Nine miles (15 km) west of Gotham City, Tim Drake flew low.
After the battle over the Batman mantle, he had declared himself Red Robin and left for a time. Tonight was his return. He used a self-built glider to move through the air—elegant as a great bird, if you could ignore the boulders being hurled at him from behind.
Beside him flew a young woman with golden hair, wearing a crimson bodysuit and matching gauntlets, a deep-red lasso coiled at her hip.
Cassie—Diana's student, Wonder Girl.
They'd run into each other by accident. Cassie had been passing through. Tim had received a message from Dick: his biological parents had been raised as Black Lanterns, and he was racing back to Gotham. He'd literally crossed paths with Wonder Girl mid-flight, exchanged a few words, and discovered she wasn't as much of a stranger as he'd assumed. After a few months under Diana's training, Cassie was full of rescue-first ideals and eager to make a name for herself. She didn't need to think twice about joining him.
On her first outing, Wonder Girl got knocked unconscious.
Solomon Grundy had broken loose—and that massive zombie, a creature Thea herself had once been completely unable to handle, gave Wonder Girl a thorough education in the gap between confidence and ability. He knocked her pride right back to the basics in three moves.
If Thea had been there, she would have had a genuine philosophical question for Nekron: does Solomon Grundy even qualify as dead? He was still walking around. He wasn't exactly alive, but he certainly wasn't entirely dead either.
Unfortunately, Cassie had no such meditations to occupy her.
Solomon Grundy—born on a Monday, christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday, took ill on Thursday, worse on Friday, died on Saturday, buried on Sunday—was a creature of ferocious power. Back then, it had taken rookie Superman, rookie Batman, and Thea working together to contain him—and if Thea was honest, the latter two had mostly been providing moral support at the time. The point stood. The version in front of Cassie was well beyond her current level.
He'd ignored her lasso entirely, backhanded her clear across the terrain, and she would have been badly injured already if Tim hadn't pulled her out of the follow-through.
Diana's twin swords, she thought. Her lightning spear. She had a lasso and her fists. That wasn't going to be enough.
"We can't pull him back into the city," she told Red Robin. "We have to deal with him out here."
Tim had already reached the same conclusion. He glanced over. "What can you do? Quick version—abilities."
Cassie wasn't about to hand a near-stranger her complete profile on a first meeting. She gave him the abbreviated version.
Tim processed it briefly. "Can you make it to the moon under your own power?"
She blinked. She had no idea. She'd never had any particular reason to find out.
"Here's the problem," he said. "That thing can't be killed. We can't beat it in a straight fight. But I don't think it can fly—and if we can get it into orbit, we contain it and deal with it later. It's the only option I see right now."
Cassie looked back at the lurching giant behind them. "But I've seen Black Lanterns fly. Why wouldn't he—"
"Black Lanterns copy the deceased's memories from before death," Tim said, working it through as he spoke, not fully certain but unwilling to wait for certainty. "Solomon Grundy technically never died—not by our records. So the ring's full functions might not be accessible to him."
He didn't know how much to trust the logic, but staying put wasn't going to help anyone.
They led the zombie across the terrain for a while, Cassie keeping him occupied while Tim broke off and found what he was looking for—a hidden Bat-cache in a hillside. A concealed panel, a series of locks, and with a roar of ignition, a space shuttle tore upward from underground.
Grundy's intelligence was not his strong suit. When he saw one of his targets leave, he didn't pause to consider why—he simply leaped onto the ascending vehicle.
Tim had been counting on exactly that. He triggered the containment locks remotely, trapping Grundy aboard, then jumped clear himself.
They stood on the ground together and watched. The shuttle climbed. Grundy raged and wrenched, but Batman's engineering held—not indefinitely, but long enough. His bellowing faded as the atmosphere thinned. The shuttle followed its preset trajectory and disappeared into the dark above the clouds, carrying its passenger toward lunar orbit.
A long silence.
No incoming boulder. No massive shape dropping back down.
"He can't fly," Tim said, more to himself than to her.
Cassie stared after the now-invisible shuttle, faintly startled. She'd expected a longer fight. That's one way to handle it, she thought.
They waited another few minutes to be certain, then headed into Gotham.
Gotham was already a spectacular disaster.
Here, at least, Batman's no-kill policy had a distinct silver lining: an enormous criminal population that was spectacularly difficult to permanently eliminate, and thus still breathing tonight. Harvey Dent, skulking with his people through the city's back corridors, had apparently decided that Gotham was his turf, and no collection of dead men were going to move in on it. He'd rallied his gang into something approaching a resistance line.
Gotham's top-tier rogues had mostly survived. The second tier had thinned out through infighting and bad luck—enough that the Black Lantern count had been climbing since nightfall. Add in Dick Grayson's parents and Tim's own, and the city was in genuine chaos.
They found the current Batman—Dick Grayson—back-to-back with Damian, both of them wielding flamethrowers, holding a perimeter. Two others flanked them: a woman Tim recognized from Gotham's criminal underground—Firefly—and a heavyset man with a broad, scarred face who had apparently made the trip over from Central City specifically to exchange fire techniques with her. Heat Wave.
The four barely held the line.
Tim and Cassie hit the flanks, and six became a fighting unit. They punched through the encirclement and broke out into open ground.
"Gotham Central," Dick said, already moving. He was wearing the Batman mantle now and carrying the authority that came with it. Nobody argued—not even Heat Wave or Firefly, who had theoretically better options and practically none.
Thea arrived in Gotham not long after. Commissioner Gordon had rallied his department—the sight of their old chief giving orders had steadied the officers enough to hold a working defense line. Thea reinforced their position with a miniature sun, added what covering fire she could against the Black Lantern advance, and turned to go.
"Boss."
Boston Brand materialized in front of her before she could leave. Deadman—floating, translucent, visibly unsettled. He pointed downward at a Black Lantern figure below. His own body, moving with Black Lantern purpose. He wanted answers.
The honest truth was that Thea had never fully resolved the question in her own mind. Was Boston Brand alive or dead? By Nekron's logic, he was dead—dead was dead. By her own understanding of souls, he had intact consciousness, intact will, intact identity. By her definition, that meant he was still here, still alive in every sense that mattered.
She and Nekron had fundamentally different definitions of death.
"That isn't you," she said, and made sure he could hear that she meant it. "That is a puppet. Nothing in it belongs to you. Remember that."
She was already four things at once and had twenty more things to be. She gave Deadman two sentences, because he was one of hers, and then she left.
Deadman floated there a while longer, watching his own body lurch around below him.
He was, he had to admit, uniquely qualified for this kind of existential crisis. He'd explored dozens of planets. He'd witnessed phenomena that broke every framework he'd been given. Across the entire universe, he'd never encountered another consciousness quite like his own—dead and yet unanchored, aware of itself, still moving through a world that technically had no room for it.
He kept watching.
He was going to get to the bottom of this.