud of you tho. 

Go to sleep.

no u.

I send Lois the text I promised: Home. Thank you.

Her reply: Good. You’re welcome. Sleep. I need you sharp for the morning meeting because I’m picking a fight.

I’ll bring coffee.

Bring optimism. Coffee is implied.

I climb my stairs instead of taking the elevator because tonight my legs want to remember that they exist. In my apartment I put my glasses on the table and sit on the couch with the blanket Ma knitted across my knees like I’m a person who came home to a place he made on purpose. The city hums beyond the window. My phone screen goes dark. For once I don’t reach for anything else.

Two weeks ago I opened a door I’d been afraid of, and the person who stepped through it gave me the smell of a street I’ll never walk and the sound of my mother’s laugh carved into stone. Tonight I ate a banana split that tasted like a dare with a woman who can slice a lie into confetti and still be kind. Between those two points is a line I can stand on. It feels sturdy.

I breathe. The world breathes back. And for the first time in a long time, the two rhythms feel like they want the same thing.

Chapter Text

Morning meeting is a ritual, and like all rituals at the Planet it’s half devotion and half sparring match. 

Perry stands at the head of the conference table with a coffee the color of motor oil and a stack of notes that may or may not be for show. The whiteboard behind him has three columns—“Must,” “Should,” and “If We Have Bodies Left”—and Lois’s handwriting already dominates the first.

“I’m not letting this go soft,” she says, bracing one hand on the table, the other fencing with an invisible opponent. “LexCorp shuttered two clinics this week and ‘consolidated’ three into a single location that’s a forty-minute bus ride from the neighborhoods they’re supposed to serve. The press release calls it ‘efficiency.’ It’s austerity with better fonts.”

Perry chews on his glasses. “I’m not arguing with your facts, Lane. I’m arguing with your pattern. You’ve made three front pages in two weeks tying Luthor to everything from zoning loopholes to suspicious ‘partnerships.’ You keep swinging like that, he’s going to stop sending comms flacks and start sending litigators.”

“Truth doesn’t stop being true because a rich man threatens to sue it,” Lois fires back. “Ethics aren’t a popularity poll.”

“I agree,” Perry says, raising a palm. “But appearances? Those matter, too. We are not an arm of the opposition. We’re a newsroom. You give me one more bulletproof piece, I run it. But don’t feed me innuendo. I won’t print your crusade.”

“It’s not a crusade,” she says, but the word stings anyway, and I can see it in the set of her mouth. “It’s a record.”

“Then keep it clean,” Perry says, softer. “I need you above reproach.”

Jimmy kicks me under the table like I’m the sideline reporter for a prizefight. I’m opening my notebook to play peacemaker when my phone vibrates with a force out of proportion to the sound. On the screen: KELEX.

He never calls this phone.

“Sorry,” I say, already half-standing. “Family emergency.”

Perry squints past the bluster; Lois looks straight through me, past the lie to the shape of the fear behind it. I hold her gaze long enough to see concern flare and then I’m moving—out of the room, down the hall, into the stairwell before the voicemail can finish downloading.

I listen on the second landing. Static, a crackle like ice shifting. Then Kelex’s voice, degraded, compressed into a single syllable that still carries a world: “Z—” The rest is a burst of nothing. The message ends.

The suit under my shirt feels suddenly heavier, as if it knew the whole time and was waiting for me to catch up. I put my glasses in my pocket and take the stairs in two jumps. By the time the alley’s air hits my face I’m not keeping human speed anymore.

The Arctic answers with its usual bluntness. The spires of the Fortress rise from the ice like an argument the world lost and had to admit was beautiful. The doors unfurl as I approach, slower than usual, like a building waking from a bad dream.

“Kelex?” My voice echoes against the metal cathedral. No answer. The hum of the ship is wrong. I can feel it in my teeth—the way a familiar room feels alien when a chair is an inch off.

I find him by following the wrongness like a draft under a door.

He’s in the central chamber, near the dais where the Projector rests, and for a second I don’t register what I’m seeing because ‘broken’ isn’t a word I let apply to him. His chassis is split from shoulder to hip; one arm is sheared at the elbow; optic lenses spidered. The crest on his breastplate is scuffed into a smear. The floor around him is scored with heat and impact. If he were human, there would be blood. What’s there instead might as well be. I kneel and gather him as carefully as if he could feel glass embedded in his skin.

“Kelex,” I say, and it comes out like I’m twelve. “I’m here.”

His optics flicker, once, twice, like stars trying to remember how to be steady. His voice is a damaged file forced through a working speaker. “Kal… El.” There’s a hitch—he always said my name like a verdict; now it’s a plea. “Cau…tion. Z—”

“I know,” I say, because I do now. The room tells me. The Fortress tells me. He tries to lift his head; I support it and feel metal that should be smooth catch and grate.

“I am—” he starts, then stops, as if ‘sorry’ is too small and too human. He tries again. “Fort…ress… compromised.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say, and the words taste like failure because I left him here with a man I invited in. “It’s mine.” I set him down gently, as if gentleness can undo anything. “I’ll be right back,” I tell him. “I promise.”

The promise is a fuse. I stand and follow the heat scars deeper into the ship.

I find Zod at the main control dais, standing where I have stood to catalog stars and ask for my father’s voice. He has transformed remembrance into occupation. He’s out of the simple recovery clothes we kept in the Fortress and into a uniform cut like mine but without grace—black, armored at the shoulders and neck where my cape would fall, designed to make a silhouette that occupies a room and refuses to leave. Across his chest, a symbol I’ve only ever seen in records: the House of Zod—angular, decisive, a thesis statement you wear like a threat.

He turns when I enter, and the man who told me about flatbread and winter light vanishes like condensation in cold air. What’s left is the general the Council sentenced—a conviction embodied.

“What did you do?” I ask. The question is useless and necessary. I hear Kelex’s damaged hum behind me like an accusation I won’t accept from anyone but myself.

He studies me, slow, a commander measuring a battlefield that has finally declared itself. “What you refused to do,” he says.

“What happened to Kelex?”

“He interfered,” Zod says, as if that’s a species of insect. “He tried to lock me out of systems he has no ethical right to control. He refused a lawful order.”

“There’s nothing lawful about this,” I say, and I can feel the anger rise, hot and clean. “You were a guest in my home.”

“I was a general in exile in a ship built by my enemy and my friend,” he snaps back. “Spare me your hospitality. I have spent two weeks listening to you sing a lullaby to a dying world and call it ethics. I listened to your stories of Earth—its audacity, its cruelty, its smallness—and I realized what I should have realized the instant I felt this sun on my face.” He steps closer, the armor ringing softly where it articulates. “You had everything. A fortress. Knowledge. Power that makes your gods jealous. You could have rebuilt Krypton here—stronger, wiser—under your stewardship. And you made yourself their mascot.”

“Champion,” I correct, voice flat.

“Pet,” he spits. “You fetch. You roll over. You bare your throat and call it humility.”

“It isn’t my right to take Earth from humans,” I say. I keep my voice level because someone should. “It isn’t yours. We are guests here. Survivors. That gives us obligations, not inheritance.”

“Not right,” he bellows, and the sound shivers the ribs of the ship, “duty. If you were too weak to bear it, you should never have called me back. I can carry what you cannot.”

“You will carry nothing out of here,” I say, and the line lands like steel because it is the only way forward. “You won’t touch this city. Or this planet.”

He smiles then—small, pitying. “You don’t understand the stage you’re on.”

I take a step, weight forward, ready, and that’s when the blow arrives from my blind side.

It’s not a punch. It’s a tackle made by a man whose idea of restraint is not breaking your spine when he could. I hit the deck hard enough to crater a panel and taste metal. The world whips sideways; my ears ring; the second hit comes in before I’ve fully parsed the first. A hand like a vise clamps my forearm; another catches my shoulder; I’m lifted and slammed again. The ship’s sound becomes a distant kettle shrieking—alarms, or the part of the Fortress that loves me trying to warn the part of me that insisted on this fight.

