Chapter 32: Surveillance
Three days of watching taught me how to see the watchers.
The first was obvious—a black sedan that appeared whenever I left my apartment, maintaining exactly two blocks of distance. Corporate plates, tinted windows, the kind of vehicle that screamed "surveillance" to anyone paying attention.
The second was subtle. A barista at the Talon who'd started working two weeks ago, whose shift always coincided with my visits. She asked too many questions, remembered too many details.
The third was almost invisible. Someone had been in my apartment while I was at school. Nothing missing, nothing obviously disturbed. But the dust patterns on my bookshelf were wrong, and the laptop under my mattress had been moved three inches to the left.
[SURVEILLANCE MAPPING: 73% COMPLETE. IDENTIFIED ASSETS: 4 MOBILE, 2 STATIC, 1 TECHNICAL.]
"Seven different methods," Chloe said, spreading my notes across her desk in the Torch office. "That's serious resources for one high school student."
"Lex doesn't do anything halfway."
"But why?" She picked up my sketch of the sedan's license plate. "You turned down his offer. Shouldn't that be the end of it?"
"With Lex, refusal is the beginning." I leaned back in my chair, thinking. "He can't accept that someone might not want what he's offering. It means either I'm hiding something bigger, or I'm too stupid to recognize a good deal. Either way, he needs to understand."
"And once he understands?"
"Then he decides whether I'm an asset, an obstacle, or irrelevant."
Chloe's expression darkened.
"You're talking about him like he's a threat."
"He is a threat. He just hasn't decided to act like one yet."
The words hung in the air. I could see Chloe processing, connecting dots between what I was saying and what she'd learned in her own investigations.
"The shipping manifests," she said slowly. "The specialized medical equipment. You think Lex is connected to the meteor freak disappearances."
"I think his family is building something. Collecting people with abilities, studying them, maybe worse." I met her eyes. "And I think if Lex decides I'm interesting enough, I could end up in that collection too."
[THREAT CORRELATION: LUTHORCORP SURVEILLANCE + 33.1 EVIDENCE = 89% PROBABILITY OF CONNECTION.]
Chloe was quiet for a long moment. Then she pulled out a folder—thick, stuffed with papers she'd been accumulating for weeks.
"I found more. While you were in the hospital, I kept digging."
The manifests inside were detailed. Shipping routes, equipment specifications, facility addresses that didn't match any public records.
"This one." She pointed to a circled entry. "Containment units. Reinforced steel, electromagnetic shielding, designed to hold subjects with 'irregular biological signatures.' Twenty units, shipped to a facility outside Metropolis."
I recognized the specifications. They were identical to what 33.1 had used in the show—prisons designed specifically for meteor freaks.
"It's real," I said quietly. "It's already happening."
"And it's been happening longer than we thought." Chloe pulled out another document. "Patient transfer records from three years ago. Meteor-affected individuals moved from Smallville Medical to 'specialized facilities.' None of them have public records after that."
Three years. The program had been running for three years, collecting people, experimenting on them, and I'd had no idea.
Because the show only showed what Clark discovered. Not what was happening before.
"We need to tell Clark."
"Not yet." I gathered the documents, mind racing. "If we move too fast, Lex will notice. He's already watching me—if he sees me sharing sensitive information, he'll know I'm a threat."
"So we do nothing?"
"We prepare." I looked at Chloe—at the determination in her eyes, the same hunger for justice that had driven her Wall of Weird for years. "We gather more evidence. Build a case that can't be dismissed. And when we're ready, we expose everything at once."
She nodded slowly.
"I can do that."
"I know you can."
That night, I found the bug.
It was small—no bigger than a fingernail—hidden inside the smoke detector in my bedroom. State of the art, probably capable of capturing both audio and limited video.
[TECHNICAL SURVEILLANCE DEVICE IDENTIFIED. LUTHORCORP ENCRYPTION SIGNATURE DETECTED.]
I stared at it for a long moment, considering my options.
Destroying it would confirm that I knew I was being watched. That would escalate things, force Lex to take more aggressive action.
Leaving it in place meant everything I said and did in my own apartment was being recorded. Every conversation, every System notification I might accidentally verbalize, every moment of privacy.
I chose option three.
The signal blocker was crude—a modified AM radio transmitter that created interference on the bug's frequency. To anyone monitoring, it would look like a malfunction. Technical issues happened all the time.
I set it up, tested the coverage, and smiled when the bug's status light flickered from green to red.
Let them wonder.
The game was getting complicated. But I was learning to play.
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