By the time Diana had beaten the chaos back into something resembling order, the one responsible had vanished.
Circe was gone.
The Valkyrie was furious. Her own kindness had been used against her.
She used the golden lasso to restore each transformed refugee one by one. They reverted cleanly—but when she looked into their eyes, she found no gratitude. Only fear. And beneath the fear, something like resentment.
Diana shook her head slowly. It had been her own failure—she hadn't moved fast enough, and Circe's magic had fallen on people who'd done nothing to deserve it. That much she could understand.
But the distance that sat between ordinary humans and gods, between people with power and those without—the discomfort she saw in their carefully polite expressions—that was harder to resolve.
Why do you have power and we don't? Why do your battles have to cost us?
Hostility thinly veiled behind deference stared back at her, and Diana found herself without an answer. Under the refugees' baffled, unreadable stares, she rose into the air and flew toward the horizon.
If Thea had known what Diana was thinking, she would have let out a long, exasperated sigh. Like hell that's self-protection. There are some people you simply cannot treat like human beings.
Like the pair in front of her right now.
"Don't play dumb. I know you both understand English."
She was wearing a fur coat, doing her best to be considerate of the ordinary people around her, attempting to negotiate with the two Russian guards at the gatehouse.
She spoke in English; they responded in Russian. She switched to Russian; they switched back to English. Whatever language she chose, they deployed the other one. A masterclass in bureaucratic stonewalling.
The people behind this didn't want her inside. Thea had no interest in making life difficult for two grunts following orders—but she'd been standing here for ten minutes now, and she'd been urgently called here barely half an hour after she'd parted from Diana.
Events in Russia had moved faster than even the Justice League had anticipated.
Superman had been captured.
He'd taken a direct nuclear hit in the Bering Strait. By the time J'onn and the others went searching, there was no trace of him. It had taken Batman himself—operating as the World's Greatest Detective—to locate a secret laboratory on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Sending a superhero into a country with complicated diplomatic relations to stage a unilateral rescue was a terrible idea. One wrong move and World War Three wasn't a figure of speech.
If that happened, Darkseid and Nekron would be the least of anyone's problems.
Fortunately, Thea held the title of First Daughter, and in terms of raw power she was unmatched across the known universe. It had to be her.
Lois Lane, upon hearing that Superman was in trouble, had nearly had a cardiac episode. As deputy editor of the Daily Planet, she had precisely zero leverage over the Russian state—but when she heard Thea was leading the retrieval, she latched onto the pretext that a journalist needed to cover the story and joined the delegation.
"You are obstructing freedom of the press!" Lois was mid-tirade when Thea caught her arm. That argument won't get you anywhere here, Ms. Lane.
Lois knew what was at stake—she wasn't reckless. Her public identity as the daughter of the Secretary of Defense was equally sensitive; both sides were still probing each other's limits. The press credential was the only card she could play openly.
But thinking about Clark—about what they were doing to him in there—she couldn't hold herself together. He had been trying to help people. He hadn't done anything wrong. These people were animals.
Even as they argued at the gate, four burly men hauled a laser cutter out of a storage room and lumbered it into the main building. From somewhere inside came the grinding sound of a power drill.
"You—you—" Lois pointed at the two guards, her voice dropping to a shaking murmur. Her expression had gone feral.
Thea caught it immediately—faint as a single ember, but unmistakable. A blue flicker in Lois Lane's eyes.
Psionic ability.
She was genuinely startled. Lois had surpassed her expectations. No external trigger, no catalyst—activating this ability on raw innate potential alone was extraordinarily rare. Her aptitude was exceptional.
"Slow your breathing. Don't escalate this." Thea spoke quietly beside Lois's ear, and a subtle working of magic smoothed over the storm coming up from somewhere deep in Lois's biology.
What just happened to me? Lois blinked, disoriented. A few seconds of memory seemed to have gone missing. Her eyes were full of confusion. Thea steered her gently aside.
"Here. Drink this. Your body had a small episode—dehydration." She pressed a bottle of water into Lois's hands and gave her a look that said: we'll talk about it properly later.
Then she turned back to the guards.
Fine. You want to play politics? I know this game. Let's see exactly how much backing this laboratory actually has.
She made calls. She knew the President well—well enough to know he was a shrewd man who would never have ordered something like this: nuclear strikes, abductions, dissection experiments. As expected, he had been buried under domestic affairs and had gone hunting to decompress—and delegated everything on his way out. The Prime Minister, meanwhile, was currently entangled in a parliamentary investigation.
Seven or eight phone calls later, the picture was complete.
The people holding Superman were from the opposition. Their stated grievances were the same tired old lines: national security threats, capability parity, and if we can't have it, eliminate it. Their actual calculation was more strategic: capture Superman, engineer a bilateral incident, then leverage the escalation—either seize power in the chaos, or arrange for the current administration to hold the bag. And if they happened to unlock the secrets of Kryptonian biology in the meantime, so much the better.
Thea had no desire to wade into internal political bloodsport. A few more calls. The opposition's military wing needed commercial backers. They also needed the underworld to handle certain transactions they couldn't put their names to. Thea had people in both places.
Pressure applied from multiple angles. The people who genuinely wanted a world war were always a small minority. Half an hour later, Clark was released.
He was a mess. But that steel body was no joke. Laser cutters, power drills, precision cutting equipment—not so much as a scratch. He shook off a coating of metallic dust, stood in direct sunlight for ten minutes until his cells had properly recharged, confirmed his radiation levels were clean, and took both of them back to the Justice League.
The Hall of Justice was a short walk from the Daily Planet. Thea knew the couple had things to say to each other in private, and moved to leave.
Lois hesitated. She wanted to ask about what had happened to her but couldn't find the words.
"Lucky you." Thea reached into her pocket and produced a small booklet—the kind that looked like it belonged in a martial arts manual—and pressed it into Lois's hands. "Take it. Practice."
It was the guide she'd originally prepared for Moira. A bodyguard perimeter was only so reliable; nothing beat self-sufficiency—especially when Thea could feel her own breakthrough approaching and wouldn't have time to be everyone's emergency extraction service.