I roll, planting my feet, and look up into a face I knew before I knew there might be a day I’d see it outside a recording: bald, heavy-boned, eyes set deep under a brow like a cliff. No malice. No mercy. A machine that taught itself how to be a man and decided it didn’t need to learn the rest.

“Non,” Zod says behind him, almost fond. “I wondered whether the first introduction should be kinetic.”

Non grunts. The sound isn’t language; it’s permission to continue. He takes a step aside so I can see the rest of the room.

Two more figures stand beyond the dais. The first is a woman in black matching Zod’s—a severe uniform that makes its own weather. Her hair is cut to military precision; her eyes flicker across me like reconnaissance, cataloguing and discarding. The crest at her chest is a version of Zod’s, altered for lineage. Ursa. The name sits in my mouth like a remembered warning.

The second figure makes a different part of me recoil. He’s younger, but not by much; his face is an uneasy compromise between my mother’s delicate engineering and Zod’s blunt geometry. The set of his mouth, the angle of his jaw—mine, and not. His gaze when it cuts to me is aggressive curiosity. Across his chest: the symbol of the House of El, redrawn with edges sharpened, corners made into knives.

“What did you do?” I ask again, but the question is smaller now. I already know.

Zod saves me the dignity of not pretending misunderstanding. “While you were teaching me your hymns to weakness, I taught myself your Fortress. Your father’s ship knew how to grow more than walls.” He gestures to the chamber beyond, where vats sit like seeds waiting for permission. “The genetic libraries held enough of you to be useful. The sun did the rest. Your body is a document written in yellow light. I made a copy fit for purpose.”

The young man—boy?—tilts his head, assessing me with a scientist’s hunger and a soldier’s contempt. I feel the floor tilt in my skull. Clones are a theory until they look at you like a mirror that refuses to be helpful.

“Why?” I ask, because even if the answer is obvious, I want to hear what story he tells himself.

“Because you’ve squandered your gifts,” Zod says, no heat in it now, just cold conviction. “You play at rescue. I will do the work. Non has his strength. Ursa has her precision. But neither carries a sun in his bones like you do. I wanted that wind at my back. I will not be denied the tool you refused to become.”

“Tools aren’t people,” I say, and look at the young man—my face and not my face. “You don’t have to be what he tells you to be.”

His mouth twitches, not toward a smile—toward a sneer he hasn’t learned to hide. He glances at Zod for permission and receives it.

“I’m not interested in sermons,” Zod says. “I’m interested in results. And you—” he points at me as if calling a cadet forward—“are going to witness them.”

“You’re not leaving this room,” I say.

“Stop me,” he says, almost lazily. “Ursa. With me.”

Ursa steps backward toward a corridor, nods to the clone—some private code between predators—and they move, fast, a ripple of black down the spine of the Fortress toward the exit bays. I launch, but Non’s hand is already on my collarbone, crushing. He wrenches me back with the efficiency of a crane. The floor answers the conflict by giving way in a sheet of cracked alloy.

“Non,” Zod says, not bothering to watch, “teach him the cost of abdication.”

Non obliges. He hauls me off my feet and throws me through a support rib as if I’m a problem made of paper. I correct in air, hit the far wall hard enough to ring the room, and find my footing a heartbeat before he is on me again—silent, relentless, reducing options to impact.

There's a strategy to this: keep me busy, keep me contained, take the field outside with soldiers who have no compunctions and a head start. Fury comes up my spine like a second skeleton. I don’t remember crossing the room; I’m simply there, meeting Non’s charge with a shoulder and a shove that cracks a column and sends frost sheeting down like broken glass. He doesn’t grunt. He recalculates. He’s very good at that.

“Zod,” I say between strikes, because if he’s going to break my house and my day in the same breath, he can give me the courtesy of looking me in the eye. “This ends now.”

“It begins now,” he corrects, almost gentle. “You will learn the difference.”

Non feints low and comes high with a hook that would pulp steel. I take it on the cheekbone and use the momentum to carry us both through the windowed arch that faces the open ice. Glass has no time to shatter; the air takes us, cold like a slap. We explode into the Arctic, a spray of sparkling shards marking our path. The wind howls its approval.

We hit the ice hard enough to roll a snow squall into being. Non rises first, patient as a glacier, and drags me up by the front of my shirt like I’m a recruit late to formation. He slings me across the shelf, and the horizon tilts into a long white line that wants to be a wall. I dig heels and hands into ice and carve a trench, arresting the slide a yard from a crevasse that has been waiting a very long time for exactly this.

He is on me before the ice dust settles. He’s not angry. That’s worse. He’s a man fulfilling a task set long ago: remove the obstacle; proceed.

I can’t give him the Fortress again. I can’t give Zod the city.

I meet him head-on, hard enough to raise a plume, and we go down into a tangle of fists and forearms and the kind of wrestling you do when you know the ground will kill anyone you throw the other into if it opens at the wrong angle. He’s stronger than anyone I’ve fought since I learned the sun could make me a myth. He’s also slower. My advantage is precision; his is persistence. The fight becomes a conversation two languages understand: test, answer, test again.

Behind us, the Fortress stands on the horizon, elegant and wounded. Somewhere inside it a friend tries to hold his body together long enough for me to make this worth the promise I made. Somewhere ahead of me, Ursa and a boy who wears my crest like a threat run toward a world that doesn’t know it’s been offered a different future.

“Come on,” I tell the cold, the sun, myself. “Come on.”

Non’s fist whistles past my ear and buries itself in a drift; I catch his wrist, pivot, and use his momentum to flip him over my shoulder and into a ridge that doesn’t want him there. Ice shears. He disappears in a cascade. It won’t hold him long. It doesn’t need to. I need seconds. I need a plan.

I rise into the air, rip the wind down my throat, and look back at the Fortress. A black figure stands framed in the wound we made in the wall—Zod, watching, hands clasped behind him like a satisfied teacher in a classroom he’s just stolen. He lifts his chin the smallest degree. I understand the language. He wants me to come back. He wants me to divide myself: save the house or save the world.

I won’t choose his choices.

I turn midair toward the city I love and the line Ursa and the clone will take to get there, and I shoot forward—but a hand clamps my ankle like a manacle and the earth reasserts itself. Non wrenches me down and the ice accepts me with a crack like a bell.

“Then we do this your way,” I tell him, and I stop holding back.

Chapter Text

The first time Non hits me without restraint, the ice sings. 

It isn’t a punch so much as a verdict: shoulder to sternum, hips driving through, the kind of tackle that lives in the bones of people who’ve only ever been told to advance. I meet him, not angling away, not diffusing, not taking the edge off for fear of what the ground will say about us. We slam together and the shelf beneath our boots buckles, a low thunder rolling under the white. The Arctic is a hard audience. It gives honest feedback.

“Fine,” I tell him, breath fogging into hard crystals that glitter and vanish. “We do this the old way.”

He doesn’t answer. He rarely does. There’s nothing to say. His knuckles do the talking, a grammar of impact and leverage. He comes in again, high-low, a hammer masquerading as a scalpel: left feint, right cross, hip throw—movements stamped into a body that once did drills until dawn turned violent. He’s more experienced than I am at this kind of contest; he reads hands and feet like a map and edits as he goes.

But I’m faster. And I want it more.

I stop treating the ground like it’s something to spare and start treating it like a tool. When his right foot plants heavy before a sweep, I ice-breath a sheen under his heel and steal traction; he slides half a step and the sweep loses purchase, giving me the half-second I need to pivot inside his guard and drive an uppercut into the angle of his jaw. The impact sends a wave through him that a human neck would never forgive. He absorbs it and tries to return the favor with interest. Good. Let him.

