Lex set down his crystal glass.
“You are absolutely the most unusual fifteen-year-old I have ever met, Alex Carter. And I have met some truly unusual fifteen-year-olds.”
“Is that a yes?”
Lex stood.
He walked smoothly back behind his massive desk, opened a heavy drawer, and produced a sleek leather checkbook.
He quickly wrote out a check…
fluidly, without a single moment of hesitation…
tore it cleanly off, and held it out across the desk.
“That is a yes. Draw up the formal incorporation papers. I will have my corporate lawyers review them closely.”
Alex calmly took the check.
Fifty thousand dollars.
Written perfectly in Lex Luthor’s precise, sharp, angular handwriting.
It was significantly more money than Alex Carter had ever physically possessed in this young body.
It was considerably less money than Sebastian Shaw had casually spent on takeout food in a single week during a stay at the Avengers compound.
Perspective was absolutely everything.
“Thank you, Lex.”
“Do not thank me.” Lex’s sharp eyes glittered with anticipation.
“Make me money.”
Alex quietly pocketed the check, picked up his faded backpack, and walked calmly to the heavy oak door.
He paused for a brief second with his hand on the iron frame, then stepped out.
He left the massive mansion and walked slowly down the long gravel drive into the cool evening air.
Behind him, in the warm, well-lit study, Lex Luthor immediately sat right back down at his modern computer and obsessively played three more levels of Crystal Cascade.
Tuesday…
The Torch
“Something is seriously wrong with Greg Arkin.”
Chloe said it the exact same way she said absolutely everything…
as a definitive statement of fact that she fully expected to be completely validated by her own subsequent investigation.
She was currently pinning a freshly printed article to the Wall of Weird, this one detailing highly unusual insect behavior in the wide fields south of town.
Massive dead bee colonies.
Highly aggressive wasp swarms.
A terrified local farmer on Route 40 who frantically claimed his entire prized corn crop had been completely devoured overnight by a bizarre species of beetle he had never seen before in his life.
“Define wrong,” Alex said flatly from his desk.
He was currently editing the latest issue of the Torch…
a deeply tedious process that largely involved correcting Pete’s terrible spelling, mercilessly tightening Chloe’s purple prose (which she fiercely resented), and completely rewriting the boring sports section that Principal Kwan strictly insisted they include, despite absolutely nobody ever reading it.
“Wrong as in a total personality transplant.” Chloe turned around and leaned heavily against the corkboard wall, her arms firmly crossed.
“Greg Arkin was a cripplingly shy, awkward kid who obsessively collected dead bugs and literally couldn’t make eye contact with a girl to save his own life. As of last week, he’s suddenly been showing up to school in completely different clothes, talking completely differently, moving completely differently. He actually cornered Lana Lang in the parking lot yesterday and confidently said something that made her visibly, deeply uncomfortable.”
“Maybe he’s just going through puberty,” Pete offered unhelpfully from the floor, where he was halfheartedly sorting dusty old issues of the Torch into rough chronological order.
“Puberty doesn’t completely change someone’s entire behavioral pattern in a single week, Pete.”
“It definitely changed mine. Just ask my mom.”
Chloe completely ignored him.
Her sharp blue eyes were locked directly on Alex…
highly focused, calculating.
“What do you think?”
Alex quietly looked at the newspaper article she had just pinned to the wall.
He then looked closely at the large map of Smallville that Chloe had meticulously taped right beside the Wall of Weird, completely covered with colored pins aggressively marking the specific locations of various strange occurrences.
The newest insect reports were all heavily clustered around the south side of town, directly near the old Arkin property.
He knew exactly what was currently happening.
Greg Arkin had recently been bitten by highly aggressive, meteor-infected insects.
The volatile kryptonite radiation was actively rewriting his core DNA, violently fusing his human biology with alien insect genetics.
Within mere days, he would fully complete his grotesque metamorphosis…
rapidly gaining terrifying super strength, the creepy ability to crawl up sheer walls, and an overwhelming, primal biological imperative to actively mate.
His chosen target would absolutely be Lana Lang.
Alex’s perfect memories of the old television show told him exactly how this whole messy scenario played out.
Greg would inevitably kidnap Lana, angrily drag her to an abandoned industrial foundry, and desperately try to forcefully mate with her.
Clark would rapidly track them down and brutally fight Greg in the crumbling foundry.
Greg would ultimately be crushed heavily under some falling machinery and instantly scatter into a massive, fleeing swarm of thousands of tiny, meteor-infected bugs…
successfully escaping, but effectively neutralized as a human threat.
The real question was exactly what Alex should do with that highly specific information.
He could easily just kill Greg.
Quietly track him down tonight, easily find him during the painful metamorphosis when he was deeply vulnerable, and magically drain him exactly the way he had brutally drained Jeremy Creek.
