Hal looked around the room—left, right, up, down—with the frantic energy of someone trying to talk himself back into reality. Was he in Gotham? Had any of this been real? Scarecrow's fear gas? Black Mask running a psy-op? Had dying been the hallucination, and had everything since—the Underworld, the bone dragon, the vast soul-march, Sinestro standing beside him like a ghost version of himself—been some elaborate mental construct?
Two-Face looked at him with the patient expression of a man who had seen too much to be surprised by denial. "You're both lucky. I only have about a minute. Remember everything I'm about to tell you."
He produced two slips of paper—one for each of them—and held them out.
"Take these. Turn left when you exit this room, go through the passage, third door on the right. Join the queue and complete the processing."
Hal took the paper. The handwriting was exceptional—confident, forceful, beautifully proportioned. Even by his own standards, which were set by handwriting that looked like something a dog had walked through ink and then dragged across a surface, this was unmistakably excellent.
The contents read themselves without him consciously trying—as natural as breathing, the way souls process information in this place:
Whereas the bearer, Hal Jordan, has rendered distinguished service and shed blood in honorable combat, his application for resurrection has accordingly been approved. Below the formal language, a signature occupied the designated line—large, sweeping, unmistakable. The young miss's name, written with her characteristic theatrical flourish.
"When you return to the mortal realm, you'll forget everything that happened here," Harvey said. "That's simply how the process works. But I'll say this sincerely—even with the Goddess watching over you, don't treat your lives carelessly."
"Wait." Hal held up a hand. "So we really are dead. And this paper actually has the authority to bring us back?"
Harvey nodded, with the long-suffering patience of a man who had once been a district attorney and was accustomed to explaining things to people still working through their denial.
"Then why don't you come back?" Hal pressed. "Can't you just—don't you want to?" He paused, his theory assembling itself along lines of moral debt and cosmic justice. "Or is it that you can't, because you've done too much wrong? You have to stay and work it off?"
Harvey looked at him the way a man who has found his place in the world looks at someone who still doesn't understand what that means.
"Work it off." A small, genuine smile. "Why would I want to leave? This place is ten thousand times better than Gotham. Everyone who ever made themselves my enemy eventually comes and stands in front of me, waiting for my judgment. Life held nothing that felt like this. But here?" He paused. "Here I've never been more certain of my own worth. No district attorney's office. No mob politics. Just Harvey Dent."
There was no trace of the split—no oscillation between impulses, no fractured energy. Just a man completely at peace with where he was. He spoke like a successful person delivering unsolicited wisdom to someone who clearly needed it, which was a tone Hal found difficult to argue with.
Harvey shook his head—the quiet shake of someone whose contentment no one else quite understands—snapped his fingers. A new passage opened in the wall.
He gestured toward it. Get moving.
Once they'd walked far enough down the passage, Sinestro kept his voice low. "Who was that?"
"Probably an Earth person," Hal said. "Back when he was alive, anyway..." He wasn't entirely sure whether this was the Two-Face he knew, or just someone with the same face.
The formal resurrection process was, it turned out, quite involved.
Applications, queuing, waiting periods, procedural review, official registration, and then final authorization—and this was on the expedited end of things. Two-Face's authority covered only the preliminary review. The technical final arbiter was Minos—a half-god with the relevant jurisdiction—but the queue moved faster than the standard track.
This was categorically different from Charon's occasional unofficial arrangements. The ferryman ran a quiet side business for irregular resurrections, for those willing to meet his particular fee. Those tended to come with complications. The formal route was slower, but clean.
In the waiting area, Hal ran into an old acquaintance.
Boston Brand—or Deadman, depending on the context—was currently the most comfortable resident of the Underworld, a soul who moved between the living and dead realms with the ease of someone who had genuinely made his peace with the arrangement. Nobody bothered him. He'd settled long ago into a pleasant, purposeful aimlessness that suited him perfectly.
Hal and Boston had always gotten along. Sinestro, calculating where he stood in a complicated and rapidly expanding set of obligations, decided that listening was more strategically useful than participating. He let the two of them talk.
Boston kept things to the surface—general mechanics, public-facing operations. He didn't go deep on the young miss specifically; that wasn't territory he was comfortable covering. He kept Hal company through the wait, in the way old friends do when there's nothing to be done except wait.
