Our Last Echo

17

Smallville

Her shift should have been over ten minutes before, but Martha still had tasks to complete, and preferably before the evening rush began. She was distracted because of her son's visit. He hadn't returned, or contacted her, and she was worried. He had been unhappy, but Martha knew her son well enough to see the anger building beneath his misery. She knew what his anger could do if unleashed. She thought she had helped, but oh, she wished he would call! She wanted to be sure.

She heaved up the heavy trash bag and manoeuvred it through the narrow door into the alley behind the diner. She opened the dumpster, trying to hold her breath as the stench assailed her, and hauled it in. When she turned to go back inside, a man blocked her way.

He was tall, broad-shouldered with dark, greasy hair and a lot of tattoos. Not someone who would easily blend in in Smallville. Fear chilled her, but Martha wasn't easily intimidated.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Martha Wake?" he asked, the words heavily accented.

"Yes..."

A hand clapped over her mouth from behind her and she was pulled back against a man's body. Her scream was muffled by the hand across her mouth and she fought against the arms that held her. Something covered her eyes and she tried to scream again.

She felt a sharp pain in her arm, then cold, then nothing.

The Arctic

It was winter and the Arctic was entering its long night. Everything was dull and grey. The low sun even stole the colour from Kovalan's cape, so the bright scarlet was a mere hint of colour in the endless twilight.

This bleak, frozen landscape had become the place he went when he needed solitude. Here, no one would come. No one would see. He shared the ice with Arctic foxes, seals and an occasional polar bear. Never anything human. Here, he was undisturbed.

You are as much a child of Earth as of Amazon. You can embody the best of both worlds.

The symbol of the House of El means hope. That's what you can bring them.

You've grown stronger here than I ever could have imagined. The only way to know how strong is to keep testing your limits.

You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They'll race behind you. They will stumble. They will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun, Tyler.

He was not to blame for the people who died on that plane. Ma was right about that, at least: in the time it would have taken for CNN to get that video on air, they were dead. He could not have helped, even if he left Metropolis the instant he knew.

You have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be, Tyler. Because whoever that man is, good character or bad, he's gonna change the world.

All these changes that you're going through, one day you're going to think of them as a blessing. When that day comes, you're going to have to make a choice. A choice of whether to stand proud in front of the human race or not.

He walked across jagged ice. He could feel the ridges and holes through his boots but barely felt the cold, though his breath turned to ice as it left him. Here, it was impossible to hide from truth, impossible to cling to comforting illusions or self-deception. This place had a way of forcing him to see clearly, and simply.

The truth about you is beautiful. We knew that one day, the whole world would see that.

The simple truth was this: Kovalan would never again hold back when someone needed his help. He could not save everyone. There would always be the cries he heard too late, the blows that fell too fast for him to reach. But never again would he fail to try. He had been wrong to let anyone tell him otherwise.