Chapter Two – Ritual
New York
March 20, 14:11 EDT
A diner in New York City seemed like a strange place to meet give the sensitive nature of their conversation, but as soon as Dick Grayson saw the building, he understood why Donna had chosen that place. A huge pentagonal shield obviously reminiscent of the symbol of the House of El, red and yellow inverted, displayed a K. Below it, boxy letters spelled out KRYPTON CAFÉ. Inside, Nightwing scanned the tables and booths. Done up in various kitschy superhero themes, including an eerily accurate replica of the Batmobile's cockpit in one of the booths.
Dick made a mental note check in with Bruce about a potential security leak there.
And then there were the servers. Dressed up—some halfheartedly, others with alarming accuracy—as superheroes, Dick noticed a red-haired girl dressed as Robin, a few Spider-Men (Spider-Mans?), and one that looked like a greasy twenty-something version of Superboy.
"Over here, Dick!" Nightwing looked and nodded, smiling. Donna Troy sat in a corner booth, a red hoodie and jeans not quite managing to conceal her literally supernatural presence. He'd already noticed her as soon as he walked in, but wanted to… take it in.
Whatever "it" was about this place.
Before one of the servers could greet him, he made a bee-line for the booth where Donna sat across from her. Donna Troy—Troia—was as radiant as ever, with deep red lips, eyes that would make a man love her and fear her in equal measure, and a supernaturally flawless complexion like Wonder Woman He and Donna were often told they'd make a cute couple, even though he only ever saw her as a friend, and he could only assume she felt the same way. Perhaps it was others' attempts to press them into a relationship that had made it seem unappealing.
"Isn't this place great?" Donna said, a flashing a big, giddy smile. "The owner is thinking about taking it nation-wide. Change the name and make it into a big thing. I suggested 'Planet Krypton'."
"'Great'," Dick repeated. "That's one way to describe it."
"What, that cute red-head dressed as you making you feel a bit uncomfortable?" Donna leaned forward. "Is that a blush I see, Richard Grayson?"
"I haven't been Robin for a long time," he said. "If you want to see blushing, bring Tim here. Actually don't, it would probably kill him."
Dick folded his hands and forced the smile off his face. "But I guess we should get to work."
Donna placed a tablet computer down on the table. "Well the problem is that the Team has most of the young talent. I've not been able to find many people I trust."
"It's talent the Team needs. They're the ones in the trenches." He paused, considering for a moment that he might have seemed dismissive of Donna's goals for her new group. Since Jason had died practically mourned by nobody outside Mount Justice and Wayne Manor, Donna had written the Team off. Heroes should be honored, she thought. Not given anonymous memorials hidden away in some basement cave. Or, now, in the Watchtower garden.
"Who do you have?" Dick said after a minute. "Aside from the obvious."
"In addition to Rachel, I've found a few candidates. We could ask one of the Roy Harpers."
Dick grimaced. "Red Arrow has a child to take care of," he said. "And Arsenal is not a team player."
"Noted." Donna flipped to the next image, though with a smirk that made Dick suspect she'd already gotten one of them.
A blond woman in a red-and-orange tracksuit. "This is Jessica Chambers. Her paternal grandparents were Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick, members of the All-Star Squadron during World War II. Diana speaks highly of them."
"What about Chambers herself?" Dick said. "It says here she's a Ph.D. student at Ivy University."
"I met her personally," Donna said. "In the field. She inherited her grandmother's super strength, and her Thesis project is a reverse engineering of her father's Super Speed formula, which he took with him to his grave. So far, she's had a lot of success. She's not as fast as Impulse, but she makes up for it with her strength."
"Kid Flash," Dick said. "Not Impulse."
Donna frowned, looking down at the table. "I still think of Wally when I hear that name."
"So do I," said Nightwing. "He was the first person besides Batman and Alfred to know my secret identity. He was my best friend. But I don't want to sell Bart short either. I think Kid Flash is who he was meant to be. Impulse is almost like this character he plays so we don't see how much his future hurt him. But sometimes he drops that character and the real Kid Flash shines through."
Donna looked wistfully at Nightwing for a moment. "So," she said. "Yay or nay on Jesse Quick?"
"Definitely ask her," said Nightwing. "Next?"
Donna swiped the image again. Now the image was grainy and blurry, but there was the shape of a woman shrouded in smoke. Donna swiped through a few more.
"On February 19th," she said, "here in New York, there were reports of a disturbance of some kind. A group of aliens that Icon and Hawkwoman identified as Gordanians after the fact."
"After the fact of what?" Dick said.
"The aliens were killed by an NYPD SWAT team," said Donna. "The corpses were taken to the STAR Labs facility."
Donna pointed out the window, and Nightwing followed the line of her arm to an island on the East River. A five-story building jutting from the bedrock seemed somehow ominous.
"The aliens that Icon and Hawkwoman saw were all male Gordanians," Donna said. "Gordanians can't fly naturally but use Nth Metal wings like the Thangarians did in ancient times. But there was clearly a flying woman present at the battle judging by these shots, and she doesn't appear to have the wings."
"She looks like she's from Jersey," Dick said. "Judging by her tan."
"Or maybe Space New Jersey," said Donna. "Listen I spoke with Shayera and Icon independently. A flying woman with orange skin being pursued by Gordanians? They both agreed she was most likely a Tamaranian slave. Tamaran is a planet that's been devastated by multiple invasions, and though they're independent at the moment, many of their people are in exile, thought to be enslaved by interstellar criminals who employ Gordanians as private security."
"I take it this Tamaranian's body wasn't recovered," Nightwing said. "You think she might be alive somewhere."
"My money is that she's still at STAR Labs." Donna sat back. "Not everyone on their payroll is as benign as Emil Hamilton or the guys in Laos. The man in charge at this facility is Silas Stone, a string theory researcher who has been sued eighteen times for accidents caused by unsafe working conditions. Each time he's settled out of court."
"That's still a far cry from keeping an alien prisoner against her will," said Nightwing.