It would definitely be the simplest approach.
The most ruthlessly efficient.
Alex rejected it immediately.
Greg Arkin was absolutely not a dying boy whose fragile body was already actively collapsing.
He was a confused teenager being violently transformed completely against his will by highly volatile alien radiation.
He was a tragic victim…
at least until he actively made the conscious choice to actually hurt someone.
And even after making that choice, the raging meteor infection was heavily clouding his human judgment, violently overwriting his original personality with dark, primal insect instincts.
Killing Greg right now would simply be murder.
Not the highly ambiguous, mercy-adjacent draining of a dying host…
actual, cold-blooded, premeditated murder.
Alex was certainly many dark things.
He was not that.
But the radioactive bugs were incredibly interesting.
When Greg inevitably scattered into a massive swarm at the old foundry, every single individual bug would internally carry a small, potent fragment of the original meteor radiation.
They were literally insects…
alien-irradiated insects, to be completely sure, but insects nonetheless.
If Alex could somehow safely capture some of those rare bugs, he would instantly have a living, perfectly renewable source of raw meteor energy to study.
To safely experiment on.
To deeply learn from.
Absolutely no killing required.
He just desperately needed Clark to get to the abandoned foundry perfectly on time.
“The bizarre insect behavior and Greg’s sudden personality change might actually be connected,” Alex said carefully, choosing his words.
He looked up at Chloe.
“Where exactly does Greg live?”
“South side. His house backs directly up against the old Creekside property… that massive abandoned plot right near the old Arkin farmstead.” Chloe tilted her blonde head curiously.
“Why?”
“Every single reported insect anomaly is squarely within a two-mile radius of the Arkin property. The exact epicenter is Greg’s house.”
Chloe’s blue eyes widened dramatically.
She spun back to the map, rapidly tracing the colored pins with her finger.
The chilling pattern was completely unmistakable once you actually knew exactly what to look for…
a perfect, concentric ring of violent insect disturbances radiating directly outward from one single point.
“Oh my God,” she whispered excitedly.
“You are completely right. It’s all coming directly from his house.”
“Or something right near his house,” Alex corrected smoothly.
“Something that’s actively attracting or aggressively mutating the local insect population. Something that might also be physically affecting Greg.”
Chloe’s expressive face rapidly shifted from genuine surprise to pure excitement to the highly particular, dangerous gleam of intense investigative determination that Alex was quickly learning to recognize as her absolute most dangerous mode.
“I need to get inside that house,” she stated firmly.
“No.” Clark’s deep voice came suddenly from the doorway.
They all turned.
Clark was standing quietly in the entrance to the Torch office, his heavy backpack slung casually over one broad shoulder.
He looked deeply troubled…
wearing the kind of quiet, heavy worry that Clark Kent always carried like a permanent, invisible accessory.
“I’ll look into it,” Clark said firmly.
“Greg’s bizarre behavior has definitely been getting much worse. He was creeping around, following Lana again this morning. If something bad is really happening to him, someone needs to actually talk to him.”
“Talk to him?” Chloe raised a highly skeptical eyebrow.
“Clark, this isn’t a simple guidance counselor situation. The guy is literally acting like a completely different person.”
“Maybe he’s just really scared. Maybe he honestly doesn’t understand what’s happening to him. I just think we should actively try to help him before we completely start treating him like a cold case study.”
That was Clark.
Always blindly assuming the absolute best.
Always bravely leading with pure empathy.
It was the exact, shining quality that would eventually make him Superman, and the exact same quality that would nearly get him killed a hundred separate times before he finally got there.
Alex said absolutely nothing.
He didn’t need to.
Chloe would aggressively push, Clark would stubbornly insist, and eventually, Clark would bravely go investigate on his very own…
because that was exactly what Clark did.
He blindly ran toward terrible danger with his huge heart wide open and his heavy fists reluctantly clenched.
All Alex needed to do was simply make sure Clark found the right place at the exact right time.
He waited patiently until Clark and Chloe had finally left the small office, still arguing amiably down the hallway about the proper approach to investigating Greg Arkin.
Then, he calmly turned back to his keyboard and began typing rapidly.
He quickly wrote a very short email to Chloe’s official Torch account from a completely untraceable, anonymous address…
an urgent tip from a “highly concerned citizen” reporting strange, mechanical noises and flashing green lights at the old Simmons foundry on the far south edge of town.
The rotting foundry had been completely abandoned for years.
It was exactly the kind of dark, secluded location that a rapidly metamorphosing insect-boy would naturally use as a protected nest.
Chloe would absolutely find the tip.
She would immediately share it with Clark.
And Clark would run directly to the foundry.
The stage was perfectly set.
And when it was finally over, Alex would quietly collect exactly what was left.