"For someone like Barry, using his abilities to help people isn't even a conscious decision yet. It's just — instinct."
Jude watched the processed footage one more time. The precinct cameras hadn't been designed to catch anything moving at that speed, but Satsuki had cleaned up the frames enough to make it readable: the prisoner's hand closing around the officer's holstered weapon, and then — nothing. A half-second gap. The gun back where it belonged, the prisoner stumbling like he'd been shoved by something he couldn't see. The officer looking down at his hip, confused.
"He doesn't even know he has powers yet. Hasn't tested them, hasn't named them, hasn't thought through the implications." Jude closed the feed. "And he's already using them to protect people. That's not training. That's character." He paused. "Only someone built like that can handle a power that runs as hot as his."
He tapped the side of the motorcycle. After nine months of working together, Satsuki read the signal immediately — panels folding out, frame shifting, the food cart reassembling itself around the chassis. Yomogi dropped from the cart rail directly onto Jude's head and settled there like he owned it.
"Move out, Three-Wheeler!"
"Move out, Three-Wheeler, meow!"
"USE MY NAME."
The Gold Bank's lobby was cool and quiet when Jude walked in, Yomogi riding his head like a particularly relaxed hat. An hour until closing.
"Daily deposit," he announced to no one in particular, and headed for the counter.
"Hello, I'd like to make a deposit."
Same account?
"That's right. Two thousand."
The branch manager came over personally, as she always did now. And why wouldn't she? For nine months, this man had walked in every two days and deposited two thousand dollars, without fail, without drama, without ever being anything other than politely unremarkable. His account balance had quietly climbed into the hundreds of thousands.
In her career, she'd handled clients who spent lavishly and made a show of it. She'd never had one who built wealth this patiently, this consistently, this quietly. It was genuinely strange, and also genuinely impressive.
"One moment, Mr. Jude. We'll have this sorted right away."
Yomogi sat motionless on Jude's head — the picture of an ordinary, well-behaved Siamese cat. Three months of practice had produced results. He looked almost convincingly like a pet.
Almost.
While Jude waited, the cat's ears moved. A slight rotation, barely perceptible, orienting toward the bank entrance. Then a small paw pressed carefully down on the back of Jude's head — the signal for pay attention, not loudly.
"There something wrong?" Jude murmured, barely moving his lips.
"Boss," Yomogi whispered back, "something smells off, meow."
Jude was half-turning when Satsuki's voice came through the earpiece.
"Blond male, baseball cap, black jacket — just entered. He came in a black Mustang. The in-car camera picked up what looks like a concealed firearm."
"Noted. But we can't confirm he's here to rob the place."
"Jude—" Her tone sharpened. "All the bank's security cameras just went offline. I've lost visual on the interior."
From somewhere outside: the low growl of a revving engine.
"Satsuki, hold your position. Don't come in yet."
"You're unarmored right now." She wasn't arguing about her name. Her voice was tight. "The battle suit configuration exists for exactly this situation."
"If we deploy full combat kit to handle a bank robber," Jude said quietly, watching the blond man move toward the counter with a folded piece of paper in his hand, "what are we doing when something serious shows up? This city is about to get very complicated. We need to stay proportional." He watched the man join the queue. "Stand by. I've got Yomogi with me. It won't come to the worst case."
"Mr. Jude." The branch manager reappeared at his elbow, professional and warm. "All done. Thank you for your business, as always."
Jude pocketed the receipt, tucked Yomogi into the crook of his arm, and activated his master-level stealth ability.
The lobby continued around him, indifferent to his existence. No one looked. No one registered the man who had just ceased, for all practical purposes, to be there.
He turned to watch.
The blond man reached the counter. The receptionist — slightly heavyset, somewhere past fifty, with the easy warmth of someone who'd worked a neighborhood branch her whole career — looked up from her screen with a professional smile.
"Hello, how can I help you today?"
The man had kept his head down through the whole queue. He slid the note across the counter without looking up.
She read it.
Looked up.
Looked at him — no knife, no gun, nothing in his hands.
"Is this a joke?" She frowned. "Kid. This is not funny."
The man finally raised his head.
"What was that?"
The fog hit before Jude could process what was happening — thick, cold, and instantaneous, rolling out from nowhere and swallowing the lobby in seconds. Three seconds, maybe five, and the world shrank to a white radius of about two meters.
These aren't regular robbers—
The sound arrived before the wind did. A crack that shook the building's frame, and then the glass dome above the lobby — a sweeping architectural feature that probably looked beautiful in the brochures — detonated inward. The fog blew apart. Wind and rain and glass fragments tore through the space, and every electrical system in the building died at once. Emergency lighting stuttered and failed. The storm outside had swallowed what remained of the afternoon light, and now the lobby was running on nothing but the intermittent white flash of lightning.
That's why the cameras went down, Jude thought. The storm knocked them out. He was generating it the whole time he was driving here.
In one of those lightning flashes, the robber's face came clear — short blond hair, jaw set, eyes carrying that specific blend of arrogance and violence that Jude had seen exactly once before. In a bank. During a robbery.
Oh.
Of course.
"Clyde Mardon," Jude said to himself. "Weather Wizard. The Flash's first major encounter — if you could even call it major. More like a tutorial boss. Starter content."
He glanced at the conditions around him: 70-mile-per-hour winds minimum, horizontal rain, glass fragments cycling through the air on the gusts.
Firearms are useless in this. Bullets would corkscrew before they hit anything.
He returned his pistol to the inventory. Rolled his shoulders. Opened the System shop briefly to flag a backup item — something to fall back on if the close-range approach went sideways — and then closed it.
"Yomogi." He tightened his grip. "Stay close. Do not get blown away."
He stepped into the storm.
"Clyde!" he called out, letting the wind carry it. "Good to see you again!"