Chapter 41: Found
Kara was bored out of her mind.
She sat quietly at the table with Emily and Caitlin, while the lawyers argued about evidence, and whether it could be introduced, and witnesses, and other stuff.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How could anyone stay awake through this? They wouldn’t even let her read a book! She desperately wished she had anti-super-speed so she could fast forward through it all.
The judge seemed nice, but she just sat back and listened as the lawyers talked about how they were
going to talk about things.
Kara tried not to pout. It was the least she could do after what had happened to Emily because of taking her in. She fiddled with the dress they’d asked her to wear. She’d started playing with balancing a pencil on her finger, but their lawyer had given her a stern glance.
She stole a glance at Caitlin’s Aunt Aislyn. She didn’t seem nice at all.
Kara pondered what she would do if the judge took Caitlin away from Emily. She hadn’t decided on a course of action yet, but she knew Emily would be heartbroken, and Caitlin too.
She was not going to allow that to happen.
At the moment her best plan was to grab both of them and fly off somewhere. The question was, where? If only she had an awesome crystal palace in the Arctic, where they could all hide out…
She was daydreaming fantasies about crystal palaces when her hearing picked up a radio. “This just in: a fire has broken out in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, on the twenty-third floor. Due to a failure in the fire suppression system the flames are out of control, far too high for firefighters to reach from the outside, and too intense to combat from the inside. Thousands of people are trapped…”
She sat up straight and came back to the courtroom. The lawyers were still talking. Tentatively, she put her hand up. No one paid any attention.
She raised her hand higher. “Um, excuse me?”
The lawyer for Caitlin’s aunt stopped speaking, annoyed, and turned to the judge. “Your Honor, can we prevent further interruptions?”
Judge Quinn frowned at Kara. “What is it, young lady? You were told not to speak out of turn.”
“I’m sorry, um, Your Honor? But there’s a huge fire in Manhattan and it’s on the twenty-third floor and lots of people are trapped and… um… I need to go?” She looked at Emily, who nodded.
The judge nodded thoughtfully. “I think we can spare you for an hour or so.” She glanced at the lawyers, frowning. “At the rate things are going.” She made a shooing motion with her hand. “Go ahead.”
“Is there anywhere I can, um, change?”
The judge smiled. “Madame Clerk, will you show Miss Kent into my chambers?”
The clerk opened the door to the judge’s chambers; Kara blurred into it, emerging a moment later as Supergirl. “Thank you!” she said, and lifted off, only to buzz around the windows like a trapped housefly. “Umm…”
“They don’t open,” said the judge, whose mouth might have twitched. She pointed towards the door. “You’ll have to go out that way.”
“Right. Thanks,” said Kara, and blurred out the door.
• • •
Clark hovered above Wilmington, perplexed. He’d neglected to look up the location of the family court building before coming, and was having trouble finding it. Ten years ago he would have just looked in a phone book, but he wasn’t having any luck finding one of those, either.
He heard the news report about the fire in Manhattan and paused his search. Then he shook his head; he
had to find Kara first.
He was just about to land and ask for directions when he heard a sonic boom and stopped. His vision found the shockwave, pointed northeast. He zoomed in on the tip and there was his daughter, looking very determined. She struck a classic Superman pose, left arm held tight against her side and right fist thrust forward, accelerating through Mach 10 as she climbed.
He watched her for a moment, a strange mixture of joy, relief, love, pride, worry, and nostalgia washing over him. “They grow up so fast,” he murmured. Then he took off after her.
• • •
Kara hadn’t had any trouble finding the building — there was a plume of thick, black smoke that had been easy to spot as she approached Manhattan. The problem was figuring out what to do.
She’d tried blowing but could see that would take a while. Her rain cloud trick wouldn’t work here, because she didn’t think she could make it rain horizontally. She glanced down at the fire trucks gathered below; the firefighters looked up expectantly, waiting for her to do something.
She looked back to the flames roaring from the shattered windows of the twenty-third floor. All she could do was blow, and hope she could put the fire out faster than it spread.
She was huffing and puffing as fast as she could when a voice came from behind her. “Hey there, Supergirl. Would you like some help?”
Kara froze. That voice… she
knew that voice. She rotated slowly in place, afraid to look. Afraid it was her imagination, or a dream, or something.
It wasn’t. There he was, hovering, his cape billowing in the draft from the fire. Superman.
But not
just Superman.
“Daddy?” she asked tremulously, still worried he wasn’t real.
He nodded, smiling.
“Is it really you?” Her voice broke.
“It’s really me, sweetheart.” He held his arms open.
“
Daddy!” she cried, her voice echoing up and down the steel canyon. She literally flew into his embrace, hugging him tightly. “Oh, Daddy!” She started to sob.
Her father hugged her while rubbing her back, and shed some tears of his own. “Kara mia, you are a sight for sore eyes. We’ve been so worried about you.” He kissed the top of her head.
She pulled back and looked up at him, smiling through her tears. “Daddy, I missed you… all of you…
so much,” she said, then burst out sobbing again. She clung to him, crying and shaking in relief, eight weeks of anxiety starting to drain out of her. “I was so suh… scared I’d never see you again! But you’re here, you’re really here… you’re really here…” After that she simply cried.
Twenty stories below them, no one could hear what they were saying, but no one needed to. The news spread outward at the speed of light. On the upper floors of the building, those trapped by the flames had their noses and phone cameras pressed to the windows, the fire temporarily forgotten.
