Tyson made it eight more blocks before Clark caught him.
Clark simply arrived in front of him and stuck out his arm. He hit Clark's outstretched arm and the world inverted, sky and street trading places, and then he was skipping across the pavement like a stone across a pond. He tore through a hot dog cart, a mailbox, and the rear quarter panel of a parked taxi before friction finally won.
He lay in the gutter for a moment, tasting copper.
"Okay," he said to the storm drain. "New plan."
As he stood, his body began molting. The dead skin sloughed away, road rash and a dislocated shoulder dissolving with it, and by the time Clark touched down thirty feet away, Tyson was whole again, covered in blood, rolling his neck, brushing shed skin like dandruff.
"Clark. Buddy. Pal." Tyson backed up with every step Clark took forward. "I know you're in there."
Clark lunged.
A fist arrived before the thought he was swinging had finished forming. Tyson got his forearms up; what little good it did. The impact drove him through the brick facade of a laundromat, through a row of industrial dryers, through the cinderblock back wall, and into the alley beyond.
He came up spitting mortar dust and threw everything.
Electricity first, Jeremy Creek's gift ripped from a streetlight transformer and his own body both, a forking blue-white torrent that caught Clark square in the chest as he stepped through the hole in the wall. It lit the alley like a photo flash. It lifted the hair off Clark's forehead.
Clark kept walking.
Fire next. Tyson slapped a palm against the alley floor, and Coach Walt's combustion raced along the asphalt in a spreading sheet, up the walls, across the dumpsters, turning the narrow corridor into a furnace. Clark walked through it. The flames curled around him, found nothing to burn, and gave up. His jacket smoldered. He emerged from the fire with his skin glowing faintly orange, cooling, annoyed the way a man is annoyed by a mosquito.
"You're supposed to at least flinch, goddamnit," Tyson said.
He reached out with telekinesis and grabbed the fire escape bolted to the building above Clark's head, six stories of rusted iron, and ripped it free. Two tons of scaffolding came down like a dropped cage. Clark punched through it, one fist opening a Clark-shaped hole in the wreckage, and Tyson was already running because the alternative was standing still, and standing still meant dying.
He went vertical. Greg Arkin's agility took him up the alley wall in four bounding contacts, brick crunching under his fingertips, and he flipped over the roofline as Clark's heat vision carved a molten line through the space he'd occupied. The beam swept after him, bisecting a water tower, and Tyson snapped a hand back and spat webbing, a thick grey rope of it, directly into Clark's eyes.
The heat vision cooked it off in half a second. But half a second was half a second.
Tyson used it to pick up a car.
The sedan was parked on the street below, and telekinesis wrapped around it like a fist, and Tyson swung it, catching Clark mid-leap and smashed him sideways through the third floor of an office building. Glass and drywall erupted outward. Tyson didn't wait to admire it. He hit the rooftop gravel, pressed both palms flat, and pulled with Sean Kelvin's hunger, dragging every degree of heat out of the air, out of the water in the pipes. Frost raced across the roof. The office block groaned as its steel skeleton contracted, windows shattering in sequence down its face, and the third floor, the one with Clark in it, flash-froze into a tomb of ice and rime.
For three full seconds, nothing moved.
Tyson stood on the adjacent roof, breath steaming, hands aching with stolen cold, and let himself hope.
Then the building's face detonated outward, and Clark came through the ice like a bullet through a wedding cake.
The flying tackle took Tyson off the roof. They fell together, four stories, and Clark drove him into the street with an impact that probably registered on seismographs. The pavement cratered. Car alarms screamed in a widening radius. Something in his back gave, and the molting triggered, not knowing how much good it would do. Dead tissue peeling away as fresh living tissue below emerged, and he jammed both hands against Clark's chest and dumped Walden's power at zero range.
The blast was gold-white and total. It caught Clark center mass and threw him end over end down the avenue, through a bus shelter, through a traffic light stanchion, ploughing a furrow in the asphalt for a hundred and fifty feet. He came to rest against the base of a granite fountain and, for the first time all night, made a sound. A grunt. Short. Pained.
Tyson climbed out of his crater and stared.
"Bet you felt that one," he shouted.
Clark stood up.
There was a scorch mark across his chest, and beneath the burned shirt, his skin was red. Reddened. Like a sunburn. That was the sum total of what the single most devastating attack in Tyson's arsenal had accomplished. Clark rolled his shoulder, worked his jaw, and started walking again, and Tyson understood. Clark had been redirected. He had not been stopped. He might not be stoppable.
"You think I can't fight you?" Tyson shouted down the ruined avenue. He spat blood onto the asphalt and rolled his shoulders, fresh skin still settling over new muscle. "I fought Eric Summers, man! And that was before I was fast. Before I had half of this. So come on!" He beckoned with both hands. "Bring that shit!"
Clark obliged.
He crossed a hundred and fifty feet of broken street in a smear of red and blue, and Tyson met him halfway.
Superspeed collided with superspeed, and the world downshifted into that stretched, syrup-slow perception where raindrops hung like ornaments, and the whole city held its breath. Inside that bubble, two men moved at full velocity, and the first exchange happened faster than sound could carry it.
Clark led with a right hand that would have decapitated a rhino. It was also the single most obvious punch Tyson had ever seen. No feint. No setup. No angle. Just raw power traveling in a straight line from point A to point B, telegraphed from the shoulder, from the hips.
Tyson slipped it. Head off the center line, weight rolling to the outside, the fist passing close enough to part his hair, and then he was inside Clark's reach where all that power meant nothing, and he put a short elbow into Clark's ribs, pivoted, and hammered a palm strike up under his chin.
It was like hitting a bank vault. His hand screamed. Clark's head rocked back anyway, and Tyson kept moving because momentum was the only thing he had. Knee to the thigh. Forearm across the throat. A foot hooked behind Clark's ankle and a shove, and the strongest thing on this continent went down on his back in the middle of the street like a drunk tourist.