"Is it though?" Donna sighed. "He treats his own employees like garbage and they're human. If he thinks an alien will help his research, who can know what he'd do?"
Nightwing thought for a moment. If Donna was right, then there was someone in danger who needed to be rescued. But they didn't know if the alien was even there, so their first step had to be recon, gather intelligence. Even if this new team would be operating in the public eye, they couldn't go in blasting everything in sight.
"You might have to give Red Arrow a call if you want to check out this alien. I'm going to be managing Artemis' new undercover operation, which is super sensitive—"
"Couldn't—" Donna began in the middle of his sentence.
"—which I really can't ask anyone else to operate." Dick thought a moment. "Maybe I could delay her insertion long enough to lead the reckon on STAR Labs."
"Even when it's my team, you want to be the leader," said Donna, rolling her eyes. "Actually my next candidate might be a big help with the intelligence gathering part."
She moved to the next image on the tablet. A teenage boy with red hair and numerous freckles.
"Danny Chase," she said. "Spoilt brat by the sounds of it, but he's a damn good hacker. Probably better than you. He won't be on the public roster."
"Sounds good to me. You're good at making people play well with others," Nightwing said. "And I can't be everywhere."
"One more." Donna swiped the screen. Another red-head, this one a young woman.
"What is it with all the red-heads lately?" Dick waited for Donna to react to that, but she didn't take the bait.
"So who is this?"
"Lilith Clay," Donna said. "Precognition. I'm not sold on her yet, to be honest."
"You don't know if she's legit?"
"No, she's the real deal," Donna said, her brow furrowing. "But precognition is all she's got. She doesn't have any other powers or training, so she's a liability in a fight."
"Then she doesn't fight," Dick said. "We could still bring her into this thing as a consultant, right? Give her our number and a codename. Omen, maybe."
"A little on the nose, don't you think?" said Donna.
"Says the heroine whose codename is just her own last name in Greek," Nightwing said.
"Okay, you've got me there." Donna tapped the corner of the tablet computer rhythmically, staring off at the sky. After a moment, she stood up and stretched. "I guess we should start. Who do you want to contact?"
"You can fly, so I say you should head to Ivy Town and talk to Jessica Chambers. I can't go too far from Hoboken as long as I'm managing Art's undercover operation."
"I don't mind making the trip," said Donna, "But couldn't you just Zeta there?"
"Not if you want to keep this entirely off the radar of the League and the Team." Nightwing stood up and tapped a few buttons on wrist unit to sync with Donna's tablet and begin transferring the files he'd need: Omen, Danny Chase, and Red Arrow.
"Ugh." Donna collected her things. "All this cloak and dagger bullshit is exactly why I left the Team in the first place."
Nightwing frowned. That wasn't why she had left, or at least not entirely. He knew that Donna and Jason were close, and Jason's death had played a big part in Donna removing herself from the Team. In a way, Nightwing thought she blamed Kaldur, at least partially, for pushing Jason as hard as he did.
If only she knew how much Kaldur had blamed himself for that.
"We'll get through it," Nightwing said. "Compared to what Artemis will have to do, our 'cloak and dagger bullshit' is easy mode."
Hub City
March 20, 17:32 CDT
Tim Drake pulled his motorcycle to a stop in front of the address he had been assigned and felt ill at ease even with the horsepower at his disposal. This was one of the better neighborhoods of Hub City, but Tim would have felt safer in the Narrows of Gotham. The town's best days were long since behind it. Even its resident costumed hero, a reclusive faceless man known as The Question, had seemingly abandoned the Hub to rust and decay.
As if to punctuate the desolation, the internet café he was supposed to be going to was now a charred husk of a building, red brick and glass strewn about even as smoke poured out past the hap-hazard application of Crime Scene tape.
Tim tapped on his coms button. "Kal, we have a problem. This place was torched, days ago by the looks of it, though it's still smoldering. Do they not have a fire department here?" Tim looked up and down the street, but saw nobody else out, even this long before sunset. The only cars within two blocks were either stripped of their tires or still rolling on them.
"Learn what you can about the fire," Kaldur replied. "If the building was looted before it burned, then the security footage may be in the possession of a local criminal."
Tim sighed. That meant he'd have to stay even longer in this town, a place that made the Bat Cave look like the Gotham Plaza Hotel by comparison.
"On it. I hope I can find a good hotel to stay at because there's no Zeta tube within 300 miles."
"I'm aware of that," said Kaldur. "And I'll route Spoiler and Batgirl to your location as soon they're finished with their tasks."
Dallas
March 20th, 17:56 CDT
Stephanie checked her watch. It was almost six PM, which meant the internet café she'd been assigned was about to change shifts. The Team agreed that would be the best time for her to get into the office.
Okay, Steph, she told herself. Just stay cool. Nobody knows my secret identity yet. I'm just any old teenage girl slipping into a web café to goof off.
Stephanie pushed the door open and the cool air crashed over her like a wave. Even in mid-March the heat in Dallas was more than what she was used to, and the café's air-conditioning felt really nice. But she had to focus. At the counter, the clerk was tapping away at the register.
"Could I get a mocha frappe?" Steph said.
Apparently the guy didn't notice her approach because when she started speaking he practically jumped onto the table that housed the coffee machine.
"Whoa, sorry," she said. "Didn't mean to startle you."
"Y-yeah," he said. The guy was maybe 18 and a bit pudgy, with curly brown hair and rimless glasses. His nametag said Chet.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, I can get you a frappe. I'm just supposed to change shifts in a minute and my other guy isn't here yet." Chet began to make the coffee.
In her ear, the communicator buzzed to life with Aqualad's voice. "Spoiler, what are you doing?"
She turned her back to Chet. "I'm thirsty, okay?"
Evidently the boy had sensitive ears. "Yeah, yeah, okay, I'm going as fast as I can!"
"Uh, no not you," she said. "I was talking to—"
"Your imaginary friend," offered Beast Boy over comms.
