By Shadar

A tale of the return of Kara Zor-El to Earth twenty-one years after her supposed death.

Things have changed just a little while she was gone...

Deep space…

2004 - Terran reckoning

Fleeting memories of blazing stars.

Absolute zero of interstellar space.

Faces… some horrible.

Others… so much fainter; friendly.

I knew who I’d been – before I died.

I knew who Darkseid wanted me to be.

His dark angel.

Unstoppable.

Unconquerable.

The question was who would I be.

The bringer of darkness?

A Death wielder?

Or light?

A Goddess?

I stared ahead, looking for that familiar wormhole, that solitary pathway to Earth.

If only I could find it!

A planet to rule?

A planet to defend?

Maybe I would do both.

I floated so cold and lifeless now, my heart beating but once an hour to conserve my energy.

Fading.

No sunlight out here, only darkness…

Darkness:

Memories.

Horrible pain.

Blackness.

Dreams:

Darkseid’s visage.

Face twisted.

Distorted.

Inhuman.

My savior?

Hardly that.

I could still smell the stench of the dungeon he’d held me in for so long. The walls and doorway had been studded with kryptonite, forcing me to always lie in the stinking, worm-infested cesspool that formed its center.

Then the training.

Always the training.

Bending my will to his always, making me his tool. Healing my flesh, for which I am thankful, even as he fed my consciousness on his filth, his evil.

Using my body for his own needs.

Always.

Finally the explosion:

Rock walls melting around me.

Kryptonite gone.

Advancing fireball.

Thermonuclear certainly, eating everything in its path.

Everything except my body, so naked and pale, the sun-like heat wiping flesh and mind clean, renewing me, leaving but one thought:

I am Kara Zor-El

I am a Kryptonian.

We don’t die easily.

Not the second time, anyway!

Arrival…

Dec 25, 2005

Jarod Bildstein was climbing solo, attempting one final climb before winter closed off the southern Himalayas. The fact that it was Christmas day had little significance in Muslim Pakistan.

He glanced worriedly at the sky - snow clouds were gathering, and the wind was blowing bitterly cold from the north. If he hurried, he still had a chance to make the summit.

He paused at the 5000-meter level to catch his breath, and used the time to add a second belay. The wall was nearly vertical here.

He’d just finished pounding a piton in when a second sun seemed to ignite behind him, one so bright that it cast its own strong shadow on the wall. He shielded his eyes with his hand as he twisted his head carefully around, fearing that the Pakistanis had fired off another of their nuclear weapons -- their testing range was less than a hundred miles to the south.

Instead he saw a flaming orb racing down from the sky. It appeared to be neither climbing nor descending, which meant it was aimed right at him!

He fumbled frantically to attach the carabiner in his hand to the new piton, and succeeded just before the ball of fire slammed into the cliff face three hundred meters below him. The wall shuddered and shook as if caught in a strong earthquake, rocks falling from above him, the explosive impact lifting him fifty feet upward and tossing him outward from the wall. He started to fall, only to be flattened against the rock when the thundering sonic boom of the meteorite’s passage arrived to nearly deafen him.

Bouncing off the wall, his arms flailing, Jarod fell. His first belay slowed him only slightly before it ripped from the wall. He fell again, only to be snatched to a stop by the new belay he’d hammered in only seconds ago, leaving him bouncing on the end of his rope a hundred meters above the fantastic heat from the impact site.

He smelled his hair singing, and his heart trip-hammered nearly to fibrillation from the twin terrors of the impact and the fall. It took all his concentration to begin swinging from side to side, then twisting his body until he could get a hand back on the wall.

He clung to the rocks for long minutes before starting to slowly work his way further away from terrible heat, then descending until he was nearly level with it. He saw a two-meter wide crater in the cliff face.

His heart gradually slowed as the initial shock and fear wore off, his terror replaced as it usually was with a sense of elation that he’d survived. He started to shout and scream as the wonder of what had just happened caught up to him: he’d just experienced a large meteorite strike at close hand!

Fascinated to know what it looked like, he was an exo-geologist after all and had searched the world for such meteorite impacts, he daringly swung back and forth on his rope, working his way ever closer to the impact site. He finally swung past the opening, his face shielded with his hands, peaking between his scalded fingers to see that the meteorite was intact. It glowed white-hot about ten feet inside a smooth-walled tunnel.

That made no sense. A rocky meteorite would have shattered on impact, and an iron one would never be able to smash a hole this deep in solid granite. No, whatever had hit his wall was a lot harder than the usual iron-nickel meteorite. This was something else… something essentially indestructible.

He could hardly contain his excitement while waiting for the rocks to cool enough to allow him to investigate, and had to force himself to eat his lunch as he hung on his ropes, his thoughts racing across the various possibilities. Whatever that meteorite was made of, it would likely be very valuable: some alien alloy maybe; possibly something that could revolutionize metallurgy. A new kind of steel.

Two long hours passed with infinite slowness, and all the time the gathering storm was descending worryingly from the peaks as it started to lash him with tentacles of snow. He knew he should be descending, hurrying off the wall before he was socked in, but he had to investigate the impact further.

The snow was falling hard and the wind was gusting to dangerous levels by the time he dared creep close to the impact crater. He anchored himself just above the entrance, finding that the rising heat pleasantly offset the bitter Himalayan wind. Slowly lowering himself by inches, he paused to hang just in front of the hole, then worked some additional slack into his ropes as he daringly crawled into the outer opening of the tunnel.

The meteorite was still glowing, seemingly from its very core now, and giving off a dim red light that let him see to the end of the tunnel, even after his shoulders blocked the outside light. He squeezed his way deeper into the tunnel, the heat doubling every foot of the way until it became too intense to go further.

Pausing there, he looked back at the howling storm, knowing that if he didn’t leave now he’d never get to the bottom before the blizzard was fully upon him.

He turned back to face the glowing meteorite, feeling it drawing him closer.

It was his.

He’d found it.

He wasn’t going to leave it behind.

Jarod huddled in the shelter of the warm tunnel for long hours as the full force of the storm roared down the mountain, the wind-loosened snowpack sending avalanche after avalanche cascading down the cliff face. Sitting inside the warmth of his tunnel, he covered his ears and watched in amazement as the snow thundered by the entrance, cleaning whatever was left of his belays and climbing gear from the wall.

 The storm lashed the cliff-face for hour after hour as it progressively grew colder, finally reaching nearly thirty below zero according to the thermometer in his pack out by the entrance. He kept working his way deeper into the warm tunnel, the meteorite strangely saving his life after nearly taking it. He huddled on the floor and slept, feeling somehow safe and secure.

By the time the storm finally passed, the meteorite was barely glowing. He used the spare sweater in his pack to augment his gloves as he wrapped his remaining climbing rope around the meteorite and tried to tug it back toward the light. Surprisingly, he found he could move it - its weight was not nearly as high as a iron-nickel rock - he estimated no more than a hundred and fifty kilos.

When he finally got it to the light, he discovered that it was blackened and oblong, yet it looked strangely familiar. Searching his memories, he recalled seeing this shape during the time he’d worked as a graduate student, excavating bodies from the pyroclastic flows of Pompeii. The victims had been huddled into fetal positions when the hot ash hit them, encasing them in rock forever.

He shook his head at the ridiculous thought of this meteorite containing a body. This thing had hit the wall at a thousand miles per hour. It had to be close to the hardness of diamond and the malleability of iron to have remained in one piece - an impossibility given any material science he knew.

He struggled to roll the rock over and check out the other side, only to find it revealed an even more familiar pattern. Looking closer, he was shocked to find what appeared to be a human foot forming part of the lower surface!

Stunned, he used his signal mirror to reflect more light into the tunnel, tracing the foot-like pattern upward to find it connected to a slender ankle. And above that, a shapely calf.

He slumped against the wall, astounded, his thoughts racing as he tried to puzzle it out. Was this an artifact from an alien culture, a statue made out of some indestructible alien metal?

He suddenly wasn’t sure if he should laugh or cry as the significance of his find washed over him - it was so bizarre. Why would anyone make a statue of someone huddled in a fetal position, let alone send it to Earth?

His only speculation was that it had to be Kryptonian. Superman had been on earth for fifty years, and everyone knew about the indestructible nature of anything that came from that doomed planet. If that was the case, he had an incredibly valuable find on his hands.

Determined to carry the artifact, he called it that now, back to his house in a nearby town, he rigged his ropes and began to work his way down the cliff face with his treasure hanging below him. It was hard going as the artifact was half again his weight, not to mention in danger of melting his climbing ropes, but the bright sunshine and perfect beauty of the snow-covered landscape gave him hope and strength.

Once he finally got it to the ground, he began the long drag over the snowfield to get back to the road and his old Toyota truck. He dug his truck out of the eight-foot drift that covered it, and then used the last of his strength to wrestle the artifact into the pickup bed. There he tied it down and covered it with a tarp before starting the slow drive back to town.

It was late afternoon by the time he crashed through enough drifts to finally reach the edge of town. There he recruited two of his climbing buddies who’d weathered the storm in his house, and they lugged the still warm artifact to his back yard, placing it on an ancient tree stump. The area was cold and damp from a waterfall which cascaded down a small cliff only a hundred meters away. Jarod loved the sound of falling water, despite the damp, chillness of the property.

When his buddies asked him what was under the tarp, he claimed it was a geode he’d found near a volcanic seam, the last to explain the heat. They were drug-headed climbers, mostly partiers, and certainly not geologists, and they didn’t know that the closest volcano was a thousand miles away.

He left the artifact on the stump as he went inside to shower and change. Then he went out to get some beer and a bag of the local mutton curry.

Returning with his food, he walked behind the house for a final look at this find. He’d barely rounded the corner when he froze, staring at the tree stump, his beer and curry falling to his feet. The tarp had been shredded and the meteorite reduced to a pile of shattered rock!

His first thought was that someone had pulverized the rock with a sledge and pried his statue out and stolen it.

In the thirty minutes or so he’d been out?

Impossible.

That’s when he saw the red glow coming from behind one of the boulders at the base of the waterfall. He grabbed his ice axe and walked carefully across the rocky ground, crossing the rushing stream as he approached the entrance to the grotto, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck rising.

The thieves were still here, cooling his artifact down enough to haul it away. There had to be a group of them if they were hauling it around.

Were they armed? Kalashnikov’s were easy enough to get in Pakistan.

“Hey, you in there,” Jarod shouted angrily into the grotto opening. “Just leave the artifact and I won’t hurt you.” He repeated his message in halting Farsi, but got no answer.

He looked up at the darkening sky, very aware that he was starting to lose the light. In another fifteen minutes, he’d have trouble seeing anything over here in the shadows.

Damn it! After all his work to bring the artifact down, he wasn’t going to lose it now.

“I’ve got an axe and I know how to use it. If you know what’s good for you…”

He was interrupted by the loud cracking of rock. Looking up toward the sound, he was stunned to see part of the cliff above the waterfall moving. Afraid that the entire wall was giving way, he leaped across the icy stream to the left, soaking his boots, backing far enough away to get a look around the boulder that blocked this view.

What he saw the absolute last thing he could possible have imagined. A tall woman with blonde hair was standing knee-deep in the freezing water, her back to him, her naked skin glowing as if she was on fire – a glow so bright that it reflected from the rocks.

“Holy Mother of… who in the hell are you?”

The woman ignored him as she tugged against the rocks that formed the far wall of the waterfall, working her fingers into a crack. Her back looked very strong as she wrapped her arms around the base of a large boulder, seemingly trying to lift it.

“What are you…”

She turned her head quickly to the side, glancing back over her shoulder. “Stay… back,” she said in halting English.

Jarod turned and ran for his life as boulders the size of small cars began falling over the woman, the largest one crashing down with a huge splash to block the outlet of the pool. The spray soaked him to the bone with icy water.

His heart was racing and his mouth was dry as he got back to his feet and daringly crept around the fallen boulder, only to find that a deep pool was quickly forming behind it. His stomach cramped into a cold ball as he saw that the woman was gone, obviously crushed beneath the boulders.

Creeping closer as he glanced up at the wall, looking for more loose boulders, a dim red glow at the bottom of the pool caught his eyes. Looking closer, he saw a small spiral of steam rising upward to meet the spray of the waterfall.

