"Sealing the breach at Central City is still on you," Flash said. "Earth-2's people have already gone home."
"Done," Thea said without hesitation.
Superman hesitated—then couldn't hold it back. "That white light. Can it really bring the dead back?"
He wasn't the only one. Flash. Aquaman. They all looked over. They all had deceased family members.
Thea ran through the same explanation she'd given Oliver.
The practical risks were severe. The ethical line was clear: power like this couldn't be exploited, especially not by them. Once the precedent was set, it would never stop. "And the white light doesn't fully obey me," Thea added honestly. "It works well passively, but actively wielding it is much harder—forcing it would cause more harm than good."
"I understand." Superman's voice was quiet and final. He seemed to be saying it to himself as much as anyone else. "The dead should remain at rest. Their work is done. We shouldn't bring them back."
"But what about the ones who were revived?" Aquaman raised a practical point. "Are they still themselves? Do we need to keep them under close observation?"
"Who came back?" Thea had been deep in the fight against Nekron the whole time—she'd only found out about Felix Faust because her people had reported in. The rest she'd genuinely missed.
Batman, freshly returned but operating at full capacity, brought the main screen to life. Photos, one by one.
She was impressed, despite herself. He had just rejoined the team, yet he'd clearly done extensive homework—not a trace of rustiness. He was already running intel briefs. Nightwing was a good man, but Bruce outclassed him by an order of magnitude.
"Captain Boomerang. Nick Necro. Felix Faust. Giovanni Zatara. Reverse-Flash. Boston Brand. And these two—winged, from off-world."
Thea stared at the images of Hawkman and Hawkgirl. Her expression went blank for a second. They were on the battlefield? They flew in from the Star Sapphire homeworld? She genuinely hadn't seen them.
"They're not aliens. The male is Khufu—the Khufu of Egypt, same one from the pyramid. The female was a priestess of his era, Chay-Ara. They died off-world, but they're as human as anyone on this planet."
She paused.
"There's also Boston Brand. He's different. Very different."
The expression on her face was not quite smug, but close enough.
"You might not be able to see it from here, but even through a screen, I can tell. Boston Brand's resurrection is completely unlike the others'. Pure life-energy and death-energy are simultaneously acting on his body. His life-signature was already unusual—now it's in a category of its own."
"The others absorbed the residual white light and revived—straightforward enough. Boston Brand was revived by the Entity itself." She crossed her arms and studied the screen. "I genuinely can't explain what he is right now. He reads as neither living nor dead."
"I think—I might have come out with him," Atom said, his face going slightly pale. "Does that mean I—"
Thea turned and looked at him for a long moment. Head tilting one way, then the other, making no effort to hide her assessment. She kept going until Atom's color drained completely.
"You're fine," she finally said. "The life-energy will make you abnormally energized for a week. You won't be able to sleep. By the way—how did the two of you get inside Nekron in the first place?"
Atom launched into the story. The whole adventure, start to finish.
By the end, Thea had only one response: she was impressed. Nekron's interior, by all accounts, was absolute decay—which said something interesting about the state he'd arrived in. Not at full strength. Not even close.
"Close monitoring," Batman said, wrapping up the debrief. His voice carried the particular weight of a man who expected to be listened to.
Thea and Diana exchanged a look with Superman. The familiar Batman had returned.
Post-war logistics were, if anything, worse than the war itself.
Coastal City was covered in bodies. The white light had purged the death-energy, but when the Black Lanterns went dark, the physical remains stayed right where they fell. This work could only be left to the heiress—it required coordinating all sides, and nobody else was suited for that.
It wasn't something heroes could handle alone. You couldn't have Superman going door to door. It required phone calls—hundreds of thousands of phone calls, contact with millions of families, government coordination across every level.
Superman volunteered for the moon: Solomon Grundy's remains needed processing up there. Everyone else divided up their respective responsibilities and scattered.
