Dozens of people had gathered in midtown Metropolis when the time came for Sacks’ press conference at three o’clock. Clark and Lana silently slipped into the crowd, watching as the district attorney glad-handed the police chief and various members of the city council before the deputy mayor introduced him to the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, speaking into the cluster of microphones on the podium, “District Attorney Sacks.”
“Good afternoon,” Sacks said as he took his place behind the podium. “Thank you all for joining me.”
Scanning the crowd assembled in the blocked-off street before him, the district attorney confidently smiled before extending a hand in a supposedly welcoming gesture as he said, “If you’re out there, Blur… come.
“Come join me at this very podium,” he continued, still outwardly smiling as he gestured to the space next to him, “and take your place as a role model in this great city of ours.”
Sacks’ address became sterner as he said, “A true hero would not hide. He would show himself, and take responsibility for the mistakes he’s made.”
Clark and Lana inwardly fumed at the dilemma that Sacks had placed them in. If no one responded to his challenge, then the district attorney would brand the Blur a coward. But if they stepped up, Sacks and his cronies would spare no effort in investigating them, putting their families under a microscope. It was the textbook definition of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
Sacks wouldn’t have been so confident in his challenge if he had known that even if the man he was challenging wasn’t inclined to incinerate him with a hard look, there was still the matter of a Kandorian soldier who at that very moment had the district attorney in his crosshairs.
The soldier in question, one Jer-Em by name, was snuggled up behind a Russian-made Dragunov SVD 7.62x54mm sniper rifle on the thirtieth floor of a Metropolis high-rise a quarter of a mile from the site of Sacks’ press conference. At that distance, lying prone as he was on a table three feet away from the open window, no one on the street would able to see the rifle before Jer-Em fired -- if in fact it became necessary for him to fire, that is.
Jer-Em dearly hoped that it did become necessary. Enough intelligence on Sacks had been conveyed to him as part of his briefing for this assignment that he had developed a thorough contempt for this particular human. Like the majority of his fellow Kandorians, he was most perplexed by many humans’ obsession with financial gain as a measure of status. And this human, Sacks, who publicly judged the rightness of Kal-El’s acts while privately subverting the principles of his office for mere material gain and endangering his constituents in the process -- he was an affront to Jer-Em’s sensibilities.
Back at the press conference, Clark was seriously considering answering Sacks’ challenge. Looking over at her boyfriend and seeing the expression on his face, Lana was grabbing his upper arm to warn him off that course of action when the Kryptonian’s attention was abruptly seized by something else -- a piercing, high-pitched whine directed solely at himself.
Clark grimaced, clapping a hand to his left temple in pain as the ultrasonic beacon bored into his consciousness. He hadn’t heard that sound since the day of the second meteor shower, when he’d reunited the Crystal of Air and the Crystal of Fire in the hidden chamber in the Kawatche caves.
Seeing her boyfriend’s distress, Lana worriedly asked, “Clark, what’s wrong?”
“Have to… get to the Fortress,” Clark gritted out through the pain.
“Okay,” Lana acquiesced, letting him drape an arm across her shoulders. Turning both of them around, she began guiding him back out through the crowd.
Encountering Clark and Lana as she not-so-gracefully pushed her way through the crowd, Lois’ conviction that her colleague was the Blur was shaken by the look of very real pain on Clark’s face. She’d seen people fake illness before, but it didn’t look like Clark was. “What’s wrong with him?”
“We think it’s a migraine,” Lana explained, still partially supporting Clark’s weight. “I’m taking him to get some help.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t wanna listen to this guy if I had a headache either,” Lois sympathized before she went back to pushing her way through the crowd. Even if Clark wasn’t the Blur, her objective hadn’t changed any.
“Out of my way. Excuse me. Move it or lose it,” she ordered as she made her way to the stage, glaring at those who attempted to block her path.
“No, it’s all right,” Sacks told the plainclothes officers nearby as Lois stepped up on the platform. He was interested in what the Blur’s biggest supporter in the press had to say. “Let her through.”
