One of the Vanishing Point's defining properties was its position outside the flow of time. Even gods weren't entirely immune to time's passage—but here, it simply didn't apply. For Thea, this man had last been seen almost two years ago. For him, roughly two seconds had passed.
"Mr. Zoom. It's been a while." Thea smiled warmly at the face she recognized—the soul-scarred skin, its surface eaten away by soul energy. The damage was unmistakable.
Zoom's memory had left him mid-race—he'd been on Earth-2, Steppenwolf having been routed, chasing Barry Allen across a ruined landscape—and now he was somewhere else entirely, and that woman was smiling at him. He turned to run before he'd finished processing the situation.
He pushed off the ground—
His legs didn't move.
He tried again. Nothing from the waist down.
Thea watched him patiently. With soul energy this pervasive, you think you're going anywhere before I finish talking?
Zoom gathered himself quickly. Whatever else he was, he wasn't someone who lost his composure for long. "What do you want?"
"Practical. Good. You have two options." Thea raised a finger. "One: my associate over there throws you into the Speed Force." She gestured toward Trajectory.
"Two: you take the name Black Flash and work for me." A pause. "Your call, Mr. Zoom."
Zoom took in the island with slow, careful glances. His experience ran far deeper than Trajectory's—he identified almost immediately that this location existed outside the timeline.
"And what exactly is the difference?" he asked, testing.
"The Speed Force absorbs you completely. Your past, your memories, your abilities—everything becomes fuel for the space itself. Nothing of you remains." Thea spread her hands. "Work for me, and you stay yourself. The job is simple: chase speedsters who are damaging the timeline and bring them in. A generous arrangement, wouldn't you say?"
It was total erasure versus working for someone else. Zoom didn't take long. He agreed, and was issued the Black Flash designation.
Thea had no illusions. He was already scheming an escape. She didn't mind. The soul energy she'd threaded into him was sensitive enough to register the finest changes—the moment he made a move, she'd feel it. A few failed attempts, and Zoom would discover the appeal of eating, sleeping, and apprehending rogue speedsters for a living.
Something else clicked into place for her too. She finally understood why, in the original timeline, Killer Frost had taken Black Flash out with a single strike during the Savitar arc. It wasn't that Caitlin had suddenly become that powerful—it was that both of them were already operating under the same organization's authority. The whole thing had been theater.
I poached two heavy hitters from the Speed Force in one day. Thea permitted herself a moment of satisfaction.
Trajectory delivered the customized Speed Force device to the avatar. With all three of them—avatar, Trajectory, and Zoom—pulling their weight, and Trajectory being a research scientist who had independently improved on the serum, and Zoom being a scientific mind in his own right capable of tuning Speed Force mechanics—it took only a few days for the Aurocore Eye 2.0 to come fully online.
Timeline disruptions were now catalogued, tagged, and sorted automatically. The combination of raw processing power, the blue energy source, and the sea beast's millennia of immersion in temporal currents produced something that could actually track where Batman had gone—no more wandering blind.
After a few more failed escape attempts, Zoom resigned himself to the situation and stopped trying.
To stress-test the Aurocore Eye 2.0, Thea sent both enforcers out on patrol. The objective was simple: find temporal trespassers. The method: straightforward.
The time stream proceeded to have a very bad week.
From behind her monitoring screens, Thea watched Trajectory and Zoom wreak absolute chaos through the timeline—chasing speedsters like they were herding chickens and dogs, scattering their quarry in every direction. Barry Allen, Don Allen, Dawn Allen, Bart Allen, Xira Allen—the Allen family, the West family, the Swann family, the three great Speed Force dynasties, all their finest members suddenly found themselves receiving entirely unwelcome visits. The epidemic of illegal timeline-hopping was curtailed with gratifying speed.
With the speedster problem handled, Thea finally had time to evaluate what Booster Gold had done with his training program.
She wished she hadn't looked.
Geriatric. The word wasn't strong enough. Average age north of forty-five, every last one of them. Absolute masters at lounging around and chatting. Combat capability? Please.
"This group is completely useless," she told Booster Gold, pulling him aside, her dissatisfaction evident. "Drop them into the Stone Age and half of them would starve to death before they'd corrected a single timeline anomaly."
Booster Gold looked genuinely pained. He was a quarterback, not a drill sergeant—and he was working with the worst possible raw material.
"What if we gave them high-tech equipment?" he offered, eventually and tentatively.
"You're offering to supply it?"
He waved his hands rapidly. "No, no—you would. They'd be armed with your weapons."
Thea stared at his perfectly serious expression, completely failing to identify the logical chain that had produced this conclusion. She relayed the request to her true body anyway.
Three days later, a considerable shipment of weapons and warships arrived—atomized into a single parcel by her true body, delivered to the Vanishing Point by Booster Gold, re-materialized on the other end, and distributed to the assembled retirees.
Watching a crowd of silver-haired former dignitaries handle energy rifles and stroke the hulls of warships, Thea couldn't find anyone to vent her feelings to.
The ships were modeled after the Daemonite vessel on the moon—with top-tier cloaking capability. Combat capability? Let's talk about something else. The energy weapons were, if anything, worse—knockoff designs reverse-engineered from alien hardware, barely twenty years ahead of current Earth technology.
This finally explained something that had nagged at her: why the Time Masters Council's weapons had always seemed so underwhelming. The mystery was solved. It was because the weapons were knockoff designs reverse-engineered from alien hardware, barely twenty years ahead of current Earth technology.
"I'm heading back to Earth for a bit," her avatar told Booster Gold. No lengthy explanations—the mental load of existing in two places at once was substantial, and Thea needed rest.
She handed off the Batman search and the timeline maintenance to him, closed the connection, and let her true body recover.
The White House had a very comfortable bed.
Approximately two days later, her mother evicted her.
"I am running this entire country on my own," Moira told her, in the tone of someone who had genuinely lost patience, "and you are sleeping through it. Go be useful somewhere else."
Thea found herself walking the streets alone, lost in thought.
She had a full list of things she needed to do. She had no energy to do any of them. Somewhere on the other side of the world, Diana was busy training her student and couldn't be interrupted. The League's members were all fighting something, or in transit to fight something.
She pulled on an invisibility spell and sat down on a bench, letting her thoughts drift.
A familiar silhouette passed in front of her.
"Kara?"
She reached out and caught the arm of a slightly distracted-looking Supergirl. The sudden appearance of a person materializing out of nowhere nearly sent the girl into the sky—then she registered who it was and exhaled.
Kara sat down beside her.