His heart raced painfully as the glow slowly faded. The woman was trapped down there!

What could he do? She’d clearly had been crushed and then drowned. The boulders weighed tons.

Something nagged at him. This wasn’t right. The cliff had been stable, he’d checked it many times. A final lingering image tortured him: it had looked as if the woman was lifting the boulder when the cliff collapsed.

Had she brought it down herself?

If she really was a Kryptonian woman, then it was possible.

His heart leaped at that thought. If so, she might still be alive!

He looked around desperately for a way to move the boulders, but it took only seconds to realize that he’d need some heavy equipment. Besides, the light was fading fast.

Leaning closer to look into the now darkened water, he was thrown from his feet when the boulder beneath him jerked upward. He leaped backward to land painfully on his ass, staring with eyes wide as the boulder continued to rise as if by magic. Beneath it, a slender form gradually appeared, upraised arms first, skin dripping with water, bare feet skimming across the water’s surface. The woman in the waterfall was holding the boulder over her head!

He could only gawk at her as she set the boulder gently down, the ground shifting beneath him from its immense weight. Her skin was cooled now, everywhere except her breasts, which still gave off a reddish glow from deep inside.

Between the unearthly glow of her skin, not to mention her arrival in the meteorite, she had to be a Kryptonian. The most powerful ally, or enemy, of mankind.

“Where… where am I?” the woman asked, her voice a sibilant alto, her words slow and hesitant as if she hadn’t spoken English in a long time.

“Ter… Teristra,” Jarod stuttered, struggling to gain control of his own senses. “I’m a… a climber. The mountains. A geologist too.”

She gave no sign of acknowledgement as she floated higher, her feet nearly brushing his face as spiraled around, rising weightlessly toward the top of the cliff. Clearing it, the last rays of sunset enveloped her, her long blonde hair floating around her head as if she was an angel.

Jarod climbed rapidly after her, feeling for his handholds, racing the sun upward, finally gaining the top of the cliff just before it fully set. The woman was floating a dozen feet beyond the cliff edge, her eyes closed as she smiled softly, her face lit by the alpenglow of gold and red that was spreading across the snowy peaks.

He barely noticed the beauty of the sunset as he instead stared at the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, her body sculpted to perfection that was beyond the wildest imagination of a fantasy artist. Her tight muscles flexed gently as she bobbed around in the air currents.

“This is a very beautiful world,” she said dreamily.

“Definitely beautiful,” he replied from inside his own dream, unable to tear his eyes from her.

“What’s its name?”

“Name...?” Jarod asked, confused.

“The name of your planet?”

Jarod swallowed hard as he forced his brain back into gear, remembering that she was an alien.

“Earth,” he finally blurted out. “Some call it Terra.”

Her smile brightened as she turned to face him, her eyelids opening to reveal brilliantly blue eyes. “Ah, a most fortuitous arrival then. I was disoriented when I had to make that last wormhole dive. Wasn’t sure.”

She floated closer to the cliff edge to hold her hand out to him. “I’m Kara.”

Jarod inched forward, glancing down to check his footing before reaching out to take her hand, thrilling to the way her long fingers held his so tightly. He watched in amazement as the final glow from her breasts faded with the sunset.

“I’m Jarod, and you’re… you’re… Superman’s daughter?”

Even as he asked that, he knew that was all wrong. Superman’s daughter was still in her mid-teens, and this woman looked early thirties. Still, the Kryptonian angle made sense. The meteorite, the glowing rock, the way she looked and the fact that she didn’t have a scratch on her. Not to mention the levitation.

“Superman has a daughter?” she asked in a puzzled voice.

“Then you aren’t…?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Jarod just stared at her, confused. “Not… Asha Zor-El?”

“Asha? No, I’m Kara. His cousin.”

“Wait a minute… you’re not…” Jarod gasped as the sudden realization hit him. “I mean, you… I thought you were dead?”

She shrugged as she flicked a wisp of blonde hair from her face. “I was.”

Jarod felt a wave of joy wash over him. He still remembered crying the day she’d been killed.

“Supergirl?”

Her eyes clouded over as she turned back toward the glorious sunset, her blonde hair shimmering like a halo as the freshening breeze caught it.

“Yes… yes, that is what they used to call me. Supergirl.”

Kara’s Return

Chapter One

I luxuriated in the fading sunset of the Hindu Kush, feeling more of my strength returning each moment as those yellow rays washed over me, dampening the horror of the last days. That wormhole dive to reach Earth had nearly been my last.

Shuddering, I could still feel my energy being sucked out by the hungry maw of the black hole – the antithesis of the yellow sun that gave me my power. The gravity waves from the hole had washed over me, seemingly splitting me in two, so much so that Darkseid’s madness briefly returned to haunt me. Desperately fighting for control of both mind and body, I went a little insane in there.

But who wouldn’t – I’d very nearly been pulled inside the event horizon, that boundary where even light can’t escape. If not for the bright memory of Earth and my cousin Kal, I never would have found that reserve of strength again. The same strength that had kept me alive during Darkseid’s long torture.

Unfortunately, I passed out as soon as I escaped the wormhole and was headed for Earth. I should have died again, trapped inside that rocky tunnel on that cliff face, out of the reach of the invigorating rays of the sun, buried forever, never to be found. Instead, I was floating here in the Hindu Kush, rescued by a man who thought he was merely bringing a piece of meteor rock home.

I was beginning to think that Rao worked in strange ways.

Sighing, I let my thoughts drift forward. I had to decide where to go next. Frustratingly, my mind was even cloudier than usual. I’d had trouble with my long-term memories since I’d woken up in Darkseid’s laboratory. Even worse, my thoughts and dreams were often filled with disjointed images that didn’t seem to match any memories I had. Most of them horrible images of my spilling innocent blood with my own hands. Surely these were Darkseid’s implanted memories, not my own. Or so I prayed.

The names of my old friends on Earth were fuzzy, besides Kal, of course. I could also see Lois’ face clearly, Bruce Wayne’s too. But there had to be many others, and I could vaguely see faces, but I couldn’t put names to any more faces.

Sighing, I knew I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. If all I’d suffered from having been dead for more than twenty years was a little memory loss, then who was I to complain.

I knew I was damn lucky to be alive.

If the blast that killed me had struck my head, then there would have been nothing to bring back.

If Kal hadn’t placed my body in a cave on the bright side of the Moon where the unfiltered sunlight constantly bathed my body, then my cells would have died.

If my tomb hadn’t been in hard vacuum, decay would have set in.

It was a sequence of very good luck, outside of the fact that I’d died in the first place.

On the other hand, luck had nothing to do with Darkseid landing on the moon to retrieve my body. He had a plan, and he’d long ago decided that I was going to be part of it, so he’d come to Earth to use his latest mindwashing technique against me. He wanted to turn me against Kal, knowing I was the only person who could destroy him.

Of course, he hadn’t planned on my being dead when he arrived. But his technology was amazing, and he didn’t let glitches like death stop him. He was the most diabolical and single-minded creature in the universe.

Sighing, I pushed that disturbing thought away, and instead smiled as I saw Jarod studying me. He seemed to be a real gentleman. He’d talked me down from the cliff – just listening to him speaking in English brought me back twenty years – and took me to his house where he loaned me the only clothing he had that fit me. Something his last girlfriend had left behind.

I’d smiled as he watched me dressing, his very masculine reaction reminding me that some men thought women looked more exciting in lingerie than when naked.

I didn’t begrudge him his passion – I owed him at least one favor. It just felt so wonderful to be dressed again, even in this little outfit. I’d spent more than a year naked in Darkseid’s dungeon after the burned remains of my old uniform had been eaten by the worms that covered my body.

Jarod, of course, had a thousand questions for me, but I just smiled and kept my peace. I wasn’t sure what to say in any case, given that I didn’t trust my own memories half the time. I also knew that Terrans got weird when they met people who’d risen from the dead. All you have to do is read the Bible to figure that out.

Of course, dead was a relative term for a Kryptonian like me. While the lack of heartbeat or respiration for ten minutes was the dividing line between life and death when it came to humans, no one knew where that line was drawn for Kryptonians. Under the right conditions, possibly never.

Jarod brought my thoughts back to the here and now as he asked me what it had been like being dead, only to smile and laugh as he heard his own question. It certainly wasn’t the usual question a guy asks a girl who’s sitting in his living room in the middle of the night.

I told him about the nightmares, although to be honest, I wasn’t sure if I’d dreamed them when I was dead or if they had started after Darkseid tried to wake me up. All I know is that I had that same horrible dream over and over – a nightmare where I watched and felt my death from every angle, again and again and again.

Whether that nightmare was Darkseid’s hell or one of my own making, I had no idea. I just know that I don’t want to go through that again.

Jarod’s face fell as I described my nightmare. I think he’d been hoping for something a bit more encouraging. Like I’d flown to the light and then been turned back or something like that. Stuff like in the movies.

I took his mind off that by describing the way Darkseid broke me out of that sickening loop of nightmares. He hooked me up to his fusion generator, I was embarrassed to tell him where the clamps were attached to my skin, and then blasted me with enough electricity to power a city. He let me fry for several days, my body growing nearly as hot as a sun.

He wasn’t trying to be nice, mind you, stopping my nightmares and all. He was actually trying to wipe out all my memories and replace them with his own delusions, pouring his poison into me.

He almost succeeded, but in the end he made one critical mistake. He told me that Kal had abandoned me in that final battle - that he’d sacrificed me to save himself.

If there was one thing I still knew, the solitary thing in my whole retched death and revival that I clung to, it was the fact that I’d given my life for my beloved cousin. I had been the hero that day, not him.

Darkseid’s lie became my anchor, my sole connection to reality, the only way to keep my sanity intact as he worked to heal my body while simultaneously trying to corrupt my soul. He wanted to turn me into one of his murderous agents. What he called his Angels of Darkness.

Closing my eyes to shut out the horror, I felt Jarod’s hands gripping mine encouragingly. I smiled and continued my story, telling him that I felt I should be grateful to Darkseid in some way. After all, he did bring me back to life. But when the time came and his enemies attacked him, I escaped without lifting a finger to help him. Strangely, I felt guilty about that.

Darkseid’s small world exploded as I felt into space, the experience leaving me with one depressing thought: were Kal and I destined to repeat this over and over again? Escaping an exploding planet? Would we bring that curse to Earth as well?

I pushed that dark thought away. I was back on the one planet I loved, and I was sitting next to one of those incurably romantic, hopeful and naïve children of Earth. Jarod was smiling at me with a look of longing that made my heart melt.

He said he’d cried when I’d died.

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I reached out and hugged him, sharing my new vitality and my warmth. It felt so good to have another person’s body touching mine.

We lay together on his couch that long night, his hands tracing mine as we talked until dawn, the two of us laughing at each other’s tales of misadventure.

I learned that his life was focused on the Kalash people who lived in this section of the Hindu Kush mountains, how they were descendents of Alexander the Great. Despite living in a predominately Muslim country, they had their own laws, religion and culture. He was trying to connect them to the outside world without destroying their rich culture in the process.

I envied his love for these simple people. Human culture in all its diversity was such a wondrous and fragile thing, and Jarod was rich in the way only a poor man can be, favoring his memories and the promise of adventure above any possessions. I found so many parallels between his life and what I remembered of mine. I’d also lived my life worrying about others, not myself.

Then there was his climbing. His other passion. The thing that kept him alive, even as every climb threatened to end his life. I laughed and threatened to just fly him to whatever summit he wished. He didn’t like that, claiming that the challenge of death and defeat was what made his victories so poignant. The last thing he wanted was me hovering around and making things safe.

I decided that I could learn some lessons from that. Unlike Kal, I could save a little of myself for myself. I could have some fun. Take some risks. Find the edge and skirt it. Not out of desperation like that wormhole dive I’d just done, but just for fun.

Jarod promised to help with that when we next met. Not that I had a clue how. There were very few things in the universe that could physically threaten me, and I couldn’t think of a single one that could be considered fun.

The first rays of sun finally brightened the windows. I rose from our little nest on the couch and soared back up into the air, meeting those warm yellow rays long before they reached the valley floor, luxuriating in that unique frequency of radiation that made me feel so good inside.

