Archive of Our Own

The Dutch plains were flat, green, and, in the opinion of Lena Luthor, extremely good at hiding things.

She had been walking for six hours through a forest that had no business being there. It was young by the standards of her work, a hundred-odd years of birch and oak and stubborn bramble, but it had swallowed a town whole. Under the roots and the moss, if you knew where to look, there were foundations. A hearth stone. A well. The crooked line of what had once been a street.

"Tell me again," said Andrea Rojas, from somewhere behind her, "why we're doing this on foot."

"Because the road ended four miles ago."

"The road was a suggestion."

"The road was a cow path, Andrea."

"A cow path with ambition." Andrea hacked at a bramble with a machete she had not needed to bring, and which she was clearly enjoying. She was a tall, sharp-eyed woman in a field jacket that was somehow still clean after six hours in a forest. "Lena. If this turns out to be a very old pig farm, I want you to know I'm going to be insufferable for the rest of the decade."

"It's not a pig farm."

"You don't know that."

"I know it's not a pig farm," said Lena, and pushed aside a curtain of ivy, "because pig farms don't have this."

The ivy fell away.

Andrea stopped talking.

It was a church. It stood alone in a clearing, ringed by the trees as though they had stepped back to give it room. It was small, and old, and wrong. The front was plain stone, as in any Catholic chapel, but the arch above the door was carved with a sunburst, and the windows were set in a pattern that matched no Christian tradition Lena had ever studied. Something between a chapel and a temple. Something someone had wanted to be both.

It was also, against every reasonable expectation, complete. The roof was whole. The door was shut. The town around it had rotted back into the earth, and the church stood in the middle of it like a held breath.

"Okay," said Andrea, quietly. "Okay, that's not a pig farm."

"Told you."

"I retract everything."

"You're allowed one more joke before we go in."

"I'll save it."

Inside, the air was cool and dry and still, and the light fell through the windows in long gold bars. There were wooden benches, worn smooth. There were shelves of wooden bowls and spoons, rolling pins, and a great scarred kneading board, the sort of ordinary household clutter you'd find in any old parish. But there was no altar. In the center of the nave, on a low round plinth, stood a statue.

It was a woman.

She was carved in pale gray stone, life-sized, and so lifelike that Lena's breath caught. She wore a simple long gown, cinched at the waist, and a cape that hung in carved folds down her back. Her hair fell in loose waves past her shoulders. One hand was held out, palm up, as if offering something. The other rested over her heart. Her face was tilted a little upward, toward the high windows, toward the light.

She was smiling.

It wasn't a solemn saint's smile. It was a warm, easy, delighted smile, like she had just heard good news and couldn't wait to share it. In all of Lena's years of studying holy figures, she had seen weeping Madonnas and furious gods, serene Buddhas and terrible Kali. She had never seen one that looked so happy.

"Whoever carved her," said Andrea, softly, "liked her."

"Yes," said Lena.

"A lot."

"Yes."

Around the base of the plinth ran two lines of text. The upper line was in a script Lena had never seen, a flowing, angular, looping glyph-work that did not belong to any culture she knew. She ran her fingers an inch above it, not quite touching, and felt the strangest sense of something almost familiar. The line beneath it was in Old Dutch, and that she could read.

In respect of the goddess of the sun, bring food and protection to our homes.

"Food," said Andrea.

"Food and protection."

"For a sun goddess. You'd think she'd want, I don't know, a harvest festival. Human sacrifice. A really nice sword."

"Apparently," said Lena, "she just wanted people fed."

They found the book on the second day.

It was Lena who noticed the panel in the rock wall behind the plinth, a stone slab with a hairline gap that didn't match the others. It took twenty minutes with a thin steel pick and a great deal of swearing to ease it open, and behind it, wrapped in oilcloth and perfectly dry, was a thick, hand-bound book.

There was an inscription on the cover, in Old Dutch.

For those who look for the goddess's grace.

Lena opened it. The pages were thick, creamy, and covered edge to edge in the same flowing glyphs as the statue's base. Hundreds of pages. Not a word of anything she could read.

"Well," said Andrea, peering over her shoulder. "That's a lot of homework."

"It's incredible."

"It's a novel-sized homework."

"It might be the only surviving text in an unknown writing system," said Lena, and her voice had gone soft and strange, the way it always did when she was about to disappear into something for a month. "Andrea. Nobody has seen this script. It isn't in any database. It isn't in any museum. It might not be human."

"Wow," said Andrea. "Okay. Now you're being dramatic."

"I'm being accurate."

"You're being the kind of accurate that means I'm not going to see you for a year."

Lena didn't answer. She was already turning the pages.

Andrea sighed, pulled up a camp stool, and set about unpacking the tents.

---

It took Lena three months to understand how the alphabet worked.

She set up camp in the clearing, a tent, a generator, a folding table and her laptop, and she photographed every page of the book, and every inch of the statue's base, and fed it all into the identification program she'd been building since graduate school. It sorted. It clustered. It spat out patterns. It was wrong a hundred times for every time it was right.

At the end of the third month, it told her that the script was a syllabic alphabet with forty-one base characters, written left to right, with modifiers above and below the line. That was all. She still couldn't read a word.

Andrea left at the end of the fourth.

"I've got a lead on that reliquary in Portugal," she said, shouldering her pack at the edge of the clearing. "It's real this time. There's a monastery with a basement."

"There is always a monastery with a basement."

"This one has two." She hesitated. "Will you be okay out here by yourself?"

"I'll be fine."

"You'll forget to eat."

"I will not."

"You'll live on coffee and protein bars and stare at a statue until you start talking to it."

"I would never."

"Lena."

