By Thea's estimate, the El bloodline's raw power combined with the Luthor bloodline's intellect meant Kara might, in time, surpass even Superman in what she ultimately achieved.
The party wound to its close. The wine—a divine vintage, as always—did what it always did, and laid out an assortment of female heroes and female cops in cheerful disarray. Everyone found a room and slept.
They'd laughed and carried on all day. Diana headed back to resume training her student. Thea began thinking about the future.
The Guardians' replacement of Hal Jordan appeared on the surface to be a response to his repeated insubordination. In reality, it was not that simple. Information coming in from the Yellow Lanterns and the Indigo Tribe confirmed that the Green Lantern Corps had been mobilizing across the universe with increasing frequency. They were positioning themselves.
Only one enemy could put the impassive little blue Guardians into that kind of urgency.
The Blackest Night was coming.
She'd considered trying to prevent it. But this was the will of the universe itself—life implies death; it was the natural order, a cause written into the fabric of existence. She could not stop it. She should not stop it.
The consciousness underlying this universe was incomparably stronger than that of Earth-2. If she placed herself in direct opposition to it, she estimated something like the Phantom Stranger would materialize within the next few seconds to make its displeasure known.
There was, technically, one permanent solution to the Blackest Night: cremate every corpse in the universe. No body, no rising.
She knew it was impossible. By a conservative estimate, ninety percent of all planets across the known universe practiced burial. Every planet she'd personally visited—without a single exception—buried their dead.
The Green Lantern homeworld of Oa alone had nearly a million deceased Lanterns interred in its cemeteries, many of them carrying the title of Greatest Green Lantern.
If Thea proposed burning them all, she might as well declare war on the Green Lantern Corps outright. It would be faster and only slightly less offensive.
And that wasn't even accounting for Earth. Outside a handful of countries in Asia, burial was the overwhelming norm globally. Presidential authority alone could never push a universal cremation mandate through. She'd need to reinstall a monarchy and enforce it by royal decree. Conservative estimate: hundreds of millions dead in the enforcement alone.
And then there was the fact that every single superhero's lost family members—every one of them—were buried in the ground. Including Themyscira. Burn all of them? She would almost certainly cause more deaths than the Blackest Night itself. She wasn't about to do something that stupid.
She put the thought away.
Not long after, through official channels, she arrived at one of A.R.G.U.S.'s secure facilities.
Before leaving the party, Diana had raised the subject of Harley Quinn—no major recent offenses, but being compelled to go on life-threatening missions with a bomb surgically implanted in her neck was inhumane by any measure. And during the Darkseid invasion, Harley had performed well. Was there a case for clemency?
Thea agreed. Harley was trending in a better direction—still chaotic, but not recklessly so. Better to pull her out and watch how she developed.
She went to A.R.G.U.S. directly and told Amanda Waller, without preamble, that she was taking Harley Quinn.
"Can you give me a reason?" Waller's expression was tight. Someone walking in and taking a prisoner this openly was a blow to her authority.
"What kind of reason do you want? Government paperwork? An executive pardon? A signed letter of commendation from the Justice League? Name it. I can produce any of them." Thea found this mildly amusing.
Her leverage over A.R.G.U.S. at this point was absolute. No one in the apparatus could outmaneuver her.
Amanda Waller exhaled slowly. "You can take Harley Quinn, but—"
"No 'but.'" Thea's voice was perfectly level. They weren't on the same level anymore. Waller no longer had standing to negotiate.
The handover was completed in minutes.
"I'm... free to go?" Harley Quinn, who'd been doing gymnastics in her cell, looked genuinely startled when the neck device was removed.
Waller walked out without a word and slammed the door. Harley blinked, looked around in confusion, then appeared to experience a sudden revelation.
"Oh! Little Thea, you came to save me?" Thea didn't respond.
"Jim! Guard! I'm leaving, okay? Ha ha ha—" The guards stared ahead, expressionless.
"Deadshot, I'm going! I'll come visit sometime!" Deadshot nearly came out of his skin when he saw Harley waving cheerfully at him through the bars from the outside. Can I stand by your side until the very end? Those words were barely cold, and she was already gone.
"Don't bother seeing me out—I'll be back to visit, I promise! —" She was still bellowing into the facility while clinging to the gate, craning her neck toward the interior. The sheer volume of her voice announced that she was exceptionally, aggressively pleased with herself.
Thea grabbed her before she could do any more damage and got her into the car. Left unchecked for another sixty seconds, half the prison population would have come out to settle old scores.
She didn't dare release this particular chaos agent directly into the general public. She dropped Harley with the Management Committee for now, left Lobo in charge of watching her for a few days, and reserved judgment.
With Harley handled, she was back at the Vanishing Point inside ten minutes. Trajectory and the Black Flash had both been productive lately. Time to review the haul.
"This one came through from the sixty-fourth century." The Black Flash stepped forward with a middle-aged man: gray-streaked hair, unfocused eyes, a manner that was slightly too casual for someone in handcuffs.
Thea pulled up the Aurocore Eye's records and read through them carefully.
The file was appalling. Every human being around him was, in this man's worldview, an NPC. He'd killed at random across multiple parallel timelines with breezy indifference. He hadn't limited himself to adjacent universes—he'd been active in Thea's own, and A.R.G.U.S. had mounted several failed arrest attempts, each one foiled by future-era technology he'd brought with him through the timestream.
"Don't look at me like that," she said. "You think you're superior because you come from the future? In the thirtieth century, the Legion of Super-Heroes had already established an absolute prohibition on unsanctioned timeline violations. Your era is three thousand years past that ruling. You chose to ignore a rule everyone agreed on. There is nothing ambiguous about your guilt."
The magician's eyes held only contempt. Even as a prisoner, he didn't believe he was in any real danger. These twenty-first-century people might be able to navigate the timestream, but their worldview and understanding were, in his estimation, equivalent to those of prehistoric humanity. That gap was his armor.
Thea extended her hand and lightly touched a finger toward his forehead.
A violent burst of light detonated outward. Her fingertip was blasted back. Both of them froze.
"Nano-restructured body?" Thea peered at him with the expression of someone who'd just spotted an interesting specimen. He'd modified himself to a terrifying degree.
The magician was equally shaken—though he wouldn't show it. Even cuffed with a power suppressor, he'd never believed anyone here could actually kill him. In his era, any weapon from this primitive age should have been trivial against the peak of future technology. That was the foundation of his contempt. But Thea's casual attempt had given him something uncomfortably close to genuine dread.
"Don't look at me like that," she said pleasantly. "Killing you won't cost me a moment's hesitation."
She extended her hand again. This time, she pushed divine power through it. Even a nano-restructured body cannot resist soul extraction. The magician's expression went blank. He fell forward and hit the floor. His eyes were open and empty. He was dead.
Thea gathered the soul fragment.
The demonstration had been intentional: the man was a genuine threat who deserved to die, and his death served as a clear message to the Black Flash.
"Bring the next one."
The second prisoner was brought forward—a small red-haired boy, barely five feet tall (about 150 cm), dragged out by the Black Flash with visible terror on his face.
"Well, well. A famous name." Thea scrolled through the records and found more or less exactly what she'd expected. This child had not committed any offense—it looked very much like the Black Flash had brought him in as a personal grievance.
She looked at the Black Flash for a long moment, letting the silence carry its own weight.
"Bart Allen, of the Speed Force lineage." She looked at the file again. "His only offense was an accidental first-time displacement through the timestream, with no history of intentional violations."
She closed the record.