Cisco swore in Spanish and pressed the heel of his hand against his right eye.
"Third time today," Caitlin said.
"I know."
"Have you—"
"Took two an hour ago. Don't help."
"Cisco."
"I said don't help, Cait."
She went quiet.
He felt the hurt land before he remembered he'd used the sharp voice — the one he used on his brother, the one he only used on people who'd earned the right to be hurt by him — and he dragged his hand down his face.
"Sorry. Sorry. Headaches are getting stupid."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. Can I get you a coffee?"
"I have a coffee."
"Can I get you a better coffee?"
She almost smiled.
That was enough these days.
I watched from the other end of the cortex. Watched Cisco grind his palm against his temple again. Watched him fail to notice that the pressure wasn't in his head — it was coming at his head from somewhere else.
[Metahuman signature: Dormant.]
[Type: Resonance-class. Match: 14%.]
[Progression: Active.]
I knew what that was.
I dismissed the notification without letting my face do anything about it.
The monitor at my elbow beeped.
Cisco was at my shoulder before I could turn my head. Headache apparently paused when a screen did something interesting.
"What did it catch?"
"Energy signature. Evans and Thirty-eighth."
"Meta?"
"No. The trace doesn't have a bio-origin. It's not coming from a person. It's coming from the air."
Barry and Caitlin drifted over. The four of us around the monitor. An orange pulse against black, rising and falling in a rhythm that wasn't any pulse of any animal known to science.
"That's not radiation," Caitlin said. "Already ran it."
"Not EMF," Cisco added. "Ran it twice."
"So?"
"So I don't know what it is."
Barry crossed his arms.
"Other hits?"
"Two more sites. Downtown. Out by Mercury. All three pulsing every six to nine hours."
Caitlin looked at me.
Here was the edge of the wedge. Push too hard and I look like I know too much. Don't push enough and Cisco misses the thread and the timeline drifts and I miss the exposure I want to be here for.
I leaned in. Looked at the waveform.
"Reminds me of something."
"Of what."
"The singularity. Before it opened. The monitors caught a drift in the background noise about forty minutes before the tear. Same shape."
Cisco's face did the thing it did when two data points clicked. He practically vibrated back to his own station. Pulled the old logs. Overlaid.
"Oh," he said.
The match wasn't perfect — different amplitude, different frequency — but the shape was the shape.
"These are rupture precursors. Little ones. Same phenomenon as the singularity — just smaller. Like something's pushing from the other side and the wall is flexing —"
He sat down hard. Pressed his palm to his eye again.
"Ow," he said.
Caitlin was already crossing the room.
---
Evans and Thirty-eighth was a shuttered furniture warehouse.
Barry blurred me there — two separate trips, because he couldn't carry two passengers and Cisco hadn't been cleared for speed travel since the morning spike. I rode in on the wind of him and my ears popped.
Barry did a perimeter pass faster than I could see. His hair was ruffled when he came back.
"Nothing visible."
"Wouldn't be. The trace runs four minutes and stops. We'd have to be here during the window."
"You want me to camp it?"
I shook my head.
"Cameras. Motion, audio, IR, visible. These are going to keep happening. If one of them stabilizes, we catch it."
Barry nodded. Looked at the empty street for a long moment.
"This is bad. Isn't it."
"I don't know."
I did know.
I'd gotten careful over the months about the shape of my lies — about when to lie by saying nothing, and when to lie by saying a thing I could walk away from later. I don't know was the safer shape.
He didn't push.
He'd stopped pushing around month two. Trust by attendance, that was the deal we had now. Show up when called. Don't ask questions. Leave when the crisis ended. I'd been paying that bill for three months. He kept taking the deposits.
We put cameras up.
On the drive back I looked at the sky more than I usually did. It was clear. Postcard-blue. Somewhere up there, the walls between worlds were getting thin.
I didn't say it.
---
Cisco was asleep at his desk when we came back.
Head down on his folded arms. Mouth open. Drool on his sleeve.
Caitlin was at the second station working on something that had nothing to do with ruptures — her metahuman gene panel, the one she'd been running on herself since August, though she didn't talk about it.
She looked up.
"Melatonin with the ibuprofen," she said quietly, tipping her head at Cisco. "He's going to hate me."
"He'll live."
"I know. Still."
I poured a coffee from the bitter pot. Offered it to her.
She took it without looking. Our hands touched briefly at the handle. Her fingers were warm. Normal warm. Good.
"Not cold today," I thought. "Different week."
I filed it. Didn't comment.
"Cameras are up at Evans," Barry said. "Coverage on all three sites tonight."
"Good."
Caitlin typed a line. Didn't look up when she said, "Harry. When you get a chance. Can you look at Cisco for me?"
"Look at him how?"
"You know more meta signatures than I do. My panel says his bloodwork is clean. But the headaches. And the timing with these ruptures."
I glanced at Cisco.
The drool. The slow rise and fall of his back. The man was two weeks — maybe less — from discovering that his brain was about to start doing things it hadn't done before.
"Yeah," I said. "I'll keep an eye."
"Thank you."
"For what."
"For not being weird about him."
I set the coffee down. Looked at her properly.
Her eyes were still on the screen. Her hands still on the keyboard. But the corner of her mouth had a thing in it.
"Caitlin."
"Hm."
"I'm never going to be weird about Cisco."
"I know. Thank you anyway."
Back to the screen. Coffee at her elbow. Cisco snoring behind her.
I'd been lower places.
---
[2:14 AM — Harry's apartment]
The camera at Evans and Thirty-eighth flickered.
I'd had the feeds up as background. Couldn't sleep. The PP bump from the Teague extraction had pushed me into a bracket where the passive drain stopped, which meant the pressure had eased, which meant I could think about things that weren't targets for the first time in a week.
I wasn't expecting anything on the feed.
Then screen three went strange.
Not a glitch. The picture held — wall held, floor held, concrete held. But for maybe a second and a half, in the middle of the frame, the air bent. Like a heat shimmer, only vertical, only shaped. A flat disc of displacement hanging three feet off the warehouse floor.
I sat up.
Leaned toward the monitor.
The disc rippled. Edges trying to stabilize. Not quite getting there.
For a fraction of a second — less — I thought I saw something through it. Not a place. Not a shape. A quality of light. The kind of light that comes through an aquarium tank versus the kind that comes through a window. And behind the light, a depth that wasn't warehouse-depth.
Then the disc collapsed. Warehouse again.
My phone buzzed.
Cisco.
tell me you saw that
Saw it.
dude.
I know.
DUDE.
Go to sleep. We log it in the morning.
He sent three more messages. I didn't read them.
I stood up. Walked to the window.
[Dimensional variance confirmed.]
[Observation recommended.]
[New hunting grounds: Possible.]
Possible. Yeah.
I pulled the blinds.
On the other side of the glass, a city that thought it was alone in the universe was going about the business of two in the morning.
It wasn't.
And somewhere across a wall that had just flexed without breaking, somebody was taking notes on how thin it had gotten.
Reading more than one of my novels? Good news — one Patreon, all of them.
patreon.com/TheFinex5
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰
― DECREE ―
More chapters reign FREE upon unwrittenrealm.com.
The throne acknowledges.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