We trade like that for long breaths measured in the time it takes a crack to run across a frozen pond. He learns me; I learn him learning me. When he bull rushes to force a clinch, I let him take the hold and turn my spine into a lever, lifting with hips and heel at once, reversing the throw he wants, using his center of gravity as a handle. He lands on his back with a noise like a plow hitting bedrock, and I am on him before the ice stops shuddering, heat vision nicking the edge of his breastplate just enough to make it buckle and pinch his shoulder for a second. He tears it away with a shrug that would rip a car door.

He’s craftier than his silence suggests. He baits with stillness, then explodes, choosing angles that compromise my balance more than my strength. He takes my ankle on a misstep and drives me down at the rim of a crevasse yawning like a black throat. I catch the lip with my fingers, my body a pendulum, and he stomps the ice above my hands because of course he does. It spiderwebs—one, two, three fractures racing toward each other. I blow, a fierce white stream that flash-freezes the cracks and buys a heartbeat, then fire heat into my palms to melt pits and refreeze them as anchors. I pull, hard enough to lift a truck, harder than that, get my chest over the lip, roll, and he’s already on me again, no gloating, no breath wasted, a storm that has decided to remain a storm.

“Non,” I say, ducking a hook that would have taught a mountain humility. “I don’t have time for you.” It isn’t taunt; it’s triage.

He answers with a knee that folds me and a double-hammer that would have ended this if I were anything else. The blows shake the aurora out of the air; green veils ripple and shiver like the sky is watching from behind a curtain. He’s not just strong—he’s used to long fights: attrition, attrition, attrition. Wear the world down until it is shaped like your intent.

I stop giving him the long fight he wants.

I go high.

He charges and I step into him, not away, my shoulder driving into his sternum as my legs piston. We leave the ice in a white explosion and he grunts—not pain; acknowledgment. He tries to rake my face with his knuckles; I jam his wrist and ride the line straight up, through wind that becomes knives, toward a sky so clean it hurts. Air thins. He likes that; he’s born to vacuum where noise can’t follow. I don’t take him to space. I don’t need to. I just need us above what he knows how to use.

At altitude, where the cold stops being a sensation and starts being a fact, I pivot around him midair, torquing his shoulder with both hands, and spin him like a discus. He flies—not because I threw him, but because I turned his own momentum into an ordinance he can’t steer. He hits the ice below in a plume taller than buildings, a geyser of powdered white that makes the world look like it’s exhaling too hard. I dive after, faster, faster, the atmosphere hissing at my shoulders, and at the last instant brake and drive a heel into the ground at his side, collapsing a ridge onto him. It buys seconds. I need seconds.

He erupts from the drift like a submarine punching through winter. We collide again, this time in a fury too quick for the eye—a blur that would read as a trick of light to anyone watching from the next continent. He wrings my forearm and I let the joint roll, allowing the twist to carry into a turn, coming out on his flank with a palm strike that sends a shock through his ribs and into the ice. He returns it with a headbutt that would end most arguments with a period; I answer with a jab that writes a new sentence.

He tries to trap me against a pressure ridge. I give him the trap and then melt the ridge behind me with a glance. He stumbles forward into nothing for a fraction of a second, and it’s enough for me to take his back, lock my arms under his, and suplex him through the newly molten ice into the refreezing slush, burying him in a matrix that hardens around him like poured concrete meeting a January night.

He flexes. The ice cracks. He flexes again. It holds—for now.

I’m breathing hard. Not because I’m winded—my breath is a bellows that can turn mountains into breath—but because anger has a rhythm and mine is beating at my ribs. The Fortress is behind me, hurt. Metropolis is ahead of me, threatened. Lois’s face when I said “family emergency.” Kelex’s voice, broken to a syllable. I feel like a wire strung too tight between them both.

I drop to one knee at the edge of Non’s temporary prison and glance down. His eyes meet mine through a sheet of perfect, impersonal ice. There is no hate there. There is no anything. The chill of his gaze could freeze oceans or leave them to steam. He is purpose given a skull.

“Stay,” I tell him, and punch.

The ice over his sternum shatters and the blow behind it goes through. He’s not human; nothing inside him is where it would be in anyone else; but force is a language even he can’t mistranslate. The shockwave travels down into the shelf, finds old faults, and relieves them with a crack that echoes forever. The ridge collapses into itself, the world settling another inch into the idea of itself. Non’s eyes flutter. His head drops back. The matrix holds. He goes limp in a way that suggests not surrender, not sleep—just the end of this stanza.

I hover above the ruin of our argument and listen. The Arctic hums, offended and then done with us. Non’s heartbeat is a distant drum, steady but softened. He’ll wake. He’ll be angry. He’ll be there when I return.

I’m already gone.

Up. Up where air becomes an idea and then a memory. Up where the cold gives way to nothingness and then nothingness gives way to light. I level out just below the place where breath is a theory and turn my face to the sun. It’s not a ritual; it’s a refueling. Yellow light writes itself into me molecule by molecule. It’s not addiction; it’s agriculture. I drink until the ache in my arms unwinds and the lead in my legs remembers it used to be air. I don’t linger. There’s no time. Enough. Enough.

I drop.

Metropolis is a diagram of need beneath me. Smoke, not fire; alarms, not order. A knot of motion at the center of downtown unthreads itself into specifics as I hurtle toward it: cars shoved sideways and upside down; a bus at an angle that makes my teeth hurt; a fountain torn into a crater and refilled with debris; people running with their heads down because their necks refuse to look at what they have decided they don’t have to.

And in the middle: two figures in black. Ursa moves like a surgeon—clinical, precise, choosing vectors that cut through assumptions. Beside her, the clone—a younger, sharper version of a face I have to share with mirrors—stands too still, cataloguing chaos like its data he ordered. Police form a ring they know won’t hold but don’t know how not to form. Their bullets ping silent against skin that was built under another sun.

I do not reduce speed as much as I should. The impact of my arrival makes a statement: the street bowls inward, asphalt lifting like a black wave, glass jumping in frames a block away. The clone turns a half-second too slow and I’m already on him, my fist a verdict that sends him cartwheeling end over end into the avenue. He hits once, twice, then skids, carving a trench the size of a city bus. A parked sedan hops and lands in a new zip code. He lies still, then twitches, then still again. Not done. Not yet.

“Superman!” someone screams, relief weaponized.

“Back!” I shout, wind carrying the word into every doorway, every earbud. “Get back! Get inside!” The police captain I know by first name meets my eyes and gets it. He starts the retreat on a beat most men would have missed. Officers fall back in practiced disorder. The ring becomes a curtain.

Ursa is already moving. She picks up a hatchback without looking at it, tests the weight in one hand like she’s choosing a scalpel, and whips it not at me but at the cluster of people too panicked to hear me. I don’t think. I go.

I catch the car by the axle a foot before it becomes the end of someone’s life, arrest its momentum with a torque that would tear a suspension to lace, and set it down to use as a shield for a family crouched behind a mailbox. The mother’s eyes are wide and glassy; the father’s are narrowed and furious; the kid’s are bright like she thinks she’s in a movie. “Run,” I tell them, gentler, and they do.

Ursa doesn’t wait for the aftermath. She takes my habit and weaponizes it. A newspaper rack—flung high, arcing toward a crosswalk. A bench—hurled through the fog of a burst hydrant. I intercept, intercept, intercept, each rescue costing ground, angles, initiative. She doesn’t press. She punctuates, cutting me away from her center with the grammar of harm. She speaks as she works, her voice a scalpel too.

“You’ll fracture your wrists on their behalf,” she says, whipping a manhole cover like a discus past my ear to ring off a streetlight, dropping it into a tangle of sparks that frightens a crowd into scattering against their own best interests. “You’ll dislocate your shoulder to keep their bones intact. And for what? They’ll thank you with parades and leave you to starve when they’re bored.”

“For the chance they get another day,” I say, tweaking a blast of heat into a thin ribbon that fuses a falling fire escape bracket midair before it can scythe into the street. “For the possibility they learn how to do better. That’s enough.”

“It is not enough,” she snaps, darting in, low, a knife at my left knee. I lift, turn, let the blade of her shin glance off my calf instead of the joint. “The strong lead. The weak follow. You could be a king and you play hall monitor.”

