“Good,” said Dr. Weeks. “Is everyone clear where they’re going? Not toward the cave-in,” he reminded Lois pointedly.
“Passage five,” she agreed, turning on her flashlight.
“Alright, then. Good luck, everyone. Be alert. Call out if you find anything,” Dr. Weeks said.
They all agreed, they split up, and then they ventured into the depths of the tomb.
The hunt was on.*****
Lois flashed her light off and on again as the others walked away then reached down and rubbed her injured knee.
“You alright?”
“Yeah, it's just sore from trudging through all this sand.” She could not
wait to get back to Metropolis and the ease of asphalt and pavement. “Ready?” she asked Clark.
“Ready, partner.”
She turned and walked back along the far side of the rubble pile. Heading toward the first door, Clark’s voice stopped her when she was almost through.
“Uh, Lois?”
She shined her light down the empty passage. No one was there.
Turning back to him, she asked in a saccharine tone, “Yes, Clark?”
“What passage do you think that is, Lois?”
“It’s passage twelve, Clark,” she said, still over-sweetly.
“And what passage did Dr. Weeks tell us to go down?”
“Passage five,” she said brightly.
“Right. And this isn’t passage five.”
“Nope!”
“That is passage twelve.” He pointed toward the door several feet down the wall and she glanced over at it.
“Yep!”
“And what passage did he warn us explicitly to stay away from?”
“Passage twelve,” she said, taking a backward step into it.
“Wait a second, Lois,” he said, dropping the silly tone.
She didn’t. “I’m going pretty slow, Clark. I
know you can keep up, so it’s on you if we end up in different rooms and disaster strikes.”
He held up his hands. “Just– Just tell me what we’re doing.”
“In all the years I’ve been doing this–”
“Getting lost in Ancient Egyptian tombs?”
“Being a prize-winning investigative journalist at the most respected paper in the nation,” she retorted quickly. “The one trope that’s always proven true is that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.”
“So?”
“So, we’re going to go back to the scene of the crime to catch the mummy!”
“But we don’t know where he caught Wahid or Gamal or Carnahan.”
“Trying to kill
me wasn’t a crime?!”
“It was irredeemable,” he said solemnly.
“Okay,” she said, moderately mollified by the tone of his voice. “But our mystery mummy’s creepy carving studio or hide-out or lair or whatever was down here, their trap was down here, and I’m guessing there was another exit down here, too. So let’s go find it.”
“Why didn’t you say any of this to Dr. Weeks?”
She looked at him as if it were obvious. “He would have said ‘no’.”
He looked heavenward as if asking for patience. “It might be the scene of the crime, but it’s also the scene of a recent cave-in. It can’t be safe.”
“I thought
you were going to keep me safe,” she said, one eyebrow raised.
“This guy’s specialty seems to be to catch people by surprise,” Clark replied, real worry creeping into his tone. “I’m afraid of what will happen if he catches us by surprise again.”
“I think that’s why we need to catch him,” she said more seriously. “How many more people are going to get surprised before someone gets this guy?”
He seemed to mull that over but didn’t immediately reply.
“Plus, who
else is going to catch this guy? The academics? The terrified excavation crew? You know it’s got to be
us, Clark.”
“Alright,” he agreed reticently, heaving a sigh. “Back to the scene of the crime.”
Together, they entered the forbidden passage twelve.
The first thing that she noticed was that the broom was gone. “Was that missing when you carried me out?”
“I, uh, wasn’t paying attention to it,” he said, a flicker of apprehension crossing his face. She felt a little pang at how worried he’d been for her.
The rest of the passage was just as she remembered it, and her mind wandered as she looked around.
“Did you see Bashir’s face when he realized the Project would go under?”
“He looked crushed,” Clark responded.
“But he was also the one to put the idea into Weeks’ head,” she said.
“What makes you think that?"
“He led him there. He said, ‘What will it take for them to stop?’ We all
know what it would take. It would take the Project closing down for good.”
“You still think it was Bashir,” Clark concluded.
“No, not really. Which is sort of a shame because there isn’t one person that all the clues point toward. I truly don’t think Bashir had anything to do with Carnahan’s disappearance. Even if I didn’t
like the guy, the rest of it doesn’t quite add up. He really loves his work, Rupert, his artifacts, the dust covering them, this whole place.”