"My imaginary…" Stephanie stopped herself. She tapped her ear and showed him her phone, hoping he didn't notice that it was actually dead. "My mother. Bluetooth."
Comms went dead for a minute—presumably while Aqualad tore Beast Boy a new one. When they came back, Aqualad only had one thing to say.
"Stay on task."
"Do you want cinnamon and whipped cream?" Chet said.
"Yup." Stephanie waited for it to be finished, and paid for it, and began to make her way to the back of the café. She noticed that her receipt had a pass for an hour of computer time, couponed off, with a little heart drawn next to it. Great: Chet was hitting on her.
She sat down at one of the computers and began typing, checking the clock. It was seven-past-six by now and still no sign of Chet's replacement. Across the room, the boy slammed the phone down, tapped angrily on the counter, and then picked it up and dialed again.
This time a blaring heavy metal song began playing, tinny and muffled. It was on the other side of the wall, in the back of the café. She heard some cursing and a thud. But if that was the receiving end of the call that Chet just made… that meant the new shift had arrived and found company already here.
Shit.
Steph looked over at Chet, trying to ignore her pounding heart. He didn't seem to hear the muffled ring of the phone from the front of the store. Not that he'd be much help. Still, Stephanie had none of her gear, nor the anonymity her mask provided. But she'd been trained by some of the best hand-to-hand fighters in the world—and someone might be in trouble. Even if he had horrible taste in ringtones she had to help him.
"Call the police!" she shouted across the café.
Steph leapt out of her chair and ran to the door at the back, kicking it open. More muffled cursing and scrambling. Behind the door there was a narrow hall that turned left and right; since the commotion was to the right, she turned that way, slipped through another small door an into an office that seemed a lot bigger than it really needed to be.
Inside were three masked thugs: a scrawny man, a rather large man, and a woman who had a good six inches on Stephanie. Unmoving, on the floor, a long-haired rocker dude lay sprawled out, his phone on the floor beneath his hand, and both looking like they'd been stomped on. Steph couldn't tell if he was breathing.
"I told you to turn that goddamn phone off," the woman thug said.
"You told me to stomp it," the big thug said. "So I did."
"Before it rang, dumbass. I told you to turn it off before it rang!"
Steph didn't need to hear any more, she pulled her hood up and cleared her throat, catching the attention of the three crooks. The big thug had a shovel, the scrawny one had a switch blade, and the woman a pair of brass knuckles.
"You picked the wrong door, little girl," the small thug said. "This ain't the ladies room. We're Rock Paper Scissors and we're gonna—"
"I did NOT agree to that name," shot back the woman, who Steph guessed was Rock. Paper ignored the bickering and came with a powerful overhead swing of his shovel. Stephanie side-stepped the head of the shovel and caught the handle with one arm, using the other to smash it, splintering the wood. She leapt into a knee to Paper's solar plexus, then pushed off his shoulder, rolling across the desk behind him
And right into Rock's fist. The brass knuckle caught her in the side, sending a wave of pain shooting through Steph's ribs. She responded by kicking Rock in the face, staggering her.
Scissors swiped with his switchblade, and Stephanie grabbed a landline phone from the desk, flinging it at his face, even as Paper tried to smack her with his shovel again. Stephanie stood, pressing her back against the wall to brace herself on the shaky desk as she caught the shovel with a crescent kick. The already splintered wood shattered, the head of the shovel snapping off and crashing onto a printer.
What she hadn't realized as how damn hard the big lug was swinging that shovel. Her foot stung from the impact and the momentum continued until Paper clobbered Rock in the face with the broken handle of the shovel. Rock backed up, tripped over the body of the night shift guy, landing flat on her ass.
Steph grabbed the head of the shovel, slid off the desk underneath a follow up attack from Paper with the broken shaft, then stood and flung the head of the shovel at Scissors, catching him square in the chest.
He dropped the bag he was holding, which fell on its side and spilled out its contents: half a dozen video tapes. The CCTV footage she was after. Someone must have been covering their target's tracks.
Paper brought down his shovel-handle, missing her head but snapping the stick a second time over her left shoulder. Steph grunted from the pain and responded by grabbing the thug's arm and pulling forward, then stomp-kicking his leg. He fell forward, off balance, and Spoiler used his own momentum to toss him him over her shoulder and onto his comrades. For good measure she fell on him, delivering a trio of quick punches to his midsection.
She would have done more, but Chet was suddenly in the hall outside the office.
"Holy shit, did you kill them? Did you kill Walter? Holy shit."
"Walter?" Steph asked, realizing as soon as she did that Chet meant his replacement. Steph grabbed Walter's arm, pulled him closer. She checked his breathing and his pulse. Alive, at least. But his eyes were still unresponsive.
"He's out cold," she said. "Did you call the police?"
Now that the adrenaline surge of the fight was starting to wear off, Stephanie was beginning to feel the blows to her side and her shoulder, and beginning to sweat from the exertion. Already self-conscious fighting in street clothes, the last thing she wanted was Chet staring over her bloodied shoulder.
"Yeah, I called them," said Chet. "I told them some crazy blonde had just kicked the door down."
"Damn it," she said. "Walter needs a paramedic; he may have a concussion. I have to get out of here."
"What am I supposed to do with these guys?" Chet shrieked as he pointed to Rock, Paper, and Scissors.
"They're not getting up any time soon," Steph said. She grabbed the bag of tapes, scooping the ones that had fallen out back into it. "But I have to run. Superhero business."
Steph darted out the back door, hearing distant police sirens. Now she just needed to get back to the Zeta tube and everything would be fine.
"Spoiler!" Aqualad's voice buzzed in her ear.
Okay, maybe not fine.
"I have the tapes," she said, hoping that success would be enough.
"What happened? The police are on route to the scene and radio chatter mentioned a blond female suspect that may or may not possess super-human strength."
"Well that can't be me," Steph said. "I can't even out-bench Bumblebee."
"Spoiler."
"I'll debrief when I get to the sub," she said. "Trying not to get caught right now."
