Chapter Text
Gordon Pryce was hanging from the forty-second floor of his own headquarters by one ankle, in a pair of pink boxer shorts with small cartoon sharks on them, when he finally started to talk.
His other leg, the left, hung at an angle that no leg should, and each time the wind swung him, he screamed. Both of his wrists were broken. Lena had done that in the lobby, with her heel, while he was still trying to reach the panic button. Six of his private security men lay in the stairwell below, in a long, groaning, tangled heap. Two of them would never walk without a cane again. One of them would not walk at all.
"Please," he said. He said it to the street, forty-two stories down, where a crowd had started to gather, and to the helicopter overhead, which had a news logo on its belly, and to the enormous electronic billboard on the opposite building, which had, twenty minutes earlier, stopped advertising soda and started scrolling, in large friendly letters, the routing numbers of eleven offshore accounts. "Please, I'll tell you anything. I'll tell you everything. I'll, I'll sign whatever you want,"
"I know you will," said Lena.
She was sitting on the window ledge, a little spatter of his blood drying on her gauntlet, beside him, one boot swinging over a seven-hundred-foot drop, with her chin on her fist.
She wore the suit. It was matte black, close-fitting, and plated at the shoulders and forearms with panels of dull green metal, and the helmet, which sealed over the upper half of her face and left only her mouth, was molded into a smooth, expressionless mask. Cables ran down her spine. A faint green light pulsed at her sternum, like a slow and patient heart. If you had looked at it with a certain kind of eye, a technician's eye, you'd have recognized the shape of the left gauntlet, and the angle of the shoulder guards, and the way the thruster housings flared at the hip. You'd have known where she got the parts.
She'd have been glad to tell you.
"You poisoned a town, Gordon," said Lena. "A little one. Ashby Falls. Nineteen hundred people. You knew about the contamination for four years. You buried the report, and you paid the inspectors, and you put the money in a bank on an island with a very pretty name." Her voice, filtered through the helmet, was soft, almost gentle. "Eleven children in the pediatric ward. Do you know their names?"
"I,"
"Nor do I. I'd like to. I thought that I'd ask you, since you're the one who signed the checks."
"Please," said Gordon Pryce, and wept.
"Mm." She tilted her head. "Do you know, I've thought a great deal about the right way to do this. The courts won't. Your lawyers are very good, and your friends are very high up, and the last time anyone tried to bring you to justice, the case was dismissed on a technicality, in four minutes, by a judge you'd had to dinner." She picked a speck of dust off her glove. "I'm not interested in justice, Gordon. I find it's a bit slow."
"What do you want?"
"Oh," said Lena, "just the money."
She tapped her wrist.
On the billboard across the street, the routing numbers vanished. In their place appeared a single line of text, in large white letters.
GORDON PRYCE, CEO, PRYCE CHEMICAL: THANK YOU FOR YOUR GENEROUS DONATION TO THE CHILDREN OF ASHBY FALLS.
Below it, ticking upward, was a number. It had a great many zeros.
"I took the liberty," said Lena, "of drafting the letter."
In the street below, the crowd had begun to cheer.
This was, by Lena Luthor's standards, a restrained evening.
Nobody had died. That was the line, and it was hers. But Gordon Pryce would spend the next eight months in physical therapy, and when he finally gave his deposition, he would do it in a wheelchair, with a pair of titanium pins in each knee and a tremor in his hands that no surgeon could fix. The shark boxers would trend for three days. His six guards would file for disability.
A less principled woman would have gone further. A more principled one, perhaps, would not have gone nearly so far.
Lena didn't see it that way.
She had thought about it, in the long hours after midnight. Men like Pryce did not fear prison. They had never feared it. They had lawyers who cost more than a hospital wing, and friends on parole boards, and a very good chance, on any ordinary Tuesday, of serving eighteen months in a minimum-security facility with a library and a golf green, and coming out to a standing ovation at the club. Jail was an inconvenience. It was a thing that happened to other people.
