The sky opened.
Not slowly. Not with warning. One second it was rotating, one second it was a slow drain in the blue, and the next second it cracked — a line of black scored across the air above Central City with the sound of tearing metal a mile high.
The shockwave hit STAR Labs forty seconds later.
The windows in the cortex didn't break. They hummed. Every pane vibrating in its frame at a pitch that went into my teeth. Cisco's coffee cup hopped across the desk and went over the edge and he didn't flinch. His hands were on the keyboard, eyes locked on six different feeds now, all of them showing the same thing from different angles.
A hole in the sky.
Black at the center. Light bent around the rim. Debris lifting off rooftops in the surrounding blocks and spinning upward into it — newspaper, a patio umbrella, what looked like a bicycle.
[Spatial anomaly detected.]
[Classification: Speed Force rupture.]
[Recommendation: Evacuate blast radius.]
I dismissed the System without reading past the third line.
Barry was already moving.
"How big."
"Getting bigger." Cisco's voice was flat, the tone he used when his hands were too busy for his face to catch up. "Growth rate exponential. We have maybe an hour before the pull is strong enough to start taking buildings."
"Pull?"
"It's a black hole, Barry. It's a goddamn black hole."
The room breathed in.
Joe said, "Iris is downtown."
Eddie was already on his phone. It rang once and went to voicemail. He hit it again.
Caitlin was at a second terminal, pulling up radiation reads, gravity flux, anything that'd give her a number she could work with.
Ronnie stood behind her. Quiet. Watching the screen.
I watched his face.
I'd been watching that face for nine seconds before I realized I already knew what he was about to say. I'd known since last night. I'd known since June of a life I hadn't been born into yet.
He knew too. He just hadn't said it yet.
"Cisco." Ronnie's voice cut through. "What stops it."
Cisco didn't look up. "Nothing stops it. We're past stop. Best case, you collapse it from inside. Counter-frequency — same principle as a sonic boom going the wrong way. Rupture the Speed Force seal from the other direction."
"From inside the singularity."
"Yes."
"What happens to whoever goes inside."
Silence.
Cisco's hands stopped.
He finally looked up. Looked at Ronnie. Looked at Caitlin. Looked back at the keyboard.
"The fusion matrix could generate the frequency," he said. "Firestorm could do it. The release would be..." He stopped. Started again. "Anyone in the matrix at the moment of release — I can't model a scenario where that person survives the back-blast."
Caitlin's head came up.
"No."
One word. Soft. Immediate.
"Cait—"
"No."
Ronnie turned to her. Took her shoulders. "Someone has to."
"Someone else."
"Nobody else can."
"I just got you back."
"I know."
"Ronnie."
"I know, Cait."
I stepped out of the room.
I needed to, because I'd lived through the next ten minutes of that conversation once already, in a future that hadn't been mine, on a couch watching television in a life that had ended in some bad country with a bad man holding a bad knife. I didn't need to hear it again. I couldn't change it. I knew I couldn't change it. The thing that had decided Ronnie was the man who went up into that hole had been decided long before I'd been shoved into this body.
I went to the corridor. Put my hand against the wall. Leaned on it.
Pressure on the ribs. Sharp.
I pulled up the System.
[Unbreakable Warrior — cooldown complete. Available.]
[Power Points: 1,350. Combat functions: Operational.]
[Tactical note: Civilian evacuation within pull radius recommended.]
Good. I had what I needed.
Barry came out after me maybe two minutes later. Didn't say anything for a long moment. Just stood next to me with his hands on his hips and his head tilted back looking at the ceiling like the building might tell him something.
"Northern district," he said eventually. "The pull's going to hit there first. Residential towers. Old stock. They won't hold."
"How many people."
"Thirty thousand in the radius. Maybe more."
"Time."
"Forty minutes until the pull takes the first roof."
I straightened off the wall. My ribs objected. I let them.
"I can help with that."
He looked at me for a long second. He was trying to decide something. You could see the math running in his face. The man from last night who'd found out his friend was a liar, and the man from twenty minutes ago who'd gotten a handshake from Eddie Thawne, and the man right now who needed thirty thousand people out of thirty thousand buildings in forty minutes.
He nodded.
"Northern district. Keep it clear. We can't have civilians in the blast radius when Firestorm goes up."
"Copy that."
I turned to move. Caitlin was in the corridor.
I hadn't heard her come out.
Her eyes were red. She caught my wrist as I tried to pass her. Her hand was freezing — colder than her hand should be, colder than anyone's hand should be, and for one half-second I wondered if she'd noticed yet — and then she squeezed, once, fingers too tight.
"Ronnie's going up there."
"I know."
"Can you—"
She didn't finish the question. Couldn't. Her mouth moved and nothing came out and her eyes were doing the thing her face didn't know how to do.
I couldn't save him. Not from this. Not from the math. I wouldn't have been able to save him even if I'd been at S-Rank with every power in the world, because there was nothing in the collection that pushed back on a black hole and lived.
I covered her hand with mine. Squeezed once. The way you squeeze when a word isn't available.
Let go.
Walked past her.
On the other side of the corridor glass, Firestorm was rising.
He came up through the observation window in a column of fire and fusion, slow at first, then faster, Ronnie's body wreathed in Stein's matrix, white-hot against a sky full of hole. The building shook in his wake. Somewhere below, an alarm I hadn't noticed started to shriek in a key that wanted your teeth.
I stopped at the elevator. Hit the button.
The city was pulling itself apart above my head.
I went down to save what I could.
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