A/N: All right, folks. I think the story stands or falls on whether this chapter works. Help me, if you will, with the believability of the interactions, motivations and decisions here. Let me know where I pulled it off, and where I didn't. This should be my most educational experience here yet.

"This isn't really," Jimmy told me, the morning Kal had set to propagate his species, "the job I first signed up for."

He'd been saying the same thing since his first week at the Planet. But the meaning had changed over the years.

The first time, he'd meant exactly what he said. Perry had just sentenced him to three days of background reading, before he could come with me to the ribbon cutting for Metropolis Children's Hospital. That time, when Jimmy complained about it, Perry took him into his office for an hour, to explain the difference between photography and photojournalism in unforgettable detail.

For the next couple of years, "not the job I first signed up for" was an inside joke Jimmy and I told each other, while picking locks or crawling belly-down through sewage.

And then more recently, it had become his wistful, not-quite-bitter commentary, on the strangeness of trying to make the latest shatterfall site look any different from the last one.

That morning, when he leaned against my doorway –he's gotten so tall, I thought - and said those words in a low, measured tone that hadn't cracked for years, it meant federal agents were back in his darkroom again.

No doubt under our old friend Santos.

I'd been useless and half-present all that morning, till that moment. I kept seeing the silent weight on Kal's shoulders, the half-plumbed depths of grief and worry still in his eyes when he'd last left. So when my eyes met Jimmy's, as the spark of our mutual anger lit up, I was almost glad for the distraction.

This was the fourth time agents had come through the Planet, searching and questioning, in the three months since Perry's arrest. One of those had cost Jimmy the accidental exposure of a week's worth of negatives. The others were just time-consuming, nerve-racking and galling.

And I had never really managed to alter them at all. I had watched the first time, shouted and waved my arms around the second, and heckled the third. The men had finished their questions and searched their targets one way or another, regardless.

But affecting them wasn't really the point.

Because since the day Kal came for Perry, things had never been the same. The Lord of the Skies had fought for us. He had taken our side against our own government. We had taken damage, but under his protection, we were still standing. I'd never seen the investigative staff as darkly cheerful, as intense, as purposeful as they'd become in the months that followed. We had published three exposes of federal-cult connections in the last three months. My people saw battle lines coalescing. They saw themselves as the standard-bearers.

A grandiose delusion, all of it. But the same time-honored delusion that's entranced us investigative reporters since the birth of the profession.

And it meant my staff couldn't stand to take unconstitutional searches from an unconstitutional law quietly any more. I couldn't stay completely silent. My people would be heartbroken.

And so of course this had happened today, when Kal was under kryptonite.

"You want me to just keep quiet, this time?" Jimmy was saying.

I shook my head. "Let's go." I wouldn't let my mouth run away with me. I'd step carefully. I'd stand between them and the staff, but not escalate the situation.

I followed him to the darkroom, past the several agents stationed around the bullpen, while the staff all watched silently from their cubicles. I found Santos and his men rooting around in the darkroom with the negatives, with the lights off, wearing night vision goggles.

I stood in the doorway and flipped on the light. Santos and his goons stood there blinking dazedly in the fluorescents.

"You gentlemen find Deep Throat in the cuttings bin, yet?" I demanded.

Then it occurred to me that flipping on the light was petty, and everything I'd done so far counted as escalating – they had been making some effort at causing minimal damage. They couldn't have known Jimmy had finished processing his batch last night.

Funny - nothing I just did was remotely illegal, but I'm already afraid. Not so brave, without Kal in the skies, are you, Lane?

"Always hopeful, Miss Lane," Santos said blandly. "We don't come for the coffee."

That was so irritating I forgot to be nervous again. Apparently Santos wanted to frame us as having some kind of playful banter. Some token friction, where the government bickers with the Fourth Estate but everyone's really on the same side. Not going to happen, with Perry sitting in a city jail to stay out of a federal ghoulag.

But I also wasn't going to overreact and let him paint us as hysterical and uncooperative. I kept my voice level.

"My staff doesn't work well when you're here. You can't help that, and neither can I. What has to happen before you can leave?"

"You could give us your Chief's source," he said seriously. "Stop pretending there's something here to make a stand over."

That was funny, because it confirmed what I'd suspected the first three times, about why they were really here. And because Santos didn't seem to care whether I knew it.

Well, I cared. That might be a real way to end these surprise visits. If I played it right. Because it had to be guesswork on his part that I knew anything about the source at all – all my conversations with Perry were monitored, and there was no conceivable proof that I had the contact protocols or could ever have gotten them after the arrest.

"Santos," I told him, "I'd hand him over baked in gravy to get my newsroom back. If you're so sure he's federal, that means you people trained him to be sneaky. I can't help you." The words were false, but the bitterness was real.

I came up to him, there in Jimmy's little fortress hung with prints, stepping over basins of sloshing chemicals to get there. "We both know this is about pressure, not evidence. But what you don't get is that the only person in the room who was surprised, the day you came for Perry, was me. Don't think that isn't eating me alive, but it's true."

He stood there looking down at me for a moment. Then he glanced past me, at the doorway. I looked back. One of his men from the bullpen was there. Whatever the man been mouthing, he clamped his lips shut the minute he saw me turn.

I glanced back at Santos. He met my eyes again and sighed. And then, unbelievably, he gestured to his men and they followed him out past us.

They had to pass through the whole bullpen to the exit, through the long morning light coming down through the high wall windows. Staff watched from the cubicles, and from the railings of two floors of balconies above. No one was gauche or foolish enough to actually hoot as I marched them out.

I followed them outside, wondering what other crisis of national security needed the Metropolis team even more urgently.

Santos did turn after the doors closed behind us. "Don't put on that little performance, Miss Lane," he had the audacity to say softly, "with anyone else but me."

For a moment I thought he meant the part about not knowing the source, and my heart skipped a beat. Then I realized he meant my reckless posturing before. But this bid for the role of the fair-minded lawman, after he'd tried to deliver my Chief into a living hell, made me angrier than anything he'd done yet. I laughed incredulously.

"Does someone else do the bad cop," I answered, "or do you play both sides?"

It wasn't especially clever, but he blinked. Then he turned to go. It was so satisfying, for one moment, that it made me realize how eager I was to be angry.

And then I remembered again that we were alone today.

And Kal was alone too, and in pain, giving something incandescent and earthshaking to the same many-handed creature that had just probed a few fingers into the Planet.

Suddenly, watching them go, I just felt tired.

When I got back inside, someone whooped and the clapping started. I rolled my eyes and waved people back to work, but the taste of it was spoiled in my mouth.

Back in my office, I dropped back down in my chair and rubbed my eyes. Well done, Lois. Needlessly provocative. Maybe Santos really does want to be a decent guy.

But I could still hear laughing outside from the staff. They had needed that. No one but Jimmy had even heard any of the words between us. But seeing someone go to face the hounds – that, they needed.

The way Metropolis needs Superman? Is that what you think you are for the Planet?

I thought, irrelevantly, of the way people gathered at his rescue sites lately, to touch his cape or his body as he passed. The way they handed him their babies to hold for a moment. He always looked uneasy, in his own way, but he took them. He didn't understand it, but he knew it was what they needed.

The difference is, he can protect them. Not perfectly. But enough to justify their hope.

Where are you leading the staff of the Planet, Lois Lane? How well will you protect them, when Kal's under kryptonite and the next Santos comes for the next Perry? They think they're outlaws already. They think, God bless them, that they're already fighting the battle.

I knew better. I knew from fifteen years of military childhood in failed nations, from a life of Dad and Perry's dinnertable talk, that we'd seen nothing yet.

I got out of my chair and went back to the doorway. I watched the staff getting back to work, drinking coffee, taking calls and putting calls on hold.

I can't protect any of you. Maybe I should stop putting you in danger. Maybe we should go back to the days before Kal ever met my eyes at a shatterfall site and made me ashamed of what we'd become.

God of my father, keep them safe. Don't let them pay for my grandiosity and my short temper. Give us a little time, a little peace, to figure all this out.

Of course, even if I muzzled us today, one of you could go home and start dinner and a fall could come and take you.

And that was what was most damning. None of this was even the real war.

Our little exposes and scuffles with our government were, so far, like trapping the rats on a sinking ship. Kal might shelter us when he could, and dignify us with his silent approval. And we had struck one good blow, bringing down the east coast cults. But the true war was being fought today in a classified lab full of kryptonite. And as usual, he was fighting it alone.