Clark flicked his flashlight upward against the wall, catching an artistic tableau of some kind of royal presentation of what looked like wheat stalks. “Well, it’s just so
cool.”
She glanced at the ancient art his light was illuminating. “Well, sure,” she teased. “Leave it to the farmboy to think three thousand years old paintings of a wheat are
cool.”
“It’s not that,” he replied with an eye roll.
They entered the room with the four little alcoves and headed to the back toward the hidden passage.
“Well, what is it?” she responded, really asking him.
“I don’t know. It’s just so
old.”
“The ocean is old. The mountains are old. Yesterday’s news is
old,” she instigated, asking for a little more.
“Yeah, but it's traceably old. Some of the people that live here can trace their families back for generations. I bet they can even trace their way back to some of the people immortalized in these tombs.”
“Sure,” she agreed, turning the corner into the hidden passage. “I guess that’s cool. If you’re into genealogy.”
“It’s not just that, though,” he said. “It's that you’re really connected to something. To other people. To the land. Even to the gods.”
“Do you want to be a
god, Clark?” she joked.
“
No,” he said forcefully. She raised her eyebrows at him and he shook his head. “Sorry.”
They walked into the open room that previously held the two unfinished statues and the completed statue of her, and she shivered involuntarily, glancing over at where they’d stood.
“This guy isn’t going to get you, Lois,” Clark said quietly.
“I know. I’m going to get
him.”
They continued on through the chamber; the makeshift table was gone, the tools were gone, the bags of cement were gone, the statues were gone.
“They really cleaned this place out,” she said.
“It looks like it,” Clark said, moving his flashlight across the floor, but only finding sand.
“So if you don’t want to be a god, what’s the fascination?”
“Huh?” he asked.
“The connection to the people, the gods,” she repeated.
“I guess it’s about knowing where you come from.”
She slowed to a stop near the end of the large chamber. “I wasn’t thinking,” she said, almost an apology.
“What do you mean?” he asked, turning back to her.
“You like seeing the history of a people, because you want that. I guess being adopted makes that kind of hard to find for yourself.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, his voice subdued.
“You
have a history, Clark, even if you don’t know all of it. But you have Jonathan and Martha and Smallville and all of
their history. You’re a part of the Kent family and you’re a part of that town, ritual corn crop worshipping and all,” she said with a smirk. “Even Zaid could tell that you were a farmer. You are already connected to the land and already connected to people. And now you’ve got all of us at the
Planet and our illustrious history all the way back to 1783,” she said, dropping into her best impression of Perry.
Clark chuckled, but was clearly considering her words. “You’re right, Lois.”
“I know,” she said with a wink. “Now let's go catch a fake mummy and prove me right again.”
He laughed, but reached out and gently squeezed her arm. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she acknowledged.
He gave her a smile. “So let’s go catch a mummy.”
And he followed her into the last chamber, the one that had fallen down around them the last time they’d been inside.
*****
“Whoa.”
Lois stopped just inside the room, taking it in.
She hadn’t been in here since Clark had carried her out. It looked so different. Before, it looked like the crumbling disaster zone that it was. But now, it was practically
orderly. Massive rocks were stacked almost neatly to one side, larger boulders on the bottom and smaller boulders on top, all the way to the ceiling. It nearly looked like a wall itself. The massive hole that she’d been trapped in had been entirely excavated. Now there stood a tall and sturdy-looking scaffolding at the center, allowing people to climb down safely. Buckets, shovels, and other equipment were stacked along the farthest wall, and just a few feet in front of her was a floodlight.
She crossed the few feet over to it and turned it on, worrying that she’d been wrong. She’d known that Superman had been here, but she hadn’t realized that he’d done such a thorough job!
“Hello?” came a voice out of the darkness.
“Who’s there?” called Lois warily.
“Ms. Lane?”
She recognized the way he said her name. “Dr. Carnahan!?”
“Please help me!”
“Where are you?” she called back.