Pain, however, was democratic.
You could not buy your way out of a shattered knee. You could not plea-bargain a broken wrist. You could not get a good lawyer to take the ache out of a spine on a rainy morning, for the rest of your life. And so if the law would not make men like Gordon Pryce suffer, she would. Now, in the dark, with her own hands. And she'd make sure it lasted.
But Lena had learned a long time ago that there was no clear line between the two.
She'd been twenty-two when she started. She'd been twenty-two, and a Luthor, and she'd spent a year in the family accounts, in the dark, with a pot of tea and a cold fury, learning exactly what her brother had built. The shell companies. The slush funds. The long, quiet, careful machinery that moved dirty money from the hands of men who'd earned it to the hands of men who'd never been caught. And she had waited for someone to stop it. She had waited for the heroes. She had waited for the capes, and the courts, and the men in blue who cleaned up Metropolis, because surely, surely somebody, somewhere, would see.
Nobody did.
Superman had saved a bus from falling off a bridge that month. He was very good at buses. But the men who'd poisoned a river, and the men who'd gutted a pension fund, and the men whose names were never in the paper, those he did not seem to notice at all.
So on a cold night in October, Lena Luthor had sat down in the basement of her brother's old laboratory, with a welding torch and a pile of salvaged parts and five years of an education that cost more than most houses, and she had built.
It had taken her seven weeks.
It had been, she liked to think, a beautiful piece of work.
That had been five years ago.
She'd been busy since. The papers called her many things. Viridian was the one that had stuck. The Metropolis Ledger had called her a vigilante, and the Daily Planet, in a carefully worded editorial, had called her a menace, and a certain news channel with a very loud anchor had called her a terrorist, which she'd had printed on a mug.
She did not, as a rule, kill people. That was the line. It was a thin one, but it was hers.
But she had done a great many other things.
She had put a slumlord, who had bricked up a fire exit and watched seven tenants burn, through the plate-glass window of his own penthouse, and then down a flight of marble stairs, and then, when he tried to crawl, she had stood on his hand until she felt the bones go. He had not walked since. She had broken a pharmaceutical executive's jaw in four places, and his fingers, one by one, "so that he'll remember to count them." She had put a trafficker's lieutenant in a wheelchair for life with a single, precisely-placed blow, and she had stood over him afterward, breathing hard, and said, "Now you know what it's like to be stuck."
She had left a banker's shoes bolted to the ceiling of his own vault. She had shut down the electricity in a corrupt senator's mansion, and left the thermostat, over the course of a week, at exactly four degrees. She had sent the complete browser history of a notorious slumlord to every tenant in the building, in a font of her choosing. She had hung a man out of a helicopter by his suspenders. She had humiliated them, in short, with a thoroughness and an ingenuity that had begun to make some of the other heroes of Metropolis uneasy.
And, occasionally, she went too far.
"Lena," said Guardian, once, kneeling over a screaming man in the wreckage of a warehouse, with his hands slick and his shield cracked, and the look on his face of someone who has just made a very bad discovery. "His knees are,"
"They'll heal, or they won't."
"You broke them."
"He had it coming."
"You broke them in three places! He's never going to walk right again!"
"Good," said Lena. "And I was extremely careful to stop at three."
She hadn't meant it, quite. Not the spine. The knees, she had meant. It was one of the troubles with the suit. It had the strength of a hydraulic press, and the reaction time of a hummingbird, and sometimes, in the middle of a fight, when the rage rose up from somewhere deep in her chest and the world went narrow and red, she lost the ability to calculate the difference between enough and too much. A man would raise his hand. A pipe would swing. And the suit, with a smooth, joyful whine of servos, would respond.
Guardian had told her, afterward, that it was a very close thing.
"I could have killed you," she'd said.
"You nearly broke his spine."
"I didn't."
"By about an inch!"
