Equal Shares

I.

"—and I'm telling you, Bruce, I'd rather go in there with the fucking Riddler."

Hal Jordan had been kidnapped by a lot of people. He'd been kidnapped by the Manhunters, by Sinestro, by a gas cloud that turned out to be sentient and lonely, by two different Kryptonians and one guy who was just a really big rock. He had never, in any of those, been stuck in a room for eleven hours listening to Batman and Nightwing fight.

It was worse than the rock.

"You're not thinking clearly." Batman's voice did the thing where it got quieter instead of louder. "You've been agitated since we arrived. The compound they're feeding us—"

"The compound. Jesus Christ." Nightwing was pacing. He'd been pacing for an hour, a tight loop between the ration dispenser and the viewing window, and every time he passed the window he glanced down at the dome and every time he passed the dispenser he looked like he wanted to kick it. "I'm not agitated, I'm pissed, there's a difference, you'd know that if you'd ever had a feeling on purpose—"

"Nightwing."

"—and I'm not doing it. I'm not going in there with you. You'd spend the whole fight on comms telling me where to stand."

"I'd be giving you tactical—"

"You'd be telling me where to stand."

Hal put his head back against the wall. The wall was warm, which was upsetting, because everything on this ship was warm in a way that suggested it was alive or had been recently. The holding pen was about the size of a high school gym, one long curve of it glass — or something glass-shaped — looking down over the arena. The Ordhi called it the Proving. It looked like a quarry somebody had dropped a cathedral into. Broken pillars, a slope of scree running down from just below their window, a flat killing floor in the middle, and on the far side, up high, a second gallery behind its own shimmer of force field, where the alien brass sat and watched them like a fish tank.

Eleven hours. Every hero on Earth, more or less — the League, the Titans, the Justice Society's remaining ambulatory members, a handful of the Gotham lot who'd shown up glaring, Kori and Arsenal and the Red Hood who'd arrived as a set, plus Deathstroke, for some reason, standing in a corner with his arms folded like he'd been invited to a wedding he didn't approve of — and the Ordhi had made their pitch in the first fifteen minutes and had not said one further word since.

The pitch was simple. Earth was under review. Two of its native species would enter the Proving and defeat the Ordhi's chosen. If they won, Earth was a warrior world and the Hegemony would treat with it. If they lost, Earth was a soft world of sub-species, and the Hegemony would do what it did with soft worlds.

Then the qualifier, delivered by a thing the size of a horse with a face like a dropped chandelier: Baseline. Unaugmented. We do not test your hired aliens. We test you.

Which knocked out Clark. And J'onn. And Kori. And Arthur, who'd argued the point for twenty minutes before the horse-thing scanned him and said saline, dismissively, and moved on. Diana, and Donna, and Cassie. Barry and Wally and every other person who'd ever touched the Speed Force. Zatanna and Constantine. Every Lantern, Hal included, because the ring was an augment even if you took it off, apparently the scan could see where it had been. Deathstroke, whose serum lit up the scanner like a Christmas tree. Half the Titans had something. Two-thirds of the League.

What was left was the Gotham lot, plus Arsenal, plus Green Arrow — who had a bad shoulder, and had said so, loudly, and then gone to sit down.

So it was Batman and Nightwing. Everyone had said so. Clark had said so, reasonably. Diana had said so, and then said it again, less reasonably, after the third hour of shouting. The Bats had the reputation, they had the history, they were — Hal had assumed — the closest thing in the room to a functioning pair.

And now here was Nightwing, saying he'd rather go in with the Riddler.

"You know what," Hal said, to nobody. "I want to go on the record. I want it noted that I have been very patient."

"Noted," Barry said, from the floor beside him.

"Because I've got another idea."

"Hal."

"Hood and Arsenal."

Barry closed his eyes. "Hal."

"No, hear me out. Hear me out." Hal pushed off the wall. Nightwing and Batman had reached the part of the argument where they both stopped talking and stared at each other, which in Hal's experience meant it was about to get worse, so this was the window. "The two of them. They work together. They've been working together, right? What is it, three years? Four?"

"They're—" Barry did a sort of helpless gesture. "Come on."

"They're what?"

"They're the Outlaws, Hal."

"Yeah, they are." Hal looked across the pen. Arsenal was sitting on the ration dispenser with his legs swinging, eating from a foil packet with his fingers, watching the Bats fight with the expression of a man at a tennis match he had money on. The Red Hood was beside him, helmet on, arms folded, doing nothing, which Hal had learned over eleven hours was a thing the Red Hood could do for an unsettling length of time. Kori was on the Red Hood's other side. She kept looking at the dome and then at the Red Hood and then at the dome. "The Outlaws Outlaws. Barry, do you know what that means out there?"

"Out where?"

"Out—" He waved a hand at the ceiling. At space. "Do you know what they did in the Vega system? There's a warlord who won't say the word 'Earth' because he thinks it summons them. There's a planet where the Red Hood's helmet is a religious symbol, it's on their money—"

"You're making that up."

"I am not making that up, Barry, I saw the money—"

"Lantern's right."

That was Deathstroke. He hadn't moved from his corner. His voice carried anyway.

"The Outlaws' file on Oa is thicker than Batman's," he said. "I've read both. Only one of them made me want to renegotiate my rates."

"See." Hal pointed at him, then thought better of pointing at Deathstroke and lowered the hand. "See. That's an endorsement. From a guy who gets paid to know who's scary."

"You're taking Deathstroke's word for it," Barry said.

"I'm taking the Guardians' word for it, the Guardians have a whole—" Hal stopped. Across the pen, Batman had turned his head. Not toward Hal. Toward the Red Hood.

The Red Hood looked back at him. Or the helmet did. It was hard to say.

"No," Batman said.

"I didn't ask you," Hal said.

"No."

"He's human." Hal heard himself getting louder and could not stop it. "He's baseline, he's good, he's got a partner who doesn't want to throw him off a roof, which, I'm sorry, is looking like a real scarcity resource right now—"

"He's a criminal."

"So's Slade, and nobody's asked Slade to save the planet."

"I'd do it for a fee," Deathstroke said.

"Nobody asked you."

Nightwing had stopped pacing. He was standing at the window with his back to all of them, looking down at the Proving, at the broken cathedral and the slope of scree and the Ordhi brass in their fish tank on the far side, and he was very still.

Hal didn't know Nightwing well. Enough to like him, the way everybody liked him, the sunny thing, the thing with the smile. He'd never seen him like this — locked up, shoulders tight, the smile gone so completely you'd think it had never been there.

"Nightwing," Batman said.

Nightwing didn't turn around.

"We're going in together. That's the end of it. When they open the window, you'll follow my—"

"I'm going to say this one time," Nightwing said, to the glass, "and then I'm going to stop talking to you, possibly forever. I. Am not. Going in there. With you."

Silence. The good kind, Hal thought. The kind where nobody was sure who was going to break it and everybody was hoping it wasn't them.

Arsenal broke it, by crumpling his foil packet.

"Anyway," he said. "What's the food situation once we win? 'Cause this is not it. This is like somebody blended a couch."

II.

"So," Jason said. "Lian."

Roy didn't look at him. He'd found another foil packet somewhere and was turning it over in his hands, not opening it. "What about her."

