Boston Brand made up his mind.
He dove at his own body.
It was familiar in the way only something you'd worn your whole life could be—he knew the dimensions of it, the weight of it, the specific way it had once moved under his direction. The first thing he thought, sliding back in, was I know this. For one unguarded moment he forgot entirely that he'd been gone, that this body had been rotting, that anything was wrong.
He reached up instinctively to touch the back of his head.
The arm started to move.
And then something vast closed over him and swallowed his will entirely.
When he came back to himself, he was a ghost again, floating in complete darkness.
The lantern ring was extinguished—fully dark, nothing. The soul-link to Thea was barely there: a thread thinner than a whisper, pulsing faintly, as if the next second might be the last one it held.
He had no idea where he was. No idea if he was still on Earth.
Great, he thought. I did something very stupid.
There was no up or down here. No landmarks, no reference points, nothing but black extending in every direction. He picked a direction at random and flew.
He flew for what felt like a long time—or possibly a few minutes. Time had no traction in this place. Eventually, he found something: white filaments crisscrossing in every direction, like the load-bearing structure of something vast and very old. They were the color of old paper, or old bone. White that had been white for so long it had started to look like grief.
"Who's there?"
A point of blue light drifted toward him from some distance away. Deadman held his ground.
The light drew closer. So did the person carrying it. Both of them stopped. Both of them stared.
Both of them recognized each other.
"Dr. Palmer?" Deadman looked at the fully armored figure of the Atom and had three simultaneous realizations: that he was surprised to see him here; that he was surprised Ray Palmer could see him at all, since the Atom couldn't perceive ghosts without yellow-ring assistance; and—most pressingly—that the only reason either of them was visible to the other was if something had gone very badly wrong for one of them. "What are you doing here? Where is here? Wait—you can actually see me?"
Palmer's helmet meant Deadman couldn't read his expression. But the body language of a man who has just convinced himself he might be dead was unmistakable.
"...Can I see you?" Palmer said, slowly. "Why can I see you? I shouldn't be able to see you. Unless I'm—" He stopped himself. Ran through the logical implications. His posture went carefully rigid. "Did I die?"
"Did I live?" Deadman said at the same time.
A long, peculiar silence.
In the normal run of things, they would never have had much reason to talk. Ray Palmer was one of the world's leading scientists, heir to significant research, young and accomplished and fluent in the language of educated people everywhere. Boston Brand had dropped out of high school, spent his twenties in circus work and the company of people his mother wouldn't have approved of, and died before he'd had a chance to fix any of that. They had approximately nothing in common.
When they started explaining how they'd each ended up here, the gap only widened.
Deadman's explanation was brief: he'd tried to possess his own Black Lantern corpse and been consumed by something much larger.
Palmer's was considerably more involved. He'd received access to a significant body of atomic research from Thea at some point—work she'd attributed to another source, though she hadn't specified where it originated. What she hadn't mentioned was that the source was himself, decades further along. He'd been building on his own future research without knowing it, and the result was that his understanding of the subatomic world had taken a very sharp upward curve.
He'd hitched rides on phone signals into virtual environments. He'd mapped the internal structure of active computing systems. This time, he'd been curious about Black Lantern ring construction, found what looked like a microscopic structural gap, and slipped inside to study it.
After that, it had gotten complicated.
Deadman, listening to all of this, had exactly the expression of a man handed a technical manual in a language he'd never encountered.
Palmer, listening to Deadman's explanation in return, looked roughly the same.
Magic and quantum physics met in this place, extended their hands politely, found they shared no useful vocabulary, and agreed to keep moving.
They explored together.
On the other side of something that wasn't quite space, Thea registered a flicker in the spiritual marker she'd placed on Boston Brand—not gone, but wrong. Somewhere it absolutely shouldn't be. She noted it, filed it, and had no time to act on it.
There was a very large problem in front of her.
The figure was approximately a hundred meters (330 feet) tall, draped in a green hooded mantle, and methodically passing judgment on the criminals of Gotham City.
"Cairo. Theft. You stand condemned."
A burst of black energy. A screaming man was reduced to nothing—not ash, not residue. Not even a soul left behind.
"Tynes. Armed robbery. You stand condemned."
Thea pressed two fingers to her temple and watched.
The Spectre. A Black Lantern now—which was not a sentence she'd expected to ever need to parse. His chest bore the Black Lantern insignia, and the power radiating off him was genuinely uncomfortable to stand near, even at distance.
She'd faced him once before. He'd been stronger then—considerably. Whatever the Black Lantern ring was doing to him, it was filtering out something essential. She could handle this version, she estimated, but it would cost actual effort.
She looked to her left, at the empty air beside her.
"Phantom Stranger," she said. "I know you're there. Step out. Because I need you to explain to me how you managed to kill Jim Corrigan while knowing he was the Spectre's host. And I want a real answer."
The air shifted. The Phantom Stranger stepped out of it—as he always did, as if he'd simply been standing behind a curtain the whole time.
His expression hadn't changed. The one Thea had come to think of as his permanent setting: the face of a man who has no strong feelings about anything, including his own continued existence.
"The Voice commanded it," he said. "No reason given. No grudge involved. I was told to act, and I acted."
Thea exhaled slowly. She looked back at the destruction ahead of her.
Here was the part she found genuinely incomprehensible: the Presence—God, whatever title one preferred—was apparently in a sufficient state of internal disorganization that His own avatars were actively undermining each other. One minor extension of divine will had gotten a second minor extension's vessel killed. And now the second extension was running loose inside a Black Lantern body, dissolving Gotham's criminal population into absolute nothing.
Efficient, she supposed. Also spectacularly counterproductive.
"And you have no solution," she said. It wasn't a question.
The Phantom Stranger shook his head, with the specific equanimity of someone who made peace with categories of problems they wouldn't be fixing a very long time ago.
She turned back to the Spectre and thought through what she knew. Without a host, the Spectre was genuinely fearsome—divine wrath given form, constrained by nothing, operating at full capacity. With a host, his power ran through human limitation. Add a Black Lantern ring's mediation on top of that, and the current version was somewhere under a tenth of what he actually was.
Still enough to erase people from existence and leave nothing behind.
She raised her right hand and snapped a bolt of lightning directly at his face. The kind of strike that could vaporize a normal person through solid cover.
Against the Spectre, it flared once and ceased to exist.
He turned and looked at her. He appeared to be assessing whether she was guilty of anything.
The result came back inconclusive. She was not, strictly speaking, a good person. She also didn't meet whatever bar he was applying tonight.
He turned back to Gotham's criminals.