"I'll eat," said Lena, and smiled, and Andrea hugged her, hard, and promised to call. She did call, twice a week, for the first month. Then once a week. Then it was whenever she remembered, which was mostly when she had something exciting to say about a monastery.

Lena didn't mind. She was busy.

By the sixth month she had mapped the entire town.

It was a slow business. She walked the forest with a metal detector and a ground-penetrating radar, and she found the iron fittings of doors, the broken edge of a plow, a child's wooden horse, a hundred clay pipes. She found a cemetery with no graves, only a field of small, rounded stones that had once been markers. From these scraps she laid out the whole village on her laptop: forty-three houses, a mill, a bakehouse, a well, a green. And in the middle of it, the church.

Then, slowly, she began to find words.

She cross-referenced the glyphs against the objects she dug up. A bowl with a symbol scratched on the bottom, which the program matched to a repeated glyph in the book, and which Lena, on a hunch, decided meant bowl. A spoon. A flour sack, with the remains of a brand. Meat, milk, salt, egg. She built a vocabulary one fragile word at a time, like a woman laying a rope bridge across a canyon.

By the eighth month she was exhausted, half-starved on camp rations, and no longer sure whether she was translating or inventing.

Then the first page came apart in her hands.

She read it three times.

She sat very still, in the lamp-lit tent, at three in the morning, with a thermos of cold tea and a laptop full of notes, and read it a fourth time.

It wasn't a creation myth. It wasn't a hymn, or a prayer, or a prophecy, or a lament. It wasn't the story of a goddess, or a war, or the founding of a town.

It was a list of ingredients.

Flour. Eggs. Milk. A pinch of salt. Sugar if you have it. Honey if you don't. Knead until it stops fighting you. Let it rest. Fry in good oil until golden. Eat while hot.

And, at the top of the page, in letters a little larger than the rest, a title.

OIL CAKES.

Lena stared at it for a very long time.

Then she began, helplessly, to laugh.

She laughed until she had to put her head down on the table. She laughed until her eyes watered, and her ribs hurt, and the tent walls seemed to ring. She had spent eight months in a forest in the Netherlands. She had survived mosquitoes, rain, and the loneliness of a place so quiet she could hear her own pulse. She had cracked an unknown writing system by hand.

And it was a cookbook.

"Oh, you absolute," she said, to the empty tent, to the statue in the dark across the clearing, to the whole smiling, ridiculous, silent town, "you're a recipe book."

Nothing answered.

She turned the page. And the next one. And the next.

Bread with seeds. Soup for a hard winter. Dumplings (the good ones). What to do with too many apples. Cakes for a wedding. A stew for when someone is sad.

There were hundreds of recipes. Each was written in a different hand, as though a whole village had taken turns, and in the margins, in tiny glyphs, were notes. Grandmother's way. Not enough salt. Too sweet. Ask Her. In one corner, beside a recipe for a plum tart, a small, neat hand had drawn a smiling face.

Lena sat back.

Something warm and aching, something she had no name for, moved in her chest.

A whole town had written down how to feed each other. And then they had built a church around it.

She didn't know what had happened to them. She didn't know where they had gone. But she knew, as clearly as she had ever known anything, that she liked them very much.

She looked at the recipe again.

She looked at the supply crate in the corner of the tent.

She had flour. She had eggs. She had milk powder, and a bag of sugar, and a bottle of vegetable oil she'd been saving for who-knows-what.

Fry in good oil until golden. Eat while hot.

"It's four in the morning," she told herself.

She was already reaching for the flour.

---

She mixed the dough by lamplight, in a tin camp bowl, with a wooden spoon she'd found in the church. She didn't measure; the recipe didn't give measurements, only feelings. Knead until it stops fighting you. She kneaded until her arms ached. She let it rest under a damp cloth while the sun came up in a long pink line over the forest.

Then she carried the bowl, and the camp stove, and a pan, into the church.

It felt right. She didn't question why.

The morning light was pouring through the windows in long gold bars. The statue stood at the center, smiling up at it, one hand held out. Lena set up her stove at the foot of the plinth, rolled out the dough on the old kneading board, and cut it into rounds with the rim of a tin cup.

Three of them she left whole, as the recipe said.

Then, on an impulse she couldn't explain, she took a bottle cap and pressed it into the center of the other three, punching a little hole in the middle of each.

"For even cooking," she told the statue, as if it had asked. "Heat gets in the middle. It's science."

The statue went on smiling.

She fried them in good oil until golden. The kitchen smell of it filled the old stone nave, warm, sweet, ridiculous, and four centuries out of place. She lifted them out one by one onto a plate, and rolled each one in sugar, and stood looking at them in the light, three plain ones and three with holes.

Oil Cakes.

"Well," she said. "Here we are."

She picked up one with a hole and bit into it.

It was wonderful.

It was crisp at the edge and soft in the middle, tender and sweet and warm, with a faint taste of honey from the sugar she'd burned just a little. It was the best thing she had eaten in eight months, which was admittedly a low bar. But it was also, she thought, the best thing she'd eaten period.

She stood there, chewing, with sugar on her fingers, and for the first time in a long time, she felt less alone.

Then she did something strange.

She put the plate down in front of the statue.

"For you," she said, softly. "Since I'm in your house."

She felt a little ridiculous. A little tearful. She wiped her hands on her jeans and turned toward the door, to get another cup of tea, and—

Crunch.

Lena froze.

Crunch. Crunch.

It was a very small, very satisfied sound. It was the sound of someone biting into something crisp, and chewing, and making a happy little noise in the back of her throat.

"Mmmmm."

Lena turned around, very slowly.

The statue was still on its plinth. But it wasn't gray.

