Little sister goes into the darkened bookstore and grabs her keys. As she does so, the door opens behind her. She sighs, "Sorry, we're closed." I know just how she feels. You spend all day dealing with customers and trying to be human and all you want to do is go home and kick your shoes off. She turns to face a seemingly empty store. "Hello?" she calls out. She creeps toward the door, peering around her. Still seeing no one, she closes the door and pulls the window shade. She turns out the lights, which makes things even darker. See, turning off the lights would be the last thing I did before I left, but this girl heads back into the store. She gets no more than a few feet before someone blocks her path. She screams and turns to run, but a man reaches out from the darkness to grab her. White fog jets out from an apparatus on his wrist, knocking her out. As she falls and the fog clears, we see the gas mask the man is wearing. The camera zooms in on the black pit of his eye, which morphs into the girl's, now wide open and terrified. She glances around and sees that she's been strapped into some some kind of shower stall of doom. She's been stripped down to her underthings, and wrapped in plastic. As the camera pans out, two other horrific shower stalls come into view, one occupied by a man and the other a woman. Clear tubing like alien intestines feed into the stalls. All three occupants gaze around them in horror. Somebody save them!

Daily Planet. Lois is typing at her computer when a ringing comes from her desk drawer. She glances around before opening the drawer and fishing out the phone. The message on the screen reads simply, "THE WALL." The back of the phone bears the Checkmate symbol. Clark walks up behind her and she hurriedly stuffs the phone back into the drawer. (I think it's the thing that Waller gave her, that I mistook for a portable hard drive.) Clark asks what she's up to and she makes some excuse about juggling deadlines. She asks the same of him and he makes some excuse about his assignments. They stop lying to each other long enough to flirt. Lois points out that they haven't been seeing much of each other lately. Clark steps very close to her and suggests they make plans to visit the romantic café across the street. "I see a table for two in our future," Lois says. They make with the cute eyes, but their flirtation is interrupted when Faora shows up. She calls out to Clark, but for a moment he's too invested in ogling Lois to notice. Lois asks, "Who's the femme fatale?" Clark notices her and lies, "An assignment that I can't put off." Clark leads Faora away. She's not supposed to visit him at the office, but she didn't want Zod to know she was contacting him. "He doesn't trust you, Kal-El," she says like she's delivering bad news. To that, I say: duh. Her sister Vala's been kidnapped and Faora thinks Clark's the only one who can help. Clark frowns ever so slightly.