The probe Cisco built was the size of a wristwatch.
He'd taped it inside a small black box about four inches square, and the box had a single button on the top and a small screen. He'd written PROTOTYPE — DO NOT REMOVE on the side in Sharpie because he was Cisco and he wrote on everything.
I was on the gurney in the medical bay at 10:14 AM.
Caitlin had my left arm laid out on the bench. She'd swabbed the inside of my elbow with iodine and put a wide IV access port in. The fluids had been running for forty minutes. My cellular integrity readout was at 70% as of the morning's panel.
Cisco set the probe on my sternum.
"You ready."
"Yeah."
"This might hurt."
"Probably."
"Caitlin."
"I'm here."
She was at the head of the gurney. Her left hand was on my forehead. Cool. Not Frost-cool. Just hand-cool.
"I'm going to push the button," Cisco said.
He pushed the button.
The probe hummed.
For a second, nothing.
Then, inside my chest, something moved.
Not a muscle. Not an organ. The Speed-phase fusion I'd been carrying for three days as an unstable presence under my sternum shifted — like a stone settling into a different position in a wall — and then it began, very slowly, to come apart.
The fragment-leak hit first.
The original phasing donor — Bell, I thought, the man's name was Bell, I'd told myself I didn't know it but I'd known — was at his daughter's recital again. Eliza Harmon was at a syringe again. The two of them, who had been welded together in storage three days ago, unwelded. I could feel the weld coming apart in real-time. It was not painful exactly. It was the same wrong-tension feeling the fusion itself had introduced, only running in reverse.
Then came the second thing.
Phasing — the original ability, the one I'd had since February of 2015, the one I'd carried through every operation since — was being removed from me.
I had not understood, until this exact moment, how much of my body I'd built around having phasing.
It was like a person who had grown up with a left hand suddenly having the left hand fade out from inside the skin. Not amputated. Faded. The neural-muscular-System pathway that had spent eleven months learning to phase me through walls and around javelins and out of a burning building was unlearning itself in the space of forty seconds.
My whole left side went cold.
Then my right side went cold.
Then a wave of nausea hit me hard enough that I made a small sound I hadn't meant to make.
"Hold on, Harry. Almost done."
Caitlin's hand on my forehead got more real. Her thumb moved against my temple in a small steady circle. Two thousand miles away from Frost-cold, I thought, and then I lost the thought because the System interrupted with a notification I hadn't seen before:
[Reverse-extraction in progress. Velocity Rush component: Removed. Phasing component: Removed.]
[Storage slots 1 and 5: Vacated.]
[Cellular degradation: Halted.]
[Cellular Integrity stabilized at: 69%.]
[Recovery period required.]
The probe stopped humming.
The wrong-tension feeling under my sternum — the one that had been getting tighter every hour for three days — was gone.
Not better. Gone.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.
Caitlin took her hand off my forehead. Picked up a pulse oximeter. Clipped it to my finger.
"How do you feel."
"Empty."
"Define empty."
"Like — there's space in me where there used to be wiring."
She nodded.
"That's the phasing. It's going to feel that way for a while."
"How long."
"I don't know."
She set the oximeter aside.
"Vitals stable. Saline through the next bag, then we get some food in you. You stay here for the rest of the day."
"Cait."
"Don't argue with me, Harry. The day before the trap is not the day you go home and convince yourself you're fine."
I shut up.
Cisco was at the bench checking the probe's readout.
"It worked."
"It worked."
"Sixty-nine percent integrity. Stable. Going to stay stable."
"Yeah."
"You can't phase anymore."
"Yeah."
"Eight powers."
"Eight powers."
He set the probe down. Came over. Sat on the second stool.
"How do we run the trap without phasing."
"Same as we planned. Caitlin's Frost lowers ambient. You pop the ring. Barry holds the centre. Joe coordinates from the perimeter. I — I'm in the warehouse on the south flank with Force Mastery, Plasma Core, Terror Scream. I can throw weight at distance now. I can't be in the room with Zoom the way we'd planned with Speed-phase."
"That's a downgrade."
"It's the trap we have."
"Barry's not going to like that."
"He's going to like it more than he liked the version where I came out of it at forty-seven percent integrity."
Cisco let out a breath through his teeth.
"Yeah."
He sat with it for a moment.
Then he did the thing Cisco did when he had a plan he wasn't sure I was going to like and wanted to get out before he lost the nerve.
"Harry."
"Yeah."
"I know about the building."
I held very still.
"What building."
"The building. The one Garrick told you about at four in the morning yesterday."
I looked at him.
"How."
"Pipeline cameras. I've been pulling the audio off them since Garrick started talking to you. He's said useful stuff three times now and you've kept it to yourself two of those times. I've been letting you do it because I figured you had a reason, but the reason has stopped being good enough. So I know about the ninety-minute window. And the breach signature."
I took a breath.
I let it out.
"All right."
"That's it? All right?"
"You were going to find out. You found out earlier than I expected. The information matters more than how clean the chain of custody was. I'd rather we have it as a team than I have it alone."
He looked at me a long beat.
"That's a reasonable answer."
"I'm trying."
"I'm telling Cait. And Barry. And Joe. Tonight."
"Good."
"You should have told us, Harry."
"Yeah. I know."
"Why didn't you."
I looked at the ceiling tile above the gurney. I'd looked at it twice in eight months. Specific tile. There was a small water stain in the corner that had not changed in either viewing.
"Because if I hand you the ninety-minute window," I said, "you build a plan around hitting Zoom inside the window. And the plan is the right plan. But I am the only person in this building who is currently the right tool for that plan, because Speed-phase was the only thing that could get to him fast enough inside the window, and I just had Speed-phase removed from my chest. So if I told you about the window, I had to tell you about the window in the same breath as telling you that the only person who could hit him inside it was no longer in the building."
"That's not true."
"Cisco."
"That's not true, Harry. Barry is faster than he was when we built this trap. Caitlin's frost combat-ready. The Pipeline ring is operational. The window doesn't only work with Speed-phase. It works with what we have, if what we have is right."
I held his look.
"You believe that."
"I believe that."
"Then tonight we re-plan."
"Tonight we re-plan."
"All right."
He stood up.
Caitlin had been standing at the bench through the entire exchange with her back to us. She had not turned around. She turned around now.
"Cisco."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for telling him you knew."
"You knew too?"
"I knew you were watching the audio. I didn't know you'd told him yet. Thank you."
Cisco looked at me. Looked at her.
"You two have a thing about telling each other things."
"Cisco."
"I'm going. I'm going. I'll see you both at six."
He went.
Caitlin sat down on the stool he'd vacated.
She didn't speak for a moment.
Then she said, very quietly: "Don't go quiet on me again."
"I won't."
"You did. You went quiet on me on the morning of the fusion. You went quiet on me the night you went down to talk to Garrick. You went quiet on me the morning after. You don't get to do that anymore."
"I know."
"Promise."
"I promise."
She nodded.
She handed me a packet of crackers from the bench drawer.
"Eat. You're going to sleep in two hours and I want food in you first."
I ate the crackers.
She sat with me until I fell asleep around 1 PM, and when I woke at 4 the saline drip was almost finished and Caitlin was at the medical bench writing a procedure on a yellow legal pad in handwriting that was much more careful than her usual one, and the rest of the team was filing into the cortex outside the bay's glass for the meeting at six.
I sat up.
Reached for my coat.
Got dressed slowly.
Went out to the cortex to re-plan the trap.
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