Once my chills were chased away, I returned briefly to say goodbye to Jarod. We promised to meet in San Francisco in two weeks. He had a small apartment there.

He kissed me and I kissed him back for the first time, the two of us holding each other so tightly. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed such simple pleasures.

Chapter Two

Once I was out of Pakistan and flying over China, it didn’t take me long to detect the presence of my cousin. Every town in China had posters that showed him posing against the red flag of their country. I saw the same thing in Japan, except there he was posing in front of the Emperor’s shrine.

Clearly, my cousin had increased his influence on Earth’s culture since I’d left. So much so that some people were worshipping him as a god. That bothered me. Having a body of steel didn’t mean we Kryptonians are wiser than anyone else.

I watched and listened to the humans of Earth as I circled most of the globe, but I didn’t stop until I floated down in the woods behind the home of the man who’d been my mentor during my last months on Earth. Bruce Wayne. Batman to everyone else.

Wayne Manor looked the same as I remembered it; and the back entrance still responded to the special keyless lock Bruce had installed for me. A lock that required a fifty-ton grip to activate. It seemed easier to open than before.

Entering, I found the house empty and dark. Still, I couldn’t help but smile as the rich wood and spacious rooms brought back a flood of memories. I remembered fondly the way Bruce and I would talk about our exploits, teasing each other with recounting how many criminals we’d brought to justice. He had a big head start, but I was catching up.

We would even spar with each other down in the Batcave, pitting my faster reflexes and strength against his amazing weapons and the power of his armored costume. The fights were rather one-sided at first. I was Supergirl after all.

He decided to even the odds by creating a little fantasy - just to make it more interesting he said. I was to play the villain and, naturally, he was the hero. Which meant he had to win. Most of the time anyway.

He started by insisting on removing my red and blue costume before we fought - I was the villain after all. I laughed and did a little strip tease for him.

As you might guess by now, our relationship wasn’t completely platonic. Batman had a kinky side, but then, I should have expected that after his affair with Catwoman.

Once my costume was off, he took the next step, implanting tiny bits of green-k in his costume to weaken me as we fought. It was still quite a fight, me the naked teenage villain and him the mighty Batman in his armored costume, but he eventually subdued me so he could tie me up and deliver me to ‘justice’.

That tiny bit of green-k did hurt a bit, but I laughed and had fun just the same. No one else knew about Batman’s kinky side, and I liked to tease him about it around Kal.

Kal, as you might expect, was not pleased at all, especially when he found that I wasn’t wearing my uniform during our little games. He assumed the worst.

He shouldn’t have. Bruce had always been respectful of me. Of course, that didn’t mean our game didn’t have a sexual edge, there are so many ways to have sex after all.

Kal seemed mollified when I finally told him I was still a virgin. Technically anyway. Also that our relationship wasn’t serious. We both knew that Bruce Wayne didn’t have room for a woman in his life, but what endeared Bruce to me was that he didn’t need any explanations from me: no mousy brown wigs; no brown contacts for my eyes; no pretenses.

Just his blonde teenage temptress who was really a supervillain. Well, in the Batcave anyway.

Standing in the empty mansion now as that flood of warm memories enveloped me, I felt strangely out of place. Wayne Manor was a part of my childhood now. A place to be held fondly in my memories, but never to return to.

Sighing, I turned to study myself in the wall-sized mirror, just as I had so many times before, tugging up the sexy stockings that Jarod had loaned me.

A different person stared back at me.

I was no longer that skinny, teenage girl who’d stared wistfully into this mirror twenty years ago, wishing for things that could not be. Instead, a woman with golden blonde hair stood there, her hair slightly curly and fuller. Her figure was more mature and she had an extra five inches of height – thanks to Darkseid’s genetic tweaks. But her eyes were still as Kryptonian blue as ever.

All in all, I decided I didn’t look half bad for a Kryptonian pushing forty.

Not to mention someone who was supposed to be dead.

Chapter Three

Searching for something to wear, I discovered a pile of my old clothes in a trunk next to Bruce’s bedroom. I laid them out on the bed, only to find that most of them were too small. A tiny pair of denim shorts came closest to fitting me, along with a white blouse from my days in the Leesburg Orphanage. I couldn’t button the up, so I tied it off as a halter, leaving my abs bare and a lot of cleavage showing. That seemed to be more the style today in any case.

It didn’t take long to dig a pair of black, high-heeled boots out of the closet that looked good on me. Actually more than good - they looked stunning with these tiny shorts and my way longer legs.

Whether 1984 or 2005, some looks never go out of style.

Looking around now that I felt more comfortably dressed, I noticed that Bruce’s bedroom hadn’t been slept in for a very long time. The entire mansion was dusty – obviously no one was taking care of the place. Alfred had probably died, he’d been an old man twenty years ago, but Bruce had always been fastidious about keeping the place neat. He would have hired another butler.

All of which meant that Bruce hadn’t lived here for a long time.

A search of the Batcave beneath revealed that it was still in active use, although the Batmobile was gone. The computers looked a lot more modern than I remembered. I sat down at an enormous flat screen and touched the mouse, and the screen lit up with a swirling Macintosh symbol. I remembered reading about these computers back in 1984, and had briefly used one to correspond via email.

I tried to find the programs I remembered, but instead found something called Firefox. Clicking on it, I was suddenly rewarded with a box and the words “Google Search” under it. Apparently Firefox expected me to type something in. A question? Something I wanted to find?

I gave it a try by entering “Batman”, and was instantly rewarded with more information than I could possibly digest. I scanned the pages as fast as they displayed, discovering along the way that Bruce had handed over his costume to his son.

That surprised me – given that he hadn’t even had a son when I last saw him. But based on the pictures, the new Batman looked grown up, although the mask made it impossible to accurately judge his age.

Out of curiosity, I searched for “Supergirl”, and was shocked when even more information flooded my screen, most of it dealing with a young blonde I’d never seen before. It didn’t take long to discover that she was the seventeen-year-old daughter of Superman.

There were now two Supergirls on Earth? Interesting.

I quickly found references to ‘the original Supergirl’, me of course, along with a lot of eulogies and so forth. They were very weird to read.

Searching further, I began to stumble across picture after picture that had been modified in some way to make me look different. Some of the ‘artists’ had even gone so far as to remove my costume and replace it with an astounding degree of anatomic detail. The artists weren’t very accurate - my nipples had never looked the exaggerated ones I saw on the screen, and I was a natural blonde, despite what some of the artists depicted.

I tried to put it in perspective as I remembered some of the sexy games Bruce and I used to play, using Kryptonite no less. The concept of an invulnerable woman was difficult for many men to handle. Yet instead of strengthening themselves in their fantasies, they always wanted to weaken me. I guess that’s what bothered me the most. Was that because it was sexier or just easier?

I wondered what Kal thought of it all? Especially given that a fair number of the later picts were of his daughter.

Viewing page after page, it didn’t take me long to decide that I could probably spend a week just reading about myself and my young replacement. Instead, I tried a few more searches, trying to figure out what had happened over the last twenty years.

Turns out… a lot. From the end of the Soviet Union to 9/11 and finally nuclear terrorism. And a zillion things in between. The pace of life on Earth was accelerating, and it seemed as if Superman and his daughter were spending a lot of time dealing with these so-called terrorists. That and an increasing number of natural disasters due to something called global warming.

Those problems would soon be trivial matters if any of Darkseid’s remaining troops gained a foothold here. All of which reminded me that I had to find Kal and warn him. His daughter too.

The problem was, I didn’t know how to find him.

A search for Daily Planet revealed that Clark Kent and Lois Lane had gone freelance a few years ago. So much for visiting their old offices. I’d always liked hanging around the Planet, listening to the reporters trying to pin down their sources, to write their stories, the epic battles fought between writers and editors.

I didn’t even mind the way Jimmy Olson would stare at my legs, and get all flustered. He’d never even asked me out or anything. I would have said yes.

Sighing as those old memories tugged at me, I briefly considered floating over Metropolis to call out Kal’s name at 200 decibels, but decided that would be really dumb. Darkseid’s agents might already be here.

I ended up doing a search in Google for Clark Kent and that led me to something called White Pages and finally to an address where Clark Kent, Lois Kent and Linda Kent lived. Linda?

I fed the address into Yahoo Maps, I’m a quick learner, and discovered that the Kents lived in the hills about thirty miles outside Metropolis city limits – a small town named Crystal Heights.

Satisfied, I used my x-ray vision to watch the tumblers in Bruce’s safe as I worked the combination dial, and popped it open to retrieve the packet of money he’d left for me over twenty-two years ago. My emergency funds.

Satisfied that I was solvent, I floated up the stairs toward my old jumping off point on the roof, hidden as it was between the three towers.

Remembering what supersonic shockwaves did to ordinary clothing – mostly leaving it behind in bits and pieces - I quickly stripped off my shorts and blouse and stuffed them into the bottom of my boots. I didn’t want to knock on Kal’s door naked.

Lois would never forgive me.

I was wearing just the boots when I bent down and leaped from the thick stainless platform, happily discovering that my longer legs thrust me close to the Mach with a single bound.

I stayed low, moving faster than a human eye could track, flying down the highways at just below the Mach to avoid the sonic booms.

Chapter Four

I was hovering over Crystal Heights a bare ten minutes later while squinting to read the street signs from two miles up. I found 2731 Venus Lane – their house. The neighborhood looked modest and their house was even more so.

Clearly, Clark Kent hadn’t changed – he was still trying to blend in with the locals.

I dropped down to land in some trees next to the property, and tugged my clothes out of my boots, pressing creases out with my palms. Seconds later I was dressed.

Smiling as I remembered how Kal had always gotten nervous when I wore my smallest uniform, I deliberately left the top button of my shorts unsnapped. I wasn’t a young girl anymore, lost and searching for someone to take care of her.

I finally hooked my thumb under my waistband to strike a pose, and raised my hand to knock on the door.

I wondered if Kal or Lois would even recognize me.

Three knocks later and I was still wondering, not to mention feeling a little silly standing in front of a closed door. Brushing the hair from my ear, I heard music coming from inside, so I stared pointedly at the door, only to have it seemingly turn transparent. I looked through two more walls until I came upon a red-headed woman who was dancing to music as she worked her way across the carpet of a large room near the back of the house, vacuuming the carpets.

She looked like Lois, but a Lois who’d actually grown younger as opposed to older. But she couldn’t be her… the Lois I remembered would never stoop to doing mere housework.

I blinked my eyes back to normal and stared at the door.

Any more than I’d let a locked door slow me down.

I had no idea how to fix her problem, but mine was easy, especially since I wasn’t really Supergirl anymore. No more slavishly following the rules according to Kal-El.

I inserting my fingernail in the keyhole and twisted my wrist - the hardened steel lock shattered, releasing the tumbler. A few jiggles of the lock later and I was inside, neat as can be.

All of which gives you a clue how dangerous my nails were if I was to really try and scratch something. I liked the idea of being dangerous. As Supergirl, I hadn’t been dangerous a day in my life.

I wandered through Lois and Clark’s house, finding the living room walls decorated with awards and decorations from various newspaper guilds, including a Pulitzer Prize with Lois’ name on it.

So she’d finally won one. Cool.

I didn’t see one with Clark’s name. Bummer.

Intermingled with those plaques were pictures of a very pretty girl, starting from birth and ending with a lovely young woman. She had darkly tanned skin and black hair and eyes.

Linda Kent.

More correctly, Asha Zor-El.

Supergirl to most of the world.

I could see a touch of Kal in her nose and lips, even more in her eyes, but nothing that reminded me of Lois. Which made sense. Kryptonians can’t have children with humans. Clearly a surrogate had been involved, although the mystery of who that might have been was already tantalizing me.

Diana was the leading candidate. Amazons shared more than a few traits with we Krypts. Besides, Linda’s hair looked like Diana’s. Which made me wonder – did Linda wear a black wig or as Supergirl, did she wear a blonde one? I sighed. Some things never change. Confusing secret identities being one of them.

I was damned if I was going to play games like that this time around. No wigs and no dumpy clothing and no pretending I as meek and mousy.