Indian Ocean
March 19th, 18:34 CDT
"You succeeded in getting the tapes," Aqualad said, examining them. "There's a lot here. It will take some time to go through. None of them have dates on the labels."
"Right. I didn't know which one was relevant," Steph said.
Kaldur sat back down. The debriefing room wasn't nearly as cozy as the old accommodations at Mount Justice, and the Watchtower had proven limited when the Team and League had been working out of it simultaneously. Miss Martian had insisted on trying to recreate the Mount Justice atmosphere as closely as possible with the new base.
"So what happened during the retrieval? This was supposed to be a stealth operation, yet reports are saying that police and ambulances were both on the scene."
"Look," she said. "Someone beat us there: three thugs who called themselves Rock, Paper, and Scissors, and they were trying to steal the tapes too. Whoever threatened to blow up my dad's cell must be trying to cover his tracks."
Aqualad didn't respond, which usually meant he was withholding information so as not to color Spoiler's account. She kind of hated it when he did that.
"So Chet—the guy at the counter—said the guy taking the next shift hadn't arrived yet. So I got a coffee and was waiting. Then he called the other guy, Walter, and I heard Walter's phone ring in the back, and the thugs swearing about it."
"They were already in the building when you arrived," said Aqualad.
"Right. I didn't have a key to the back and didn't have time to explain anything, so I just kicked the door open and got to the office. The thugs attacked me—"
"Which explains your injuries."
"They got in a few hits, yeah," Stephanie said. "I'm not as good as Artemis or Batgirl."
"You're fourteen, Stephanie. It's remarkable that you took on three adult opponents by yourself."
"Regardless," she said. "I messed up."
He shook his head. "Given that you had no gear and no backup, you did as well as could be expected."
Aqualad sighed. He reached for the holoprojector on the table, turning it on. Three photos appeared above the table—their builds familiar; but now they were unmasked. They appeared to in their late-twenties to mid-thirties, and had amber skin and dark hair.
"They're all Latino," Steph observed. "I didn't notice accents."
"They were born and raised in the United States," Aqualad said. "The three of them have arrest records going back years—all of them from their home city, El Paso."
"Isn't Blue Beetle from there?" said Steph. "You asked him about them?"
"I will when he returns to duty. His school is not on Spring Break like Gotham Academy." Aqualad manipulated the controls of the holoprojector.
"But something more to the point here. All of them have been linked with a figure known as La Dama, a criminal mastermind that many think is simply an urban legend."
"You think she's not?" said Steph.
"Beetle has encountered her before," said Kaldur. "But her involvement in this just makes things more confusing, not less."
"How so?" Steph felt her brow furrowing and wished it would quit that.
Aqualad turned off the holoprojector.
"Our profile of the bomb-threat perp is a world traveler who is good with computers. If he were trying to cover his own tracks he would just hire local talent to steal the tapes—or more probably destroy them. That means this wasn't a failed attempt to cover his tracks, but that La Dama is also trying to discover his identity. It's imperative we do so before she does."
Paris, France
March 21, 00:39 UTC
Batgirl clinged to the side of a Parisian bistro, her grapnel line and clawed gauntlets holding her in place. She hoped she didn't damage the building's face too badly, apparently Napoleon had eaten at that very café before. It was closed at the moment: this wasn't a part of Paris that stayed busy all hours of the night. Across the narrow street, beyond a tiny electric car, was the squat red brick internet café that might have the footage she needed. Before radio silence she'd got the impression that Spoiler's mission had run into a bit of trouble. As Batgirl began to aim her secondary grapnel so that she could zipline down to the web café, something caught her attention.
Granted, that something seemed to be fishing for it: a man clad in a bright white bodysuit, utility belt clamed about his waist and a gray sash across his chest that seemed to serve no function whatsoever. He sneaked around behind the café, where Babs could just make out the knob of a door, pulled down goggles from the crown of his head, and got to work with lock picks.
"And here I thought Crazy Quilt's costume was a bit 'here I am come arrest me' sign." Babs aimed her grapnel at a tree that crested over the fence behind the café, so that she would have a straight shot down onto the white-garbed thief. She launched the hook and it claimed into the tree with a sharp snap. The thief looked up at it, then did a double take as he noticed the line, turning to follow it up to Batgirl's perch.
She had already left it, now hurtling down towards the thief at a sizeable fraction of terminal velocity.
"Zut alors!" he said. Then Batgirl kicked him in the chest, sending him tumbling back into the brick fence with a grunt. He spat a few curses and then got up, drawing a fencing sword. "Le Cerveau dit qu'il n'y aurait pas de héros interférents."
"The Brain is smart," said Batgirl. "But he doesn't know everything."
"Vous comprenez Français?" he said. "Zhen I will speak to you in your language, Batgirl, zhat zhere may be no misunderstanding. I am the Great Jewel Thief LeBlanc, and you have come between me and my prize."
Batgirl cocked her head at him. "So you're a jewel thief who wears white… and you call yourself The White. Is this a racial thing? I know a lot of French people have problems with the Muslim immigrant population—"
"Non!" barked Le Blanc, aghast. "I'm not like zhat, I'm not zhe bee-goat. It is not a 'Ray-Shall Thing' as you put it. LeBlanc is my name. Andre LeBlanc, Jewel Thief extraordinaire."
"So the name came first," she said. "Just clarifying: I'm pretty sure there aren't any jewels here for you to steal, which means you and I are probably here for the same thing. Ergo, I'm gonna kick your ass now."
LeBlanc thrusted his sword at her. "En garde!"
Paris, France
March 20th, 00:45 UTC
Batgirl stood on the roof of the internet café, waiting to make sure that LeBlanc wasn't about to be rescued by some unknown accomplice before the police arrived. Also she kind of felt sorry for how bad she'd thrashed him. What kind of idiot brings a fencing sword to a jewel heist anyway?
She tapped her comlink button.
"Aqualad," Babs said, ending her radio silence. "I found this shop's CCTV system. It's an old harddrive with no USB or Wifi. I'll have to hardwire it to a computer back at the base."
