Chapter Text
Kara peered over her shoulder, down the empty hallway towards the frozen elevators. There were only long shadows to keep her company, the only source of light through the empty offices were the twinkling lights from National City’s skyline shining from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Her senses, though still better than most humans, were unbearably dull compared to her normal, and she struggled to monitor every shadow, every hint of a whisper. But everything around her was deafeningly quiet. She was alone. For now.
She moved towards the tall, heavily armoured man she had so carefully knocked out. Even during a solar flare, she tried to watch her strength. She’d done enough reading to know brain injuries were terrible things to deal with in the long term.
She looked at the discarded weapon on the floor and picked up the surprisingly lightweight automatic rifle. Her fingers ran along the almost imperceptibly rough edges of the weapon — the weapon was half-plastic, and that plastic was likely 3D-printed. The shape of the weapon reminded her of some old training sessions with Alex, back when she’d first come out to the world as Supergirl. Kara thankfully remembered how to quickly check that the safety was back on and the magazine more than half-full. Though it was dark, she could tell the barrel was not obstructed, but she didn’t want to test it to make sure it would fire if she needed. The unconscious man also had several extra cartridges of bullets squirrelled away in packs attached to his belt. She pocketed them in her dress pants. She thanked Rao she’d worn her favourite work slacks that came with actual proper pockets — too much of human women’s formalwear neglected pockets.
The weapon secure in her hands, Kara confirmed the man was properly disarmed and unconscious before rifling more thoroughly through his pockets.
Jackpot: Kara found a short-range radio in his jacket pocket, the dial conveniently left on the channel used by the group of armed men who had taken over LuthorCorp tower.
(Despite a voice that sounded suspiciously like Alex raging in the back of her mind, Kara refused to label the armed men as “terrorists” until she understood their intentions — for all she knew, this was another one of Lex’s horrifying “pranks” on Lena. Ever since he’d been brought back, his behaviour towards Lena was as deranged as it was capricious.)
The handheld radio was surprisingly low-tech, though covered in a strange layer of a rubber-like substance. Maybe it was to protect the little walkie-talkie from whatever technology the men had used to take out the building’s power. Whatever it was had also knocked out both Kara’s phone and her DEO-issued ear piece.
Kara opened the radio channel and kept quiet as she listened in on the chatter.
She was absolutely certain they were all human, at least based on what she had observed, but she had never learned this particular language. As she listened, her eyes roamed the dark hallways around her. She could not afford to be caught off-guard. As for the language… maybe it was a central African — maybe western African? She thought she could hear the odd French or Portuguese word thrown in, but maybe she was reaching. She wracked her brain for all morsels of linguistic information about the continent south of the Sahara that she’d absorbed over the years. There were hundreds of languages commonly spoken on Earth, and while she’d spent a bit of time in college getting acquainted with books and film in several dozens of languages, she’d never had the time to learn more than a few basic phrases in both Swahili and Shona.
Or perhaps she had never made the time.
If it was one of the various Gur languages, spoken by tens of million people across many countries in Central and Western Africa, her near-eidetic memory helpfully supplied, Kara felt simultaneously ashamed and frustrated at her own ignorance. She needed information — the radio could have been a goldmine if she had been less focused on Western languages in college — or maybe it wasn’t an African language at all —
Kara’s panic spiral and blood froze when she picked out, amongst the rushed words spoken by her adversaries over the radio, a painfully familiar name, though pronounced in an unfamiliar lilt:
“… Lena Luthor…”
Another voice answered, and she picked up a second, and then a third, and then a fourth repeat of “Lena Luthor, Lena Luthor, Lena Luthor,” as three different men conversed about the LuthorCorp CTO over the radio.
Kara could barely breathe, her chest filled with ice as the radio chatter petered out into a thin film of static. The conversation had ended. She lowered the volume on the radio as low as it could go, possibly too low for human ears, but even with her powers blown out, she would be able to pick up any more chatter, and hooked the radio to her own belt.