Kara was oblivious. She was aware only of her father, his loving embrace, and the reassuring words he murmured in her ear as she wept. She thought she could bask in that feeling forever.
After a while, though, her tears subsided, and she sniffled and looked up at him. “Dad, what—”
She was interrupted by the building, which emitted a belch of flame that engulfed them both before dissipating. She blinked at her father in surprise.
He smiled and used his thumb to wipe the tears from her cheeks. “I’m sure you have a ton of questions, sweetheart — I know I do — but maybe we better do something about this fire first, huh?”
She looked around, aware of her surroundings again, and nodded. “I’ve been blowing but it’s way too big.”
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you some other tricks to try. But first let’s take our capes off and leave them on that flagpole across the street.”
Kara squinted. “Why do we need to do that?”
• • •
Kara hesitated when her father floated calmly into the inferno, then turned and beckoned her to follow. It didn’t seem to be hurting him, so she floated in behind him.
They stood in the midst of the superheated, toxic gasses and thick black smoke, but that wasn’t an obstacle to their vision. Kara goggled at the sight of office furniture and equipment charred and glowing like the logs in a fireplace. Computers melted and sagged like that painting she’d seen once with the melting clocks. Thankfully, no people had been trapped on this floor.
Her father was looking around, then seemed to spot something. “This way,” he said, and she floated dutifully behind him — the floor was too littered with debris to walk easily.
He pointed. “See inside that wall?”
Her vision peeled its surface away, revealing a bunch of pipes. “Uh-huh.”
“See the second biggest pipe, the metal one? That’s usually the water. You can look inside it to make sure. See?”
Kara could see the water inside. It was boiling hot from the heat of the fire, even through the wall. She nodded. “What’s the biggest one?” She looked inside it. “Oh…
gross.” She made a face.
Her father nodded emphatically. “Yeah, stay away from that one. OK, the fire’s too big now to use the sprinklers even if they were working. We’re going to use that water pipe as a hose instead.” He did exactly that, smashing through the wall and tearing the pipe. He moved the thick main around as if it were a cloth hose, the metal creaking as he did so.
At first only steam came out, but soon the pipe was gushing water, and her father played it over the flames, starting to quench them. He turned and smiled at her. “Now you try it.”
Kara gingerly took the water main from her father and moved it from side to side, inundating the flames. After about five minutes, the fire was greatly reduced.
“What do we do now, Dad?” asked Kara. “The water can’t reach everywhere.”
“Now it’s time for another trick. Luckily, this building is separated from its neighbors. Follow me.” He crushed the water main closed and flew out through the window. Kara was right behind him.
“What we’re going to do is fly around and around the building. The wind we generate will pull the air out through the broken windows, and that’ll starve the flames of oxygen. What I want you to do is keep an eye on me, and stay on the opposite side of the building from me. Fly the same way I do, OK?”
She nodded. “OK.”
“Wait until you see me on the other side. I’ll start slow so you can sync up with me.”
Her dad zipped to the other side of the building, and counted down. “Ready? 3… 2… 1… Let’s go!”
They started flying faster and faster in a tight circle around the twenty-third floor; to those watching, they blended into a blurred purple ring. Kara alternated between tracking her father on the other side, and watching as the wind of their passage sucked all the air out of the floor that was on fire. Soon the flames were out, but they kept going at it until the glow of hot embers inside faded.
She pulled up next to her father as they stopped. “How did you learn how to do all that stuff, Dad?”
He grinned. “The hard way, sweetheart, through trial and error. I’ve helped at a lot of fires over the years. I’ve made my share of mistakes.”
“Really?
You make mistakes, too?”
He laughed and ruffled her hair. “Of course I make mistakes! Everyone does. I made a lot of them to start with, and I still make them sometimes.” He shook his head. “The next step is to get the people off the upper floors.”
“How do we do that?”
“Look at the stairs first. You see?” He pointed, and Kara looked through the building.
“They look OK to me…”
“Look closer. You see some of the supports have buckled and pulled away from the walls? They wouldn’t hold people’s weight. But that’s easy to fix; come on.”
Her father zipped back into the building, Kara right behind him. Now that the fire was out it was safe to open the stairwell door. He had to rip it open: it was welded to the frame. They floated into the stairwell.
“Here’s the only damaged section. See here?” He pointed at a section of stairway that had separated from the mounts in the wall.
“Uh-huh.”
He grabbed onto the stringer that had buckled, twisted it back into shape, then pulled it near its mount again. “OK, use your heat vision, right here.” He used his own at first, heating the joint to show her. “Hotter… hotter… that’s great! Watch for the metal starting to flow… then stop. Now blow on it gently to cool it. Perfect! Now the rest.” Under his tutelage, she welded the stairway back to its supports.
“Are we done?”
“Almost. We have to test it before people can walk on it.” With that he floated up onto the stairs, Kara right behind him.
“How do we test it?”
“Well, it’s a secret superhero technique. Do you promise not to tell anyone?”
Kara folded her arms and tilted her head skeptically. “Da-ad…”
“OK, it’s not really secret, just silly. You test it like this.” He started jumping up and down. “If anyone saw me doing this they’d never take Superman seriously again.”
After staring for a moment, Kara giggled and followed suit. They kept at it for a half minute or so.
“It looks safe,” he announced, and offered her a fist bump, which she returned. “Let’s go get our capes and talk to the fire chief.”
• • •