“Kings bury nations,” I say, taking her jab on my forearm and countering with a compact cross that would have turned a brick wall into a suggestion. She sways an inch and resets. “Hall monitors keep the halls from burning.”

“You fight your own kind,” she says, disdain curled around the last word like a sneer. She kicks, pivoting on the ball of her foot with a grace that has injured more people than I want to imagine. I catch her ankle mid-arc and step through, trying to off-balance her into a sweep. She rolls through and comes up with the landing foot already aimed at my throat. I tap it aside. She smiles, quick and sharp. “Do you think the humans will love you when they see what you can really do?”

“If you’re an example of my kind,” I say, serious, “I’d rather be human.”

“Then you can die with them,” she promises, and pulls a trick I haven’t seen since a training program in the Fortress: a feint at my head that hides a throw—rebar, six feet long and jagged—ripped from a construction barrier and speared at the couple behind me who didn’t run when I said run because some people can’t hear over the sound of their own feet.

I twist, heat-vision slicing the bar into three harmless pieces in the space between heartbeats, then take her palm like a knife under my ribs. It doesn’t hurt the way a human strike would. It moves mass the way engineers move bridges. I go back three feet and hit a bus that has been abandoned at an angle like a beached whale.

She’s on me in the next instant, cutting at tendons, testing for laxity, seeking the give that will cascade into failure. She fights like a physician treating me for my illusions. I stop letting her.

Metropolis is my ally. I know the seams of this street, the way the asphalt crowns and falls for drainage, the microsecond delay in the light at 48th and Market when it throws left-turn green. I know the way wind moves around this block at this hour; the way a gust from the river pulls into the canyon of towers on an invisible rope. I use what I know.

I let her herd me south, seeming to concede ground—and at the last second step left into the leeward side of the fountain’s marble wall and exhale cold hard enough to gift it a skin of ice. She pivots to adjust, foot seeking friction that isn’t there, and in that instant her weight is mine. I sweep her heel with my toe, push at her hip with my palm, and turn her center ninety degrees away from itself. She goes down, controlled and violent, her shoulders hitting the iced stone with a crack that spiderwebs the glaze.

She doesn’t stay down. Of course she doesn’t. She gets up with the same energy she fell with and comes for my eyes like she’s been waiting all day to blind me. I step into the attack and jam both her wrists toward her sternum, then pivot inside her elbows and pin them long enough to bring my forehead down into the bridge of her nose. Kryptonian bone meets Kryptonian bone with a report like a small explosion. She staggers; I do not.

“Yield,” I say, because it’s a language I speak even when no one else does.

“Never,” she says, honest as ice.

“Then sleep,” I answer, and put her there—body locked, angle set, a single hammer on the jaw that toggles a switch. It’s not pretty. It’s not meant to be. She slumps, breath still going, heart stubborn and strong. I let her fall into my arms instead of letting the pavement take her.

Sirens thread the air. The ring of officers has reformed at a distance they can live with. People are filming because people always are. I look across the crater I made with the clone and find it empty. Of course it is. He learned my speed in the first second of our acquaintance and cached it for later. He’s out there, sharp and untested, a knife that hasn’t learned it can cut the hand that holds it.

I can’t hunt him now. Zod is still at the Fortress, treating my home like a staging ground. Every second he breathes its air is a sentence I have to pay off.

“Captain!” I shout to the police commander. He jogs forward with a posture that says his knees hurt and he doesn’t have time to notice. “Hold this area. No one approaches her without gloves, goggles, and my say-so. She’s strong even asleep. Treat the ground like a live wire.”

“Copy,” he says, voice steady, eyes eating every word and filing it under Do Not Die. “You taking her?”

“Securing her,” I say. I look at the crowd—faces I’ve seen on trains and in stories and in lines at bodegas—and raise my voice until it carries like a weather report. “You did well. You listened. Keep out of the streets. Let the first responders do their jobs. Help your neighbors first. The rest is noise.”

A murmur answers me—fear breaking into something like focus. It will hold as long as we do.

I scoop Ursa up like a child who fought a hurricane to a draw and jump. The ground drops away. The air cleans itself of smoke and adrenaline. I angle north; the sun lays a hand on my back as if to say keep moving.

There’s a weight behind my sternum that isn’t exhaustion. It’s a knot of anger and regret braiding itself into resolve. I let the wind pull at it until only the resolve remains. The ice appears on the horizon like a continent that decided to start earlier than the others and never stopped. The Fortress rises from it like an answer.

Zod wanted me divided—house or city, friend or stranger, past or future. He gets none of those binaries. He gets me, entire, with the work I’ve done and the language I’ve learned and the limits I respect only when they’re moral. Non is sleeping in a tomb he made for himself. Ursa is heavy in my arms but not as heavy as the choice that brought us here. The clone is loose in my city and thinks that means something he’ll enjoy. It won’t. I’ll teach him the way I learned—consequences first, then ethics.

The Fortress doors unfurl. I land in the central chamber, lay Ursa on a reinforced slab, and key the auxiliary field around her that we built and never thought we’d need this way. It snaps into place with a blue shimmer.

“Kelex,” I call, and wince at how much hope I’ve hidden in the syllables.

A light blinks in the damaged casing in the corner. He’s still with me. He’s still with us. “Kal… El,” he manages.

“I know,” I say, eyes on the dark corridor where Zod waits at the controls of my father’s ship. “Hold on.”

I square my shoulders, feel the sun in my bones, and step toward the man who thinks he knows what duty is. I’m done conceding definitions.

Chapter Text

The cloning bay glows like an eclipse—circles of cold light stacked above a cradle of alloy and cables. It smells like ozone and old sea. Zod stands at the control spine with his back to me, hands flying over a set of haptic rings that bloom instructions into the air. In the growth chamber, a shape is forming: not a body yet, just a scaffold of cells encouraged to believe they have a future.

He doesn’t turn until I’m close enough to hear the rings whisper against his gauntlets. He glances at the field where Ursa lies bound and unconscious, then at the empty stretch of air where Non should be. His expression barely changes, but satisfaction slips off it like frost in sunlight.

“You beat them,” he says. “And the clone. I confess—I didn’t think you could do all three before I finished the next iteration. Perhaps I have underestimated how uncompromising and morally righteous Jor-El’s son would be.”

“It’s better than the alternative,” I say. My voice sounds steady. Inside, a wire is humming.

He touches the growth field again. The scaffold shivers—a line of code deciding not to comply for the first time in its short existence. I take one step and the step becomes a blur and then I am at the console, palm on the cutoff. The field dies with a thud that only I hear. Silence blooms.

“Enough,” I say.

Zod looks down at my hand on the control, then up at my face. The flicker of amusement that crosses his eyes is too clean to be contemptible. “The hardest lessons are often taught by the worst punishments,” he says. “This is one of them. You are learning, Kal-El. I am pleased to be your teacher.”

I feel anger rise like a tide catching a low wall—quiet, then sudden, then too strong to ignore. Kelex on the floor with his chest plate torn. The cop’s steady hands holding the line while Ursa used bystanders to cut me. The crater where the clone landed and the blank space where he should have been. My mistake is ringing all these moments like a bell. I had believed him. I had wanted to. I let that want become a door.

“This is on me,” I say, because it is, and because saying it makes what comes next precise. “And I’m going to fix it.”

I hit him.

Not a feint. Not a warning shot. A straight right, shoulder stacked over hip, weight through the floor, no restraint. It lands. He absorbs it by turning at the last instant, letting the force travel through armor and bone into the console, which shatters backward like ice. He uses the recoil to step inside my reach and drive a palm up under my ribs. The breath leaves me in an explosion of heat; the impact carries me backward into a bulkhead that remembers, briefly, what a mountain is.

“Good,” he says, advancing. “Now you are worth my time.”

We fight.

I promised myself I’d make this easy to follow. So: no blur. One movement at a time.