But Clark was ahead of her, wading through the darkness to the opposite end of the room, just skirting the pit that had already claimed them once. She followed him, flashlight in front of their feet, careful to avoid running afoul of the edge.
“I’m here. I’m over here!”
She saw Clark slide to a stop and drop down to the ground behind a short wall of cement bags. At least that explained where the new statue had come from.
Catching up, she found Clark huddled over Carnahan, who was lying on his side, bound at his hands and feet.
Clark had already started working the ropes at his wrists, so she dropped to her knees at his feet and began to unknot the ropes there.
“Boy are we glad to see you!”
“And I, you, Ms. Lane.”
“We thought you’d–” She caught herself just in time. “We were worried you’d had a heart attack!”
“Heart attack? No. You sound like Bashir, worrying over me.”
“So you don’t have a heart problem?” Clark asked.
“Well, I do, yes. But it’s just a touch of angina. Easily controlled with medication. How did you even know?”
Clark had somehow gotten through his set of ropes already and was helping Carnahan to sit up. She tried to hurry with her own ropes.
“We found a statue of you this morning,” Clark told him. “It was carved to look like you’re having a heart attack.”
“How odd,” he said, though Carnahan seemed more focused on rubbing his wrists. “I didn’t think anyone on the Project even knew.”
“You said Bashir knew,” Lois pointed out, tugging hard at a stubborn knot.
“Yes, well, Bashir and I are friends. Of course Bashir knows. But that’s all.”
Lois’ knot finally came undone, and she quickly pulled the ropes from around Carnahan’s ankles.
“Dr. Weeks knows,” Clark said, helping Carnahan to stand.
“Yes, I suppose he would. He has access to all of my paperwork through the school.”
Carnahan took an uneasy step and nearly toppled over the bags and perilously close to the pit.
Lois and Clark both immediately grabbed onto him.
“Oh, goodness, thank you, my friends,” he said, gasping. “I appear to be less than steady on my feet.”
“Let’s just get you out of here, and we can talk when we find the others,” Clark said. "Lois, can you–” He held out his flashlight to her, and she took it. Then he put his shoulder under the older man’s arm, wrapping his own arm around Carnahan’s waist. Together, they started to move toward the exit.
Lois shone one flashlight in front of her and the other behind her, aiming for Carnahan’s feet.
Carnahan was clearly struggling. His limp was more pronounced, and he was sinking heavily into the sand with every other step. They needed to move faster than this.
She caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye and hissed, “Clark!”
They were out of time!
Seeing light from another flashlight headed down the tunnel toward them, Lois switched both of hers off, creating less of a direct target. She held up her thick Maglite in a defensive posture.
The flashlight wielder had caught up to them.
Stepping into the chamber, they came into range of the floodlight.
But it was only Zaid.
“Oh, Zaid!” Lois said, “You scared me! Where’s Abo?”
“I didn’t find Abo,” he replied to her.
“Well, never mind that now. Actually you’re just in time. Help Clark get Dr. Carnahan out of here.” She flicked the switch on the first flashlight and was looking for the switch on Clark’s when she heard him call her name.
“Lois, get behind me.”
His voice was stark and strained.
And she looked up to see that Zaid had pulled out a pistol, and that it was trained on them.
“You?!” she exclaimed. “How could it be
you?”
As if to answer her question, Wahid and Gamal stepped from the shadows behind him, entering the room.
For a heartbeat, she was thrilled to see Wahid and Gamal both alive.
But then everything clicked together.
“You’re
all in on it?”
“You were so sure that this was just one person,” Zaid sneered at her.
“But you– You’ve all worked here for
years. You said so yourself! How could you do this to the Project? To Dr. Weeks and Rupert and Bashir–”
“How could
we do this to
them? How could
they do this to
us?” Zaid snarled.
“Do what?” she asked incredulously. “It seems like you’re the ones doing everything–breaking the generator, scaring the whole crew, stealing gas and artifacts, trying to hurt people with falling ladders, blowing up the tomb!”
“And what is the Project doing to us?” Zaid asked, as if he were the one aggrieved.
“It looks like they’re preserving your heritage?” she shot back.
“Our heritage doesn’t need to be preserved by Americans.”