Suddenly I was irritated with myself, for playing into our show. Grandiose, indeed.

Even if it was fun. A good way to start the morning. And easier than I expected – excellent timing.

Much, it finally occurred to me, too easy and too excellent.

A few agents in the back. More agents in the bullpen. I had walked past them to the darkroom. They had stayed behind, near the hall to the private offices.

Ridiculous, Lois.

If you wanted to plant fallbait in someone's office, how would you do it?

Don't start down that path. No one's found corruption at the level of the field agents.

Wouldn't have to be corruption there. Just obedience to corruption higher up.

And what then? The new generation of fallbaits could always be anywhere. Will you tear your house apart every night? You wouldn't be the first to go mad that way.

But how stupid will you feel if a fall does come, and you thought this far and talked yourself out of looking?

Not very. I'll be dead.

I always lost these arguments. Feeling half-idiotic, but with my heart pounding, knowing I wouldn't get anything done until I looked, I went back to my office. I started with my desk drawers, rifling through them, trying to remember if anything looked out of place.

Of course, I was wrong. There wasn't any fallbait in my desk.

It was in my bookshelf.

Palm-sized, disk-shaped, all smooth plastic, the damned little thing was both easy to miss and brazen.

And there were so many better places in my office to hide it that I wondered, rolling it over in my palm, whether it was meant as a threat and not a serious attempt at all.

I took it to the roof and put it through our contained electromagnetic pulse chamber. We were one of three civilian institutions in Metropolis that had our own EMP – Perry's purchase, after my fallbait cult series, when the death threats were peaking. And as the confirmation testing for deactivation whirred along, I leaned back against the wall and collected my thoughts.

It was outrageous, inconceivable. If Santos' men, or just one of his men, had even been the ones to plant it. It could be a hideous coincidence. It could even be someone above them trying to frame them.

And the irony was, it didn't even matter. Because, regardless, now we had to evacuate and declare ourselves the first American target of the new breed of fallbait.

Never mind that less than one in a hundred fallbaits used a second bait for backup, and evacuating now was an utter waste of time. Or that tomorrow there would be another next-gen strike somewhere else, no matter what anyone did today.

We'd be cordoned off and subpoenaed and investigated. The Planet would become the showground for the American response. Today's edition could be the last for weeks. It was almost as good as just closing us down.

There in the shadow of the old Planet globe, that wood and steel monstrosity that had shaded my smoke breaks and my meets with Kal and now my fallbait deactivating, I sighed. Perry, this isn't exactly the job I first signed up for.

Help, Superman, I added, to my own bitter unamusement.

The EMP finished. I glanced at the readout.

The fallbait wasn't just dead. It had never been active. It must have been on a timer that hadn't activated yet.

So we'd never been in imminent danger of a fall. Not that it made a difference.

I shook my head, went back to my office and hit the shatterfall drill button.

Nothing happened. I jiggled it. Nothing.

Oh, shit.

My heart kicked up in my chest. Guess the chance of there being a backup fallbait just increased, folks.

I closed my eyes for a second. My skin was crawling. Okay, that's okay. We'll do it one floor at a time.

I headed for the phone. The dial tone made me giddy with relief; I realized I'd half-expected the line to be dead.

I started with the guard in the first floor lobby.

"Vince, it's Lois. Is your floor's overhead paging working?"

Silence for a moment. "I think so. Why? Yours out?"

"Go on and flip it on for me."

"Are you expecting someone? The lobby's empty."

"I need you to relay a page."

"Everything okay up there?"

"You got the overhead on yet, Vince?" I felt like an ass, stringing it out like that. But I was afraid half the receptionists would bolt and run without announcing, if I told them the news up front.

A moment's pause. "It's on."

"Thanks. Repeat this. Ladies and gentlemen…"

"Ladies and gentlemen."

"This is a fallbait alarm. This is not a drill."

"This is a fallbait alarm. This is…oh, shit. Uh, this is not a drill. Repeating, a fallbait alarm is being activated. Christ, Lois, is the system down? Are we under -"

"You got it. It could still be nothing, but…you got it from here, down there?"

"You need me to call the other floors?"

I blinked. That stroke of genius hadn't occurred to me. "You want to take one through eight, while I take nine and up?"

"No," came Kal's voice from the doorway.

He looked brilliant, calm, and utterly well. My heart leapt. "Take the odds and give him the evens, and you both work up. So people from the higher floors don't trample the ones below."

I stared up at him as he came to my desk. For those few moments my heart unclenched with relief.

Then I caught a strange flash of naked, wordless fury in his eyes. Not so calm after all. Then he controlled it again.

And then I remembered that I hadn't called him.

Which meant that I knew what had.

"You catch that, Vince?" I said numbly, without moving my eyes.

"I got it. Thank God he's here."

"Yeah." I set the phone back down on the cradle. "How long do we have before it comes?"

"Maybe five minutes." There was a tight undercurrent in his voice I'd never heard before. Then he got that under control as well. "But I can't triangulate it vertically. It could be any few floors. Was there bait?"

I held up my thumb and forefinger, to show him the size. His eyes widened, and then narrowed, understanding. "In my desk drawer. But I EMP'd it. There must be others."

He turned his eyes to the floor. They glazed with that otherworldly shift of his deep vision, peeling down through the floors and walls. Then he swept that strange gaze up to the ceiling, and did the same for the floors above us. If I'd had any doubt about his not having gone under kryptonite that morning, it was gone. I wondered inanely if they'd found a way to work without it.

A moment later, he looked back at me and shook his head. "Nothing I can find."

I nodded. "Okay. Okay. I have to make the calls from inside. Or I'll spend the whole time fighting with the switchboard."

We looked at each other for an instant longer. That fury was still glittering in his eyes; his voice was calm. "Make your calls. I'll start on the top floors."

I nodded. My mouth was dry. The gristle holds together, and the flesh drips out.

Grow up, Lane.

"Lois. I will be back for you, before it comes."

I nodded again.

"Guys?" came Jimmy's voice, sick and quiet, from the doorway. From the look in his eyes, he'd heard plenty.

"Jimmy," I said, "please get out. Go. I've got this."

He closed his eyes. "But the first three stories have wooden floor beams."

We both stared at him.

"They don't carry the building's weight. Just their floors. Lois, you know, right?"

Of course I did. He was right. They were the ribs of the original Planet. I looked back and forth between them. "Okay. But maybe it won't happen there."

Kal went perfectly still for a moment. Then he shifted his gaze back to me. "All right. Same plan, Miss Lane."

I went for the phone.

He turned to Jimmy. "Come with me, James Olson," he said gravely, and stretched out his hand.

I was on the phone with the third floor's receptionist when they went out the window.

I made it through the thirteenth's before he got back. All of them held steady long enough to make the overhead announcement four times. I'd never been so proud of our administrative staff in my life.

Kal waited as I finished the fifteenth, the last. He held out his arms as I hung up, and I stepped into them. They closed around me, one hand pressing my head tight against him to prevent whiplash. He was damp with the sweat of fifty terrified Planet employees.

His acceleration was fierce and hard. The world dropped, my stomach tightened; my arms convulsed around him for a moment. When he set me down in the crowd a moment later, I staggered a step and he caught my elbow.

There we all were, huddled back at the feet of the glassy high-rises all round us, and he was off again.

A bit over three minutes had passed.

The next few minutes were full of glass shattering time and again, the blur of him shooting in and out of the windows, setting screaming people down and shooting off again. He was targeting the higher floors, while people poured out the front entrance. Everyone was shrieking, crying, inside the building and out on the street. Someone had called the police, and squad cars were wailing in from the cross streets.

And then the flow of people trailed off, and then it stopped. Not five minutes had passed.

I peered into the revolving doors; I couldn't see anything through the glare and distance. Had the fall come early? Another ten seconds passed, and the edges of the crowd started to drift forward. The police started shouting at people to stay back.

Something massive cracked inside, traveled like a shot, cracked again.

Oh, Jimmy, you were right.

The screaming changed. People started pointing up at the roof.

Where the great globe of the Planet was folding and melting, the steel ribs sinking through wooden brackets and support beams gone soft like molasses. Obscenely, like bread falling, it sank in on itself without falling off center. The curved ribs thudded, one after another, on the concrete roof, and then toppled over and rang as they settled flat.

My God. It took the bottom floors and the roof at once.

That has to be the biggest shatterfall in history.

