With Rao dead, the temporal breach was at last sealed. On the timeline Thea had reinforced and crystallized, no new enemies would be emerging from nowhere. After consulting with Superman and Supergirl, H'el was contained on an unnamed planet.
The real trouble, however, was only just beginning.
One World. One Dream. The impact of Rao's ideology on Earth's existing order didn't vanish with his death and the alien retreat—it sat in front of everyone, vast and immediate and unresolved.
More than seventy national governments had been dissolved by Rao. What was supposed to happen to them now? Call back the former officials and resume the old arrangement? Nobody wanted a stack of institutions managing their lives again—and if the old arrangement had always been there, people might have tolerated it. But ordinary people had tasted "freedom" for several days. They wanted it to continue.
The economic losses defied any attempt at calculation. Rao believed everyone was his child, and therefore everyone deserved equal rights. His doctrine was one of equal distribution: resources belonged to every person, without exception. He had said this and meant it. The economic infrastructure of every nation and every major corporation had been dealt a near-annihilating blow.
Thea's high-tech research labs, weapons manufacturing facilities, airline companies, shipping companies, and pharmaceutical companies had all taken heavy hits. No major conglomerate worldwide had escaped—Batman, the Atom, and a crowd of other hero-billionaires had suffered the same fate.
Various pieces of high-tech equipment had ended up in the hands of the general public. Thea's operations fared slightly better than most—Deathstroke and Livewire had stepped in at the critical moment, killing a large number of Rao cultists trying to loot her assets under the banner of "redistribution," and the leakage remained manageable.
Wayne Enterprises and Palmer Tech, however, had been hit far worse. Equipment had flowed into the civilian population and given them the confidence to stand against the government. Trying to rebuild the companies afterward was nearly impossible—too many people in critical positions had simply vanished.
Thea's secretary delivered a report: verifiable losses to her holdings exceeded fifteen billion dollars. Factor in the enterprises taken over and remotely controlled after those hidden families withdrew, and the actual number cleared a hundred billion—all of it in real enterprises, not stock market valuations.
Add the collapse of the global economy and the resulting drain on the divine power of wealth, and Thea's fury at Rao simmered at a steady burn. The only mercy was that he was dead. Had he still been alive, she would have dragged him out for a thorough beating.
"Global economies have suffered catastrophic damage."
"Stock market reopening continues to be delayed. The Federal Reserve urges the public to exercise rational judgment..."
Experts and academics flooded the media, trying to talk ordinary people into returning to their normal lives.
As if that were possible.
Rao had distributed money directly from governments and corporations into citizens' hands—and he had done so with perfect mathematical fairness. Ordinary people had no intention of giving it back. Governments were so resource-depleted they could barely function. The conflict between the two was fundamentally irreconcilable.
Thea's reach was considerable and Deathstroke's blade was reliable, but a great deal of technology was simply gone. Equipment that had landed in civilian hands had been stripped down, rebuilt, painted over—and there was nothing in the world to prove it had ever belonged to anyone else.
In short, everything was a tangled mess.
———
Metropolis. The Hall of Justice.
Batman had called a meeting.
The scheduled hour had not yet arrived; normally that window was casual conversation time. Today, everyone was too busy for that.
They all had lives outside the masks, and Rao's reach had touched every corner of those lives.
Kyle Rayner was on the phone. His father's car had been "redistributed," and he was working through the insurance process.
Nightwing—who had formally joined the Justice League, and whose public identity was that of a Blüdhaven police officer—was slumped over a table, working through case files from the past several days. Rao's influence had acted like a compressed spring: the moment the pressure lifted, a massive surge of criminal activity had exploded. He looked exhausted.
The most overwhelmed by far, however, was Thea. The Hall was her territory and every communications line ran through it. She was running three simultaneous video calls, managing crises across multiple continents. Diana was beside her, fielding calls on her behalf. Between this moment and Rao's first act three days ago, Thea hadn't stopped working—not since she'd first inherited the company had she been this relentlessly occupied.
Across the room, the Flash was writing incident reports at superspeed. The stack had already grown half a meter tall. Superman had his laptop open, working on his next article.
Batman walked in to find a room full of people running visibly on fumes. He said nothing—he had only just finished his own round of crises.
A quiet clearing of his throat. As the one who had called this meeting, he spoke first.
"Rao was not a bad person." In the Hall of Justice, Batman laid out everything that had happened in ancient Krypton and turned to the agenda at hand.
The assembled heroes took it in with murmurs of reflection. Rao was dead—but what he had left behind on Earth would not disappear just because he had.
The Sahara and several other major deserts had been converted into arable land. The ice sheets over Greenland and Siberia had thawed. Warlords across Africa had fallen. Regions once considered uninhabitable were showing signs of becoming something like paradise.
In their wake: rising sea levels, suddenly disrupted water cycles and ocean currents, climate instability, mass migrations, borders overwhelmed by population movement.
Politicians held their noses and turned to the social crises. The natural ones, they handed to the Justice League.
"Can those regions sustain what they've become? The expansion of the human living space—that's a genuinely positive development." Batman turned to Thea. "Can it be maintained?"
"What am I supposed to do about it?" she shot back immediately. "If Siberia and Greenland are left alone, they'll gradually return to cold—that's a cold air mass problem, not a magic problem." Zatanna, recently added to the League's roster, backed her up.
"The Sahara is the same story—it's been desert since 3000 BCE. Plant trees. Combat desertification through sustained effort. That's the legitimate approach. Rao turned sand into soil, but as that divine power dissipates over time, things will revert. This is a science problem, not a magic one." She paused and dispatched an order—drones deployed from Cairo, reconnaissance over the Sahara.
The footage reached the Hall of Justice within minutes. The heroes gathered around to watch.
Rao had done remarkable work. Under his influence, the Sahara had become fertile, and the population had begun to move—Africans leaving home, heading toward this new land of abundance, starting over. Many people from countries around the desert, fleeing war, were pressing in the same direction; roads were choked with people carrying everything they owned, moving toward the "paradise" they longed for.
"How long will Rao's magic hold?" Superman asked. His feelings about Rao were a knot he hadn't untangled. The reverence was still there—Rao's ideals were, at their core, his own. But stripping away the individual will of ordinary people, that he couldn't accept, and never would.