"A silent alarm was triggered," he said. "Why are you still there?"
"Making sure the guy who triggered it makes it into police custody," she said. The flash of sirens on the far end of the road caught her eye, and she slipped down and lay prone so the cops wouldn't notice her.
"Someone was there too?" said Aqualad.
"Yeah. A jewel thief called Andre Leblanc. I've looked him up. He's got a pretty impressive resume. Lousy swordsmanship though."
"Swordsmanship?" said Beast Boy. Batgirl ignored him.
"And get this," Batgirl said. "He was hired to retrieve this by The Brain. Do you think the Light is involved in the threats? I mean that's not usually their style."
"I think the Light is trying to figure out who sent the threat," Aqualad said. "Spoiler encountered hired goons that work for El Paso's La Dama—"
"Does the supervillain community know something we don't?" said Batgirl. "The threat didn't even accomplish anything besides wasting John Stewart's time. And ours."
"Perhaps," said Aqualad. "Or perhaps they just want to know who has access to enough Kryptonite that they can casually mail a sliver of it to Belle Reve."
Hoboken
March 26, 15:48 EDT
Sarah flung Artemis into the ropes, whispering something into her ear that she didn't quite catch. She'd called one of the moves they'd practiced earlier, but unable to anticipate what the young woman was doing, Artemis could only react, catching Sarah's arm as she swung and hurling Sarah over her shoulder in a judo toss. If it were a thug or supervillain, she would have followed it up with a painful strike to the back as Sarah landed. Instead she just let Sarah bounce off the canvas and roll to a stop.
"What the hell was that, Tegan?" Sarah snapped, pushing herself up and using the rope to steady herself. The arm Artemis had flung her by must have been sore, as Sarah kept rubbing it with the opposite one.
"I didn't hear you," said Artemis. "I just improvised."
"I said 'block three strikes'," Sarah said. "Not tear my arm out of its socket."
"No," Derek said. "It sounded more to me like you said 'bloated strike'."
"I heard it 'bladder Skype'," said another student, Julie.
"You shouldn't have heard it at all," Wayne said. "Sarah, talking fast and slurring your words doesn't make it harder for the ring mics to pick you up, it just makes it harder for your opponent to know what you're thinking. And that leads to screw ups and people getting hurt."
The instructor climbed into the arena with Artemis and Sarah. "Of course that also doesn't mean Tegan was right to toss you like that."
Artemis bit her lip. Seven years on the Team—not to mention Crusher's brutal training through her childhood—had etched reflexes, habits, reactions as normal as breathing. Someone takes a swing at you, you respond in kind. Redirect their momentum, make their power work for you. Over the past week she'd watched too many wrestling matches on DVD where strikes were simply traded, sometimes slapping just to make noise and prove that physical contact was happening. And she got it: it was painful getting slapped on the chest, but not really harmful. It just stung—assuming of course your opponent's hands weren't radioactive.
But just trading blows—or even just blocking blows—was a good way to lose a fight, especially against a bigger opponent. Sarah had a good five inches and twenty pounds of muscle on Artemis, and fighting her programming was difficult.
"When you perform a throw," Wayne said. "Make sure your opponent is ready. Plant your feet. Grandstand to the crowd a little, yeah? The point of a throw in this business is to make noise when your opponent hits the mat, not dislocate their shoulder. You don't so much chuck them—"
Wayne took Artemis by the wrist, squatting into a position where he had leverage. Artemis followed his lead, and got ready, playing to a crowd of eight.
"—as you help them toss themselves."
Wayne stomped the mat, his foot thudding against the plywood boards beneath, and Artemis and Wayne worked together to launch her into a summersault that Artemis had to fight every instinct in her body to twist out of and land on her feet. She slammed down into the canvas, the give taking some of the sting away as she spread out her arms and slammed them down on the mat, as they'd practiced in the drills on Friday, spreading the impact and making the landing really thump.
Several of the other trainees clapped as she landed, and Artemis curled up her legs and jumped to her feet. She wiped a bead of sweat off her forehead as it passed her eyebrow and made a mad dash for her eye.
"That was good," Wayne said. "Real good. Now work on performing it on your opponent without injuring them."
Artemis washed her face and arms and quickly changed into a loose-fitting clean shirt and a pair of khakis that Kate had bought her, —it didn't quite eliminate the tinge of sweatiness she'd worked up tonight, but it was good enough until she got 'home' to shower. Derek let slip that the other four women were heading out to some new place in Brooklyn to eat and was confused that she wasn't going with them.
"They didn't mention it to me," she said, pretending to be offended.
Artemis wasn't really surprised though. All of them had been giving her the cold shoulder since she had nearly dislocated Sarah's. At least she didn't have to fool Wayne about her real intentions. The others were starting to think she was some kind of shoot-fighter, which a cursory web search on her phone led Artemis to believe meant a pro wrestler who started real fights with the other talent.
What did surprise her was Wayne's voice in the hall behind her as she was about to step out the door of the gym.
"Tegan," he said. "Listen. I didn't mean to humiliate you in front of the others."
"You didn't," she said.
"Let me finish." Wayne sat down on a bench by the water cooler. "I didn't mean to embarrass you, but your incident with Sarah today isn't the only complaint I've had about you lashing out."
"I'm not lashing out, Mr. Williams." Artemis had to shove her actual training to the back of her mind and remember what Tegan Lee's excuse was. "But my training wasn't for show fighting, it was for riots, real self-defense. I find it difficult to let myself be hit or thrown."
"Then don't," Wayne said. "Every wrestler has to develop his or her own style and persona. If you can't get over those reflexes, then use them to your advantage. Make your gimmick someone who is untouchable, who blocks hits, dances around her opponents, but is slow to strike back, who fears her own power. Your look says heel, but if you work at it, you can be a face."
Wait, she looked like a bad guy to him?
"I'll work on that, then," she said.
