Chapter Text
Eight-fifteen on a cold clear evening in Star City. The night was young, but the fight was old. Laurel Lance’s adversary was obviously groggy, but still on her feet. Laurel could feel her own muscles burning, her options dwindling. She honestly wasn't sure that she could win this.
Tonfas - disarmed. Canary Cry - fritzed (there was a strangeness to how that had happened which Laurel intended to explore, but not right now). Fists and feet it was, then. Her adversary was fast and graceful, with a more than serviceable arsenal of strikes and blocks, but Laurel had the slightest of edges when it came to power. Roll the dice. She's exhausted, too. Just one more big punch…
The other woman tottered from the impact of Laurel’s desperate hook. Go down. You know you want to. Your body’s craving the ground as much as mine… . But the gamble failed. Steely fingers wrapped around Laurel’s over-extended wrist; a knee drove the wind from her lungs; an elbow in the back hammered her to the newly riven asphalt, while the glaring streetlights reeled above. Got to get up. Got to fight on, somehow. But nothing left.
I’ve failed this city.
“Stay on the deck, lady, for both our sakes.” The stranger was leaning against a wall, bent almost double, forcing the words out between gasping breaths. “I don’t… I don’t think that I could lay you out again.”
“You… you said that you caused the earthquake.” Laurel tried to will strength back into her recalcitrant limbs. It was a work in progress. “You’ll have to kill me, if you want me to stay down after that.”
“Huh?” The stranger’s eyes widened. “You thought that I would cause all this…” she gestured at the fractured cityscape around them with the hand that was not supporting her against the wall, “...deliberately? What kind of a crazy does that?”
“You’re new in town,” Laurel raised herself, with difficulty, on one elbow. “I can tell.”
“Newer than you’d guess.” Her opponent had picked up one of Laurel’s tonfas, and was inspecting it.
“Well, here’s another thing that a newbie should bear in mind about Star City.” Laurel smiled. “It’s not just the bad guys who understand redundancy.”
“PUT DOWN THE TONFA AND STEP AWAY FROM THE BLACK CANARY.”
“What?” The stranger twisted to look at the burly figure who had spoken from the other side of the parking lot. She turned back to Laurel. “‘Black Canary’? That’s you?”
“On a good day, yes.”
“OK. Pretty sure that anomalously chromatic songbirds don’t usually punch that hard, but I’ll roll with it.” She raised her voice. “Listen up, archer boy. I don’t want any trouble. But I’m not used to taking orders from a Hawkeye wannab…”
An arrow jolted the tonfa out of her hands.
“Hawkeye who?” said Oliver Queen. And then he charged.
Laurel, despite a sneaking regard for the ragged determination with which her former opponent fought, knew before the first blow landed how the bout would end. Fresh, the stranger might have been able to give Oliver a work-out, but the hard-won victory over Laurel had sapped almost all her strength. Oliver himself seemed a little off his game; nonetheless, barely a couple of minutes passed before the stranger slumped unconscious to the ground. Oliver caught his breath and turned to Laurel.
“Status, Canary?”
“Well, I can walk.” Laurel finally struggled to her feet. “But I can’t sing.” She tapped her necklace. “Something took out the Canary Cry at the start of my fight with…. whoever she is.”
“I’ll ask Overwatch to look into it.”
“Overwatch needs to look into our comms, too. Have you noticed that they seem to have stopped working?”
“I have. It was the static from your end that made me check up on you.” Oliver tapped his ear. “Now it looks like mine have gone, as well.”
“Strange.” Laurel frowned at Oliver. “Are you OK? You looked a little… sub-par just now.”
“It wasn’t my first fight of the evening.” Oliver put his hand on his shoulder and winced. “We have a problem.”
“Besides Damien Darhk?”
“More urgent than Darhk.” Oliver knelt to pick up the stranger. “I’ll tell you back at base.”
***
“While you were checking out those tremors, I was investigating the reports of gang activity on Wesinger and Papp. By the time I got there, the issue had already been… resolved.”
Laurel reflected upon the usual character of conflict resolution on the streets of Star City. “By a bigger issue?” she asked.
“Pretty much.” Oliver massaged his shoulder again. “If I’ve reconstructed what happened correctly, eight of the gang-bangers were on their way home after some standard mayhem when they ran into a lone woman in an alleyway. They decided that they had time for a little fun.”
“Which, I’m guessing, was a mistake.”
“Uh-huh. The kind of mistake that means you’ll never make another. I arrived just in time to see the move she used to finish off the last one. That was how I knew for certain who she was.”