She shut her eyes, and counted backwards from ten once, and then again, an old ritual she’d carried from her earliest days after landing on earth.
Lena was alive.
She was certainly their target, but she was alive.
She had to be alive.
Kara threw out her previous plan of escaping and calling for help, as she rose to her feet and looked around for the emergency exit sign. But, instead of making for the stairway, she looked back at the dead elevator doors.
She needed to move without being detected. She couldn’t fly, and she certainly didn’t have her super-strength, but there was a reason Alex never let her slack off too much on her workouts. She still had considerable muscle mass, even with her powers blown out. Strong enough to scale the inside of a dark elevator shaft.
If she could keep her own claustrophobia in check.
Slowly, she took off the lightweight cotton suit jacket she’d worn to work that day. It restrained her shoulders, and she couldn’t afford that. She looked down at her heels. They weren’t outrageous or anything, but they would not survive a climb. She stepped out of them as well, and placed both her suit and her shoes carefully on an empty desk. She checked the automatic rifle again, and thank goodness it came with a long strap so she could fasten it over her shoulder, onto her back. She needed her hands clear.
Alex was going to kill her.
Correction: Alex was going to fucking kill her, if she even survived this.
But first: she had to get to Lena. Kara muttered a prayer to Rao under her breath, and steeled her nerves as she looked for something, anything, sturdy enough to hold open the elevator doors. She was going to need as much light as she possibly could in the black elevator shaft.
Earlier
“Hey Jess, is Lena in?” Kara adjusted her glasses nervously, holding a little box between both her hands. She’d almost talked herself out of coming three times on the way from CatCo, but finally she decided that even if Lena wouldn’t see her, maybe she would leave the gift (bought long before… Kara didn’t let herself finish the thought) with Jess, or just on Lena’s desk.
Jess smiled at Kara but it lacked the warmth reflecting the rapport Kara had slowly (very slowly) managed to establish with the administrative assistant over the years. Kara admired Jess’s loyalty. And back in her own assistant days, when she’d worked with Cat, Kara had been exactly the same.
“Lena is upstairs at the Christmas party.” As CTO in this new reality, Lena spent a lot more time in the lab and a lot less time in the C-suite with her brother. Even her office was several floors below Lex’s, now. “She won’t be back down here for the rest of the night, Miss Danvers.”
Kara barely managed to hold on to her helpless, lopsided smile.
“I just came to drop off her Christmas gift. I could leave it in her office, or with you — whatever’s best! I don’t want to be a bother.”
Jess’s frosty corporate demeanour softened, though only a little, and she held out her hand:
“I’ll make sure she gets it, Miss Danvers.”
Kara nodded, and it felt like her chest was caving in on itself as she handed over the box wrapped in glossy red and green paper, decorated with cheerfully inclusive Hanukkah and Christmas symbols. She’d so hoped to see Lena in person, but maybe this was better.
“Happy holidays, Miss Danvers.” Jess bowed her head in dismissal, and looked back down to her tablet, ready to get back to work even if it was almost 7 PM, when the lights suddenly shut off.
Not just the lights — the screen of Jess’s tablet went dark.
Kara discretely tapped her earpiece as she pulled out her cell from her pocket. It was also dark, and no matter how often she tapped the power button, it seemed her phone was bricked. “Alex?” she whispered. She was fairly certain her sister was at the DEO tonight.
“What’s going on?” Jess muttered under her breath to another one of Lena’s employees, a slight man whose name Kara had never learned. “We have state-of-the-art back-up generators. They should kick in whenever there are three consecutive seconds of a blackout.”
“I don’t know. All lines are down, including the emergency ones.”
“Which security protocol do we follow? Evacuation?” Another man, who Kara vaguely remembered worked in Lena’s main laboratory, had rushed towards them.
And that’s when Kara heard the first set of gunshots.