She tilted her head. “But I thought his whole thing was going to the Egyptian Museum of– The Ancient Egypt Museum or something.”
“The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities,” Clark supplied from over her shoulder, his voice tense.
“Right. That place. And isn’t Bashir Egyptian? He said his main job here was conservation."
“Cairo,” inserted Wahid, as if the city was a four letter word. “Not Qurna.”
“What?” she asked, not sure she was understanding.
“He does not live here,” Gamal said emphatically.
“Wait, Qurna?” she repeated, trying to catch up. “I thought we were in Luxor.”
Zaid took the reins of the conversation. “Yes, everyone would make you believe Qurna didn’t exist. But it
does. And the
people of Qurna exist, too. We watch over these tombs. They are our home.”
“I don’t understand. Are you saying that you
live in the tombs?”
“For such a famous reporter, you don’t know much,” Zaid said condescendingly.
“The Qurnawis live in the mountain,” interjected Clark. “Some of their homes are carved into the same bedrock that the tombs are carved into.” Lois shot him an inquiring look, and he shrugged and answered, “Jimmy’s research packet.”
“So, what? You think the tombs are yours?” she asked Zaid.
“The tombs
are ours,” he replied indignantly.
“Qurnawis protected them for years and years,” Wahid spoke up.
She looked around at the enormous pile of rubble just next to the entrance to the chamber and the deep pit beside her that the men in front of her had practically dug themselves.
“It seems like you’re doing a great job,” she said sarcastically.
“You know nothing,” Zaid snarled back.
“And what about the flooding damage?” she asked challengingly. “Have you been repairing
that?” When an answer wasn’t immediately forthcoming, she turned to Wahid. “Or the damage that we heard about from tour buses parking on top of it? Did you stop that? Or fix that mess?”
Wahid grunted at her, and she turned back to Zaid. “Because it looks like the team from the Project are the ones cleaning up everything you say
you’ve been doing.”
“Enough!” Wahid spat.
“You think that Kent Weeks was the only man that asked to dig here?” Zaid asked acerbically. “That he’s the only person that could do what he’s doing with all that grant money? Other people petitioned. People with a prior claim. People with knowledge that had been passed down through generations. People who had worked on these sites their entire lives. But what made him different?”
“American,” grumbled Wahid.
“That’s right,” Zaid said. “Our government bows down to the American dollar. Even when it means giving away our own heritage.”
She blinked, and Zaid scoffed, advancing on her.
“Like I said, you know nothing. Nothing about this place. Nothing about its history. Nothing about how to protect it. Nothing about how it belongs to its people. You Americans only know how to
take.”
“I haven’t taken anything!” she argued.
“You’ll take credit for the article you write about all of our hard work,” Zaid told her. “Weeks will take credit for discovering what my ancestors built here. And your city will take the artifacts.”
“I– Dr. Weeks–” She spluttered angrily over his accusations before spitting out, “Those artifacts will come back! They’re only on
loan to Metropolis, to debut the collection. To show people what your ancestors have done here!”
“But how many will end up in your museums instead of ours? In private collections?”
It made her think of the vault of art that had been found in Metropolis last year: a full-figure painting of the Mona Lisa, Gainsborough's lost masterpiece
Yellow Boy, the original score to Beethoven's
Tenth Symphony, Van Gogh's portrait of his own severed ear. None of them had come from artists in America. They’d all come from somewhere else and ended up in a private collection, just like Zaid said. Her anger flickered.
“How much more will you rob from our lands?” Zaid asked, sounding fraught and sad now instead of angry.
She’d heard this somewhere before. Something Carnahan had said. “You think the Project is just the frontrunner in an obelisk race?”
“Aren’t they?” Zaid asked.
“No,” she insisted firmly.
“I wish I hit her in the head with that shovel,” Wahid grumbled.
Her eyes finally shifted to really look at him and not at the gun that had been holding her attention. Wahid was tall, taller than her, with hulking broad shoulders. A little light lit in her mind.
“
You were the mummy. It was
you I fought before the cave-in,” she said, piecing things together. “You left the campsite right before the mummy appeared for the first time. And you were– well, we
thought you were kidnapped or killed after that. But you weren’t, were you? You set yourself up as a victim, but you were in here the whole time, turning out the lights and moving the statues into place. And then when everyone left, you dressed as the mummy and came out so that you could lead us to the statues and disappear again.”