"That's what I'm asking."

"She's fine. She's with Dinah. Dinah's — she'll be fine."

"Roy."

"I'm thinking." Roy tore a corner off the packet, sniffed it, made a face, didn't eat it. "I'm thinking it's a couple of bug fuckers and we've done worse before breakfast. And I'm thinking that if it goes sideways she's six and the last thing I said to her was don't feed the dog grapes."

"Solid advice."

"Grapes are bad for dogs, Jason."

"I know. I'm agreeing with you."

Roy put the packet down. His knee was going. It'd been going for about an hour, since the Lantern started making his case, and every time Jordan said the word Outlaws like it was a brand name, it went a little faster. Roy was good in a fight. Roy was better than good, Roy was the best shot Jason had ever stood next to and Jason had stood next to a lot of people who shot things for a living. But Roy was also the guy who'd once spent an entire firefight on a moon of Rann narrating what he was going to make Lian for dinner when he got home, and Jason had not, at the time, thought that was a problem, because they'd won. Now he was looking at Roy's knee and thinking about Rann and thinking, this isn't the same, this is the whole planet, and you're not sure, and I can see that you're not sure.

He didn't say any of that. Roy would've thrown the packet at him.

"Hey," he said instead. "You still got those extended mags? The ones for the Mark Sevens?"

Roy blinked at him. "Yeah. Why?"

"Gimme."

"Why—"

"Because I asked nice."

Roy pulled them out of his vest. Four. He'd had four this whole time, tucked in the front, and nobody had searched anyone because the Ordhi apparently thought sidearms were a joke. Jason took them and stacked them in his own vest and did not explain, and Roy looked at him, and looked at his knee, and made himself stop.

"You're not asking me to go in," Roy said.

"Nope."

"You gonna tell me why?"

"Nope."

Roy let out a breath. It was long, and it shook a little at the end, and Jason very carefully did not look at him while it happened.

"Okay," Roy said. "Okay. Cool. Whatever you're doing, don't die, I'm not explaining that to Lian either."

"Noted."

Dick was still at the window.

He'd been there since he told Bruce to get fucked — quietly, which for Dick was more alarming than loud — and Bruce was standing four feet behind him with his cape pulled in like a bat sulking on a wire, and everybody in the pen was pretending not to watch them, and it was, Jason thought, a very good position for Dick to be in. Back to the room. Face reflected faintly in the glass. Hands loose at his sides.

Jason wandered. That was the word for it. He wandered along the wall, past Green Arrow, who was glowering at his own shoulder, past the kid — Robin, Damian, the little assassin — who watched him go with his mouth doing the thing it did, past Kori, who touched two fingers to his arm as he passed and didn't say anything. He ended up at the window, ten feet down from Dick, looking out at the Proving like he was checking the view.

In the glass, Dick's eyes moved.

Found his.

Well? Jason didn't say. He tipped his head, a quarter inch, toward Bruce.

Dick's mouth flattened. In the reflection it looked like nothing. Jason had been reading that mouth for years, in reflections and once through a scope from four hundred yards, and it said absolutely fucking not.

Me, then.

Dick's hand came up — just came up, casually, scratching the back of his neck — and on the way down, two fingers folded, thumb across them, a beat, released. Bat-sign. The old set, the one Bruce had drilled into both of them, that Bruce would recognize in a heartbeat if he'd been looking at Dick's hand instead of the back of Dick's head.

Yes. Together.

Jason felt his own face do something under the helmet. He let it.

Then — because Dick was Dick, and always had been, and there was a part of Jason that would be reading that mouth in reflections until one of them was dead again — Dick's fingers went again, small, fast, down against his hip where the room couldn't see. Surprise them. Flat hand, closed to a fist, opened. Gather.

Jason's hand, at his side: fist, tapped twice against his thigh. Got it. Already started.

The corner of Dick's mouth went up. In the reflection it looked like a man thinking about lunch.

"Hey," Jason said, loudly, turning around. "Hey. Bug guys. Question."

The pen went quiet. The Ordhi in the fish tank across the way didn't move, but a sound came from somewhere — the ceiling, the floor, the alive-feeling walls — like a throat clearing, if the throat was full of gravel.

"You said humans." Jason pointed at himself, at the chest plate, the bat cut into it. "Baseline. No hired aliens. Fine. But I got a problem, and I want to check it before we get started, because I'd hate to walk in there and have you go oh, sorry, disqualified halfway through. I died. Right? Died, dead, in the ground for a bit, then I got dunked in a magic green pond in the desert and came out the other side. So." He spread his hands. "Does that count against me? Am I still on the list? What's the ruling?"

The scanning sound came, the same one they'd used on Arthur. A pressure on the skin like somebody holding a hand very close to your face without touching it.

The gravel throat spoke.

The contaminant is noted. It does not augment. It impairs. You are diminished. You are human.

"Diminished." Jason nodded slowly. "Great. Love that. Really validating. Thanks."

"What are you doing," Bruce said.

"Getting a ruling, Batman, what does it—"

"You are not going in there."

"Says who?"

"Says me." Bruce took a step. Cape swinging. "You're not going in there, and you're not going in there with Arsenal, because Arsenal has a child, and this isn't one of your—"

And that, Jason thought, was going to be the thing. That was going to be the thing that did it, the thing Bruce said about Roy, and he was going to be angry about it later in a real way that would make him go and detyre a car, but right now, right now he was going to use it.

"Don't you fucking talk about Roy," he said, and let his voice go — really go, the whole chest, the voice that emptied rooms in the East End. Bruce's head came up. Every eye in the pen went to Jason, which was the point. "Don't you dare, you don't get to stand there and lecture me about Roy Harper's kid like you know one fucking thing about—"

"Lower your voice."

"Make me. Come on. Come on, you've wanted to for years, you want to do it in front of the whole League, here's your shot, let's go—"

Over Bruce's shoulder, Dick had turned from the window. Was walking. Nobody was looking at Dick. Dick was crossing behind Bruce, slow, casual, one hand trailing along the cape like he was moving it aside to get past, and Jason kept screaming and watched three batarangs and a fistful of smoke pellets vanish out of the belt like it was a magic trick.

"—and you know it, and he knew it, and the only reason you're standing there instead of on your ass is that I haven't decided yet—"

Clark had started to move. Jason saw it and didn't care. Dick was clear. Dick had gone past Bruce and past Clark and past Wally, who was leaning against a pillar, and Dick was still walking, picking up speed, away from all of them, toward the far end of the pen, and then he wasn't walking.

Then he was running.

Jason heard the pen inhale. Somebody — Donna — said "Dick—" and Nightwing hit the end wall with one foot, ran up it two steps, kicked off, came down running harder. Hit the side wall. Came off it. He was building it, the way he built it on rooftops, the way Jason had watched him do it from a hundred vantage points across Gotham, every step feeding the next, and the whole pen had gone so quiet Jason could hear his boots on the warm floor, and every face in it had the same expression, and the expression said oh God, he's going for the Red Hood.

Jason stopped screaming.

Dropped to one knee. Linked his hands.

Nightwing's foot came down in them, and Jason stood up with everything he had.

III.