He comes in with a left hook. I parry it with my forearm and answer with a jab to the collarbone—testing. He rides the jab, then stamps my foot. Pain spikes; he uses the flinch to rake my ear with an elbow. I duck the follow-up—an overhand meant to end this—and shoulder-check him through the next row of haptic rings. They spark and die. The cloning cradle powers down. Good. One problem less.

He grabs for my wrist. I let him take it—then rotate my elbow over his forearm to break the grip and snap a short punch to his jaw. He grunts. I kick at his knee. He shifts and the kick lands on shin instead. Armored. He counters with a knee to my thigh. The muscle seizes. I change levels and tackle him at the hips, driving him backward down the corridor.

We crash through a door into the gallery of the Archive. Crystals in their racks ring like struck glass. Zod slams both fists into my trapezius, a hammer-blow to collapse posture. I drop—by choice—and roll, hooking his ankle with my heel. He stumbles. I come up with a rising hook to the ribs. He narrows his eyes in appreciation.

“Two weeks,” he says, circling. “And you’ve already made the same mistake humans do with you. You think this is a contest of strength.”

“It’s a contest of will,” I say, matching his orbit. “And I’ve had more practice.”

He smiles; this one isn’t kind. He flicks heat vision at the ceiling—not a beam, a scatter—to bring down slats and dust. The distraction is cheap and it works. He crosses the space, shoulder-first, lifting and turning to throw me through the railing.

I fall one level into the machine shop. Tools spin out like shrapnel. I land on a rolling cart that tries to scoot out from under me; I stomp it into stillness and am moving before Zod drops in after me, cape-less, armor bristling, a black argument in a white room.

We exchange in a tight range: elbow, elbow, knee; forearm block, head movement, weight shift. He’s as strong as Non was and as cunning as Ursa—he sets traps three beats ahead and springs them without ceremony. I don’t give him three beats. I give him one. I press hard, keep the distance where I can feel his breath, deny him the space to spin up plans. Every time he tries to step out to reset, I touch him—a glove on cage wire—reminding his body it’s still in a fight.

He breaks the rhythm by going vertical—pushing off a beam, flipping over me, landing behind and kicking the back of my knee. I drop to a knee; he cocks a fist to hammer the base of my skull. I post a forearm against the floor, twist, and his fist hits floor instead, cracking alloy. I sweep his planted leg and follow with a palm-heel to the throat. He chokes once—out of surprise more than damage—and surges to his feet with a burst that takes us through the far wall into the hydroponics bay.

Water sprays in bright arcs. Plants I coaxed from Kryptonian seed go skidding across tile. We splash through the ruin. He grabs a pipe and rips it free, whips it at my head. I duck; it spears a tank behind me in a gout of water. He charges with the next section of pipe like a spear.

I stop backpedaling.

His point comes for my sternum. I meet it with both hands, angle it aside, and let it slide past. The momentum spins him a fraction and his flank opens. I slam a fist into the floating ribs under his armor hard enough that I feel the edge of a plate flex. He hisses and comes back with a headbutt. I take it—forehead to forehead, bright pain that fades as quickly as it arrives. He stumbles half a step; I don’t.

I hook his arm, step in, and hurl him shoulder-first through the bay door into the main spine. He rolls, kips up. I’m there: cross, hook, low kick. He eats the cross, parries the hook, checks the kick with an armored shin that vibrates my bones. He taps heat vision—a quick snap to my eyes. I close a lid and the beam pencils across my cheekbone, hot and irritating. He wanted a reaction. He gets nothing. I pick him up by his cuirass and throw him into the lift shaft.

He bounces off a maintenance ladder, catches a rung with one hand, and slingshots himself back out like a catapult. The heel of his boot slams into my chest and we go skidding together across the spinal walkway toward the hangar mouth. The big doors sense impact and begin to iris open in emergency protocol. Arctic air knifes in. Zod grabs the lip of the opening, swings, and boots me through the widening gap.

The cold outside is immediate and thorough. Frost takes a bead on my eyelashes and fires. I tumble across ice and come up on one knee, boots cutting a clean line. Zod follows, lands light, then heavy, then light again—he can’t decide whether to show me his weight or his ease. The wind takes his voice when he speaks; I hear it anyway.

“This lesson,” he says. “Brace yourself.”

He comes fast, not a blur—an arrow. He wants this clear too. Left hand feint, right hand spear, body behind it all. I parry the right, jam the left, step in to contest hips. He forces the clinch and I let him, then turn him at the waist and dump him. He rolls with it and regains feet. He’s smiling again. He’s enjoying this. He respects it.

We fight on the ice.

Here are the beats, so you can count:

He jabs. I slip outside, answer with a hook to the ear. He turns with it, minimizing damage.

He low-kicks at my calf. I check with my shin and wince anyway; bone against bone is honest work.

He tries a trip. I widen stance. He eats the failure and immediately switches to a body lock. I pummel inside to underhooks and lift. He posts a leg wide, breaks my leverage.

I break his rhythm with breath—cold, hard, narrow—icing the patch beneath his back foot. He adjusts weight late. His heel skids an inch. I shove. He stumbles. I throw a straight right that lands on the lip of his jaw. He falls.

He rolls backward, kips to feet, shoots in for my hips. I sprawl—hips heavy, chest light—and shove his head aside. He abandons the takedown and wraps my waist, then suplexes. I go up and over, twist midair, land catlike, come forward with a double that nails him before he finishes his recovery.

Heat vision—both of us, short pulses. Mine at his right pauldron to heat and soften it; his at my hands to force a flinch. I don’t flinch. The pauldron warps. He tears it off and throws it at my head like a discus. I swat it aside.

He tests the ground. I test the sky.

Up—just enough to change angles. I dive, shoulder into his sternum, and drive him fifty yards across the ice into a pressure ridge that shatters like sugar glass. He buries me in the debris with a blast of breath as cold as mine, then throws an elbow into the pile where my head should be. It hits ice instead. I worm through the rubble, come up under him, and cut his legs with a scything sweep. He drops to a knee. I knee him in the face. He grins blood and stands.

That’s the thing: he stands. He keeps standing.

A thin thread of fear slips under my breastbone—human-shaped, insistent. Two weeks under this sun has made him a problem for anyone. For me, he’s still a match. I am not used to matches; I am used to calculus. The thought arrives: Am I facing something beyond me?

And then—Lois, as clearly as if she were standing on the ice with her hands in her pockets, telling me like it’s a joke with sharp teeth: fear is an option, not a command. You can obey it, or you can disobey it.

I disobey it.

I stop thinking about what he is and start acting like who I am.

I press. I do not give him space to be clever. I deny the angles he likes, cut off his exits, make the fight small. Every time he tries to throw me far, I anchor to him with a hand, a grip, a sleeve. Every time he tries to go high, I go higher first. He swings big; I make the target small. He tries to set his feet; I melt a coin of ice beneath his heel and steal the platform. I use the wind that I know better than he does; I put it at my back and in his eyes. I talk less. I hit more.

He slows.

It’s incremental at first: a half-beat delay on recovery, a punch that doesn’t carry quite the same freight, a breath that sounds just a shade heavier. Two weeks of this sun is a gift he didn’t earn. Decades is muscle memory in every cell. The difference compounds. His guard slips. I find ribs again—three quick shots under the armor—and when his elbow drops to protect them I take his head, snap it sideways, and put him on his back.

He bounces and flings himself up—refusal is his skeleton—but I meet him mid-rise with a palm to the chest that sends him sliding. He gouges a trench and stops himself with a fist planted in blue ice. He’s breathing hard now. He looks up at the sun like he wants to negotiate terms.

“No more lessons,” I say, and mean it for both of us.

He roars—not theatrical, not for show; a sound pulled out of him by a thread he can’t cut—and charges. I step in, jam both his biceps with my forearms, and headbutt him. His eyes blank for half a heartbeat. That is enough. I hook a hand behind his head, another at his belt line, lift, turn, and slam him flat. The ice underneath us groans and then is still.