The look on Clark's face was worth every broken bone in Tyson's hand.
"That's what the point of the race was, Clark," Tyson said, circling as Clark surged back to his feet. His hand knitted itself whole, dead skin flaking off his knuckles. "You've never been challenged. Not once. Not really." He ducked a haymaker that demolished the mail truck behind him, stepped through the wreckage, and stung Clark's ear with a jab the Kryptonian barely felt. "You never needed to push yourself. Why learn how to fight when you can't get hurt?"
Clark swung again. Same punch. Same line. Tyson rolled under it and raked a low kick across the back of Clark's knee, and the joint buckled just enough to drop him to one kneecap, cracking the pavement.
"Well, guess what, country boy." Tyson drove a knee toward Clark's face, connected, felt his own patella shift in ways patellas shouldn't. "You aren't in Kansas anymore."
Tyson wasn't a trained fighter. Nobody had ever taught him footwork in a gym with a coach and a heavy bag. What he had was a childhood in New York, and a dozen small altercations that needed to be solved with fists, and the accumulated education of every beating he'd ever taken and every one he'd ever given back. He fought ugly. He fought dirty.
Clark fought like a tank. Overwhelming force.
Against anyone else on Earth, tank won. Against someone fast enough to keep up and mean enough to exploit every tell, the tank kept swinging at empty air.
Clark grabbed for him. Tyson spun out of it, snagged Clark's wrist on the way past, and used the bigger man's own pull to yank him off balance and into a lamppost. The pole folded around Clark's skull with a sound like a church bell dying. Tyson followed with a spinning backfist that snapped Clark's head sideways, then spit some webbing around his ankle mid-turn and pulled, and Clark went down again, face-first this time, plowing a trench through the sidewalk with his chin.
"See, this is embarrassing," Tyson said, dancing back out of range, shaking out his ruined hand as it shed the ruined bits and rebuilt itself. "You're the strongest guy on the planet, and you fight like a toddler having a tantrum. Big swings. No brain."
Clark rose from the trench. Concrete dust sheeted off his shoulders. He wasn't hurt. That was the problem, the enormous, insurmountable problem underneath all of Tyson's trash talk. Tyson had hit him twenty times, and Clark wasn't hurt. Every strike Tyson landed cost him bones. Every takedown bought only seconds. He was winning every exchange and losing the fight, because the fight was over if Clark connected once.
Then the worst thing happened. Clark stopped telegraphing.
It wasn't that his skills improved. It was speed, deployed with something that finally resembled thought. He threw the same stupid straight right, and when Tyson slipped it, Clark simply threw another one faster, no recovery, no reset, raw Kryptonian reflexes brute-forcing what technique would have finessed. The second punch grazed Tyson's temple.
Grazed. A graze from Clark Kent.
The street pinwheeled. Tyson's feet left the ground, and he cartwheeled sideways through the plate glass of a pharmacy, through a shelf of greeting cards, and into the pharmacist's counter hard enough to fold it in half. His skull rang like a struck gong. Blood sheeted down from his temple, hot and fast, and his vision doubled, tripled, slowly straightening itself.
He molted where he lay and got up before he was ready because he needed to keep moving.
Clark came through the pharmacy wall instead of the window, and Tyson got his guard up in time to catch the follow-up on his crossed forearms. Both bones in his left arm fractured on impact. The force lifted him off his feet and put him through the back wall into the stockroom, through the stockroom into the alley, and he landed rolling, shedding broken pieces of himself, the molt working overtime.
"Okay," he wheezed, propping himself against a dumpster. His arm reset with a sound like snapping celery. "Okay. So you can learn. Worst possible time for personal growth, Clark."
Clark stepped through the hole in the wall. There was a cut on his lip. One cut. A single bead of alien blood, from twenty of the best shots Tyson had ever thrown in his life, and Clark touched it with his thumb and looked at the red smear like it was a personal insult.
Tyson began to say, "If you could make God bleed—"
Then Clark came again, and the dance resumed, except now it was even. Tyson still slipped the first punch. He no longer had time to slip the second. He gave ground, weaving, deflecting what he couldn't dodge, his forearms breaking and reknitting and breaking again, trading three landed hits for every one he absorbed, and it wasn't enough, because his hits were withdrawals from an empty account and Clark's were mortgage payments on his skeleton.
A backhand caught his shoulder and dislocated it. A knee he mostly avoided still cracked his hip. Tyson kept moving, kept molting, kept talking, because the talking was the only weapon that hadn't broken yet. But that wasn't true.
He still had the necklace.
The locket hung against Tyson's sternum where it always hung, dull lead on a steel chain, the emergency he never talked about and never went without. It had ended the Eric Summers fight. His hand came up, fingers closing around the lead casing, thumbnail finding the seam.
Clark stopped walking.
His head tilted, just slightly, and he focused on Tyson's fist, on the chain, on the small lead shape he had seen before. Recognized.
He didn't close the distance.
His eyes ignited.
The beam crossed four hundred feet in no time at all and struck the locket with pinpoint, horrifying precision, and the lead went from cold to molten between one heartbeat and the next. Heat seared through Tyson's shirt. He smelled his own chest hair burning. The locket's seam, the hinge, slagged shut into a single fused lump, and the lump was melting toward his skin.
He ripped it off. Chain links parted, molten lead spattered his knuckles, and he hurled the ruined locket away from his body on pure animal reflex.
Clark was there before it landed.
Tyson didn't see him move. There was no blur, no smear of color, none of the visual hints of speed. Clark simply ceased to be at the fountain and began to be here, plucking the glowing lump of lead and kryptonite out of the air with two fingers, and then his arm blurred, a throw, and the locket left his hand with a crack of split air and rose. And rose. A tiny orange spark climbing through the night sky, past the tops of the towers, past the cloud deck, shrinking, gone, somewhere above Metropolis.