Emboldened by that thought, I headed toward the sound of the vacuum cleaner. Pausing at the entrance, I took a deep breath. This was my moment of truth – my first connection with my old life.

I stepped into the room.

Lois jerked her head up up from her vacuuming and stared blankly back at me, then switched the machine off. She looked a bit startled.

“Can I help you?”

Rao, she was gorgeous. The Lois I remembered had been attractive, but nobody would have called her beautiful. She had to be in her fifties by now, but she looked half that age. In fact, her complexion was perfect, not a line on her face, not even around her eyes. Which were sparkling blue and clear.

The Lois I remembered had hazel eyes.

More faulty memories, I assumed. A scan of her body revealed the broken arm and ribs from those accidents, not to mention an appendectomy scar.

“I don’t know how you do it, Lois, but you’ve gone from cute to totally gorgeous.”

Lois stood up straight to stare back at me, her eyes traveling up and down my body. She looked puzzled. Given that she seemed to have gotten younger while I got older, not to mention how much taller I was, I could excuse her for that.

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure…” she started to say.

“Your daughter took my place. An honor. Thank you.”

Her puzzled look turned suspicious. She was obviously practiced at protecting the family secrets.

“It’s me. Kara.”

Lois’ eyes opened wide, and then narrowed suspiciously. “And I’m the tooth fairy.”

“How many blondes do you know who can fly, Lois. Besides your daughter, I mean.” I lifted up on my toes and kept going, my head bouncing lightly off the ceiling as if I was a helium balloon.

Lois staggered backward, nearly falling over the couch as she looked incredulously at me. “Your… what?”

I just smiled. “I’m a who. And here I thought you were never at a loss for words, Lois.”

“This can’t be,” Lois said with a shake of her head. “We were all at your funeral. You’re dead!”

“Yes, I most certainly was,” I nodded, trying to keep from laughing at the astounded look on her face. “But we Krypts have more tricks up our sleeves than just leaping tall buildings in a single bound.”

“This is… this is bullshit. I saw your body. The fatal injuries. The…” She stopped in mid sentence, her eyes narrowing further. “I warn you, if this is some kind of game lady, I’m more than capable of taking care of myself.”

“I don’t doubt that, Lois. Sleeping with cousin Kal every night can rub off on a girl. It’s certainly done wonders for your complexion and your eyes.”

“I don’t know what you’re…” Lois started to say, only to bite her tongue when I crossed my legs and bobbed around in midair.

“Look at me closely, Lois. You’ll see what I say is true.”

“Kara… Kara it really is you!” Lois suddenly cried out as she ran across the room to wrap her arms around me, hugging me with a fierce strength. “This is so wonderful, so impossible, but it’s the absolute best birthday gift anyone could give Kal. He will be so thrilled to see you!”

“Kal’s birthday…?” I started to ask, then smiled, remembering that he’d come to Earth sixty years ago. Today was Clark Kent’s birthday.

“But how did you survive all those injuries?” Lois started to ask, her reporter’s instincts never far from the surface. “Everyone proclaimed you dead. Even Kal did. And where have you been for two decades?”

“I really was dead. Lying in that tomb on the Moon.”

Lois blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“Someone recently took an interest in reviving me. Amazingly, they pulled it off.”

I wasn’t about to say whom, nor how he did it. Nanosurgeries and Kryptonian stem-cells and spending months in some kind of liquid suspension. Something else too -- some strange DNA they injected into my matrix which makes me a bit of a chameleon. Darkseid wouldn’t tell me where those genes came from.

“But you’re taller and older and truly stunning, Kara. So who was the prince who woke the princess?”

I shook my head. “We can talk about that later. Let’s just say I’m very lucky.”

“Lucky? That’s the understatement of the eon. You look late-twenties. If that.”

“I’ll be forty soon.”

Lois laughed. “Well, then there’s definitely something to be said for sleeping half your life away.”

“I wish I’d only been sleeping. I don’t recommend dying until you’re old and dried up.”

“Do you have any idea how big a story this is? You have to tell me all about it.”

“Not that you can ever publish it,” I smiled. “But off the record, I’ll only say is that the dying hurt more than you could possible imagine.”

Her face fell. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. The pain went away very quickly and then I felt all floaty and tingly as the light faded away to black. The next thing I remember I was having these bad dreams. Then I woke up.”

I wasn’t going to say ‘revived from the dead’, as some people would presume theological implications from that statement. This had nothing to do with God, although Darkseid quite possible was the Devil.

Instead, it was just medicine, although practiced on a very advanced level. My brain cells hadn’t deteriorated during my long death -- thanks to my Kryptonian heritage and the fact that my body was stored at near absolute zero in a vacuum -- and the patterns and memories of my life were trapped inside. It was only my internal organs, most of them blasted into charred flesh during that final battle, that had to be regrown.

“My God, this is the story of the century, Kara. Everyone remembers you. I’d love to have an exclusive.”

“I would like that too, Lois,” I laughed, realizing that she’d be a reporter until the day she died, “assuming I ever want to have my story published. But right now, I want to know everything that’s gone on here since I died. Especially with you, with Kal and with my young namesake. The new Supergirl.”

“I can’t wait for Asha to meet you… her Aunt Kara. She’s still learning the ropes, and you could teach her things that Kal can’t. Or won’t.”

“Sounds like fun. I’ve never had a niece before.”

Lois took my hand to lead me toward the kitchen. “I don’t know how anything could be more amazing than the story of your return from the dead, but lets make some coffee and talk. We’ve got a LOT of catching up to do.”

Chapter Five

Lois laid her side of the story with the outlined simplicity of a reporter.

- She and Clark had married.

- Batman had a son with Catwoman, whom they named Bruce Wayne, Jr.

- The Amazons arrived to present the Eryingale Proposal to Kal. Essentially an Amazon chosen at random to bear Kal’s child. That was a difficult period for Lois… apparently it took a long time before the young Amazon got pregnant.

- The challenges of raising young Asha, half Amazon, half Kryptonian. She’d been super right from birth.

- Terrorists with explosives, guns and missiles had taken the planet to the edge of chaos. Kal had been working day and night to try to hold things together.

- Asha appearing in public as Supergirl following her tenth birthday.

- Batman’s retirement after he’d been badly injured fighting the Joker, his son taking his place.

- Asha announced to the world as the head of the UN antiterrorist force in a special ceremony at the UN when she turned sixteen – barely a year ago.

- Father and daughter slowing the rise of terrorism, only to have it turn nuclear in the last months. Kal thought the technology was alien, but hadn’t been able to prove it until just this week.

I nodded at the last point, suspecting the worst.

“Kal thinks the aliens are sending an agent here, Kara. Someone who is strong enough to challenge even him.”

I said nothing. I wasn’t about to volunteer that Darkseid had been brainwashing me for that role before I escaped. Instead, I offered: “Darkseid is behind it. He should be dead, but he has a habit of borrowing other people’s bodies and setting up shop again.”

“Darkseid?” Lois asked worriedly. “Kal said just last week that he really was dead now.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“But he’s putting his agents on Earth?”

“That murderous bastard’s got a grudge to settle with Kal.”

Lois picked up on the anger in my voice and looked at me curiously. “So he’s bringing the fight here? To the one place Kal values above all others.”

I nodded before adding lamely, “That would be my guess.”

It was actually a lot more than a guess.

“So,” Lois said, her face brightening, “then it’s even better news that you’ve returned. You always did have a good sense of timing. You and Kal and Asha can fight him together.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“So, enough of such depressing thoughts,” Lois said as she clasped my hand. “Tell me about you. All that teenage cuteness seems to have mellowed into a truly beautiful woman, Kara. And not a mark on those perfect abs.”

“You mean, given that my body was nearly cut in half from ribcage to hips? Just my spine left.”

“Don’t remind me,” Lois winced. “I saw your body before Kal buried you. What was left of it.”

I just shrugged, feigning indifference. “A dozen reconstructive surgeries to rebuild my core, then a flood of Kryptonian stem-cells to regenerate my organs followed by a million surgical nanobots working to reconnect everything from the inside out.”

“You regrew everything? Nanobot surgeons? Amazing. Stem-cell research hasn’t gone nearly that far here on Earth. But how did that make you so much taller?”

“Kryptonian growth hormones were part of the mix. Also some other DNA that wasn’t Kryptonian. Something very alien, but that’s all I know.”

“That’s a scary thought. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you guys are already alien enough.”

“You more than anyone would know that, Lois.”

“So how did it work?”

I shrugged. “I’m told I spent the first year of my recovery in some slime tank as my organs grew. Thankfully I don’t remember any of that.”

I didn’t mention the nightmares, which had haunted me.

“So you wake up looking way better than before.” She paused, looking at me closely as she winked. “Not bad at all. But there’s one important thing you haven’t told me - who was the knight in shining armor who came to your rescue?”

Chapter Six

George Fredericks stood in the back of the photography studio in Hollywood, staring at a remarkable poster on the wall. It was a picture of a model wearing nothing but a tiny pair of shorts, her top undone to reveal flawless breasts as she walked down a beachside boardwalk. She was the most perfect woman he’d ever laid eyes on.

He tore his eyes from her long enough to read the note next to the picture. It said it had been taken over in Avalon, along with a bunch of technical information on the camera and settings.

He looked back at the girl on the poster, mesmerized.

John Spitzer walked through the door of his studio to see a seedy-looking baldheaded man staring at his favorite picture. The man’s jeans and denim jacket were greasy and his eyes didn’t seem to focus right, plus he was so emaciated that he looked as if he was starving. Starving and about to beat off against his wall. This was the infamous MindRipper?

John cleared his throat. “Have you met her?”

George’s head snapped around, his beady eyes focusing on John’s. “Who?”

John nodded toward the picture. “Zyara.”

George swallowed hard as he looked back at the black and white picture, his body surging with even greater desire. “That’s… that’s her? I had no idea.”

“You think anyone but a Kryptonian could look that good? Or have the guts to walk around in public with her boobs hanging out.”

“They’re hardly hanging,” George drooled at the firmest tits he’d ever seen. “You say she works… for him?”

“Yup. Which, believe it or not, makes her our boss.”

“Hardly looks old enough to be one of Darkseid’s so-called Angels of Darkness.”

John shrugged. “She might even be Darkseid himself for all I know, twisted fuck that he is. What’s for sure is that despite her sweet looks, she’s the most lethal killer on this planet.”

“And she’s an El? Related to Superman?”

“Second cousin on his mother’s side. Her mother was on that Kryptonian colony ship that was transiting out from their sun when the planet blew.”

George exhaled. He’d been recruited into the Alliance a year ago, and had enjoyed spying on Superman and his daughter, but lately things had started getting weird. He’d been picking up bits and pieces of some else’s thoughts. He didn’t think it was Zyara.

“So why am I being called in?”

“Because you’re the god damned MindRipper.”

“I don’t go by that name anymore.”

“Pity, because being the Ripper is the only thing that makes you valuable to us. You can sense a Kryptonian’s thoughts.”

“We each have our skills.”

“You’ll do it then?”

“Do what?”

John sat in the chair behind his desk, tossing a folder across it. “We’ve received recent satellite sensor data that says another Krypt has found their way to Earth. So naturally, we need you to find the bastard so Zyara can deal with them.”

“It’ll cost you. Not the usual price either.”

“Money is not a problem.”

“Don’t want your fucking money,” George said with a shake of his head. “I want to meet her.” He pointed at the picture.

John frowned at the sleezy, bald-headed man. He couldn’t imagine an uglier more disgusting human being. “That’s impossible.”

George turned and walked toward the door. “OK, then I walk. Nobody else in the Alliance can tune into a Kryptonian’s thoughts.”

John watched the bald man’s back until he reached the door, and then cursed. “OK. OK. But it’s your fucking funeral.” He scribbled down an address on a piece of paper and threw it at him. “This is where she and I meet. I’ll tell her you’re coming.”

George nodded.

“But you have no idea how dangerous she is. She kills people for the sheer fun of it. She’s a bit… touched.”

“Touched?”

“Crazy. Unstable. Unpredictable. Pick your poison. Anyone who’s been around Darkseid is a little off their rocker.”

“She won’t hurt me. She needs me. More than she can possibly know.”