Her eyes moved over to the shorter man.
“And you pointed out the mummy the first time, to make sure that everyone saw it. Then, you insisted that the crow was an omen of death in front of the whole group. You made them more afraid. Plus, you were the only one unaccounted for when the generator went out. But Zaid told us your real part in this when we met. You were the statue carver. We were worried you’d been killed, but you were just in here, too, working with the cement. Zaid said that you can carve anything in nature to look real. That would include
people, too, wouldn’t it?”
Gamal didn’t respond, but his hand twitched in response.
While she was confident she had most of it figured out now, she was still curious about one thing.
“How did you know how to carve Carnahan having a heart attack to scare us? You had to have known about his disease.”
“I pay Wahid to pick up my prescriptions in Luxor,” Carnahan’s unsteady voice came from behind her. “I didn’t know he knew what they were for.”
She remembered Bashir telling them that Wahid supported his family with odd jobs. “Right, Wahid runs errands for the Egyptologists. So he saw the medicine and then he told you, didn’t he, Gamal?” Shaking her head, she said, “You really are an incredible artist. I thought the statue of Wahid was real.” She saw a flicker of something like pride in the artist’s eye. “It’s a shame that this is what you chose to do with your talent.”
“And what choice did he have?” Zaid cut in aggressively. “No one that comes to see the history of Qurna will buy anything from a Qurnawi artist. Tourists that come here only care about the Egyptians who are dead. Should Gamal starve to satisfy them?”
“And you,” she said, rounding on Zaid. “You’re the foreman. You were supposed to be helping the Project. But you took advantage of everyone’s trust in you. You were always in sight, so we didn’t suspect you, but by always being around, you could get information for Wahid and Gamal on how to sneak around without getting caught. You always knew where everyone would be, so no one would ever see a statue being moved. You knew where all the inventory was and could get away with moving materials around without being questioned. Unlike any of the other workers, you could go anywhere you pleased, and it wouldn’t be suspicious. And–you’re the one who called the local paper to write that hatchet job article about the Project.”
“I’m the one who
made the plan.”
Zaid smirked.
“I’m the one who decided to take our history back, if no one would give it to us.”
He sauntered up to her, the very picture of a man in control and out of control at the same time.
“I’m the one that decided it was an injustice that the uneducated tourists coming here won’t even look at the art of a living Egyptian artist, that Wahid has dug through the sand of these excavation sites his whole life yet his family still lives in the dirt, that my degree is useless here because I was born in Qurna.”
He stopped in front of her and used the barrel of his pistol to tilt her chin upward, forcing her to look him in the eye.
“And I’m the one who decided that getting rid of a famous, arrogant, American reporter would shut the Project down faster than anything else.”
She’d been right.
The story was escalating from kidnapping to murder.
She heard Clark shift behind her, and Zaid backed up several steps to see around her, angling himself in front of the massive stone wall Superman had built.
“Don’t move,” said Zaid, his pistol definitively aiming behind her.
Lois was suddenly worried that she’d made a mistake—a bigger mistake than usual. Because she knew that wandering around the tomb alone would likely draw out the man impersonating the mummy, but she hadn’t banked on his having accomplices. Or on his standing so far apart from her, out of range of any attack she might plan. She also hadn’t counted on his having a gun.
And she hadn’t counted on the panic that would ignite when that gun was trained on Clark.
Was it possible to jump into a pool without checking the water level, even if you were surrounded by sand?
Because even if the curse of the mummy wasn’t real, the curse of Lois Lane’s love life was right on track.
She had to come up with a plan, and quickly, before her nightmares met with reality and Clark met a fate even worse than Lex’s.
“Don’t worry,” Zaid said, reading her face. “We’re not really killers. I don’t want to shoot you. We’ll wait until night and then take you miles away from here. The desert will finish you and the sand will bury you–”
Out of nowhere, a cracking noise interrupted Zaid’s words as a rock above him came loose from its place near the top of the rubble heap.