“And who was that?”
“Someone I was told about in the League of Assassins. Only one person knows the Leopard Strike.” Oliver fell silent for a moment. “The League call her Shiva. They say that she cannot be overcome.”
“She’s that good?”
“Maybe.” Oliver frowned. “She knocked me down twice in quick succession. Never said a word. The second time, I wasn’t fast enough getting back up to re-engage. She dropped one of the League’s smoke-bombs, and disappeared.”
“What’s this Shiva doing in Star City? Doesn’t she know that Nyssa dissolved the League?”
“She may not care. Ra’s told me that the Shiva stands outside League law. Violence was the League’s religion. But religions have their hermits as well as their monasteries. The Shiva’s sole aim is to perfect her art.”
“And now she wants to perfect it in Star City.” Laurel bit her lip. “Is she gunning for you, Ollie? Has the Green Arrow got good enough to catch her eye?”
“We’ll see.” Oliver sat back. “So, tell me about your day. You think that the woman downstairs set off the earthquake in the Glades?”
“She said she did. I found her standing, alone, not far from where Felicity had mapped the epicentre. Everyone else had fled to the neighbouring streets. She said: ‘Stay away from me; I did this.’ And then…” Laurel sighed. “Then I saw red. It was like the Undertaking, all over again. Like…”
“Tommy.” Oliver looked away.
“Yeah.” Laurel toyed with her necklace. “I tried to use the Cry on her, but it…. sparked out. Never did that before. So I went in, and fought her hand-to-hand, but she matched me, strike for strike. Neither of us could hang on to an advantage. It felt like hours. As you saw,” she prodded a bruise, and winced, “I cracked first.”
“So we know that she can fight. We know that she dresses….”
“Like us? Yeah. It’s an aesthetic that sends a message.”
“And we know that she says that she caused this evening’s tremor.” Oliver scratched his chin. “But that makes no sense. Dig and Thea swept the scene after we left. There’s no kind of tech there which could possibly renew the Undertaking.”
“Maybe it isn’t tech we need to look for.” Laurel stood up. “I think that I should go down and talk to her.”
Oliver’s jaw tightened. “It would be better if I did that.”
“Says the Green Arrow, surprising no one.” Laurel patted him on his unbruised shoulder. “Relax. I’ve got this. I think that I was beginning to build a rapport with her.”
“Was that before or after she decked you?”
“I’ll let you know what I find out.”
***
The stranger had been sitting cross-legged in one of Oliver’s cages, not unlike Nyssa in similar circumstances. She rose to her feet as soon as she heard Laurel enter the room. Under the artificial lights of the base, her lineaments were clearer than they had been in the Glades. She stood a little shorter than Laurel, but boasted a comparable physique. Asian and Caucasian ancestry mingled in her bruised features. She looked to be in her mid-to-late twenties.
“Hello again, songbird. Thirsty for a rematch?” The stranger drew a hand lazily along the insides of the bars. “You bring the fight; I’ll bring the cage.”
“How are you feeling?” said Laurel.
“Groggy.” The stranger touched her neck and grimaced. “The big guy sure knows his way around a choke hold, doesn’t he?”
“He puts a great deal of work into not killing people.”
“Good to know.” The stranger cocked her head on one side. “Why are you here, lawyer-lady?” She smiled as Laurel was not quite able to suppress a start. “Ah. Thought so. It’s the paper cuts - not standard vigilante wear-and-tear. You have another job, which still occasionally means shuffling sheets. Even with your fighting togs on, you look a bit upscale for a PA. Lawyer, then, or maybe journalist. If I’d been wrong, I’d have shrugged it off as liking the alliteration.”
“Cute.” Laurel’s lips thinned. “You think you’re the only one who can play that game?”
“I’ve been in your shoes. From where you’re standing, the only sensible move in this game is not to play.”
“You’re probably right.” Laurel walked forward, unlocked the cage, and stepped inside.
“My.” The stranger’s brow wrinkled. “This really isn’t the city of the sensible people, is it?”
“You’re just getting that now?” Laurel folded her arms. “I’m not afraid of you.”
The stranger snorted. “Then you really haven’t been paying attention.”
“I acknowledge your strength and skill and… the other thing. Whatever that is. Given how our fight panned out, I kinda have to. But this whole Blood Knight routine you’re trying to pull? I’m not buying it. I saw the expression on your face when you realized that I thought you meant to cause the earthquake.”
The stranger averted her eyes. Shorn of her bravado, she looked tired and worn. Laurel persisted:
“You were horrified.”