He lies there, chest heaving, eyes on the sky. Then he laughs once—a choked, small thing that acknowledges satisfaction and failure in the same syllable. He tries to sit up. I put a hand on his chest and press. He doesn’t get up.

“Up,” I say, and haul him anyway.

He struggles—a twist at the hips, a rake at my wrist, a kick at my knee—but it’s automatic. The strength behind it is dwindling. My grip doesn’t change. I drag him across the ice toward the open mouth of the hangar, boots skidding two straight lines that look like a signature. The Fortress feels me coming and opens its jaws.

Inside, the air is warmer and the light is honest. The cloning bay lies dark, panels shattered, the cradle silent. The Archive watches without judging. Kelex’s damaged frame blinks on the floor—a single steady light like a heartbeat that refuses to take instruction from anything but itself.

I take Zod to the central chamber.

The containment field we built around the Projector—the same one that held him when he first stepped into time—is still mounted. I keyed it to our biometrics. It listens to me like a dog that knows not to run into the street. I shoulder Zod through the threshold and drop him inside the ring. The field flares, humming to announce it has remembered its duty. He stands, swaying, finds his balance, and places his hands behind his back—not in surrender, not in mockery, but in a soldier’s habit that keeps the skin of his forearms unruffled by outcomes.

“Kal-El,” he says, voice rough. “You think this is over, and perhaps, for you, it is a chapter with a jubilant cadence. For me, it is a pause. That is all the Zone ever gives anyone. I will return.”

“If you do,” I say, meeting his eyes until I see the stubborn spark there stop looking for mine to move, “I’ll be waiting.”

He inclines his head by the width of a breath. There is no plea in him. There is no rhetoric left. Relief, maybe—a soldier recognizing that the battle’s geometry has declared itself and there’s no trick of terrain left to play. He looks past me once, toward Kelex, and something unreadable crosses his face. It’s gone before it becomes anything I can name.

“Kelex,” I say, without turning. “Status on the Projector?”

His voice comes thin, glitching, but proud. “Emitter—functional. Focus—stable. Lattice—within… tolerance.”

“Thank you,” I say. “For everything.”

“Fortress—holds,” he answers, and the light on his chestplate steadies, as if the statement itself has repaired a circuit.

I step to the dais. My hand knows the controls; my mind hates that it does. I dial the bridge up from minimal to operative: five percent amplitude to paint the veil; seven to deepen it; ten to make it a door. The air thickens in front of Zod, the shimmer returning like a scar learning how to itch. The hum of the lattice rises to a note that makes teeth ache.

Zod squares himself to it. Of course he does. He faces the thing he argued to use and suffered by. He accepts the horizon in front of him as a fact. He breathes once. He does not look back. He steps forward.

The veil takes him the way a lake takes a stone, without ceremony, without words. The field reads his passage and reports it in a soft chime.

Silence after. Real silence. Not an empty room—just a room with one less argument in it.

I lower the amplitude and let the shimmer fade until the air remembers it was always just air. The Projector powers down with a sigh. I rest my hand on the housing where the crest of the House of El is etched—a promise and a warning—then lift it away.

My body wants to stagger and doesn’t. I stand still and breathe until the adrenaline drains enough that I can feel the bruises underneath it. The Fortress hums, a sound like relief. The cloning cradle’s lights are dead. The hydroponics bay drips in the distance. Somewhere a pipe pings as it cools.

I kneel beside Kelex. His optics brighten a little when my shadow crosses his faceplate. Up close I can see the delicate scoring where a hand tore at him; I can also see the neat work he did on himself even while broken, temporary patches across critical lines, triage on his own skin.

“You did well,” I tell him.

He tries to shake his head and thinks better of it. “I… failed to… prevent intrusion.”

“You bought me time,” I say. “You told me what I needed to know. You kept the Fortress alive. That’s not failure.” I touch the crest on his chest with two fingers—light, because everything that matters is fragile—and then stand again.

The city waits. So does Ursa. So does a clone with my face and no compass. There is work to do—repairs to the Fortress, calls to make, apologies I owe and can’t make yet, not in full. But for the first time since the crest on the Projector flashed in the mill, the knot behind my heart loosens. The worst version of this story didn’t get to finish its sentence.

I look up at the window where the light pools golden against ice. The sun sits there, bright and indifferent, writing its energy onto everything without asking what we plan to do with it. Decades under it have made me into a man who can make this choice and live with it.

Zod was right about one thing: the hardest lessons sometimes arrive as punishment. I won’t forget this one. I won’t let it make me smaller. It will make me sharper.

I key the outer field tighter around Ursa. I ping the city scanners with a pulse only a handful of people will recognize as me and get back the confirmation I need: the police perimeter holds; the casualties are fewer than they might have been; the crater has turned into a neighborhood conversation instead of a memorial. I send one message to a number that will be waiting for it even if she pretends she wasn’t.

I’m okay. Situation contained. More later.

 Three dots. Then: Knew you would be. 

I smile at the screen, pocket it, and turn to the work in front of me. The Fortress needs my hands. The city needs my back. And if the Zone returns what it took again someday, I will be here, ready to make the choice again, with clearer eyes and steadier hands.

“Let’s fix our house,” I tell Kelex.

His optic flickers once in assent. The Fortress hums in agreement.

And somewhere beyond time, a soldier stands at attention and waits for another door. He can. I’m not afraid of doors anymore.

Chapter Text

The Fortress holds its breath when I carry Ursa into the chamber. 

She’s still half in the fight—jaw clenched, hands flexing at nothing, a soldier’s body refusing the order to stand down even as consciousness loosens its grip. I set her inside the containment ring and nod to Kelex. The field hums awake with a clean, blue shimmer.

“Emitter?” I ask.

“Nominal,” Kelex says. His voice is steadier now—patched and proud. He has replaced one optic lens with a spare that’s a half-shade off; the effect makes him look like he’s winking at the world.

“Focus?”

“Stable.”

“Then let’s end this.”

The Projector’s face gathers light as if remembering an old habit. The air thickens into a pane that isn’t there, the way heat becomes visible over desert roads. I look once at Ursa—at the set of her mouth that doesn’t know how to shape the word surrender—and then I look away, because respect sometimes means not witnessing the moment you hope will make a person better even when you know it won’t. I press the control. The veil takes her without a sound.

Non is heavier in my arms, a shut door carried down a hall. He groans once as I lower him into the ring, the kind of sound you could mistake for a machine stalling if you didn’t know that machines envy this sort of stubbornness. The field answers. The veil opens. He goes with the same brute inevitability with which he greeted everything else. No ceremony. No last look.

When the chamber is quiet, I rest my hand on the housing where the crest of the House of El is etched. The metal is cool under my palm, and for a moment I imagine my father’s touch on the same mark, decisions on his shoulders heavier than mine and less forgiving. I step back and exhale a long, slow breath that leaves a taste like old snow at the back of my throat.

“Kelex,” I say, “record this as closure for current threat protocol.”

“Recorded,” he says. “And Kal-El—”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for returning the Fortress to itself.”

“Together,” I say. “We did it together.”

He doesn’t correct me. We both know I’m being generous with credit, and that generosity is a choice worth practicing.

I don’t linger. Metropolis doesn’t wait, not for grief or triumph or anything in between. There are still sirens in the city’s voice; there are still windows you can read the sky through that used to be walls. I push off into the air that immediately tries to file the rough edges off me. The Arctic shrinks behind me into a smear of white and intention.

Back in the city, the work is simple in a way that lets me keep breathing. I lift beams. I shore up walls. I freeze leaking gas lines, thaw hydrants, ferry firefighters two at a time from places no ladder can reach. I hold IV bags at shoulder height while an EMT steadies a hand against a life that doesn’t want to be steady yet. I kneel in glass-strewn streets and listen for anything that sounds like a voice you can still answer, and when I hear it I lift the street. I speak little.

