They'd tried it three different ways and arrived at the same answer each time: Shawna could not teleport to a location she was seeing through a security feed. The destination had to be somewhere her own eyes were looking at directly. Which meant binoculars, and a head start.
"We should have gotten her a better pair," Caitlin said, watching the tracker on Cisco's screen. "Her line of sight is her entire combat range. It's the most important piece of equipment she has."
"I know, I know." Cisco rubbed the back of his neck. "I've been running on fumes. I finished the two guns and then — honestly, I barely had time to even think about Ronnie."
The name landed in the room the way it always did lately.
Caitlin pressed her lips together.
"We'll find him," Cisco said quickly, catching himself. "I already ran his face through Felicity's recognition script — full camera coverage of the city center. The moment he shows up anywhere on the network, we'll have him."
Caitlin nodded. Barely.
On screen, Shawna's location beacon was moving at a pace that made Cisco do a double-take.
"Is she — how fast is she going?" He leaned toward the monitor. "She's covering multiple blocks every two seconds. That's — that's faster than Barry's average long-distance speed."
"Currently," Wells said. "If Barry eventually pushes past the speed of light, the comparison becomes meaningless. Miss Shawna's method has a hard ceiling that Barry's does not." He paused, watching the blip jump again. "That said — she's clearly been developing this ability independently for some time. Precise teleportation is far more difficult than it looks. The fact that she's this fluent with it, self-taught, is genuinely impressive."
"She's almost there." Caitlin pointed to the screen. "Cisco, switch to the bank cameras."
"Already on it." His fingers moved across the keyboard. "And we got lucky — Roy left the cameras running. Probably figured doing nothing was better cover than obviously tampering with them."
The feed came up. The interior of Central Savings Bank was a contained riot — customers fighting tellers, a manager in a suit wrestling with a man near the vault, which stood wide open. Roy had clearly scouted the location in advance. He'd triggered his ability at the moment of maximum civilian density and let the chaos do the work for him.
"The Rainbow Raider," Caitlin said, half to herself.
Cisco turned his head. "What?"
"Roy. Rainbow Raider. RGB as a nickname just doesn't land."
"Excuse me." Cisco straightened. "Naming is my thing. You already claimed 'Peek-A-Boo' for Shawna. It's my turn." He turned back to the screen with the air of someone making a formal declaration. "His name is Prism."
"Does anyone else think 'Prism' sounds a little delicate for a guy who incites bar riots?"
"Rainbow Raider," Barry said, from where he'd been quietly watching the feed.
Cisco looked betrayed. "Barry—"
"It fits his ability and it's memorable. I think the Doctor agrees." Barry gestured toward Wells without looking away from the screen.
Cisco turned to Wells with desperate eyes.
Wells adjusted his glasses. "Focus on the mission."
"The Doctor abstains," Caitlin translated immediately.
"That's a tie, which means—"
"Which means Rainbow Raider wins because it was proposed first." Barry still wasn't looking at him.
Cisco slumped.
"Okay, I'm in position." Shawna's voice came through the comms — steady, but with the particular quiet of someone surveying something they hadn't expected. "It's pretty loud in there."
She was on the street outside, binoculars up, watching through the glass. The chaos inside was worse than it looked on the feed. Someone near the back of the room had a gun.
Shawna had spent years in bars. She'd seen fights escalate, seen bottles connect with heads, seen the particular moment when a room tips from loud to dangerous. Large-scale brawls didn't rattle her much anymore.
Guns were different.
She knew guns in bars too — knew what they looked like when someone pulled one, knew what happened when they went off. She'd always been good at being somewhere else before it got that far. Distance was a skill she'd cultivated carefully.
If I stand in front of the gun, I get hit.
The thought was fast and automatic, and it cost her half a second.
"Shawna — move!"
Cisco's voice in her ear snapped the moment. She was gone before the word finished.
She materialized behind the woman with the gun and drove the stun gun into her back. The current hit hard — the woman's whole body seized — but the trigger was already moving.
The bullet left the barrel.
A man across the room grabbed his stomach and went down.
The electric current had thrown the aim off. The shot had been lined up for his head.
Shawna stood there for a moment, stun gun still in hand, looking at the man on the floor.
Half a second.
She ran the calculation she didn't want to run. If she'd moved the instant she saw the gun instead of when Cisco told her to — if she'd grabbed the muzzle on arrival instead of going for the trigger hand — the bullet might have gone into the ceiling. The man might be standing.
But I'm not the Flash. There's no reason I should throw myself in front of a gun for a stranger. I got there as fast as I could. I stopped it from being worse.
It's not my fault.
The man was still moving, at least. One hand clutching his side, breath coming in sharp pulls, face turned up toward the fluorescent lights.
She'd seen ordinary people all her life — in the bars, on the street, filling the city in the background of everything she did. They blurred together. That was just how it worked.
This one didn't blur. He was right in front of her, and he was bleeding, and she had been two steps away.
It's not my fault.
But she remembered what Cisco had said, back at the lab, with his researcher's precision:
"The Flash has almost never won his first encounter unprepared. That's how most of his close calls happened."
The implication had been about preparation. About knowing your opponent before engaging. But standing here, in this bank, watching a man breathe carefully around a bullet wound — she heard it differently now.
The Flash stood in front of the gun. Every time.
That was why he kept almost dying.
That was also why he kept saving people.
Shawna looked at the man on the floor, and didn't say anything to the voice in her ear.