At seven minutes past two in the morning, Lois Lane read the note for the eleventh time, and it still said exactly what it had said the first time.

It was short. It didn't have a name in it. It didn't have a single thing in it that a reporter could use, no handwriting she recognized, no postmark, no smell of anybody's perfume, and she had checked for all three. She put it down on the kitchen table, squared it up with the edge, and picked up her legal pad instead.

"Who," she said, writing it. "How. Why us."

"Lois."

"I'm working."

"I know you are." Clark was standing in the doorway in his T-shirt and pajama pants, holding the baby against his shoulder the way you would hold something made of spun sugar. He had been holding her for an hour. She had stopped crying the second he picked her up, and he hadn't dared put her down since. "I went over the whole neighborhood. Every street out to the river. There's nobody. No car pulling away, no footprints in the yard. The locks weren't touched."

"Somebody got in."

"Somebody got in," he agreed, and then said the thing she had been not saying for an hour. "And I didn't hear them."

Lois put the pen down.

Her husband could hear a man drop his car keys in a parking garage across town. He could hear her heart speed up when she lied about having eaten lunch. Somebody had walked into their house in the middle of the night, set a baby down and walked out again, and the man who heard everything had slept straight through it.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm writing that under How."

He came and sat down across from her, carefully, and the baby made a small sound and settled again. She had a little dark fuzz of hair and a fist about the size of a walnut, and she had that fist wrapped around one of Clark's fingers, and she was not letting go.

An hour and a half ago, the crying had woken them both at once. Clark had sat straight up in bed and said, "That's not the television next door," and then he had looked through the bedroom wall, and his face had gone a color Lois had never seen on him. By the time she got her robe on he was already downstairs, standing over the basket in the middle of the living room rug with his hands held out a little in front of him, as if the basket might go off.

The first practical problem had come about ten minutes later, when the baby stopped being startled and started being hungry, and they discovered that the two of them, between them, owned a great deal of coffee and half a carton of skim milk and nothing at all that a baby could eat.

"I'll go," Clark had said, and gone, and come back four minutes later from an all-night drugstore somewhere with his hair blown straight up and his arms full: three kinds of formula, two packages of diapers in two different sizes, a box of bottles, a pacifier shaped like a duck, and a book called Your Baby's First Year. "The man at the register asked if it was my first," he said, a little dazed. "I said yes. I didn't know what else to say."

Lois had read the side of the formula can out loud while Clark warmed the bottle in a pan of water on the stove, and they had both stood over the pan watching it like it was a ticking bomb, and then argued about how you tested it on your wrist, and in the end Clark had simply looked at it hard for a second and said it was exactly right. The baby had agreed. She had drunk every drop and then fallen asleep on his shoulder with her mouth open, and that was where she had been ever since.

"How old do you think she is?" Lois asked.

"Three months? Four? My mother will know."

"Your mother will be on the first plane out of Wichita the second you call her."

"I know." He looked at the clock on the stove. "It's three in the morning in Kansas."

"Clark. Call your mother."

Martha Kent picked up on the second ring, as if she had been sitting by the phone. Lois could only hear Clark's half: "Mom. No, we're fine. Everybody's fine. Mom, listen, something happened. Is Dad awake? You'd better get him."

Lois went into the living room while he explained, because she didn't want to watch his face while he did it. The basket was still in there, on the floor where they'd found it. She knelt next to it. A plain basket, the kind you could buy at any import store on the east side. A soft white blanket folded in the bottom. She ran her fingers along the hem, looking for a label, a laundry mark, anything. Nothing.

She had wanted this. That was the part she wasn't writing down on the legal pad. After everything this year, after all the hoping and the doctors and the news nobody wants to hear, she had lain awake more nights than she would admit to wanting exactly this, a baby in this house. And now here one was, out of nowhere, like an answer to a question she had been too scared to ask out loud, and all she could feel was afraid.

Because nobody gives you a baby for free. Not in her experience. Somebody, somewhere, wanted something.

"They're coming," Clark said behind her. "Mom wanted me to come get them, and Dad said he'd rather take his chances with the airline. They'll be here by noon." He sat down on the floor next to her, still holding the baby, and leaned his shoulder against hers. "She said to tell you that you're going to be fine."

"She doesn't know that."

"She's my mother. She knows everything." He was quiet for a minute. "Lois. Whoever brought her here knew they could get past me. They knew which house. They knew it was us."

"I know."

"That scares me more than anything Lex ever did."

She took the baby from him then, because it seemed like the thing to do, and was surprised at how little she weighed, and how warm she was, and how she turned her face into Lois's collarbone and sighed as if she had been waiting all night to get there.

"Well," Lois said, and her voice came out funny. "Hi."

When the sky started going gray over the rooftops, Clark found them both asleep on the couch, the baby on Lois's chest and Lois's hand spread across the baby's back, the legal pad on the floor beside them. He put the afghan from the hall closet over them, and sat down in the armchair, and watched them until the sun came up.

End of Part 1

Martha Kent came through the front door at eleven-forty with a suitcase in one hand and a sack from the drugstore in the other, took one look at the baby in Lois's arms and said, "Oh, would you look at her," in a voice Lois had never heard her use, not even at the wedding.

Jonathan came in behind with the other two suitcases. "Your mother bought out the baby aisle at the airport gift shop," he said, and then he saw the baby too, and set the suitcases down very quietly, and didn't say anything else for a while.