When I do speak, I speak mostly to one person. Lois finds me in the field because of course she does. She wears a hard hat like she hates it and boots like she was born in them. She doesn’t lead with questions; she leads with water bottles and triage lists and a kind of authority that makes men twice her size stop and listen.

When I do let her put a recorder near my voice, the sentences are brief and exact.

“Why did they come?” she asks me on the third day, standing in the shadow of a burned-out bus depot that now smells like wet ash and hot plastic.

“They followed me,” I say. “That’s on me.” I don’t say from where. I won’t give the Zone another door.

“Where are they now?” she asks. Her pen doesn’t move. She will remember the words without needing ink to hold them down.

“No longer a threat to Earth,” I say. “My focus is on Metropolis.”

The quote runs that night on page one. Three sentences, precisely balanced, none of them letting a flame jump to a fresh wall. The newsroom calls it a masterclass in emergency messaging. Lois calls it a start and tells the copy desk to strip adjectives.

I talk to other press when I must. Mostly I don’t. A microphone is a siphon and I don’t have the luxury of being turned into an essay when a person in a stairwell needs to hear a voice telling them help is here. I let the city’s camera phones take their peace. I let Jimmy take the photo he’s been waiting a decade to take—me, shoulder to shoulder with a firefighter beneath a collapsed awning, both of us dusty and unphotogenic and grinning like the building decided to be kind for once.

In the background of all of it, a different voice rises, amplified across screens and front pages. Lex Luthor’s face appears wherever glow meets attention. He is too smart to shout. He worries aloud. He regretfully invites accountability. He hypothesizes that perhaps the line between protector and provocateur is thinner than we’d like. He wonders why a man who can bring gods to heel also brings gods to our door.

Some people nod along. Some roll their eyes. Most just keep sweeping their stoops and hauling bags and passing out sandwiches and putting their city back the way it was by the time anyone had the gall to tell them it shouldn’t be. I don’t answer Lex. If there’s a language he can’t hear, it’s silence. But if there’s an argument I can win, it’s in the shape of a rebuilt wall and a street empty of sirens.

The days lengthen and loosen. Ambulance wails recede into the usual weather. The rope lines around the crater get replaced by orange cones and bored cops making sure the teenagers don’t skate the smooth parts. A graffiti artist paints a mural of hands on the side of a building nobody loved before it was hurt; the hands are all different sizes and colors and they’re holding the city up. Somebody sticks a “Lex for Mayor?” sticker at the bottom and someone else peels it off gently and throws it out. I watch it happen from five blocks away and let myself laugh.

A week and some days after everything, the newsroom sounds like itself again. The morning meeting is back to a mix of municipal theater and real urgency. Perry throws a crumpled memo into the trash and misses; Jimmy retrieves it and slam-dunks with a flourish that makes Perry pretend he’s annoyed. Cat walks by with a headset on and a smile sharp enough to peel fruit. “Lane, your Luthor follow-up sings,” she says, not stopping. “Kent, your profile of the EMTs is better than your tie.”

Lois smirks at me across the table. I tug the knot looser an eighth of an inch to acknowledge the hit. We are busy, and the busyness feels like prayer.

At lunch I make a show of being very concerned about an email. Then I stand up quietly and make my way to the staircase. No one stops me. They have their own fires to tend.

The roof is a relief every time. It smells like hot tar and paper and wind that’s had to work to get here. The Daily Planet globe hums like a giant bicycle wheel turning in air, and when the light hits the letters at the right angle it makes them look like they’re moving forward even when they’re still. I walk to the edge and look down at the street, which is also back to being itself—buses sighing, bikes darting, cabs honking in a Morse code that spells out nothing but impatience and love.

The news cycle has finally surrendered to its own appetite: a city council scandal that would be funny if it weren’t expensive; a celebrity chef opening a restaurant where the food wants to be forgiven; a missing dog with a better headshot than some of our freelancers. All of it matters to someone. None of it will matter tomorrow. This isn’t cynicism. It’s health. The world can’t live at a boil. It has to simmer or we burn.

I think about resilience the way you think about a word you used all your life but only recently understood. Humans have a way of putting themselves back together that doesn’t make sense if you map it. They grieve and work and make jokes and forget and remember and bring casseroles to people who never liked casseroles and post signs that say WE GOT THIS on windows that still have crack lines like spiderwebs. They get bored with tragedy at exactly the right time. They don’t call it a superpower. I do.

“Figured I’d find you up here.”

Lois’s voice arrives not like a surprise, but like the end of a sentence I wasn’t sure how to finish. I turn. She’s standing in the doorway, wind trying to steal a piece of her hair and getting scolded for it. She crosses to where I’m leaning and takes my spot without asking, the way people do when they’ve earned a place.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” she says back. We stand there for a while, looking down at the city like it’s a story we’re sharing even if we’ll write very different versions of it.

“Where were you,” she asks, casual enough to pass for small talk if it weren’t us, “when the Kryptonians hit downtown?”

I knew this question would arrive. I built answers for it the way a person builds a shed out back—useful, sturdy, designed to hide tools. I pick one up and try it on.

“Family emergency,” I say lightly. “It came up fast.”

She nods as if that makes sense. Then, a beat later, the follow-up: “And where were you when they were in the city?”

This answer is built, too. “Sheltered in place,” I say, matching her tone.

“Right,” she says. “Except no one saw you after you sprinted out of the morning meeting. And I mean no one, Clark. You vanished like a plot hole. And that same second, our friend in blue started showing up in places the GPS on your phone would swear you weren’t.”

Her voice isn’t accusatory. It’s… careful. And there’s something underneath it I can’t ignore, something like disappointment’s smarter cousin.

“Lois,” I begin, reaching for another shed with another lie inside.

She turns to face me fully and pins me to the tar paper with a look. “There’s something going on,” she says, no flanks left open. “I want the truth.”

There’s a reflex in me that’s older than this conversation. It says: protect her by keeping her out. It says: the fewer people who know, the fewer targets you’ve painted in a world that doesn’t need help choosing who to hurt. I’ve lived by that reflex since I learned what leaving fingerprints on air can do. It has saved people. It has broken me in ways that don’t show on X-rays.

I open my mouth to deploy it one more time and it dies on my tongue. Not because I’ve come up short of words. Because I am tired in a way that no sun can fix. Two lives are heavy. Two lives held wrong are heavier. I think about the woman who walked into a burning paper mill of a newsroom the day we met and threw me a lifeline by taking my copy and making it better, and another lifeline by making me laugh, and a third by building a standard and then believing I could meet it. I think about the kiss under the awning that still makes my knees act like they’re new to this job. I think about the fear she pulled me out of like pulling me out of a riptide by the collar.

I loosen my tie. She watches that small move like it’s the tip of an iceberg and waits to see how big the rest is.

My fingers go to the buttons. One, two, three, and the red and the blue are there in the small triangle of truth I just cut into my shirt. The wind, finally successful, lifts both fabrics at once.

“I’m Superman,” I say. The sentence is ridiculous and sacred and somehow manageable once it’s out in the air between us.

Lois doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t step back. She doesn’t say she knew or that she had no idea. She does the thing that is her superpower: she gets specific.

“Who else knows?” she asks, and the question is a negotiation with reality, not a test.

“My parents,” I say. “That’s it.”

She nods once. The wind toys with a piece of hair and she lets it, just this once. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because anyone who knows could be put in danger,” I say, and I hate how rote it sounds until I hear the part of it that is still raw. “Every time I’ve seen someone used against someone else, it—” The sentence breaks in the middle because I’ve learned not to finish it. I try again. “I don’t want to hand my enemies a list. And I don’t want to look at you and calculate how many contingencies I can build around your life.”

“I can handle contingencies,” she says, almost gently. Then, not gentle at all: “Do you love me?”

There’s a beat where the air is too thin to breathe. Then she rescues me from my own cowardice by stepping closer and taking a handful of my shirt and pulling me into a kiss that burns all the paperwork I was writing in my head. I’m not careful. I don’t need to be. We kiss like we’ve been learning how to for weeks in sentences and finally let the paragraph happen. Her hands are strong where they hold me. I put a palm at the small of her back and feel the line of her body and something in my chest loosens that has been too tight since I learned how to pretend to be two people.