She'd said nothing to that. She had simply stood there, in the broken warehouse, in the cold gray light, with a helmet under her arm and a quiet dread in her stomach, because she knew he was right. And she'd known, with a sudden, terrible clarity, that if she stayed in Metropolis much longer, one of those inches would run out.
So she left.
She moved to National City on the first of March.
She'd taken a flat on the sixteenth floor of a modern, unremarkable tower, under the name Lena Walsh, and told no one. There was a small, rather dreary balcony. There was a view of the harbor. There was a very large workshop in the second bedroom, with a battery of screens and a rack of unfinished helmets, and a single picture on the wall, a photograph of a woman with kind eyes and her mother's black hair, which she had never once mentioned to anyone.
It was a clean start. It was a fresh city.
And for the first six weeks, it was almost peaceful.
She found three corrupt landlords, a pension thief, and a mid-level manager who had been quietly selling the personal data of eleven thousand customers. She dealt with each of them in her customary manner. A few headlines. A few angry public servants. And then, on a clear April night, at the top of a stolen-cargo warehouse in the harbor district, with a smuggler's ankle in one gauntlet and a thick coil of cable in the other, she heard a sound above her head.
It was a clean, ringing, whistling sort of sound, like a bell being struck underwater.
She looked up.
It was a woman.
She was hanging in the air about forty feet over the warehouse roof, with her hands on her hips, and her cape snapping in the harbor wind. Her hair was a bright, shining, impossible gold. She wore blue and red, and a shield on her chest with a curl of black at its heart, and her face, her face was young, and fierce, and open, and absolutely unafraid.
"Put him down," said Supergirl.
Lena stared at her.
"I'd really like it," said Supergirl, "if you'd put him down."
They'd been fighting for a year.
It had begun as a serious thing. It had begun with fear, and caution, and a kind of grim mutual courtesy. Lena had known the stories. Everyone had. The Girl of Steel, the Kryptonian, the one with the heart of a lion and the strength of a mountain, who'd torn a collapsing bridge out of the air with her bare hands. She had not been an opponent anyone chose lightly.
But somewhere in that first month, between a rooftop chase and a failed ambush, it had changed.
Lena couldn't have said when. It might have been the night that Supergirl had caught a falling beam that Lena had shot, deliberately, at the opposite wall, and said, in a tone of faint, genuine exasperation, "Really? You couldn't have warned somebody?" It might have been the afternoon she'd blasted Lena off a rooftop, and then, twenty feet down, caught her by the arm and swung her, gently, onto a ledge, and said, "Don't get cocky." It might have been the evening that the two of them, panting, bruised and furious, had stopped in the middle of a rainy alley and found that they were both, to their mutual astonishment, laughing.
"You are so annoying," Supergirl had said.
"You started it."
"I did not!"
"You arrived."
"I was summoned! There were alarms!" She'd wiped the rain from her face, and glared, and a dimple had dug itself into her left cheek. "You broke a man's legs!"
"He was selling infant formula that wasn't."
"He'd have gone to jail!"
"For eighteen months," said Lena. "On a plea."
"That's something!"
"It's nothing." She'd stepped closer, without quite meaning to. The rain ran down the slope of her faceplate. "It's what the rich get when they've made children sick. A prison with a tennis court. I won't accept that."
"There's a process,"
"The process failed."
"Then we fix it. We don't, we don't just break people!"
"Who's we?"
"Everyone!" said Supergirl. "Everyone who wants it to work!"
They had stared at each other, in the thin gray rain, a foot apart. Supergirl's chest was heaving. She was soaking wet. Her eyes were very blue.
"You could be so good," she'd said, quietly.
And Lena, to her own horror, had felt something in her chest give way, like a floor.
"I am good," she'd said.
She'd left before the last word was out.
That was the thing.