It was pink. Warm gold, and pale rose, and the soft cream of living skin. Her hair was the color of wheat in the sun. Her gown was a deep and brilliant blue, and her cape, a swirl of red, hung down her back in real folds, stirring in the faint draft. She was standing, barefoot, on the stone plinth, with a sugar-covered donut in each hand and a smear of sugar on her cheek.

She looked at Lena.

Lena looked at her.

"Oh," said the woman, with her mouth full, in a language Lena had never heard in her life, "for Rao, these are so good."

Lena, who had a doctorate and a reputation for staying calm in a crisis, sat down very hard on the nearest bench.

The woman crunched. She swallowed. She made another small, blissful sound, closed her eyes, and said something long and enthusiastic in a language that sounded like music being poured over rock. She held up the donut in her right hand, the one with the hole, and peered at it with deep scientific interest.

She said something else.

She poked her finger through the hole.

She said something very excited.

"I don't," said Lena, faintly. "I'm sorry. I don't understand."

The woman paused. She looked at Lena properly for the first time, and her whole face changed. She hopped down from the plinth, still holding both donuts, and stood in front of her with her head tilted, studying her.

She was tall. She had blue eyes. She had a sunburst of freckles across her nose, and a gentle, open, curious, absurdly kind face, and she was looking at Lena the way a child looks at a very large dog, with delight and total absence of fear.

She said something, slowly, in Old Dutch.

Lena's heart skipped.

It was an ancient, rough, strangely accented form of the language, but it was Dutch. She caught perhaps one word in three. Who. You. These.

She held up the plate.

She tried one word in the language she'd been reading for months, and then, clumsily, the same word in Dutch, then English.

"Oil cake," she said. "Donut. Do-nut."

"Doe-nut," said the woman, with enormous care, rolling it around her mouth. She grinned. "Doe-nut."

And then, very gravely, she took a bite of the other one, and said it again.

"Doe-nut."

Lena put her face in her hands.

She was laughing again, helplessly, and her eyes were wet. She was a scholar. She was a doctor of linguistics. She was a Luthor. She was in the middle of a forest, in the middle of the Netherlands, talking to a woman who had just stepped out of a statue, and the first word they had managed to share was donut.

"Okay," she said, to herself. "Okay. Hold on. I have a thing."

The thing was the app.

It was the one project she hadn't talked about, the one she'd built in the long, cold nights of month five, when the alphabet wouldn't yield and the loneliness had grown loud. It was a translator. Not the usual kind, built on matched corpora and common phrases, but something stranger, a system that listened to a language until it found its structure and then built its own grammar from scratch. It had never been tested on anything but a handful of dead dialects.

She pulled out her phone, with trembling hands. She held it toward the woman, and pressed a button.

"Say something," she said. "Anything."

The woman blinked. She looked at the phone. She said a long, rolling sentence in her own tongue, and the phone listened, and thought, and whirred, and a tinny voice said:

"Is this a magic mirror? It's very small."

The woman jumped.

She stared at the phone. Then she said, in a delighted rush:

"It talked!"

"IT TALKED!" said the phone, in a cheerful synthetic voice.

The woman clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes went round. A glorious, helpless, wondering grin spread across her face, and she looked up at Lena with such joy that Lena nearly cried.

"Who are you?" said the phone, in careful Old Dutch, as Lena spoke into it. "What are you?"

The woman handed her the second donut, gravely, as if it were a treaty. Then she drew herself up, with great dignity, and put a hand over her heart.

"I am Kara Zor-El," said the phone. "Of the House of El. My people called me the Princess of the Sun." A pause, as the phone caught up. Then, in a smaller voice: "Are you a Saxon? Or a Briton? You talk very strangely."

"Irish," said Lena, and the phone repeated it. "I'm from Ireland. Is a, a descendant of Gaelic, I suppose. But I'm speaking English. A modern version of the tongue the Britons spoke."

"Modern," said Kara, with great interest. And then, with the careful carelessness of someone who has been dreading a question and finally asked it: "What year is it?"

"Two thousand twenty-six."

Kara went quiet.

Lena watched her face. She watched the delight slip, and the wonder fade, and something older and more tired settle behind her eyes. It was a very long way down. She watched her do the arithmetic, and then, with a visible effort, set it carefully aside.

"That is a long way from the last time I was awake," said the phone, softly.

"I'm so sorry."

"I suppose," said Kara, with a small, strained smile, "that if I went looking for my old friends, I wouldn't know anyone."

Lena didn't have anything to say to that.

She took her hand instead.

Kara looked down at their joined hands, and then up. Her eyes were very blue and very bright.

"Thank you for the oil cake," she said.

"You're welcome," said Lena, and the phone said it too, and this time, Kara laughed.

-----

They talked for nine hours.

They sat on the church floor, in the light of the high windows, with the plate of donuts between them, and the phone propped on a stone, translating in both directions. Lena made a second batch halfway through. Then a third. She learned not to ask Kara whether she was hungry, because the answer was always yes.

She learned the story in pieces.

"There was a war," said Kara, cross-legged on the floor with a donut in each hand. "A big one. Long before the town. The kind you don't forget. I fought a battle so hard that my powers were spent. I used everything I had. When it was over I was only a girl with no strength, in a field full of broken people."

"What kind of powers?" said Lena, carefully.

"Oh," said Kara, and licked sugar off her thumb. "Many. I could fly. I could lift things. I could see through walls. I was very hard to kill." A small, rueful smile. "I'm not, now. Not quite."

"Not quite?"

"I need sunlight, and I need food. Lots of food. That is the whole of it, and it's a long story. The villagers took me in. They fed me. They gave me a bed and a bowl of soup, and, well, I was too tired to be anything but grateful." She looked down. "They were very good cooks."

"So they built you a church."