When we break, it’s because laughing has become necessary.

“So that’s a yes,” she says, breath a little shorter, eyes brighter.

“That’s a yes,” I agree, and I can’t stop smiling, which is going to be a problem downstairs. “I love you.”

“Good,” she says, and it lands like a promise, not a verdict. Then her reporter brain clicks back on with a sound I’ve come to love. “Okay. New question. How do we do this?”

“We?” I repeat, dazed and grateful that she gave me the plural before I asked for it.

“We,” she confirms. “You and me. Clark and Superman and Lois. I don’t want to be in a story I can’t report on because I’m too busy being in it. But I also don’t want to be the last to know when you’re bleeding in an alley. We set rules.”

“Rules,” I say, relieved to have something practical to hold. “Okay. First rule: you never, ever become my source on Superman without telling Perry.”

She laughs. “I would pay good money to see you say that to him.”

“I will,” I say. “Second rule: you can ask me anything, and I will answer unless answering will get someone hurt, and if I can’t answer I will tell you I can’t and why. No more lies. I can’t do it anymore.”

“Good,” she says, and the word is warmer this time. “Third rule: you don’t keep me out to protect me. You tell me when you can. I decide what I can carry.”

“Deal,” I say. “Fourth rule: if Lex goes after you—” I stop, because the part of me that wears the cape wants to say if Lex breathes your air wrong and the part of me that wears the tie knows better. “If anyone goes after you because of me, we go to Perry. We go to the cops. We go to whatever law exists that will take our side. We do not make a vendetta out of a newsroom.”

“Look at you,” she says softly. “Ethics even when your heart is screaming for revenge.”

“It’s loud,” I admit.

“I like you loud,” she says, then glances down at my chest, at the triangle of color. “I also like the shirt. It’s very you.”

I rebutton slowly, not because I want to hide, but because it feels like we should mark the moment. The tie goes back where it belongs. The wind leaves us alone. The city keeps moving under our feet because that’s what it knows how to do.

Lois looks over the ledge again, then back at me. “For the record,” she says, “your stories got better when you started lying less.”

“I’ve noticed,” I say. “I think a good editor might be responsible.”

“Flattery?” she asks, eyebrows up.

“Fact-checkable,” I say.

We don’t go back downstairs right away. We stand and watch Metropolis be itself. A kid pedals past a bus and races his own shadow. A dog refuses to cross at the light until his person agrees to a different route. Somewhere, sirens rise and fall the way they always will. The globe hums above our heads and spins and spins and spins.

“Lex’ll keep sniping,” Lois says finally.

“I know,” I say.

“He’ll try to use this,” she says, tipping her chin toward my shirt, toward the life I just handed her.

“I know,” I say again. “He’ll fail if we’re careful. If we’re smart. If we don’t let him write the sentences.”

She bumps my shoulder with hers. “Good thing we’re writers.”

“Good thing,” I say.

She takes my hand and squeezes once—firm, like checking a grip before a climb. “You’re allowed to be happy, you know.”

“I know,” I say, and for the first time, I don’t feel like I’m lying to either of us.

We go back inside. The stairwell is cooler than the roof, full of the smell of paper and coffee and ink—church, by another name. At the landing, she stops me with a palm on my chest.

“One more rule,” she says.

“Name it.”

“When you have to go,” she says, “just go. Don’t waste time thinking up excuses. Tell me ‘I have to go,’ and I will cover for you, and later you will tell me what you can. The city needs you more than I need a neat story.”

“Okay,” I say. The relief is immediate and enormous. It makes my knees weak in a way Zod never did. “Okay.”

We step into the newsroom. It looks the way it should: catastrophes reduced to manageable shapes on whiteboards, jokes riding in the slipstream of hard work, Perry yelling “Lane! Kent! Stop fraternizing and start filing!” with a grin that makes the bark into a handshake.

“Yes, chief,” Lois calls back, already moving toward her desk, already reaching for the phone, already doing the job that keeps this city honest.

I sit. My keyboard is where I left it. My notes are a mess in a way that makes only me happy. I open a new document and for a long moment just look at the blinking cursor, which looks like a tiny man jumping up and down saying come on, come on, get to it.

Okay, I tell it. Okay.

I start typing—about resilience, about work, about the way a city remembers itself after someone tries to teach it a different story. I write about first responders and neighbors and hands. I do not write about a kiss on a roof. I don’t need to. It will inform every sentence anyway.

Across the room, Lois looks up and meets my eyes. She doesn’t nod. She doesn’t wink. She just smiles, small and real, and goes back to work.

I do too.

Chapter Text

The newsroom has its rhythm back. 

Phones ring with urgency that’s routine, keyboards chatter like rain on rooftops, and the Planet globe outside the windows turns and turns as if it’s always been there, unbothered by anything that tried to shake the city. I’m at my desk, sleeves rolled to the elbows, working on a feature about volunteers rebuilding the southside library. Half my notebook is full of quotes about insulation and roof trusses, but the other half is filled with stories people wanted me to hear—why they showed up, why they stayed, why they believe that putting a book back on a shelf is a civic duty. Those are the parts I’ll keep.

I’m in the middle of polishing a sentence when Perry’s voice cuts through the newsroom: “Kent! My desk, now.”

I push my glasses up, grab my notebook out of habit, and cross the floor. He’s got a paper unfolded on his desk, the Central City Citizen, headline splashed across the top in bold red font: THE RED BLUR: CENTRAL CITY’S MYSTERIOUS NEW HERO.

“Take a look,” Perry says, tapping the page with a thick finger.

I skim quickly. Eyewitness accounts. Security footage stills blurred into streaks of crimson. Stories of muggers tripped up before they knew they were running, of fires doused before alarms finished ringing, of people pulled out of harm’s way by someone who moved faster than the eye could follow. The article speculates—guardian angel, metahuman, maybe even a hoax. The photographs make it clear it’s no hoax.

Perry watches me read, arms folded. “Central City’s got itself a protector. Or at least, it thinks it does. People are buzzing. Citizen’s running this front page, others are picking it up. Won’t be long before it turns into a circus. I want to know if it’s a show worth watching, or if this ‘Red Blur’ is the real deal.”

I fold the paper back along its crease and set it down. “You want me to go.”

“That’s right,” Perry says. “You’ve got the nose for this, Kent. You’ve written about Superman better than anyone else in this city—and don’t give me that aw-shucks routine, you know you have. If anyone’s going to get under the hood on this speedster, it’s you.”

He leans forward, lowering his voice, though the rumble carries far enough for Jimmy to crane his head from across the room. “And if it is the real deal, if Central City’s got its own cape, we want the story before Luthor’s PR machine spins it into another problem.”

I nod, slow. My mind’s already splitting—one part cataloging the questions I’ll need to ask, another wondering who this Red Blur really is, another filing away the thought that Metropolis isn’t the only city learning what it means to have someone watching out for them.

“I’ll pack a bag,” I say.

“Good,” Perry grunts, leaning back in his chair. “Train leaves at six. Don’t miss it. And Kent—” His tone softens, just barely. “Watch yourself out there. Blurs don’t stop bullets.”

“I’ll be careful,” I promise.

I turn, catching sight of Lois at her desk. She’s half-buried in notes, but her eyes flick up, meeting mine for the briefest second. She doesn’t ask where I’m going—she knows better than most that news has a way of pulling me off the map. Still, there’s a question in her smile, a silent: You’ll tell me later?

I give her a nod, small but certain. Then I grab my jacket off the back of my chair, the Citizen tucked under my arm, and head for the elevator.

Metropolis hums below the Planet’s windows, stronger every day, still carrying scars but proud of them. I take one last look at the city I love before stepping into the elevator. Perry wants a story. Central City has a mystery. And me?

I’ll find the truth. One way or another.