Hal's ring was gone, but the reflex wasn't, and so his hand was up and pointed at nothing when Nightwing went through the window.

Through the window. The force field was a membrane, it turned out, not a wall — it gave, it stretched, it let him out like a mouth spitting a seed — and then he was clear of it and going up, not out, a long high arc over the slope and the scree and the pillars, blue stripes flashing, a shape that had no business being that far in the air from a throw.

Hal had seen the Red Hood stand up. He'd seen the hands. He still couldn't put it together. That was a grown man. That was a hundred and seventy pounds of grown man and he'd gone up like a kid off a trampoline.

Down on the killing floor, forty Ordhi warriors turned their heads.

All of them. Every chandelier face, every faceted eye, swinging up to track the flying thing, and Nightwing came down in the middle of a knot of them on the far side of the floor, hundreds of feet from the window, and Hal lost him in a crash of chitin and limbs, and then found him again because he was the only thing moving that fast.

"He's—" Barry was on his feet. "What is he doing, he's alone down there, why did—"

"Where's the Red Hood," Clark said.

Hal turned around.

The Red Hood wasn't in the pen.

The window was still rippling faintly where something had gone through it. Backward, Hal thought. He'd been on one knee, he'd stood up, he'd thrown, and then — Hal replayed it and couldn't find the frame — he'd just kept going. Tipped over backward through the membrane, out and down onto the scree, and Hal looked out and down and saw nothing. Rocks, and at the bottom of the slope a tumble of broken masonry that could have hidden a car.

On the far side of the floor, Nightwing was fighting nine of them at once and laughing.

Hal could hear it. Everyone could hear it — the dome carried sound, or the Ordhi were piping it in, some cruelty of the arena so the watchers got the screams. But Nightwing wasn't screaming. Nightwing was going through those things like water finds the low ground, over one, under another, escrima sticks cracking off the joints where the plates met, and he was saying something, and the words came up thin and clear:

"—really thought that'd be harder. No offense. You guys have a real lobby energy, like, a hotel lobby. Is this all of you? Is this the whole—"

The nearest Ordhi warrior's head came apart.

Snapped, more like. A small clean hole above the left eye where the plates met, and the thing went down like somebody'd cut its strings, and the sound of the shot arrived a half-second later from the wrong direction entirely: the slope. The rocks. The bottom of the hill under the window where there was, still, nothing to see.

Another one dropped. Then another. Same hole, same spot, that seam above the eye that Hal hadn't even noticed until it started getting used.

"Jesus," Oliver said, very quietly, beside him. "Jesus, look at his grouping."

The Ordhi noticed on the fourth. Heads came round. Some of them started up the slope, big loping things, and there was a burst of fire — two, three, four, so fast it sounded like one — and four of them were on their faces in the scree, and the ones behind stopped.

"He's using rounds," Diana said. "Where did he get—"

"Arsenal," Hal said. He'd seen the handoff. He hadn't understood it. "He got 'em off Arsenal."

Arsenal, on his ration dispenser, was grinning like it was Christmas.

"—no, no, right there—" Nightwing's voice, across the floor, sharper now, and then he was moving again, a whole new direction, dragging the cluster around him toward the base of a fallen pillar. "Hood! You want these lined up or do you want to work for it—"

"I want you to shut the fuck up and stop moving so much!" The Red Hood's voice came from the rocks. Nowhere. Everywhere. "I got one guy in the scope and then you're in it, you're always fucking in it—"

"That's called being useful—"

"That's called being a target, that's what that's—"

Nightwing threw one of them. Actually threw one, a thing twice his weight, got low and got a shoulder under it and put it over the pillar, and it was still in the air when the round took it through the eye-seam and it hit the far side dead.

"—that's what I'm talking about," the Red Hood said. "See? Set 'em up. Like a civilized person."

"You're welcome!"

"I didn't say thank you!"

In the pen, nobody was talking. Hal became aware of that. Fifty of the most powerful people in the solar system standing at a window, and not one of them had said a word in — he checked, he couldn't check, his ring was gone, whatever — a while.

Clark's face had gone very carefully blank, the way it did when he was listening to something and didn't want to say what.

Batman's cape had stopped moving. Batman, as far as Hal could see, had stopped moving. He was standing where Nightwing had walked past him, one hand very slightly raised toward his own belt like he'd just now noticed something wrong with the weight of it.

"Tt," said Robin, to nobody, and Hal would have paid real money to know what that meant.

IV.

The thing about Ordhi, Dick decided somewhere around the twelfth one, was that they'd never fought anybody short.

They were built for other Ordhi. Everything was up high — the plating, the big hooked forelimbs, the eyes on their pale sockets set right at the top of the skull. They swung at head height and the head they were swinging at was three feet above his. So he just kept going under. Under the swing, hit the knee — they had something like a knee, it bent wrong, it hated being hit — under the next one, hit the other knee, and by then the thing was folding down to his level with its eye-seam right there, and he didn't even need to do anything about it because—

Crack.

"That one was mine," he said.

"You were dawdling."

"I was setting it up—"

"You were making a speech. I could see your mouth going through the fucking scope, you were — you were talking to it—"

"I was asking about the food!" Dick rolled over a low bit of wall, came up in a crouch on the other side, took stock. Fourteen down, give or take. The rest had pulled back into a loose arc, which was smart, and were staying out of the open lanes, which was smarter, and were still absolutely not looking up the hill, which was the only thing that mattered. "I'm allowed to be curious! Eleven hours of couch paste, Hood, I want to know if that's culture or punishment—"

"It's the cafeteria." Something moved on the arc's left flank and stopped moving. "This is a warship, Nightwing, this is a garrison, they've been eating that shit for years. No wonder they're like this. You'd conquer planets too."

"That's — okay, that's fair, actually."

"I know it's fair."

Three came at him at once, which was new. Dick went up the pillar beside him — the cathedral bits were good, honestly, whoever'd built this had built it for people who climbed — and came down behind them, and got one across the back of the joint with both sticks, and heard the crack and the crack of the other two dropping before he'd even squared up.

"Hey," he said. "Hey. Question. What's the architecture. What's the vibe here. Is this theirs or did they steal it?"

"Stole it."

"How do you—"

"Look at the joins. Look at the — that column base, that's four different kinds of stone, they didn't quarry this, they shipped it. This is a trophy." A pause, a shot, an Ordhi at the edge of the arc going down without a sound. "Whole arena's a fucking mood board of everybody they've ever beaten. That's what you're standing in. That's a scrapbook."

"That's grim."

"It's tacky is what it is. I'd never."

"You have a skull on your helmet—"

"It's a brand—"

"It's a skull, on a helmet, on a man, who's lecturing me about décor—"

The gunfire stopped.

Dick heard it stop, felt the shape of the silence, and thought shit without slowing down, because that was the deal, that was always the deal — you didn't slow down for the other guy's problem, you went faster. He went faster. The arc had heard it too, or felt it, the way things that hunt feel a gap, and the whole line of them started forward.

"Hood."

"I'm aware—"

"How many—"

"I'm out, Dick, I'm out, Harper's mags are done—"

There was a way he'd have handled that, once, which was to stop thinking about it. There was a way he handled it now.

"Left hip," he said. "Ten seconds. Don't shoot me."