They never found a middle. They'd tried, in their way. Every fight, every rooftop, every ruined warehouse, every night, Supergirl would arrive with that fierce, earnest, open face, and say, "Lena, please. Jail is enough. They'll answer for it. It doesn't have to be this cruel," and Lena would say, "It does, I'm afraid, if they're to remember," and the whole thing would begin again.
She'd have said, if anyone had asked, that she hated it.
But she'd begun, in the privacy of her own flat, in the long dark hours with her tea and her screens, to look forward to it.
It was ridiculous. It was an infatuation. It was a young woman in a cape, with a face like morning, appearing out of nowhere to scold her, and it had begun to occupy a larger and larger part of her thoughts. She'd begun, absurdly, to make her plans around it. She'd leave a door unlocked. She'd lengthen the fuse on a smoke bomb, by a few seconds, in case a certain flier was running late. She'd catch herself at three in the morning, in the empty workshop, sketching the line of a shoulder, and the curve of a cape, and the shape of a smile, and she'd throw the pad across the room in disgust.
She's your enemy, she told herself.
She's the law. She's every person who ever looked the other way.
She's the most alive thing you've ever seen.
She kept the knife in her left boot.
It was a small thing, six inches of green-glowing steel, in a sleeve of lead. She had made it herself, in the first week, in a moment of clear-eyed pragmatism. Just in case. It was the single object in the whole of her armory that she'd never used, and never meant to use, and never, in all those months, been able to bring herself to put down.
It was a Tuesday in April, a year to the week after that first night on the warehouse roof, when she first noticed.
She was hunting a man named Dennis Rourke, a tall, ruddy, well-fed gentleman with a very expensive suit, who had spent six years laundering money for Maxwell Lord. He kept an office on the thirty-first floor of the Alder Building, a glass-walled aerie with a view of the bay, and a bomb, small, silent, and green, tucked neatly under his mahogany desk.
She'd planted it that morning. It was a warning, more than anything. Small enough that nobody would be hurt, loud enough that nobody could ignore it. She was standing in the doorway, with her helmet sealed and a pleasant smile on her lips, when the window behind her exploded.
"Lena!"
She didn't turn.
"Good evening, Supergirl," she said, politely. "You're late."
"I'm not late. I was in the middle of a, you planted a bomb?"
"A very small one."
"In an office building!"
"It's very small."
"Lena!"
She pressed a button on her wrist.
The room lit up in a flash of green. She'd been counting. She was already through the door, and sprinting down the corridor in a long, humming, hydraulic stride, and behind her, in a neat little line, she dropped a trail of bright little marbles. They rolled across the carpet, and popped, one by one, in a series of dense green clouds. It was a trick she'd used a dozen times. A smokescreen, a scatter of flash charges, a few seconds of beautiful, blinding confusion, and then the stairwell, and the roof, and the long dive into the night.
"Stop!" shouted Supergirl, from somewhere behind her.
Lena grinned. She took the corner.
And it occurred to her, rather slowly, as she ran, that she could hear her.
Supergirl was behind. She was a long way behind. Lena could hear her boots on the carpet, a slow, heavy, thudding sound, like someone running through deep water, and the harsh edge of her breathing. It wasn't a flier's tread. It wasn't the clean, whistling rush of a woman who could cross a room in the space of a thought.
It was labored.
That's odd, thought Lena.
She hit the stairwell at a flat sprint. She took the steps three at a time. She was on the roof in a matter of seconds, with the wind in her face, and the thrusters bellowing, and the whole of the glittering city spread out beneath her like a handful of broken glass.
She looked back.
Supergirl had just reached the top of the stairs.
She stood in the doorway, leaning on the frame, with her chest heaving and one hand pressed to her side. Her cape hung limp. Her face, in the glare of the helipad lights, was drawn and pale, and her eyes, those clear, bright, impossible eyes, were shadowed, as though she hadn't slept in a week.
"Wait," she said, hoarsely. "Wait, I just want to,"
Lena hesitated.