"They built me a church. I didn't ask them to." She lifted her chin, indignant. "I told them not to. I said I was not a goddess, I was a girl from space with a bad sunburn. But then the harvest was good three years running, and they got ideas."

"A girl from space," said Lena, flatly.

"Krypton," said Kara. "It's a planet. It's a long way."

"Right," said Lena, and, after a moment, to her own surprise, "I believe you."

Kara blinked. "You do?"

"I've been looking at a statue that came alive for the last nine hours. It would be rude not to."

Kara beamed.

"Then came a second war," she went on, quieter, "and a bad one. A warlord, with a very large army, coming for the town. I couldn't fight him. I had nothing left. So I told them to run." She put the donut down. "I told them to leave everything and run, to go far, to be safe, and I would keep the road. The church was the last place I could stand. I put every last thing I had left into the stone. I made a wall. The soldiers came, and they couldn't get in. And they couldn't stay out. And in the end they went away."

"And you stayed."

"And I stayed. I was so tired. I thought, I'll rest a little while. A week. A month." She looked at her hands. "The sun got in through the windows every day. The food, well. There was always something on the plate. A small kindness, left there by people who'd stopped believing, but kept on leaving it anyway. It kept me, you know. Hanging on. Half asleep. A statue." She gave a small, rueful laugh. "And then a woman came, and made oil cakes."

"With holes in them."

"With holes." Kara pressed a hand to her heart. "I have not had a hole in an oil cake since my own mother's kitchen on Krypton. I thought I was dreaming."

"The hole's for even cooking," said Lena.

"Whoever thought of it," said Kara, with deep reverence, "is a genius."

"It was me."

"Then you are a genius."

Lena felt herself blush to the roots of her hair.

She tried to change the subject. "So what's the curse? You said it's a long story."

"Oh, it's not a curse. It's more of a, it's the wall." Kara waved a hand at the church. "I put myself into the stone to hold it, and the stone put some of itself into me. I can't go farther than the doors, not without help, and I can only stay awake when I'm full, and in sunlight. Otherwise I get sleepy, and I turn to," she waved a donut at the plinth, "that."

"So you need to eat. A lot."

"A lot."

"And you need sun."

"And I can't leave the church."

"Can't you?" said Lena, and stood up, and walked to the door. She pushed it open. A great wash of afternoon sunlight spilled across the stones. Beyond it lay the clearing, the trees, the camp, the flat green world.

Kara stared at the doorway.

"I can't go out there."

"Have you tried?"

"Not for four hundred years."

"Try."

Kara got to her feet, slowly. She walked to the threshold with the careful, lurching step of someone who has forgotten how to be afraid and is relearning it in real time. She stopped at the line of the stone. She put out one bare foot. She hovered.

"If I turn to stone," she said, in a small voice, "will you make more donuts?"

"I'll make you a hundred."

"Then," said Kara, "all right."

She stepped out into the sun.

For a long, held moment, nothing happened.

Then Kara let out a breath.

She turned her face up to the light. Her hair caught fire. Her skin glowed, a warm, living gold, and something in her seemed to unfold, the way a flower does, or a cat in a patch of afternoon sun. She spread her arms. She laughed, a bright, startled, joyous sound, and spun in a slow circle on the grass, and the red cape swirled out around her like a flag.

"Oh," she said, in her own language, and then, in the cheerful voice of the phone in Lena's hand: "Oh, I forgot. I forgot how much I missed it."

Lena didn't say anything. She just watched, with her hand pressed to her mouth.

It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

"I can stay," said Kara, laughing. "I can stay out here! The wall, it doesn't, it let me go. Lena! Lena, I think it's because someone opened the door!"

"I think," said Lena, "it's because someone gave you a donut."

"Both."

"Both," Lena agreed.

Kara flung her arms around her, and lifted her clean off her feet, and spun her around in the sun. Lena yelped. Kara laughed. A thin shower of powdered sugar fell from Kara's sleeve and drifted down onto the grass like snow.

When she set her down, they were both a little out of breath.

"So," said Lena, adjusting her glasses, "I suppose you'll need clothes."

"I have clothes."

"You have a nightgown."

"It's a very nice nightgown."

"It's four hundred years old."

"It's vintage," said Kara, with dignity, and Lena laughed, and the long, lonely silence of the forest broke for the first time in nine months.

Behind them, in the open door of the church, the plinth stood empty, with a sugar-dusted plate at its foot. And if you looked very carefully, the stone seemed to hold the faintest, most satisfied smile.

------

It took eleven days to get Kara Zor-El out of the Netherlands, four hundred euros in emergency luggage, one very confused customs officer, and a great deal of sugar.

The customs officer was the worst part. He looked at Kara's temporary papers, which Lena had procured through a chain of favors she would never discuss, and then at Kara, who was wearing jeans, a cardigan, and a look of intense joy, and said, "Purpose of your visit?"

"I'm moving in with her," said Kara, in careful English.

"Moving," said Lena, "to the apartment. It's a figure of speech."

"It's a very good apartment," said Kara. "It has a couch."

The officer looked at the two of them for a long moment. Then he stamped the papers and waved them through, and did not ask a single further question, which Lena would later decide was the finest example of Dutch civil service she had ever encountered.

Lena's apartment in National City was a high, sunny, white-walled place with big windows and too few furniture pieces, because Lena had never really been home long enough to buy any. It had a couch, a desk, a kitchen she barely used, and a long wall of shelves full of books. Kara stood in the middle of it, in the late afternoon sun, and turned slowly in a circle.

"It's very tall," she said.

"It's the eighth floor."

"And the windows are so big."

"I like the light."

"I like the light too," said Kara, with deep feeling, and walked straight to the biggest window, sat down on the carpet, and tipped her face up into the sun like a cat. After four minutes of this, she sighed, stretched, and said, in the voice of someone describing a religious experience, "Lena. I think I'm going to live here."