Tyson's only real weapon was leaving the atmosphere.
"Okay," Tyson said. "That's just showing off."
Clark turned to face him.
Tyson's hands came up. Palms out. Walden's light kindling in them, gold bleeding to white, the charge building from his shoulders down through his forearms because it was the only card left in the deck and he was going to play it until his arms fell off—
Clark didn't let him fire.
The distance disappeared. Clark's hands closed around both of Tyson's wrists, and squeezed.
The bones broke. Radius and ulna, both arms, a wet double crack that Tyson heard through his own skeleton before the pain arrived.
The light died in his palms.
His hands dropped, useless, and the Stones hummed against his body, and Clark stood over him, still holding on.
Then Clark threw him.
There was no windup, no visible effort. One moment Tyson's wrists were caught in that impossible grip, and the next the world became a centrifuge. The street inverted. The sky wheeled past, then the street again, then a rooftop's edge, then sky, end over end over end, and somewhere in the tumbling chaos Tyson understood that he was airborne in the way that satellites were airborne, that Clark had simply decided he should be somewhere else and made it so.
He cleared the buildings. He knew this only because he clipped one on the arc down.
An air conditioning unit exploded around him. Then gravel, rooftop gravel chewing through what remained of his shirt and the skin beneath as he skipped and rolled and fell off the edge, then finally, finally stopped.
For a while, he just breathed. Something in his chest clicked when his lungs expanded. Broken rib.
Get up.
The molt tried. He felt it working, the dead tissue loosening across his back and arms, the itch-burn of new skin knitting underneath, but it was slow now, sluggish, like an engine turning over on a cold morning with a dying battery. He'd healed too many times tonight. Tyson had been drawing from Greg Arkin's gift repeatedly, and it seemed to be falling off.
His arms wouldn't answer. Both forearms were wreckage, the bones grinding when he tried to move them, and the molt was triaging, working his ribs first, his skull, the important things, leaving his arms for last.
Get up. He's coming.
Tyson rolled onto his back. That took eight seconds and cost him a scream. The clouds overhead were orange with city light, and rain was starting, fine and cold, and he lay there feeling it patter against his ruined face and thought, absurdly, that Martha Kent might still be awake. Sitting in that farmhouse kitchen with the lights on. Waiting.
His thoughts were wandering. That was the concussion talking.
The molt reached his left arm. The bones pulled straight, fracture lines fusing, dead skin splitting along his forearm like a seam, and he got the arm under himself, then the other one, half-healed, good enough, and pushed himself up to one elbow—
Clark landed and crossed to him at a walk, unhurried, rain beading on his shoulders, and Tyson got his newly-mended forearm up to aim Walden's power.
Clark stepped on it.
The bone went again. Both bones. The same radius, the same ulna, every minute of desperate healing undone under a boot heel like he was crushing a cigarette, and Tyson yelled, more desperate this time, as the molt found almost nothing left to work with.
Clark stood over him.
Empty eyes. Rain running down a face that had smiled at Tyson across a farmhouse table, that had laughed at his jokes in the loft of a barn, and there was nobody home behind it. Just Jor-El's will wearing his friend like a coat. Just like Isobel was wearing Lana. Clark looked down at Tyson, at the pockets, at the three Stones of Power humming their eager little song, and his hand reached down.
Tyson spoke.
"I killed Dr. Walden."
The hand didn't stop. But Tyson kept going, because words were the only bones he had left that weren't broken.
"He came after you. Woke up out of that coma with Kryptonian starfire in his hands and one thought in his head, and the thought was kill Clark Kent. To stop you from becoming this."
Clark's fingers touched the jacket. The Stones sang louder.
"I fought him, and I—" Tyson's voice caught, but he forced it through. "I drained him. I held on, and I pulled, and I felt his power come out of him, and he got weaker and weaker, and he was helpless. I brought him to the sinkhole. And I let go."
The hand at his jacket had slowed. Maybe. Or maybe that was the concussion and hope conspiring.
"I listened to him all the way down. You want to know what that sounds like? It sounds long. It sounds so much longer than the fall should be. And then it stops, and the stopping is worse." Tyson stared up past Clark's shoulder at the orange clouds. "I went down after. Checked for a pulse, like there was some version of this where a man falls that far onto rock and I find one. There wasn't. And I stood over his body in the dark, and you know what scared me? Not the body. My heartbeat. It was steady, Clark. Even. Standing over a man I'd just killed, and I remember thinking, this should be harder. It should have wrecked me. It didn't. And I've been carrying that around because what kind of person does a thing like that and just... keeps walking?"
The rain fell. Clark's hand had stopped, fingertips resting against the jacket, motionless.
"I did it for you." Tyson's broken arms lay useless, so all he had was his eyes, and he put everything into them. "I looked at Walden, and I looked at you, and I decided you were worth more than he was, and I made the call, and I live with it. Every day. That's what I am, man. Down under the jokes and the powers and all of it." His voice dropped. "And the world does not need more of that. It's got plenty. It's got Lionel Luthor, and it's got Jor-El, and it's got me. What it needs, what it is starving for, is somebody who wouldn't have made the choice in the first place. Somebody who'd have caught Walden with one hand and me with the other and never once stopped to ask which of us deserved it. Somebody whose first instinct, every time, every single time, is save them all.
"That's you. That's not Kal-El. Kal-El is a name on a memo from a dead planet. That's Clark Kent, who Jonathan and Martha Kent raised in a farmhouse, who can't watch someone drop their groceries without crossing the street to help. Jor-El didn't build that. Your mom built that, packing your lunches. Your dad built that, working you on that farm and loving you the whole time. Years of it, brick by brick, and some ghost in a little ship thinks he can pave over it?"