It lasted less than a second. But it was the first time she had ever, in a year of fighting, hesitated. She stood on the edge of the roof, with her thrusters idling, and a small cold knot forming in her stomach.
"Are you all right?" she said.
It was out before she could stop it.
Supergirl blinked.
"What?"
"You look," said Lena, in a voice that sounded, even to her, uncharacteristically careful. "Unwell."
For a second, a very odd expression crossed Supergirl's face. It might have been amusement. It might have been something much closer to tenderness.
"I'm fine," she said. "Just a cold."
"You're a Kryptonian."
"It's a very bad cold."
"Supergirl,"
"Go," said Supergirl. "Go on. Before I change my mind."
And Lena, God help her, went.
The second time, it was worse.
It was a week later. She'd gone after a hedge fund manager in the financial district, a man who had been shorting hospital stock during an outbreak, and had found, in the middle of it, that she was waiting. She'd lingered on the roof an extra minute. She'd checked her sensors twice. And when Supergirl finally arrived, a good four minutes after the alarms, she came in low and slow and wobbling, like a drunk bird, and landed on one knee.
She didn't say anything. She didn't lecture. She simply knelt there, for a very long time, with her head bowed and her hands braced against the concrete, while Lena stood three feet away, utterly still.
"You should," said Lena, finally.
"I know."
"You should rest."
"I know."
"Why are you here?"
"Because," said Supergirl, and lifted her head, and looked up at her with an expression of exhausted, unwavering sincerity. "Because somebody has to be."
Lena found that she could not speak.
She left a bomb on the roof, as she always did, and a message on the hedge fund manager's screen, and went home. But she didn't sleep that night. She lay in the dark, with her helmet on the nightstand and a hard, unfamiliar ache in her chest, and watched the ceiling.
She's sick.
She's sick, and she's still coming. She's still coming every time.
She turned over and put her face in her pillow, and said, quite distinctly, "Idiot."
She did not specify which of them she meant.
The third time, she saw it on television.
It was a Thursday night. Lena was on the couch, in sweatpants, with a bowl of takeout noodles and a half-built circuit board in her lap, when the news cut to a breaking report. A creature had risen out of the bay: a large, scaly, rather poorly-conceived thing, with too many eyes and a long muscular tail. It was crashing through the harbor district, upending shipping containers, bellowing at the sky.
And Supergirl was fighting it.
Lena put down her noodles.
She leaned forward. The camera, a long shot from a helicopter, was a little shaky, but it caught everything: the creature's tail whipping across the pier, the blue-and-red blur that dodged it, the whine of the sudden, sharp, familiar crackle of heat.
She watched Supergirl raise her hands.
She watched the beams come out of her eyes.
They were thin.
They were thin, and pale, and flickering, a wavering thread of red where there should have been a bright, blinding lance. They hit the creature's flank, and it roared, and shook, and kept coming. Supergirl staggered. She tried again. The beams guttered, and sputtered, and went out.
"No," whispered Lena.
She stood up.
She did not decide to. It simply happened, the way a hand pulls back from a flame. She stood in the middle of her living room, in her socks, with a half-built circuit board in her fist, and watched on a forty-inch screen as the woman she had been trying not to think about for twelve months fell to one knee on a concrete pier, and put up a shaking arm, and fought on.
The creature went down eventually. It was Supergirl, in the end, who brought it down, with a single massive blow, thrown with the last of her strength, that cracked the pier in two. She stood over the fallen thing for a moment, swaying. And then, quite deliberately, she turned to the camera, and smiled, a small, tired, brave, utterly false smile, and lifted a hand to wave.
Don't, thought Lena, with a flare of fury. Don't you dare. Don't pretend you're fine.
She switched off the TV.
She stood in the dark.
And then she walked, very slowly, into her workshop, and sat down at the bench, and stared for a long, long time at the little glowing sphere of lead and green that lay in its case under the lamp.