“Zip it, counselor,” Lois muttered to Sacks as she moved to stand behind the podium. Resting her hands on it as she leaned forward to speak into the microphones, she looked intently at the crowd before she saying, “I’m Lois Lane from the Daily Planet, and I’m here to tell you that I know the Blur.”
There were murmurs from the audience at this, and a plainclothes officer moved toward Lois, only for D.A. Sacks to raise a restraining hand to the man, saying “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
Up in Jer-Em’s sniper perch, the Kandorian was about to pull the trigger on Sacks when he heard a voice through the earpiece of his headset.
// “Dev-Em, hold your fire,” // Basqat ordered in Kryptonian. // “The major wishes to see how this situation plays out.” //
// “Aye, sir,” // Jer-Em replied as he carefully eased his index finger off the trigger of the Dragunov, rankling as much at the reference to Zod’s presumed rank as to being addressed as Dev-Em.
He and his follow Kandorians were not truly the people that they remembered being before their donors’ blood samples were taken on Krypton; they were merely copies of those people. Therefore he had privately taken a new first name -- Jer, from an old Kryptonian word for “echo.”
Back at the press conference, Lois told the crowd, “The D.A. says that a true hero would come forward. Well, the Blur can’t.
“It’s because he knows that the best way to protect you and me is to steer clear of all of this political hoopla,” here she briefly shot a scathing look at Ray Sacks, who stood off to her right, “and remain the one thing that you and I need most -- a light in the darkness. A symbol for us to believe in when all other hope is lost.”
Pausing for a moment, Lois went to say, “I’ve looked into the Blur’s heart, and I can tell you that his intentions are good.”
She concluded by saying, “Let the Blur be the hero he needs to be.”
Looking back as he and Lana walked down the street, Clark smiled as he heard the thunderous applause from the crowd following Lois’ speech before the two of them superspeeded out of Metropolis, heading for the Arctic.
Up in his perch, Jer-Em allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction at the crestfallen look on Ray Sacks’ face that he had glimpsed through his telescopic sight as he heard Basqat’s command: // “Stand down and prepare for withdrawal, Dev-Em. Major Zod has decided that there is no need for intervention at the present time.” //
// “Aye, sir,” // Jer-Em replied as he engaged the safety on his rifle, then removed the magazine and carefully ejected the chambered round before proceeding to ease himself off of the table that he had been lying on and packing up his rifle.
* * * * *
When Clark and Lana reached the Fortress of Solitude, the ultrasonic beacon immediately shut off as they entered the main chamber and found Kara waiting for them. He was impressed by the speed of her arrival, as he had activated their family beacon only a few days before.
Looking over his cousin’s attire, he noted that she wore the same outfit of a blue jacket, red scoop-neck shirt, and black trousers that she’d worn the last time he saw her, plus the little metal pendant shaped like their family crest that she’d shown him before she left.
“It’s good to see that you and Clark are back together,” Kara told Lana, hugging the younger woman before turning and favoring Clark with the sort of amused expression that one might bestow on a distracting younger sibling.
“So what’s so important that I had to take a hyperspatial shunt all the way from the Aquarius galaxy? I couldn’t feel anything for two days -- except for a feeling like I had ants crawling all over me.”
Clark found himself smiling at his cousin’s good-natured complaint. “It’s good to see you too, Kara.” Addressing her question, he said, “When you were here the last time, you said that you heard rumors in the Phantom Zone that Kandor somehow survived Krypton’s destruction. I think we found the source of those rumors, right here on Earth.”
Her expression turning serious at this information, Kara softly asked, “How?”
“It’s something called the Orb of Kandor, a military experiment that was conceived during the Last War, a few months before you were born,” Clark told her. The war with Black Zero had retained that designation because the civil war that Zod had started had barely ended -- and never been officially named -- before Krypton was destroyed.
“It was a project designed to clone an entire battalion of Kandorian soldiers to ensure Krypton’s survival. The Orb was based on technology developed by my father and… altered by yours,” he said
He refrained from using the more accurate “perverted” in front of Kara. She already knew the nefarious truth of Zor-El’s character, thanks to the fact that his replicant had nearly killed her in this very Fortress two years ago for interfering with his plan to wipe out humanity.