“You’re right. I was.” The stranger’s face was still turned away. “Canary…”
“Yes?”
“Is this Hell?”
Laurel started. “What?”
“Sorry. Forget I said that.” The stranger looked back to meet Laurel’s gaze. “Did… Did I hurt anyone?”
“We don’t think so. Folks in the Glades have got good at running away from trouble. Your only casualties were my chin, my back, my abs, and my ego. They won’t forgive you in a hurry.”
The stranger broke into a small smile. “They can join the club. You dished out some serious damage yourself. I’m just too stoic to let it show.”
“This is you doing stoic?”
The stranger grinned outright. “I know. Frightening, isn’t it? You mentioned ‘another thing’.”
“I did.” Laurel tapped a hand against her leg. “There’s something about the way you’ve been behaving. You’re caged in a city you don’t know, outnumbered, physically overmatched…”
“Huh. While the big guy’s around, maybe.”
“... but you’re not afraid. Not even a little. It’s like you’re only here because you think that this is where you ought to be.” Laurel leaned forward. “What’s your ace in the hole?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“When I tried to use my Canary Cry on you, you put up your hand, and, all of a sudden, the tech stopped working. I thought at first that that was a coincidence. But it wasn’t, was it? You’re a meta.”
“I’m a what now?”
“Meta.”
“Well, I’m told that a generous helping of genre-savvy is a key component of my subversive charm, but I don’t see how that’s…”
“You’re a metahuman.”
“Oh. I think I can guess what you mean by that. We have a different name for it, where I come from.”
“So, then. What can you do?”
The stranger closed her eyes. She extended her hands towards the floor. Laurel felt it in the air - a heaviness, a thrumming insistency - before the shiver communicated itself to the bars, to the floor, to her own flesh and bone. The stranger’s eyes snapped open. The shiver ceased.
“My name is Daisy,” she said. “Vibration belongs to me.”
***
Felicity was in the control room when Laurel returned.
“Oliver’s gone to check in with Dig and Thea,” she said by way of greeting, “And you need to be aware of something. Your new friend? She is not from around here.”
“I’d gathered that.”
“Your new friend is very seriously not from around here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how you and Oliver kept losing comms when you were near her? Well, I ran some scans. And then I video-conferenced Barry, Caitlin, and Cisco. They confirmed what I’d already suspected.” Felicity looked at the monitor that was covering the cells. Daisy was sitting cross-legged once more on the floor. “Your sparring partner isn’t from this Earth.”
Laurel frowned. “She’s from Earth-2? One of those metas that Barry says were dumped here by Zoom?”
“That’s where it gets freaky. Our friends in Central City have got started on mapping the dimensional signature of people from Zoom’s Earth. Daisy doesn’t display anything close to that. I don’t think that she’s even from the Earth with the superstrong flying alien chick that Barry took a wrong turn at Albuquerque into the other da…” Felicity stopped when she saw Laurel’s expression. “Oh. Oliver hasn’t told you yet about Barry and the superstrong flying alien chick? Well…”
“Felicity, can we take a rain check on the superstrong flying alien chick? Even though that’s a sentence that I seriously never expected to hear myself say? Solving the mystery of Daisy is kind of the priority right now.”
Felicity looked a little disappointed, but nodded. “OK. The thing is: I suspect that Daisy’s Earth may be radically different from ours. Even though,” she tapped the monitor, “it still has metas. I’m glad that she only set off three of the security alarms with that little display just then.”
“Yeah.” Laurel peered absently at the screen. “But how did she get to Earth-1? She’s not a speedster, that’s for sure. Girl’s got some serious reflexes, but our fight would have lasted for less than a second if she could move like Barry. In fact, if she’s anyone on Team Flash, she’s…”
“Cisco.” Felicity beamed. “You’re brilliant!”
“I am?”
“More hot Central City gossip, courtesy of Oliver. Cisco’s vibes can open breaches from Earth to Earth.”
“Seriously, those people should set us up a news feed. Cisco can jump between universes now?”
“More or less. It isn’t easy, and he needs some tech to do it. But, my guess? Little Miss Daisy’s powers brought her to Star City.” Felicity sat back. “She tore through the vibratory barriers between the Earths.”
Laurel shivered. “When we were talking just now, she asked me whether this was Hell.”
“I heard.” Felicity stared sombrely at the image of the cells. “I don’t think she knew that she could do that. Which, if true, leads to the million-dollar question…”
Laurel nodded. “... How does she get back to the Earth she came from?”