Kal stepped from the wreckage a few moments later. He stood talking with the police for a moment, among the flashing lights of the squad cars and ambulances. They were telling him something; he became very still, and nodded, and shot off into the sky.

The count, all told, was no one dead from the shatterfall, but eleven injured from trampling.

Jimmy and I split up the calls to their families. My mind was churning as I made them, there on my cell in the middle of the milling crowd as the ambulances pulled away. Partly over how much worse it could have been, how many calls of a different sort I might be making now. Or how it might be Jimmy, calling Lucy and Mom.

Partly over how Perry's heart would break, how he should never see that crumpled globe.

But mostly, under it all, with a fierce, quiet, horrified awe.

Because in the planning this latest disaster, our faceless enemies had let something slip.

That fallbait was meant to be found. It was atrociously hidden. It was begging for it. But after the shatterfall. During the standard cleanup search, it would have provided the usual explanation for why disaster had come.

Only I knew that it had never once been active.

Which meant the shatterfall itself had been intelligently targeted, and someone had known it. Maybe no shatterfall had ever been a natural phenomenon.

And what that meant, God only knew.

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I came back to the Planet after dark. I threaded my way between the official vehicles, their silent flashers flicking on and off, making the long shadows leap from one angle to another. No one stopped me.

The damaged floors were locked off. I didn't want to see them anyway, the wooden desks and chairs melted into each other, the first three floors all jumbled up together at wrong angles on the ground.

But the stairwell was open. I took the sixteen flights up to the top, with a couple of stops to catch my breath. I came out onto the roof, where the carcass of the globe lay in the moonlight like a broken monster.

"It's after curfew," Kal said softly, behind me.

I turned and looked at him, without blinking, so as not to see the wreckage around us any more.

I saw the brief glimmer of his deep vision in the moonlight, as he swept me for injuries. He didn't look like he'd been to the Fortress that night.

He hardly could have. In the hours since the Planet fell, eight new shatterfalls had struck governmental centers worldwide. Each one, with a next-generation fallbait at the scene. Twelve hundred potential casualties – but today, at least, all but six of them averted. At then, to top it, an arson back here in Metropolis, at a warehouse on Fifth and King – a sympathy crime, no doubt, from a lone cultist who hadn't had enough notice to get hold of proper bait.

We stood looking at each other in silence for a while. Then I looked back out over the city.

"My dad's funeral," I said finally, "was five weeks after the third round of chemo failed." Kal's eyes widened a bit, that slight gesture that used to look so spare to me. I buried my hands in my pockets.

"That was a few years into the shatterfalls, when it was just starting to look like we couldn't lick them. The minister had caught the self-pity bug that was going around among the living. He picked the verse that reads, 'The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart. Devout men are taken away…"

"'And no one understands,'" Kal finished softly, 'that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.'"

That surprised me only slightly; I wondered distantly if there was anything in the history of man's religions that he hadn't read. And memorized instantly, flawless to the word. In rural Kansas, he'd most likely have been raised by Baptists. Or Presbyterians, given his penchant for Calvin.

"Utter wishful thinking," I answered, turning back to him. "But even so, I'm glad Perry can't see this yet."

"Lois," he said, with a strange note in his voice, "I'm so sorry."

Without quite knowing why, I thought of Jimmy in the doorway again. And Vince, at the lobby desk. I said, "I was sure it was me that they – whoever - were after. A threat. Pressure. Maybe a little one-room shatterfall."

He raised his eyebrows. "Which wasn't unlikely."

"No. Just wrong." I opened my mouth again, to say something about how I'd been sure I had taken care of it, how I'd been bitter about having to go through the motions. Then I decided that the details of my prickles of guilt over my private thoughts this morning were a bit self-indulgent.

So instead I said, "It was the Planet they wanted. The whole Planet. God. Who ever heard of a twenty-story shatterfall?"

The anger flashed again in his eyes. "Brutal theatrics. The others today were the usual size. There must have been something different about your bait."

I smiled grimly. "Oh, there was." And then I told him what had happened that morning till he came.

He almost laughed once or twice, when I told him about my run-in with Santos. After I finished, about the fallbait being dead from the start, he was silent for a long moment. He looked out over the decaying skyline, into the night.

Finally he said, quietly, "That changes everything."

I looked up at him.

"For one thing, I suspect I know now why they can make these new ones so small." He said it pensively, as if his mind were halfway elsewhere.

"You think they don't work at all."

He glanced back down at me. "Not if they don't have to."

We looked at each other there in the warm and desolate night, with the siren lights flashing, and the shatterfall's handiwork sixteen stories down, right beneath us.

"I think," he said finally, "that the shatterfalls are really and truly drawn to power. And to true high-current fallbait. We have fifteen years of evidence for that. But if this is also true, if they can be sent…then even if your people close the power plants, let the factories rust, and go back to the soil, they won't be safe. And someone prefers they not know that."

There was a strange edge in his voice on the word 'someone'. I had thought about that question all that afternoon- a now-indisputable intelligence, with a power no scientific publication had ever explained and no leak had ever hinted at. What if it was federal?

What if it wasn't?

Five years ago, I would have been burning like the wrath of God, full of schemes to track it all down and expose it. Half of me still was. The other half knew that that smooth lack of leads was as perfect as ever, and there was still no way inside it.

My poor people. You won a moral victory with the cults. But it turns out you have an enemy whose face we've never seen, and I don't know how to find it. A bigger, more chilling dead-end.

"But we will find it. Maybe." Kal raised his eyebrows, and I realized I'd said that aloud. "Who's behind it, I mean. Even if it just means waiting for the next mistake. They might make another."

Kal hesitated. "Someone may find it," he agreed. "What you've learned should be public, certainly."

"We still have the online site. It will be."

There was a curious gentleness in his eyes, as he looked me over again. Not his deep vision this time; he was looking for something else. "Yes," he agreed again. "And then what?"

There was no point pretending not to follow.

We both knew the building was never going to be recertified for occupancy. Our funds would be frozen till the background investigation of my staff finished, and that would also be never, whether any were guilty or not. Whether the feds had anything to do with the fallbait, or the shatterfall, or not. "When the rabbit jumps into your stewpot," Perry would say, "you don't make it go back and come in through the snare."

None of which really even mattered. Because the question wasn't whether we could pick up the pieces. It was whether we should even try.

For what purpose - to resurrect the same maverick spirit that had nearly gotten my staff killed today? They were never prepared to be vigilantes. They weren't going to find the power behind fifteen years of shatterfalls by flipping through their tattered contact books and going to press conferences. They were white-collar office workers with families, who fell in love with a cause and nearly died because they thought they were still living in the old America. This wasn't their game any more.

"Got to find them jobs," I mumbled.

"And you," he said more gently, "then what?"

"Oh, I'm unemployable," I said absently, reflexively. Which was true, of course, in the States. Probably not in the international market. Maybe in one of the European Union countries itching to flaunt its independence, where the press was no freer in general but might be freer to write dangerous things about America.

Oh, yes, where I'd be on the wrong side of the ocean from the only thing remotely resembling a lead.

Then I shook myself. What was I thinking? It was eight hours since the fall. I shouldn't be making any decision bigger than fish or chicken for dinner. I looked up at him. "I don't know, Kal. I don't know yet."

But he almost smiled. "I'm glad."

I blinked.

"Lois," he said softly, steadily, "don't decide right away. You've been a soldier for your people. You won them their first battle, and now you can prove to them once and for all that they're at war. That may be all they needed from you." Carefully, he took my shoulders; paradoxically, the heat from his big hands made me shiver, realizing the rest of the night had turned cool. "Maybe the battle belongs to others now."

Weirdly, looking back into his dark eyes, the grace and freedom in those words was better than warmth. It flooded me for a moment, like a band across my chest had snapped. One more expose, the greatest yet - and then no more worrying about employees, no more haunting the shatterfall sites, no more checking the alarm four times at night and knowing it wouldn't stop the ones who meant it. And it would be all right, not a sin, wouldn't make him ashamed of us again, because the battle belonged to others now.

"You'd never buy those words."

"For me, they'll never be true." Kal laid one hand on my head, like a blessing, like a sacrament. "But we're not all made the same." He hesitated just a moment. "You could choose now to disappear."

It took me a moment to realize what he meant. "Smallville?" I almost laughed aloud; he dropped his hands, folded his arms across his chest, and looked back at me with a new twinkle in his eye.

