The alarm was new.
Not the klaxon I'd heard a dozen times for routine meta-sightings. A different tone — higher, thinner, coming out of a speaker Cisco had bolted in six weeks ago specifically for the rupture cameras. I'd never heard it fire before. I heard it now from the stairwell, two floors below the cortex, and I was already moving before I'd stopped processing the sound.
Caitlin was at the door when I came through it.
"Evans and Thirty-eighth?"
"Here."
She said it the way you say a bad diagnosis. Quick. Clean.
The cortex was full of light that shouldn't have been in it.
A disc of blue-white air was hanging three feet off the floor in the middle of the room. Same geometry as the camera flicker from the warehouse feed three nights ago — same flat plane, same edge ripple — except this one had stability. Whatever had been flexing the wall between us and somewhere else had just finished flexing.
The wall had opened.
Cisco was backed up against his console with one hand out like he meant to ward it off and the other already on the emergency breach protocols Barry had asked him to draft two months ago. Barry himself was in full suit, must have changed at speed when the alarm hit, and he was crouched in a runner's stance on the far side of the disc. Waiting to see what came out.
Something came out.
A shoe.
Specifically, a leather oxford, brown, scuffed at the toe.
Then the rest of the man.
He came through the disc in a half-stumble like a man catching a train at a bad angle. Tweed jacket over a grey turtleneck. Tall — my height plus two inches. Grey at the temples, the rest dark. He caught himself on Cisco's console with both hands and the breach disc snapped shut behind him with a sound like a dropped book.
He looked up. Saw Barry in the Flash suit.
Something in his face went soft.
"Oh, thank God," he said.
[New presence: Unknown.]
[Signature: Speed Force residue. Origin: Non-local.]
I dismissed it. The System didn't know who he was. I did.
Jay Garrick. Forty-something. Warm grey eyes. A mouth that pulled a tired, relieved half-smile the exact way a man who'd rehearsed the tired, relieved half-smile in a mirror on the other side of a dimensional wall would pull it. Every muscle in his face knew its job. I watched him find the room one person at a time — Barry first, then Caitlin, then Cisco, then me — and every pass ran a micro-calculation across his expression that he was careful to hide under exhaustion.
He was very good.
I'd have fallen for it in my old life. Half of me wanted to fall for it now, just out of appreciation for the craft.
"My name is Jay Garrick," he said. "Where I'm from, I'm — I was — the fastest man alive. I lost my speed fighting something. It took everything from me. It's coming here."
"It?" Barry said.
"Zoom."
Jay leaned harder on Cisco's console. The tremor in his hands looked genuine. It probably was. Doing something scary for real at the moment you wanted to look scared was the easiest performance in the world.
"I can help you. I can tell you what I know. I just need somewhere to sit down."
Barry looked at Caitlin.
Caitlin looked at me.
My face did what I'd been paying it to do for eight months now. Measured. Interested. Concerned. The mask of a consultant who recognized the shape of a problem without having met the problem before.
"Medical," I said. "Scan first. Conversation second."
"Good call." Barry stepped forward. "Come on, Jay. Let's get you checked out."
Jay let himself be walked out of the cortex.
When he passed me he made eye contact. A fraction longer than he needed to. The smile he used on me was a small one — collegial. One older guy to another. I smiled back the same way, because not smiling back would have told him more than smiling would.
His pulse tapped lightly against his jawline when he passed me.
Calm.
Way too calm for a man who'd just punched a hole between worlds.
---
It took Caitlin forty minutes to run everything she wanted to run.
Jay sat on the edge of the gurney with his shirt off, and she moved a handheld scanner across his chest while he made self-deprecating jokes about his posture. He had an old surgical scar on his left shoulder. A tattoo on his forearm that he said he'd gotten in the Navy on his Earth. His heart rate was slow and steady. His blood pressure was within range. His cellular readings were consistent with a man who'd been a speedster and had the power stripped from him, which was the one thing that wasn't a lie.
I watched from the corner with my arms crossed.
Barry stood at the door.
When she finished, Caitlin gave Jay a blue hospital shirt and stepped back.
"Clean on every panel I can run," she said. Carefully. "I can't vouch for what I can't measure."
"Understood." Jay pulled the shirt on. "Thank you."
Barry nodded at me. We went out into the corridor.
"Thoughts."
"His story is consistent," I said. "Internally. His vitals track with what he's claiming. His Speed Force residue is real. He's not faking a biology."
"I'm hearing a but."
"But we verify before we trust."
"How do we verify someone from a parallel universe?"
"I don't know yet. But 'he seemed nice' is a bad standard. Cisco'll figure something out. He's good at this."
Barry rubbed the back of his neck.
"He's asking for a room."
"Give him one. Same floor as the cortex. Cameras. Motion on the door. If he wakes up at 3 AM and walks somewhere, we want to know."
Barry half-smiled. "You always this paranoid?"
"Lately, yeah."
He huffed. Clapped my shoulder once on his way back in.
That was new. The shoulder thing. Two months ago he wouldn't have. I didn't acknowledge it out loud. I'd learned not to acknowledge the gradient of things.
---
Eleven forty-seven at night, the corridor outside Jay's room was dim.
I'd told myself I was going home and instead I was standing with my back against the wall between two overhead lights, in the dark patch, where the camera Cisco had put in above Jay's door wouldn't see me.
Through the observation window, Jay was asleep.
Or performing it. You could tell with most people. His breathing was slow, shoulders slack, one hand curled by his face on the pillow. The performance, if it was one, was a top-of-the-class performance.
I watched him for about three minutes.
"That's Zoom," I thought. "That body under that quilt is the body that's going to take Barry apart on camera and drag him through Central City by the ankle in about four months."
I didn't move.
I couldn't touch him. Not yet. Even if I could get past Barry and Caitlin and Cisco — and I couldn't — Jay Garrick on this floor wasn't a person with a power I could pull. The power was on the other side of the wall we hadn't crossed yet. The body in that bed was an avatar. A decoy. An assembled lie.
I could extract from a decoy and end up with a handful of nothing.
I needed the real one.
I needed Earth-2.
[Target logged.]
[Extraction vector: Cross-dimensional. Complexity: Extreme.]
[Estimated PP reward: High.]
A door clicked down the corridor.
I was around the corner before the sound finished. Back stairs. Night air on the roof. I took the long way home through side streets to burn off the thing in my chest that hated being this close to a real monster and having to smile back at it.
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