"And, look," said Wayne. "You're not really 'one of us'. You're a cop. You put your life on the line, and if this Glorious Godz-with-a-Z promotion is really responsible for kidnapping, then I want you to bust the FUCK out of them. But if you don't figure this out now, you're never gonna pass as someone who actually wants to be a wrestler."
"I get it," Artemis said. "Thanks, Wayne."
He shrugged. "S'what the city of Bludhaven is paying me to do. Now get out of here, 'cause I need to hit the showers."
El Paso
March 27, 00:21 MDT
The living room at La Dama's mansion was dark. The criminal element, it had been said, was a superstitious and cowardly lot. La Dama had seen evidence of this herself—indeed she had become quite adept at using it to her advantage. But she also disagreed that it *had* to be true. Rather than continuing in superstition and fear, La Dama had learned all she could of the more arcane ways of the world: her speed dial had sorcerers, experts on alien biology, dealers in alien weaponry and metahuman artifacts. Superstition and cowardice were only useful traits in one's enemies.
One of her magicians, a sorceress known as Tala, greeted her at the door. Tala was a tall and perpetually barefoot woman with lavender hair and eyes that were a milky, luminous white. For once, her dress's neckline was reasonable, at least.
"Amparo, darling," Tala said. "It has been too long."
Tala took Amparo's hand and raised it to her lips, kissing the ring on Amparo's finger.
Amparo smiled diplomatically, though in truth the fawning sorceress annoyed her. Tala's loyalties lay with the most powerful person in the room, and Amparo was acutely aware that someday that might not be La Dama—especially if the Blue Beetle continued to curtail her operations. But that was a matter for another time.
"Have you brought the scrying stone?" La Dama said.
Tala nodded, waving a hand, her long, violet fingernails sparkling as a small marble on the living room coffee table expanded into a shimmering crystal ball. Amparo's gaze shifted back to Tala in time to see her dress shift to the usual low cut, revealing the black rune on her chest.
"You left it here?" La Dama said.
"Here, and hidden," Tala said. "Even from you."
"If my niece had found it—" La Dama let the threat hang in the air as Tala sat down by the coffee table. The room grew darker still, the front door to the mansion slamming shut. Candles that hadn't even been there when the lights were on suddenly set themselves ablaze, lighting the room in dim, flickering light. Tala's parlor tricks were impressive, but La Dama had seen them all before.
"But she didn't find it," said Tala. "And I can hardly carry this heavy crystal ball as I travel. Prying eyes are drawn to the peep hole nearest a source of light."
Amparo sat down on the floor opposite Tala, and placed a photo on the table. Taken by an informant within Belle Reve, it showed the sliver of Kryptonite that had been sent with the bomb threat against Cluemaster.
"Save the excuses. I need to find where this came from."
"Your printer, judging by the freshness of the ink," said Tala.
"You know what I mean." Amparo pressed her lips together. "Can you find the source of the K-shard or not?"
"It would be easier if you had the sliver itself." Tala closed her eyes and began chanting in some language Amparo couldn't place. Then, in Amparo's head, Tala's voice continued out of sync with her lips. "But perhaps I will find your meteorite yet."
The chanting seemed to fill the living room, the scrying stone shooting arcs of electricity. La Dama watched as the photograph on the table began to vibrate, then bulge. The Kryptonite shard—or rather a hollow specter of it, a hologram formed of magic, rose from the image as though surfacing from a pool that smelled of ink; it hovered over the sparking crystal sphere, then lowered into it.
The scrying stone flashed, showing a ghostly image of a man in a thick jacket and cap, standing over a Kryptonite rock. The rock was on a shelf, tagged and labeled. Equipment in the background indicated some sort of laboratory, but the image in the crystal shimmered as it passed through the man's head. Amparo saw from his eyes now, as he took a laser cutter and shaved off a small piece of the Kryptonite, slid it into his pocket, and replaced the stone. When he turned to leave, a guard, face obscured by the motion and the distortion of the scrying stone shouted something Amparo couldn't hear, then drew a night stick.
But the man whose memory she had borrowed pulled a a gun and fired three times into the guard's chest. The guard fell to the ground and the man began running, working his way out of the lab into a sterile hall, then into the sun. He looked around, apparently getting his bearings.
It was a university campus.
"Enough!" Amparo said.
Tala's chanting ceased, the lights returning to normal, the candles vanishing with their flames. The Crystal ball in the center of the table once again shrunk to the size of a marble and fell into a small jar of identical spheres, Amparo losing track of it visually and then mentally, other things rushing in to fill the gap in her thoughts.
"Did you find what you needed?" said Tala acidly. "I might have had a clearer read had you printed with more dots per inch."
"Your help is appreciated and your pay will be more than adequate," Amparo said. "But I don't need more magic. Legwork will get me through the rest."
"As you wish," the sorceress said, a smile playing across her lips. "Don't be late with your payment, or I shall have to turn you into something unpleasant."
Tala left through the mansion door, her clothing transforming back to a less conspicuous form, though still leaving her feet bare. Amparo slammed the door behind the witch and glanced into her living room. She knew she had to look for that crystal ball; it was a security risk, not to mention a risk to her niece. If some demon spied on her through the stone and harmed her—but she couldn't remember where Tala had put it or what the stone was concealed as; the hiding spell had already wiped those events from her mind, though they'd happened only seconds earlier.
Cursing the witch's insolence, Amparo turned to her study. A guard was shot at a university laboratory somewhere. The story sounded familiar, and where the magic trail ended, the internet would pick up the scent.
Bludhaven
March 28, 16:54 EDT
Artemis knew the warehouse that Nightwing led her into had a bit of history with the Team: it was where Nightwing had made arrangements for those who lived at Mount Justice to stay after its destruction. Most of the salvage from that event had eventually made its way to the Watchtower during the time the Team operated from there, and later to the Aquabase when the United Nations' prying eyes had made the Watchtower too crowded and bereft of privacy for a covert ops team.
