Life seemed to find its way back to normal. On Monday morning, Thea arrived at the office to find her secretary, Miss Macy, already busy at her desk.
"Mr. Luthor doesn't need anyone's pity," Miss Macy said, her voice perfectly even, her expression like she was discussing a stranger. "He didn't then. He still doesn't."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Miss Macy thought for a moment, then decided to speak. "Mr. Luthor had a major falling-out with his sister and left LuthorCorp on his own. I waited for him on the route he always takes — ready to leave with him. He turned me down without hesitating for a second."
"You love him?"
"I don't think it's love. I admired him. But that chapter is over now." Miss Macy's expression closed off with practiced speed, professional smile sliding back into place. She set a stack of documents requiring signatures on Thea's desk and walked out, composure fully intact.
Thea had nothing particularly useful to offer her. Miss Macy was, in her private life, a deeply passive person — someone who preferred to lock onto a pattern and ride it for decades. Her feelings for Luthor were less romance and more entrenched habit.
Her loyalty was beyond question. As for Luthor sending her back as a spy — that sort of thing was beneath his pride. He simply wasn't that kind of man.
Thea sighed quietly and turned her attention to her own work.
Five days later, Thea arrived at the Extraterrestrial Oversight Commission. She was barely through the door when Diggle came charging toward her with a document folder.
"We just intercepted this. A woman killed one of our elite field agents."
Thea had a focused work ethic. She took the folder and read through it rapidly. "A... exotic dancer registered under the name Priscilla, at a bar near a military base in New Orleans. She dismembered our agent? Wounds consistent with extraterrestrial origin?"
"Yes, ma'am." Diggle was in his element — the transformation in him was remarkable. The shifting circumstances seemed to have returned him to something like his old military days, and he clearly thrived on it. "Agent Evans found her suspicious — identity documents too vague, too clean. He and his partner Agent Fanna went to investigate. The target realized she'd been made, killed Evans, assumed his appearance, and spent an hour inside Agent Fanna's head pulling Commission intelligence."
"A female extraterrestrial with shapeshifting ability and telepathic reading." Thea turned it over in her mind. What had started as a Justice Girls gathering was branching into something with progressively more tendrils — and this clearly fell within the Commission's operational scope. She'd take the case.
"Where is Agent Fanna now?"
"In the polygraph room."
"Let's go."
Thea found Agent Fanna quickly — a woman she recognized: blonde hair, blue eyes, a figure that turned heads. One of the Commission's rare genuinely striking agents, recruited after she'd blown the whistle on her FBI superior's very ill-advised extracurricular activities.
The polygraph team had run her through the wringer repeatedly, and their conclusion was consistent: Agent Fanna's account checked out.
Thea waited for the examiners to clear the room.
"Agent Fanna, walk me through the incident one more time, in your own words."
The agent was visibly tired of repeating herself. She kept it together — she wasn't about to mouth off to Thea — but she lit a cigarette and ran through it again.
It matched the report. She and Evans had gone to investigate the exotic dancer. Evans, whose enthusiasm for the job was perhaps a little too obvious, had irritated her enough that she'd slammed the door and walked out. An hour later Evans tracked her down, the two of them had a brief... heated exchange, and then a phone call from upstairs informed her that her partner had been dead for two hours.
In a horror film, that would have been Agent Fanna's death scene. Fortunately, this was not a horror film.
When she'd registered something was wrong and come back armed, the Evans she'd been with was long gone. The Commission analysts had pieced together the shapeshifting conclusion from there.
Thea raised an eyebrow at the polygraph team's documentation. In the name of forensic completeness, the examiners had asked Agent Fanna to reconstruct the entire exchange in granular detail — what was said, what she saw, where she stood, and when she left. Agent Fanna, a product of serious combat training, had eidetic recall for events under stress. She'd reconstructed the full timeline to within ten seconds of total accuracy. The polygraph confirmed: her timeline was consistent.
Her team has some interesting interpretations of investigative procedure, Thea noted internally.
"I believe your account," she said. In her presence, lying was exceptionally difficult — even the most subtle fluctuation in the soul's resonance didn't escape a goddess of the Soul divinity.
"Commissioner, I'm formally requesting to join the pursuit operation. Evans was a pig, but he was my partner. I want to be the one to pay that back."
"Approved." Thea turned to Diggle. "How far along is the pursuit prep?"
"Ready on your authorization and operational code designation."
"Good. Take Agent Fanna. Five single-pilot mech units, each equipped with telepathic interference dampeners. Thirty-minute departure window." She paused. "That bar she operated out of is called Voodoo Bar — so let's give this target a matching call sign. Codename: Voodoo."
She sent them both off to prepare and settled in to review every available record herself. The target wasn't a threat she took seriously — but she'd never gotten anywhere by underestimating people.
In under twenty minutes, all five mechs were ready to deploy — Diggle and Fanna included. The Commission's batch-production armor couldn't match the hand-crafted pieces Thea had built for herself, but it was a substantial step up from the exoskeleton suits used during the Cold Flame campaign. Energy weapons, flight capability, close-combat hardening — standard Commission elite issue.
Tracking a fugitive like this, a divination compass or a simple scrying spell would have solved it in minutes. But Thea preferred not to appear too mystical in front of her operational staff. Her title here was Dr. Queen, not Oracle Queen.
Her team ran a collaborative analysis using conventional methods. In a society this interconnected, even a shapeshifter left a trail.
"Commissioner, the target has surfaced at a D.E.O. facility in Mississippi. D.E.O. reports significant data theft."
"Damn it." Diggle's jaw tightened. Thea was unfazed — the idea that stealing data would give someone a decisive edge was a remarkably naive theory of victory. Whatever that shapeshifting extraterrestrial had and whoever might be backing her, the limit was obvious.
"New Orleans to Mississippi in under an hour? The D.E.O. base coordinates came from Agent Fanna's memory. We're not under D.E.O. jurisdiction — reset the model, restart the tracking sequence." She turned to the reporting agent. "And — what exactly did she take?"
The agent looked slightly uncomfortable. "She made a complete copy of all Justice League member files."
Thea went still.
The Justice League. That changed everything.