The objective factors limiting Nekron were another matter entirely.
Take Zariel—the notably flamboyant angel who had always lingered at the Phantom Stranger's side. Upon resurrection, the man had apparently decided to shake things up and undergo a complete gender change.
Thea lay flat on her back in her own bed, staring at the ceiling with an expression of genuine alarm.
What if Nekron tried something similar?
He was the embodiment of pure, absolute death—clean, untouched, unchanging. But purity wasn't the same as permanence. If Nekron, through whatever obscure and terrible logic drove a being like him, ever decided that a gender change was worth attempting, he would basically have the role of Death locked up. No set of criteria could stop him after that.
Nekron must go.
She couldn't kill him. That was simply a fact she had to work around. But she could contaminate him. His entire nature was pure—pure death, pure negation, absolute and unalloyed. That purity was precisely its vulnerability. Introduce enough of The Green and The Red into that nature, let the contamination spread, then drag him to the deepest and most inaccessible corner of existence and bury him under a hundred layers of sealing formations. The problem would be managed for the foreseeable future.
Furthermore, the Ankh had been hinting at something: glimpse death through life. That made the Life Equation research non-negotiable. All roads, considered from any angle, led back to the same conclusion—Nekron, the obstacle blocking her path, had to be removed.
The plan had one additional advantage: she didn't need to execute it alone. Raise a banner of cosmic justice. Present Nekron as the existential threat he genuinely was. Rally every force that had any stake in continued existence to the cause. Let them believe—accurately, even—that they were protecting the cosmos.
Meanwhile, Thea would be eliminating her most dangerous competitor.
Virtuous. Mutually beneficial. No contradiction whatsoever.
She lay in bed another three days, letting the accumulated exhaustion drain away, then started moving again.
Star City first. A loop through familiar streets. The city was quiet—almost peacefully, unremarkably quiet. Damien Darhk, who in the original timeline had eventually become a serious problem, had been pulled out of circulation long ago and redirected toward considerably more constructive activities. Without him as an anchor, Star City's criminal ecosystem had atrophied to the point where it barely warranted dedicated attention. This was why Tommy and Laurel had recently migrated to Gotham in search of more substantial opposition. When the hunting ground runs dry, you find another one.
Shado, nearly seven months along, had relocated to the new continent to prepare for the next generation of the Queen family.
Roy Harper, like a number of the younger heroes, had packed a bag and set off to find his own path.
As for Oliver—she had gone looking for him and been turned away entirely. The Green Arrow was in Central City, apparently helping Barry deal with Savitar.
It was unexpected, but not unwelcome, when her phone buzzed with an incoming call from Lois Lane.
They agreed on a coffee shop nearby. Thea arrived, they exchanged a few pleasantries, and Lois got straight to the point.
"Clark is being impossibly stubborn," Lois said. Her tone was measured, noticeably more restrained than it had been in her earlier years—motherhood had taken some of the edges off. "The Daily Planet was acquired. The new management wants to shift editorial direction toward digital media. What exactly is wrong with that?"
She wrapped both hands around her cup. "He acts like a man frozen in amber, clinging to print journalism like it's the last true institution in existence. I cannot reason with him. Clark—Krypton didn't have print newspapers. What is he actually defending here?"
Thea sipped her coffee slowly and let the full picture come together.
The Daily Planet—founded in 1826, an institution in every meaningful sense—had been approaching the end of its era for years. Younger readers and older ones alike had moved to digital; the decline of print was not a trend but a tide. It had nothing to do with justice or ethics. It was simply the shape of change.
Out of consideration for Clark's feelings, Queen Consolidated, Wayne Enterprises, and a handful of other wealthy heroes had tacitly agreed to leave the Planet alone. The result of all that careful avoidance was that the paper had been picked up by a neutral conglomerate—not good, not bad, simply businesslike.
Thea was privately amused by the tax issue. Clark had immediately dug up the new owner's history of tax irregularities and turned on Lois, demanding to know whether conscience mattered more than money. Which was a fair moral question, in isolation. The truly funny part was that in this day and age, almost nobody didn't play games with their taxes—Queen Consolidated, Wayne Enterprises, Palmer Tech, all of them. The new owner of the Daily Planet had simply been unlucky enough to wander into Clark's crosshairs at the wrong moment.
The new owner had also replaced Perry White as editor-in-chief. With Lois.
Clark saw it as a betrayal. For the first time in their marriage, he had slammed the table.
"He said I took the wrong side," Lois said. "That I'm legitimizing people who don't deserve it."
She was now executive producer of the evening news division and executive vice president of new media—considerably more senior than her old column-reporter position. On paper, a genuine advancement. In the apartment, unbearable.
"Here's what I've been thinking," she continued, with the careful word-choice of someone who had genuinely thought it through. "I need to find more common ground with Clark. Something that actually closes the gap between us."
She met Thea's eyes directly. "I want to learn Kryptonian. The language, the customs. And if it's possible at all—I want to be able to fight alongside him. Not just stand near him looking supportive."
Thea studied her for a moment. Lois was watching the distance between them accumulate, and had decided to do something about it from her side. She wasn't asking Clark to change. She was doing the changing herself—quietly, without any announcement. In Thea's opinion, this was considerably wiser than the version of Lois who had once charged headlong at General Zod without a plan.
"Learning to fight alongside him," Thea said. "Actually keeping pace with him."
"That's exactly what I want."
Thea weighed the practical scope of it. Turning an ordinary human into someone who could fight alongside Superman was, on paper, a massive undertaking. But difficult and impossible were not the same category. And Lois wasn't as ordinary as circumstances had made her appear. On Earth-3, Superwoman was Diana's direct counterpart, and Superwoman's base template was Lois Lane. A different world's history had made that version extraordinary; this world's path had made her ordinary. The potential was in the design.
"Come with me," Thea said.
She brought Lois to her lab and assembled a sleek, tech-forward bracelet while Lois watched.
"Pure technology. Looks like a smart health tracker from the outside. But while you sleep, it delivers immersive learning—language patterns, cultural context, combat techniques. I've preloaded Kryptonian language and customs, plus every major Earth fighting discipline currently in practice." She brought up the display interface. "Download anything else from here as you need it. Conservative estimate: thirty days to complete the full course. What you do with it afterward is up to you. But with solid fundamentals and proper armor?" She gave a small, decisive nod. "Front-line capable. No question."
"Thea—thank you." Lois pulled her into a genuine hug and left the lab at a pace that suggested she'd already started navigating the device interface on the way out.
Thea had been about to leave herself when something at the edge of her awareness made her pause.
She tilted her head upward.
Clark was watching from the moon. It was, admittedly, quite a distance to maintain silent observation from. She considered pretending not to notice for approximately three seconds, then conceded it was pointless and flew up.