“And the Orb’s been activated? There are Kandorians here, on this planet?” Kara asked urgently. When Clark nodded, she inquired, “Which battalion is it?”
Clark hesitated for a moment before replying, “An elite unit called the Sword of Rao.”
“But… that was Zod’s battalion, back when he was a major,” his cousin murmured, her face taking on an expression of dread as she said in a near-whisper, “Then Zod is here. He’s alive.”
“Yes, but he’s depowered,” Clark informed her. “All of the Kandorians are. My father made sure of that by irradiating the Orb with blue kryptonite before it was sent to Earth.”
He pausing before saying, “That doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous, though. They’ve already released a Kryptonian virus that made Metropolis look like something out of ‘28 Days Later,’ and God knows what else Zod is planning while they try and restore their powers.”
“So you need me to help rein them in,” Kara deduced. She mulled that over for a moment before acquiescing with a shrug. “Okay. Well, if nothing else, it’ll be good to see James again. I suppose he and Chloe are married by now.”
Seeing her cousin go pale, the Kryptonian girl immediately became concerned. “Kal-El? What is it? What’s wrong?”
Clark swallowed heavily, trying to figure out how to tell Kara that Jimmy was dead -- killed by Davis Bloome after Chloe had separated the ex-paramedic from his monstrous Kryptonian alter ego Doomsday with black kryptonite. His cousin’s crush on Jimmy had honestly slipped his mind when he had decided to activate the beacon to call her home.
He took a deep breath, then looked his cousin square in the eye before saying, “Kara, there’s something you should know…”
* * * * *
While Clark filled Kara in on what had happened since she left Earth, Lois Lane was feeling rather satisfied with herself as she returned to the Daily Planet. Public support for the Blur had skyrocketed, any ill feelings over the blackout having apparently vanished. Quite a few people had pointed out that just because the Blur’s symbol had appeared at the recent rash of clumsy saves didn’t mean that Metropolis’ mysterious protector was involved in those incidents -- a conclusion that Clark had also pointed out to her, but she’d been too full of indignation over not hearing from the Blur to listen at the time.
As she’d expected, her announcement at Ray Sacks’ press conference that she knew the Blur had generated a lot of consternation among the authorities; she had even heard some of them making noises bringing her in for interrogation, to find out exactly what she knew. But nothing had come of it, which surprised her a little, considering how pissed off the district attorney had looked at the end of the conference.
As Lois walked into the basement bullpen at the Planet, her pace slowed as she saw something sitting on her desk: a single red rose in a slim crystal vase, with a small white piece of paper propped up against the vase. Taking the rose from the vase and holding it to her nose, Lois inhaled deeply of the rose’s fragrance before she picked up the paper to read what was written on it.
She didn’t recognize the handwriting, but that didn’t matter, considering the message that the note conveyed:
Thank you. Meet me on the roof.
Still holding the rose, Lois sighed, her mouth widening in a smile as she headed to the elevator. She was finally going to meet the Blur, face-to-face.
The brunette was still smiling when she stepped through the roof access, but that smile quickly faded, the rose dropping from her slack fingers to fall to the ground by her feet as she caught sight of who was waiting for her -- the last person she expected or wanted to see right now.
Namely, District Attorney Ray Sacks, who was smiling like the proverbial cat who just ate the canary as he leaned up against the low wall framing the elevated area of the rooftop that ended at the ledge.
“You know, when you said you had looked into the Blur’s heart, I had no idea how close a relationship you had,” Sacks commented in a deceptively conversational tone.
Lois swallowed before tersely replying, “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Oh, the safety of this city is always my business, young lady,” was Sacks’ rejoinder, his tone growing a tad more threatening as he added, “Now, tell me the true identity of the Blur, and I’ll overlook your annoying antics.”
“You talk a good game, counselor, but you don’t believe a word of it,” Lois refuted. Stepping forward to stand a few feet away from Sacks, she continued, saying, “All your shady backroom deals with organized crime have just come home to roost. I’ve even picked out a nice little font for my exposé: ‘Shady Sacks sucks the city dry.’”
“Well, well, well,” Sacks replied, momentarily pursing his lips in a mock-impressed look at Lois’ imagined title before he said, “I actually… had another headline in mind.”