"Don't—"

Dick was already going.

Straight at the line. They didn't expect that either — he'd noticed they didn't expect anything, they'd expected the world's finest to be Superman, and so the whole Proving had been designed for somebody who'd fly at them, and instead they'd got a man who ran under. He hit the ground in a slide that took him past the first two and through the legs of the third, and came up out of the slide already running, up the slope, into the rocks, toward the tumble of masonry at the bottom of the hill where nobody had looked for eleven minutes.

Jason was behind a block the size of a fridge, the Mark Seven broken open across his knee, staring at the empty well like it had personally insulted him.

Dick pulled the mag off his left hip and threw it.

Jason caught it without looking. Looked at it. Looked at Dick.

"This is a Deathstroke mag."

"Yeah."

"This is—" He turned it over. Slade's stamp on the base plate, the little D. "Where the fuck—"

"He had it in his pants pocket like a normal person—"

"You got ammo off Deathstroke—"

"Load the gun, Jason."

Jason loaded the gun. Slapped it home, racked it, was up on one knee over the fridge-block and firing before Dick had finished turning around. "What did it cost you?"

"Don't worry about it."

"What did it cost you, Dick—"

"Don't worry about it—"

"If you owe Slade Wilson a favor I swear to God—"

"It's fine, he gets a Christmas card, go, go, they're—"

The first Ordhi came over the lip of the slope and lost its head in the ordinary way, and Dick was off the hill and back on the floor before the second one arrived.

They got another twelve that way.

Dick stopped counting after that because counting was for people who didn't have a rhythm, and he had a rhythm, he'd had it since about the third one. Jason on the hill. Dick on the floor. Jason's voice in his ear — not in his ear, there weren't comms, but it felt like it, it always felt like it, the man had a way of talking to you like he was standing right there even from four hundred yards. Dick would drive them somewhere and Jason would drop them. Dick would go somewhere stupid and Jason would say why the fuck are you going there and then cover it anyway. That was the shape. They'd found it on a rooftop in the Bowery three years ago, by accident, by both of them going after the same guy and getting in each other's way, and Dick had been so angry about it that he'd said something unforgivable and Jason had laughed so hard he'd had to sit down.

"You're getting slow," Jason said.

"I'm getting efficient—"

"You're getting old. That one you did on the pillar, that was — you used to do that as a spin. Now it's a turn. That's a turn, Dick, that's a dad move—"

"I'm thirty—"

"I'm aware. It's very sad. We all noticed."

"There's a thing behind you."

"There's not—" Crack. "Okay, there was."

Then the big one came out.

Dick didn't see where from. Some gate in the far wall, some hole in the scrapbook, and the arc parted for it — respect or fear, hard to say with a face like a chandelier — and it came down the killing floor at a walk. Half again the size of the others. Plates the color of old blood. Something in its forelimb that wasn't a claw. Something that hummed.

"Hood."

"I see it."

"What's it holding—"

"I don't — get down, Dick, get down, that's a—"

The hum went up a note.

Dick was running. He didn't remember deciding to. He was running for the rocks at the base of the hill and the thing's forelimb came up and the hum peaked and the fridge-block was right there and then something hit him from the side with the weight of a car.

He'd been hit by Jason before. That was the thing. He knew what it felt like — the specific horrible enormity of him, the way he did it, arms around and over, all that armor turned outward and Dick tucked in the middle of it like an egg — and so when the world went white and the sound came a half-second later and threw them both across the scree, Dick's body didn't do anything except go loose and let it happen. Roll with the roll. Hands over his face. Wait.

The white went away. There was a ringing. There was Jason's weight, on him, holding.

"—armor," Jason was saying. Had been saying, apparently, for a bit. "—the fuck do you wear this, it's foam, Dick, it's foam with a bird on it—"

"It's kevlar-weave—"

"It's sportswear. You'd get more coverage from a wetsuit." He rolled off, and there was a sound, and Dick looked and saw the whole left side of Jason's jacket smoking gently. He didn't seem to have noticed. "Are you hit."

"No."

"Are you hit, don't no me, I know what your no sounds—"

"I'm not hit. You sat on me. Are you—"

"I'm fine, I've got plates, that's what plates are for—"

"Your jacket's on fire."

Jason looked down. Slapped it out. "That's why you layer."

The hum was starting again, out on the floor.

They looked at each other.

"I'm out," Jason said. "That was — that was the last of Slade's. I got maybe four in the pistol and the pistol's not gonna do a thing to that."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay." Dick got up. His knees were fine. His ribs were — his ribs had been through worse. He picked his sticks up out of the scree, where they'd landed, one and then the other, and checked the grips, and turned around. "Let's go."

"Let's go, he says—"

"You got a better idea?"

Jason stood up too. Pistol in his right hand. Knife in his left — he'd got it from somewhere, Dick had stopped asking years ago where the knives came from — and the jacket still smoking a little, and the helmet turned toward the floor and the big thing and the humming, and Dick could not see his face and did not need to.

"No," Jason said. "Not really."

"Great."

"After you."

"After me—"

"You're faster—"

"I'm thirty, I thought I was old—"

"Oh my God, go—"

They went.

Later — much later, when someone had made a recording and someone else had leaked it and the recording had been slowed down, frame by frame, by people with far too much time and a working knowledge of the Bat-family's field techniques — the general consensus would be that there was no way to explain the last four minutes of the Proving without assuming that Nightwing and the Red Hood had trained together, for years, extensively, and on purpose.

Dick, in the moment, didn't think about any of that. He thought: left.

And Jason went left. And the thing's forelimb swung where Dick had been, and Dick was under it, and Jason's knife was in the joint where the plate met the shoulder, and the thing screamed — they could scream, turned out, they'd just been saving it — and Dick came up off the floor and put both sticks into the eye-seam at once.

It didn't die. It should have. Dick had seen that seam take a nine-millimeter round from four hundred yards and it had always died. But it didn't die, and it swung, and Jason said "down—" and Dick went down and felt the wind of it go over, and heard the pistol go — four, all four, right into the open mouth-parts — and the thing staggered.

"That's all I got," Jason said.

"Then we do it the hard way."

"I hate the hard way—"

"You love the hard way, you tell everybody about the hard way, you've got a speech about the—"

"Shut up and get on its back—"

He got on its back. That was — that was the trick, the one they'd worked out in the Bowery on a guy in a mech suit. Dick went up. Jason went in. The thing couldn't reach behind its own shoulders and it couldn't take its eyes off the man with the knife in front of it, and so it had a choice, and it kept making the wrong one. Dick worked at the plates on the back of its neck. Jason worked at the front. The thing turned in circles, screaming, and the rest of the arc — what was left, eight of them, nine — stood back and watched it, like it was a sport, like they didn't want to interfere.

"There's a — there's a gap—" Dick had his fingers in it. Something soft under the plate. "Jason, here, I need—"

The knife came up. Handle first. He didn't look; he didn't have to; he put his hand back and it was there.

He put it in.

The thing stopped turning.

It stood. It stood for a long second, the humming arm gone quiet and its head tipped up toward the fish tank on the far wall, where the Ordhi brass sat behind their shimmer, and then it went down at the knees, and Dick rode it down, and stepped off it onto the floor.