So the lack of hominess in the dingy building didn't surprise Artemis, though the large ring of candles and intricate runic symbol drawn on the floor in chalk did. Zatanna always made magic seem so easy: say the words backwards, and it happens. Even though Artemis had known, intellectually, that the homo sapiens magi blood of Zee's mother and the training Zatarra had bestowed on her were the reason her power came so easy to her, it still shocked her to see that this new magic user needed such an elaborate set-up.
Speaking of the new blood, a girl of seventeen or so stood in the middle of the room, dressed inconspicuously in a black top and dark blue jeans—or it would have been inconspicuous if not for the blue cloak she wore over them and the dark violet hair that framed her very pale face.
"This must be Artemis Crock," the girl said, a weak smile playing across her thin lips. Her voice was soft and unassuming, but very direct.
"So it must," Dick said. He wasn't in his costume at the moment, or his police uniform, just simple street clothes. "Artemis, this is Rachel. She's going to be performing the ritual on us."
"Us?" Artemis said.
"The ritual requires both a target and a vessel," the girl explained, though Artemis had addressed the question to Dick. "And my name is Raven. I don't know why Richard insists I must have an alias, it's not as though I have any loved ones on this plane of existence to keep safe."
Artemis scanned Raven's face for a hint of a joke, but found none. "On this plane?"
"It's a long story," said Dick, moving to a point near the edge of the magic circle and taking a seat on the concrete floor. An intricate design with three appendages of sorts rested in the middle of the circle, and Raven took a standing position at the farthest one. "Raven can tell you about it later, if she wishes."
"She can also speak for herself," Raven said. "Take a seat, please. This will take some time."
Artemis assumed the last appendage indicated where she should sit, and moved to it. After a moment of quiet, Raven closed her eyes and, though she seemed to be sitting, actually hovered in the air, bringing her legs up to a crossed position in front of her instead lowering the rest of her body to the ground.
"What will this ritual do?" said Artemis.
"All memory of you will be blocked from the minds of those who know you exist. Raven said. "You will be a blank slate to them, someone they're being introduced to for the first time. All records of your existence will be wiped clean, and everything everyone knows about you will be sealed inside the mind of Richard Grayson."
Artemis' jaw dropped. Everyone would forget her? But that would mean…
"Kate," Artemis whispered.
"I'm sorry," said Nightwing. "She won't miss you, though, at least. She won't worry about you."
But, but… Kate.
And M'gann, Zatanna, Conner, Raquel, Roy, Gar, Bart….
Mother. Jade.
Lian, her tiny niece.
Artemis suddenly realized why Nightwing had refused to tell her anything about this: if she had known how deep undercover she'd be—
"If you wish to back out," Raven said, her voice lower and raspier, yet coming more forcefully now, "then you must do so now. Once I start the ritual, breaking it off will cast the worlds' memories of you to the winds, and then even Richard won't know you."
"Do it," Artemis said. "I didn't come this far to back out now."
Raven's eyes glowed bright white. "Then I will begin."
The sorceress began chanting in a language Artemis had never heard before. The magic circle shimmered, now less a drawing and more like a stream of ink. In seconds, it turned blood red, even as the flames on the candles turned bright white and shot up to the ceiling of the warehouse. Artemis felt the power of the spell wash over her like a warm ocean wave, and memories came unbidden to her mind, images of Artemis and her family—Crusher and Paula and Jade. Artemis' own image, when she could glimpse it, her hands and feet, the clothes she was trying to select from her closet, her own reflection in a mirror, shattered. All color and life left like a cloud of fireflies or sparks, leaving only a void.
Artemis realized that the rest of the world had gone dark, she could see nothing but her own memories playing out before her, but then she heard a sharp breath from Nightwing somewhere beyond the rightmost periphery of her vision, in the shadow, and knew that he was still with her, absorbing all that Raven's spell washed away.
Gotham City
March 28, 16:59 EDT
A relatively fresh headstone stood in an old Gotham cemetery, proclaiming half a truth. Artemis Lian Crock, Beloved Daughter. Though the woman who owned the name on the stone was beloved by her mother dearly, the implication here lie her remains had always been misdirection. The stone, as if sensing its usefulness had long since passed, and only now did it notice, weathered away in seconds, the name and epitaph becoming illegible.
Washington, D.C.
March 28, 17:21 EDT
Ray Palmer, ten nanometers tall, slipped through the microprocessors of the computers in the rebuilt Hall of Justice. The computer was powered down for his safety—he was just making some routine checks to make sure sub-atomic tampering was not to blame for the recent overheating problems they'd been having. So far he hadn't encountered anything indicating such a problem. Off in a distance incomprehensibly long from his perspective, yet less than a centimeter away, the towering wall of the system's harddrive cast its shadow over everything, so when an arc of energy crackled along the corner of the device, he immediately took notice. It cascaded along the disk, then vanished, like some sort of surge of mystical power. The Atom could only wonder what the light signified.
Central City
March 28, 18:14 CDT
Mary West held a photo of her son and Artemis, gazing at the happiness in their faces with a bitter sadness. It had been the better part of two years since Wally had—vanished. She refused to even think of what had happened to him in mortal terms, in anything that would make it utterly final. Still, all these months, and no sign that he'd ever come home to her. It was only with the help of that girl that she and Rudy had gotten by.
Mary resolved to call Artemis. To check up on her. She picked up the phone and began to dial… but couldn't recall the number.
Whose number? She asked herself, and didn't have a good answer. It was as if she'd been trying to call her son, only to remember that he was gone. Mary put the phone back on the charger.
She fought off tears as she set the photograph back on the shelf, Wally and a classmate whose name had slipped her mind. Wally seemed so happy in that picture, and though he'd always been a relatively easy-going child, Mary had no idea why the joy on his face was so infectious in that shot. Or why the loss she felt suddenly seemed so much greater.