"Kal. I don't know, about what comes next. But I don't think I'm an individual assassination target yet. We're already halfway to being martyrs today – I don't think they'd want to make a real one, unless we came back swinging." I laughed dryly. "I doubt even this fall was expected to kill anyone. It's been over a year since a fall in Metropolis itself got past you."

In fact, the past few months, even as they multiplied, almost none had gotten past him anywhere. "And it's not like they would have known you'd be under today."

A sudden darkness flitted over his face. And then I remembered that he hadn't gone under kryptonite today at all.

"God, Kal, I'm sorry. With everything, I didn't…of course I was going to ask you. This morning, you weren't…how did it…" I made myself stop, took a breath, and started over. "What happened?"

I saw that involuntary flicker of anger again, before he stilled it, looking at me. Then he sighed, and said, simply, "I changed my mind. I thought better of it."

Weird, how those words relieved me by surprise again, how they came like cool water, just one sip's worth.

"And so I told them not to bother with titrating out the kryptonite." He looked up at me, grim again. "And that made him very nervous."

I blinked. "Him? Your lead investigator? Your Schrodinger's man?"

Kal nodded. His eyes were narrowed again; I was certain, for a moment, he was seeing it again in his mind's eye.

And then, more relevantly, it occurred to me what he meant.

"About what time," I said slowly, "were you refusing to go under?"

"About half an hour," he answered levelly, "before your fall began to sound."

We looked at each other in dark mutual understanding, him grim, me in fury dawning all over again, when a moment ago I'd thought I was too tired. Kal would have missed every fall this day, the worst in five years.

I had no idea what to say. Then I did.

"That son of a bitch."

"I've known him fifteen years," Kal said simply. "And I spent that half hour in the sky, wondering if I was irrational, or going mad. Reversing my decisions on a few moments' thought, seeing enemies in old friends. I wondered if kryptonite poisoning could do such a thing, and me never know it. And then I didn't have to wonder any more."

I looked him over, my mind racing. That lead investigator. That man who meant nothing to me, whom I'd barely heard of. How much had Kal trusted him? Enough to go under his power, God knew how many times, for how many years. Enough to talk physics and philosophy with him. How much was that?

"Do you think," I said slowly, "that he knew it was coming without bait?"

Kal smiled darkly. "Was he, you mean, another rank-and-file fallbait cultist. Or something very different. My question exactly."

I let out a low whistle. "And what about the lab, and the others? What do you make of it?"

"Very little," he answered quietly. "After the fall, by the time I returned, there wasn't much left."

"The 5th and King warehouse." I felt sick.

"The lead from the walls was in puddles. Still liquid. I walked through the wreckage, and it sizzled under my feet." He paused for a moment. Without looking at me, he added softly, "I thanked God, when I found bullet holes in the skulls. That was a mercy."

I took hold of his arm. They were friends, or teammates, or uneasy allies, for him. For me, it was more grief for strangers. I felt sick. And then ashamed, at my sneaking gratitude that it wasn't him comforting me over the Planet staff.

This was becoming a very bad night.

He was speaking again. "His secretary wasn't among them. Kitty something. A sweet, vapid little thing. She used to have whims sometimes, about trying to understand what we were doing, but they never lasted long. For her, I don't know even what to hope for."

I found my voice. "Who is he, Kal?"

He turned to me and raised his eyebrows.

"I'll investigate the hell out of him." It sounded so thin, so macho. As if I'd forgotten I didn't have an office anymore.

But he had the grace not to smile; he knew, for what it was worth, that I meant it. Instead he said, simply, "I'd be grateful. Last name, Luthor. First name, Lex. Of course, most of that you could do from anywhere…"

"Luthor with an E? Or an O?"

"An O."

"Anything I'm looking for?"

He sighed. "Old research. Data that was never published. Political leanings. Lukewarm letters of recommendation. I don't know. Of course you won't find anything criminal. Or civil."

"No. Not if he carried the clearance to work on you. But physicists don't coolly carry out their first six murders and their first arson in the same half hour."

And then I felt sick again, as it occurred to me Kal could never have ignored today's pattern in retrospect. If Luthor had gotten what he wanted today, I doubted he would have wanted Kal alive to ask questions afterwards.

"Especially," he added into my reverie, "look for anything to do with his observer phenomenon. Cats, or no cats."

I nodded. "Kal," I said softly, "I'm so sorry."

He looked back at me. "I didn't know any of them well. Just long. God forgive me, when I left…it didn't occur to me that, whatever it was, not all of them were in on it."

"And that your principal investigator was a calculating sociopath? That he might kill them in the next half hour?"

It had sounded less flippant in my mind. But he gave me a ghost of a smile.

It never seems right to mention something new, right after speaking of strangers' sufferings. But there was one question we had been circling long enough.

"Why didn't you do it?"

He looked back over at me, unsurprised. "Lois," he said after a moment, "would you forgive me, for setting that aside for now?" He sighed. "I know that's a poor trade for the things I've learned from you tonight. But I need to think first. I need to see how the pieces settle out. I need to plan." Then his eyes softened again. "And you have enough to think of already."

Don't we both. "I'll forgive you," I allowed, "but I won't forget."

"Do you want," Kal said softly, for the first time in over a year, "to come back to the Fortress tonight?"

I thought about it for a moment. It might not be a bad idea.

And then I realized that it was, that I didn't want to lose what was left to me of the Planet that way. Including the grief.

I smiled up at him dryly. "And not feel curious again, about why you changed your mind, till the middle of the week? You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

He smiled back at me, gravely, with that same dry twinkle I'd first seen on my balcony so long ago. We sat in silence for a while, till he heard another fall coming, somewhere. I stayed on for a few moments, looking down at the city.

I asked You to protect my staff, and you gave them a shatterfall. I asked You for a little peace, and You gave me more work to do, another clue and no idea what to do with it. I asked you to protect a brave boy trying to do a man's job, and they never even found his body.

I asked You to spare my dad, and we all know how that turned out.

Maybe after these last pieces, I will retire.

Liar.

And then finally, my anger drained, I thought, the life I had is over. And I don't know where to go.

I shook my head, stopped whining, and headed home.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The days that followed were mad, pivotal, and not as bad as I'd expected.

I made my first and hardest call to the Assistant Editor of the Metropolis Sun. We'd come up the ranks in parallel. She was wickedly cynical, controlled her mouth better than I did, and treated her people fairly.

"I know it's a hell of a time to call, Les," I led off. "Have you got a minute for me?"

She was silent for a second; thinking, I imagined, of what happens when a drowning man gets hold of another swimmer. I couldn't blame her. I didn't even disagree. Who was I to say when they had to make a last stand?

But I don't want you to follow us down, Les. Much as it pains me, I want your circulation to triple.

I want you to need a lot of new employees.

"Lois," she said simply, "starting yesterday, we're all Planet. Tell me what you need."

If I'd gotten less sleep, I might have lost it right then, with that small kindness. "I wanted you to know first," I said, swallowing. "I'm taking resignations from seventy-two of the best reporters, photojournalists and admin staff alive today. I think most of them will want to stay in Metropolis."

She was silent for another long moment. "Bastards froze the accounts?"

"We jumped right into the stewpot, Les."

"You know we're still trying to stay out of it." She said it quietly, almost regretful, almost guilty.

"I want you to stay out of it."

Another silence. "Have them send resumes to my office, not through HR. Make them triplicates. The ones I can't use, I'll take to the all-Metropolis editor's meeting Tuesday."

"Thank you, Les," I said simply. It seemed ridiculous to say "I owe you", as if I'd be able to pay her back.

She snorted. "Thank me," she said, "if you can get them to resign."

And that was that.

Luthor was as clean as Kal had expected. The pride and prodigy of Suicide Slum; then theoretical physics out of our own U. of Metropolis; then recruited almost immediately into the initial shatterfall projects fifteen years ago, where Kal must have met him first.

And, of all miracles, he was one of six people in history to survive a shatterfall, making him a minor scientific hero. One of the early experiments had tragically succeeded in drawing one. He'd been on the far edge of the radius. Like the other survivors, he'd been largely well by six months later.

Except, like the others, that he never grew a hair on his body again.

Piecing even that much together took hours, online and in the University bookstacks. Whenever the tediousness got to be too much, I'd look up at the faces of the students around me, bent over their studies. Like J.J. would have been; or just like themselves, serious and focused. All of them would say they knew, if I asked them, that a fall could come at any time. But did they realize they'd be turning a page, in mid-thought, and then - God, stop it, Lane, stop it.

