First Mission

Some nights at the Hall of Justice are perfectly quiet. The satellite dish turns on the roof, the river below catches starlight, and everyone rests.

This was not one of those nights.

At three in the morning, Victor Stone's eyes opened in the dark and lit up blue. He was already reading the data before he was fully awake — when you are Cyborg, your body and your machines are the same thing, and his machines never really sleep.

What he read made him sit up fast.

A tidal wave. Enormous. Rolling toward the coast of Japan, toward Osaka, a city of millions — and it had forty minutes before it arrived.

The Hall lit up like a sunrise.

Arthur Curry was out the door and into the Pacific before the alert had finished sounding. He hit the ocean and accelerated, cutting through the deep water the way a dolphin cuts through air, and reached the fault zone in twelve minutes. The Pacific Ocean is very wide. Arthur is very fast.

He found the rupture in the ocean floor and placed his hands on the stone and pushed — not to break it, but to steer the surge of energy sideways, into a deep trench where it would scatter and fade. It was like redirecting a charging elephant with your palms. He did it anyway, because he is the King of Atlantis.

The wave slowed. It did not stop.

Barry Allen arrived in Osaka harbor while most of the city was still asleep. He took about two seconds to remind himself which languages he had memorized on the run over — Japanese, English, Filipino, Portuguese — and then he started running. He knocked on every door in twelve blocks. "Tidal wave — high ground — now — go —" in every language, up every stairwell, around every corner. Before the sky had started to lighten, he had moved a small city's worth of people up the hill.

Hal Jordan raised his power ring and built a wall. Green light poured out in sheets and columns, shaping into a seawall three miles long, rising from the dark water like a glowing reef. His teeth ached from the effort. His fists shook. He planted his feet in midair and held on.

The wave hit the wall. CRASH — white water exploded upward, spraying outward in great fans of foam. The emerald wall shuddered and flexed but it did not break. Hal Jordan held it because he had to.

While this was happening, Clark and Diana flew the harbor in neat, precise sweeps. Side by side, close enough to call across the water. They moved fishing boats and cargo ships out to deep water where the swell would pass beneath rather than overturn them — one vessel, two, ten. The work was steady and strangely peaceful.

Batman watched the seismic network. He always watches everything. He noticed a second, smaller rupture beginning to form north of the first. One quiet transmission. Hal heard it and moved, and the second surge never became a threat.

J'onn J'onzz moved above the neighborhoods, invisible. He could sense the minds below him — the frightened, the sleeping, the injured, the trapped. One by one he located people the rescue teams had not yet found, and guided searchers to them as quietly as a whispered direction.

When the wave finally arrived, it was bruised and reduced — a surge of white water that rolled up the low streets, knocked over market stalls, soaked through ground floors, and receded without roaring. Muddy and damp, but intact. Not a catastrophe.

At dawn the eight heroes stood on the wet sand, watching the foam retreat. Barry wrung seawater from his sleeve. Arthur sat on a harbor piling and listened to the ocean settle back into its old rhythms.

After a while, Victor Stone looked at the quiet tide and said three words: "Good mission."

Three words. They meant something much larger. They meant: we read each other. We covered every gap. We were exactly where we needed to be.

The sun came up over Osaka and turned the wet streets gold. A child pressed her face against a rain-streaked window and watched the strange group of heroes standing on her beach.

The Justice League waved back.

Rest easy now. The wave has passed.