The light broke like a wave.
"Connection severed."
"Connection severed."
Across Gotham, every Black Lantern touched by the expanding white came apart—black energy dissipating, animated dead collapsing back into what they actually were. The effect kept spreading. It swept outward for over fifty kilometers (about thirty miles), blanketing the city and everything around it.
Everyone in Gotham looked toward where the fighting had been, trying to understand what had just happened.
"Don't—" Thea said. "Stop—"
She reached out and pulled back. Reached and pulled back again.
In the brightness, she thought she saw it: another version of herself, indistinct but unmistakably present—and beside that other self, a small white shape waving. The little unicorn. The fragment of herself she'd once split away. The purest and least compromised part of her, which had been living its own separate existence for a long time now.
It turned toward her in the light and waved.
She understood what was happening.
That fragment of herself—the purest and most uncomplicated part she had once split away—and the White Dove were burning together now, merging in the final strike, and there was nothing to be done about it, and no reason to try.
She reached out again, slowly, and this time did not pull back. Just held her hand open for a moment.
Then she let go.
It's all right, she thought. I don't regret it. I didn't then. I wouldn't now, even starting over from nothing. The past had made her what she was. The separation had served its purpose. She could grieve without regret, and she could let go without grief destroying her.
She closed her hand and let her arm fall.
The combined light hit the Black Lantern Spectre square in the chest.
He survived it.
He was the Spirit of Vengeance—filtered and diminished and rotting inside a Black Lantern ring, yes, but still that. A strike of that magnitude would have annihilated almost anything that existed. The Spectre held. His massive frame was broken and scored in ways that weren't healing correctly; the divine face beneath the hood had been burned into something that barely passed as a face anymore. But the construct was still upright.
Thea moved before he could begin to recover.
She manifested both arms at his scale, intercepted the Spectre's straight punch, and used the block to drive inward from either side of his chest—fingers hooked like grapples—and pulled. The decayed musculature of a Black Lantern body wasn't built to resist that kind of force applied from within—the black flesh tore without much argument. There was no blood behind it. No organs, no beating heart.
There was a small figure, curled in the hollow.
"Get him out," she shouted.
The Phantom Stranger was already moving. He reached in, took hold of the figure, and pulled Jim Corrigan free.
The response was immediate.
Something vast and luminous came down—not physically, in the way that certain things exist outside of physics and are nonetheless completely real. The Blue Lantern construct Thea had been maintaining for the last several minutes detonated outward from its center. She absorbed the impact and was pushed back roughly a hundred meters (about 330 feet), tumbling through the air until she found her footing.
The Phantom Stranger was still holding Corrigan, which turned out to matter.
The Black Lantern shell disintegrated. The light settled. The true Spectre had returned—and Jim Corrigan was back where he belonged.
Corrigan opened his eyes.
He looked at the Phantom Stranger.
"You." The weight of everything Corrigan remembered—the betrayal, the alley, the particular way bullets felt entering a body—was present and fully accounted for. "You rotten— you deserve to die for what you did to me—"
The Phantom Stranger nearly produced an undignified sound. You were under a Black Lantern's control when you said that, he thought, with rising desperation. You are now free. You are currently saying the exact same thing. Do you not understand that I just dragged you out of—
He looked to Thea for some form of assistance.
Thea was sitting on the edge of what had recently been a wall, one hand resting lightly on the ground, face turned away.
The Phantom Stranger had been navigating human grief for thousands of years. He recognized the expression. He left her alone.
The true Spectre combined with its restored host was considerably more powerful than the Black Lantern version had been—but Corrigan had only just woken up, and his resentment was at its absolute peak. The Spectre, perhaps in the interest of solidarity, had apparently decided to hand the controls over to his host for the moment.
Which was why Jim Corrigan was now throttling the Phantom Stranger with both hands.
Zauriel came and sat near Thea without being invited.
She glanced at him sideways. His charge was currently being throttled at close range, and he appeared unbothered.
"Were they your friends?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "They were good people."
A pause. "I could collect them. Their souls—gather what remains, bring them to Heaven."
She turned to look at him more directly. "Their souls are—"
He drew his sword. The blade lit.
What happened next was something Thea hadn't expected to see. Small lights—dispersed, fragmented, scattered by the intensity of what had just burned through this area—began to respond to the sword's radiance. Drawn inward, slowly, the way scattered iron filings respond to a magnet being brought near. Gathering. Reorganizing. Taking shape.
The methodology wasn't purely soul-work. She could identify the blend—prayer, intention, accumulated blessing, the specific weight of something consecrated over enormous stretches of time. A cousin to the devotional energy in her own balance. Zauriel was calling the fragments together the way a name calls a person: you are this. You belong here. Come back.
Two spheres formed in the air between them.
One shed a faint red warmth—Hank Hall, unmistakably. The other—
Thea looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked at Zauriel—noted the slight unsteadiness in his posture, the fractional irregularity in his breathing that hadn't been there before.
That cost him something, she thought. And that second light—that's a once-in-eternity grade of soul. Heaven is going to know exactly what it's receiving. And after several thousand years of extremely poor performance reviews, Zauriel is about to have a very, very good one.
She kept that thought to herself.
She looked at the two lights floating in the air between them, and she nodded once.
"Go," she said.
Zauriel gathered the two spheres without ceremony. A single streak of white—ascending directly without a backward glance, without a word to his colleague, who was still audibly objecting to his situation across the courtyard.
The Phantom Stranger watched his only companion of thousands of years leave at high speed. He extended one hand toward the departing streak of light with the expression of a man watching his backup walk out.
Thea gave him a small wave and also left.
He's fine, she thought. The Spectre can't actually kill him, regardless of what Corrigan currently believes.
She followed the light.
The powers of Hawk and Dove didn't belong to any individual—they belonged to roles, to a continuous function in the world's equilibrium that had to be filled as long as the world required it. What had made Don Hall what he was would have been incompatible with Heaven's economy anyway; the power remained behind, drifting, looking for new vessels.
She watched it settle.
A pair of sisters she didn't know—Holly Granger and Dawn Granger—took a breath and looked at their hands with the expression of people who had received something they hadn't applied for.
Thea watched until she was certain the transfer had completed, then turned away.
Not my business anymore, she thought. You're your own people now. Whatever you do with it—that's yours.
She finally had a moment to look in on Boston Brand.
She reached for his marker, felt the shape of it—and went still.
He's inside Nekron?
She extended her sense carefully. It wasn't ideal. There was nothing she could do from outside—and she didn't yet know that Ray Palmer was in there too.
He'll come out when Nekron is summoned to the surface, she reasoned. That's the only workable sequence from here. Hold on, Boston.
She moved on.
Thea swept through the major cities over the following hours, the Ankh amulet making the transit cost almost nothing. First wave of Black Lanterns: contained, everywhere she checked.
Faora and Hal Jordan had taken down General Zod together.
After that, they'd gone to Star City. Oliver had been struggling—Black Lantern Robert Queen was a problem he couldn't look at without it costing him something—and Faora and Hal had arrived in time to close it out for him.
And somewhere above every city that still had lights on, Superman moved.
Wherever the situation was worst, he was already there.