Their last fight began at eleven o'clock on a Friday night, on the roof of a charity.
It was a very good charity, if you took its brochures at their word. Hearts United, it called itself, and its annual fundraiser had, over six years, raised forty-one million dollars for the families of children with cancer. Its director was a silver-haired woman named Margaret Voss, who appeared on talk shows and cried. Its building was a handsome, glass-fronted tower in the midtown district, with a fountain in the lobby and a plaque to the dead.
And in the basement, on a server that Lena had spent the better part of a month quietly pulling apart, were the real books.
Thirty-eight of those forty-one million dollars had never gone anywhere near a child.
She was kneeling on the roof, with a cable in one hand and a tablet in the other, and the wind in her face, and a long progress bar crawling slowly across the screen. Upload: 71%. Virus propagating. In forty seconds, every dollar in the charity's accounts would be routed, in a long, anonymous, meticulously-constructed chain, to a hundred and twelve families. A portion would go to an account in the name of L. Walsh, because the work was expensive. The rest would go to the people it had always been meant for.
Upload: 74%.
"Lena."
She didn't look up.
"You're early," she said.
"Lena, don't."
There was something in the voice, a thin, strained, ragged quality, that made the hair rise on the back of her neck. She turned her head.
Supergirl stood on the other side of the roof.
She looked terrible.
She was gray. There was no other word for it. The golden glow had gone out of her skin, and left it the color of old paper, and there were deep, bruised hollows under her eyes. Her cape was dragging. One hand was clamped against her ribs, and her knuckles were white, and when she lifted the other, in a slow, trembling, pleading gesture, it shook like a leaf.
"Please," she said. "It's not, you don't, I know why you're doing it. I know. But it's, there's a, there are other," She swayed. "Please. Just let me,"
Upload: 88%.
"Get out of here," said Lena.
"I can't."
"You can barely stand!"
"I can," said Supergirl. She took a step. Her knee buckled, and she caught herself, and her face, in the pale light of the roof lamps, twisted in a spasm of pain. "I can. I just need to,"
Upload: 96%.
"Stop it!"
She was on her feet. She hadn't noticed rising. The tablet fell from her hand and clattered on the concrete, and she was standing in the middle of the roof with her fists clenched, shouting, in a raw, high, furious voice that she did not recognize as her own. "Stop it! Stop it, stop coming, you're, you can't even,"
The bar ticked to a hundred.
A bright green chime sounded from the tablet.
Transfer complete.
"Oh," said Supergirl, faintly. "That's,"
Lena pulled the pin on her last bomb, and threw it.
It was only a smoke charge. It was a little spherical flash of green, and she flung it at the center of the roof, between them, to buy a clean thirty seconds, and she turned, and she ran for the edge, and she dove.
The wind took her.
She dropped, in a long, falling arc, the glass of the building rushing by, and she fired the thrusters, and waited for the rush. She waited for the swoosh, the bright whistling roar of a pursuing cape, the thump of a strong hand closing around her arm. She waited for the bright, familiar, infuriating voice to cry, Lena, wait!
It did not come.
She spun in the air.
She looked up.
Forty feet above her, in the glare of the roof lamps, hung Supergirl.
She wasn't flying.
She wasn't falling, either. Not yet. She was just there, suspended, with her arms hanging loose and her cape drifting around her, swaying slowly from side to side, like a leaf on a thread, and her head, her head had begun to tilt. It tipped, slowly, to one side. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth had fallen a little open, and the whole of her was slack, completely, terribly slack, like a string cut in the middle of a dance.
And then she began to fall.
"No," said Lena.
She did not think.
She did not have time to. There was a very long, very sharp, very cold instant in which her whole mind went white and quiet and perfectly clear, and in the clarity there was only a single thought, she's going to hit the ground, and her hand slammed down on the control at her hip, and every ounce of power in the suit went screaming to the thrusters.
The world roared.
She went up like a rocket.
