The cinder-block warehouse smelled like dust and old machine oil.
Cisco had set up at the far end of it under the only working bank of overhead fluorescents. Two folding tables. A diagnostic suite that hadn't existed three days ago — he'd built it in his apartment over a weekend, three sensors clipped onto a laptop, two probes I was meant to wear taped to my temples. A cooler with bottles of water and electrolyte mix. A first-aid kit Caitlin had packed with notes pinned to specific compartments. Use this if cellular integrity drops below 80. Use this if he stops breathing.
I read the notes once.
Folded the lid down.
"Sit," Cisco said.
I sat on a folding chair in the middle of the cleared concrete. The warehouse's only chair. He'd brought it specifically. The light from the fluorescents above made a hard-edged circle of brightness around me and the rest of the warehouse went dark by contrast.
He taped the probes to my temples. His hands were steady.
"You ready."
"As I'll be."
"You can call this off."
"I can. I'm not."
"Just so it's said."
"It's said."
He stepped back to the diagnostic table.
I closed my eyes.
Pulled up the System fusion matrix.
[Velocity Rush × Phasing — Compatibility 78%. Designation: Speed-phase. Configuration: Backup-only.]
[Estimated Cellular Integrity post-fusion: 85% ± 4%.]
[Confirm fusion?]
I confirmed.
The first thing was the fragment-leak.
Eliza Harmon was in my head for a quarter-second. Her hospital bed at St. Catherine's. The IV in her arm. The way she'd looked at me in the pharmacy and said they said if you took the powers it stopped hurting. Then a man whose name I'd never learned — the original phasing donor, two and a half years gone now — sat at a kitchen table I didn't recognize and laughed at something his daughter had said.
Then the two of them collapsed into each other.
Then there was a third thing.
Not a fragment. A pull. Something the System had not warned me about. Velocity Rush had cellular damage built into it. Phasing did not have damage built in — phasing was a clean ability, energetically — and when the two of them fused in storage, the damage spilled over into the phasing channel like a chemical contamination spreading through a clean tank.
For one second I felt my own genetic baseline shift.
Not toward death. Toward thinness.
The cells in my body had been operating at 97% integrity since the Eliza extraction. They were now running at something the System couldn't immediately quantify because the integrity value was holding at 88% but the pattern underneath the value had changed. My cells were still mine. They were just operating at a slightly different tension. A wire pulled tighter than it should be.
I was breathing fast.
"Harry."
"I'm okay."
"Cellular integrity reading 88%. That's lower than projected. Harry."
"I know."
"Abort."
"Don't abort."
"Harry —"
"Don't abort, Cisco. It's stabilizing."
It was. The wire-tension thing was settling. The 88% was holding. Not climbing back toward 97 — that was permanent now — but holding at 88, which the projection had said was the full deployment number, not the backup-only one.
Backup-only had projected 91%.
I'd lost more than projected.
The fusion came in fully ten seconds later.
[Fusion: Speed-phase — A-Tier. Sync 5%. Cooldown 8 hours. Cost per use: 120 PP/second.]
[Description: Phased traversal at sub-Mach speeds. Maximum duration per use: 6 seconds at current sync.]
[WARNING: Cellular degradation increases per use. Estimated -2% per second deployed.]
[Velocity Rush slot: vacated. Phasing slot: vacated. New slot occupied: Speed-phase.]
I opened my eyes.
Cisco was at the table watching the laptop. He looked up. His face had a green-grey cast in the fluorescent light that had nothing to do with anything except the lights.
"It took."
"It took."
"Eighty-eight percent integrity."
"I see that."
"That's the full deployment number, Harry."
"I see that too."
"Harry."
"Let me try it."
"Let you — Harry, you just lost nine percent of your cellular integrity in the fusion alone, before you've even —"
"I know. Let me try it. Once. Six seconds. I want to know what we have before we panic about what it cost."
He looked at me a long beat.
He nodded.
He stepped back from the table. Picked up the second laptop he'd brought — the one with a high-frame-rate camera pointing at the chair I was sitting in.