Gateway City
March 28, 19:17 PDT
La Dama still felt jetlag as she stepped off the hospital elevator and made her way down the hallway. She had, it turned out, been very lucky. The security guard Tala had showed her in the crystal ball, though he was shot three times, had survived his wounds. After several surgeries, he was finally in stable condition and held at a hospital near Holiday University—the same Holiday University that had, not so long ago, had come under scrutiny for claiming to have discovered a piece of Kryptonite that had been on Earth for centuries—something that the scientific community at large dismissed as impossible, given Krypton's destruction was estimated to have occurred less than fifty years ago. It had been a simple enough matter to put two and two together, though finding a flight to Gateway City at a decent hour had been somewhat difficult. With her refusal to play ball with Vandal Savage and his illuminati creeps, La Dama felt unsafe using private jets. Mass murder of humans was generally not the Light's M.O. but targeted assassinations were definitely in their wheelhouse.
Nonetheless, she was here now. She slipped into the security guard's room inauspiciously, hoping not to draw the attention of any nurses or doctors.
Lying very still in the hospital bed, save for the occasional flicker of the remote that controlled his TV, the wounded security guard lay, hooked up to instruments and IVs. Frankly, he looked like shit, but it wouldn't be diplomatic to say so out loud.
"Did he hire you to come finish the job?" the guard said.
"I'm sorry?" Amparo strode across the room and sat down in a faux-leather covered chair that wasn't nearly as comfortable as it looked. "Did who hire me?"
The security guard made a strained grunting noise that might have been a bitter laugh.
"Lady, don't play games. I mean the guy at the lab. The one that put these bullets in me."
"I'm not with him," Amparo said. "I'm actually trying to find him."
"What for?" the man said. "You have a thing for a man in uniform? Wanna give him what's coming to him and avenge my honor."
Amparo blanched on the inside, but kept her face neutral. "I'm afraid not. I'm simply an interested party investigating—"
"Bullshit," the guard said, moving more than he had before to sit up higher against the back of his bed, though it was clear the motion caused him a great deal of pain. "You're no cop and you're no private eye either. So if you don't tell me why you want to find him, you're out of goddamn luck."
"Fine," La Dama said. "I'm the leader of a criminal empire and live under constant threat from a superhero who happens to be close friends with my niece; an international conspiracy of supervillains wants me dead; and the man who stole that Kryptonite and shot you has spent the last eight months, as best as I can tell, gathering an army to take down that conspiracy of supervillains. To be frank, while it's unfortunate what he did to you, I want to help him achieve his goal."
She paused, stood, and took a step up to the side of the guard's bed.
"Now you can tell me what you know…"
Amparo drew a small syringe from her coat and placed the needle against the bag of liquid painkillers that fed the guard's IV. A green liquid bubbled within. Venom wouldn't kill the guard, at least not immediately, but getting a dose while nursing three bullet wounds would be excruciating.
"…or I can make your life quite hellish."
The man stared at her, growing even paler.
"Noah Kuttler," the man said. "Math professor at Fermin College in Hub City, where I used to work. Man has deep, deep pockets. Promised a huge pay off plus medical if I made it look good. I was just expecting him to clock me. The bastard didn't tell me he was gonna bring a gun, let alone shoot me with it. I don't care if you kill him or join him, it makes no difference to me as long as the money keeps coming."
Amparo pointed the syringe into her mouth and squirted, lemon lime soda splashing her tongue.
"It's Mellow Yellow," she said. "Threats are always more effective when I let the imagination run wild."
La Dama left the room at a quickened pace, though not fast enough to miss hearing the security guard mutter crazy bitch under his breath.
That didn't matter though. She had a name now, and a location. Hub City was even further from El Paso than Gateway City, and Amparo didn't like to leave her business ventures for too long. Still, she didn't trust any of her lieutenants to contact this Professor Kuttler. Hopefully Tereza could hold down the fort while she was away… and hopefully Jaime Reyes would be too preoccupied with his super-friends to notice that she had left El Paso.
Bludhaven
March 29, 00:01 EDT
There was a surge of power, one last jolt of memories disintegrating around her, and suddenly Artemis felt cold. She opened her eyes. Raven still sat across from her, and Nightwing to her right, but both were now bathed in shadows. It was late at night, and a chill had settled into the air.
"You must be the girl," Raven said. "Forgive me if I can't remember your name, but after six hours my ritual was very thorough."
"Six hours?" Artemis repeated, feeling for her jacket on the floor behind her. She pulled her two IDs out of her jacket pocket. The one that said Tegan Lee was unchanged, but her real ID, her Gotham City driver's license, was blank. "No wonder my ass hurts."
She stood up, shivering a bit in the cold, and pulled her coat back on. She was acutely aware of her physical needs—bathroom, warmth, food, something to drink, sleep… not necessarily in that order. But she didn't feel any different. Her memories were, as far as she could tell, completely intact.
"This is weird," said Nightwing. He stood up, still in street clothes—though Artemis didn't know why she'd expected him to change mid ritual. "My head feels heavy."
Raven put her feet on the ground—Artemis bet her butt wasn't hurting too bad, sitting six hours on a cushion of air—and moved over to help steady Nightwing.
"You now have all knowledge and memories regarding this person inside you now, Richard. You can't access these memories without the proper training, but they may spill into your mind when you're dreaming. Try not to be alarmed. It will all pass when you transfer them back to her."
"Will we need you for that?" Artemis asked.
"No," Raven placed her fingers on Dick's forehead, on the middle of his Anja chakra, and whispered something in the same language she had used when casting the ritual. "All he needs to do is speak your True Name, and he'll release your memories. That's why I had to give him your own memories of yourself as well, so that he can know how to say it, just as you would."
Artemis had a grim thought, then.
"And what if he were to—" she started to say die, but tried to soften the question somewhat. "Take a blow to the head? Suffer some memory loss?"
"Or perish in battle," Raven said. "Then you'd better hope he has the presence of mind to speak your name with his last breath… or you'll be forgotten forever. According to the Book of Azar, the last time this ritual was performed, it happened to an immortal. He still wonders the world, a phantom, a stranger to everyone, save the keeper of his name. Luckily that won't happen to you, because you'll eventually die."
"Yeah…" Artemis said. "Lucky me."