"The moment Clay finds out you can teleport," Jude said, "he will start working on you. Armored trucks. Exhibition halls. Private vaults. Anywhere you can see, you can reach — and that's a very short mental step from 'my girlfriend is incredible' to 'my girlfriend could solve all our problems.' He'll frame it as necessity. There's always a debt, always a deadline, always someone who'll hurt him if it doesn't get paid. The details will change. The structure won't."
He shrugged, watching her face.
"I don't plan to belabor this. I just wanted to say it once clearly."
Shawna was quiet. She was thinking about the visitation room, about Clay's eyes going sideways to check the guard before dropping his voice to ask about Marcus. About the way "I love you" had transitioned, in the span of two sentences, into "how much do you have saved up."
"But what if he needs the money?" she said.
"Everyone needs money." Jude shook his head. "The difference is always in the method. Petty theft was your ceiling — you set it there yourself, even if you didn't think about it in those terms. He doesn't have that ceiling, and he'll spend as long as it takes finding the right angle to move yours." He paused. "I'll say this plainly: even if we handed him full funding, a business plan, and a clear path to legitimate income — he'd still choose the fast way. Because it's fast, because it's low-risk for him, and because you'd be the one carrying the weight. I'm sorry to use that word. It's the most accurate one I have."
He stopped talking.
For a moment the only sound was street noise from somewhere up the block.
"That's probably enough of that," Jude said. "You don't need a stranger dissecting your relationship at you. Let's talk business." He shifted the cart slightly. "Did Clay make a decision? About cooperating?"
"He wants out," Shawna said. "But he's scared of Marcus. I didn't get a chance to ask him directly about the gang — visiting time ran out."
"Understood. Barry can have Joe arrange another visit, and you can put the question to him then." Jude turned his cart slowly. "We'll also add something to the offer. If he's willing to give us actionable information on Marcus's operation — enough to put Marcus away — I'll still process the patent in his name. Joe keeps it quiet, no one will know Clay was the source. Marcus goes away for decades. Clay walks out clean, debt cleared, no one looking for him."
He glanced over at her.
"Which is, all things considered, more than Clay deserves."
Shawna didn't answer. She was thinking about what Jude had described — the exact shape of it, the precise mechanism — and how much of it had already been visible in that one conversation through the glass.
But what if he's unwilling?
She didn't say it out loud. She didn't need to. Some things you had to let settle on their own time.
Back at Star Labs, Cisco met Shawna at the entrance to the secondary lab with the expression of someone who had been thinking about ability mechanics all afternoon and had a lot of questions.
"Teleportation — you move with objects, people, all of it?" He started before she'd fully cleared the doorway. "Have you actually tested the upper limit of what you can carry?"
"Not really." Shawna looked at the equipment laid out on the table. "I know I can take at least one other person with me. And it has to be somewhere I can already see. Weight limit, size limit — I haven't figured that out yet."
"Capability limits are a later-stage problem," Wells said from behind his workstation without looking up. "Right now we need a combat framework that works with what we know. Please pick up the two items on the table."
Shawna looked. On the table: a compact stun gun and a sleeker, needle-free device that took her a moment to place.
"The stun gun has been modified," Cisco said, tilting his head with the modest pride of someone who wanted credit without asking for it. "Three seconds to unconsciousness, skin contact required. The other one is a tranquilizer gun — high-pressure airflow, no needle, delivers the anesthetic through the skin in about one second. Same contact requirement."
"Neither is lethal," Caitlin added, "and neither needs to be, for our purposes. The stun gun will even restart a stopped heart if you have to. The anesthetic won't cause lasting harm regardless of dose — the main side effect is extended unconsciousness, which is more or less the intended function."
"The raw material for the anesthetic is actually Jude's liquor," Cisco added, with the tone of someone sharing information he still found slightly unbelievable. "Same batch that functions as basically a medical miracle in every other context. If he ever released the formula, Caitlin could probably collect a Nobel in medicine and a Nobel in chemistry simultaneously."
"Just don't accidentally tranquilize yourself," Caitlin said.
Shawna examined both weapons, checked the weight distribution, and clipped the holster belt around her waist. It sat well. She turned the stun gun over in her hand, thinking through the geometry of it.
"So the play is: teleport behind the target, apply the weapon before they register what's happening?"
"In favorable conditions, yes," Cisco said, switching seamlessly into the register of someone who spent a lot of time thinking about tactical scenarios. "But we always need to know what we're walking into first. Farooq could black out a whole city — a stun gun wouldn't have done anything to him. Someone with armored skin, accelerated healing, energy projection — you need the tranquilizer to work before they can activate their power. The surprise is the whole advantage. If they see you coming, the advantage is gone."
He crossed his arms. "The Flash has been doing this longer than anyone, and he almost never won a first encounter unprepared. Most of his close calls came from that exact problem."
Shawna absorbed this. "That sounds like a short career expectancy."
"Your next target is considerably less dangerous," Wells said. He pressed a key and the main screen lit up with surveillance footage — grainy bar interiors, multiple venues, timestamps spread across the past week. "Barry collected the CCTV records from every bar that's had an outbreak of large-scale brawling in the last several days. The cross-comparison analysis finished an hour ago."
He let the footage speak for a moment, then turned to face the room.
"We have a match."