Chapter 635: Final Remnants

The hunter Ethan ward was on the ninth floor, behind two sets of security doors and a corridor that was protected by magic. It was not a normal hospital wing. Bruce had seen the plans months ago, when the World Hunters organization first began building these units in partnership with private hospitals, and he had thought then that they looked like what would happen if an intensive care unit and a chapel had a very peculiar child. Bundles of silver cable ran along the ceiling, threaded with faint runes of pale blue light. Instead of a single bank of monitors, each bed had a floating ring of translucent glass that tracked something no ordinary instrument could measure: the flow of mana through a patient’s body. A nurse in gray scrubs moved quietly between the rooms, checking the rings, talking to herself.

Bruce Wayne walked through all of it in a gray suit, with a visitor’s badge clipped to his lapel, and nobody looked at him twice. A step behind him, shapeshifted into the form of a tired, stooped man in a rumpled coat, J’onn walked with his hands in his pockets and his eyes half closed.

"He’s in the last room," said J’onn softly. "I can feel him from here. His mind is..." He paused. "Faint, to say the least."

"Faint is better than the alternative," said Bruce.

They stopped outside the door.

The room was small and dim. A single bed stood against the far wall, its sheets pulled up to the chin of the boy lying on it, and above him a ring of glass turned slowly, tracing circles of silver light across his chest. A drip ran into his arm. A softer, stranger cable ran into his temple, and it glowed a steady, careful blue. He was so thin. His face was pale, and his hair stuck to his forehead in damp dark strands, and there was a faint line between his eyebrows, as though even in sleep he were working very hard at something.

Ethan did not stir.

Bruce stood at the foot of the bed and said nothing for a long moment.

A television hung in the corner of the room, someone had left it on, tuned to a rolling news channel, the volume turned low. Bruce reached for the remote to switch it off, and stopped.

"...for the third consecutive hour, no new gates have been detected anywhere in the world," said the anchor. She was a composed woman in her forties, and she was working hard to keep her voice steady. "The World Hunters organization has confirmed that its global monitoring network, which has registered at least one new gate every nine minutes since the phenomenon began, has now gone entirely silent. Association officials have declined to comment on what this means."

"She’s frightened," said J’onn quietly.

"She should be," said Bruce. "It’s the first signs of peace this planet has had in months."

The screen cut to a reporter standing in front of a glass tower in Seoul. Behind her, in the lobby, a handful of men and women in plain clothes sat on sofas with their phones in their hands and the exhausted, slightly hollow expressions of people who had been told to expect a war and found themselves in the middle of an afternoon.

"...guild headquarters across the city are reporting the same thing," said the reporter. "Raid teams have been stood down. Support staff have been sent home. One guild leader, who asked not to be named, told me that his people have been watching the gate monitors for hours, and the screens just stay green." She turned to a broad-shouldered man in a tailored coat, who looked into the camera with a strange, lost smile.

"We don’t know what to do with ourselves," he said. "I’ve been raiding gates for months now. Last night I slept through the whole night. I don’t know if I’m happy or if I’m terrified."

"Do you believe this is the end of the phenomenon?" the reporter asked.

"I don’t know," said the man. "I hope so. But I wouldn’t bet my guild on it."

The picture shifted to a panel studio. A balding man in a gray suit leaned toward the camera, hands steepled.

"What we can say is that it’s too early to draw conclusions," he said. "The awakened have not lost their abilities. Every hunter who awakened before this event still has their powers. If the gates are truly gone, Awakening as a phenomenon appears to have outlived them, and that’s an important distinction. It suggests the underlying mana is still present in the world. Whether it will continue to produce new awakened, we simply don’t know."

"And yet," said the anchor, "there are some reports of exceptions."

The balding man hesitated.

"Yes," he said. "A small number."

The channel’s chyron changed. It was a bright, plain red bar, and the words scrolled across it in white.

BREAKING: SEVERAL TOP-RANKED HUNTERS COLLAPSE WORLDWIDE. THREE CONFIRMED DEAD.

Bruce didn’t move.

"We are receiving reports," said the anchor, and for the first time her voice cracked, just slightly, "that a number of the world’s most powerful hunters, the strongest of the awakened across several countries, have collapsed suddenly over the past two hours. Three have been confirmed dead. The remainder are reported to be in intensive care, unconscious, with no known cause. Hospitals in the United States, Japan, and Germany have confirmed receiving three patients." She swallowed. "The Organization has asked the public to remain calm."

"Three," said J’onn.