It tore at her. It ripped the breath from her lungs, and wrenched her arms in their sockets, and the green light at her chest blazed up, white-hot, in a howl of overloaded servos. The building flashed by. The street rushed up to meet her, and then fell away, and she was rising, and the falling body was there, spinning slowly, a blue-and-red star, with a streak of golden hair, twenty feet, ten, five,
She caught her.
She caught her about thirty feet from the ground, in a bone-cracking, spine-jarring, desperate grab, with both arms around her waist, and the thrusters screaming. The weight hit her like a car. It was no weight at all. She was a feather, a handful of nothing, a child. She was lighter than Lena had ever imagined, as though whatever it was that had always held her up had been taken away.
"Got you," gasped Lena. "Got you, I've got you, I've,"
She swung them both in a long, wide, graceful curve, bleeding off the speed, and came in low across the plaza, thrusters flaring, and lifted.
She went up.
She went up, and up, and up, with Supergirl in her arms, and the lights of the city fell away beneath her feet. The wind tore at them both. She landed on a flat roof two blocks away, a dark, empty, tar-papered rectangle with an air-conditioning unit and a satellite dish, and went down on both knees, still holding on.
She was shaking.
She laid her down.
She did it gently, one arm behind her head, and Supergirl's cape spilled across the tar like spilled wine. Her face, her face was so very pale. Her lips had gone gray. Her breathing was shallow, and slow, and uneven, and under Lena's palm, where she'd laid it, instinctively, on her sternum, her heart was beating in a way that was wrong. It stumbled. It dragged.
"Hey," said Lena, hoarsely. "Hey. Hey, come on. Wake up."
Nothing.
"Supergirl."
Nothing.
She was not, in the ordinary sense of the word, a woman who panicked. She'd been in a burning building, and a firefight, and a car with its brakes cut. She had faced her brother, in the end, down the barrel of a gun. She'd learned a very long time ago that the only useful thing you can do with fear is to put it in a box, and she put it in a box now, with an effort that felt like closing a vault door.
Think.
Think. She's a Kryptonian. She has a team. She has a,
She stripped off her right gauntlet.
She reached out, with a hand that was only a little unsteady, and laid it against the side of Supergirl's head. Under the golden hair, behind the ear, there was a tiny flesh-colored disc, almost invisible, the sort of thing you'd miss if you weren't looking for it. A comm. She had known it was there. She'd seen it a dozen times, in a dozen fights, and never said a word.
She pressed the scanner in her palm to it.
The little screen on her wrist flickered. Scanning. Frequency match. Encrypted channel. Bypassing. She'd hacked harder things. It took her eleven seconds. She was in, and the earpiece was in her own ear, and a voice, a sharp, clipped, terrified woman's voice, was shouting in the middle of it.
"Supergirl! Supergirl, come in! We lost your signal four minutes ago, where are you, what's your status, Kara, answer me, please,"
Lena shut her eyes.
She opened her mouth.
"Supergirl is down," she said. "She's fainted. She, I caught her, she's breathing, but she's, it's not right. What do I do?"
There was a very long silence.
It lasted about as long as it takes for a heart to stop.
"Who is this?" said the voice, very quietly.
"It doesn't matter." Lena's voice cracked. "Please. What do I do?"
They told her to bring her to the roof of a building in the east end, a squat, nondescript block with a flat top and a single blue light. She did it in ninety seconds. She set her down, very carefully, in the circle of the light, and straightened her cape, and arranged her arms, and told the voice in her ear that she'd done it.
"Good," said the voice, now steady and tight. "Good. We're on our way. Two minutes. Please, just stay with her."
"I'm," said Lena.
She stopped.
She had meant to leave. She had meant to say good luck, and take off into the dark. She was the Viridian. She was a vigilante, a thief, a menace. She had no business being anywhere near this woman, in this place, in this light.
She did not leave.
