The Vanishing Point. The end of time.
"Still no sign of Bruce?"
Booster Gold shook his head. "He was forcibly redirected before—the trajectory drifted off Omega's set path. That makes him a lot harder to track."
Thea had no good answer for that. The trail had gone from a predictable pattern to a completely erratic one. Booster Gold was leading his ragtag band of elderly bureaucrats across the timestream, patching up temporal anomalies in Batman's wake—and as for when it would ever end, the deeply honorable Booster Gold had absolutely no idea.
She kept working through the backlog at the Vanishing Point, trying to reconstruct Batman's movement trail.
Nothing.
The self-styled Time Masters Council currently consisted of a hundred-odd aging officials, five ships, technology approximately twenty years ahead of Earth's, fewer than ten combat-capable young operatives, and weapons that were essentially knockoff energy rifles. Enemies with no name weren't worth engaging. Enemies with a name, they couldn't beat. In short: a deeply embarrassing organization.
The two speedster enforcers, however, had been remarkably productive. Rogue time-travelers had become nearly extinct along the timeline.
She returned to Earth. Oliver found her there, and told her why he'd come.
"Barry moves fast—Wally's been rescued, and Savitar is Barry? So the whole plan is to keep it from him while they figure out how to stop Savitar?" Her older brother had hauled himself to Central City on his own initiative. After he finished the story, Thea fished around in her Wealth Space and tossed him a vivid green grenade.
"What is this?" Oliver caught it, caught off guard—though he had to admit the color suited his aesthetic.
"An inertia grenade, modeled on Turtle Man's cells. On detonation it creates a heavy-deceleration zone roughly five hundred meters across (~1,640 feet). Once Savitar's slowed down, the rest of you pile on. Put him down with overwhelming fire."
She sounded completely unbothered.
It played out almost exactly as predicted.
The Flash, Kid Flash Wally West, Impulse Bart Allen, and Savitar—four speedsters tearing through Central City in a desperate chase. In the end, Green Arrow used his sister's grenade, detonating it at a point where the four were converging. It created a deceleration field.
"Overwhelming fire" turned out to be off the table. Inside the zone, every speedster was reduced to normal human pace, and bullets slowed to near-stillness.
That made it Oliver's show.
He calculated every escape angle and reaction window, then loosed twenty arrows in one unbroken motion. Even at near-frozen speed, they sealed off every direction. Forward, back, left, right—Savitar had nowhere to go.
He was defeated.
Barry, true to his nature, made the same choice his future self had made: exile. Savitar was banished to the Speed Force. History had bent itself back to the right path at a strange angle—Savitar's fate, it seemed, could only ever be the Speed Force.
Strange, the things fate insists on.
Thea hadn't made her presence known. She watched alone from the sky as Savitar's scheming amounted to nothing. Fate's grip wasn't that easy to escape.
Over the next two weeks, she moved constantly between Earth and the outer cosmos, working toward a more aggressive approach to Blackest Night.
After Blackest comes Brightest—and in her current tier of power, Brightest Night looked almost quaint. Nekron descended, a trickle of death-energy contaminated the Earth's will, and the forces of The Green and The Red threw a tantrum. That lingering residue wasn't even worth calling a scratch. She bypassed the Parliament of Trees entirely, slipped into The Green through the back channel Swamp Thing provided, and laid a broad containment net along the outermost layer of the Earth's will. Even if Nekron managed to seep a little power through, the damage would be minimal.
With the Earth's natural deforestation trend already in check—both the environment and civilization moving in decent directions—she extracted a measure of energy from The Green and used it to forge ten counterfeit Green Lantern rings.
With Earth's affairs settled, she traveled to Oa.
The proposal for a joint coalition was rejected before she'd finished speaking. The Guardians were as immovable as stone.
"Your perspective is impossibly narrow. I can let it go that you tipped off Larfleeze and had him ambush me. But why are you still clinging to those laughable categories? Yellow Lanterns are evil? The Indigo Tribe was founded by Abin Sur, so they're traitors? The Blue Lanterns are defectors? Do you not understand that a universal crisis is bearing down on you?"