She shot the briefest glance at Clark to reassure herself that he was still safe and whole; he seemed to be looking right at the rock over the top of his glasses.
Focusing back on the falling rock, she saw it just as it landed.
Right on Zaid’s head.
He looked up for a second, surprised, and then slumped sideways.
There was a moment of stunned silence.
And then everyone seemed to realize that the gun was loose.
Lois launched herself forward first, immediately followed by Wahid and Gamal.
It didn’t take her long to reach the gun, but Wahid did too, and he started moving forward menacingly, trying to put himself between her and the gun. She sidestepped instead, keeping it
between them.
Darting a quick glance to the side, she saw Carnahan crawling away from the fighting and Clark awkwardly flipping Gamal over his hip, following him down into the sand.
When she looked back at Wahid, he was rushing her, and she decided to borrow Clark’s trick, using Wahid’s speed and momentum against him. She grabbed for the arm he had outstretched toward her, twisting to flip him.
But her footing on the sand wasn’t firm, particularly under her throbbing, overtaxed knee, and he was a big man, so instead of flipping Wahid the way she’d intended, she only succeeded in unsteadily sliding them both over a few feet.
Wahid gained control first. He pushed her so that she kept slipping sideways, turning her back to him.
His arm was already held against hers, so he gripped her wrist hard and forced her arm behind her.
She cried out as he sharply bent her elbow, slamming his own arm across her bruise and pressing her arm upward–causing Clark to call out her name in an immediate response.
But thankfully, between taekwondo and self-defense classes, an arm lock was something she knew how to get out of!
As fast as she could, before Wahid had fully pressed her arm upwards, she stepped to the right, almost into his arm, and twisted herself out of the position of total control he’d locked her into.
Wahid’s hand was still clamped around her wrist, so she twisted it, lining up the smallest side with the space where his fingers and thumb met, and then forcefully brought her other hand up against his hand and her own wrist to slide it free.
Dancing back a step, she dodged as he grabbed for her, and for just a second, he slid off balance.
It was the opportunity she’d been hoping for.
She feinted low to recenter herself, and he followed her down, anticipating an attack.
But it cost him—he slipped further off balance, and she stepped into the perfectly set-up roundhouse kick she’d prepared in her feint.
Her knee was hurting, but it held as she spun.
With Wahid’s own stance lower, she managed to land the kick straight into his head.
He toppled immediately.
Their fight had taken them away from the gun but closer to where Gamal and Clark had been scuffling in the sand.
When she turned back to them, Gamal wasn’t moving, and Clark had just about reached her.
“You alright?” he asked.
“Of course,” she smirked, huffing a stray hair out of her mouth.
Clark was standing! she thought triumphantly.
They’d been in a dangerous situation, and Clark wasn’t a fighter, but the bad guys were down and the Lois-Lane-boyfriend curse had not come to claim Clark Kent today!
She heard scuffling behind her, but before he could turn to see if Wahid had found his feet, she heard Carnahan shout out victoriously, “I’ve got it!”
His joy was short-lived.
His words were punctuated by the gun going off.
For the first time she could remember, she was more worried that it would hit Clark than it would hit her.
She saw Clark’s face turn stark, his eyes shot through with fear, and her worry turned to panic.
Even though the bullet was moving at a supersonic speed, her mind was moving like it was underwater.
She had the briefest instinct that she should get down. But another part of her knew from experience that bullets moved faster than their own sound through the air, so if she had already heard the shot, her fate was sealed in one direction or the other.
But suddenly she was looking into Clark’s eyes, so much closer than they’d been only a millisecond before.
How had he covered that distance so quickly?
And why did he still look frightened, and now worried, too?
She didn’t feel shot.
Shouldn’t she feel pain if she’d been shot?
Still underwater, her peripheral senses came back online, and she realized that she was facing the complete opposite direction than she had been only a second ago.
How had
that happened?
She hadn’t moved.
But more important than that, if she and Clark had miraculously switched places, that meant he had been standing between her and the bullet–
Her hands came up to grip his back, feeling her eyes widen.
“Were you– Did you– Are you hurt?” she gasped out.
“I’m not hurt,” he assured her, his hands resting on her upper arms, rubbing them lightly in a soothing kind of way.