"Three of the strongest," said Bruce. He was looking at the boy in the bed. "They are clearly talking about the vessels of the Rulers."

"So it seems..."

A long silence followed. The television moved on to a segment about a gate-adjacent shipping route, and then to a weather report. Neither of them watched it. J’onn’s eyes had closed, and his shoulders were very slightly hunched, as though he were bracing for something.

"Bruce," he said quietly. "Do you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

"I do not think you can. But I can." The Martian’s voice was thin. "Something is tearing."

It began with the ring of glass.

It was spinning faster. Bruce saw it first, the silver light tracing quicker and quicker circles across the sheet, and then a harsh little chime sounded from the monitor beside the bed. A second chime followed. The rune lines in the ceiling flickered, and the soft blue glow of the cable in the boy’s temple stuttered like a candle in a draft.

"J’onn."

"Wait." The Martian had stepped to the side of the bed, one hand raised. His eyes were shut and his face was drawn. "It’s the link. It is the very last of it. It is letting go..."

The boy’s chest arched.

It was a small, terrible motion. His back lifted off the mattress by an inch, and the sheet tightened across his ribs, and a breath tore out of him in a long ragged gasp. Something pale rose from his chest. It was not light, exactly. It was fainter than light and colder, a thin and fragile white thread that unspooled from him, curling upward, thinning, trembling in the air above the bed.

The monitors screamed.

"Nurse!" Bruce was already moving. "We need..."

"Don’t," said J’onn.

Bruce stopped. The Martian had not opened his eyes. He had both hands raised now, palms toward the boy, and he was breathing very slowly, very evenly. "Do not touch him. Do not give him anything. If you give him anything, it may pull the thread back and tear it the wrong way. Let it go, I think this is what Arthur meant."

The white thread hung in the air for a heartbeat. Then it came apart, quietly, into a few small drifting motes that faded before they reached the ceiling.

The chime stopped.

The ring of glass slowed, and slowed, and went still. The cable at Ethan’s temple flickered. His back sank gently to the mattress. His chest rose, fell, rose again, and the next breath was slow and even and quiet. A little color came back to his face.

Somewhere down the corridor, a nurse’s footsteps came to a halt outside the door.

"It is done," said J’onn.

His voice was barely a whisper. He lowered his hands and opened his eyes, and Bruce saw that they were wet.

"He is still there," said the Martian. "He is very tired. But he is still holding on."

Bruce let out a breath he had not known he was holding.

He stood for a while with his hand resting on the rail at the foot of the bed. He did not speak. The nurse looked in, saw the readings, and withdrew without a word. The television murmured on in the corner.

"Maybe Arthur can do something about this," Bruce said at last.

He said it quietly, almost to himself. His eyes had not left the boy’s face. "He has power over death. Over life, in a way. If anyone could make sure this boy lives, he could."

"He did mention," said J’onn, "that it was a matter of their willpower."

"I remember."

"I do not think it would be wise to give the boy any more magic. Not even as help." J’onn’s voice was gentle. "He is balanced on a very thin line right now, Bruce. If something foreign were forced into him, even something kind, it may be the very thing that breaks him. At this rate, it might kill him."

Bruce was silent.

He wanted to argue. J’onn could see it in the set of his shoulders, in the way his fingers had tightened around the rail. He wanted to find a loophole, a trick, a clever third option no one had thought of. He had spent half his life finding those. But this was not a room that responded to cleverness. This was a boy in a bed, doing the hardest thing he would ever do, and there was not one useful thing in the world that Bruce Wayne could do to carry it for him.

"No," he said finally. "I can’t deny that."

He let go of the rail.

"Then we leave," said Bruce. "We let him recover. We have other matters to attend to."

"You may stay, if you wish," said J’onn. "I can handle the..."

"No." Bruce’s voice was firm, and not unkind. "I came to see him. I needed to confirm what Arthur told us with my own eyes. I’ve done that." He straightened his jacket. "The Earth still needs us. So do the people on it. There is a great deal of fear out there, and not enough answers."

J’onn inclined his head.

At the door, Bruce paused. He looked back once at the pale boy in the dim room, and at the soft blue glow of the cable at his temple, and something passed across his face that was neither the businessman nor the detective.

"I’ll have the Foundation cover his care," he said. "Quietly. And I’ll have a specialist team look in on him. Without telling the Association, he is my guild member afterall."

"That would be kind."

"It would be necessary." Bruce stepped into the corridor. His voice had turned brisk again, the old, familiar Batman, the one that kept everything else at arm’s length. "Any news from Orion?"

"Not yet, I am afraid," said J’onn.

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