As he came away from the low wall that he’d been resting against to stand face-to-face with Lois, Sacks’ mouth widened in a smug, ugly smile as he leaned forward and said, “And you’re standing right on top of it.”
Turning to follow Sacks’ gaze, Lois saw a ten-foot version of the Blur’s “S”-shield drawn in white chalk on the paved surface of the rooftop.
“‘The Blur murders Lois Lane.’ Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?” Sack gloated as Lois stared at the symbol.
“Nobody will ever believe you,” Lois protested, not turning around.
“Honey, when the Blur decided not to come forward, he put the ball back in my court,” Sacks proclaimed, prompting Lois to turn and face him. “I can make him whoever I want him to be. It just takes a little doubt.”
“You don’t give people enough credit,” Lois scowled, pissed off by the corrupt D.A.’s shallow opinion of the public. “Why would the Blur suddenly turn into a murderer?”
Sacks laughed at that, genuinely amused as he explained how he’d gotten the idea for this little setup.
“Because you just announced in front of millions of people…” he said before his voice and expression turned deadly serious, “…that you are the only person who knows his true identity.”
Deciding to make a break for it, Lois lunged for the rooftop door, but the door opened and two thuggish-looking men in black leather jackets stepped out onto the rooftop, grabbing the reporter by the arms before she could reach the doorway.
“You’re the one hiding in the shadows, not the Blur, you coward,” Lois shouted at Sacks, struggling as his goons dragged her back across the rooftop.
“Unfortunately, that’s a story you’re not gonna get to write,” Sacks casually commented as his men forced Lois up to the ledge, then threw her over the parapet, screaming as she went.
“All right, let’s get out of here,” the D.A. told his thugs, briefly fussing with the knot of his necktie before the three of them strolled across the rooftop to the metal door that admitted access to the stairwell.
Unbeknownst to Sacks, his men hadn’t used quite enough force when they threw Lois off the roof, and she had managed to grab hold of a flagpole projecting from the side of the building about ten feet below the parapet.
As she hung there, literally holding on for dear life, Lois hoped the Blur would get to her before she lost her grip -- whether he was Clark or not.
* * * * *
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, speaking into the cluster of microphones on the podium, “District Attorney Sacks.”
“Good afternoon,” Sacks said as he took his place behind the podium. “Thank you all for joining me.”
Scanning the crowd assembled in the blocked-off street before him, the district attorney confidently smiled before extending a hand in a supposedly welcoming gesture as he said, “If you’re out there, Blur… come.
“Come join me at this very podium,” he continued, still outwardly smiling as he gestured to the space next to him, “and take your place as a role model in this great city of ours.”
Sacks’ address became sterner as he said, “A true hero would not hide. He would show himself, and take responsibility for the mistakes he’s made.”
Clark and Lana inwardly fumed at the dilemma that Sacks had placed them in. If no one responded to his challenge, then the district attorney would brand the Blur a coward. But if they stepped up, Sacks and his cronies would spare no effort in investigating them, putting their families under a microscope. It was the textbook definition of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
Sacks wouldn’t have been so confident in his challenge if he had known that even if the man he was challenging wasn’t inclined to incinerate him with a hard look, there was still the matter of a Kandorian soldier who at that very moment had the district attorney in his crosshairs.
The soldier in question, one Jer-Em by name, was snuggled up behind a Russian-made Dragunov SVD 7.62x54mm sniper rifle on the thirtieth floor of a Metropolis high-rise a quarter of a mile from the site of Sacks’ press conference. At that distance, lying prone as he was on a table three feet away from the open window, no one on the street would able to see the rifle before Jer-Em fired -- if in fact it became necessary for him to fire, that is.
Jer-Em dearly hoped that it did become necessary. Enough intelligence on Sacks had been conveyed to him as part of his briefing for this assignment that he had developed a thorough contempt for this particular human. Like the majority of his fellow Kandorians, he was most perplexed by many humans’ obsession with financial gain as a measure of status. And this human, Sacks, who publicly judged the rightness of Kal-El’s acts while privately subverting the principles of his office for mere material gain and endangering his constituents in the process -- he was an affront to Jer-Em’s sensibilities.
