The tower was quiet, bathed in a comfortable blanket of sleepy silence. Robin appreciated the peace; he only ever managed to work when his team members weren't acting like children. It was past midnight, the clock striking dull, rhythmic patterns against his eardrums as he scrolled through endless pages of encrypted files. The sound was almost as oppressive as what he had uncovered about the complete lack of efficacy within countrywide law enforcement. This is what happens when heroes become commonplace. Shaking his head, Robin hit the print button and leaned back in his chair, trying to think about what to do. People weren't his strength. Logistics, he could handle. Strategy. He knew how to pick a lock, how to diffuse a bomb. How to banish apathy from the minds of the people whose jobs he'd taken…that was a larger problem, and a potentially crippling one for innocent people. Robin ran an agitated hand through his hair and decided to turn his attention to solvable things for the time being. He would talk to the team about this one later – it was Starfire's territory, or maybe Cyborg's.

He was halfway through a thick file on prison breaks when the page in his hands flashed blood red in time with the lights that bathed the plexiglass walls around him. The siren broke the happy silence that had settled into the corners of the Tower and awoke its inhabitants, all of whom rose with varying levels of resentment and stumbled, half awake, into the living room. Raven was the first one there after Robin, having melted into the shadows of her wall as soon as the light flashing behind her eyelids had interrupted her meditation. Robin greeted her with a nod, noting the shadows around her eyes and her red-rimmed lashes.

"Still not sleeping?"

Raven gave him a brief glance, then lowered her gaze and raised her hood.

"No."

Raven had had trouble since Trigon had destroyed her home dimension. She hadn't spoken about seeing it in flames, not even to Robin, but he had managed to get a few words out of her immediately after Trigon's defeat. "I went to ask them for help," she had said. Robin had said something about how she hadn't needed it in the end, and she had smiled sadly, but said nothing more on the topic. Robin knew better than to press her, worried as he might be.

Raven sensed his concern and frowned slightly. There was nothing Robin hated more than a problem he couldn't solve. That was his main flaw…and his greatest strength, at least as a leader. Raven knew how to separate her job from her personal life, and she knew that her grief was something that time would have to heal on its own. That wouldn't stop him from trying to help though, a fact that had the irritating effect of warming her and annoying her simultaneously. Starfire was next in the room. Raven gave her a once over, wondering absently if there was some kind of Tamaranian trait that guaranteed perfect hair and a scent of strawberries. From what she'd seen of the planet, she doubted it. The alien leaned over the back of the couch to squint (like a model from a commercial for contact lenses) at the screen, on which an image was flickering.

"What is it?"

Robin had been scowling at the alert screen – as was his habit when something like this came up – and now bent down to type some incomprehensible coding into the master computer. The image wavered, then sharpened as Cyborg and Beast Boy entered the room, both looking less than awake. Robin gave them a brief once over.

"Get yourselves together, we've got a problem."

Raven felt a little sick as she looked at the screen through baleful, impassive eyes. An empty alley looked back at her, illuminated only by one flickering streetlamp. The damp pavement shone with spilled gasoline and broken glass and splashed across the wall facing the camera, written in something that looked suspiciously like blood, were the words: "She dies if you can't save her first." Cyborg swore under his breath, Beast Boy looked unusually somber, and Robin's scowl began to look like a permanent addition to his face. Starfire was halfway out the door before Robin gave the order, and Raven found herself remembering the alien's own experience as a hostage. Starfire had never given them more than snippets of that particular experience, but Raven sometimes got glimpses of emotions that were dark enough to make her shudder. She followed the rest of the team out the door, hovering about a foot off the ground as she hastily prepared her mind for combat. Her powers had been more volatile since Trigon. You would have thought that destroying her demon spawn of a father would have been cathartic, and it had been, but her personified emotions didn't seem to be able to separate his destruction with the destruction of Azarath, and they had an annoying tendency to run around in her mind, trespassing on each other's domains and tripping over invisible boundaries. It wasn't easy to regulate, but she put in the extra effort. She didn't want to lose control, didn't want to allow all her enemies to join Doctor Light in the world of eternal darkness she had trapped him in.

So she hung back as the others piled into Cyborg's pet car, followed Starfire through the night sky, kept track of her team via Robin's bright red – rather ostentatious, Raven thought – motorcycle. The streets were quiet, illuminated by the streetlamps that cast as much shadow as they did light. When they got to their destination, she melted easily into one such shadow, letting Robin know where she was with a light touch to his consciousness. He hated it when she did that; reminded him of his own temporary insanity. A natural consequence of saving someone from their demons was that you were forever associated with that horror. Raven felt a slight twinge of regret as she withdrew, feeling an echo of the irritation he tried to hide behind a slight nod and the steely determination that was so integral to his character. Raven preferred the shadows. She could watch this way; get an idea of the battle before it truly began. Robin liked this strategy too; Raven often functioned as a secret weapon, an additional fighting force that no enemy was prepared for. The rest of the team was less happy, mostly because it made them uneasy not knowing where she was. This time, though, there was no battle to watch. Nothing happened, and as the seconds ticked by, Raven's mind sounded a warning that it took her a while to puzzle out. Something was severed, some kind of sense that she couldn't put her finger on. She felt blinded though her eyes were still functioning, deaf though her ears picked up the slight buzz of the broken street lamp and the breathing of her teammates. By the time she realized what was wrong it was too late.

