Chapter One
*Voices in My Head*
Lois was calling him.
This was not an abnormal occurrence, but as her voice registered to his senses, so did the just-ebbing tide of excruciating pain. He thought to himself as his muddled brain climbed toward consciousness that the sensation was rather odd—out of place.
That is, until he remembered the Kryptonite.
His eyes snapped open, and the dim glow of the street lights just outside of the alley next to his apartment dancing around Lois’s dark head blinded him until he blinked a couple of times.
“Clark!” he heard again, clearly this time. He moaned in response. The pain ebbed further, and he felt her delicate hands on his chest, reassuring her that he was going to be all right after this latest ordeal.
“I’m okay, Lois,” he said, his voice only slightly slurred. He took a deep breath, and suddenly felt much better. Surprising his fiancée, he stood, his powers returning rapidly after his—thankfully—short exposure to the deadly substance.
Lois, her relief embodied in near-hysteria, flung her arms around his neck in a tight hug. “Thank God! I thought I’d lost you when you wouldn’t wake up from the Kryptonite force field, and then Sarah and that Miller guy—Clark, they FLEW away, just FLEW up into . . .”
She didn’t stop there, but he missed the rest because he heard a different voice—a voice he could not put a face to anywhere within his telescopic x-ray vision, which was improving by the second.
Lois must have noticed he wasn’t listening, because she shook him gently, asking, “Clark, what is it? Is someone in trouble?”
Focusing on her face, he shook his head, confused. “I . . . I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone’s in trouble.”
“Then what is it?”
“Maybe it’s just the last effects of the Kryptonite.” He dismissed his confusion.
Lois wasn’t so sure, and even if she was, that wouldn’t have stopped her from asking, “What did you hear?”
Clark opened his mouth to answer—he was planning to start with, “It sounds crazy,” but didn’t get past “it” before he heard it again . . . a soft, somewhat feminine voice coming from somewhere . . . in his head?
His eyes grew wide and Lois looked at him in concern as he listened again. And the voice had a searching, questing quality to it as it said, *Kal-El, my son?*
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“Wh-who’s there?” Clark asked the air, momentarily forgetting that Lois was beside him.
“Clark?” Lois said. “There’s no one here but you and me. Unless I can’t see them, which is entirely possible, but--”
He re-focused on Lois, and said, “I think I’m just hearing things.”
Getting a bit irritated at his cryptic responses, Lois snapped quietly, “WHAT things?”
Clark looked down, and mumbled in a voice he knew Lois could barely hear, “Voices . . . in my head, like before, only it’s not Sarah or that Miller guy. It must be leftover effects from the Kryptonite.”
Lois was doubtful. “But you’ve never just ‘heard things’ before after Kryptonite—have you?”
He shook his head. “No—wait, it’s happening again . . .”
*Kal-El, my son? If you can hear me, say ‘Yes’ in your mind.*
Clark’s eyes got even wider, and he did as bid while providing commentary for Lois. “Now, the voices are giving me directions. It was confusing enough when they were calling me ‘son.’”
At that moment, he had an idea.
*Who are you?* he thought into the “direction” from which the mental voice seemed to be coming. *WHERE are you?*
“Clark?” Lois asked. “This is getting kind of weird.”
When he heard the answers to his questions, Clark couldn’t disagree with his fiancée.
“I know,” he told her. “And you’re not going to believe this—I’m not even sure I believe it . . .”
The possibility was mind-boggling, but despite the part of him that hounded him with impossibility warnings, deep down, he couldn’t help but believe the voice when it said:
*Look into the Earth’s orbit, where the transport which has carried us to you these three decades has finally arrived. I am Lara.*
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