Chapter Text
Technically, Lois isn’t breaking and entering. Hell, she isn’t even trespassing. Yet.
Luthor Labs is sleek and well-funded, with plenty of security measures to keep out any journalist who wasn’t cleared to do a puff piece. When she’d tried to do a story on them last year, she’d been stuck with publicly available information, opinions of locals, and one interview with a Luthor Labs cafeteria worker, on the condition that his name be kept private. Needless to say, Perry had shot that one down pretty fast.
Last week, she had received an anonymous tip from a whistleblower, giving her an exact date, time, and route to enter the building.
Sketchy at hell? Absolutely.
Irresistible? You betcha.
There’s a not insubstantial chance that she’s about to walk straight over the line into ‘trespassing’ territory, without plausible deniability. It would be a pretty decent setup to lure her and being able to prosecute her would definitely be convenient for Luthor, considering how many articles she’s written dragging his image through the mud.
The corridor she’s in is not exactly empty, but pretty quiet. It leads to the bathrooms that school field trips and visiting consultants and whatnot use, but it’s far enough away from the crowded lobby that she can hear her own footsteps and imagine them to be thunderous. She may not have crossed any lines just yet, but she feels like she’s sneaking around.
One of the doors that clearly has a keypad is propped open with a doorstop. It calls to her like a siren, that familiar itch to find the thread, to follow the lead, to learn the truth.
A woman in a labcoat rounds the sharp corner and stumbles into her and they do a quick dance to get out of one another’s way.
“Sorry,” Lois offers with an awkward laugh. The scientist gives a nervous smile in return before briskly exiting the building by the same door Lois used to enter.
Get it together, Lois. Either slink around the semi-public spaces or sneak into the ominous off-limits area, but for the love of God, don’t just gape in the hallway.
When she puts it like that, the choice is clear. She could never resist a good ominous off-limits area
Once the decision is made, she walks with purpose, but with just a slight expression of confusion, as if she had been planning to meet someone but just got very turned around and somehow thought the bathroom would be in this very private hallway with a keypad.
Believable? No way in hell.
Hard to disprove? Yeah!
She’s almost to a dead end when a buzzing sound makes her jump out of her skin. Automatically, her hand flies to her pocket, but the movement makes it very clear that the sound is coming from her handbag.
Opening it, she sees not her indestructible purple phone case, but a flip phone she’s never seen in her life, displaying one unread text.
Damn, she should have gotten a better look at that scientist/ sleight of hand magician/ whistleblower?
The text reads: Last door on the left
She tries it. It’s unlocked.
At this point she’s on a whole different planet from ‘plausible deniability’.
If you’re already feeling the anxiety of sneaking around, you may as well get a story out of it. You’re in this deep anyway.
Her logic isn’t exactly airtight, but it doesn’t matter. She’s already turning the knob.
Over the next several minutes, Lois’ heartbeat picks up, but so does her curiosity.
The texts come in one at time, directing Lois’ path through 2 more hallways, down an elevator, through another hallway, and down a larger, more secluded, clearly higher security elevator. Twice in this endeavor, she doubles back to avoid incoming footsteps, but both times, whoever it was veers off into a side office.
It’s around the time she’s punching in the code she was texted to operate the 2nd elevator that it really sinks in just how risky this is. She’s no damsel in distress, but she likes to know how deep the water is before she jumps in. Right now, Perry won’t want anything to do with this bullshit, Jimmy’s on vacation, and Clark is on ‘vacation’, because Superman is off planet. Hell, with her old Honda Civic failing its smog test last week, there’s no way Lucy even has money for bail.
These thoughts are enough to make it hard to breathe, but they aren’t enough to make her turn back. For all she knowa, she could just as easily be caught on the way back anyways, and then she’d have all the consequences without even having the story.
She’s 27 levels below the ground floor when the doors open and she steps out of the elevator. The phone buzzes, and she opens the text as quickly as the antique will allow.
Second door on the right. Code is 061993.
This has to be a trap, right? It doesn’t take a genius to know that she’ll chase after a good story hook, no matter what line and sinker are attached.
Still, she bites, and inputs the code.
Lois opens the door with her heart in her stomach. It jumps up to her throat when she sees a person in the room.
A boy.
He’s a teenager, sitting on a metal chair, at a metal table, drinking some muddy-red juice that looks and smells foul from a straw. The whole room is sterile and empty. He turns when she opens the door, and he’s wearing a white jumpsuit with an S design that she recognizes.
The look in the boy’s eyes is pretty far from hope.
He looks like the photos in her fiancé's childhood home, with shorter hair, and a lot less plaid and smiling.
“Hello,” she says, almost surprised to hear her own voice. She may sound a little wary, but there’s friendliness in her tone too. Her mind feels like it’s both running on overdrive and freezing.
He looks a little confused, and he stands. She has to stop herself from taking a step back.
She doesn’t know what the hell is going on here, but it’s something big.
“Do you need me to do something for you?” The teenager asks, too clinically.
Who are you? What are you? Are you okay?
“Could you tell me your name?” She asks, gently, but still in her real voice. She always hated being condescended to when she was young.
“I’m called Project 13.”
Good Lord.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, thankful that her mind is falling into interviewer mode while she wonders how the hell she’s going to do something about this. She doesn’t even know what needs to be done.
“This is where I take nutritional breaks and sleep. I have training scheduled in 24 minutes,” he explains, a little uncertain.
“Oh,” she adds, an automatic vocal filler that often gets interviewees to continue.
“Of course, if you need anything done now, I’ll do it,” he adds, with just a slight undercurrent of a rush.
His face may be smooth, his tone blandly professional, but this boy is terrified. Of her. Of the world.
His skin is pale and his jumpsuit spotless. Has he ever been outside of this lab?
“Are you okay?” she asks, even though she doubts he even knows what being okay is. He doesn’t seem like he’s been okay a day in his life.
“My heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure are all on the low end of the normal range. My respiratory rate is currently slightly elevated. My cognition is normal, with no unusual symptoms to report,” he rattles off.
Definitely not okay.
“I want to take you out of here. We need to get you outside.” Her voice sounds more decisive than she had realized she was. But it’s clear, something is deeply wrong here.
For all she knows, he could be dangerous. He probably is. But it’s clear he’s also in danger.
He doesn’t even have a name.
The boy’s eyes widen with some spark of the curiosity she feels in her own soul, then narrow into something just a little too skeptical to be blank. “Is this a simulation?” he asks.
Instead of unpacking that, she just shakes her head and gives a confident answer. “No. We’re leaving.”