Back at the press conference, Clark was seriously considering answering Sacks’ challenge. Looking over at her boyfriend and seeing the expression on his face, Lana was grabbing his upper arm to warn him off that course of action when the Kryptonian’s attention was abruptly seized by something else -- a piercing, high-pitched whine directed solely at himself.
Clark grimaced, clapping a hand to his left temple in pain as the ultrasonic beacon bored into his consciousness. He hadn’t heard that sound since the day of the second meteor shower, when he’d reunited the Crystal of Air and the Crystal of Fire in the hidden chamber in the Kawatche caves.
Seeing her boyfriend’s distress, Lana worriedly asked, “Clark, what’s wrong?”
“Have to… get to the Fortress,” Clark gritted out through the pain.
“Okay,” Lana acquiesced, letting him drape an arm across her shoulders. Turning both of them around, she began guiding him back out through the crowd.
Encountering Clark and Lana as she not-so-gracefully pushed her way through the crowd, Lois’ conviction that her colleague was the Blur was shaken by the look of very real pain on Clark’s face. She’d seen people fake illness before, but it didn’t look like Clark was. “What’s wrong with him?”
“We think it’s a migraine,” Lana explained, still partially supporting Clark’s weight. “I’m taking him to get some help.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t wanna listen to this guy if I had a headache either,” Lois sympathized before she went back to pushing her way through the crowd. Even if Clark wasn’t the Blur, her objective hadn’t changed any.
“Out of my way. Excuse me. Move it or lose it,” she ordered as she made her way to the stage, glaring at those who attempted to block her path.
“No, it’s all right,” Sacks told the plainclothes officers nearby as Lois stepped up on the platform. He was interested in what the Blur’s biggest supporter in the press had to say. “Let her through.”
“Zip it, counselor,” Lois muttered to Sacks as she moved to stand behind the podium. Resting her hands on it as she leaned forward to speak into the microphones, she looked intently at the crowd before she saying, “I’m Lois Lane from the Daily Planet, and I’m here to tell you that I know the Blur.”
There were murmurs from the audience at this, and a plainclothes officer moved toward Lois, only for D.A. Sacks to raise a restraining hand to the man, saying “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
Up in Jer-Em’s sniper perch, the Kandorian was about to pull the trigger on Sacks when he heard a voice through the earpiece of his headset.
// “Dev-Em, hold your fire,” // Basqat ordered in Kryptonian. // “The major wishes to see how this situation plays out.” //
// “Aye, sir,” // Jer-Em replied as he carefully eased his index finger off the trigger of the Dragunov, rankling as much at the reference to Zod’s presumed rank as to being addressed as Dev-Em.
He and his follow Kandorians were not truly the people that they remembered being before their donors’ blood samples were taken on Krypton; they were merely copies of those people. Therefore he had privately taken a new first name -- Jer, from an old Kryptonian word for “echo.”
Back at the press conference, Lois told the crowd, “The D.A. says that a true hero would come forward. Well, the Blur can’t.
“It’s because he knows that the best way to protect you and me is to steer clear of all of this political hoopla,” here she briefly shot a scathing look at Ray Sacks, who stood off to her right, “and remain the one thing that you and I need most -- a light in the darkness. A symbol for us to believe in when all other hope is lost.”
Pausing for a moment, Lois went to say, “I’ve looked into the Blur’s heart, and I can tell you that his intentions are good.”
She concluded by saying, “Let the Blur be the hero he needs to be.”
Looking back as he and Lana walked down the street, Clark smiled as he heard the thunderous applause from the crowd following Lois’ speech before the two of them superspeeded out of Metropolis, heading for the Arctic.
Up in his perch, Jer-Em allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction at the crestfallen look on Ray Sacks’ face that he had glimpsed through his telescopic sight as he heard Basqat’s command: // “Stand down and prepare for withdrawal, Dev-Em. Major Zod has decided that there is no need for intervention at the present time.” //
// “Aye, sir,” // Jer-Em replied as he engaged the safety on his rifle, then removed the magazine and carefully ejected the chambered round before proceeding to ease himself off of the table that he had been lying on and packing up his rifle.