Silence. Wind moved across the rooftop, dragging veils of rain. Somewhere far below, sirens threaded through the streets, headed for the wreckage they'd made.
Clark's hand still rested against the jacket, against the Stones.
It wasn't moving.
"Come home," Tyson said almost gently. "Your mom asked me to bring you home. She's probably in the kitchen right now with the light on. Your dad's out on the porch pretending he's not watching the sky. And neither one of them can sleep, because the only thing they want is you back. So come home, Clark. Come home and be their son."
Something cracked in Clark's face. A flicker, faint as a match struck at the bottom of a lake, a light seen through deep water, guttering, fighting the pressure. His hand withdrew from Tyson's jacket, an inch, another inch, trembling in a way that Kryptonian muscle had no mechanical reason to tremble. His jaw worked against nothing. A muscle in his neck stood out like a bridge cable, straining, as if two hands had hold of his head and were pulling in opposite directions, and the rain ran down his empty face, and Tyson lay broken in the gravel and watched a war he couldn't help with.
"Fight him," Tyson whispered. "You stubborn Kansassian son of a bitch. Fight him."
Clark's whole body shuddered, once.
Then he blinked.
And his eyes were his again.
— Meteor Freak —
His palms came up, pressing against his own face. Clark turned in a slow, unsteady circle, taking it in. The cracked concrete where their fight had carved trenches. The bent rebar jutting from buildings. The rain pooling in the craters their bodies had made.
Chloe near the stairwell access door, holding Kyla Willowbrook, who was sprawled on her side with blood matting the hair above her ear. Kara knelt between them, one hand checking Kyla's pulse, the other pressing a torn strip of her own sleeve against Kyla's scalp wound. She looked up when Clark turned toward her.
Beyond them, in the rubble of the club, pink light crackled between Isobel Thoreaux's fingers as she picked her way toward them. She and Kara had clearly been fighting before Clark's awakening pulled her attention. Her mouth was moving, some incantation or taunt lost under the wind, and her borrowed eyes burned.
Clark saw all of it.
Then he looked down at Tyson.
Tyson lay in the rubble with both arms at his sides, and his wrists were wrong. The left bent, swollen and purple. The right was worse. The shape of bone pressed against the skin from the inside, a ridge where no ridge belonged, and his fingers had ballooned into fat, useless sausages that wouldn't close around anything.
"What did I do?" Clark's voice came out small. Horrified. Completely, unmistakably his.
"You kicked my ass," Tyson said from the gravel. "Thoroughly. Like, definitively. I want that on record. If anyone asks, I lasted way longer than I should have."
Clark didn't laugh. He stared at the wrists, at the broken bones, and his mouth opened and closed twice without producing sound.
Tyson sat up. His ribs clicked, his vision swam, and the molt was still working sluggishly across his back, shedding dead skin in wet strips that the rain plastered to the gravel. He got upright, got his legs under him, and then came the hard part.
He reached into his jacket.
His fingers wouldn't cooperate. The swelling had turned his hands into clubs, and the bones inside his wrists ground against each other with every millimeter of movement. He gave up. Justin hadn't been able to use his hands either. So Tyson reached into his pocket with telekinesis and grabbed the first Stone, and dragged it out. Then the second. Then the third.
Three Stones of Power. Three artifacts that a dead witch, an alien intelligence, and a man formerly in a tuxedo had fought across three cities to possess.
"These are yours," Tyson said. "They were always yours."
Clark looked at the Stones. He didn't take them.
His hands stayed at his sides, half-raised, fingers curling and uncurling. The weight of the last several hours was surfacing all at once. The programming that had hollowed him out and filled the space with Jor-El's blueprint. The fighting. The people he'd hurt. His mother, somewhere in Smallville, whom he'd pushed aside.
His shoulders rounded inward. His chin dropped. He looked twenty years older and ten years younger at the same time, a boy carrying a man's guilt, and his hands stayed where they were, close to the Stones but not closing.
Kara appeared at his shoulder.
She'd taken damage. A split lip, already healing. A scorch mark across her collarbone where one of Isobel's spells had connected, the skin beneath it pink and new. Her hair was plastered flat by the rain, and she moved carefully, like she was managing injuries she didn't want to show. But she was standing, so she was in better shape than him.
She looked at Clark's face. His real face. Confused and guilty and young and present in a way that Kal-El's borrowed mask had never been. She crossed the last few feet between them and stopped at his side.
"Clark." She said his Earth name. "Look at me."
He did. Reluctantly, like a child expecting to be struck.
"The House of El," Kara said, "is not what Jor-El made it tonight. It's not a brand. It's not a leash." She drew the symbol on her own chest, the S-shape that wasn't an S. "This meant hope. On Krypton, before the Council corrupted it, before your father turned it into a command for a son he'd never meet. It meant that the family wearing it believed things could be better. That people were worth saving."
Clark's jaw tightened. "He put it on me like a—"
"I know what he did. I fought what it turned you into. And I'm telling you that the man who wrote that program was brilliant, and arrogant, and terrified, and wrong. He was so afraid of what Krypton's death meant that he tried to build a soldier instead of trusting his son." She paused. "Knowing where you come from is not the same as being owned by it."
The rain fell between them. Clark's hands still hovered near the Stones in Tyson's outstretched palms.
"What these Stones will build. It's not a prison, Clark. It's a library. It's everything Krypton was. The science, the art, the history, the mistakes. All of it, preserved, waiting for someone to learn from it. You can go there. You can learn where your blood comes from, what your abilities mean, what Rao looked like when it was still a yellow star. And then you can come home to Smallville and eat your mother's pot roast and help your father fix the tractor and be Clark." Her hand found his shoulder. "Build what your father meant these Stones to build. But build it as the man Jonathan and Martha Kent raised. Not as the weapon Jor-El tried to forge."
Clark looked at her for a long moment. Then down at the Stones.
Then he took them.
