The results came back within minutes, and Barry read through them carefully, letting each piece settle into place before reaching for the next.
An ambulance had been called for DeVoe personally, not a lab assistant or a colleague. He'd refused transport at the scene.
What remained of the building's security footage, half corrupted by whatever the power surge had done to the system, showed him alone in the lab both before and after, walking out under his own power afterward, unsteady for only a few seconds before it passed.
The power logs told the more interesting story. The circuit feeding Lab 7B had drawn a spike far beyond anything a simple electrical fault would produce, a profile that matched, almost exactly, the load signature Barry remembered from DeVoe's own recovered notes months ago.
Not a malfunction. A device under active load, pushed hard enough to nearly overwhelm its own wiring.
"That draw is higher than anything in his notebooks," Barry said slowly. "Higher than his last documented prototype was ever rated for."
"Correct," Gideon said. "Current data is insufficient to confirm functional success. It does confirm the device was active, under significant load, and that DeVoe survived the session without requiring hospitalization."
Barry sat back and let that settle, and felt something colder than simple curiosity move through him.
'I cut his funding,' he thought. 'I severed his STAR Labs opportunity myself, and made sure he'd never know it happened. By every reasonable measure, his research should be years behind where it was in the world I remember, not standing at the edge of a breakthrough his own equipment almost couldn't survive.'
He thought about the accelerator, still months away, still the one truly fixed point in a timeline he'd already proven could bend in every other direction he pushed it.
He'd built his entire plan on the assumption that everything else was negotiable, changeable, his to shape or delay or redirect.
DeVoe's rise had never been on that list. It had simply been something he assumed his own interference would be enough to prevent, or at least slow past relevance.
'What if it isn't negotiable either,' he thought. 'What if some things in this timeline happen no matter what I do to the road that's supposed to lead there.'
He didn't have an answer for that tonight, and he was honest enough with himself to admit it. What he had instead was a question worth sitting with, and the discipline not to act on half of an answer before he understood the shape of the whole one.
"Keep passive monitoring on that circuit and on DeVoe's public activity," Barry said. "Nothing active. I want to understand what I'm actually looking at before I decide what, if anything, to do about it."
"Logged," Gideon said.
---
Dinner at the West house two nights later was exactly the kind of low, easy evening Barry hadn't realized he needed until he was sitting in the middle of it, Joe at the head of the table telling a long, meandering story about a suspect who had tried to hide from CCPD inside a costume shop's window display, Iris rolling her eyes at the parts she'd clearly heard before.
"In broad daylight," Joe said, shaking his head. "Standing perfectly still next to a mannequin in a Halloween mask. We got a call from a customer who said one of the mannequins looked nervous."
"It probably was nervous," Iris said. "It had just committed a crime."
Barry laughed, and for a while the conversation stayed exactly that light, easy and grounded in nothing more complicated than family dinner and Joe's endless supply of work stories.
It was Iris who brought up the other thing, halfway through dessert, in the same casual tone she used for everything until you realized how carefully she'd chosen the moment.
"Hey, weird question," she said, "you still keep half an eye on Queen Consolidated stuff, right? From back when you shorted the Gambit thing?"
"Sometimes," Barry said carefully. "Why?"
"I got a call today from a source I've used before, someone who works maritime insurance," Iris said. "She said a salvage contractor flagged an unusual signal near the original search area a few weeks back. Not confirmed as anything. Probably just debris settling differently, or a transponder from something else entirely that drifted into the zone. But apparently it was enough that someone reopened a case file that's been closed for years."
Barry kept his voice easy, even as something quiet and electric moved through him, a feeling he recognized instantly and had been waiting years to feel again.
"That's probably nothing," he said.
"Probably," Iris agreed, "which is exactly why nobody's written about it yet. But I've got a good nose for probably nothing turning into something in about six months." She smiled at him over her glass, sharp and knowing in the specific way that always meant she'd noticed more than she was saying. "I'll let you know if it ever turns into an actual story, Allen."
"You do that," Barry said, and meant it more than she realized.
Joe glanced between them, missing the undercurrent entirely, and steered the conversation back toward safer ground, a lieutenant's retirement party coming up next month, whether Barry was going to make an appearance this time instead of vanishing into work the way he usually did.
Barry promised he would, and meant that too, even as part of his mind stayed exactly where Iris had left it, turning a years old, quietly reopened case file over and over, patient enough to wait and see exactly where it went.
---
Miles away, in the basement of the CCU physics building, Clifford DeVoe sat alone in the dark of Lab 7B, the overhead lights still flickering faintly from whatever damage the earlier surge had done to the wiring nobody outside had been allowed to properly inspect.
The device on the desk in front of him no longer looked like the crude, unstable prototype from his earliest notes. It had changed the same way he had, refined through failure after failure until what remained finally worked the way he'd always believed it could.
His hands were steady as he powered it down for the last time that night, and when he finally looked up, his eyes carried none of the strain or confusion that had marked every earlier session. They were sharp now, clear in a way that made the dim, damaged lab around him look smaller than it had an hour ago.
Hmmm.
The low electrical hum faded out completely, leaving only silence and the faint smell of burnt insulation still hanging in the air.
DeVoe reached for his notebook and wrote a single line at the bottom of the page, his handwriting steadier than it had ever been before tonight.
Stable. Successful. Beginning tomorrow.
He closed the notebook, sat back in his chair, and allowed himself, for the first time in longer than he could remember, to simply think, clearly and completely, about everything that came next.
Read more chapters, 30 days ahead of Webnovel Updates on Patreon marvelstark