Thea sealed the breach between worlds at Central City first. The S.T.A.R. Labs facility had been leveled by the fighting. One-fifth of the city was gone. Flash's team had rented a temporary apartment as a staging point; she stopped in briefly, confirmed the seal, and left.
Coastal City, when she arrived, looked like a city-sized funeral home in the middle of being organized by committee. Local police, city government, the city council, a dozen charity organizations—all of them moving at cross purposes, all of them overwhelmed.
The problem was simple and intractable: the bodies were piled together, and nobody knew whose was whose.
She was barely inside the perimeter when she nearly walked into an argument.
"That's my father's body!" A young man had both hands clamped around a corpse's legs and was not letting go.
The man pulling from the other end was built like a dock crane, covered in tattoos, ears full of rings. "That's my boss," he said flatly. "See the bullet holes in the leg?"
This exact scenario was repeating itself across the entire city.
The government had done what governments do—issued a cover story involving alien interference—and the public had mostly accepted it. Most of these bodies had been dead for years. The grief was distant and complicated. What wasn't complicated was the compensation fund: the government and several hero-aligned foundations had pooled a significant sum, specifically to cover the cost of recovering, transporting, and reburying remains. Congress hadn't blocked a single line item. The money was sitting in Coastal City's municipal account.
That announcement had brought several million people to the city by morning. Over a million bodies in total—fewer than eight hundred thousand with enough remaining features to be identifiable—and several million claimants. The math created obvious outcomes.
Thea had nothing to contribute here. She wasn't going to walk through the city with a White Lantern and run a mass resurrection—everyone home, find your own family. That wasn't on the table.
The government workers were experienced. They could tell legitimate claims from false ones.
Her actual job was the Lantern Corps situation.
The Black Hand was a problem she had no interest in. The ring that could only be claimed after death had zero appeal. She handed it off to the Green Lantern Corps to imprison wherever they saw fit.
The Indigo Tribe, Yellow Lanterns, and Star Sapphires departed in waves.
Saint Walker lingered. He'd found Earth's emotional richness compelling—humanity felt things with unusual intensity, he said, and he was thinking about recruiting. He had a few Lantern hopefuls in mind.
He lasted two weeks before leaving. His real mission was the Blue Lantern beast, Adara—a three-faced phoenix whose form Thea had glimpsed briefly during her time wearing the White Lantern ring.
Atrocitus departed with Dex-Starr—the enormous blue-gray cat—after the two of them had killed several animal abusers in what Thea chose not to officially acknowledge, and headed back to Sector 666 with the rest of the Red Lanterns.
The only one still on Earth was the orange one.
She found Larfleeze in what appeared to be a junkyard—except that every item of junk had clearly been personally collected. Old refrigerators. Cars with missing doors. Buckets. A three-legged stool, which he was sitting on, bent over a surface, writing something. His right arm was occupied clutching his lantern, so he was doing it left-handed, three claws gripping the pen like a dagger.
"Hey! What are you doing?" She hovered above him.
"Writing," Larfleeze said, looking up with the calm of someone who had decided she wasn't an immediate threat.
She looked at his "writing materials." She almost laughed.
He had found a roll of toilet paper somewhere. On it, in unsteady letters, was a list. A very long list. His ring's translation function had converted it into English, which meant she could read it: shampoo, flip-flops, trains, airplanes...
The list ran over thirty feet.
"Is this... your letter to Santa Claus?" she asked.
Larfleeze lit up. "Yes! Yes! The bald man said this Santa can fulfill any wish. This planet is amazing!"
Lex Luther had gotten to him. Of course Luthor had gotten to him.
Thea stared at Larfleeze—a being who, for all his power, operated at approximately the intellectual complexity of a very verbal dog—and thought about how unsurprised she'd be if Luthor ended up with the orange ring eventually.
Larfleeze was still talking. She stopped listening, opened a portal directly behind him, and pushed him through it.
She pulled out Nekron's scythe and aimed it at the portal's other side. "Get out. Go back to Okaara. Come back to Earth and I'll use this on you."
