The breach opened at 11:47 AM the next day, twelve minutes before the deadline expired.
Cisco's monitor pinged. The pitch was wrong. Not the high-thin tone of a small Earth-2 incursion. A deeper bell-tone we hadn't heard before. Bigger geometry. He'd briefed us on the pitch the night before, after he'd modeled what the signature of a stabilization-window breach would look like.
"Window's open," he said.
His voice in our earpieces was very calm.
"Mark."
The silo complex was empty of civilians. The city hadn't been told about the trap — Joe had pulled the last patrol car off the perimeter road forty minutes ago citing a non-specific threat assessment — and the abandoned grain elevators were as alone as a piece of land could be inside the city limits.
I was in the southern silo with Caitlin.
She was in the centre of the floor in a black combat coat she'd ordered specifically for today. Hood up. Hands flat at her sides. The temperature inside the silo had been dropping for the last fifteen minutes — she'd been holding ambient at about 15 degrees as a baseline, and as the breach pinged she let it drop further. The walls began to frost over.
I was at the conveyor tunnel exit, ten paces from the ring. The ring sat in the centre of the warehouse beyond the silo wall — visible through a gap in the cinderblock Cisco had cut into the wall a week ago — twenty-two feet across, dark, dead, waiting for a trigger.
Force Mastery primed in my chest. Plasma Core ready in my right hand. Terror Scream in the back of my throat.
Eight powers. No phasing.
"He's coming through," Cisco said in our ears. "Three blocks north, breach widening — there. Boots on ground."
"Trajectory?"
"Toward the silos. He knows we're here."
"Of course he knows," Joe's voice. From his coordination position outside the perimeter. "We made it easy for him."
"Quiet on the line," Barry. From the central warehouse. He was at the ring's edge. The Pipeline ring up at full diameter, dim, the trigger box dead-centred. Barry was the lure. His job was to be visible from the air, run a slow loop inside the ring's circumference until Zoom committed, then break for the trigger box.
A shadow crossed the silo's high windows.
Cisco: "Visual. He's on the elevator roof. Looking down at Barry."
I lifted my hand a half-inch.
Caitlin's eyes didn't move from the centre of the silo floor.
The temperature dropped another five degrees.
The shadow on the high windows moved.
A blue lightning trail came down the elevator wall in a single vertical line and Zoom was on the warehouse floor next to Barry in the time it took a single breath.
Barry didn't run.
He stood his ground.
I watched it through the gap in the wall.
The mask considered Barry for a full second. The mask was less wet now. The voice that came from under it had a different texture than I'd ever heard from it.
"Faster."
Barry didn't speak.
"I can feel it on you. You are faster than you were."
"Yeah."
"Where did it come from."
"Doesn't matter."
"It does. Tell me."
Barry didn't answer.
The mask tilted.
"The doctor."
Caitlin, in the next room, did not flinch.
"The doctor is here. I can feel her too. She has the cold now."
Barry said: "She's not a wedge. None of us are. Whatever you think you're going to threaten with — it doesn't work. We talked about it. We voted."
"You voted."
"We voted."
The mask was very still for two seconds.
Then Zoom moved.
He moved at a speed that, even with Barry's transferred-Velocity edge — no, not transferred, the wires in my head crossed for a moment — Barry's own training, his recovery, his weeks of sprinting until he collapsed — was just enough for Barry to see coming. He sidestepped. Zoom hit air. Barry was already three feet to the left, two feet to the left, moving in the way Cisco had drilled him to move for two weeks: not at speed, but in patterns Zoom couldn't predict because they weren't speed-patterns, they were dance-patterns Cisco had stolen from a Brazilian boxing manual and made Barry memorize.
Zoom missed three swings in a row.
His head turned.
He caught the rhythm.
He landed the fourth swing — across Barry's ribs — and Barry went sideways into the ring perimeter and landed on his hand and pushed off it and got his other hand on the trigger box.
Pressed it.
The Pipeline ring lit.
Twenty-two feet of suppression field came up around Zoom and Barry simultaneously. The blue lightning that had been bleeding off Zoom's shoulders cut out in the same instant. The Speed Force connection — for as long as the ring held — was gone.
Zoom's mask snapped sideways toward the ring perimeter.
His face under the mask was, for the first time, fully visible.
Barry saw it.
He froze for a quarter-second.
I saw the freeze through the wall.
Not because of recognition — Barry had known since Powell Boulevard. The freeze was different. The freeze was vertigo. The face under the mask was not Jay Garrick's face. Not exactly.