“Pray you are right. And that she’s not in one of her moods.”

George nervously parked his car in front of an old warehouse in Long Beach a few hours later, checking the address twice. This was the kind of place even the cops would think twice about entering. A haven for gangbangers and every other kind of criminal element.

Naturally, he didn’t think of himself in that context, despite the fact that the Alliance had one goal – killing Superman and his daugther.

He was obsessed as was his nature, only capable of focusing on one thing at a time, in this case Zyara’s picture. He couldn’t get that image out of his head. Such perfection. He knew she’d be beautiful any place he met her.

His pulse was racing as he opened the rusted door of the warehouse and stepped inside, only to be greeted by two bodies, their arms and legs twisted into impossible contortions. A flood of confusing thoughts hit him at the same time.

Zyara was here!

His mutation was unique in that he could sense the surface thoughts of a Kryptonian’s mind from a distance of a hundred yards. He could also sense their mere presence from thousands of miles away. A disturbance in the force he called it, borrowing the term from the Star Wars movies. He didn’t have a clue how it actually worked, but it did.

He closed his eyes and focused, trying to see what Zyara saw. He was rewarded with an incredibly sharp black and white image of himself as viewed from above. He could even see his skeleton glowing beneath his skin and his heart beating so fast. Shuddering, he realized she was upstairs and she was looking through the floor with her x-ray vision.

Rats scampered across the filthy concrete as he gave the broken bodies a wide berth, obviously Zyara’s doing, and slowly picked his way through the debris toward a set of stairs. He kept his weight near the sides of the creaking steps as he slowly climbed, thankful that he didn’t weigh much. Once at the top, he walked boldly through the single doorway.

The goddess in the picture was standing in front of the single window of the old office, an orange plastic chair next to her. Her dark hair reflected a bit of red in the sunshine, and her eyes were blue. She wore a black long-sleeve bodysuit with huge cuffs. It ended in a leotard bottom, leaving her long, slender legs bare, a fashionable pair of ankle high black boots with spike heels making them look so sexy.

“So, the mighty MindRipper himself needs to see me,” she said sarcastically. “Pray tell how I can help you.”

“I’m tired of being your god-damned monitoring station,” George blurted out, finding himself off balance. She was even more beautiful in person. An electric field seemed to surround her, making his whole body tingle. “I want to get involved in more of the action.”

“Bullshit. You came here because you wanted to meet me. John told me how you were drooling over my picture. Or was it just my tits?”

George cursed silently. John had briefed her, and she was trying to put him on the defensive.

“And I don’t need x-ray vision to see that little dick of yours is ready to explode,” she added. “Is that why you came? Begging for favors?”

“Yeah, but I ain’t begging. It’s my new price.” His heart was pounding and his mouth had gone dry.

“Then you have a death wish. Just like the assholes downstairs who thought I was an easy target.”

“You don’t understand, sweetcakes,” George growled, struggling to regain the initiative. He fought against his growing weakness, unable to tear his eyes from her legs. They were so long, so gorgeous, so strong. “You… you need me now more than ever.”

“Bullshit. I should just kill you and wait for the Krypt to make his or her move. They all go public eventually.” She stepped around the chair to move closer to him.

“It’s not that simple, Zyara. They’re as strong as you are. Maybe even as skilled. If you want to be sure of success, absolutely sure, then you need to know their weaknesses. You need to get at them through those they care about. The El’s are weak that way.”

Zyara reached up and grabbed his throat, lifting him off the floor. “You don’t know shit about my family.”

“Drop… me… I… you need…” he gagged.

“You think I need you?” she hissed. “I know exactly how to kill another Krypt. And a million ways to kill you stinking frails.”

“Just… just as… they know… how…” his words ended in a wheeze as her grip grew tighter.

She pulled his face close to hers as she watched him turn blue. His pulse was beating frantically in her hand, his body as frail as a captured bird. Disgusted, she tossed him across the room.

He hit the wall hard, one of his shoulder blades shattering as he fell to the floor, groaning in pain. She walked across the room to place her boot on his head, pressing his face against the filthy floor.

“OK. You got one chance to prove I need you. Tell me something that nobody else could know about me. My big weakness.”

George struggled to concentrate as the pain in his back grew excruciating. He struggled to push past it, knowing with horrible certainty that his next words would determine whether he lived or died. He reached up to daringly wrap his hand around her slender ankle, completing the contact with her body that he needed to delve deeper into her thoughts.

He was rewarded with a very erotic fantasy of a man in a red and blue costume making love to Zyara. He was as dramatically endowed as a porn star and was incredibly athletic. Every part of his fantastically muscular body was crystal clear except his face, which was in shadow. “Your weakness… you always… you always dream its Superman making it with you when you please yourself.”

Her foot pressed harder, her spike heal drawing blood against his cheek. “Anyone could guess that, asshole. He’s the only swinging dick on the planet who could please me. That doesn’t make me weak.”

“But ten times a day? Your usual rate of self-pleasure. Except… except after you see the big guy on TV, well, then it’s more often… all night long. You’re infatuated with him.”

The press of her boot softened. He turned his head slightly to look up at her, seeing a hint of color rising across her neck. “I’m impressed. You get to live a few minutes longer.”

He gripped her ankle tighter as he rolled all the way over on his back, nearly screaming as he pressed his broken shoulder blade painfully back into position. She stood over him, her boots straddling his face as he looked up between those incredible legs, seeing heaven itself. Reaching up, he daringly wrapped his other hand around her calf, finding her skin was warm and soft, even as the muscle beneath felt as if it had been carved from solid steel.

“Get your hands off me, asshole, or I’ll stomp your fucking face right through the floor!” Despite her demand, she made no attempt to move away.

He gripped her leg tighter yet, and another strong image filled his mind’s eye. “You… you intend to kill him some day. You fantasize about draining him even as he fills you. Of ripping a thousand orgasms from his body to drain all his strength before…” A disgusting image of Superman’s body, crushed and broken filled his mind. “…before tearing his cock off… before crushing him between your legs.” The images of her fantasy mutilation were so graphic and powerful that George wanted to throw up.

Instead, he stared up to see her growing wet as he described her ultimate fantasy, her legs quivering softly, hard nipples tenting her top. “That’s every girl’s fantasy.”

George looked up at her as if she was deranged. Listening to her jumbled thoughts, sensing her wild arousal, he decided that John was right… she was crazy. Then he came across another disgusting memory.

“You… you also amuse yourself by pretending to be a hooker in one of those seedy bars near here. You wear a costume, like Supergirl’s, a blonde wig too, and you let men try to fuck you. Illegals, transients, gangbangers. Young yet physically vital men. Men the world will never miss.” He frowned. “Except they can’t make it with you. You laugh and tell them they have to wear a costume like Superman to get strong enough. Then, once they put it on, then you…” He gagged as her mental images filled his mind. “Then you do what you plan to do to... him.”

“STOP.” She shouted so loud that the glass in the window exploded, her eyes flashing dangerously blue, a hint of red coloring her whites. She reached down to grab his shirt, jerking him up from the floor to hold him at arms length, his feet dangling. “So I’m convinced of your power. Name your price.”

George smiled at her, sensing he’d snatched victory from the very jaws of death. “Simple. I want you. In that costume. But instead of crushing me to death like you do the others, I want you to make me a… a god.” He moaned, reaching out to cup her firm breasts. “You… you’ll weaken yourself. Kryptonite. Then you’ll let me have you. Your first real fuck.” Gasping for air, he was so turned on he felt as if his heart was going to explode.

Zyara’s eyes flashed again as she lifted him higher, muscles tensing, only to feel his body stiffen and begin to shake, his eyes rolling up in his head. He was so lost in his passion that he’d lost all control.

She hid her disgust as she slowly lowered him back to his feet, helping him to stand, even straightening his shirt as she smiled confidently at him, pleased with herself. She was in control again. He wanted to fuck her. So much so that he’d risk death itself. Enough that he’d even come as she killed him. Good. She could use that. She’d let him think he had the power over her right up to the moment she really did kill him. Just like the others.

“OK, it’s a deal, Ripper,” she smiled, her perfect teeth glimmering, eyes sparkling. “But not until you find me this new Krypt. Identify him or her, and you’ll get me. Blonde wig, costume and all.”

George smiled weakly. “You’re… you’re the boss. Boss.”

Chapter Seven

Once Lois was convinced that I’d told her all I was going to, and her reporter’s instincts were satiated for the moment, she seemed to wilt in her chair. Clearly there was something else she wanted to talk about. Something painful.

I prodded a bit, and it all came out in one angry burst.

Kal was having an affair. With an Amazon. Her name was Cassie and she was Diana’s goddaughter. She’d been born human before enhanced by the Amazons. He’d been sleeping with her for nearly two years.

I stared at Lois, dumbfounded. This didn’t sound like the Kal I knew.

Lois continued: She said Kal refused to talk about it. He claimed he’d always needed the Amazons that way. A simple need, a convenience, a way to keep other people safe. Nothing more. He also claimed it was over. That he wasn’t going to see her again.

Lois broke down, and I held her. She said she didn’t believe him. That he was in love with Cassie.

I wasn’t sure what to say. Kal had always been such a straight shooter, it seemed inconceivable that he’d lie to Lois.

I knew that part of his story was true - his relationship with the Amazons. Kal and Diana had had a thing since he’d reached puberty. Protection of the humans, Diana had described to me. She said everything about Kal was super, including his sperm. They couldn’t allow a billion tiny tailwigglers to race around at supersonic speed, impregnating every woman in Smallville.

That was way more than I wanted to know about my cousin, especially given I’d been sixteen when Diana told me about it.

But after thinking about it for a few days, I’d decided it was bullshit. Not the super sperm and the danger they presented -they were probably real enough, although Kal wasn’t about to share this worry with me. But rather the fact that Kal had to relieve himself on Earth. He could easily go to the moon, even to Mars. Anywhere outside the atmosphere.

Hell, he could have come to me, a wicked thought that had found its way to more than a few of my dreams that year.

No, Diana had been playing another game with Kal. A game of dominance and control. She wanted to make him dependent on her. Sexually and emotionally, and not out of some noble desire to protect humanity.

I lost most of my respect for Diana after that, and I was so glad when Kal fell in love with Lois. What kind of marriage would two supers have, competing with each other, both trying to save mankind? I’d made enough trips to the future that year to date some guys who were in my power class, another story of its own, to decide that I wanted a normal man in my life. I know it sounds crazy, but I need a man in my life who can keep me human.

Lois’ tears turned to anger as she described her frustration and her fears. I comforted her as best I could, but finally had to leave before I got angry too. I had to hear Kal’s side of the story before I took sides.

So I made my excuses to Lois, promising to come back after I’d talked to Kal (I think I actually said after I kicked his ass) and flew off. I circled the town two miles up, trying to clear my head as I listened to the desperate housewives who lived in this Stepford. Unfortunately, the banal conversations made me sick to my stomach. How could people focus on such trivialities? How could they complicate and screw up their lives so badly? Everyone was either having affairs or their jobs or their kids were totally fucked up.

I couldn’t take it… I needed to go somewhere real. And fast. That meant Metropolis. The big city might have its raw edges and more than its share of seediness, but it was definitely real. Things weren’t homogenized and bleached lily white. If people’s lives in the city were screwed up, they didn’t smile and pretend it was all OK. They went out and did something about it.

I felt like I was going to go crazy during the twenty minutes it took me to get to Metropolis. I to fly very slow to avoid fraying my outfit - it would be hard to arrive naked in crowded Metropolis without someone seeing me, especially as I would have to find clothes somewhere.

I wound up using the cover of a deserted building to land in an alley behind the Starbucks over by the UCM Medical Center. A couple of bums stared at me as I floated down, but anyone who bothered to listen to their story would think they were babbling about Kal’s daughter. She was the only Supergirl they knew.

I was in no mood to meet Kal right now, and what I really needed was coffee to clear my head. I’d been addicted to espresso since back in the 80’s when it wasn’t fashionable yet. Not in the US anyway.

I ordered a triple cap and a biscotti before walking outside to sit in the sun. Slumping a bit in my chair as I sat close to the street, I crossed my legs and watched people walking to and fro along the busy sidewalk.

