The breach room was the size of a small gymnasium.
Cisco had built it in October. Reinforced walls, sensor array, blast plating on the ceiling because the singularity had taught everyone in this building a healthy disrespect for what could happen if a hole in the air decided to widen. He'd left the floor open. Just bare polished concrete and a circle of yellow tape eight feet across.
I stood inside the circle.
He stood across from me. Black t-shirt, his hands flexed at his sides, jaw working.
"Walk me through what we said," he said.
"You pick the destination. You pick the duration. We come back when you say. I touch nothing. I take nothing."
"And."
"I'm a tourist."
"And."
"I keep my hands in my pockets."
"Good." His shoulders rose and dropped. "I picked Hub City."
"Hub City."
"Smaller. Quieter. I vibed it three times this week. There's a deli I want to try. It's two blocks from where we're going to land."
"A deli."
"It looked good. Stop looking at me like that."
"I'm not looking at you like anything."
"You're looking at me like that."
"Cisco."
He pulled in a breath. Held it.
Lifted his hands.
The blue came up out of his palms — slow at first, the color of a swimming-pool light, and then stronger. The air in front of him began to fold. A flat plane of disturbance about six feet tall and four feet wide. Through it, faintly, I could see something that wasn't this room.
A street. Brick. Different angle of sun.
"Now," he said.
I stepped through.
---
The first thing was air pressure.
Not different. Wrong. As though my ears were a quarter-second behind the rest of my head, popping to catch up with a shift that had already happened. My foot came down on cobblestone. The second foot came down on cobblestone. By the third step I was through and Cisco was through behind me, stumbling a half pace, catching himself on my shoulder.
Hub City.
The street ran east-west. Three-story brick buildings on either side, taller in the distance. The air smelled like rain that hadn't fallen yet and something fried — onions, oil — coming from a vent on the side of the building to our left.
Above us, the sky was lavender.
Not at sunset lavender. At three in the afternoon lavender. The sun was the right color, but the sky around it had gone soft and lilac in a way Earth-1 skies did not.
A zeppelin crossed it.
Slow. Large. A long white cigar shape with the words PRESCOTT INDUSTRIES down its flank in dark green lettering that I could read from the ground.
"Madre," Cisco said quietly.
I didn't answer. I was looking at the zeppelin.
[Earth-2 designation confirmed.]
[Local metahuman signatures within scanning range: 47.]
[Local Speed Force activity: Detected.]
[Recommendation: Maintain low profile.]
I dismissed all four lines at once.
Cisco let go of my shoulder. Stepped past me. Walked four paces into the middle of the street and just turned in a slow full circle with his face up.
"Look at the streetlights," he said.
The streetlights were brass. Tall. Each one had a small sign halfway up it that I assumed was a street name, except the lettering on the signs was a typeface that didn't exist on Earth-1 — squarer, with a vertical stroke at the foot of every letter that made the whole thing look like the credits of a film noir.
A man walked past us in a fedora.
Not a hipster fedora. A fedora fedora. He didn't look at us. He had a folded newspaper under one arm with a headline I caught half of — MAYOR SNART ANNOUNCES — and then he was past.
Cisco grabbed my wrist.
"Did you see —"
"Yeah."
"Was that —"
"Probably."
"Mayor —"
"Cisco."
He shut up.
We started walking.
---
The deli was on the corner of two streets I couldn't read.
The interior was small — six stools at a counter, three tables, a glass case with sandwiches behind it that had labels on them in the same square typeface. The man behind the counter wore an apron and a small paper hat. He looked up when we came in.
"Two?"
"Two," Cisco said.
We sat at the counter. The stools were leather and brass. A radio in the corner was playing something with horns.
I picked up a menu. Two pages. Sandwiches with names I didn't recognize next to ingredients I did. A Reverend was turkey, brie, fig jam, on pretzel. A Hudson was roast beef, blue cheese, pickled onion. The prices were in dollars but the dollar sign was on the wrong side of the number.
Cisco was watching me read it.
"You okay?"
"Yeah."
"You look weird."
"I am weird."
"Different weird."
I set the menu down.