And then I'd have to get up and take a walk, and look at the faces of the people passing me in the street instead - businesspeople and parents with infants, since the older kids were still in school - hearing my college Shakespeare.

These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air.

Lane, stop it.

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve…

I wasn't sleeping well.

I hadn't been able to visit Lucy and my little twin nephews since it happened. I couldn't stand the thought of looking at their faces and thinking those words. Post-traumatic stress, Kal called it, and said survivors always recovered best in tiny towns in Kansas.

Back to work. Luthor had published well over a hundred papers on the shatterfalls. Stolid, unremarkable work. It took calling in three favors to get hold of his doctoral thesis.

My third time through the abstract, I admitted I was out of my depth. I couldn't believe what it seemed to be saying. Our physics correspondent took a look for me, without a murmur about how we would come up with his usual fee.

I was wrong, of course. It didn't say what I'd thought. It said something far stranger. Luthor's observer effect was increasing.

No, it was changing. It was becoming something different altogether.

The observer effect itself, the indeterminacy of a probabilistic event until you recorded it, had been demonstrable for the sixty years since it was first proposed. Most of Luthor's thesis was devoted to refining methods.

And then one footnote, like a teaser, had this. The earliest studies had toyed with going one step better. They led observers to expect a single given outcome – 'the nucleus will decay'; or, 'it won't' - and then compared that with the reality. Expectation, as anyone who's experienced daily life could have predicted, had no effect on outcome at all.

Until sixty years later, a few years after the shatterfalls started, when Luthor tried it again.

It was a minimal effect, a half percentage point of probability this way or that. It took him over a thousand observations to demonstrate it at all. But it was real. What his subjects expected to see was more likely to happen.

And he stuck it in a footnote.

"They would have laughed him out of the department," my correspondent explained. "It's a triumph of hubris that he put it in at all. You almost wonder if he cared whether he got the Ph.D. or not."

No wonder the man had spent the next fifteen years slipping Schrodinger's Cat into conversation whenever he could.

If the original observer effect made Kal uneasy about the power placed in mortal hands, he was going to have a breakdown over this one. What it all meant, as usual, God only knew.

I wrote up the Luthor story and the latest shatterfall revelation. "Nicely done," Kal said softly from the couch, when he read them. "And scarcely believable," he added, pointing to the bit on Luthor's thesis.

Then he looked up at me and added, dryly, "But you need a disclaimer. Put these side by side as they are now, and Luthor will never make it to police custody. A mob of your readers will spot him and lynch him, and then expect the shatterfalls to suddenly stop."

Which, of course, was ridiculous. They had started when Luthor was a fourteen-year-old in Suicide Slum. Whatever he had to do with them now, whatever it all had to do with his observer effect, it was beyond reason to think he was the whole story.

I rolled my eyes and left Kal there, and went back into the kitchen to get the tea going. The list of possible unforeseen consequences of publishing was the last thing I wanted to think about more.

It had been dogging me since the day of the fall. If secrecy was so important to our enemies, if they had restricted their activities all these years to fit the high-energy attraction pattern we all believed in, God only knew how they would react when the cover was blown.

I poured the water over the teabags. There was no listing all the possibilities, or weighing all the risks, with such a thing.

I had even thought, for a day or two, of giving Luthor himself a chance to contact us, to see what he might say. "But what could he say, that you could test the truth of?" Kal had answered. "And whatever you fear he might do, you'd be giving him the chance to do it before you published."

I didn't realize how long I stood there, lost more in paralysis than in thought, till I looked down at the teas and saw they had gone dark. I shook my head, stirred in the sugar, and brought them back out. "You write the disclaimer, then. I'll share the byline with you. I needed a way to end it, anyway…"

His eyes were closed, his chin on his chest, my printout in his lap.

I stopped in the doorway and watched him, the shock of black hair in front of his eyes, the rise and fall of his chest.

How many falls today, Kal-El, besides the six that I know of? I remember when two in a week was bad. And yet fewer slip past you now than then.

If it's true that your body needs three hours a night, how long have you gone without sleep, to make you fall asleep on my couch?

How long till you're so tired the sound of a pre-fall doesn't wake you? Or you drop a man in your exhaustion? Or crush him?

How old were you, when you first realized this was going to be your life?

And your team, God rest their prosaic souls, were right about this much: you can't keep it up alone forever.

I crept in, set down the teas without a sound, and opened my laptop. Time to post it, already. Maybe, maybe, someone can do something with this.

Besides, what am I afraid will happen? More shatterfalls?

I brought up our online site to post the articles. I hadn't seen it for a few days. When it came up this time, I blinked.

J.J.'s old friends on our web maintenance had taken down the picture of the old Globe on the day of the fall; the pages had been left spare and solemn. But some time in the few intervening days, they'd replaced it with a shot of Earth herself from space.

Defiant, grandiose little boys, I thought, and smiled sadly.

I blew up the image and looked at it for a moment, the crystalline sharpness of the green on the blue, the marbling of the white cloud veil above it, the gold fire of our yellow sun winking out behind it.

That shot would have to be over fifteen years old; no nation had tried a shuttle launch since the falls started. But she was lovely, our planet. She'd be darker at night now, if we could look down on her again. But no less lovely for that. That was when I thought of how to end my piece.

What still remains unclear? I typed, without taking my eyes off the screen. The breadth of federal involvement, the goals and identities of the perpetrators, the source and secret of the technology. In short, nearly everything.

But what is finally clear is this. Earth is under attack. From some group of her own children, or from whatever alternatives may exist. It may be an attack in their eyes as well; or it may be a mining operation, a harvest. But to Earth, it is war.

She never sought this battle. She bore it patiently for fifteen years. She bore ten million deaths, another Holocaust, another Stalin's purge. She bore a return to worldwide poverty, after one short decade when the children of even Sudan and North Korea had finally had enough to eat. From fifty trillion dollars annually, her GDP has dropped to seven, and half her children never see their fifth birthdays. Without the work of the Man of Steel, her only adopted son, those estimates would be even more unprintable.

Earth is patient. She waited, and studied, and tried to rebuild. She tried to find out what she had done, what natural phenomenon she had triggered, to bring this down on her head. But now she knows the truth: she has a living enemy. And one day she will find him.

And one day, Earth will make reply.

I hit send.

That's for you too, Luthor. Let's see what that does with your expectation and outcomes.

Investigative reporters, I think, can't help being grandiose. The best we can do is know it.

Kal stirred behind me. I looked back, and his eyes opened on me.

We looked at each other for a long moment. Finally he gave me a little half-smile; there was nothing to say. Then he got up to go.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next night I gathered the investigative staff at Jimmy's place, to finish things. Everyone was there on time, a feat I'd never achieved at a single staff meeting in my career.

"Was it you who set the Star on us, Lois?" someone asked mildly.

"You'd think we were unemployed, or something."

"Or maybe she thinks that after her last article, there's nothing left worth writing."

"Yeah, hell of a piece, Lois. Goosebumps, I had. Big huge ones."

I laughed and motioned them to silence. "All right, guys. Listen up. Maxwell got out of acute care yesterday. He's over in inpatient rehab now. Drop by and give him some love. He's the last one."

"Hey, Lois," said my new hire, the twentysomething who'd been there the night I met Kal at the fall scene, "you think there's any chance Superman would do our ribbon cutting when we reopen?"

That broke the mood. For a moment I was shocked by her ignorance, and it broke my heart that I was going to have to explain the obvious in front of everyone. From their sidewise glances at her, everyone else felt the same. Then I took a closer look and saw the irony on her face, and breathed a sigh of relief.

"That's fine. That's a good segue. So let me state the obvious here. This wasn't the kind of crackdown some of us were afraid of. Technically, the Planet hasn't been closed. But we've got no building, and I've got not only no expense money for you, but no paychecks. And that's not going to change."

None of it news, but the room was completely silent. I sighed. No point drawing it out. "I'm going to accept your resignations so I don't have to lay you off. Then you're going to start returning Les's calls, and you're going to be polite and grateful, and then you're going to say yes. She's sticking her neck out for you. She'll probably screw you with a pay cut – she's only human - but if it's more than fifteen percent, let me know."

I stopped, expecting the room to erupt into chatter, but the silence continued. I looked over at Jimmy, puzzled, and saw a funny little smile on his face.