When had his hands come up to her arms?
When had they switched places?
The worry was returning to his eyes, which didn’t make any sense if they were both fine.
Carnahan said something then, and she fuzzily registered that Clark called something back to the Egyptologist over his shoulder, but she couldn’t track what he’d said.
Because her drowning brain began its ascent toward the surface.
Toward the sun.
The sun was brighter in Egypt, nearer to the equator than Metropolis. And Clark had looked the healthiest she’d ever seen him.
But he’d gotten
weaker in the prolonged dark of the cave-in.
And how
had they survived that blast of dynamite that must have been right on top of them, anyway?
How had they survived the cave-in
at all?
When the ground had first fallen out from beneath her, Clark had held her–and there was a millisecond where she’d felt weightless. She’d assumed that it had been a trick of gravity. But what if it had been the temporary
suspension of gravity?
And
speaking of flying, how did Superman even know that the tomb had caved in? Neither she nor Clark had called for him, and Luxor felt pretty far from home for a random fly-by.
And speaking of
far from home, just how much Arabic could Clark have picked up during a couple of weeks of travel, anyway? As much as he’d spoken to the excavation team and the doctors?
And not just Arabic but at least as much Chinese, too?
And why would being fluent in two other languages be such a cause for him to worry?
Plus, did adults even have photographic memories? She’d thought that was something only kids had.
And just now, he had moved toward her but she hadn’t
even seen it.
He had
moved her, turning her around, and she hadn’t even
felt it, just a heady rush of air that she’d barely clocked in the heart-stopping second when the gun went off.
The whole trip, she’d been tripping over things–the airport stairway, the bag of cement, rocks in the sand–and he’d always caught her, even when she’d thought he hadn’t been near enough to reach her. How incredible did his reflexes have to be?
Super incredible?
Dr. Weeks seemed to think that it was a miracle they had survived.
Back home in Metropolis, she knew exactly where to find her weekly dose of the miraculous.
And this entire trip, he’d been showing her.
Her hand came up to his chest, where the crest would sit.
“But you– You’re wearing short sleeves,” she stammered, her brain snagging on the one thing it hadn’t pieced together yet. “And shorts.”
“I left the suit at home,” he told her, his voice quiet and serious.
“But y– Superman was here, stabilizing the cave,” she wrestled, shaking her head.
“I went home and got it,” he explained rationally.
And she blinked at the most obvious possible answer because OF COURSE he had gone home–
flown home, her brain amended–and gotten it. It had probably taken him
seconds.
She probably knew Superman’s powers better than anyone besides himself–and besides Martha and Jonathan Kent, she realized, the thought rocking her–and yet it was like she couldn’t even recall what he could do, just because it was Clark in his maroon t-shirt and not in the blue spandex suit.
“Did Carnahan see you…?” she trailed off, not having ready words to describe exactly what he must have done.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “He was looking down, fumbling with the gun. We’re farther from the light now; it’s harder to see.”
It was harder to see where they were standing now, closer to the edge of the precipice.
But even so, her mind had lit with clarity.
She had said that she wanted to take more risks in her personal life. That’s why she’d jumped into the hasty engagement with Lex. Guided by her brain, Lex Luthor had been the perfect partner–erudite, providing, urbane. She snickered internally at her own folly.
Her overpaced mind narrowed down to just one thought.
The ancient Egyptians had been right: the brain was useless.
Guided by her brain, she hadn’t been able to connect all the dots to see who a person was, not Lex, and not Clark.
But guided by her heart, she had always been able to see who Clark was; she’d just fought against listening to it. Going against every rule she’d ever made for herself, she’d nearly agreed to go to dinner with him when he’d asked her out at the end of the Messenger investigation. She’d even
told him about the rule when she’d been tied up the day before! When pheromones had invaded the newsroom, she’d thrown herself at him unapologetically. Even as someone who prided herself on her own self-sufficiency, she’d fled to his protection the moment the Prankster had given her a real scare. She winced as a dozen other memories assaulted her at once; tucking into his arms after Sebastian Finn had choked her, dancing with him at the Corn Festival, and flinging herself into his arms after the awful farce of a wedding. And also believing in a total stranger in outlandish spandex just because he had kind eyes when telling a child that his mother had made his cape, kissing him goodbye as he went off to stop an asteroid, even inexpertly digging a bullet out of his shoulder–because that had all been Clark too, her mind reconciled.
