Barry was genuinely pleased about the suit.
He didn't particularly want to take his shirt off in the street a third time. At some point he'd probably develop enough control to keep air friction from turning his wardrobe into a fire hazard, but that was a future-Barry problem. Right now, a close-fitting fireproof polymer suit with aerodynamic paneling was one of the most practical things anyone had ever handed him.
"Alright." He pulled the mask down and looked at Cisco and Caitlin. "We need to find Mardon."
Caitlin was already on it. "I ran the S.T.A.R. Labs satellite array over Central City — there's a location showing rapid atmospheric pressure fluctuation. Localized and significant." She turned the tablet so he could see. "Here."
Cisco clapped him on the arm. "We've got him."
The farm was exactly as Joe remembered it, and he didn't particularly want to remember it.
"Last confirmed location before the crash," he said, low and even, as he and Eddie moved through the perimeter. "If he's using it as a base again, we call for backup once we confirm."
"And if he's not here?"
"Then we're back where we started." Joe checked his sidearm. "Either way — gun out, eyes open. A colleague took a bullet in this building. I don't want a repeat."
They moved inside.
The interior was dim, the last of the sunset not making it past the boards. Joe's eyes adjusted — and there he was. Sitting in the center of the space, entirely untroubled, like someone waiting for a bus.
Clyde Mardon.
Nine months ago, this man had been cornered and desperate, hiding in the dark and shooting from ambush because he had nothing else. Tonight he was sitting in the open light with the posture of someone who'd decided the rules didn't apply to him anymore.
Joe kept his expression flat and his pace slow. He gestured to Eddie to get the angle, pulled out his cuffs, and moved in.
"Hands on your head. On your feet." He kept his voice steady. "It's over, Mardon."
"Oh." Clyde didn't turn around. He almost sounded amused. "You found me."
He still didn't move. "You remember that night, Detective? The accelerator went up, the storm hit, and our plane went down." A pause. "I woke up on the ground, alive, and I had — this. All of this." He spread his hands slightly, like a man gesturing at something enormous. "From that moment, I understood. I am God."
Joe stared at the back of his head.
Oh, for the love of—
"Why would a God rob a bank?"
The question landed flat and genuine. Clyde opened his mouth. Closed it. Joe, who had been in this job long enough to have heard every variety of criminal self-mythology, watched the gears catch and slip and catch again, and felt nothing but tired.
In the shadows along the far wall, Jude — who had arrived twenty minutes earlier and set up in exactly the right corner — found himself nodding involuntarily.
That's the question, isn't it. He watched Clyde working through his response with the expression of a man who'd just been asked to explain why oxygen is wet. You're standing here declaring yourself a deity and you spent the week robbing savings accounts. Pick a lane.
Clyde recovered. "You're right," he said, with the tone of someone who had decided agreement was more threatening than argument. "My perspective was too narrow before."
The air pressure changed.
It was subtle at first — a shift in the quality of the air, a low subsonic vibration — and then it wasn't subtle at all. Wind erupted from around Clyde in a concentrated burst, and Joe and Eddie went airborne.
Joe rolled with it, years of training turning the impact into something survivable. He came up onto one knee, already moving. Eddie had hit the haystack wrong and wasn't moving.
Clyde was standing in the center of a growing vortex, the wind building around him in concentric rings, climbing in speed and violence until it tore the roof of the greenhouse off in a single gust and opened the sky above them. A tornado — a real one, not a parlor trick — formed around him with the deliberate patience of something being constructed.
He walked forward, and the storm walked with him.
"Tonight," Clyde called out, voice amplified and scattered by the wind, "Central City learns what it means to obey God's will!"
Joe had Eddie over his shoulder. He got them both out of the building's footprint, turned, and emptied his gun into the storm wall.
The bullets disappeared without acknowledgment. Joe watched them go and made peace with it.
Inside what remained of the warehouse, Jude had already opened the System shop. He pulled up a tranquilizer gun — quiet, untraceable, sufficient — and was calculating angles when Satsuki's channel crackled in his earpiece.
"Standing by."
"Hold—" He pressed a hand to the motorcycle's chassis. "Wait. Someone's coming."
He felt it before he saw it. A change in the texture of the night — a new quality of motion, different from the tornado's blind, grinding power.
Then the red streak appeared.
It came from the east, low and fast, trailing a shimmer of gold at its edges like the afterimage of something that had been moving too quickly to fully exist in any single moment. It arced across the sky in a line that crossed the tornado's path and stopped — or rather, slowed enough to suggest a human shape inside all that velocity.
Joe West, with Eddie unconscious across his shoulders, stared.
"What—" He tracked the red figure, his expression moving through several things quickly. "What is that?"
Barry Allen. The suit. The speed. The wind already pulling at him as he circled the perimeter of Clyde's storm, reading it, calculating something.
Central City's destined hero, Jude thought, watching. Right on schedule. Roughly.
He put the tranquilizer gun back in the inventory and leaned against the motorcycle.
Barry pulled the filter on his mask aside — nose and mouth free, airflow unrestricted — and picked up his pace.
"Barry." Cisco's voice in the earpiece, tight with urgency. "That tornado is running at two hundred miles per hour and it's accelerating. You need to move now."
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