After parting from Barry, Thea hauled the unconscious woman to one of her properties—she had real estate on every continent at this point—and sat down across from her without saying anything.
Eliza Harmon had no visible heroic potential whatsoever. When she'd first gotten her hands on super speed, she'd robbed wealthy gala guests—fine, one could argue that was Robin Hood logic at a stretch. But then she'd ransacked Mercury Labs and the Central City Police Department. That was just revenge. Plain and simple.
If Harmon had been a man, Thea would have stayed back and watched her turn to ash.
Harmon's consciousness was still half-lost in the sensation of running at impossible speed. Thea did a quick check and quietly stabilized her soul. Slowly, Harmon came back to herself.
"You." The recognition in her voice was immediate.
"Looks like you know who I am. That makes this easier. You were in serious danger back there—if you'd drunk that last one—" Thea held up the heartwood vial and let the implication hang.
"So what? Who cares?" Harmon's voice spiked with sudden heat. "People like you have never once given a damn about people like us. You've got the whole world cheering for you—the Chosen One, the superhero, the girl everyone loves—what do you know about anything? Hmph." She looked like she wanted to bite through something.
"Ms. Eliza Harmon." Thea's voice was completely flat. "I've reviewed your employment records. Mercury Labs currently has twenty-nine ongoing research projects. You are the lead researcher on one of them, drawing an annual salary of seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. After the lab came under my ownership, all staff received across-the-board raises—yours included, somewhere between three and ten percent. By any reasonable measure, bottom tier is not a category you belong in."
Harmon's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Thea pressed on. "Do you know what Mercury Labs' interns are paid? I'm guessing you've never thought about it. Less than three percent of your salary. So tell me—what exactly gives you the right to call yourself disadvantaged? I'm waiting."
Thea had been carrying weeks of frustration over Batman's situation, and her patience had been worn down to nothing. The rare combination of a snapping tone and a hard stare was enough to lock a scientist's nervous system in place. Harmon went very quiet.
She didn't bring up class again.
Thea kept up the act. She pointed at the heartwood vial. "Tell me where this came from."
Harmon didn't try to hide it. She laid out the whole story—the rumors she'd heard about a shop that granted any wish, the trail she'd followed, the exchange itself. Every detail.
Thea adopted her best expression of someone hearing this for the first time, her brow creasing with theatrical concern. "Does magic like that actually exist?"
Now that the adrenaline had worn off, the scientist in Harmon was reasserting itself. "They said they'd take my soul. Am I going to die? End up enslaved somewhere forever? I..." Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "I don't actually want to die."
Thea drummed her fingers on the table with the expression of someone deeply troubled. "This is extremely unusual. You had no speed abilities before? The vial gave you everything?"
Harmon nodded vigorously.
"You may be in serious trouble. You need to stay far away from whoever runs that operation."
"And go where? The Justice League headquarters?"
Thea let a beat pass, then finally showed her true colors. "Ms. Harmon. Answer me one question first—did you like having super speed? That level of it, the way it felt?"
Of course she did. She'd traded everything for it, hadn't she? She nodded.
"Then here's an offer. I have a Justice League position available. You'd be protected from whoever's tracking you, and you'd get to run as fast as you want, as often as you want."
The moment the Justice League entered the equation, the entire conversation elevated itself. For all Harmon's grievances against the world, she genuinely respected what the League represented. She leaned forward immediately. "What kind of position?"
Thea gave her a selective overview—Batman's disappearance, the timeline damage, the need for enforcement against unauthorized temporal travelers. Authorized travelers, naturally, would be members of Thea's own Time Masters Council. Obviously.
The Justice League brand did its job. Harmon agreed with barely a moment's hesitation.
Her ordinary appearance would serve her fine in civilian life, but she needed something more imposing for the work ahead. Thea designed her field look after a specific image—Harry Potter's dementors, to be exact. Tattered black robes, the kind that communicated do not approach. Something vaguely spectral.
"Much better. Give me a run."
Harmon shot forward. Even to Thea's eyes—her true body's eyes—the speed was difficult to track.
But the more striking thing was what else happened. Harmon passed straight through the wall. It wasn't a speedster's vibration trick. It was more like the intangibility of Martian Manhunter in his phased state.
"Ms. Harmon." Thea called after her. "Based on what I just saw—you overused the Speed Force. Under normal conditions you're fine, but once you hit a certain threshold, you shift into a semi-incorporeal state."
"You should enter the time stream as soon as possible. Every day you wait, the transition accelerates."
In ordinary life, Harmon could keep her name. In the field, wearing the robes, she had a new one: time wraith.
One enforcer, though, was nowhere near enough. Speedsters were everywhere. And she was thinking of another one in particular—someone she distinctly remembered being hauled off by a time wraith. Where was Zoom right now?
Thea channeled a thread of pure soul energy into Harmon—in her taxonomy, soul energy divided into ghost essence (drawn from the dead, heavy with resentment) and living essence (extracted through voluntary exchange, far cleaner). What she gave Harmon was the latter.
It left Thea winded. But it was worth it.
By infusing Harmon with soul-domain energy, Thea had effectively altered her metaphysical jurisdiction. Anyone who used the Speed Force was, according to the Speed Force's own rules, eventually drawn into that space. The soul-domain energy short-circuited that claim. Harmon now belonged to a completely different system—soul, wealth, and time—with no overlap with whatever had claim over her before.
Thea exhaled. She opened a portal to the Vanishing Point.
"Go. Begin your work."
She sent Harmon through, then turned back toward the outside world.
"Assess her memory," her avatar instructed the moment Harmon arrived on the island.
The soul energy Thea had given her had done more than grant abilities—it had overwritten Harmon's personal timeline with Thea's own. Everything in her past was now calibrated to align with Thea's version of events. Some memories would be clear. Others would be deliberately obscured.
The newly transformed half-divine being blinked, something strange moving behind her eyes—the sensation of a timeline clicking into place. The past solidified; the future remained in fog.
"Why are so many of my memories blurry?" Harmon asked. She couldn't tell avatar from original.
"Because powerful beings leave traces as they move through time. You can sense their passage—but you'll never see their true faces." Thea kept her tone cryptic. She told herself it was kindness. Protection from knowing too much. Protection from giving Thea a reason to keep her permanently silent.
"Bring him in," she said, once the memory orientation settled.
A strange luminescence gathered in Harmon's eyes. A silver vortex opened—and a tall figure was thrown unceremoniously through it.