Bruce's voice on the secure line had the quality it got when he had been working for twenty hours straight and was too far into a problem to be polite about what the problem was telling him.
"Third scene," he said. "Three targets, three different countries, nine days. He is accelerating."
Diana was in Istanbul, standing in the lane where Cruz had died. The bazaar noise reached her from two streets over — vendors, tourists, the normal life of a city doing what cities do when someone has died in one of their side streets.
"He did not leave the drag marks this time," she said.
Silence on the line.
"He left them in Athens," she said. "He left them in Rome. He did not leave them here. He knows I'm reading them."
"He's adjusting to your investigation."
"He's communicating with it." She crouched down and looked at the alley's paving — the faint scuff of the chain on the stone during the fight itself, which he could not have suppressed without compromising the weapon's use. Just the departure marks were gone. "He told me he knew the first two scenes would be found and examined. He showed me the chain. Now he is showing me that he can choose when to show it."
She stood. "The target logic is consistent. All three received divine protection directly from the Olympian gods or their artifacts. Demetrios was empowered by them. Warkiller was created by them. Cruz carried one of their objects."
"I've been cross-referencing," Bruce said. "There are six more individuals in Europe with Olympian-grade divine connection. Three are in France, one in Germany, one in Austria, one in the Netherlands. If the pattern holds—"
"He is going to work through them," she said.
"Yes."
"Not necessarily in that order. He has been choosing targets based on something besides geography." She thought about it. The geographic movement was westward but not linear — Athens to Rome to Istanbul was not a straight line. It was target-selection driving geography, not the other way around. "He knows who they are. He has information about all of them. He built this list before he started."
Bruce was quiet for a moment. "That implies preparation. Prior research."
"Extensive prior research," she said. "Which implies access to a database of metahuman identities that is either on par with ours or assembled from different sources." She thought about what different sources would look like for someone with this profile. Not corporate. Not governmental. Something older. "He has been doing this for longer than nine days."
"He has been doing this for years."
"Or decades," she said. "Or more."
She walked out of the lane and into the Beyoğlu street and stood in the thin November sun.
"There are six more people on that list," she said. "And one of them is Cassie."
* * ** * *
He spent a week in Lyon.
Not because the target was difficult to find — Cassie Sandsmark had a Young Justice operation in the city and was not being subtle about it, the League's junior division operating with the specific enthusiastic visibility of people who had not yet learned that visibility was a resource with a cost. She was seventeen, extraordinary, and had her grandfather's bloodline running through her in a way that the Architect had recognized from Cronus's descriptions when he had read the initial metahuman dossiers during his library days in Athens.
Granddaughter of Zeus. One generation removed from the source of everything.
He spent a week watching her, and the week changed something in his understanding of what he was doing.
She was not Demetrios. She was not Warkiller. She had not received anything — she had been born into it the same way he had been born into his divine blood. She had not asked for Zeus's attention. She had simply arrived in the world with what she arrived with, and she had used it in ways that the Architect had to admit, reading the record, were by any measure decent. She led her team with more care than her age warranted. She de-escalated situations the League would have handled with force. She had, twice in the last six months, put herself between her teammates and threats that were aimed specifically at her.
She was good at this. She would become excellent.
He sat in a café near the Presqu'île district on the fifth day and thought about this honestly.
The Boy wanted to be done. The pattern was the pattern and she fit the pattern and the pattern was the point.
The Architect built the counterargument: she did not receive anything. She was born. That is not the same. Demetrios asked for the blessing. Warkiller was created specifically to receive it. She simply exists. The account is not with her.
The Boy said: she has what I do not have. She has a grandfather who acknowledges her. She has—
She is seventeen, the Architect said.
The Boy went silent.
He sat with his coffee for a long time.
He was still going. That was not in question. But the question of what he did when he got there was more complicated than he had allowed the plan to make it.
* * *
He went on the sixth day.
She was patrolling alone — a night shift, eastern district, her team elsewhere on a separate call-out. He had known the schedule for four days.
He did not approach her from hiding. He walked toward her on the street, the mask on his face, the chain loose at his side, and let her see him coming.
She turned and set herself immediately — good instincts, no hesitation — and he saw her assess the chain and the mask and reach the correct conclusion about what he was.
"You're the one," she said. In English, which was apparently the reflex.
He said nothing.
She moved first — a sharp aerial rush, coming in high to clear the chain's primary range, going for his head. He let her get close and then the chain came up from the right side in a short sharp arc, not to hit her but to intercept the trajectory, and she adjusted mid-air with a flexibility that was genuinely impressive, banking sideways and coming in at a different angle.
The next three minutes were a real fight. She was fast and she was creative and she had the divine durability that made her difficult to hurt significantly. She got a kick into his midsection that would have broken a normal person's ribs, and he stepped back and reset. He got the chain around her left forearm on the second wrap attempt and she broke the grip through brute force and rotation.
He was not trying to end it quickly. He was evaluating.
The Architect was tracking something specific: whether she had a ceiling. Every fighter had one, a point past which they could not adapt quickly enough. He was looking for hers.
She did not have one in the range of this fight.
The Boy noted this. The Boy, which had been burning throughout the engagement with something between rage and the complicated thing it always felt about Zeus's bloodline, registered that she was exceptional, and the registration was not entirely hostile.
On the fourth minute he put her down — a full-force chain strike to the solar plexus that got through her guard because he had spent the entire preceding engagement creating a habit in her defensive pattern and then breaking it once. She hit the pavement hard and he heard ribs give.
She got up anyway. Slower. Bleeding from a cut above her left eye from the street.
She got to her feet and looked at him across ten meters of Lyon side street, breathing carefully because at least two of the ribs were compromised, and she said: "Why?"
The question was not afraid. It was just a question.
He looked at her.
Seventeen. The same grandfather who had looked away from a room in Themyscira's foundation. But she had been born into it, the same as him.
He walked away.
He did not look back. The Boy was very loud about this decision for the next four kilometers, in the specific way the Boy was loud about things it agreed with that it had not been consulted on. The Architect had made a unilateral call and the Boy, underneath its noise, was not objecting.
He left Lyon on a train to Paris, changed for Brussels, and began building the profile of his next target.
The chain-drag marks, he left in Lyon. Very visible. He wanted Diana to see that he had been here and to see that the scene was different from the others.
He wanted her to notice that he had walked away.