Yes, the ancient Egyptians had gotten their priorities exactly right, just as Bashir had said.
The heart truly did rule the soul.
“So, secrets in the dark,” she murmured, so quietly that only Superman could have heard it.
His palpable worry morphed into confusion. “What do you mean?” His voice was nearly as low as hers had been.
“You promised. You promised me somebody to rely on and a future together, and having each other’s back during the day and telling each other secrets in the dark. Is this what you’d meant?”
“Lois, you have to believe that I was going to tell you–” His voice sounded like it was edged in panic, but that wasn’t where she’d been going anyway. Not right now.
“I know,” she cut him off. “You had a week.”
He nearly did a double take. “Yes. I did…So you’re not, you’re not–”
“I probably will be. Mad, embarrassed, a little betrayed, beyond exasperated, and
mad…” she said honestly. “But right now I’m sort of just glad that we’re both alive. And that you keep your promises.”
His eyebrows knit minutely together and she explained, “You had my back–literally. When you saved me, you gave me a future back. And you gave me our first secret.” Her hand on his chest flexed, and his confusion was replaced by hope.
“And you’re…okay with all of that?” he asked tentatively.
She would be eventually.
One day.
Soon.
“Yeah.”
The smile that swept across his face was so brilliant that it made her feel like she’d never seen his true smile before.
“Ah, excuse me, but I really don’t know what to do with this, but I’m not sure I ought to be the one holding it.”
She’d forgotten Carnahan was here.
“I’ll be right there,” Clark called over his shoulder before making eye contact with her again, checking in.
She nodded but then put her hand out to stop his retreating arm.
He gave her a quizzical look.
“Lois Lane has more experience with disarming guns than Clark Kent,” she said under her breath, and stepped around him to see Carnahan holding the weapon in his open palms.
Smothering an eye roll, she walked over to him, extricating the weapon from his willing hands and putting the safety back on with a sharp metallic click.
A beam of light split the darkness in front of her.
“What’s happened here? We heard a gunshot!”
Dr. Weeks appeared out of the passage, Bashir only a step behind him.
“Is everyone alright?” Bashir asked.
“Everyone is fine!” Clark assured them immediately. “The bullet didn’t hit anyone. I think it struck the far wall,” he said, gesturing.
She tilted her head at that. He had been really,
really fast.
Catching her silent realization, he half-grinned at her.
“Rupert!” Bashir exclaimed. Obviously happy to see his friend, he sloughed through the sand toward Carnahan, clapping him on the back.
Meanwhile Weeks’ light had found Wahid, still unconscious.
“Is– Is he…?” Dr. Weeks stammered.
“No,” Clark assured. “He and Zaid are unconscious. Gamal is tied up over there.”
“So he and Gamal weren’t killed?”
“No. That was just an elaborate ruse,” Clark explained.
“Zaid, Wahid, and Gamal have been stealing from the tombs for years,” she continued. “When the Project came, they joined to try and stay close to what was happening here. But then the more thorough you were and the deeper the exploration went, the more they realized that they couldn't get away with it forever. So they tried to scare you off and sabotage the Project.”
“And they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for these two reporters,” Carnahan quipped.
“Yes,” agreed Dr. Weeks solemnly. “I believe we owe you a large debt of gratitude.”
“Thank you,” Clark replied. “But now, we’d better find something to tie up these other two. I’m not sure they’ll be out for much longer.”
“There’s more rope stacked over there,” Weeks said, reading toward a pile of equipment on the far side of the room. “I’ll get it.”
“I should go and get the police,” Bashir said. “I will come back quickly,” he promised, leaving the room at a jog.
Carnahan looked at them from where he stood. “So, this is all done, now? We all live happily ever after?” he asked.
Her eyes sought Clark’s, and she found both hope and a question.
She let her smile answer Clark, while she said to Carnahan, “We still have a story to write.”
Clark chuckled. “Isn’t that the same thing?”
For her, it really was.