Hal was still turning things over. Goddess of Death. He'd known Thea was formidable—anyone in his line of work knew that much—but the implications of that particular title kept expanding the longer he looked at them.
Sinestro, meanwhile, was running his own arithmetic.
She's that powerful. Can I actually take the Yellow Lanterns back from her? Even if it were physically achievable, the consequences would make it not worth doing. Korugar's population isn't immortal—sooner or later, everyone eventually becomes accountable to forces much larger than individual ambition. And with Thea holding this particular position in the cosmic hierarchy, the eventual accounting would be very difficult to navigate around.
This was, as far as Sinestro could tell, a problem without a clean solution. He was not accustomed to problems without clean solutions.
Not that the two greatest Green Lanterns had much choice at the moment. They were stuck in the queue, quietly criticizing the Underworld's processing efficiency, and waiting as eagerly as two dead people could for their number to come up.
...
In the material world, everything was still on fire.
The Guardians of the Universe—whose relationship with the phrase trustworthy stewards of cosmic order had never been entirely uncomplicated—had absorbed the First Lantern's accumulated power, used their own cellular material to manufacture the Third Army, and then vanished entirely. As a parting gesture, they had taken Ganthet and Sayd with them.
The initial Third Army assault on Oa had been partially repelled when Thea arrived in time to cut down the first wave—if she hadn't shown up when she did, they would have been annihilated right then. But the conversion rate was merciless—within an hour, a second wave hit, larger than the first, and the outer defense network damaged during the Blackest Night had still not been repaired. The Guardians had apparently had six months to address that particular item and had collectively decided not to. Critical facilities began to fall one by one.
With a third wave building, the calculus was simple.
"Fall back to the Blue Lantern homeworld!"
"Medics and new recruits first—cover them!"
"Reserves are critical to the Corps—John, protect them!"
Kyle Rayner's circumstances in this particular timeline were somewhat unusual. Thea had stolen much of his spotlight. He didn't appear to particularly mind—his own light still burned clearly—and with the Guardians absent, the informal title of "greatest Green Lantern" had a better claim on him than on any of the alternatives. Guy Gardner and John Stewart had both been doing this longer than he had, with notably less to show for it.
The ring Ganthet had made specifically for him, combined with the sheer emotional range Kyle operated with naturally, made his constructs individually more than a match for mass enemies. He bought time for the retreat, and kept buying it.
The evacuation followed procedures that had been recently rehearsed under worse conditions. Not quite six months since the Blackest Night—they knew this route. New recruits moved first, shielded by experienced Lanterns, falling back in structured stages toward Odym.
Along the way, Blue Lanterns, Yellow Lanterns, and Indigo Tribe members met them with intercepting support. The rear guard held.
And then Mogo—the living planet, the most remarkable member of the Green Lantern Corps in terms of sheer scale—entered the battle directly. Channeling Blue Lantern energy, he released a beam several hundred kilometers across. The pursuing Third Army at that moment numbered in the hundreds of millions.
The beam swept through them.
Every single one: gone.
"Kyle—please, come with me." Saint Walker appeared at Kyle's elbow, his expression carrying the particular quality that Kyle had come to associate with something critically important that is also apparently happening right now. He had Kyle's arm before Kyle had fully registered the request and was already moving.
Kyle stumbled. "Easy, Saint Walker—I just finished a—"
The two of them had always been close. Both operated in the register of feeling everything at full volume, which created a particular kind of bond. Soranik—Kyle's partner, and Sinestro's daughter, which was a family configuration no one had yet found a comfortable framework for—had more than once noted that the friendship had some qualities she couldn't entirely account for.
"The Goddess has been waiting for a while. It is genuinely urgent, I promise. Please trust me."
Mention of the Goddess produced a complicated expression from Kyle.
He and Batman had independently arrived at the same basic question about Thea: was she a god or a person? The evidence kept contradicting itself. If she was a god—she spent her days on Earth, occasionally went shopping, and showed up in tabloid headlines on a semi-regular basis. If she was a person—Saint Walker treated her with a reverence that bordered on active theology, complete with full prostrations at the drop of a hat.
Kyle had never resolved this. He suspected today wasn't going to be the day.