His hands closed around all three at once, lifting them from Tyson's control, and the reaction was immediate.
"No!" Shouted Isobel, still trying to clear the building.
Light erupted from between his fingers. Not pink, like the magic that still crackled where Isobel stood in the shadows. Not gold, like the healing warmth of Tyson's molt. White. Pure and total and blinding, the kind of light that had no color because it contained all of them, and it poured upward through the rain like a searchlight.
The three Stones moved against each other in Clark's grip. Tyson heard it, a crystalline grinding, a harmonic that climbed past hearing into something felt, a vibration in the bones of his chest, in his teeth, in the plates of his skull. The Stones were merging. Edges softened and flowed together like ice under a jeweler's torch, facets aligning, geometries resolving, three becoming one.
The Crystal of Knowledge formed in Clark's palms.
A single prismatic structure, multifaceted, throwing rainbows through the rain.
Then the pull started.
Upward. Clark's feet left the ground. His boots cleared the gravel by an inch, then a foot, then two feet, rising with the slow certainty of a balloon released by a child's hand, and the Crystal blazed in his grip, and the light intensified, and the pull was aimed north. Tyson could feel the direction of it like a compass needle in his chest. North. The Arctic.
Kara felt it too.
She was close enough. Kryptonian. Connected enough to the Crystal's frequency by blood and heritage and the quantum accident of sharing a dying star's last light. The field caught her like a current catches a swimmer, and her boots scraped across the concrete, dragged forward, then sideways, then up. She reached for the ground. Her fingers scraped gravel and found nothing to hold.
"No," she said, in a flat, quiet refusal. She hadn't agreed to this, hadn't been asked, and was being taken anyway.
She turned to Tyson with one last look.
Everything was in it. The morning in the Talon apartment when she'd sat on the edge of his bed and almost said something that started with a letter neither of them was ready for. The phone call, her voice in his ear saying you're not alone. Three months of not calling. Three months of checking to see if he had. The nights she'd spent looking at his apartment from the water tower.
She reached for him.
Her hand extended across the widening distance, fingers stretching, and Tyson's hand came up, broken wrist and all, the bones screaming as he forced his swollen fingers to open, to reach back, and the gap between them was two feet, then three, then four, and their fingertips didn't touch.
The light took them.
Clark and Kara were pulled northward in a column of white that split the Metropolis sky like a crack in the world. The ground shuddered. The rubble danced. Tyson shielded his face with his ruined arm and squinted into the brilliance, and for one half-second he saw her silhouette inside the light, one hand still reaching back, and then the column narrowed to a point, and the point became a contrail, and the contrail stretched across the underside of the clouds and faded.
Two seconds. Maybe less.
Tyson stood with broken wrists and an empty sky and the ghost of her fingers almost against his.
The contrail faded. The sky closed over it like water over a stone.
He stood there. Rain on his face. Arms hanging useless. The place where she'd been was just air now, just Metropolis night, and it hit him in the chest harder than Clark had, because Clark had only broken bones.
Kara hadn't wanted to go. In that moment she'd reached for him.
He was still staring at the empty sky when Chloe's voice cut through the rain.
"Tyson!"
She was crossing the rubble toward him with Kyla beside her, and her hands were glowing. Golden light spilled between her fingers, dripping off her palms like honey poured over lamplight, and Kyla was walking under her own power, the blood above her ear already dried to a dark crust. Somewhere in the chaos, Chloe had figured it out. The power he'd passed to her, she'd figured out how to aim it in the middle of a war zone because that was Chloe Sullivan in a sentence.
She reached him and stopped dead.
"Oh, my God." Her hands hovered an inch from his chest, the light gilding the wreckage of him. "Tyson, what the hell is going on? How did Clark and Kara just, just do that? Where did they go?" Her voice climbed. "And you look like a horror movie monster, you're covered in blood, there's skin, there is actual shed skin stuck to your jacket, how are you even still alive?"
"Practice," Tyson said. "Lots and lots of practice."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got that fits in the next ten seconds."
Then her hands pressed against him, and the light was warm. It moved through him like the first swallow of coffee on a freezing morning, like sunlight on the first warm day after winter, and his body responded the way parched ground responds to rain. His left wrist knit first, the bones sliding back into alignment with a deep, grinding click. Then the right, the ugly one, the ridge of displaced bone sinking back beneath the skin where it belonged. His ribs shifted, clicked, settled. The raw patches where the molt had run out of material sealed themselves. The road-rash across half his body simply stopped existing.
He exhaled a breath he'd been holding.
"Okay," he said. "New rule. You come to all my fights."
"Tyson, I need you to explain—"
The world exploded pink.
The spell hit them like a wave hits the beach. No warning, no incantation he heard, just a wall of rose-colored force that picked up all three of them and threw them. Tyson turned in the air on reflex, bug-instincts twisting his spine, and hit the gravel in a skid that ate ten feet of ground and the last of his jacket's dignity.
Chloe hadn't turned. Chloe was human, a human who could pour light out of her hands, and humans didn't land from throws like that. She lay crumpled against a ventilation housing fifteen feet away, one arm folded under her, and Tyson's heart stopped until he saw her back rise. Fall. Rise. Breathing. Just breathing.
Kyla landed on her feet.
She came down in a crouch, low and balanced, fingers spread, and something in the way she absorbed the impact wasn't entirely human either. She was up and moving toward Chloe before the dust settled.
Isobel was breathing hard. Kara had cost her. Lana's borrowed body carried a limp now, and scorch marks streaked the dress, and blood ran thin and pink in the rainwater tracking down her temple. But the aura around her hands burned steady, and she found Tyson across the rubble.
"Kyla!" Tyson shouted. "Get her out of here!"
Kyla didn't argue. She got her arms under Chloe and lifted her, glanced once at Tyson with something that might have been a warning or a goodbye, and ran.