That was when it occurred to me everyone else had already been there before I arrived. How long before? Plotting what?

"Guess I'll go where my acting editor sends me," Jimmy said mildly. "Even undercover at the Star. Even if it's not the job I first signed up for." Heads nodded around the room.

Looking them over, bright faces with mischief in them, for all the world as if they hadn't just gotten the chastening of their lives, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Still living in the dream. But apparently, from the kinds of things I was posting, I was buying into it too.

Yes, but I didn't have a family to support.

"All right, guys. You're beautiful. I couldn't ask you for more. But there's not only no money. There's no work. I'm not holding out on you. I don't have any leads. Maybe this battle does belong to others."

"And if we ever find a lead," my new hire said, in a bone-dry voice that reminded me of Kal at his most sarcastic, "the Star will of course trip over itself to publish it yesterday."

I rolled my eyes. "What do you want from them? Two years ago we were the worst of the lot. It's still honest work. There are still other things worth writing about. It's not always up to journalists to save the world."

But she was right, and my mind was running even while I was talking. The Planet was dead, and not dead. What it really was, was bodiless. With servers in eighteen countries, and the ear of the world.

And seventeen cents in petty cash.

But what you can't see, you can't crush. A lot like the cults, actually. Except that they had money.

And we had Kal. Well, not had him. But if we had to move a message…if we needed to post something from a different server in a different country every time…

If you want to move up from closet felon to the Ten Most Wanted list.

"It's just," Jimmy was saying, "that if we happened to come across something dangerous but worth publishing, we'd hate to ask the Star to take the risk…if there's a perfectly good online paper that combines cutting-edge timing with flawless fact-checking…"

I couldn't help it any more. I broke down and laughed. What a disaster.

But…nothing said we had to be a major underground seditious publishing house. Just a channel for important news when it arose. Once a week or once a year, whenever it was needed. Couldn't I keep it all under my own name, and decide when it really was time to cut and run to Smallville?

"I'd steal all your bylines shamelessly," I heard myself saying.

"That would be a change," someone said dryly, which was patently unfair. I laughed again.

Then I caught Jimmy's eye. "I thought we talked about not being a hero."

He shrugged helplessly.

Fools.

But if Kal would help me, just maybe I could protect them, and we could run the one truly free press on the planet. On a very irregular publishing schedule.

Whistling in the dark. But shouldn't there be someone doing it?

"You'd have to teach me your posting protocols," Kal said, levelly, later that night.

I laughed.

"Lois," he said more softly, "It's very difficult to back down after you become a symbol. You'll break spirits. This is one of the few graceful exit points you'll ever have. You may not want this tomorrow."

I shivered a little. "That's why I'm hurrying. And look," I added, bringing up the shot of Earth on the front page. "Isn't she lovely?"

Kal was silent for a long moment. "Oh, Lois," he said finally, "that doesn't even do her justice."

I went into the site code and added, "For one hundred and sixteen years, the Daily Planet has published 'all the news that's fit to print'. After our ongoing reorganization, its focus will be narrowing. Future Planet articles will be confined to the news too sensitive for physical papers to print. Send comments and questions to ActingEditor-at-PlanetInExilenet."

We looked at it for a moment in silence. I felt strangely light, almost giddy. No doubt it would wear off by tomorrow.

"Not a soldier any more, then," he said softly, looking at me. "A general."

"In the largely symbolic part of the war, yes. But maybe we'll have our day."

He raised his eyebrows. "The enemy thought the Planet was dangerous enough as it was."

I turned round in my chair to face him. "Now I think it's time for you to tell me what happened that day."

He shook his head. "Not yet." He gave me a little smile. "We don't all make decisions as quickly as you."

For forty-eight hours afterwards, we were the second most popular site on the web. Kind words and death threats poured in even faster than tips from lunatics. Far faster than I could keep up with. Kal sorted them for me in a few minutes each day, flipping through at a speed limited only by the laptop's response time. He might be missing things that were important, but there was no help for it.

But the first one he showed me was terrific. And, of course, anonymous.

You're making people very angry, Lois Lane, it started, without a greeting. I haven't had so much fun in years. Had to be one of the first ten thousand people to welcome you underground.

Of course, you've also made my position more sensitive than ever. We all signed up to take the bullet some day, but apparently I'm in less of a rush than you are. May have something for you soon, though.

Give Perry my love.

Which, of course, I couldn't, but it warmed my heart to know his source was still at large.

And, for the moment, so was I. There was no Good Citizen case against me yet; receiving anonymous emails, and publishing work that merely embarrassed the government, were still legal. From other dangers, I'd be safer in Smallville; I'd be far more effective in Metropolis. Frequent comings and goings between them would be the worst of all worlds. I lived carefully, and we argued about it time and again.

And my contacts nationwide, and more contacts of Perry's worldwide than I'd known existed, started coming out of the woodwork to feed us again. They were a jittery lot, till they were satisfied the Planet wasn't under new federal management, but their hearts were pure. I started to have visions of building an underground reporting empire. I saw Lucy and my twin nephews when I could, but told her precious little; it was an open secret, but I think we both felt safer with it all unsaid.

Things began to feel almost stable.

And then one night I asked Kal again what had happened the day he left the laboratory, and this time he told me.

First he looked at me for a moment, with the expression of a man who's put off something dreadful till even he's lost patience with himself. I had the strange feeling he was three or four conversations ahead of me, and didn't like what he saw.

Then he remembered the mug circled in his long fingers, and raised it to his lips. When he looked back at me, there was something different, something quieter in his eyes.

"Everything was glass and steel there," he said after a moment. "It was a laboratory; what else would it be? I was ready; they were titrating the kryptonite in the back room."

He looked almost embarrassed. "And then I thought suddenly that the windows were too high, and the children would be cold – absurdly, as if anyone had proposed raising them there. Before they had learned even to walk, they'd spend each day looking up at the sunlight, wondering why they kept wanting so badly to feel it."

The image ambushed me. It hurt, unexpectedly, like a stab in a sore place. I winced, and he saw it. He looked at me wryly, as if seeing his own thoughts reflected, knowing they were silly, and still unable to escape them.

"None of it remotely true. Imagine, how attentively such children would be raised. They had volunteer couples, screened for their perfect balance of warmth and strength. But I couldn't help it."

"And then," and he laughed ruefully again, but with a strange, shaken undertone, "then I realized that in all these days of trying and planning, in all my reluctance and frustration, that was the first time I'd once felt compassion for the little things."

Kal looked back up at me and shook his head. "And think of that, Lois. Growing up in an alien world, raised with caution and precision, one day understanding you were being shaped for their needs. And then looking up into your father's eyes, and seeing suspicion looking back at you there too."

I didn't have to imagine. I could see it as if it were in front of me.

Because it was. This vision of his was too unconsciously precise. He wasn't imagining. He was remembering.

He saw it in my eyes; his own eyes widened a bit. "Lois," he said quickly, unwillingly, "my parents were the finest people I know."

I said nothing; this was territory he never let me enter. How could I confirm it, or deny it? It might be true, and I could still be right, both at once.

"But raising an alien, or half-alien, mind, teaching it good and evil – who do you choose for that task? What screening tests help you? How do you lay that job on the shoulders of a young couple who knows there's nothing of themselves in that child that they could call on? What do they do, when she turns two, and they realize that by the time she's four, her tantrums will be deadly? What can they do, but hedge her round, from the cradle, with rules that must never be broken?"

Then he caught my expression again, and apparently realized he was doing nothing to help his parents' case and gave up. If I hadn't felt so sick at heart, I would have laughed.

"I didn't have an alternative, of course," he said after a moment. "All I wanted was time to think. More time, again…it would have driven any team mad. But the way Luthor reacted seemed excessive, even for that." He opened his palms, as if to say, and you know the rest.

I sat back. I had no idea what to say. These were waters I knew nothing about, the borders of secrets he kept even closer than his human name. And they were, apparently, reaching out for him, over the miles and years from his childhood in Smallville.

Weeks ago, you pulled back because of fear of these children. Will you pull back now out of compassion? And keep circling the world till you fall from the sky?

"What now, then, old friend?" I said finally.

He sighed. "I still respect much of your government, Lois. But I don't trust them."

"Any farther than you can throw them, maybe?" I finished wryly. "Which is how far exactly?"