The arc looked at them.

Jason wiped the knife on his thigh. It didn't help. He put it away anyway.

"So," he said. "Who's next."

Nobody was next. They came all at once, and it was — Dick would think this later, would say it to Jason in a kitchen with a beer, and Jason would throw a dish towel at him — the most fun he'd had in a year. Nine of them, tired, scared, fighting in a language they'd never learned, and two of them who'd been finishing each other's sentences since before they'd admitted they liked each other. Jason took a hit that would've dropped a horse and stayed up and said "rude." Dick went between two of them and didn't come out the other side, and Jason didn't look for him, because Jason knew he'd be on the pillar, and he was on the pillar. Dick said "right" and Jason went right. Jason said "duck" and Dick didn't, because Jason was lying, because that was a thing they did, and the last one put its whole weight into the swing at the head that wasn't there and Dick took its knee out and Jason took its head off with a rock.

With a rock.

Dick stood there and looked at it.

"What," Jason said.

"You—"

"I was out. What was I supposed to—"

"It was very Bruce."

"It was not — take it back — that was resourceful—"

"Old Testament. Very first Robin. I'm just saying."

"I'm gonna hit you with the rock."

The dome had gone quiet. Not the ringing quiet from the blast — the other kind, the kind that had a shape, forty-one bodies' worth of it lying around a stolen cathedral, and up on the far wall the fish tank, and up on the near one the window, and behind the window fifty faces Dick hadn't looked at once in — how long? He checked. He couldn't check. Whatever.

He looked now.

Nobody in the window was moving. Roy had his hands over his mouth, but his eyes were doing the thing that meant he was laughing behind them. Kori's smile was the biggest thing in the room. Hal Jordan looked like he'd swallowed a bee. Clark had the blank face. Tim had a pen — where had he got a pen — and was writing something on his own glove. Damian's mouth was going.

Bruce was at the front. Bruce was right up against the membrane with one hand flat on it, and Dick looked at him, and Bruce looked back, and Dick found that there was nothing at all he wanted to say.

So he turned to Jason instead.

"Field's still up," he said.

Jason looked. Their window: shimmer. The fish tank: shimmer. Nothing had dropped. The Ordhi brass sat in a row behind their wall and looked down at the two of them like they'd seen something in the bath.

"Huh," Jason said.

"Yeah."

"Well, they're not gonna let us out."

"Nope."

Jason looked at the fish tank for a while. Then at Dick. Then back at the fish tank, up on its ledge, thirty feet of sheer wall below it, a rope or a hanging or something like a tapestry dangling off the lip like it'd been hung there to make the room look nice.

"Get on," he said.

V.

"He tackled him," Barry said.

"I saw."

"No, but — Hal. He tackled him. He was behind cover. He was behind the rock, Hal, he was fine, he came out from behind the rock to—"

"I saw, Barry."

"He'd have had it. Nightwing was two steps from that block, he'd have made it, and the Red Hood came out anyway, and got between him and a — that was a plasma discharge, that was a ship-grade—" Barry's hands were doing something in the air. Barry's hands did that when he couldn't run. "And then he insulted his armor. While on fire."

"I know."

"I don't—"

"Barry. Look."

Down on the floor, the Red Hood had crouched.

Nightwing walked up his back like it was a staircase.

That was — Hal ran it again in his head, and that was what it had looked like. One foot on the bent knee, one on the shoulder, and up, and now he was standing on the Red Hood's shoulders, and the Red Hood was standing up under him, slow, and then walking. Just walking. Across the killing floor, over the bodies, toward the far wall, with a grown man standing on him, and neither of them had a hand on the other. Nightwing's arms were folded. The Red Hood's were swinging at his sides like he was going to get the mail.

"That's not—" Oliver said.

"Shut up, Ollie."

"That's not possible, the balance on that, you can't—"

"Ollie, I swear to God—"

"Tt," said Robin.

Hal turned around. The kid was standing right behind him. Had been, apparently, for a while, with his arms folded exactly the way Nightwing's were folded, and his face was doing something furious and complicated.

"What," Hal said. "What does that mean, you keep—"

"It means," Robin said, "that Grayson has never once permitted me to do that."

Up the wall, the Ordhi brass had started to move. Not much. Shifting. One of them leaning to the next. A sound was coming through the speakers — a hiss, a lot of hisses, laid over each other, and Hal had heard enough alien languages by now to know what a room full of people all saying what the fuck at once sounded like.

At the base of their wall, the Red Hood stopped.

Nightwing looked up at the fish tank. Said something Hal couldn't hear. And the Red Hood reached up, and took him by the ankles, and lifted.

Straight up. Arms locked. Full extension over his head, and Nightwing stood on his hands like that was a floor, and reached up, and put his palm flat on the bottom edge of the Ordhi force field, and tilted his head like a man listening to a wall.

"Oh," Clark said, from the front.

Everyone looked at him.

"He's checking for the resonance," Clark said. "The — it's a standing field, it's got a frequency. He's finding it." A pause. Clark's head tipped a fraction, the way it did. "He just asked for a knife."

Down on the floor, the Red Hood let go of one ankle.

Just — let go. Nightwing, held up at full extension in one hand, on one foot, did not so much as sway, and the Red Hood reached down with the free hand to somewhere on his own thigh and came up with a blade, and flicked it upward, and Nightwing caught it without looking and started tapping.

Tink. Tink. Tink.

"How," Diana said. It was the first thing she'd said in an hour. "How long have they been—"

"Years," Deathstroke said. "You didn't know?"

Every head in the pen turned.

Deathstroke, in his corner, shrugged.

"I've had contracts on both of them," he said. "You learn things. Never took either one. Bad math. You take one, the other shows up." He paused. "I'm impressed nobody in the family worked it out."

Batman didn't turn around.

Tink. Tink. Nightwing had found something; his tapping had gone from searching to steady, a rhythm, and he called something down, and the Red Hood's free arm came up.

Nightwing dropped into it.

Dropped — the Red Hood's arms came down and in as Nightwing came down and in, and the Red Hood went to a crouch as Nightwing landed in a crouch on his shoulders, and there was a beat, a held breath, two bodies coiled on top of each other like a spring somebody'd stepped on—

They exploded.

Hal didn't have a better word. The Red Hood came up and Nightwing came off him, over the lip of the ledge, thirty feet of wall gone in one shot, and hit the force field with the knife point-first at the exact moment—

—it went down.

Clark made a small noise.

Nightwing went through the gap in a somersault and came up in the middle of the Ordhi brass.

Below him, the Red Hood was already on the hanging. Going up it hand over hand, the way a man goes up a rope when he doesn't need his feet, and the last thing Hal saw before the far gallery turned into a tumble of screaming chandelier faces and blue stripes was the Red Hood going over the lip with the pistol in his hand and somebody's tapestry over one shoulder like a cape.

"Tt," Robin said.

"What does that mean—"

"It means," Robin said, and for the first time since they'd been taken, he sounded eleven, "that I want to do that."

VI.

The tapestry was a mistake. Jason knew it the second it caught on the lip — it was heavy, it was old, it smelled like a wet dog that had been dead a while — and he'd taken it anyway because a man should go into a room with something over his shoulder, and now he was over the ledge and there were nine of them and Dick was already on three and the tapestry was around his neck like a scarf.