Isobel let them go.
That was the frightening part. She didn't so much as flick a finger in their direction. Her attention stayed on Tyson, total and undivided, and she started walking toward him through the rain.
"Four hundred and eighty-two years," she said almost pleasantly, if you ignored the murder underneath it. "That's how long I have pursued those Stones, mon loup. Through the fire they burned me in. Through death itself. Four hundred and eighty-two years, and tonight I stood close enough to touch them." She stopped ten feet away. "And you gave them to a farm boy."
"In my defense, he's obviously more than a farm boy, and they were technically his."
"You set me up." The pleasantness cracked, and what came through the crack was centuries of fury. "The exchange. You knew he would come, you dangled the Stones like meat and let us tear each other apart while you slipped the prize to the player you chose. I trusted you. Do you understand how rare that is? How many lifetimes it has been since I trusted anyone?"
"You possessed my girlfriend and my other friends," Tyson said. "We were never exactly building the foundations of our relationship on bedrock, here."
Isobel laughed. It came out as half a sob, and then she pressed her glowing hand flat against her own sternum and went still.
"She's fighting me," Isobel said quietly. "Right now. She never stops, your Lana. She is exhausted, she is buried, and still she claws. Do you know what she fights for, Tyson? Not herself. You. Every time this body sees you, her heart throws itself against my ribs like a bird against glass, and I have lived inside that feeling for days now. I have felt what it is to love you from the inside. And God help me, some of it has soaked in."
The rain fell between them.
"So here is my offer, and I will only make it once." She lifted her chin. "Bind yourself to me. Willingly. Not as a prisoner, as a mate. Come with me, be mine, and I will release the girl. I will step out of her and leave her sleeping and whole, and she will wake up in her own skin with her own heartbeat, and she will never have to fight again." Her borrowed face went soft, and that softness wasn't a mask. "I am offering you mercy. I am offering you her life. Call it love if that word is easier to swallow."
"Let me make sure I've got the fine print," he said. "You'll leave Lana. Actually leave her, out of her body, out of her head, gone. If I go with you willingly. That's the deal? Simple trade, me for her?"
"Simple," Isobel echoed, and shook her head slowly. "Nothing about you is simple. You betrayed me once tonight already, wolf, and you smiled while you did it. I gave centuries to those Stones, and you handed them away like pocket change. So no, I do not trust you. I do not know how to trust you anymore. That is why it must be willing. A binding cannot be forced. That is its nature, that is its point. You would have to mean it. Every word, every vow, sealed in a way that even you could not slither out of." She held out her hand across the rain-swept gap between them, palm up, light pooling in it like a votive flame. "But yes. You for her. Your word, your will, your self, and Lana Lang wakes up tomorrow. That is the trade. That is the only trade." Her voice went low, and honest, and hungry. "Take my hand, Tyson."
Tyson looked at her hand.
Palm up. Light pooling in the cup of it, rose-gold and steady, throwing soft shadows across the tendons of Lana's wrist. Lana's hand. Lana's fingers, the same ones that had laced through his in the Talon theater, that had pressed flat against his chest when she laughed too hard and needed something to hold onto. Isobel wore them like borrowed gloves, and the light in them was not Lana's, would never be Lana's, but the skin was hers, and the bones were hers, and somewhere underneath five centuries of stolen will, Lana Lang was throwing herself against the walls of her own skull trying to get out.
He looked at her eyes.
Brown. Warm brown, the color Lana's eyes had always been. But the thing looking out through them was older than the country they were standing in, and it wanted him, and her patience had outlasted death.
If this was the cost. If this was what it took to crack open the cage and let the girl out. If the price of Lana waking up tomorrow in her own body with her own heartbeat and her own name was Tyson walking into a cage of his own.
He'd pay it.
He stepped forward and took her hand.
The contact was immediate and electric, not his electricity. Isobel's fingers closed around his, and her grip was stronger than Lana's had ever been, and the light between their palms flared.
"Say it," Isobel whispered. "Say you come willingly."
"I come willingly."
The words left his mouth, and something in the air changed. Isobel's free hand came up and pressed flat against his chest, over his heart, and the light spread from her palm into his shirt, through his shirt, into the skin beneath.
She began to speak.
"Par le sang versé et le sang promis.Par la chair offerte et la chair acceptée. Je te lie à moi, loup, comme la lune lie la marée."
"By the blood shed and the blood promised. By the flesh offered and the flesh accepted. I bind you to me, wolf, as the moon binds the tide."
The geas settled over him like a net. He felt it cinch with a totality that left no room for ambiguity. It wrapped his intentions, his choices, the thousand small freedoms that made up the act of being a person, and it held. The boundaries of it registered the way a dog feels the edges of a yard, instinctively, completely, the knowledge of where he could and could not go written into the base of his brain.
Then, beneath the surface, something else. A sensation so subtle he almost missed it. The net was tight, the boundaries were real, the feeling of being held was total, but none of it was touching him. It was like watching rain hit a window from the inside. He could see it. He could feel the pressure of it against the glass. But the glass held, and he stayed dry.
The geas pressed against him and failed to get in. It failed just as Desiree Atkins' power had failed to seduce him.
He didn't let the relief reach his face.
"Tu es à moi," Isobel finished. "Et je suis à toi. Jusqu'à ce que ma magie s'éteigne ou que les étoiles cessent de briller."
"You are mine, and I am yours. Until my magic fails or the stars go out."
The light between them pulsed once, twice, and went out. The rain kept falling. Somewhere far away, a siren wailed and cut off mid-note.
Isobel looked up at him. Her pupils were blown wide, dark enough to drown in, and her breathing had changed. Faster. Shallower. The hand on his chest curled, fingers gathering a fistful of his ruined shirt, and she pulled him half an inch closer.