* * * * *
When Clark and Lana reached the Fortress of Solitude, the ultrasonic beacon immediately shut off as they entered the main chamber and found Kara waiting for them. He was impressed by the speed of her arrival, as he had activated their family beacon only a few days before.
Looking over his cousin’s attire, he noted that she wore the same outfit of a blue jacket, red scoop-neck shirt, and black trousers that she’d worn the last time he saw her, plus the little metal pendant shaped like their family crest that she’d shown him before she left.
“It’s good to see that you and Clark are back together,” Kara told Lana, hugging the younger woman before turning and favoring Clark with the sort of amused expression that one might bestow on a distracting younger sibling.
“So what’s so important that I had to take a hyperspatial shunt all the way from the Aquarius galaxy? I couldn’t feel anything for two days -- except for a feeling like I had ants crawling all over me.”
Clark found himself smiling at his cousin’s good-natured complaint. “It’s good to see you too, Kara.” Addressing her question, he said, “When you were here the last time, you said that you heard rumors in the Phantom Zone that Kandor somehow survived Krypton’s destruction. I think we found the source of those rumors, right here on Earth.”
Her expression turning serious at this information, Kara softly asked, “How?”
“It’s something called the Orb of Kandor, a military experiment that was conceived during the Last War, a few months before you were born,” Clark told her. The war with Black Zero had retained that designation because the civil war that Zod had started had barely ended -- and never been officially named -- before Krypton was destroyed.
“It was a project designed to clone an entire battalion of Kandorian soldiers to ensure Krypton’s survival. The Orb was based on technology developed by my father and… altered by yours,” he said
He refrained from using the more accurate “perverted” in front of Kara. She already knew the nefarious truth of Zor-El’s character, thanks to the fact that his replicant had nearly killed her in this very Fortress two years ago for interfering with his plan to wipe out humanity.
“And the Orb’s been activated? There are Kandorians here, on this planet?” Kara asked urgently. When Clark nodded, she inquired, “Which battalion is it?”
Clark hesitated for a moment before replying, “An elite unit called the Sword of Rao.”
“But… that was Zod’s battalion, back when he was a major,” his cousin murmured, her face taking on an expression of dread as she said in a near-whisper, “Then Zod is here. He’s alive.”
“Yes, but he’s depowered,” Clark informed her. “All of the Kandorians are. My father made sure of that by irradiating the Orb with blue kryptonite before it was sent to Earth.”
He pausing before saying, “That doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous, though. They’ve already released a Kryptonian virus that made Metropolis look like something out of ‘28 Days Later,’ and God knows what else Zod is planning while they try and restore their powers.”
“So you need me to help rein them in,” Kara deduced. She mulled that over for a moment before acquiescing with a shrug. “Okay. Well, if nothing else, it’ll be good to see James again. I suppose he and Chloe are married by now.”
Seeing her cousin go pale, the Kryptonian girl immediately became concerned. “Kal-El? What is it? What’s wrong?”
Clark swallowed heavily, trying to figure out how to tell Kara that Jimmy was dead -- killed by Davis Bloome after Chloe had separated the ex-paramedic from his monstrous Kryptonian alter ego Doomsday with black kryptonite. His cousin’s crush on Jimmy had honestly slipped his mind when he had decided to activate the beacon to call her home.
He took a deep breath, then looked his cousin square in the eye before saying, “Kara, there’s something you should know…”
* * * * *
While Clark filled Kara in on what had happened since she left Earth, Lois Lane was feeling rather satisfied with herself as she returned to the Daily Planet. Public support for the Blur had skyrocketed, any ill feelings over the blackout having apparently vanished. Quite a few people had pointed out that just because the Blur’s symbol had appeared at the recent rash of clumsy saves didn’t mean that Metropolis’ mysterious protector was involved in those incidents -- a conclusion that Clark had also pointed out to her, but she’d been too full of indignation over not hearing from the Blur to listen at the time.