By one o'clock Martha had the baby bathed in the kitchen sink, dressed in a little yellow sleeper and fed from a bottle she had somehow already sterilized, and had shown Lois how to fold a diaper so it didn't sag, twice. Lois took notes. Clark watched his mother and his wife bent over the kitchen counter together and thought he had never loved two people so much at the same time.

Then Lois straightened up and said, "We have to report it."

The kitchen went still.

"Honey," said Martha.

"No, I mean it. A baby turned up in our house. Somewhere out there somebody might be looking for her. Some mother might be going out of her mind. We can't just keep her because we want to." She looked at Clark. "You know we can't. You'd never let me write a story where somebody did that."

"And if they run tests?" Clark said quietly. "If she's... if there's something about her that isn't..."

"Then we'll deal with it. But we do it right."

He didn't like it. She could see him not liking it. But he nodded.

Before she could lose her nerve, she picked up the phone and called Perry at home, and told him, more or less, everything except the part about the locks. There was a long silence on the line.

"Lois," Perry said finally, "in thirty years in this business I have had reporters call me with a lot of reasons why they couldn't come in. I have had a broken leg. I have had a hostage situation. I once had a man tell me his house had been carried off by a tornado with him still in it, and that turned out to be true. But I have never had anybody call in with a baby." Another silence. "Take the week. Take two. Tell Clark the zoning board can survive without him. And Lois?"

"Yes, Perry?"

"Congratulations. Or whatever the word is. I'll figure out the word by the time you get back."

Inspector Henderson came himself, which Lois hadn't expected. He stood in their living room in his rumpled coat, looking at the basket and the note and the sleeping baby with the face of a man who has seen everything twice and is now seeing something for the first time.

"No forced entry," he said. "No witnesses. No missing child reports in the city that match. I checked before I came over." He looked at Lois. "You realize, if this were anybody else, I would think you two had made this up for a feature story."

"We didn't."

"I know you didn't. That's what bothers me." He wrote something in his notebook. "I'll put it on the wire to the state and the neighboring states. If somebody's looking, we'll hear. Until then she has to go somewhere, and I'll tell you right now, the county shelter is full."

The somewhere turned out to be a woman named Ann Johnson, from Children's Services, who arrived at four with a clipboard and a cardigan and a pair of half-glasses on a chain, and who spent two hours going through every room in the house, every cupboard under every sink, and every question Lois could have imagined and several she couldn't. At the end of it she sat at the kitchen table with her clipboard and looked at the two of them over her glasses.

"Emergency foster placement," she said. "Thirty days, until the hearing. It's irregular. But you're married, you're employed, you've got a grandmother in the house who obviously knows what she's doing, and I would rather this child slept here than on a cot in my office." She signed something. "Don't make me regret it, Mrs. Kent."

"Lane," said Lois automatically. "Kent. Either. Thank you."

After she left, Clark went out on the back step and stood there in the dark for a long time. Lois found him there.

"I want to call Dr. Klein," he said, without turning around. "Just to look at her. Quietly. If she's... if there's any chance she's like me, Lois, she's going to need somebody who understands what that means before some pediatrician on Ninth Street tries to give her a shot and bends the needle."

"She's not a lab experiment."

"I didn't say she was."

"You said STAR Labs. It's the same thing." Her voice cracked a little. "She's a baby, Clark. She's three months old. She likes the yellow sleeper better than the green one. She's not a mystery for us to solve."

He turned around then. "You've been solving her since two o'clock this morning. You've got a legal pad."

She opened her mouth, and closed it, and then she laughed, the kind of laugh that is mostly the other thing. He put his arms around her and she put her face in his shirt.

"We're going to be terrible at this," she said.

"We're going to be wonderful at this." He kissed her, there on the back step, with the kitchen light on behind them and his mother pretending very hard not to look out the window. "Dr. Klein can wait a few days. Okay?"

"Okay."

They didn't give the baby a name. Lois wouldn't. "If we name her, we keep her," she said, "and we don't know yet if we get to keep her." So Martha called her the little one, and Jonathan called her Sprout, and Clark called her sweetheart, and Lois called her nothing at all out loud, and something else entirely in her head.

At seven minutes past two in the morning, the baby started to cry.

Clark was on his feet before Lois was even awake. She heard him cross the hall to the spare room, where Martha had made a crib out of a dresser drawer and two folded quilts, the way she said they used to do in Smallville. She heard the door open.

Then she heard nothing at all, which was worse.

"Clark?"

"Lois," he said, very calmly, the voice he used on ledges and in burning buildings. "Could you come in here, please? Slowly."

She came to the door. The nightlight was on. The drawer was empty, the quilts still dented in the shape of a small body.

The baby was six inches above them, in the air.

She hung there in her yellow sleeper, turning very slowly, like a leaf on still water. She had stopped crying. She was looking straight at Clark with wide, interested eyes, and as they watched, she waved one walnut fist at him, and laughed.

To be continued in Part 3...

Author's note: I know, I know. I'm sorry about the cliffhanger. But the show did it to us first, and I have been waiting two years to do it to somebody else. Part 3 is written. It's on a yellow pad in my purse. I'll type it as fast as I can, I promise. Please write and tell me what you think the answer is, because I want to know if I've hidden the clues well enough: [email protected]