"There," she said. "It is done. You are bound, and I am bound, and neither of us can break it without breaking ourselves." She tilted her head, studying him with something between triumph and genuine wonder. "You actually did it. I thought you would find some clever way to cheat. Some trick, some loophole, some last-second betrayal. But you just... took my hand."
"I'm full of surprises," Tyson said. "Mostly bad ones."
"Not this one." She smiled, and it was Lana's smile worn crooked, worn wrong, but underneath the wrongness there was something startlingly real. "Kiss me, Tyson."
So Tyson kissed her.
His right hand found the small of her back and pulled her in, and Isobel made a sound against his lips that was half surprise, and she melted into it. Her fingers released his shirt and slid up to the back of his neck, nails dragging lightly across his skin, and she kissed him back with the full weight of a woman who had crossed death to get here.
His left hand joined the right. Both palms flat against her back now, fingers spread wide, and he moved them the way a man moves his hands across a body he's memorized. Up along the ridge of her spine. Across the wings of her shoulder blades. Down again, slow, tracing the architecture of her through the ruined fabric of the dress.
He knew this body.
He knew the dip at the base of her spine where Lana was ticklish. Knew the way her ribs flared slightly wider on the left side. Knew the exact spot between her shoulders where she carried her tension.
And he knew the mark.
He'd traced it a dozen times. In bed, in the dark, his fingers following the lines of the symbol branded into Lana's skin like a cartographer mapping a coastline. He knew where it started. Knew where it curved, where it branched, where the lines thickened and where they thinned to almost nothing. Knew the gap.
The gap.
The flaw in the seal. The one-way valve. The door the witch came through. He could hear the Trickster's voice in his memory.
Right here. You blast this gap with enough juice to collapse the valve, the seal breaks, and whatever's inside gets evicted.
Tyson's right hand stopped moving. His palm settled over the gap. His fingers found their positions like a pianist finding home keys, each one placed with the certainty of someone who'd rehearsed this moment in his head every night since leaving Smallville.
Light bloomed in his palm.
Isobel pulled back from the kiss. Her stolen brown eyes went wide.
"What—"
Tyson fired.
The light punched through the gap in the seal like a key into a lock. He didn't flood it; it wasn't a full-on blast; it was a needle. A single focused thread of Walden's energy threaded through the valve's opening and into the architecture of the mark itself, and the effect was instantaneous.
The seal on Lana's back flared visible through her clothes. Every line, every curve of the symbol lit up like a circuit completing, burning through the fabric of the dress in a pattern that matched the one Tyson had memorized with his fingertips in the dark. The light flooded the valve. Filled it. And collapsed it.
The one-way door slammed shut.
From the wrong side.
A raw, tearing sound ripped from a throat that wasn't hers. The pink aura erupted outward from Lana's body in a shockwave that hit Tyson in the sternum and sent him skidding back three feet.
Lana's body dropped.
She folded like a puppet with cut strings, knees first, then sideways, and Tyson caught her before her head hit the ground. He went down with her, one arm under her shoulders; a hundred and fifteen pounds of unconscious girl breathing shallow and steady against his chest.
Above them, Isobel hung in the air.
Spectral. Translucent. The shape of her was there, but the substance was gone, a woman drawn in smoke and rose-colored light, hovering three feet above the ground with her dark hair drifting in a non-existent wind. The imperious posture remained, but the body was gone, and the power was guttering, and the rain fell through her without touching her.
She looked at Tyson.
The hostility was gone. The fury, the centuries of accumulated rage, the betrayal, all of it had burned out in the scream, and what remained was something Tyson hadn't expected to see on that face. Clarity. The terrible, quiet clarity of a woman watching the last card fall.
"How?" she asked. Her voice was thin as tissue paper, already fading. "The geas should have held. You spoke the words willingly. I felt it take. How did you break it?"
Tyson looked up at her from the ground, Lana's head cradled against his shoulder, rain running down his face.
"I didn't break it," he said.
Isobel stared at him.
"I'm immune to pheromones," Tyson said. "Found that out the hard way with Desiree Atkins. Something about the way my body processes external influence, chemical, biological, it just slides off. I didn't know if that extended to magical compulsion. I hoped it did. Hoped so hard I could taste it." He looked down at Lana's face, slack and peaceful for the first time in days. "And even if it didn't, even if the geas had locked in and I'd been yours forever, it would've been worth it to save her."
Isobel was quiet for a long moment.
"She never stopped fighting," she said. "Not once. Not for a single moment. I have controlled kings and cardinals and men who fancied themselves unconquerable, and every one of them went quiet eventually. Accepted it. Stopped pushing. Not her. Every hour of every day, that girl threw herself against me. Screaming. Clawing. Biting at the walls of her own mind like a wolf in a trap." She looked at Tyson. "You chose well, mon loup."
"I know."
"And you. Clever. Strong in ways that have nothing to do with the gifts you carry. Mischievous in ways I would have enjoyed for centuries, had things been different." Her form flickered, thinned, and she solidified again through what looked like sheer stubbornness. "Strength comes in many forms, Tyson. You have more of them than you know."
He didn't answer. He held Lana and watched the witch die for her second time.
Isobel looked past him. North, toward the contrail that had already faded, toward the Arctic, toward the alien and his cousin and the Crystal they carried.
"My quest was never only about power," she said. "The Stones were protection. A guarantee. The men who burned me, who burned my sisters, who built pyres in town squares and called it God's work, they feared what they could not control. The Stones would have made certain no one could do that to my kind again. And now they fly north in the hands of a boy, and my quest is over, and I am very tired."
She looked down at Lana's body. At the back where the dress had burned through, where the mark had been. The skin beneath was smooth.
Unmarked.
"She could learn," Isobel said softly. "My spellbook remains. She carries my blood, my lineage flowing through her veins, into a girl born in a world where nobody burns witches anymore. She has the gift. She could be magnificent."