As she’d expected, her announcement at Ray Sacks’ press conference that she knew the Blur had generated a lot of consternation among the authorities; she had even heard some of them making noises bringing her in for interrogation, to find out exactly what she knew. But nothing had come of it, which surprised her a little, considering how pissed off the district attorney had looked at the end of the conference.
As Lois walked into the basement bullpen at the Planet, her pace slowed as she saw something sitting on her desk: a single red rose in a slim crystal vase, with a small white piece of paper propped up against the vase. Taking the rose from the vase and holding it to her nose, Lois inhaled deeply of the rose’s fragrance before she picked up the paper to read what was written on it.
She didn’t recognize the handwriting, but that didn’t matter, considering the message that the note conveyed:
Thank you. Meet me on the roof.
Still holding the rose, Lois sighed, her mouth widening in a smile as she headed to the elevator. She was finally going to meet the Blur, face-to-face.
The brunette was still smiling when she stepped through the roof access, but that smile quickly faded, the rose dropping from her slack fingers to fall to the ground by her feet as she caught sight of who was waiting for her -- the last person she expected or wanted to see right now.
Namely, District Attorney Ray Sacks, who was smiling like the proverbial cat who just ate the canary as he leaned up against the low wall framing the elevated area of the rooftop that ended at the ledge.
“You know, when you said you had looked into the Blur’s heart, I had no idea how close a relationship you had,” Sacks commented in a deceptively conversational tone.
Lois swallowed before tersely replying, “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Oh, the safety of this city is always my business, young lady,” was Sacks’ rejoinder, his tone growing a tad more threatening as he added, “Now, tell me the true identity of the Blur, and I’ll overlook your annoying antics.”
“You talk a good game, counselor, but you don’t believe a word of it,” Lois refuted. Stepping forward to stand a few feet away from Sacks, she continued, saying, “All your shady backroom deals with organized crime have just come home to roost. I’ve even picked out a nice little font for my exposé: ‘Shady Sacks sucks the city dry.’”
“Well, well, well,” Sacks replied, momentarily pursing his lips in a mock-impressed look at Lois’ imagined title before he said, “I actually… had another headline in mind.”
As he came away from the low wall that he’d been resting against to stand face-to-face with Lois, Sacks’ mouth widened in a smug, ugly smile as he leaned forward and said, “And you’re standing right on top of it.”
Turning to follow Sacks’ gaze, Lois saw a ten-foot version of the Blur’s “S”-shield drawn in white chalk on the paved surface of the rooftop.
“‘The Blur murders Lois Lane.’ Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?” Sack gloated as Lois stared at the symbol.
“Nobody will ever believe you,” Lois protested, not turning around.
“Honey, when the Blur decided not to come forward, he put the ball back in my court,” Sacks proclaimed, prompting Lois to turn and face him. “I can make him whoever I want him to be. It just takes a little doubt.”
“You don’t give people enough credit,” Lois scowled, pissed off by the corrupt D.A.’s shallow opinion of the public. “Why would the Blur suddenly turn into a murderer?”
Sacks laughed at that, genuinely amused as he explained how he’d gotten the idea for this little setup.
“Because you just announced in front of millions of people…” he said before his voice and expression turned deadly serious, “…that you are the only person who knows his true identity.”
Deciding to make a break for it, Lois lunged for the rooftop door, but the door opened and two thuggish-looking men in black leather jackets stepped out onto the rooftop, grabbing the reporter by the arms before she could reach the doorway.
“You’re the one hiding in the shadows, not the Blur, you coward,” Lois shouted at Sacks, struggling as his goons dragged her back across the rooftop.
“Unfortunately, that’s a story you’re not gonna get to write,” Sacks casually commented as his men forced Lois up to the ledge, then threw her over the parapet, screaming as she went.
“All right, let’s get out of here,” the D.A. told his thugs, briefly fussing with the knot of his necktie before the three of them strolled across the rooftop to the metal door that admitted access to the stairwell.
Unbeknownst to Sacks, his men hadn’t used quite enough force when they threw Lois off the roof, and she had managed to grab hold of a flagpole projecting from the side of the building about ten feet below the parapet.
As she hung there, literally holding on for dear life, Lois hoped the Blur would get to her before she lost her grip -- whether he was Clark or not.
* * * * *
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