There was a hand over her mouth, a gun to her head, an arm wrapped tightly around her waist, heavy breathing in her ear. And she knew immediately what was wrong because people couldn't sneak up on her. Her connection with the emotional energy around her, the sense that she valued the most, was gone. She could no longer summon the dark energy that was her defense, no longer call objects to her with the small pieces of her own shadow, no longer escape out of her body in the raven that granted her mind a safe haven. It was as if her mind had been walled off, trapped in a net of something that pulsed a vague, electric blue. A choked scream threatened to escape her throat as she realized the implications of her entrapment, one that fell on deaf ears as she was dragged into a waiting car. The last thing she felt was the engine rumbling to life.

Robin knew something was wrong when Raven's presence disappeared like someone had switched off a light. Usually, they remained in very faint contact until she entered battle. Dislike the touch though he might, Robin took very real pleasure in being able to give orders without opening his mouth. Raven gave a unique dimension to the power of their fighting force, and the abrupt absence of her mental energy caught him off-guard until he noticed that the rest of his teammates were experiencing worse problems. Starfire had crashed unceremoniously to the ground and was moaning, which was uncharacteristic in and of itself. Her strength made falls like this less than harmless – if anything, the ground should have taken a beating. He had started towards her when a strangled cry made him turn sharply to watch Cyborg's lights shut off, leaving him twitching on the ground. Beast Boy reached Starfire's side, exceptionally pale, before he too collapsed, the lines of his skin trembling faintly as his pupils, illuminated in the light of the streetlamp, dilated rapidly. Robin, performing a quick assessment, decided that Starfire had the worst of it and knelt beside her, pulling out a medical scanner.

"Star? Stay with me, okay?"

She made a barely audible noise and lifted one arm, cradling it to her body. Robin winced as he saw the odd angle that her hand was bent at. Her voice was faint when she spoke, but a trace of her strength remained in the way she snapped the bone back into place, face contorted into a grimace that made her barely recognizable.

"I am not…permanently…damaged," she panted, pushing her hair away from a face that gleamed with sweat. Robin placed a hand on her shoulder and glanced around.

"Beast Boy?"

He shook his head, still shaking.

"I'm all right. Tried to transform. Got zapped."

Some of the pigmentation had come back into his face and his eyes had returned to normal, and Robin sighed in relief.

"And Cyborg turned off. What was that?"

Starfire, still holding one arm, was examining an ankle that was swelling rapidly.

"Someone has removed our powers. That is why you are not affected, Robin."

The sound of her voice alarmed him, laced with pain as it was.

"You need to lie down."

Improvising, he drew off his cloak and created a makeshift pillow, shoving Starfire gently back against the ground, whereupon she let out a sound that made him wince and closed her eyes. He glanced at Beast Boy, who looked equally concerned, and Cyborg, who hadn't regained consciousness.

"I never thought I'd be grateful not to have powers."

Beast Boy gave a laugh that wasn't really a laugh and stood up, somewhat shakily.

"What are we dealing with here?"

Robin shook his head.

"Anybody that can turn off powers at will has some kind of supertech, definitely. That's Cyborg's department…"

He looked uncertainly at the gleaming metal on the ground.

"He'll be okay, right?"

Beast Boy had started shaking again, but answered steadily enough.

"He'll be fine….hey!"

The transformation was slower than usual, and, Robin guessed from the expression on the monkey's face, painful. When Garfield emerged again, he raised an eyebrow and received a shadow of a grin in return.

"It's wearing off."

Sure enough, Cyborg's lights came back on and Starfire managed to pull herself to her feet, still massaging her sore limbs. It took a few minutes for everyone to return to normal, but it soon became evident that no lasting damage had been done. Except…except that Raven's presence was still conspicuously absent from his mind.

"Where's Raven?"

His voice was sharper than he intended, and his teammates were almost immediately as alarmed as he was. Cyborg touched the control panel on his arm, frowning.

"I can't get a lock on her signal."

Starfire had moved uncertainly toward the shadow that Raven had been enveloped in. Now, she stood up, the remains of a communicator and a jeweled belt held in her cupped hands. Robin swore violently and spoke through clenched teeth.

"Split up. Search the city. I don't want to see any of you again until we find some kind of clue."

But after a three hour-long search and a rendezvous at the same place she had disappeared, Robin was perilously close to panic.

"Okay, team. We need something and we need it now. What have we got?"

Their silence only increased the nausea that was shaking his composure. Resisting the urge to hit one of them, he turned and stalked toward his motorcycle, intending to tear the city apart, brick by brick. It was a half-articulated exclamation from Starfire that stopped him. When he looked at her, her hands were at her mouth, eyes wide with shock as she stared at the wall that was still dripping blood. A screen had opened up in the bricks. Robin found himself wondering how it had gotten their until he took a step closer and made out the image that was flickering balefully at them, interrupted by static.