"Mr. Stagg?"
He was already halfway to the side exit when the voice stopped him — or rather, when the polite persistence of it made him pause for the half-second required to assess whether it was worth pausing for.
It wasn't, as it turned out. A young woman, blonde, blue-eyed, well-mannered, the kind of clothes that suggested she'd dressed up for this but hadn't had much to work with. She had the cadence of a student. Something about a thesis.
Stagg's eyes moved across her in approximately 1.2 seconds, which was the amount of time he typically allocated to evaluating people who weren't immediately useful. The assessment was professional rather than personal, though the distinction was largely academic in his case. His private life had always included women of considerably more strategic value — the kind who came understanding the terms and left with a clean settlement. This one didn't register as that type either. She registered as homework.
"Excuse me, miss." He waved once, the gesture of a man closing a conversation that hadn't really started, and kept moving through the security corridor.
Iris watched him go.
"Well," she said to Barry, who was standing beside her. "He's not going to be easy to quote."
"I got that impression."
"I'll have to find another angle for the thesis." She turned away from the exit. "Or just describe him in general terms and hope he doesn't read it."
"He probably doesn't read theses."
"That's actually reassuring."
Thirty-seven seconds after Simon Stagg's car pulled out of the Stagg Building's underground garage and into the afternoon traffic, Danton Black arrived at the building's service entrance with five versions of himself, twelve pistols, and a plan that was now approximately thirty-seven seconds obsolete.
He'd memorized the venue layout. He'd calculated the timing. He'd accounted for Stagg's habit of working the room after his speeches — the man loved the ritual of it, the parade of people wanting to associate themselves with his success. He never left early. He never passed up an audience.
Except today.
Danton scanned the lobby through the entrance gap a second time, then a third. 3:09 PM. The crowd was still there, still moving in the same wealthy constellation around a center that was no longer occupied by anyone worth killing.
Bathroom, he thought. He's in the crowd somewhere. Or the bathroom.
His phone made a sound.
A call, connecting automatically, without him touching it. The screen showed an unknown number. He looked at it for one confused second, and then —
"Don't go, Danton."
Elizabeth's voice.
The world went very still for a moment. He ran through everything, very quickly: she knows about the gun shop, she knows I'm here, she's been—
"Don't be confused." The voice continued. "I'm not Elizabeth. I used a voice changer. Look at your caller ID."
Unknown Number.
He let out a breath he hadn't registered holding.
"Then who are you. And what do you want."
"I want to tell you that Stagg already left. You should go now, before you add another charge to your file."
"You know what I was planning."
"If you weren't planning it, I wouldn't have bothered finding you."
Danton absorbed this. "You want to use me against him."
"That's backwards. We were already moving against him. You happened to be positioned to help. The details are uploading to your phone now — read them when you're clear." A pause. "Leave. Now."
The call ended.
He looked at the lobby again. 3:12. The stage was empty. The people around the podium were beginning to redistribute, the event's center of gravity dissolving now that its centerpiece was gone.
He dialed Stagg's personal contact — the one he'd kept from his time at the company. Busy. He tried the office line. Busy. He tried the event coordinator's number, which he'd found in the building's publicly accessible reservation system.
Busy. Busy. Busy.
He put the safety back on.
Damn it.
He'd wasted too long at the entrance. He reached for the door to pull it closed — and through the gap, a venue security guard was already looking directly at him, taking in the balaclava and the visible holster with the expression of a man whose shift had just become significantly more complicated.
"Hey — you! What are you doing?"
The door slammed. All six versions of Danton moved at once, the clones reacting with the same automated precision they'd shown in the warehouse — down the back corridor, through the service door, into the alley, toward the van.
In the lobby, Barry heard the commotion and was moving before he'd consciously decided to.
The security guard was already through the door. Barry was through it faster, the alley resolving around him as he accelerated — six hooded figures piling into a black van at the far end, the last one pulling the door shut as he arrived—
His legs stopped working.
Not gradually. Not with warning. One step, the next step, and then the wall was coming up to meet him and he was sitting against it with his back to the brick and his vision narrowing in from the edges, and the thought he had before the dark finished closing in was approximately: this is the second time this has happened this week.
The van's taillights moved away down the alley.
A rectangular section of wall opened beside him.
Two heads appeared in the gap — one human, one cat.
"Boss, he fainted again, meow. Should I jump out and poke him?"
"No need." Jude looked at Barry, slumped against the wall with the peaceful expression of someone who'd been hit with a precise static discharge at exactly the right moment. "The timing was perfect."
He stepped out of the gap, crouched beside the unconscious speedster, and located the energy chocolate tucked in Barry's jacket pocket — the same one he'd given him at the cart, earlier, which Barry had apparently been saving.
He took it back.
"I gave it to him for an emergency," he told Yomogi, who was watching with large, unblinking eyes. "This doesn't count as an emergency."
He ate it.
"Also," he said, peeling the wallpaper off the wall behind him, "I genuinely wanted to see whether a cat's reaction speed was fast enough to track a speedster. Seven times human baseline — the theory is interesting." He rolled the wallpaper up and tucked it away. "Next time."
He, Yomogi, and the motorcycle disappeared into the gap in the wall. The wallpaper closed behind them. The alley was empty again inside of four seconds, and when the venue's backup security team arrived ninety seconds later, all they found was Barry Allen sitting against a brick wall looking confused, and a van that had turned three corners and was by then indistinguishable from traffic.
In the van, Danton let one of the duplicates take the wheel and opened the file on his phone.
He read.
His expression, behind the balaclava, went through several things in sequence.
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