Three days after the consolidation, a hostile from Earth-2 came through a breach into the parking garage of Mercury Labs and started flipping cars.
Not metaphorically. The first one was a Honda. He flicked his hand and the front end of the car went vertical, then over, then onto its roof, and the car alarm started, and that was about when Cisco's monitor in the cortex pinged us at home.
I caught the call on my second cup of coffee.
Was at STAR Labs in fifteen minutes.
Barry was already in the suit. He looked good. Two weeks of physical therapy and the kind of speedster healing the rest of us had to watch in awe; the only sign of the Powell Boulevard incident was a slight stiffness in the way he turned his head to follow Cisco's monitor.
"Gravity manipulator," Cisco was saying. "From the readings — high-end. Earth-2 signature. He's flipped six cars in three minutes."
"Casualties?"
"Two pedestrians winged, both walking. He's not aiming at people."
"Yet."
"Yet."
Jay was at the back of the room.
I made eye contact with him across the cortex. He gave me the small worried-friend smile. I gave him back the small ready-to-help smile. Two liars trading lies, I'd thought once, weeks ago. The thought had calluses on it now.
"Barry," I said, "I'll come with."
He looked at me a beat. "Okay. Cover the perimeter. I'll go in for the contact."
"Copy."
Caitlin tossed me an earpiece. I caught it. Slotted it.
"Be careful," she said. Same voice she'd use on either of us. The little rim of professional concern she'd built up around me over months.
"Always am."
We moved.
---
The Mercury parking garage was on its third overturned car when we arrived.
Barry stopped at the entrance. Pointed two fingers at the second-level ramp and was gone in a streak of yellow. I went up the stairwell on foot, two floors, came out near the south end.
The gravity man was in the middle of the ramp. Mid-thirties, suit jacket, no tie. He looked like a junior accountant who'd had an extremely bad week. He had his hands out and a Volkswagen was rotating slowly in the air about ten feet above his head while he stared up at it with an expression of distracted curiosity.
He noticed me before he noticed Barry.
His head whipped around. The Volkswagen jerked sideways in the air, lost six feet of altitude, slammed back down onto the concrete with a shriek and a crunch of a wheelbase folding.
He shoved a hand at me.
The pull came on me like stepping into a clothes dryer. Down. Sideways. The floor of the parking garage grew toward my face like a wave. My knees buckled. I went to a half-crouch.
Force Mastery would put him on his back in two seconds.
The thought arrived clean and unwanted.
Plasma Core would solve this whole event before Barry got around the corner.
I let both thoughts pass.
Phased instead.
The pull went through me. My body didn't have the right kind of mass for whatever wave he was sending. I came out of the phase three feet closer to him, on my feet, low, and I drove my shoulder — Unbreakable Warrior burning across my chest the moment I'd activated it on the run — into his sternum.
He went up off the floor and back six feet and slammed into a concrete pillar with the wet sound of a man who'd just had ribs broken.
He slid down. Stayed sitting.
Barry was at his side a half-second later. Cuffed him with the meta-dampener cuffs. Done.
I let Unbreakable drop. The cooldown locked behind it.
My ribs hurt where the impact had loaded into them. The Unbreakable had taken the edge off but I'd be feeling the bruise for a week.
"You good?"
"Fine."
"That was a hell of a tackle."
"He had me on the floor. Closing the distance was the only option."
Barry looked at the pillar. Looked at the man at its base.
"Looked like more than a tackle."
"The phase took the gravity. The mass at the end of the phase was going at speed."
"Right. Right."
He didn't push. He'd been pushing less since November. I noted it. Filed it.
We waited for CCPD.
---
Caitlin caught me in the corridor when I came back to the cortex.
She had a thumb-bandage in her hand and a half-irritated expression I'd seen her wear a thousand times on Cisco and never once on me before today.
"Sit."
"What."
"You're walking funny. Sit."
I sat on the gurney in the medical bay.
She lifted the side of my shirt. Made a face at the spreading purple.
"Is this going to keep happening."
"Probably."
"You're getting better at this."
"Practice."
She looked up. Held my eyes.
"You are getting better at this."
It was a different tone. Not the doctor-voice. Not the friend-voice. Something flatter.
I held the look.
"Practice," I said again.
She watched my face for another half-second and then looked back down at the bruise and pressed the bandage onto it with the deliberate efficiency she brought to everything physical.
"You don't have to tell me," she said, voice low. "Just so you know that's not — that's not what this is. I'm not asking you to tell me. I'm telling you I noticed."
"Okay."
"Okay."
"Caitlin."
"Hm."
"Thank you."
She finished taping the bandage. Pulled my shirt back down.
"You're welcome. Don't get hit by a car."
"Never on purpose."
She almost smiled.
She didn't quite get there.
She turned to put the tape back in the cabinet and the small motion she made with her left hand — a tiny shake-out of her fingers, the way you'd shake water off — left a faint glitter of something on the cabinet handle.
Frost.
She caught me seeing it. I caught her catching me. Neither of us said anything.
She closed the cabinet.
"Go home," she said. "Eat something hot. Sleep with the bruise iced."
"Copy."
She left the room.
I sat on the gurney a minute.
---
That night I drove out to the warehouse district past the docks.
Not for an extraction. For a rehearsal.
I'd flagged an empty cinder-block building four months ago. No cameras anywhere within three blocks. No homeless using it because the door had a chain on it that you needed bolt-cutters to address. I had bolt-cutters.
I went in.
Set six bricks on the concrete floor in a rough hexagon.
Stood in the middle.
Lifted my hands.
[Force Mastery activated.]
[Cost: 80 PP/minute. Cooldown ready.]
The bricks lifted off the floor as a group. Not in a row. Not as clumsy individual objects. As a cluster, the way I'd been picturing them for three days. They orbited me — slow, steady, equal radius from my center of mass.
I held them at six feet for thirty seconds. Then ten feet. Then I dropped them all at once except for the one I was concentrating on, and that one I held in the air over my open palm and thinned — pulled the density of the brick out of itself the way the density-shifter had pulled it out of his own bones to walk through walls. The brick turned grey. Translucent. Held its shape.
I closed my fist.
The brick came apart in my hand into dust.
Set the dust down on the floor.
Looked at the small grey pile.
The mask weighed a little more tonight than it had two days ago. The mask had been weighing more every week for a while. There was a number, somewhere in the future, where it was going to weigh more than I weighed, and on that day it would come off, and somebody in a room with me would see what I'd been hiding.
I hadn't decided yet who I wanted that person to be.
I dropped Force Mastery. Walked out. Padlocked the door. Drove home in light traffic.
When I came up the stairs to my apartment, my phone was buzzing in my pocket.
A text. Caitlin.
Can we talk tomorrow. Privately. Not the lab.
I stood in the hallway with my keys in the door.
Read it twice.
Yes. Where.
Three minutes later: Coffee place near my building. The one with the green door. 9 am.
I'll be there.
Okay.
I put the phone in my pocket. Turned the key. Went inside. Hung my coat.
Stood at the window in the dark for a long time looking at the city lights.
Then I went to the bathroom. Took the bandage off. Looked at the bruise. It was already darker than Caitlin had taped it over — Unbreakable rebound was a thing my body and I had never quite learned to like — and I pressed it once with two fingers to feel the depth of it. It hurt the way a thing should hurt.
I taped a fresh ice pack to it.
Went to bed.
Set the alarm for eight.
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