It was Jay Garrick's face aged. Older. Hollower. Eyes that had not slept in a long time. The face of a man who had spent a long time inside another man's body and was now wearing his own face for the first time in a year and was uncomfortable in it.
Zoom — Hunter Zolomon, the System helpfully provided — looked at Barry with that face for the half-second he had before the suppression field finished him.
He moved.
Even without speed, he moved.
He threw himself at the ring perimeter at a sprint, because the suppression field stopped Speed Force but not legs, and he was a strong man even without his connection. He hit the ring's edge. Bounced. The ring shimmered. Held.
I came out of the conveyor tunnel.
Force Mastery on the ring's secondary trigger — Cisco had built a secondary lock into the perimeter, accessible only from the south — and I clamped it. The ring's containment scaled up by another fifteen percent. Hunter staggered against the inside of the field.
Caitlin walked out of the silo into the warehouse.
She walked at her own pace. Her hood was up. Her hands were at her sides.
She crossed the warehouse floor to the ring's edge.
Stopped six feet from the perimeter.
Looked at Hunter.
He looked at her.
"Doctor."
"Hunter."
"You used my name."
"I read the file from your Earth. The one Jay let us read. You're Hunter Zolomon. You were a CSI on your Earth before you became this. You had a wife. You had a daughter. You watched your father kill them in front of you when you were eleven."
He held very still.
"I did."
"And then you spent thirty years deciding the way to make sense of it was to be the thing that did it to other people. So you became the thing that did it to other people. You made yourself into the thing. You wore Jay's face here for a year because you couldn't stand to wear yours. You named me on a phone because hurting me was the next thing you could think of that would make sense of what your father did. I read all of that yesterday."
"Doctor."
"I'm sorry."
"What."
"I'm sorry your father did that. I'm sorry your wife and daughter died. I'm sorry you became this. None of that is an excuse for any of what you've done in this city, in this building, to my friends. But I'm sorry. Because if it had been me, I think I might have become this too."
He stood very still.
He looked at her through the ring perimeter.
She looked at him back.
"You don't get to make me a wedge," she said. "You don't get to make any of us wedges. The cage you're in is going to hold for as long as we want it to hold. We are going to take you to the Pipeline. We are going to lock you next to Jay Garrick — who you used like a puppet, who you turned into a man who couldn't look at himself for a year. And you are going to spend the rest of your life thinking about whether you would rather have been the man your father made or the man you decided to be."
He did not move.
His face did something I'm not going to forget.
It was not collapse. It was not breaking. It was the very small fracturing of a face that had not expected to be addressed by name.
He looked at her for another long moment.
Then, quietly, in the voice that was no longer the wet machine and was no longer the tweed-jacket Jay voice but was something else, smaller, his own:
"I will get out of the cage."
"Maybe."
"I will come back for you."
"You'll try."
"And next time I will not stop."
"Yes you will."
He looked at her.
"Why."
"Because we know your name now. And we are going to put it in front of every speedster who has ever existed in either of our universes, and we are going to put it in front of the Speed Force itself, and we are going to make sure that if you ever try this again, every speedster in every Earth knows where to look. You don't get to be a ghost anymore, Hunter. You're a person now. You're in a file."
He looked at her a long time.
He looked at me on the south side of the ring with my hand on the secondary lock.
He looked at Barry on the ring's far side.
He looked at the ceiling of the warehouse.
Then — and this I did not expect — he sat down on the inside of the ring perimeter.
Crossed his legs.
Put his hands in his lap.
"Take me to the cell, then."
"Cisco."
"On it."
The Pipeline transport rig had been on standby in a truck outside the warehouse for an hour. Cisco rolled it through the south door now. We loaded Hunter through the secondary lock in a sequence we'd rehearsed three times over the last twenty-four hours. Containment held the whole way. Truck rolled. Joe rode shotgun with his service weapon across his lap.
Truck pulled out of the silo complex at 12:14 PM.
Caitlin stood in the warehouse for a long time after.
I went to her.
She didn't look at me.
"That was good," I said.
"It wasn't supposed to be a speech."
"It worked."
"It almost didn't. He almost broke the ring. If you hadn't hit the secondary —"
"It worked, Cait."
She closed her eyes.
She put her face in her hands.
Stood like that for thirty seconds.
When she lowered her hands her cheeks were wet.
"Take me home," she said.
I took her home.
Reading more than one of my novels? Good news — one Patreon, all of them.
patreon.com/TheFinex5
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰
― DECREE ―
More chapters reign FREE upon unwrittenrealm.com.
The throne acknowledges.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