He threw it on the nearest one.

It worked, to be fair. The thing went blind and swung at nothing and Jason put the pistol against the side of its head — empty, the pistol was empty, but they didn't know that — and then remembered it was empty and hit it with the pistol instead. Twice. It went down under the tapestry and stayed down, and he stepped over the lump and looked around.

The fish tank wasn't a fish tank from the inside. It was a room. A long one, low, a lot of dark polished stone, and nine of the Hegemony's finest in a lot of robes and a lot of jewelry, and the thing at the far end — the one that had done the talking, the horse-sized one with the face like a dropped chandelier — hadn't got up. It was sitting on something that wasn't quite a throne, watching, with its hands folded, and it was the only thing in the room that wasn't panicking.

Jason didn't like that.

"Dick."

"Busy—"

"Big guy's not moving."

"I see the big guy—"

"He's pleased, Dick, he's pleased about something—"

Dick put one of them through the wall. Not a wall, a screen — one of the tall glass panels along the back, and it went in a spray, and the thing went out over the ledge and down thirty feet and did not, from the sound, land well. "Then go ask him—"

Two came at Jason together. Guards, he thought — they moved like guards, they had the plates, they had something in their hands that was probably a weapon in the sense that it hummed — and he'd been throwing men twice his weight through doorways since he was nineteen and these were not men and this was not a doorway but the principle held. He went low on the first and put a shoulder into the joint, and it folded, and the humming thing dropped, and he had it.

It was a rod. About two feet. Warm. He didn't know what it did.

He hit the second guard with it, and found out.

"Oh," he said, over the noise. "Oh, that's good."

"What's—"

"It's a stick, Dick. It's a — it's a shock stick, it's like a — hang on—" The guard was still going. It was going sideways, in a heap, twitching, and the smell coming off it was one Jason knew from a place he'd rather not think about. "It's like a cattle prod but it's mean about it—"

"Great. Can it get him?"

The thing on the not-throne had stood up.

Everything else in the room had stopped. Jason counted: four down, two through the window, the tapestry lump, the twitching one. One more — a thin one, robes, no plates, backed into the corner with its hands up in a way that was universal. And the big one, standing, seven, eight feet of it, and the jewelry on it wasn't jewelry. He saw that now. It was plating. Ornamental, chased, something like gold, but it was armor and it went all the way down.

"Diminished," it said.

The voice came from everywhere. Speakers. It was still on the goddamn speakers.

"Yeah," Jason said. "Hi."

"You were counted. You were ruled. The contaminant, the ground-death, the rot in you—" It came forward. It moved like a thing that had never had to move fast, and didn't intend to start. "You were the least of them."

"Sure was."

"The Proving was calibrated for the greatest. For the flying one. For the one who—"

"Yeah, see, that's the thing about calibration," Jason said, and looked at Dick, and Dick looked at him. "Somebody's gotta tell you what you're measuring."

Dick's mouth twitched.

Go.

They went.

It was — Jason would think this later, and not say it — like the Bowery again. Like the mech-suit guy. The big one couldn't reach behind itself and couldn't take its eyes off the front, and the two of them had been sharing one opponent's attention for so long it had stopped feeling like a technique. Dick went up. Jason went in. The shock stick did nothing to the plating and everything to the seams, and the thing found that out at the elbow, and screamed, and swung, and hit the polished stone floor where Jason had been a quarter-second before hard enough to crack it.

"Left—"

"I know—"

"You don't know, you were going right, you were committed—"

"I was feinting, it's called a feint, I'm allowed to be sophisticated—"

Dick was on its shoulders. Had been for a bit. Had his sticks crossed behind its head and was pulling and the thing had one arm up trying to get him, which meant one arm down, which meant Jason went in under it with the shock stick reversed and put it up, hard, into the place where a thing that size kept its throat.

The stick went in about six inches. It made a sound. Jason had heard the sound before, from cows, from a farm in the Basque country he'd hidden on for a month once, and he'd been sorry for the cows and he wasn't sorry now.

"Hold it," he said.

"I'm — holding — it—"

"Hold it still—"

"It's eight feet tall, Jason, what do you want me to—"

Jason found the end of the stick with his thumb. There was a stud there. There'd been a stud there since he picked it up and he'd been curious about it.

He pushed it.

Later, the Lantern would tell people that from the window it had looked like lightning going the wrong way — down into the thing, not out of it — and that the whole gallery had lit blue for two full seconds, and that Nightwing had ridden it down like a man on a horse he'd decided to trust. Jason didn't see any of that. He saw the plating go dull. He saw the eyes — there were a lot of them, in the chandelier — go out one by one, like somebody turning off a house. He felt the weight come down and stepped out from under it, and it hit the polished stone all at once, and the sound went through the floor and up his shins.

Dick stepped off it.

Looked at it. Looked at Jason. Looked at the stick, which was smoking.

"I'm keeping that," Jason said.

"Obviously you're keeping that."

"It's mine."

"I didn't say—"

"You were thinking it. I could see you thinking it. You wanted the stick."

"I have two sticks—"

"Yours don't do that."

In the corner, the thin one with its hands up made a small sound.

They both turned.

It was — Jason looked at it properly — some kind of clerk. No plates, no weapon, robes with a lot of pockets, and it was holding something to its chest with both hands and its hands were shaking, and it was looking at the thing on the floor and then at them and then at the thing on the floor.

"You," Jason said. "You work here?"

It said something. The speakers didn't pick it up; it was too quiet. It said it again, and this time Jason caught the shape — some kind of yes — and the way it was holding the thing to its chest, which was the way people held things they thought were about to be taken.

"Great." Jason pointed the stick at it. Not on. Just pointed. "You're gonna show us the computer."

"The what—" That was Dick.

"There's a — every ship's got a — Dick, they're a Hegemony, they've got paperwork, they've got a manifest, there's a ship's inventory somewhere and I want to see it—"

"We should get the others—"

"In a minute."

"Jason. The field's still up. They're stuck in there. Bruce is going to—"

"Bruce can wait. Bruce has waited in worse rooms. We have a thing to do first."

Dick stared at him.

"We need," Jason said, "to decide the loot split."

VII.

"The what."

"Article thirteen point nine." Jason had the clerk by the elbow and was steering it — gently, for him — toward the back of the gallery, where the glass panel Dick hadn't broken was showing rows of something that could've been text. "Section thirty-two. Sector 2814 Salvage and Reparations Accord, ratified — I don't know, a long time ago, before money."

"I'm sorry we didn't all memorize the entire legal code of every space sector—"

"You'd have had time, you spent eleven hours fighting with Bruce—"

"I was busy—"

"You were pacing."

The clerk touched the panel. The rows of text shivered and became other rows of text, and Jason leaned in and read them like a man reading a menu, and Dick stood behind him with his arms folded and became aware, slowly, that the speakers were still on.

He could hear the pen. Not words. Movement. A lot of people shifting, breathing, the specific quiet of fifty heroes listening very hard. Somebody — Wally — said "is he—" and somebody else shushed him.

"Jason."

"Mm."

"They can hear us."

"I know."