I was quickly amused by the way guys would make it halfway past Starbucks before spotting me, then their eyes would open wide and they’d almost trip over their own feet as they seemed to forget how to walk. It happened every time.

It was so cool just being myself - no mousy wigs and goofy clothes, no bright costume either. Just sitting alone in the sunshine sipping my Cappuccino. Nobody knew my name. Nobody knew I was Kryptonian. It was heaven.

“May we join you?”

Jolted from my thoughts, I turned to see two guys in their late twenties standing behind me. They were wearing sweaty t-shirts, shorts and sneakers.

“Of course.”

“Cool. I’m Matt. This is my buddy Robert.”

I noted the volleyball tucked under one arm. “So, how’d your game go?”

“We won, of course.”

We shook hands. Both had strong, confident grips.

“I’m Kara,” I offered, breaking the ice.

“Ah…” Matt said, “the most popular girl’s name of the late-80’s. I’m glad you pronounce it with a soft A. Kahra. So many people ruin it by using a hard A.”

“And why does that matter?”

“Because people named their daughters after Kara Zor-El. She pronounced her name precisely as you just did.”

“Funny thing about that,” I smirked.

“She was quite the heroine. The whole world mourned her loss.”

“I’m surprised you even remember. You were what… maybe ten or so when I… when she died?”

“Twelve.”

“I’ve swear I’ve seen you before, Kara,” Robert said. “Cover of Shape magazine maybe?”

I shook my head. “I’m not a model.”

“An actress then?” Matt tried. “What movies or shows have you been in?”

“Sorry guys, not an actress either. I’m kind of between jobs at the moment.”

“Well you should be,” Robert smiled as he piled it on. “A model I mean. You could make a mint with that face and those long legs.”

He was definitely trying to flirt with me. “I’ll give it some thought.”

“So what do you do?”

“Kind of like police work. But not exactly.”

“CIA.”

“That’s classified.”

“Cool.”

“So what do you guys do?”

“Third year surgical residents,” Matt deadpanned. “Over at UCM Medical.”

“Doctors, huh? Surgeons even. Modest too. I bet all the girls fall at your feet.”

Matt laughed. “Like I have time? Robert and I escape for a game of vball once in a while. Otherwise, we’re officially slaves of the hospital.”

“How many more years of that?” I asked.

“Two more. We’re both specializing in reconstructive plastic surgery.”

“Boob guys. You’ll make millions.”

Matt frowned. “That’s not all plastic surgeons do.”

“Technically, no. But I did read somewhere that boob jobs make up 80% of the schedule for most plastic surgeons.”

“We’re actually more into reconstruction,” Matt continued. “Bullet wounds, traumatic injuries, automobile accidents. Not that elective surgery cosmetic bullshit.”

I laughed softly. “You mean, if my boobs fall off, you’ll sew them back on? But if they’re too small, then that’s too bad.”

Matt smiled. “Something like that. But I don’t think you have anything to worry about on either account.”

“My, my… doctors with a sense of integrity. And humor. Who’d have guessed? Things really have improved while I was gone.”

“Gone? Overseas you mean?”

“You could say that if you consider the gulf of space to be a sea.”

“Huh?” Robert asked.

“So, what do you guys know about stem-cell based organ regeneration? Or nanobotic reconstructive surgery?”

Robert’s eyebrow lifted. “That’s very cutting edge stuff. John Hopkins is doing some advanced work in that area. Where did you read about it?”

“I was a patient. I got shot a while ago. Had a lot of reconstructive work done.”

“No shit?” Matt said. “Let me see.”

I stood up and turned to the side, slowly unbuttoning the top button of my shorts as I pulled my waistband down. I was being a bit of a tease, but it was fun to be around some cute guys my age.

Human men in general fascinate me, what with their overt and uncontained sexuality, their playfulness and their mix of bravado and vulnerability. They always made me feeling warm and cozy and desirable.

I’ve long wondered if I feel this way because I grew up in the sterile atmosphere of Argo City. Androgynous clothes and jobs and relationships. Sex only for reproduction. They might as well have been Quakers.

Or maybe it came from spending the last half of my teenage years under my older cousin’s watchful eye. He behaved like a strict father who expected me to be a beacon of virtue, always telling me how we had to be examples to everyone else.

No more. I’d almost lost my life, nearly my soul too. Now I had a second chance at life, and I planned to truly live it to the hilt.

Glancing back into Robert’s eyes, I laughed as I saw the way his focus traveling up and down my body, not just my stomach, his thin shorts giving his thoughts away. I lifted my leg and smiled back at him.

“You really gotta work on that professional gaze, doc. You’re supposed to be checking out my wound, not checking me out.”

“Jesus… you’re gorgeous,” Robert blushed. “Stunning really. Never seen legs so long. Thank god you aren’t a patient.”

“Thank you,” I said with sincerity. “But honestly, these legs just came with the genes.”

“We’re used to working with the sickest people on the planet,” Matt added, trying to explain his friend’s infatuation, “not the insanely healthy and fit. Or the beautiful. Mostly we do city hospital cases. Charity stuff. Gunshot wounds, stabbings, mutilations, attempted suicides. Mostly from the slums. Not pretty stuff.”

“Then I’m glad I could brighten your day. I know what its like to grow up in a neighborhood that’s falling apart.”

“You? Where was that?”

“Place called Argo. Really bad contamination problem forced everyone to leave.” I wasn’t about to say, ‘die’. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only one to make it out alive before they dumped the whole place into the Phantom Zone. My family was still alive, if you could call living like a wraith as living.

“Industrial pollution,” Robert said, shaking his head. “They ought to lock the bastards up.”

“More like astral pollution. Meteorites.”

Robert looked at me strangely as Matt scooted his chair closer, reaching up to pause with his fingers nearly touching my stomach, looking up at me. He was so focused on my stomach that I don’t think he was even listening to the conversation.

“May I?”

“Certainly, doctor.” He was at least was trying to be professional.

People on the sidewalk had stopped to stare, and every eye in the Starbucks was on me as he gently ran his fingers gently across my abs, circling my navel, then lower. His delicate touch sent a flutter of tingles racing through me, making my nipples itch. He had an incredible sense of touch. “What kind of gunshot was it, Kara? I can’t find any evidence of a wound.”

“Not a gun. A particle beam. A couple of terawatts I think. It more or less vaporized the middle of me.”

Matt chuckled. “I’m serious, Kara. I don’t see any evidence of either the wound or the surgery. Must have been very small caliber.”

I shrugged, deciding he wouldn’t understand about particle beams. “Nanobots did the closing. They’re not much bigger than a white blood cell, so their sutures are too small to see with the naked eye.”

Matt slumped back in his chair and laughed. “Yeah, right, maybe in some science fiction novel. But not during my lifetime.”

He smiled up at me as I did the top button of my shorts back up.

“I will say that you’ve got an interesting way of seducing doctors, Kara. Having them check you for wounds you don’t even have, then letting them discover that you’re absolutely flawless.”

I folded up my legs and slumped back in my chair. “It’s not like that. If you’d seen me after the attack, you wouldn’t have called me flawless. My liver, uterus, kidneys - everything below my navel was cooked meat.”

“Uh, huh,” Robert said, rolling his eyes at his friend as he glanced pointedly at his watch. “But of course, that would make you very dead, Kara.”

“I was. For a long time. But now I’m not, as you can see.”

“Yeah,” Robert said, the disbelief clear in his voice. “You’re the most undead person on the planet.”

He’d obviously decided I was messing with his head. But he was right about the last.

“Which is why I really want to learn more about how stem cells and nanobots work together,” I said earnestly. “The guy who fixed me up wasn’t much into explaining things, but I’d like to help accelerate the development of that kind of technology here on Earth.”

“As opposed to accelerating it… somewhere not on Earth?” Matt asked in wonder, his eyes crinkling with amusement.

I nodded.

“OK. Let me get this straight… you were dead, and some doc with 23^rd century medicine fixed you up and brought you back from the dead?”

I winced. “That sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? But yeah, that’s more or less it. Unfortunately, he didn’t exactly subscribe to the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm.”

“Look, we really gotta go,” Robert injected. He thought he was outside my field of vision as he swirled his finger around his temple as if to say to Matt: “This one’s really loony”.

Matt ignored him, his eyes bright as they focused on mine. “Look, ah, maybe I’ll call you later, Kara. I’ll tell you everything I know. I just finished a survey course in stem cell regeneration. What’s your number?”

“923-2108.” That was Bruce’s old number. I presumed it still rang in the mansion.

“Great. I’m Matt Domino, by the way.”

“And I’m Kara Zor-El.”

Matt froze, just staring at me as Robert grabbed his arm. “We gotta go buddy. Surgery in an hour. Gotta scrub in. Like now.”

Matt was still staring back at me as Robert half dragged him to the sidewalk. “She’s a goddamn kook, Matt,” he whispered. “Faking injuries, calling herself Kara Zor-El. Babbling about SciFi medicine. You remember that last girl you fell for? The psycho who thought she was an alien?”

“But she’s gorgeous, man. Like an angel.”

“Yeah, but you know how it works. God keeps the playing field level. Brains and beauty aren’t allowed in the same body. Unless he turns ‘em totally fucking wacho.”

I listened to them talk as they walked off, quickly draining the last of my cap. This business of being myself was obviously going to be harder than I’d thought.

Rising to walk after them, my long legs quickly closed the distance. I breezed by as I smiled at Matt. “Oh, and don’t call before nine, Matt. I’ll be visiting the International Space station until then.”

I waited until I was ten feet in front of them and then pushed off with my toes, soaring straight up into the sky. I didn’t worry about my clothes this time, and broke the Mach a mere five stories up, leaving a trail of shredded clothing, some crackling shockwaves and two VERY surprised young doctors behind.

Cursing under my breath as I climbed into the stratosphere, I knew that little stunt was really dumb. Showing off and all. But the way Robert had talked about me had pricked my pride.

I wondered if Matt would still call now that he knew I hadn’t been making anything up. I hoped so. Maybe he really could tell me something about how I’d been healed.

And if he didn’t know anything about that… well, he was really cute.

Chapter Eight

“Got her…” George Fredericks whispered to himself as he shuffled down a street in Metropolis. He’d picked up a disturbance in the mass of tangled thoughts that filled the air - the rogue Kryptonian was flying over his head. Glancing up, he saw a very faint dot racing across the sky. Not close enough to identify, but close enough to predict her course.

He pressed a button on his cellphone. A military crisp voice answered. “Avril 7. Location of target?”

“Flying west from Metropolis.”

“Affirmative,” the voice said. “Male or female?”

“Couldn’t see.”

“Roger.” The line clicked dead.

Zyara was airborne ten seconds after her cellphone rang. She’d already had a heads-up about Superman and his daughter landing at the old nuclear test range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, which was already reason enough to go and investigate. Now there was a report of that mysterious Krypt heading in generally the same direction. Something was up.

She streaked eastward from LA, traveling at twenty times the speed of sound just outside the atmosphere, opening her eyes wide as she scanned the sky in front of her. The odds were low that she’d actually spot the Krypt this way, but it was worth a try.

She was crossing over the southern Rockies ten minutes later when she saw a tiny dot flying below and far ahead, angling southwest over New Mexico. Zooming in with her telescopic vision, she saw a blonde female.

Supergirl? Wasn’t she already on the ground at Alamogordo?

Studying the woman as best she could through the shimmering air, she decided the stranger looked older than Supergirl. This had to be the rogue. Maybe even one of Darkseid’s Angels like herself.

After the destruction of his base, a dozen Angels had been spread far and wide, many of them unaware of where they’d been. By default, they’d either try to pick up their old lives and return to familiar haunts, or at the minimum, seek out other Krypts.

She wasn’t going to take any chances. Darkseid had always said to hit hard and fast and maintain the element of surprise. Or in human terms, shoot first and take names later.

Even better, if this was an Angel, then a powerful enough blow might even trigger her dark side. Darkseid’s genius lay in the way he overcame the conscience and moral judgment of the people he conditioned. Self-preservation was the strongest drive of any lifeform. Push people close enough to the edge, take them to a place where they thought they were fighting for their life, and their values would change. People would do what it took to survive.