She looked at Tyson. The ghost-smile returned, knowing and resigned.
"But you won't let her risk it. You're stubborn that way."
"Guilty," Tyson said.
Isobel laughed. It was barely a sound. A vibration in the rain, a tremor in the light she was made of, and it faded as it left her.
She straightened. Drew herself up to her full spectral height, chin lifted, shoulders back, every inch the Countess she had been in a life that ended on a pyre in 1604. She looked at the sky. She looked at the city. She looked at Tyson one last time.
"Take care of my blood," she said.
Then she let go.
It wasn't dramatic. There was no explosion of light, no final scream, no theatrical dissolution. Isobel simply relaxed. The tension that had held her together and unfinished business released; her form softened at the edges, the edges became translucent, and the translucence became nothing. She came apart the way morning fog comes apart when the sun finds it. Quietly, completely, and on her own terms.
The pink light faded from the air. The taste of old roses vanished from Tyson's tongue. The rain fell clean and cold and ordinary.
Isobel was gone.
Lana's fingers twitched first. Then her brow creased, the way it did when she was working through something. Her eyes opened. Brown. Clear. Warm and sharp and entirely, unmistakably Lana.
"Tyson?"
Her voice held none of Isobel's theatrical purr, none of the accent. Just Lana. Confused and hoarse and real.
"Yeah." He exhaled. "It's me."
She blinked. Looked at the sky, then at the rubble, then at him.
"I remember everything."
Three words, and the air between them changed.
The memories landed one after another. Her breathing stuttered. She pressed her palms flat against the concrete as if she needed to confirm that her hands belonged to her again.
She remembered. All of it.
Isobel's thoughts threading through her mind like roots through soil.
Isobel's plans, her cold assessment of every person around her as either useful or disposable.
Isobel's genuine, unsettling appreciation for Tyson, the way the witch had looked at him and seen something she wanted to keep.
She remembered the possession of Chloe, of Kyla. She remembered the gala. The waltz. Isobel wearing Kara's face while she spun across the dance floor in Tyson's arms, and Lana had been right there, screaming but unable to say a thing.
She remembered her own mouth forming words she hadn't chosen. Her own hands reaching for the Stones with purpose that wasn't hers. Her body walking, talking, fighting, flirting, dancing, and all of it performed by someone else while Lana watched from the inside like a passenger in her own skin.
She remembered Clark. She remembered Kara.
The tears came quietly, tracking clean lines through the dust on her face. She sat up on her own, and Tyson offered his hand, and she took it, and he pulled her to her feet. She was shaking. Not from weakness. From the effort of holding something enormous and letting pieces of it out.
He didn't tell her it was okay. It wasn't okay. Nothing about any of this was okay.
He just stood there and let her cry.
Tyson turned at footsteps on the rubble.
Kyla came first, picking her way through the debris. Behind her, Chloe walked under her own power, one hand pressed to her ribs, her blonde hair a disaster, her expression caught somewhere between shell-shocked and stubbornly defiant. They both looked at Tyson. Then at Lana. Then back at Tyson, the question obvious.
"It's okay," he said. "She's free. We're all free." He looked at the three of them, battered and filthy and upright. "Everything's going to be okay."
Chloe reached Lana first. Didn't hug or crowd her, just stood close enough that their shoulders almost touched. Kyla flanked the other side.
Four people on a ruined Metropolis street. The battle was over. They were alive.
Chloe looked around at the destruction, at the cracked asphalt and the scattered glass and the gouge in the building where Kara had gone through the wall, and said, "So. Think insurance covers 'act of sixteenth-century witch'?"
It wasn't a great joke. The timing was off, and the delivery was flat, and nobody laughed.
But it sounded like Chloe, and that was enough.
"When I get some meteor rock," Tyson said, "I'm taking that power back."
Chloe's mouth dropped open. "You're repossessing my powers? I just fought a witch!"
"And you did great. Bang-up job for your first fight." He held up a hand before she could interrupt. "I'll give you fire and ice. You earned it."
"This wasn't my first fight!"
"Chloe, you got possessed, and then you ran immediately."
"That's still fighting! That's fighting from the inside! That's a tactical retreat that you ordered!"
Kyla made a sound that might have been a laugh. Lana wiped her face with the back of her hand and almost smiled.
Then the quiet settled.
The joke faded. The adrenaline faded. What was left was four people standing in wreckage, and the truth that some of what had broken tonight couldn't be healed with a touch.
Lana looked at Tyson.
He looked at her.
Everything they needed to say filled the space between them, too large for a ruined street corner, too raw for a night that had already taken so much. She was working through it. The memories of Isobel's interest in him tangled with her own feelings, tangled with the violation of having those feelings used by someone else. The way Isobel had looked at him with Lana's eyes and meant it, and how Lana had to live with knowing that some of what the witch felt had been drawn from her.
"I need time," she said.
Tyson nodded. He didn't argue. Didn't say I understand, because that would be a lie. He had no idea what it was like to be locked inside your own body, to feel your hands move without your permission, to hear your voice say things you'd never choose to say. He couldn't understand that. He wouldn't pretend to.
What he did was simpler.
He let her go. And he did so without fear. She'd come back when she was ready, and he'd be here.
Lana took Chloe's arm. Chloe covered Lana's hand with her own, and the two of them turned toward the end of the block. Kyla followed a half-step behind, quiet and watchful.
The three girls had been returned to themselves and were walking away from the battlefield under their own power.
Tyson watched them go.
When they disappeared around the corner, he stood alone on the rubble. The contrail from the Stones had long since faded into invisibility against the dark. The Metropolis skyline glittered around him, indifferent, millions of lights belonging to millions of people who had no idea what had just happened.
He looked at his empty hands. They were mostly healed.
He had no kryptonite. No Stones. All that was left here was a spellbook, somewhere in this wreckage, that he'd need to find before heading back to Smallville.