The relationship between them had hit an all-time low. She wasn't about to stroll into someone else's house just to vent. She wanted the domain of Death—but she had no intention of dying for it.
The Guardians ran deep. Billions of years of accumulated power. There was no telling whether they had contingencies specifically designed for her.
She entered Oa through illusion, making one final attempt.
The Guardians remained unchanged. Three conditions: abandon the Blue Lanterns, surrender the Indigo Tribe, and dissolve the Yellow Lanterns.
Thea almost laughed. "You are going to die horribly."
She dismissed the illusion and left.
To break Nekron properly, she couldn't prevent Blackest Night—but she also couldn't afford to do nothing, not if she wanted to tip the scales of will-power in her favor. The trick was restraint: don't let it go too smoothly, but don't stop it from being summoned either. That was an extraordinarily fine line to walk. Fortunately, the Guardians refused to cooperate—if Nekron couldn't claw his way out, that would've been a real problem for her.
The Oa visit wasn't entirely fruitless. There had originally been twelve Guardians. One had been killed and possessed by Parallax during the Coast City incident. Ganthet and Sayd's exile accounted for two more. When Thea had last visited Oa, nine remained. Today there were eight.
Ruling out diarrhea, menstrual leave, childbirth, and other entirely mundane causes—the absent Guardian was almost certainly the one who would trigger Blackest Night. Scar.
There was a ninety percent chance she'd already departed for Sector 666 to begin summoning the Black Lantern rings. The event was close. Very close.
Without much hope, she sent an illusion to Zamaron—homeworld of the Star Sapphire Corps.
The Sapphires, the Violet Lanterns of Love, received her warmly. Their history was entangled with the Guardians' own—their founders had been among the Guardians' kin, women who'd broken away over disagreements on how to handle the rings, traveled here, found the violet power source, and built the Star Sapphire Corps.
"Your Majesty, please come and witness the depth of our love." The Zamaron Queen—blue-skinned, same lineage as the Guardians—led Thea to the violet power battery.
What Thea saw stopped her cold.
Inside an enormous amethyst were two skeletons, encased together, with a pair of weapons wrapped alongside them.
"They are a pair of lovers," the Queen said, voice rising like a hymn. "Undying and inseparable. Their love transcended every mortal boundary. They are the source of our strength."
Thea stared at the fossils entombed in that ancient crystal.
Those two. That's Hawkman and Hawkgirl, isn't it.
And judging by the crystal's age—at minimum four thousand years. Possibly far older.
She'd always wondered why neither Hawkman nor Hawkgirl appeared anywhere in her timeline. Now the answer was obvious. Horus had been eliminated. The two of them, caught in the aftermath, had been carried here on an alien vessel. The Queen's reverence was earned—their love was real, genuine enough to keep them together forever, with no reincarnation and no departure, their souls sealed in that crystal for eternity.
Which was precisely why Thea's timeline held no Hawk-pair.
She wanted to warn the Queen: those two skeletons would be among the first priority targets when the Black Lantern rings came for them. But she had no standing to say it. Either the Sapphires destroyed the crystal themselves or the Black Lanterns did—the end result was the same for the power battery. She could only offer polite exclamations about the beauty of love and move on.
As things stood: rage, fear, hope, compassion—all four were hers to wield freely. Greed had been nudged forward through her encounter with God. That left only Green's courage and Violet's love.
The Queen's philosophy, in Thea's view, was unhinged. Love justifies everything. You can do anything for someone you love, law and universal values be damned. A little too raw for her tastes. She let it go.
At the end of their conversation she raised Blackest Night. The Queen's optimism genuinely surprised her—in the Queen's reckoning, crises of this magnitude happened several times per century across the cosmos. Nothing to worry about. And there was, beneath the words, a faint condescension toward this New God who seemed to be getting wound up over nothing.
Thea let out a dry little laugh and said nothing more.
As Saint Walker always said: "All will be well."
Fine. If nobody else is frightened, why should I be? Then let's all sit back and wait.