In the case of his Angels, Darkseid had programmed that particular emotional response. He used fear as the trigger. It was the reason his agents were so convincing when they returned to live among familiar surroundings and people. They didn’t even know they were agents.

Zyara smiled at that last thought. She was one of the rare Angels who had only one side, and hers was definitely dark. There was nothing about Kryptonian society, mores, religion or anything else that she valued, given that she’d been made to feel like an outcast from her earliest childhood.

She clenched her fists, arms extended, and aimed for the woman’s head, hoping to knock the bitch out of the sky on the first pass. Anyone blonde enough to spend all her time looking down as she flew deserved to get her ass kicked.

Pedro Fernandez was working his way north across New Mexico, traveling by night, moving from one town to the next, blending in with the locals during the daytime. He’d crossed the Rio Grande two days ago, and despite his worsening cough, he was making good progress. He just wished he didn’t feel so damn weak all the time.

Unlike his compatriots from San Salvador, he planned to get to the northern states before looking for work. The scrutiny for illegals was far more relaxed in Minnesota than it was close to the border.

He coughed again, worried by the specs of blood he found on his handkerchief. Maybe he could even see a doctor there… perhaps find what was wrong with his lungs.

Walking through a small shopping mall on the outskirts of Roswell, his hat covering his face, he was trying to blend in with the local Hispanics near the Industrial Air Park when a blinding flash lit the sky directly overhead. He dove into the shadows between two adobe buildings, a reflex he’d perfected in the army, only to be knocked off his feet as a violent shockwave crashed all around him, kicking up dust and making his ears ring. Car alarms started to go off up and down the street and people started shouting, children crying.

He’d been a soldier long enough to hunker down and not panic when the shooting started. Whether it was a plane collision or a meteor or even some kind of weapon, he knew that a hell of a lot of hurt had just been released in the sky overhead.

Five miles overhead, Zyara shook off the effects of her massive collision, and began to search for the other Krypt. She saw her five miles away, falling toward a small city. Roswell, the signs said.

She accelerated toward her victim, hoping to reach her before she came around. She’d gotten a good hit in - her bruised fists were testament to that. She didn’t even want to think what the other woman’s head might feel like. Their closure rate at impact had been close to Mach 10.

The blonde was still tumbling head over heels, still traveling well above the Mach, when Zyara finally caught up to her - unfortunately very close to the ground. The two of them slammed into the parking lot of a small shopping mall, scoring a direct hit on a Ford F150 pickup. The truck exploded as their steel bodies plowed through it and then the pavement, blasting a huge crater in the asphalt. The stench of gas surrounded them from a broken gas line, and then it ignited with a thundering WHOOSH.

Zyara ignored the flames as she slammed her fists into her victim’s face so powerfully that the shockwaves knocked people off their feet in the open-air mall and snuffed out the fire. More car alarms started to go off. The shockwaves from her subsequent blows knocked cars on their sides, each blow clearing a large circle in the middle of the parking lot.

She was still pounding away when the blonde’s eyes snapped open and she reached up to grab her wrists. Zyara struggled mightily to free herself, only to be shocked to find she could barely move her arms. The blonde grinned fiercely as she slowly forced Zyara over on her back, using nothing but raw strength and her flight power, jamming her head back against a buried rock.

Zyara kicked at the blonde, only to have one of her toenails scrape along a piece of steel from the truck, sending sparks flying. The gas line exploded again, enveloping their bodies inside the inferno.

Zyara was terrified as she recognized Darkseid’s madness in the blonde’s eyes, her flaming hair billowing around her like an angel of death. This woman wasn’t being triggered by fear or survival instincts – she was a predator, one of his Assassins, Darkseid’s pride. They were triggered solely by the desire to kill!

The two of them fought a desperate battle beneath the shattered pavement – one that Zyara knew right away that she was going to lose. The blonde was far too strong. She would probably fill her body with Kryptonite and tie her weakened arms and legs up, leaving her to slowly die – that was Darkseid’s usual way of dispatching a Krypt.

Still, Zyara fought back like a banshee, hoping for a miracle. And she was rewarded with one. The blonde’s eyes suddenly rolled up in her head and her arms went limp.

Startled but elated when she found was able to tear her wrists free, Zyara was horrified a moment later to see the blonde’s face melting, almost as if the flames were consuming her flesh. Her eye sockets sagged, her hair turned darker, her mouth changed shape and her skin took on a sickly greenish hue, her body jerking and spasming as it gave off a series of wet snapping and sucking sounds as if her very bones were being broken from inside.

Zyara recoiled in horror, unable to tear her eyes from the Assassin, watching as her hair turned raven black, her greenish skin took on a golden hue again and her figure filled out, large breasts seemingly inflating on her chest, looking almost as if they were being pumped up.

Gasping, Zyara realized a Zygotian metamorphosis was under way! She’d heard rumors about Darkseid’s most dangerous experiments - he’d been trying to create a Krypt who took on different physical forms. The ultimate assassin. A shapechanger, her morality as changeable as her form.

The morph was completed in minutes, resulting in a woman who was still stunningly beautiful, but looked completely different. Hers was now a dark and dangerous beauty.

Despite the realization that this mutant woman was a sister in arms, Zyara wondered if the woman could infect her with whatever virus allowed her to melt and reform her flesh. She decided not to stay around and find out.

She focused her voice, overcoming the roar of the gas flames, and told the Assassin where Superman was. She carefully described her original mission, and then leaped into the air to flee back to LA.

Better to let this creature of darkness turn her destructive energies lose on that big Boy Scout and his daughter than on her.

Chapter Nine

I woke to find myself lying naked in a small crater of asphalt, shattered bits and pieces of cars and trucks all around me, a jet of flame blasting me like a giant blowtorch. Cursing as I sat up, I realized I’d blacked out again.

How long this time?

I stood up and leaned in the flames, and without thinking much of it, pressed by breast against the end of the large gas pipe, snuffing out the fire’s fuel source. A quick grip and twist of my hands fused the end of the pipe closed.

Groaning, I cursed as I felt that numbing pain at the base of my skull again. I hoped that whatever was wrong with me, Darkseid could fix it. The last thing I needed was to keep passing out at unexpected times.

First problem was to figure out where I was. I stood up and scanned the area around me. It looked like Earth. I read newspapers in their racks, phone books and street signs, discovering I was in Roswell, New Mexico.

How interesting. Darkseid knew I had long experience living among these humans, and he’d dropped me right into the epicenter of Earth’s alien weirdness. Fortunately, given the heavy Hispanic population in this area, it wouldn’t be too hard to fit in here.

Second problem was to get some clothes. Walking around naked would draw too much attention. I rose and walked toward a line of stores at the edge of the parking lot, my hair billowing around my head from the heat. The parking lot looked like a war zone, what with windows shattered, cars tipped on their sides, people huddled behind them. My arrival must have been dramatic.

Either that, or I’d been fighting someone who’d made them fear for their lives.

I detested these damn holes in my memories, but it was always like this after a seizure – trying to figure out what everyone around me already knew.

Wandering toward the shops as people ran from my path, I found a store that sold regional clothing. I quickly picked out a lacy white top and a short, orange skirt with silver tassels. It looked New Mexican enough. The terrified clerk hid behind her counter as I got dressed.

Emerging back into the parking lot, my skin cool now, I saw a dozen pair of eyes on me, their faces an amusing blend of awe, arousal and fear. Amused by my audience’s reaction, I raised my hands and wiggled my hips, loving the feel of this tiny skirt, not to mention the sexy fit of this top.

“What do you guys think? Is it me or the outfit?”

The men said nothing, their eyes as big as saucers. They obviously weren’t used to being around beautiful women. Or maybe it was that flaming hole in the parking lot and the crushed truck. Or the fact that I was a Kryptonian goddess.

I scanned the closest man’s body as he hid at the entrance of an alleyway, only to see a cluster of red spots in his lungs. He had cancer, and it was eating his lungs. The poor devil.

“Come out and let me see you, amigo. It’s not polite to stare at a lady while you hide yourself.”

The man hesitated for a moment, and then stepped forward, trembling with fear.

“What’s your name?”

“Pedro, ma’am. Pedro Fernandez.” His Spanish accent was strong. “The seniorita is?”

“Lora. Lora-El.”

He held out his hand, his arm shaking. I wrapped my arms around him, hugging him gently, feeling his frailty, remembering how firm my body was compared to a human’s. “May I kiss you, Pedro?”

His eyes grew even larger as I felt his body stiffen. From fear or from longing, I wasn’t sure.

“You have only weeks to live, Pedro. Excruciatingly pain ones. I can ease your suffering now. With just one little kiss.”

He tried to pull back, his eyes filled with fear despite my comforting words. I gently held him with my irresistible strength, turning my head slightly to kiss him softly.

He fought me for a brief second, not realizing the gift I was giving him, and then the toxin on my lips worked its magic. As always, it initially behaved like a powerful aphrodisiac, a flush of overwhelming arousal filling his body with intimate promise. He held my face and kissed me back hungrily. That was the moment the toxin took him. His heart frozen in mid-beat and his body went limp.

I smiled as I gently laid him down in front of the store, the light quickly fading in his eyes as his soul fled. I’d just eased him into the next life, and he’d gone while filled the flush of sacred desire. No death was better than that.

A glance around showed other people who could benefit from my kiss, yet they backed away, some of them starting to run. Others screamed. A man with a handgun pointed it shakily my way and fired, the bullet missing me by inches as it headed toward a young child on the far side of the parking lot.

I did a back flip to catch it only inches in front of the boy’s face, the shockwave of my rapid movement blowing the windows out of the store behind as I held onto the boy, his mother swept away by the overpressure. This child was healthy, and today was not his day to die.

I lifted the crying child in my arms, showing him the hot bullet that had nearly ended his life. “Should we return this to the bad man who almost hurt you?”

The boy stopped crying to look at me, then nodded.

“OK…” I flicked the bullet with my finger, returning it at the exact velocity it had left the gun barrel with. It caught the shooter in the center of his chest, knocking him off his feet. “He won’t make such a careless mistake a second time.”

Speaking of time, I was suddenly reminded that Superman was only a short distance from here.

I set the boy down, and he raced to his injured mother.

How had I forgotten my mission? I was supposed to go there and send him a message. To tell him not to interfere in Darkseid’s plans or risk the loss many lives.

Including his own. His daughter’s too.

We were family, after all. I had to protect them too.

Chapter Ten

“So this is one of their mini-nukes?” the slender blonde named Asha asked her father. Kal-El was dressed as usual in his red and blue tights, his signature cape hanging long. He was holding what looked like a cell phone in his hand.

They were standing in the old equipment shed on the Alamogordo test range in New Mexico, near the place the first atomic bomb had been detonated. The range had been reactivated at Superman’s insistence.

Asha-El was barely past her seventeenth birthday, and wearing a black halter and boots beneath a yellow sleeveless dress with a wide black belt. The dress was sacrificial, but her undergarments were woven from the strongest fabrics on Earth. Bullet and heatproof, they were the next best thing in indestructibility to Kal’s famous uniform.

The same could be said for the girl.

The young woman the world knew only as Supergirl.

Kal nodded. “It’s a very dangerous device, honey, although certainly not lethal to me. But with your half Krypt, half Amazon heritage, you have to be more careful.”

“Looks exactly like a normal cell phone to me, dad. No wonder these things are getting through the scanners.” She took it from her father’s hand, holding it at arms length as if it was a serpent.

“The technology isn’t local, and it was obviously designed to defeat our scanners. Even works as a GSM phone. They’ve rigged them to detonate on the forth ring of an incoming call.”

“As good an incentive as I’ve ever heard to answer your calls quickly,” Asha quipped. “But how can it defeat the scanners? Plutonium is very easy to detect.”

“Because it isn’t really a nuclear weapon, even if it has the yield of one. It’s an anti-matter bomb.”

Her right eyebrow rose. “Anti-matter? That doesn’t even exist on Earth, dad.”

“True, but it obviously does where this came from. The inner workings are shielded from our eyes, but the scientists at Star Labs took one apart. They found two tiny magnetic-containment vials of opposite spin matter. When triggered by a powerful piezoelectric transducer, the containment breaks and the matter and anti-matter mix.”