"You are absolutely going to live here."

"Do you have any food?"

"I just did a grocery run."

"How much?"

"Enough for a week."

"Oh," said Kara. "That's sweet."

Lena would remember that sentence later, when the refrigerator was empty by Thursday.

She had not known, in the church, how much Kara ate.

Everything had been a blur of donuts, a stove, and astonishment. But in the apartment, in the plain light of a kitchen, with a goddess standing at the counter with a spoon, the scale of it became clear.

Kara ate breakfast. Then she ate a second breakfast. Then she ate, "a snack," which was a loaf of bread, a wheel of brie, and the better part of a jar of honey. She ate lunch, and then she ate whatever Lena had been planning on eating for lunch. She learned the word "takeout" on the first night and the word "unlimited" on the second. She watched, with reverent silence, a cooking show on Lena's tablet, and said, at the end of it, in a hushed voice:

"They fry things."

"They do."

"On the television."

"They have a channel for it."

"They have a channel," said Kara, and her eyes filled with tears.

Lena learned very quickly to keep granola bars in every room, because the first time Kara ran out of food in the middle of a sentence, she simply stopped. Mid-word. Her eyes closed. Her head tipped back against the couch. She let out a soft, comfortable little snore, and when Lena shook her, she didn't wake.

For one horrible second Lena thought she was turning to stone.

Then she remembered the plate.

She grabbed a cookie. She waved it under Kara's nose.

Kara's eyes snapped open.

"Oh," she said, with her mouth already full. "Thank you. That was close."

"You can't do that," said Lena, sinking onto the couch with her heart in her throat.

"I know. I'm sorry. I didn't feel it coming."

"I thought you were, I thought you'd gone."

"I'm so sorry." Kara put a hand over hers. "I won't let it happen again."

"You'll carry snacks."

"I'll carry snacks."

"In every pocket."

"In every pocket," Kara agreed, and from then on she did, and Lena found granola bars in the lining of her coat, her shoes, and, once, a very confused-looking sandwich in her laptop bag.

The sun, at least, was no trouble. Outside the church, with the walls no longer holding her, Kara drank it in like water. An hour on the balcony in the morning and a walk in the afternoon gave her all she needed, and she took to sitting in the sun with her eyes closed and her face upturned, so still and golden that the neighbors across the way started waving.

"They think I'm a yoga person," she told Lena, brightly.

"You are a yoga person."

"I'm a goddess."

"Yes, but in this building it's the same thing."

-----

The reading lessons were Kara's idea.

"You've been staring at my book for nine months," she said, on the third night, as they sat on the couch with the cookbook open between them and a pizza box on the floor. "I want you to read it."

"I got through the first page."

"You got through the first recipe. It's very different."

"Is it?"

"There's hundreds of them," said Kara. "And the best ones are at the back." She tapped the page. "Come on. I'll teach you. It's my language, I should be allowed to."

So, over the course of a week, Kara taught Lena to read Kryptonian.

It went faster than either of them expected. Lena had already done the hard part, the structure, the patterns, the forty-one characters. What she lacked was the sound, and the grammar that lived inside the sound. Kara read the recipes aloud, in a soft, sing-song voice, with a finger under each line, and Lena followed along, and the symbols that had been a dead code for nine months began to come alive.

She learned that the looping mark above the line meant warm, and the dot below it meant please. She learned that the characters at the top of every page, which she'd been reading as a title, were actually the name of whoever had written it. She learned that a small spiral in the margin meant I made this and it was good.

"But how did they know how to write it?" she said, on the fifth night. "Your language. The villagers. Why would a Dutch farming town write a cookbook in Kryptonian?"

"Because I taught them," said Kara.

"You taught them?"

"They didn't have a cookbook. They had recipes in their heads, which they argued about. Everyone's grandmother did it differently." Kara scratched her cheek. "I said, you should write it down. They said, we don't know how. So I showed them. My letters are quick and simple and the sounds are very clear, easier than Dutch, I think. And they took to it." A small, wondering smile. "Some of them wrote more neatly than I did."

"They kept it in a secret panel."

"They kept it for me. So that if I ever woke up hungry, they would have left me something to cook."

Lena looked down at the book in her hands.

"The title on the cover," she said slowly. "For those who look for the goddess's grace."

"Yes."

"They meant you. They meant that whoever found it, and cooked from it, would find you."

"I think," said Kara, "that they hoped."

She was quiet for a moment.

"I'm glad it was you," she added.

Lena found that she couldn't answer, so she turned the page.

-----

Lena began the search that night.

She didn't announce it. She simply opened her laptop on the kitchen table, set a mug of tea beside it, and began, quietly, to build a list.

The book was the key. Every recipe was signed by its writer, in the little glyphs at the top. She cross-referenced them against the cemetery stones, the church's doorframe, a ledger she'd dug out of the mill foundations. By the end of the first night, she had two hundred and ten names. By the end of the second, three hundred and four.

"There could be thousands of families," she told Kara, over a very large breakfast. "If they survived. If they had children. Four hundred years is a lot of time. A town of two hundred people could be, well, anyone, now."

"You're going to look for them?"

"I'm going to look for them."

"All of them?"

"Well. As many as I can."

"Why?"

Lena stirred her tea. "Because someone should," she said. "They built you a church. They left you plates of food for four hundred years. They wrote a cookbook." She looked up. "And you're sitting in my kitchen, wondering where they went, and trying very hard not to look like you are."

Kara's face went still.

"I'm not trying."

"You're doing a very bad job."

"I miss them," said Kara, in a very small voice.

"I know."

"I want to know if they were okay."

"I know."