"You know—"

"Loot gained in the defense of a sector world," Jason said, not looking up, "against an attack by a hostile power, where the defenders are not a state-sanctioned military force, is split evenly between the successful defenders, in proportion to — no, hang on, it's not proportion, it's evenly, it's by head — between the successful defenders." He tapped the glass. "That's you and me. Two heads. That's fifty-fifty."

"The League will handle the—"

"The League's not a defender." Now he looked up. The helmet turned toward Dick, toward the window across the dome behind Dick, and Dick could feel it looking at the window. "The League was in the pen. Eating paste. You want to know what the League's entitled to under thirteen point nine? Nothing. Zip. They can put it in the newsletter."

"You're seriously—"

"I'm seriously not walking out of here and handing a shipload of salvage to Batman so he can put it in a vault and tell me it's evidence." Jason's voice had gone flat. Not angry. Just very, very clear, the way it went when he was saying something he'd say to a room. "I'm owed. By law. And if it goes to the League, it goes into the League's vault, and I never see it, and I know that, and you know that, and you're standing there hemming at me like you don't."

Dick opened his mouth.

"And if I have to," Jason said, "I will take the Justice League of America up in front of the Lantern Court on a salvage claim, and I'll win, and every Green Lantern in the Corps will have to read the transcript."

Dick closed his mouth.

Across the dome, in the window, somebody made a noise like a man trying not to laugh through his nose. Hal Jordan, probably. It sounded like Hal.

"Fine," Dick said.

"Fine?"

"Fine. Fine. Do the — pull it up, let's — I'm not letting you do this alone, God knows what you'd—"

"Thank you."

"—take, you'd take the engines and leave them the chairs—"

"That's slander—"

The clerk had found the manifest. It was long. It scrolled. Jason put one hand flat on the panel and started reading, out loud, because of course he did, and Dick stood at his shoulder and read it too and thought, distantly, this is going to be the worst hour of Bruce's life.

"Pharmaceuticals."

"No."

"I haven't said anything—"

"Jason. No. I'm not letting you run a — you have a drug empire, you don't need a space drug empire—"

"They're not illegal." Jason had found the line item. He was tapping it. "Look. Look at the — it's vesh, it's — the clerk says it's vesh, it's a stimulant, it's from a plant on a planet nobody on Earth's ever heard of, it's not on any schedule anywhere. It's not even a crime. It's tea."

"It's space tea."

"It's legal space tea."

"You're going to sell it."

"I'm going to test it, first, like a responsible person, and then I'm going to think about it." The helmet turned. "What's the League gonna do with it? Seriously. Walk me through it. Superman's gonna take it to the Watchtower and put it in a drawer. That's it. That's the whole plan. Two hundred kilos of the only stimulant in the sector that doesn't come with a comedown, and it goes in a drawer next to Bruce's spare cowls—"

"—I don't have—"

That came through the speakers. Very quiet. Dick did not turn around.

"—and in ten years somebody finds it and it's gone off. That's waste, Dick. I'm against waste. I was raised better."

Dick looked at the line item. Two hundred kilos.

"Half," he said.

"All. What are you gonna do with a hundred kilos of—"

"Give it to the League—"

"So it can go in the drawer—"

"Fine. Fine, God, take it, take the — I'm putting it on the record that I objected—"

"So noted."

"—and if this ends up in a club in Gotham—"

"It'll be tested and labeled and come with a pamphlet, Dick, I run a professional operation—"

"Ordnance."

"Oh, here we go."

"There's a — hang on, the clerk's got a — it's a gravity thing. Gravity-shear projector. Ship-mounted. It's what took the ceiling off the Kryptonian embassy on Thanagar in — I don't know, whenever. It's big." Jason was scrolling. "And there's a bench one. Same principle, you can pick it up. Field-strippable."

"What are you going to—"

"Roy."

Dick closed his eyes.

"Roy, Jason. You want to give a — you want to take an insanely gifted, plainly insane engineer with a six-year-old and a garage and hand him a weapon of mass—"

"It's not a weapon of mass anything, it's mid-mass, at best, it's a tool—"

"—destruction, that took the ceiling off—"

"Because." Jason turned around. All the way, this time, and put his back to the panel. "It's nice. To do thoughtful things. For the people you care about."

Dick stared at him.

"Someone told me that," Jason said. "Once. With a very straight face. In a kitchen."

"That's mine. You can't — I said that, that's my—"

"Well, it's mine now, it's salvage, I found it in a—"

"I was talking about a birthday present—"

"And this is a birthday present. For Roy. Who's turning — I don't know what he's turning. Something. He's turning something. And it'll make him happy. And you told me that mattered."

"I hate you."

"No you don't."

Across the dome, Dick heard Roy say, very clearly, "Oh my God, yes." And then Ollie say something short and sharp, and Roy say "What? It's thoughtful—"

"The bench one," Dick said. "Only the bench one. The ship-mounted one goes to the League and gets bolted to the Watchtower where somebody can watch it."

"Deal."

"And you explain it to Dinah."

"I'm not explaining anything to Dinah. Roy can explain it to Dinah. Roy's a grown man—"

"Medical."

"Yours."

Jason paused. "You haven't even—"

"It's a medical bay. You've got clinics." Dick reached past him and tapped the line item and it unfolded into a list — surgical, diagnostic, pharmaceutical synthesis, something the clerk called a knitter with a lot of hand gestures that Dick didn't want to think about. "You've got fifty people in a basement on Fourth Street who'd sell their kidneys for a—"

"Fifty-two."

"—for a synthesis rig that doesn't run on a hot plate. Take it. Take all of it. I'm not — I'm not going to argue with you about that, I'd look like an asshole."

Jason looked at him for a second.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay."

"Okay? That's it? No speech?"

"I'm saving it."

"For what—"

"For the art."

There was art.

There was a whole line item for it. Trophies (cultural), the clerk translated, and then a sub-list that went on for two screens, and most of it was the kind of thing you'd expect — banners, standards, the flags of people who'd lost — and then there was one entry, near the bottom, that the clerk stopped on and made a face about.

Jason had it brought up.

It was — Dick looked at it for a long time. It was a sculpture. Maybe. It was about four feet tall, and it was, as far as he could tell, a lot of teeth. Many different sizes of teeth. From, he was fairly sure, many different kinds of mouth. And they'd been arranged in a kind of spiral, a rising twist, and at the top of the twist the spiral opened out into something that was — that was definitely, there was no way around it — a scream.

"No," Dick said.

"I want it."

"Absolutely not."

"Look at it. Look at it, Dick, look at what it's doing—"

"It's screaming—"

"It's expressing. It's — that's pain, that's grief, that's twelve civilizations' worth of grief, someone made that, someone sat down with a bag of teeth and—"

"And you want it where—"

"Safehouse. The one on — the one with the good kitchen. Over the table."

"You'd eat under that?"

"I'd eat anywhere. I've eaten under worse. I want to be reminded, Dick, I want to look up from my eggs and remember that everything ends—"

"I want it too."

Jason stopped.

"You—"

"I want it." Dick folded his arms. "It's half mine. Salvage law. Two heads."

"You hate it, you just said—"

"I do hate it. That's the point." Dick looked at the thing again. The scream at the top. The way the light caught the molars. "I'm going to put it in the front hall of the Manor."