"Six seconds. Mark."
I activated Speed-phase.
The world bent.
It wasn't a smear. It wasn't slow-motion. It was something I'd not had a body for, before now — the floor of the warehouse felt softer, the air felt thicker, and I came out of the chair without standing up out of it, the way you come out of a dream where you'd been sitting and suddenly are standing without the in-between.
I was three feet to the left of the chair.
Then I was six feet to the left.
Then I was on the other side of the warehouse next to the loading door, twenty-five feet away, having walked through the chair and the table and the diagnostic suite and Cisco's body without disturbing any of them.
I could see my path. The phase had left a faint visual trail in my own perception — a corridor of slightly-dim air showing where I had passed.
Six seconds.
The cooldown locked.
I stumbled. Caught myself on the loading door. My knees were shaking.
[Cellular Integrity: 76%.]
I closed my eyes.
Cisco came across the warehouse at a run.
"Harry."
"I'm here. I'm okay."
"You went through me."
"Yeah."
"You went through all of it."
"Yeah."
"That was —"
"I know."
He caught me under the arm. I let him hold me up. We stood there for a minute by the loading door. My cellular integrity readout was at 76% and the wire-tension thing under it had pulled tighter. I could feel my own heartbeat in my fingertips in a way I hadn't been able to before.
"Sit down," he said.
"In a minute."
"Now."
I sat down on the concrete with my back against the loading door.
He sat next to me.
He didn't say anything for a long time. Then he opened a bottle of water and put it in my hand and made me drink half of it.
"That was six seconds," he said.
"Six seconds."
"Cellular Integrity dropped twelve percent. Not the projected two-per-second."
"Yeah."
"So you have, what, three uses of that ability before you're at sixty? Two before you're below safe?"
"Yeah."
"And you wanted to use it as backup."
"Yeah."
"For a fight that lasts how long."
"As long as it lasts."
He looked at me.
"Harry."
"I know."
"This is a one-shot."
"I know."
"You use this once in the trap. Once. And then you don't use it again. Ever."
"I hear you."
"And then you don't ever do another one of these dangerous fusions."
"I hear you."
"Promise me."
I drank the rest of the water.
"I promise you I will not perform another dangerous fusion of this class."
He waited for the trick in the sentence.
I let him sit with it.
"That sounds like lawyer language."
"It is lawyer language. It's the most I can promise. I'm still going to do whatever needs to be done if Zoom comes back wrong."
He swore, quietly, in Spanish.
"Get me back to my apartment, Cisco. Caitlin needs to look at the integrity readings tonight."
"Yeah."
He helped me up.
We went out of the warehouse through the side door I'd phased through three weeks ago to test Force Mastery on a coffee cup. I walked under my own power. My knees were not steady but they were holding.
In the car he didn't speak for the first ten minutes.
Then he said, "What does it feel like."
"The phase or the cost."
"Both."
I thought about it.
"The phase feels like walking through deep water. Slow. Heavy. Wrong-shaped. But the geometry of where you arrive is exactly where you wanted to arrive. There's no missing your spot. The cost feels like a piano string that's been tightened a quarter-turn past where it wants to be. It hurts in a way I don't have a word for. It's not pain exactly. It's more like — being a tool that's slightly the wrong size for what it's being used for."
He drove without speaking for two more blocks.
"Harry."
"Yeah."
"If we're being honest, neither of us was sure that fusion was going to take."
"No."
"And now it has."
"Yes."
"And we have it."
"Yes."
"And it's going to save Barry's life."
"Maybe."
"Probably."
"Probably."
He pulled up at my apartment building. Stopped the car. Killed the engine.
"Get some sleep. I'll text Cait the readings on the way home. She'll meet you at the lab tomorrow at nine."
"Copy."
I went up. I did not sleep.
I sat at my kitchen counter for an hour and looked at the System readout that showed Cellular Integrity: 76% in a small steady font, and I wrote a single word in my notebook on the page after the Jay's voice — Barry caught it under the speed line from October.
The word was enough.
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