"I'd like," said Kara, and stopped, and tried again. "I'd like to see them. Their children's children. Just once. Even if they don't know who I am."

Lena reached across the table.

"Then we'll find them," she said.

----

On the seventh day Andrea came home.

She had been in Portugal for five months, in a monastery, with two basements, chasing a reliquary that turned out to be a very old and very decorative soup tureen. She was tanned, tired, and a little smug, and she had two boxes of pastel de nata under one arm and a key to Lena's apartment in her pocket. She had made herself a copy years ago, for emergencies, and Lena had never been quite brave enough to ask for it back.

She let herself in.

"Lena," she called. "I've got great news, and I've got pastries, and I want a full report on the, the statue, did you ever get that thing to talk?"

She stopped in the doorway.

There was a woman on the couch.

She was tall, and blonde, and barefoot, and she was sprawled across the entire length of the sofa like a very large cat, one leg draped over the back, one arm trailing on the floor. She was wearing one of Lena's oversized sweaters, a pair of Lena's sweatpants, and an expression of deep, bone-deep contentment. There was a bowl of popcorn balanced on her stomach. On the coffee table lay a plate with the crumbs of what had once been an entire cake. A cooking show was playing on the television, muted.

She turned her head and looked at Andrea.

"Hello," she said, in careful English. "Are you the one with the pastries?"

Andrea looked at the pastries.

She looked at the woman.

She searched her own head for an extremely reasonable explanation, and found the shelf empty.

"Lena!" she called, in a faint voice.

"Coming!" came the answer, from the kitchen. "Don't talk to her yet, I'm trying to, oh. Oh no."

Lena appeared in the doorway with a dish towel and a spatula. She took in the scene at a glance: Andrea in the doorway, Kara on the couch, a box of pastries, a very long pause.

"Andrea," she said. "You're back."

"I am."

"You didn't call."

"I wanted to surprise you."

"It's very surprising."

"Lena," said Andrea, very calmly. "Who is that?"

"That's Kara."

"Hello," said Kara, and waved a handful of popcorn.

"And where, exactly," said Andrea, "did Kara come from?"

Lena took a breath. "The statue," she said.

Andrea's mouth opened.

It closed.

It opened again.

"I told you," she managed, at last, "I told you you'd start talking to the statue."

"I didn't just talk to it."

"I said that! In the church! I said you'd be alone out there until you went mad and started having conversations—"

"I did not go mad."

"You brought it home."

"She walked."

"She walked," said Andrea, in a voice of hushed and dreadful wonder, looking at the popcorn bowl, the sweats, the cake plate. She took a step into the room. Kara waved again, cheerfully.

"She's very nice," said Lena. "She's, well, she's the goddess in the church. She's an alien. Her name is Kara Zor-El, she's about four hundred years old, and she'd like to know if those pastries are for her."

"They're," said Andrea, and looked at the box she was holding, and, slowly and without any apparent conscious thought, held it out. "They're for you."

Kara took one.

She bit into it.

Her whole face lit up.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's wonderful. What is it?"

"A, a custard tart. From Portugal."

"They have a country for it?" said Kara, in awe, and ate another one.

Andrea sat down on the arm of the armchair, very slowly, like a woman lowering herself into a bath.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?" said Lena.

"Okay. I'm going to accept this. I'm going to sit here and be extremely calm, and in a week I'll be fine." She looked at Kara, who was eating a third tart with total concentration. "How many of those can she eat?"

"All of them."

"That's fair."

"She's a goddess."

"That's very fair," said Andrea, and took one for herself.

They told her everything.

It took an hour, three pots of tea and the second box of pastries. Kara explained the war and the wall. Lena explained the cookbook and the list. Andrea listened, with her chin in her hand, and her eyebrows rising slowly toward her hairline, and when they finished, she said, simply:

"You're going to find the villagers."

"We're going to try," said Lena.

"All of them? Four hundred years' worth?"

"One at a time."

"And Kara's coming with you?"

"I'm coming," said Kara.

"On planes?"

"I've already been on one. It was very loud." A pause. "They gave me a little bag of pretzels. It was the best day of my life."

Andrea looked at the two of them for a long moment: the dark-haired scholar and the blonde goddess, side by side on the couch, with a plate of crumbs between them and an enormous cookbook open on the table.

Something shifted in her face.

"You know," she said, "I've been after relics for fifteen years. Golden idols, forgotten tombs, a very large soup tureen." She stood up. "I've never once found one that wanted to come home with me."

"She's not a relic," said Lena, sharply.

"I know," said Andrea, and smiled, a little crookedly, and rested a hand on Kara's shoulder. "I know. I'm just saying that's the best find any of us ever made."

Kara looked up at her. Her eyes were bright.

"Thank you for the tarts," she said.

"Thank you for existing."

"That's very nice."

"I'll stay out of your way," said Andrea. "I'll keep the apartment warm. I'll water the plants. You two go and do your thing." She looked at Lena. "Call me when you find something."

"I will."

"I want a full report."

"You'll get one."

"And Lena?"

"Yes?"

"You look happier than I've seen you in five years," said Andrea, quietly, and then, because she was Andrea, "Don't let it go to your head."

-----

It took Lena exactly one week to find the first family.

She found them by accident, in the end. She had been tracing a surname, Otter, that appeared eleven times in the book, always in the margins of the pastry recipes, always with a little drawing of a fish or a flour sack. The name was rare. It had not survived in the Netherlands. But it had turned up, in a Prussian guild record of the early 1700s, listed against a baker who had moved to Berlin and opened a shop in a small street near the river.

Established 1736.

The shop was still there.

