The hum of the League jet has a rhythm I’ve long since memorized — steady, low, comforting in the way thunder sounds when you know the storm isn’t meant for you. Outside the window, clouds stretch like fields of silver cotton, sunlight splitting them in warm, gold-tinted lines. Below us, the land rolls out flat and endless — Midwest country. My kind of country. Rows of cornfields, water towers, faded barns with tin roofs that gleam in the sun. I can almost smell the soil from here — that mixture of earth and grain that still reminds me of home, of Ma and Pa, of simpler times before “Superman” was anything more than a secret between a scared kid and his parents.

But this time, we’re not flying over Smallville for nostalgia’s sake.

The call came through thirty minutes ago. A small-town dispatcher, her voice trembling as she played back a recording from a local grocery store’s emergency line.

“She fell from the sky,” the woman had said, breathless. “Hit the parking lot like a comet — but she’s alive. She’s talking, or… trying to. We can’t understand her. She’s—please—just come quick!”

Bruce rerouted the jet before she’d even finished the message. Diana’s brow furrowed in that quiet, knowing way of hers. Barry made a joke about alien visitors and meteor girls — but the way his knee kept bouncing told a different story.

And me? I couldn’t shake the sound of the woman’s voice. Or the faint, almost familiar static in the background of the call. A tone I couldn’t quite place — high-frequency, faintly distorted. Kryptonian.

The wind hits us as we descend, rattling through the open bay doors. The farmland looks peaceful at first — rows of sunlit yellow and green — until you see the crowd gathered near the town’s edge. Pickup trucks line the road like barricades. Police tape flutters in the wind, holding back a wall of frightened faces.

As soon as we touch down, the murmurs begin. I can hear every heartbeat, every whisper. “Over there!” one man shouts, pointing past the diner and down the main street. “She’s still by the market!” Another woman clutches her child to her chest, eyes wide. “She ain’t right,” she says, her voice trembling. “She’s not human.”

I exchange a glance with Diana — steady, reassuring, the kind that says we’ve got this. Bruce gives a curt nod, already scanning for threat vectors. The others follow suit, spreading out, eyes sharp.

And me… I just listen. The air hums differently here. There’s a pull, a frequency just beneath sound — like a heartbeat calling through the noise. I can feel it in my bones, familiar in a way that makes my chest tighten.

I take a step forward. One breath. Then another. The world narrows around me — voices fading, the sun dimming behind clouds — until all I hear is her.

A young voice. Trembling. Confused. Speaking a language the others can’t understand — but I can. Not Earth-born. Not foreign. Home.