She stood there. She stood there for a very long time, in the cold wind, on the roof of an unmarked building, with her helmet off and her hair coming down, looking at the face of her enemy. The bones were fine and strong. There were freckles across her nose, faint, dusted, that she'd never been close enough to see. A line of bright sweat stood on her forehead. Her lashes, long and gold, lay still against her cheek.
She was, thought Lena, absurdly, about twenty-five.
She was only about twenty-five years old.
"Don't," said Lena, aloud, to nobody. Her voice was unsteady. "Don't you dare die on me. I haven't finished," She swallowed. "I haven't finished being angry."
The wind picked up.
Somewhere in the distance, a siren began to wail.
She knelt. It was a foolish thing to do. She knew it was foolish. But she took Supergirl's hand in her own, and held it, the long, strong, cold fingers curled limp in her palm, and it was shaking.
And then, very slowly, it tightened.
Lena went rigid.
The fingers closed around her wrist. They did it with a surprising, unexpected strength, like iron wrapped in silk. The head turned. The eyelids fluttered, once, twice, and lifted, and a pair of eyes, slow, unfocused, dazed, but unmistakably blue, found her face in the dark.
"Caught you," said Supergirl, in a thin, cracked whisper.
Lena stared at her.
"Finally." The ghost of a smile touched her cracked lips. Her eyes drifted half shut. Her fingers did not loosen. "Caught you."
She laughed.
It was the tiniest, softest, most breathless sound, hardly more than an exhale. But it was a laugh, and it was real, and it rang across the wind-blown roof like a bell.
And then her hand went slack again, and her head rolled to one side, and she was gone.
"Supergirl!"
There were boots on the stairs. There was the clatter of a door, and a flood of harsh white light, and half a dozen figures in black tactical gear poured out onto the roof, with a stretcher, and a med kit, and a red-haired woman at the head of them with a pistol in her hand and a look of such naked terror that it hit Lena like a blow.
She was standing at the edge of the roof.
She did not remember rising. She did not remember backing away. She'd put her helmet back on, somehow, and sealed it, and she stood there in the shadow of the air-conditioning unit, with her shoulders hunched, and her hands at her sides, and the cold wind pulling at her cables.
The red-haired woman went down on her knees.
"Kara," she said. "Kara. Kara, can you hear me? Kara." Her hands, quick and shaking, went over Supergirl's face, her throat, her wrist. "She's alive. She's, her pulse is," Her voice cracked. "Get the stretcher. Move, move!"
They moved.
They lifted her like glass. She was a small, pale, bright thing on the black canvas, with her cape trailing, and they bore her away across the roof in a tight clot, calling to one another in low, urgent voices.
The red-haired woman was the last to go.
She stopped at the stairwell door. She turned her head. And across forty feet of cold, dark, wind-whipped concrete, her eyes met Lena's, hard and bright and wet.
She did not say anything.
She didn't draw her gun. She didn't shout. She stood in the light of the open door, in her black jacket, with her hand on the frame, and for about three seconds the two of them just looked.
Then she gave a single, short, stiff nod.
It was not a thank-you. It wasn't forgiveness. It was something more careful, and more grudging, and more real than either: the nod of one woman to another across a wall, in the instant before it begins, very slowly, to come down.
She went through the door.
It swung shut.
Lena stood alone on the roof.
She stood there for a very long time, under the sodium lights, with her hands hanging empty. The wind had died. The siren had faded. The only sound in all the world was the faint, steady hum of her own suit, and the slow thudding of her own heart.
She lifted her right hand.
It was still bare. She'd never put the gauntlet back on. She stood in the cold, and looked at it. The palm. The fingers. The pulse in her wrist, where a stronger hand had closed, and held, and laughed.
She could feel it still.
A warm, faint, lingering pressure, like a handprint on glass.
"Caught me," whispered the Viridian, to the empty roof.
And she stayed there, in the dark, with her fingers curled tight around nothing, until the stars began to fade.