It was a narrow, honey-colored building on a cobbled lane, with a green door and a hand-lettered sign. Bäckerei Otter. Seit 1736. The windows steamed in the morning chill. A smell drifted out into the street, warm and yeasty and sweet, and when Kara smelled it, she stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk.

She stood still for so long that a man had to walk around her.

"Kara?" said Lena.

"That's the bakehouse," said Kara, in a strange, soft voice.

"It's a different building."

"It smells like the bakehouse." She put a hand over her mouth. "Oh. Oh, Lena. It smells like Tuesday."

"Tuesday?"

"Bread day," said Kara. "The whole town got up before dawn. Old Hendrik, and his daughters, and the boys who carried the wood. The whole green smelled like this." Her eyes were wet. "I used to sit on the wall and watch them bring the loaves out."

Lena took her hand.

"Do you want to go in?"

Kara nodded, once.

They went in.

The shop was a long, warm, crowded room with a wooden counter and shelves stacked with golden loaves, pretzels, seeded rolls, and glazed pastries in neat rows. A bell jingled over the door. Behind the counter stood a tall, round-shouldered man of about sixty, with flour on his forearms and a grandfatherly squint, who looked up and smiled.

"Guten Morgen," he said.

"Guten Morgen," said Lena, in her best German, and then, because it was not very good, switched to English. "Good morning. We were hoping, we're looking for Herr Otter?"

"That is me. Matthias Otter." He wiped his hands. "What can I get for you?"

Kara was staring at the pastry case.

She was staring at one tray in particular, a round tray of fried, sugar-dusted rings, each with a neat hole in the middle.

"Those," she said.

Herr Otter followed her gaze. "Berliner Ringe," he said. "Old family recipe. A hundred and fifty years we have made them like this. A hole in the middle, so they cook evenly. The Oma says it is better."

Kara made a very small sound.

"Two," said Lena, quickly. "Two, please. And, and a coffee. Two coffees. And Herr Otter, I hope this isn't strange, but we'd like to ask you about your family history."

The baker raised his eyebrows. "My family?"

"Your family's very old. It goes back, I believe, to a town in the Netherlands. A small town, in the forest, with a church."

His hands stilled.

"What church?" he said.

Lena reached into her bag.

She set the book on the counter.

For a long moment, Matthias Otter didn't say anything at all.

He stared at the cover. He touched it, very lightly, with one floury finger. Then he straightened, and turned, and said something over his shoulder in rapid German to a young woman in the back, who vanished into the kitchen, and came back thirty seconds later with a key.

He led them through the shop, and down a flight of narrow stairs, and into a cool stone cellar lined with sacks of flour. In the corner stood an old iron safe. He opened it with a hand that trembled.

Inside, wrapped in cloth, were three books.

The first was a German volume, handwritten, from the nineteenth century. It was a cookbook, with a title page in an elegant, looping hand: Rezepte der Familie Otter. The second was older, much older, and cracked, bound in worn leather, in the heavy, half-forgotten Dutch of the sixteenth century. It had the same recipes, in the same order.

The third was bound in plain brown cloth. It was thick, creamy, and tied with a faded ribbon.

He opened it.

The pages were covered in flowing glyphs.

"My grandmother's grandmother's grandmother," said Herr Otter, in a hushed voice, "gave this book to her daughter. She said, Keep this. Keep the recipes. One day someone will come looking. We did not know what it said. We only knew that we must keep it." He touched the page. "My father baked from the German copy. He told me the old one was a mystery. A book of a language that nobody could read."

"It's Kryptonian," said Kara.

He looked up.

She had stepped forward, very quietly. She had tears running down her face. She put a hand on the open page, over one of the little glyphs at the top, and said, in a voice that cracked:

"That's Otter."

"I, what?"

"It's the name. The one who wrote it. Otter." She laughed, wetly. "That's Anneke Otter. She made the best plum tart. She used too much cinnamon, and she never admitted it. Her daughter had a crooked little finger, and she used to drum it on the table when she was nervous. Her husband was always burning the bread." She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist. "I knew her. She was my friend."

Herr Otter stared at her.

"She was," he whispered, "my, my ancestor. Eleven generations."

"She was a very good baker."

"She, you, how," said Matthias Otter, and then, with a visible effort, stopped, and drew a deep breath. He looked at Lena. He looked at the book. He looked, for a very long time, at the young blonde woman, in a borrowed cardigan, weeping softly over his family's most precious secret.

Slowly, the way a man steps onto very thin ice, he said:

"Are you her?"

Lena opened her mouth.

"I'm Kara," said Kara. "I'm a friend of the family."

It was, as it turned out, enough.

He sat down on a flour sack and put his face in his hands. And when he looked up again, there were tears in his own eyes, and a smile on his face so wide and so astonished that it took ten years off him.

"We kept it," he said. "All this time. We kept it."

"You did," said Kara, softly.

"We kept it."

"Thank you," said the goddess of the sun, and bowed to him, a small, grave, old-fashioned bow, from the waist, the way she'd once bowed to his great-great-great-great-grandmother. "Thank you for the bread."

They stayed until closing.

They traded stories and photographs and the long, tangled history of a family that had walked out of a forest in a time of war and never forgotten. Herr Otter told them about a cousin in Hamburg, an aunt in Basel, a branch in Lyon. He told them his father's stories, in which the old town was a golden place, full of singing, where nobody ever went hungry. He made them tea. He made them eat.

He did not make Kara eat. He just kept bringing food, and Kara kept eating it, until, around four in the afternoon, he stopped, and looked at the pile of empty plates, and said, very slowly:

"Ah."

"Sorry," said Kara.

"No, no. It is," said Herr Otter, delighted. "It is exactly what the old stories say."

He gave them a copy of the German cookbook, a list of three more families he thought might know something, and a bag of sugared rings for the road.

At the door, he took both of Lena's hands in his.