He gave me a brief flicker of a smile, and then took a breath. "I worked out a flight path when the acceleration of the falls started. I can circle the earth in twenty-four minutes, and pass within hearing distance of land that houses ninety-four percent of humanity. Most of the rest has little that would draw a shatterfall. There's time."

I blinked. It wasn't the falls themselves that were wearing him down. It was patrolling for them. No wonder little got past him now. How many circles in a day?

"Time? We both know you're at your limit. Time for what?"

He took another breath. "Time to try again, differently. Privately, as secretly as possible. With just one or two children at a time, born to one mother. To try to be a real father, and give them a real childhood. To watch their minds develop, knowing that between us, their mother and I have it in us to understand them. To see if this is an answer. Or not."

I blinked. He looked up at me, with a shadow of his old dry gleam. "I suspect the role of disciplinarian will fall to me as well."

And then his eyes dropped to the floor and he went on, quickly, without looking up, as if he were entering the final push. "I was thinking, maybe, of some cheerful Midwestern girl. Someone brave but not ambitious, ready to serve her people, happy enough in her community to need little from me."

"Someone simple – not stupid, but simple – enough," I added softly, understanding, "to love them without question."

He met my eyes silently. "It would be less intimidating, I thought, for my mother to find and canvass her first."

"Someone willing to try for a pregnancy," I mused, "as soon as could be managed."

"Five children or so, in total," he added. "Then the range of their hearing could blanket the earth. It wouldn't matter if they flew, or lifted buildings. With a reliable twenty-minute lead, they'd only need to give warning."

I said nothing. That about covered it.

"Lois," he said more softly, "I knew you wouldn't approve. Almost, I don't even want you to." He hesitated. "But I had hoped, if you were in Smallville…they'd be almost your nieces and nephews, in a way. Wouldn't they? I'd thought possibly, whatever I lacked or did wrong with them, you might notice it, and tell me..." He trailed off, and stared down at the table, with the look of a man trying to shape something out of smoke.

I opened my mouth to say something, before I realized that for once I had no idea what to say. Watching him for the last five minutes, I could see the ghost of the brave, frightened boy he'd been, in every move he made.

What did it mean for him, any of it? Apparently, that he had a hell of a lot of faith in Midwestern values. Or in his mother's eye for potential. There must have been good, too, in that childhood he didn't speak of, for him to trust her with that choice.

Happy enough to need little from me. There was a world of implied future in that. The unknowns of a life with a stranger – those were enough to make anyone tremble.

But was that even it? Or was I reading things in again?

Or is it maybe even simpler than that?

I came halfway around the table and sat in the chair around the corner from him. "Kal," I said softly, "I need to understand something."

He looked up at me, with that hesitant look of one who suspects what's coming.

"Is it so repulsive to you?"

He raised his eyebrows.

"Does it seem bestial, maybe? Literally, like being asked to lie with a beast?"

He met my eyes like a boy taking his medicine, here at the end of all his secrets. "Is that what you think?" he asked back, very softly.

I shook my head. "I don't know. I've wondered. I've wondered if, if things were different, you might have found some happiness in love. Or if it's somehow more against your nature than anyone imagines. That wouldn't be shameful. There's nothing to be ashamed of. I just want to understand. I was just thinking, about all the hundred things that could seem terrible about this, and then I thought I might be overlooking the most obvious of all."

He shook his head, and thought for a moment before he spoke. "It's not repulsive. Not that that would matter; I'm done with involving third parties. It's true, I don't know how I may react, what silent parts of my ancestors might wake in me. I don't know what one speaks about afterward, or how things change around it." He hesitated, eyes fixed on the table. "I don't know what I would say to her, if she were…afraid."

I started to try an answer, but he was hurrying on.

"But more, I think, I don't know how one takes on this work, side by side with another person, to raise such children and be good to them. But everyone has to learn these things, don't they?" He laughed, with a strange, tense note in his voice. "Imagine, Lois – would you inflict me as a father, as I am now, on any child?"

I laughed with him, painfully. It was becoming clearer and clearer how little he could know about what made a normal childhood. He had seen the best of intentions turn out poorly. Why should he believe me, if I tried to comfort him with promises that this time it couldn't happen?

Especially if the girl he finds mistakes his caution for sternness. The way everyone does, the way I used to.

"Kal," I said after a moment, without quite knowing why. "With a man's understanding, now…did anything happen, at your parents' hands, that you might call abuse from another?"

He looked back at me for a long moment, and I had the strange feeling he understood the question better than I did. "No. There was nothing like that in them. They just had a very difficult task."

We were silent for a moment – him no doubt reviewing the demographics of the Midwest, and me looking at his broad back bent over the table. At this faithful son, this boy who had picked up the world at seventeen and never set it down again.

I thought about my own first time, at seventeen years old myself, in the back of a pickup with my boyfriend of the time. A boy I'd liked well enough; but, really, just the boy I was with on the day I decided I'd had enough of being Lois the preacher's kid.

I'd looked up into his eyes afterward, and realized with a chill that he thought he loved me. And watched his face, as he realized that what was looking back at him was nothing of the kind.

But love can grow with time. It wouldn't always be like that for him. And they're not all as cold as you were back then. More likely, she'd worship him.

And we all know how comfortable that makes him.

And if he did something foolish, or started meddling with prison sentencing again, would she stop him?

And I knew, with the silent instant absoluteness of a shatterfall, with what Dad would have called the voice of God, that it was enough. That I could send no more brave and frightened boys into the world alone, to protect my people, with a "Be careful."

"And would it be easier," I said softly, "with a friend whose love you have already?"

I almost thought he'd jump, but he didn't; I nearly jumped myself. I think for a moment he was too shocked to move. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then turned his head and opened them on me.

I was surprised; it wasn't grief or embarrassment looking back at me. Just compassion.

"Poor human soldier," he said softly. "You've given up enough for your people. They don't need your body, too. That's one job another can do." A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Did you give this little thought to taking the Planet renegade?"

I answered, even as I realized the thought had, in some form, been fermenting for months. "That may be the smoothest change of subject you've ever attempted on me."
"Ever been caught at," he corrected, with a trace of his old gleam in his eye. Then he paused. "I love your heart, Lois," he said more seriously. "But it's not up for discussion. Forgive me for drawing it out of you. The fault was mine. I shouldn't run here with my every worry, as if it were yours to solve."

"Would it," I said softly, half to myself, "be more of a burden with me, and not less? I could believe that. It wouldn't offend me."

"You're treating this," he answered mildly, "as if it were a conversation we were actually having."

I laughed a little. "Laying the ground rules. The conversation hasn't started."

He stood, covered my hand with his, and laid his other hand on my head for a moment. They were shaking. "Good night, Lois. Thank you." He turned to go.

"Please," I said mildly, "don't make me grab your cape again."

He stopped, there with his back to me, that brilliant cape falling from his shoulders. "All right," he said finally. He turned, and folded his arms across his chest. "I know this isn't the world I was a boy in, where people married for love and had children for happiness. But you know you have my protection, such as it is, already. And your world doesn't need you for this."

He paused, as I watched him silently. His face softened a bit and he came back across the room toward me. More gently, he said, "And you know better than anyone that I'm not prepared to make a wife happy. I know what I'm able to do and what I'm not."

He fell silent, and we looked at each other across the room. Five years ago, maybe he would have been right. "Okay," I said mildly. "What else? Or is it my turn?"

He laughed incredulously.

I sighed and got up from the table and came around in front of him. "Tell me it's not what you want, that your first plan would be better for you. Or that you don't know, and you need to think. Or tell me plainly, if you'd want me to consider it, if not for your absurd suppositions."

"You feel this way tonight," he answered softly, without meeting my eyes. "No one can sustain it for a lifetime. No one should have to."

I raised my eyebrows. "I'll take that as option three, then."

He wouldn't meet my eyes; he didn't answer. I was trembling with my own audacity.

"We're both what our world made us, Kal. What happiness do you think you'd cut me off from, that I'll long for so bitterly? The career and family that await me in my life in exile?"

"Smallville isn't exile!"

"Sorry. Slip of the tongue. I meant 'Smallville.'"

Kal laughed, almost involuntarily. He sobered again the next moment. "Don't you think I know you've given up your future? But who knows what could change in one year, or two? You might have a chance at…the pursuit of happiness."

He hesitated a moment, and then went on. "And what you forget is that I'm not what this world made me."

He straightened above me; his massive chest rose with his indrawn breath. "You forget how many, many hundred things may be different between us, Lois. Things you can't right now imagine."