“So that’s why the components look like ordinary phone stuff. That’s how the vibrators in phones work.”

Kal nodded.

“Yet if that report I read is correct, these things have a quarter the power of the Hiroshima bomb,” Asha grimaced. “Nasty if it’s in the pocket of the guy at the next table in Starbucks.”

“It’s not designed to kill cities, honey, but mostly to decimate a neighborhoods, to bring down large buildings or vaporize airplanes. Perfect to destroy a military base. Maybe a city’s subway system or an athletic stadium and surrounding area. Tactical targets like that. Clearly a weapon of terror.”

“So…” Asha paused as she took a deep breath. “I guess we have to change our protocol, given what I also read of the brightness of the burst. If I’m going to toss it, how high do I have to get it before its safe?”

“Thirty miles at least, otherwise anyone looking up will be permanently blinded. The burst is far brighter than a nuke. Pure matter to energy conversion.”

Asha grimaced. “I’m sure Einstein would be thrilled.”

“The blast effects and heat will be minimal beyond a half mile or so,” her father added. “Other than perhaps for aircraft navigation. But a ground burst in a crowded city could flatten a square mile. Not just from the heat – most of the fatalities would come from flying or falling debris.”

“So, I toss it into orbit if I can. But what if we can’t get it away from people fast enough? Like we’re indoors and its on its already on its third ring?”

“That’s where the risk lies. Like any explosive, a failed attempt to contain the burst with our bodies will ultimately make it more powerful.”

“Can’t we channel the force into the ground -- just like we do with conventional explosives?”

“We can, honey, but the difference is that its thousands of times more powerful than your typical terrorist bomb.”

“Which means there might be bits and pieces of me around to pick up afterward.”

“You are certainly tougher than that, Asha. But if it overpowered you, forced your arms and legs open after you’d partially contained the pressure, then the release could be even more destructive than if it had been allowed to detonate in free air.”

Asha rolled her eyes. “I know the drill, dad. If we don’t succeed in channeling it, then by attempting to contain it, we actually amplify the final overpressure wave and cause more destruction. Duh. I’m not twelve anymore.”

“Sorry, honey, but these things have me worried. Two have already detonated, and there were thousands of casualties. We’ve found three more unexploded ones… so far.”

He paused for a moment, taking a deep breath as he composed his thoughts. “Even worse, Asha, I suspect someone is bringing these in to destabilize Earth governments. Perhaps by the dozens, maybe by the hundreds, I have no idea. And based on what we’ve seen so far, they’re being channeled to terrorist groups.”

“So, we’ve gotta figure out how to contain these little hummers, huh?” Asha said brightly. Like any other teenager, she was always eager to test the limits of her abilities. Given she had most of her father’s powers, that was a challenge all on its own.

“Right. We can do it here in Alamogordo as there won’t be any hard radiation.”

Asha shrugged. “Cool. Better to check it out now as opposed to during the heat of battle. No pun intended.”

“The hitch is that I’ve never gotten you this close to a nuclear-grade detonation before,” Kal said worriedly, sounding like the father he was.

“Only a matter of time until I have to, dad. A real nuke or one of the things. As I said, it’s far better here than in Times Square.”

“You’re sure you want to go through this?”

Asha answered by sitting down and pressing the mini-nuke against her stomach, just the way her father had taught her to smother explosives back when she was very young. She pulled one leg up, trapping the explosive low across her abs.

Turning to look to the side, she saw her father looking anxious as she worked the yellow dress out of the way. “You can buy me another dress later, dad.”

“I’m worried about the girl beneath.”

“I’m the Girl of Steel dad. Don’t worry.”

Despite her confidence, Kal still looked worried as Asha pulled her other leg up and then hugged both knees to her chest, pressing her elbows in as tightly as she could as she turned her body to steel.

Kal had taught her to exploit the natural pocket that formed at the convergence of her legs and lower groin. The resulting pocket would let the gas expand a bit, in this case the pure energy, yet also give it only one way to go – straight downward into the Earth.

Asha tucked her knees in tightly and lowered her head to block off any upward exit, reminding herself as she did that the concentrated force of the detonation was going to be channeled downward across some very intimate real estate. Fortunately, it wasn’t just her muscles that were super. Something that both thrilled and intimidated her boyfriend, Bruce Wayne, Jr.

She looked up at her dad, and smirked as she suddenly imagined him using this technique. She briefly imagined him with a nuclear hard-on. Cassie would probably be thrilled, which would intimidate her mom even more if she found out.

Pushing that misplaced thought away, along with her worries about her parent’s failing marriage, she concentrated on the task at hand, gritting her teeth as she tightened every muscle in her body.

“OK, dad. Do it. Now.”

Kal reached stiffly into his cape pocket to find his cell phone. He said a little prayer to Rao as he dialed the phone his daughter held.

Kneeling, he wrapped his arms reassuring around her as her phone began to ring.

Chapter Eight

A blinding flash lit the display screens in the underground bunker on the Alamogordo range.

“We got a detonation down range, sir,” a technician called out excitedly. “Definitely nuclear grade.”

“No surface blast effects registered yet,” another technician chimed in. “But we have a strong ground wave propagating. Hold on…3…2…1”

The floor of the control room leaped beneath their feet as everyone grabbed onto something secure.

“Initial reading is 6.7 on the Richter scale.”

A flurry of echoing tremors repeatedly shook the floor, but with fading intensity. They were reflections from rocky deposits deep in the Earth’s crust.

“And we’re a half mile from ground zero,” Colonel Somerfield mused, exhaling the lung full of air he’d been holding. “Not bad for something that looked like a cell phone.”

“Supergirl channeled all the force into the ground,” one of the technicians said, his eyes large. “Fucking unbelievable.”

Another tech chimed in excitedly, his enthusiasm also overcoming his professionalism as he watched the infrared scope. An object far hotter than the surface of the sun was climbing at escape velocity. ”Jesus. That damn thing blew her clean off the planet!”

“But it worked,” the Colonel said calmly as he studied the instruments. “Blast telltales located a mere thirty meters from ground zero show that people would have survived. Serious burns maybe, but survivable.”

He looked up to see the amazed look on his men’s faces. “And she’s only a kid!”

Floating down the armored elevator shaft as I listened to the voices inside the control room below, I realized the test had just been completed. It amazed me that Kal and his daughter depended on these backward local technologists for scientific support instead of bringing in experts from outside – one of the reasons Earth wasn’t making progress faster.

I paused at the bottom of the shaft to listen for a few moments, and then worked my fingers into the gap between the steel elevator doors. I needed to ring the loudest alarm bell I could in US military and government circles, and start reducing the Terran’s dependence on their supposed saviors. Once the government felt insecure, no longer trusting in their protection, they would be willing to talk options. Survival of any nation was more important than political niceties.

And it all started today.

Taking a deep breath, I forced my hands slowly outward, putting my Kryptonian strength to work. The inch-thick steel doors easily folded up on either side of me. Stepping out of the mangled doorway and into the firing range’s control room, I saw every head in the room spin around in unison to stare at me, the scream of tortured steel still echoing around the huge room.

I paused with my hands on my hips and projected my voice the way Darkseid had trained me:

“Don’t be too impressed with your so-called Supergirl. She’s not a true Kryptonian.”

“Who… who in the hell…” the Colonel sputtered, “…how did you get in here?” He looked past me to see the mangled doors, answering his own question.

I studied the display screens, noting that they’d just detonated a Mod 1 AMAT.

“Get a call out to Superman,” I heard the Colonel whisper to the tech by his side, his words clear despite the distance and the whoosh of fans. “Flash priority.”

I snapped my head to the left, eyes flaring with the frequency of light that was most damaging to human flesh. Megawatt beams crossed the room at light-speed to strike the communications tech square in the chest.

A blinding flare of sparks enveloped the doomed man’s entire body as the accelerated photons from my retina stripped the very flesh from his body, ripping atoms from molecules to vaporize it before it could even burn. I kept my eyes open wide, pouring on the power.

The Colonel covered his face and recoiled from the terrible heat, staring from between his fingers in horror as the technician’s flesh vaporized, leaving his bleached white skeleton to topple out of his chair and crumple to the floor. His annihilation was so complete that only the tiniest hint of smoke rose to spread thinly across the ceiling.

I smiled softly to myself, satisfied with the clean kill. The human had died painlessly, his nerves vaporizing before the impulses of pain could even reach his brain. The least I could do was to bring painless deaths to these wretched humans - they’d already suffered enough at the hands of their leaders.

The two guards across the room bravely began to fire back at me, the deafening rattle of their assault rifles filling the cavern. I held myself rigid as bits of fabric from my clothing exploded into shards all across the front of my body, my lace top shredding from dozens of bullet holes.

I knew I could easily deflect these bullets with my hands, or toss them back at the shooters, but instead, I kept my expression blank as I endured the sharp pricks. I’ve never enjoyed the dimpling thud of bullets hitting my breasts, especially given that a few invariably found my nipples, making them burn with an itchy desire as they engorged, but I endured it today. I kept my hands on my hips and thrust my chest forward into the violence, immovable and seemingly unaffected by the violence.

It was far more important to make a strong impression on the Colonel. He was pivotal to sending Darkseid’s message not only to Superman, but upward through the entire US military establishment.

I regretted what I had to do next, but I had to put the right explanation mark behind the Colonel’s message. To let him know that Darkseid would stop at nothing to achieve his goals. I opened my eyes wide and unleashed another blast of heat vision toward the first guard. His body exploded in sparks and was vaporized in seconds, just like the technician. I repeated it with the second guard, catching him in mid-stride as he panicked and tried to run away.

The Colonel screamed in anger as he jerked his handgun from his holster and raced fearless toward me, mindless of the fact that I could kill him just as easily as his men. I ignored him as I slowly swept my blazing eyes around the room, my irises growing as bright as an arc welder each time I paused to stare at someone.

The Colonel in turn aimed his gun directly into my eyes from close range and fired, the bullet shattering against my pupil to send metal slivers under my eyelid, making me blink furiously. My heat vision scattered, igniting several of the consoles and a woman’s dress.

I could have stopped the Colonel with a bright glance, but I wanted him alive. Instead, I stared at the screaming woman who was on fire, and her flesh vaporized just like the others, leaving only her strangled scream to fill the room. I quickly directed my lethal glance toward the rest of the men and women in the room. They were suffering from mortal fear now, and I didn’t want that suffering to continue. It didn’t.

The room itself was on fire by the time the CO₂ gas blasted from the ceiling. I turned last to glare at the Colonel, my heat vision muted enough so that his hair was the only thing that singed, his uniform smoking. His hand was shaking violently as he stared helplessly into my bright eyes, still clicking the trigger of his now empty gun.

“Tell your people that if they insist on aligning with Superman, or if he tries to get involved in Darkseid’s affairs, then I am more than capable of repeating this attack. Inside the Pentagon. Inside any of your silly holes in the ground. A hundred times over.”

The Colonel stood frozen in place, dumfounded and horrified as the clouds of gray CO₂ gas washed over him, dampening the flames as fast as they’d started, cooling his burned skin.

“And if Superman asks who was here, tell him his wife Lora sends her love.”

The Colonel’s mouth worked soundlessly as I bent my long legs and leaped straight upward, crashing into the forty-foot thick cap of ferroconcrete that formed the roof of the underground shelter.

I’d set the game in motion. The next move was going to be Kal’s. Or the government’s.

Exploding concrete peppered the Colonel’s body like shrapnel, cutting his flesh and tearing his uniform as the woman blasted through the ceiling as if it was made of mere paper.

He dropped to his knees in a pool of blood, and vomited, initially giving thanks to God he was alive. Then he lifted his head and looked around, seeing the smoking skeletons that moments earlier had been his men. Glancing up at the ragged hole in the ceiling, he shook his fist and vowed to avenge their deaths. They’d all died bravely in the line of duty.

It was all he could do to regain his feet and stagger toward the exit, choking on the thick smoke, barely able to breathe due to the oxygen-displacing CO₂. But he had to notify the Pentagon that their worst fear of the last fifty years had come true: an enemy had arrived that no power on Earth save one could defend them from.

A rogue Kryptonian – the ultimate enemy of mankind. A dark angel who claimed she was Superman’s wife!