Chapter 11 — Demon of Gotham, Part 11
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She was already late and she knew it and she ran anyway, because running was at least doing something.
The hallways of Gotham High were mostly empty now, the last stragglers having filtered into classrooms when the bell rang, and that emptiness worked against her — no crowd to move through, no cover, just her footsteps carrying down the terrazzo floor and the fluorescent lights overhead making everything look slightly worse than it was. Her dark red ponytail whipped behind her, a few loose strands cutting across her face, and she didn't bother pushing them back because both hands were occupied holding her bag strap and her dignity.
The thoughts were moving faster than her feet.
How could I let this happen. I let Pam drag me into another one of her crusades, and just before first period too. Damn it. If even one of my teachers calls my dad — she cut that thought off before it could finish, because she genuinely didn't want to think about what he'd say. Commissioner Gordon had a very particular expression he made when he was disappointed, and she had a very thorough familiarity with it.
Room 304 appeared at the end of the corridor.
She slowed to a walk ten feet out, smoothed her shirt, pushed her sleeves up to her forearms, and opened the door with the careful quiet of someone hoping to go unnoticed.
Mr. Burke turned from the board.
He was a middle-aged man with reading glasses he kept pushed up on his forehead even when he wasn't reading, and the particular expression of a teacher who has been doing this long enough to find tardiness more amusing than irritating.
"Ah," he said, with the practiced warmth of someone enjoying himself. "Miss Gordon. Glad you could finally join us."
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Metropolis had rebuilt itself the way cities do when they have no other option — pragmatically, and faster than anyone expected. Five years on from the invasion, the skyline was whole again, the streets repaved, the worst of the structural damage absorbed into a construction boom that had employed half the city and left certain neighborhoods looking almost newer than they had before. If you didn't know where to look, you could almost miss what had happened here.
The woman exiting the coffee shop had been here for the invasion. She remembered what it looked like before, during, and after, and she found the recovery neither comforting nor impressive. Cities rebuilt. That was what they did. It didn't mean anything.
She had short maroon hair and pale skin and brown eyes, and she wore her black biker jacket open over a gray tank top, the skull design across the back visible when she turned. Black trousers, four ear piercings — three on the right, one on the left — and black lipstick that she'd been wearing long enough that people who knew her wouldn't have recognized her without it. She held a caramel latte in one hand, took a sip, and let the morning settle around her for a moment.
Hard to believe it had been five years.
Her phone rang.
She shifted the cup to free her other hand and dug into her jacket pocket, produced the phone, and answered without looking at the screen.
"Hello."
"Joey." The voice on the other end was male, clipped, the voice of someone who organized his sentences the same way he organized everything else. "We've got another job."
"Where?"
"Gotham."
She raised her eyebrows, just slightly. Then the corner of her mouth moved. "Is the target the Bat?"
A pause. "No. Something else. We don't even have a full profile on it yet."
She turned the latte cup slowly in her hand, looking out at the Metropolis street. "Can we at least play with the Bat while we're there?"
The sigh on the other end was long and deliberate, the sigh of a man who had answered this question before. "No. Stay on task, Rojo."
She laughed, low and easy. "You're never any fun, Rick." She took a last look at the skyline, at the rebuilt towers catching the morning light. "I'll be there in a couple of hours."
She hung up and slipped the phone back into her pocket.
Things were starting to move. She could feel it the way she always felt it — a shift in the air before the weather changed, a specific quality of anticipation that she'd learned, over the years, to enjoy.
She took another sip of her latte and walked.
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Somewhere in the space between star systems, the Chimera Sui Generis war hammer moved.
It was a vast ship, built for something other than speed — wide and dark, its hull plated in a material that absorbed light rather than reflected it, making it difficult to see against the black of deep space until you were already too close. Inside, the scale of it became apparent in a different way. The corridors were high and wide, designed for occupants who were not built on a human scale. The sounds of the ship were industrial — the deep mechanical cycling of systems, the movement of heavy boots on metal floors, the occasional pressurized hiss of a bay door opening or closing.
The knights moved through it with the efficiency of things built for a single purpose.
They were large, all of them, covered from head to foot in black nanotechnology armor that moved with them like a second skin. The red visors of their helmets caught the corridor lighting in thin horizontal lines. Some were boarding departure pods in the lower bays, sealed in and launched out into the galaxy to continue the search. Others clustered around the ship's mapping systems, adjusting trajectories, cross-referencing coordinates. None of them spoke unless they had something to report.
One knight walked past all of them, deeper into the ship, until the corridor ended at a large black door. He pushed it open and entered.
The lab was enormous and cold. Along the walls, pods were mounted in rows from floor to ceiling, some of them occupied — shapes visible through the clouded material, the slow process of replication still underway. The knight moved past them without looking and made his way to the far end of the lab, where the workspace was.
Psyphon did not look up.
He was a skeletal figure in a sleeveless black robe, his build thin in the way of something that had never required physical strength because it had never needed it. His skin was paper-white, his eyes blood-red, the black spots around them matching the color of his lips. A fin ran along the top of his head, marked with three black stripes. His jaw was encased in a brace-like armor that extended across his torso, a red keypad set into the chest piece. His fingerless gloves carried smaller versions of the same keypads, and his four-fingered hands moved across his current work with the focus of a man who found interruptions actively offensive.
The knight dropped to one knee and waited.
Several seconds passed.
"How goes the search," Psyphon said. It was not really a question.
"It continues." The knight's voice was deep, designed for volume, not nuance. "Progress has been slowed by the Green Lantern Corps and their plumber allies. We have dispatched units disguised as asteroid clusters to the outer sectors to move beyond their patrol range."
Psyphon's hands didn't stop moving. "Inform me when you have achieved actual results rather than creative logistics." He adjusted something on the device in front of him. "Our lord Vilgax will be returning soon. He expects to find results. As do I."
The knight bowed his head, still kneeling. Then he rose, turned, and left the way he came.
The door closed behind him.
Psyphon worked in silence, alone among the pods and the machinery and the slow, patient business of preparation.
( Author request --
So I think I have hit a little wall... Haha...
I was thinking about the team waller had , the null division, and who I wanted to place in it, but then I realized something, apart from Rick Flag and Rojo, I can't think of anybody else.... I still need two members, 1 male and a female, since I don't really read dc comics that much, I don't know if there are others like Rick Flag under waller, if you know some ..... please help)
( Author request 2 -..
I'm really bad at naming things, been trying to rack my brain for names to give Ben's
Kryptonian.
Thanagarian.
Tamaranean.
Czrian ( lobo species, don't know if I spell it wrong) .
Form, if you have something please share)