"It's the size of it," I said quietly. "The whole-world-of-it. I expected — I don't know what I expected. Different sky, sure. I'd have bet on different cars. I didn't bet on a typeface. I didn't bet on a guy with a paper hat who's about to take my order in a dollar that doesn't work the same way."
"You sound like you're enjoying it."
"I am."
"That's allowed."
"I know."
The man behind the counter leaned on the case. "Boys. Lunch?"
I ordered the Reverend. Cisco ordered something called the Slugger that had four different meats in it. We paid in Earth-2 currency Cisco had — he'd traded an Earth-1 silver dollar for a small handful of Hub City notes the first time he'd vibed here, apparently, and never told me, which I noted and didn't comment on. The notes were green and white and had a portrait of a woman I didn't know on one side and a building I didn't know on the other.
The sandwich was excellent.
I said so.
"Told you," Cisco said with his mouth full.
A radio update came on. The voice was a woman's. Updates from the Star City detention center where Killer Frost and Deathstorm remain in custody following last week's — And then the radio shifted, the song coming back in, and the news was gone.
Cisco's chewing slowed.
He swallowed.
"Did you —"
"Yeah."
"I'm not — I'm not telling Cait that."
"No."
"Right?"
"No."
"Right."
He took another bite. Smaller.
I made a mental note. Killer Frost detained on this Earth. Not at large. Survivable mention.
I'd been worried Cisco was going to suggest we walk past a wanted poster. I'd been ready to steer him away from one. Instead the Earth had handed us the information through a radio, in passing, in a deli, with neither of us flinching visibly, which was about as easy as the universe had ever made anything for me.
We finished the sandwiches.
We walked outside.
---
We'd been on Earth-2 for eighty-six minutes when I felt the second pulse.
Not from my System. From somewhere down the street. A pressure at the base of my skull — light, brief, precise. The exact kind of pressure I'd been training Cisco to feel in his own head for two weeks.
I turned my head a half degree.
A man at the end of the block. Watching us.
Tall. Long coat. Older. Standing in the doorway of a building with brass numbers above it. He didn't move when I made eye contact. He just held it. The pressure at the base of my skull held with him.
Then he stepped back into the doorway and was gone.
"Cisco," I said.
"Yeah."
"Take us back."
"Right now?"
"Right now."
He didn't argue. Eight months ago he'd have argued. Today he just turned, took my wrist, and pulled me into the side alley.
His hands came up.
The breach opened.
I stepped through with the shape of the man in the doorway burned into the back of my eye, and the pressure at the base of my skull only fading once I was through and a foot off Earth-1 concrete and the breach was closing behind me with a sound like an exhale.
Cisco was breathing hard. Hands on his knees.
"What was that."
"I don't know."
"Don't I don't know me."
"I don't know yet."
He looked up at me.
Whatever was in his face wasn't anger. It was the start of a question that hadn't formed into words yet, a question that involved every promise he'd extracted from me in the last month and every piece of trust he'd put on a shelf labeled we'll see. He looked at me and the look held.
I held it back.
"Someone saw me," I said. "Not us. Me. A person on Earth-2 noticed my System pinging on a frequency he could read."
"That's — that's not supposed to be possible."
"No."
"Harry."
"Yeah."
"Who has that."
"On this Earth?" I said. "I don't know anyone."
I'd answered the question he'd asked.
The question I hadn't answered — the one neither of us said out loud — was what it meant that someone on the other Earth might.
Cisco pulled his phone out of his pocket. Looked at the time. Looked at me.
"One month from today," he said.
"One month from today."
"We're going to talk about this between now and then."
"Yeah."
"A lot."
He put his phone away. Walked to the door. Opened it. Looked back.
"Hey."
"Yeah."
"Was the sandwich worth it?"
I thought about it.
"Eight out of ten," I said.
"Eight?"
"Solid eight."
"You take that back. That sandwich was a nine."
He held the door for me on the way out.
The lights in the breach room hummed.
Somewhere across the wall we'd just closed, in the doorway of a building I couldn't read the address of, an old man in a long coat was probably already on a phone telling somebody in another language that an unauthorized signature had walked into his city and walked out again.
I made a note to myself to figure out who that signature reminded him of before I came back through.
Because it had reminded him of someone.
I'd seen it in his face.
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