With that settled, she finally had a moment to gather her thoughts.
She put the scythe away. Nekron could serve as a reference point, but not a model. Learn from me and you'll live. Imitate me and you'll die—the saying applied perfectly. Their paths were completely different.
She'd said it before the White Lantern fight, and she believed it more now: death is life's companion. The two don't cancel each other out. They belong together. The way to find truth in death is to look for it from within life. That was her path.
On the other side of the world:
Cairo, Egypt.
The ancient light of civilization had long since gone elsewhere. What remained was a city full of ordinary people managing ordinary lives—narrow streets, corners thick with uncollected garbage, everyone moving through their days with the particular numbness of people who'd stopped expecting anything different.
Today, though, there was something to look at.
Two people moved through the streets in a way that gathered eyes from a block away.
Modern Cairo was comfortable with short sleeves and jeans on young people, and women needed only a headscarf to be unremarkable. Even so, these two stood out.
The man looked like he'd walked straight out of a bathhouse—a white cloth wrapped at his waist, bare-chested above it, the kind of muscle that suggested not gym work but the simple accumulation of physical labor over many years. He moved without self-consciousness.
The woman wore a bright floral robe and was looking around openly, with the unguarded curiosity of someone seeing everything for the first time. They spoke to each other in a language nobody around them recognized.
Young people stared from a distance. Some older residents were affronted—this was not how a woman presented herself in public.
One elderly woman, short and solid in a black robe that reached her feet, with a face set in permanent judgment, planted herself in front of them and began to loudly lecture the woman, punctuating her words by jabbing her finger.
The man's eyes went sharp and flat. He grabbed the old woman by the collar and lifted her off her feet.
The young woman said something low and quick. He looked around—every eye in the area had dropped away from his. He set the woman down, took his companion by the arm, and walked on.
"Chay-Ara. This place—it isn't our world anymore." His voice was heavy. "At least, it isn't the one I knew."
The woman had no answer for that.
These two were, of course, Prince Khufu and Priestess Chay-Ara—revived by the white-light waters, luckier than they'd had any right to expect. During the Blackest Night their minds had been cloudy, but their personal will—preserved across centuries by the star-sapphire crystal, the power of Horus, and the N-Metal—had been strong enough to hold. Strong enough that when Thea shattered them, they'd clawed back through space to return to Earth with Black Lantern rings still attached.
The white light had revived them cleanly.
But Earth had changed. Ancient Egypt was a topic in textbooks. The two of them had arrived without clothing, tried to draft the first person they met into service, and been repeatedly shot by police officers before they fully understood their situation. Without the N-Metal war hammer, they were only slightly stronger than normal humans.
Four thousand five hundred years away, and now they were back—approaching every new thing with careful wonder, and underneath the wonder, a thread of genuine fear.
"Wait." Khufu threw his arm out in front of Chay-Ara. His eyes had found something in the shadow of a doorway.
A tall figure in a dark cape stepped out.
"Why are you following us?" Khufu's speech was halting—a patchwork of Arabic and English, the two languages he'd found most common on Cairo's streets, assembled over days of careful listening. His mind was sharper than it used to be: thousands of years of N-Metal exposure had reshaped both his brain and body.
Batman—who had volunteered for this surveillance assignment himself—paused. He also spoke Arabic. Communication, at least, was possible.
Thea had said they weren't aliens. Ancient humans, revived. Worth verifying in person.
He wasn't surprised by much these days. Aliens, goddesses, and now two people from before the fall of the New Kingdom. Another Tuesday.
He told them, plainly: I'll be watching you. Don't make trouble. Then turned to go.
"Hey—wait." Khufu held up his hands, sketching a shape in the air. Long. Wide. Like this. "Have you seen our hammer? I think it's still on Earth somewhere."
Batman, whose philosophy of surveillance included a strict policy against arming unknown subjects, said nothing, and left.