"What do you mean he might have died in a car accident?"
The relief in the lab had lasted approximately four seconds before Cisco's brain caught up with what Barry had actually said. "Barry, you're at a farm. In a suburb. Think carefully about the words you're choosing."
"I'm not — I'm not making this up." Barry sounded like a man trying to report something he himself didn't fully believe. "A semi-trailer came out of nowhere. I don't know where it came from. It blinded us with the headlights, hit Clyde, sent him several meters — I should check if he's actually—" A pause. "Yeah, I should check."
The channel went quiet. In the lab, no one breathed.
"He's gone," Barry said. "Not breathing. And he's already — I think he was gone before he hit the ground."
Cisco, Caitlin, and Wells looked at each other across the console.
Wells was quiet for a moment longer than the others. Something moved behind his expression — a calculation running too deep to read. "Bring the body back, Barry. We may be able to find something useful."
"I can't. Joe's already called for backup. The scene needs to stay clean."
Wells accepted this without argument. When he spoke again, the analytical distance was gone, replaced by something warmer and more deliberate. "Regardless — you all did exceptional work tonight. Cisco, Caitlin, Barry. Get some rest."
"What about you?"
"I'll follow shortly." A pause. "I've been in this chair long enough to stop minding it. Go."
The look he gave them was the specific look he reserved for project approvals — precise, penetrating, and slightly alarming. Cisco and Caitlin exchanged a glance and evacuated the lab in under thirty seconds.
Ten minutes later, Wells wheeled alone down the lab's east corridor and pressed his palm flat against a section of gray wall.
A blue light swept across his hand. A panel separated from the wall with a soft mechanical click, revealing a door that wasn't on any of S.T.A.R. Labs' public schematics.
The room beyond was small and dark until the lights responded to his presence. He rolled inside, and the expression he wore for the world — warm, patient, burdened by guilt — dissolved completely. What replaced it was colder and considerably more precise.
"Gideon," he said. "Show me the future report."
"Of course." The AI's voice was clear and immediate.
A newspaper appeared in three-dimensional projection above the console — crisp, sharp, the masthead of a Central City publication. The headline was large enough to read without effort:
THE FLASH DISAPPEARS IN CRISIS INCIDENT
The date beneath the banner: April 25, 2024.
Wells read it. The tension in his jaw eased, fraction by fraction, until something that might have been satisfaction settled there instead.
On schedule.
He stayed with it for a long moment, then let the projection dissolve.
The following morning came in gold and clean, the way mornings do after storms have passed and taken their damage with them. Police units were already working the Mardon farm — cordoning, photographing, logging the anatomy of what a tornado does to a building from the inside.
Barry and Joe stood at the perimeter and watched the light come up.
"You went to see your father yesterday?"
"Before all this. I told him I was close." Barry kept his eyes on the horizon. "That I was going to find the real killer."
Joe was quiet for a moment. When he turned to Barry, the relief in his face was genuine — and so was the guilt underneath it.
"I'm sorry, Barry." He put a hand on Barry's shoulder. "I should have believed you. A long time ago."
"Joe—"
"Let me finish." He shook his head. "The moment I saw Clyde Mardon's face yesterday, I understood. I understood that I'd spent fifteen years being wrong about something that mattered more than almost anything else." He met Barry's eyes. "Your father is innocent. I know that now, and I'm going to prove it. That's a promise."
Barry didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
Joe pulled him in, briefly and firmly, the way fathers do. Then he stepped back and got practical, which was also the way fathers do.
"One condition. Iris doesn't find out what you're doing — any of it. The suit, the speed, the metahumans, none of it." His expression was serious. "A hero's family is always the first target. If anyone wants to get back at you, they'll go through her. Keep her out of it."
Barry looked at him for a long moment.
"Okay."
Joe nodded.
"Today," Joe said, looking out over the field, "is a new day."
"Central City is genuinely pleasant." Jude rode the bicycle down the morning street, food cart trailing behind him, and allowed himself to appreciate the lack of active catastrophe. "Every time a villain goes down, there's this window of peace afterward. Gotham never has that. Gotham doesn't do windows."
A thunderclap of displaced air hit him from the left and nearly took him off the bicycle.
The streak was already gone by the time he registered it — red and gold, a shape that resolved briefly into something human-shaped and then wasn't anymore, tearing down the street at a speed that left the air tasting like ozone and kicked up a cloud of dust that enveloped the cart entirely.
Jude sat up straight on the bicycle and felt the vein in his forehead.
"Satsuki." His voice was very controlled. "What was that."
"Five hundred and forty-four kilometers per hour." A pause. "He did pay, though."
Jude opened the cart's display panel. Two katsu-pan were gone from the front row — a clean gap, the rest of the arrangement undisturbed. He reached into his pocket. A crisp ten-dollar bill that hadn't been there before.
He looked at it for a moment.
"I need to track him," he said. "Have the nanobots deployed?"
"The ones in the katsu-pan? Yes — they were in the filling." Another pause. "But didn't you say tracking a speedster is pointless?"
"I said it was pointless for an ordinary person to track a speedster." He tucked the bill away. "You're not an ordinary person. You're a silicon-based life form whose processing speed makes human reaction times look geological. When you have Barry Allen's movement data — trajectories, behavioral patterns, tendencies — you can build a predictive model. You won't be reacting to where he is. You'll be calculating where he's going to be."
The motorcycle's headlight flickered in a way that suggested she was processing something exciting. "You want me to develop a counter-speedster algorithm."
"For future reference. There are going to be others — not all of them friendly. And if you have the model, you can engage them on even terms. Maybe better."
A beat.
"Are you genuinely committed to justice," Satsuki asked, "or are you preparing contingencies against people who happen to move fast?"
"Don't ask me that." Jude waved a hand. "It's Batman's fault. He taught everyone who came after him that preparation is a moral imperative. All roads in the DC universe lead back to Batman and his paranoid contingency files. Change the subject — where did Barry go?"
"There's a building fire three blocks east. He appeared to overshoot by approximately nine blocks."
"Still learning to brake." Jude rolled his eyes. "Alright. Saving lives is saving lives — I'll let the stolen pastry go this time."
He pedaled forward.
"But Satsuki — next time he takes something without stopping? Give him a static shock on exit."
"Understood," she said, with the tone of someone who had been waiting to be authorized to do exactly that.