"Thank you," he said. "I don't know what you are, or what this is. But thank you. My father would have, he would have been so happy."

"It was our pleasure," said Lena, and meant it.

X. The Grace
It was dusk when they stepped out onto the cobbled lane, with a paper bag of donuts between them and the last of the light turning the river to gold.

They walked for a while in silence.

Kara had a donut in one hand. She was holding it, not eating it, a thing so unprecedented that Lena kept glancing sideways, waiting for her to say something.

At the corner, by the river, she stopped.

"Lena."

"Mm?"

"I've been thinking."

"About?"

"The plate," said Kara. "In the church. The sign said, for those who look for the goddess's grace. It was a, you know. A promise. A, a thing that happens. If you wake the goddess and you feed her, she gives you something. A blessing. A wish."

"I read that."

"And I never," said Kara, awkwardly, "gave you anything. You woke me up. You fed me. You taught my book to speak. You've given me a home, and a family, and, and the sun, and I have just been standing here, eating your food, and—" She stopped. She turned, and faced her squarely, in the dusk, with the river lights behind her. "I would like to give you something. A wish. Whatever you want. It's what I owe."

"Kara," said Lena. "You don't owe me anything."

"I do."

"You don't. I got what I wanted. The knowledge, the language, I got to find the Otters. That's, that is more than enough."

"But I want to."

"I know."

"So ask."

"There isn't anything."

"There's always something."

Lena looked at her. She looked at the long fall of golden hair, and the soft blue eyes, and the single bright trace of sugar on her chin. She thought of nine months in a forest. She thought of a gold-lit church, and a plate with a bite taken out of it, and a voice saying oh, for Rao, these are so good.

She felt the color climbing in her cheeks.

"Well," she said, carefully. "If I had to ask for something."

"Yes?"

"It's very silly."

"I'll love it."

"It's not very, I mean. I wouldn't want, only if you wanted to."

"Lena."

"A kiss," said Lena, in a very small, very fast voice. "I'd like a kiss."

Kara went quite still.

"A kiss," she said.

"You don't have to."

"From the goddess."

"I told you it was silly."

"It's not silly," said Kara, softly, and stepped closer. She smelled of sugar, and cinnamon, and warm sun, and she put one hand, very gently, against Lena's cheek. "It's the best wish I've ever been asked for."

"Is it?"

"I think I've been waiting for someone to ask," said Kara, "for four hundred years."

And she kissed her.

It was slow, and sweet, and a little sugary. It tasted of warm bread and sunlight. It went on for a long time, there at the edge of the river, with the lights coming on one by one along the water, and a donut, forgotten, balanced precariously in Kara's hand.

When they finally broke apart, Lena was dizzy.

"Wow," she said.

"Yes," said Kara, a little dazed. "That was, yes. I think the goddess just got more out of that than the supplicant."

"Then I'd say it's a fair trade."

"Very fair." Kara beamed. She looked, for a moment, utterly unguarded, like a girl who had just discovered the whole sky. "Lena. I liked that a great deal."

"I did too."

"I'd like to do it again."

"That can be arranged."

"But first," said Kara, and brought her hand down, very seriously, on the paper bag, "we need to find the other families."

"We will."

"All of them."

"All of them."

"And Lena?"

"Yes?"

"There was a thing, on your little screen. At the apartment. I saw it between the fried things." She leaned in, with enormous gravity, as if sharing a state secret. "It was cold. It came in a cone. People lick it."

"Ice cream?"

"Ice cream," said Kara, with reverence. "I would like to know about ice cream."

Lena laughed.

She laughed so hard that she had to hold on to Kara's arm. She laughed until the river lights blurred, and the cobbles swam, and a stray gull wheeled overhead, annoyed at the noise. She laughed with the particular helpless joy of someone who has spent nine months alone in a forest, and found, at the end of it, the best possible company.

"Come on," she said, wiping her eyes. "There's a place on the corner. I think you're going to like it."

"Will they have a hole in the middle?"

"No."

"That's fine," said Kara generously. "I'll forgive them."

"That's very big of you."

"I'm a goddess," said Kara, and took her hand. "We're very forgiving."

They walked down to the river together, in the long gold light, with a bag of donuts and a cookbook and a list of three hundred and four names. Somewhere ahead of them were the descendants of a village that had loved a girl from the sun. Somewhere were more recipes, more tables, more quiet, ordinary kindnesses that had kept her alive for four hundred years.

They had all the time in the world to find them.

And the adventure, as they say, had only just begun.

----

Epilogue:

Kara's first scoop of gelato was pistachio.

She tasted it. She went very still. She turned to Lena with her eyes wide and her whole face luminous, and said, in a hushed and trembling voice:

"It's cold and sweet at the same time."

"I know."

"Why did nobody tell me?"

"I believe," said Lena, "the Italians tried."

The gelato man, who had been watching with growing alarm, said something in rapid Italian. Lena's phone, which had learned several new languages in the last week and was, frankly, enjoying itself, translated:

"Madam, if you are going to cry, please do it away from the display."

"I'm not crying," said Kara, who was. "I'm having a spiritual experience."

She had a second scoop. Then a third. Then the gelato man, wiping his eyes, gave her a fourth, on the house.

Somewhere in Berlin, in a flat above a bakery, a man in a flour-dusted apron was telling his grandchildren a very strange story. Somewhere in a high white apartment in National City, a woman with a key and a very large soup tureen was watering Lena Luthor's plants. And somewhere under the roots of an old forest in the Dutch plains, a small stone church stood quietly in the dark, smiling in the way of places that have been loved, with a plate on the floor, left out for whoever came next.

There would be more recipes, and more families, and more sunlight.

But first, there was ice cream.

Final.