Silence.

Across the dome, from the window, something that might have been Tim saying "oh, no," very softly.

"Right by the door," Dick said. "First thing you see. Every gala. Every board member, every senator, every time he walks in from a patrol — first thing. In the eyeline. And I'm going to tell Alfred it's a gift and Alfred's going to keep it there, because Alfred knows what a gift means—"

Jason had gone very still.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. That's better."

"I know it's better."

"That's — no, that's actually better. You win. Fuck. You win." He shook his head. "I was gonna put it over eggs. You're gonna put it over Bruce. That's vision. That's long-term thinking."

"Thank you."

"I'm a little jealous—"

"I know you are."

"—like, that's the kind of thing I'd—"

"You can visit it."

"I can not—"

"You can visit it at Christmas. As a civilian. In a suit."

"I'd rather eat the teeth."

"Livestock."

"No."

"There's — Dick, there's six hundred head of something—"

"No. Neither of us. Nobody. Give it to the League."

"The League doesn't want six hundred—"

"Give it to Arthur."

"They're not fish, Dick, they're — the clerk says they're like goats, if goats had six—"

"Then give it to Clark. He's got a farm."

Pause.

"—I don't have a—" from the speakers.

"He's got a mom with a farm," Dick said, louder. "Same thing. Next."

"Cloaking module."

"No."

"I want—"

"No, Jason, you're a crime lord, I'm not handing you stealth technology from a warship, that's — that's an actual line, that's a real one—"

"Fine."

"Fine?"

"Fine. You take it. Put it in the Watchtower." Jason went back to the panel. "I'll just steal it off you in a month."

"You will not—"

"I absolutely will. You'll put it in a room with a keypad and I'll have the code by Tuesday, I've seen your keypads—"

"That's — Jason, that was one time—"

"It was four times and one of them was your apartment—"

"Currency."

"Split."

"Split."

"That was easy."

"It's money, Dick, I'm not a monster."

"There's a — okay, hang on. Personal galley. The big one's. It's got — the clerk's saying real food. Not the paste. The good stuff. Whatever they were eating up here while they watched us eat a couch—"

"Yours."

"Mine? You don't even want to—"

"I want you to cook it."

Jason went quiet.

"For — for everyone," Dick said, into the quiet, and heard how it sounded, and didn't take it back. "When we get them out. Which we're going to do. Soon. Everybody's been eating paste for eleven hours, they're going to be animals, somebody's got to feed them, and it's not going to be Clark, Clark thinks pie is a food group—"

"—it is—"

"—so it's you." Dick pointed at the panel. "That's your share. You cook it. Tonight. In the — this ship has a galley, right, a real one, not the paste machine—"

"It has a galley."

"Then that's the deal."

Jason looked at the line item. Looked at Dick. The helmet did the thing where it didn't do anything, and Dick had known him long enough to know what that was.

"Fine," Jason said. "But I'm not doing dessert. I'm not — nobody's getting a dessert—"

"Nobody wants a dessert."

"Wally wants a dessert."

"Wally can want."

"Okay." Jason went back to the panel. "Okay. Where were we. Ship."

"Ship?"

"The ship, Dick. The thing we're standing in. Somebody's gotta—"

"League."

"You're giving them the ship?"

"We're not both — what am I going to do with a warship, park it in Bludhaven? It goes to the League. As — call it a gesture. Goodwill. Since we're taking everything else."

"We're not taking everything else—"

"We're taking the drugs and the doomsday thing and the teeth, Jason, I'm not going to make Hal Jordan stand in front of a Guardian and explain why the Justice League has a Hegemony cruiser on the books and doesn't have a screaming tooth sculpture—"

"—fair—"

"—so the ship goes to the League, and you go and open the goddamn pen."

Jason looked at the manifest one more time. Scrolled to the bottom. Back to the top.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay. Clerk. Which one's the—"

The clerk pointed.

Jason pushed it.

VIII.

The field came down with a sound like a very large balloon giving up, and for a second nobody moved, because they'd been standing at it for so long that the absence of it felt like a trick.

Then Clark stepped through, and it wasn't.

"He can't," Batman said.

He hadn't turned around. He'd been facing the dome the whole time — Hal had watched him not turn around for the entire loot conversation, had watched the back of his cowl go through the pharmaceuticals and the gravity thing and the teeth — and now he said it to the empty air where the field had been, low and even, like he was stating the time.

"He can't take any of it. That's evidence. That's an arsenal. That's — Nightwing just handed a crime lord a—"

"He can, though," Hal said.

Batman turned around.

Hal had known this was coming. He'd known since about the pharmaceuticals, when Diana had made a noise and Ollie had said he's not serious and Arthur had said he's serious and Hal had done the math in his head — the legal math, the Corps math, the thing the Guardians had made him sit through for two hundred hours in a room that smelled like ozone — and had come up with the answer he was now, God help him, going to say out loud to Batman's face.

"Thirteen point nine is real," he said. "Section thirty-two's real. He's got it right. Every word. I've read it — I had to, they test you on it, there's a — there's an exam." He took a breath. "The League's not a defender. The League was in a box. Two of them went in, two of them won, two of them split it. That's sector law, that's not his law, that's mine. The Guardians wrote it. If he takes the League to the Court on this, the Court sides with him, and I have to testify—"

"He's a criminal—"

"He's a citizen of the sector who defended a sector world, and the Court doesn't care what he does on a Tuesday." Hal heard his voice going up again and didn't stop it this time. "And I'm going to say something else, and I want everybody to hear it, because I'm done. I'm done with the — with the faces. The Outlaws aren't going to do anything bad with it."

Silence.

"They're not," he said. "I've seen what they do. I've seen the file. You know what's in the file? Trafficking rings. On four planets. That's the Outlaws' hobby. Six months ago they took apart a slaver fleet in the Vega system with three people and a ship they'd stolen from the slavers, and the Guardians sent them a letter. A thank you letter. Do you know how many of those I've gotten?" He pointed at himself. "Zero. I've gotten zero letters."

"Hal—" That was Barry.

"He's going to put the medical bay in a clinic. He's going to give a gravity gun to a man who makes his daughter pancakes shaped like Batman. He's going to cook dinner. For us." Hal turned to the window, to the dome, where Nightwing was standing in the gap of the far gallery with his arms folded, watching all of this the way he'd watched everything, and the Red Hood beside him with a shock stick over his shoulder and the tapestry, still, the goddamn tapestry—

"And," Hal said, "he's right about the drawer."

Nobody said anything.

Down in the gallery, the Red Hood raised one hand. Waved. Slow, from the wrist, like a man on a float.

The speakers crackled.

"Hey, Lantern," said the Red Hood's voice, through the whole dome. "Appreciate that. Really. Very moving. Two things." A pause. "One: I want it in writing. Two: dinner's at eight and if anybody brings paste to my table—"

"He's not cooking," Batman said.

"—I will end them, and thirteen point nine won't cover it—"

"He is not—"

"—and Clark, buddy, I know you can hear me, bring the pie—"

Clark, halfway down the scree slope, put both hands over his face.

"I'll write it up," Hal said, to no one, and went to find something to write on.