I straightened myself, and looked up at him. "Do you think that's still frightening to me? If you know something that would really throw me, tell me now."

Kal blinked, and then a little smile tugged at his lips. "It wasn't a bluff," he said mildly. "Just a concern."

"Don't you think," I said softly, "that I know that?"

"Don't you think," he said, more softly, "that what we have now would be a sad thing to spoil, if it's true?"

I blinked. I might be terrified, but at least I wasn't so grim.

Or maybe, horribly, this whole conversation was a mistake. Maybe this was the last thing he wanted, and he was trying to turn me down gently, and I was a fool to keep taking aim at his arguments.

Or maybe the poor man was trying to tell me, and really thought I didn't understand, that he had no idea if he could come to love a human like a husband loves a wife. And that he thought that might break me, if not at first, then at last.

But I didn't ask him for that.

He looks at me now, and all he sees is the infinity of ways to lose something, all the waveforms collapsing to the same end. The only thing I can do is try to take that fear away, and let him choose.

I sighed, and reached down to take his hands between mine. "What is it you think I want from you, Kal? What has the potential to spoil so badly? I know what your life is like and why. And I love you for it. That's all."

Kal looked back, unblinking, half-believing.

"Believe that I love you enough to do this. Without regretting it, and without expecting you to change. And enough to be glad you trusted me with the truth, if this would really bring you more trouble than help." I paused. "Make your choice, Kal-el, today or not today. Don't be afraid."

He was staring at me, eyes wide and raw. "Believe all that? I don't know," he said shakily, softly, "how to even imagine it."

I slid my arms around him, closed my eyes and laid my head against his chest, hearing the pounding of that massive heart. Wishing his believing were as simple as my saying it.

And conscious slightly, this time, in a different way, of the width and solidity of that chest, of the strength of the arms that came around me. And of the weight of him – but then, he'd never let it rest on me.

"Lois," he said softly, almost whispering, "I'm not J.J."

That killed me, that he thought he might be the stand-in for the workings of my guilt. I sighed again, and shook my head against him. "Well, I sure as hell wouldn't be making this offer to him."

"You don't know what you're saying," he murmured.

"Strictly speaking," I answered dryly, "I know better than you do."

He laughed once, and then I felt the movement in his chest as he shook his head above me. "Even on that subject, which I wasn't addressing…think of it, no option for abstinence at the proper times. And it's hardly lovemaking we're discussing here, regardless, is it?"

I laughed. "So doing it for the sex is out?"

"It hasn't," he said dryly, "been the highlight of the experience to date."

"My turn now," I answered. His hands moved to my shoulders; he stepped back, without letting go.

"My fertility plateaued ten years ago. In three years it will start to drop. We might, or might not, be able to finish. You should know that."

"Five or so children in as many years," he said softly. "It would wear out your little body."

"Mine was built for children. More than yours was for kryptonite."

He pulled back and looked at me. "Using kryptonite," he said softly, "isn't optional. Regardless of…anything."

I thought about that for a moment. "So you were thinking about putting your life in a stranger's hands?"

He looked faintly amused. "Am thinking. You would have thought of a better idea?"

"I would have thought until I had one!"

"I tried. For over a month."

Yes, while I pestered you.

"Kal," I said reluctantly, because there was no going back from full disclosure, "is it dangerous? The pregnancy."

He hesitated a moment, clearly reluctant to make my case any easier, and then gave up and answered. "I'm as sure as I can be," he said carefully, "that it would be no more so than any other. There's nothing in my chemistry that should make it toxic. And the…powers…don't develop before contact with sunlight. My ship hit ground at night, and I was covered with bruises from its landing. It wasn't till the sun rose in the morning…" He trailed off. "So it would be possible to end it, if necessary. We made sure of that much, before planning our first attempt."

And that left us there, looking at each other, with everything laid out and nothing left to say.

I looked at him, standing perfectly still. I'd expected to feel horrified at my own daring, gnawed by second thoughts, everything sounding utterly different when spoken aloud.

And I did. But not so much. Not too much.

"Well, then," I said.

Kal looked at me for a long moment. "Lois," he said finally, his lip quirking up, "do you know what I thought of, when I thought of this?"

I beat down a smile myself. "What?"

"I thought," he said, growing solemn again, "that if you ever bore children, you'd be a tigress in defending them. That they'd be safe with you, if anything happened to their father. That there would be some love in you for both halves of their souls." He hesitated.

Dizzyingly romantic, it wasn't.

But maybe that was his point. His warning, that his reasons might always be different from mine.

"Selfishly," he said after a moment, half-laughing at himself, "I hated the thought of looking in your eyes every day, seeing the weight there and knowing it came from me."

He looked up. "But what I didn't want to admit," he went on, holding my eyes, "was that that wasn't the real question. What mattered was whether you could still take joy in them, and be content in their happiness, whether you were happy or not."

And that, I realized, was his point. He was saying he didn't believe me. That he was certain I'd grow weary of sharing his life. And that that was all right.

The only promise he needed was that his children wouldn't pay.

That was frustrating.

But there it was, wasn't it? The first test of whether I really meant the things I'd told him. Because if so, then it wasn't for me to write how this had to play out, how he had to see it, what his reasons had to be.

All right, then. I'll offer you what you will take. And the rest, we'll figure out, one day at a time. God willing, you'll be wrong. I think, for a moment there, you did believe me.

"I think I could, Kal," I said finally. "If I am a terrible mother, that won't be why." I hesitated. "I wish your life hadn't taught you to ask that question."

His eyes widened, and he said nothing.

"Besides which," I added, "twins run in my family."

Kal gave me a flicker of a smile. And then we looked at each other and the silence stretched out; everything in it was changed, charged with too much meaning. Like the moments after a shatterfall, when bonds broke and rearranged themselves, into something that looked the same, but was very, very different.

"Lois," he said finally, softly, "You almost make me think you mean it."

"But nowhere near," I said, a little sadly, "make you stop dreading it."

Kal shook his head. He understood too well. "You think I don't trust your heart. There's nothing I trust more." He looked me over, as if he were fixing me in his mind. "But I can grieve a little, can't I, over sending you into a battle I can't fight?"

There was nothing I could say to that. I shook my head, denying something, not sure what. He looked away first, to the floor, and then back up at me. He started something once, twice, and then shook his head. "Let's speak again," he said finally. "Later." He hesitated. "I won't hold you to anything you said tonight, you know. You shouldn't hold yourself."

"All right," I said, my heart still pounding, from God knew what brew of reactions.

"All right."

He turned to go, in his usual way, and got almost to the door. Then he turned back, laughing once, helplessly. "Unless there was anything else you wanted to cover tonight? Because what kind of exit I should make, after such a conversation, is beyond me. Another human knack I should have learned."

I laughed myself, and then realized how infectious his was, how strangely light he looked in that one moment, as if he'd shed the world's weight in the last hour.

We weren't so different.

"Go home, Kal. I meant what I said."

"I know," he answered. Then he was gone.

It occurred to me, absurdly, that five years ago the the counterfeminist implications alone would have paralyzed me.

Jimmy was running the Star darkroom by the end of the next week. Perry was finally hitting his ideal weight and pretended to be outraged at the new depths I'd led the Planet to. It was days before I realized it had never even occurred to me to consider telling them.

Someday, maybe.

Kal and I spoke again at the end of the week. He was gentle, careful, precise, searching me for any change of heart. It would have been a lovely scene, if not for the Tucson shatterfall that interrupted it. And so I was a bit rushed in telling him to make up his mind already, because I already had.

What I remember best is the near-disbelief in his eyes, as he backed away toward the balcony doors. "Thank you," he said softly, as if he didn't trust himself with longer words. "You almost make me think this might end well." Then he looked back over his shoulder, and back at me, and said helplessly, "I'll be back."

"Go on," I said, laughing despite myself. "This wouldn't feel right without a fall."

I sat looking at the door for a few moments after he left. I wondered if I should be numb, or full of solemn plans and purpose. I'd have to get a thermometer, to follow my body temperature over the month. I wondered what my dad would have said about the mercies of his God this past month, letting me see that my old plans were gone first, so I'd never be tempted to blame the new ones.

I wondered, irrelevantly, if the home of Kal's mother had internet access already. Or if there were some way I could get it at the Fortress. Then I realized I was shaking. Then I decided that was probably all right.

After all, it wasn't exactly, I thought absurdly, the job we'd first signed up for.