"Has anyone else noticed," Cisco said, with the careful phrasing of a man who has been sitting on an observation for several days and finally decided to deploy it, "that there's been a strange, invisible hand quietly improving the quality of life in central Central City?"
Caitlin looked at him over the top of her kinmokusei namagashi — a small, soft wagashi, pale gold, the osmanthus fragrance coming through clean and floral without being aggressive. She had opinions about its texture. She was forming them in real time.
"Explain," she said.
"Think about what everyone's been carrying around for the past month. Look at any given street corner, any given office, any given precinct—" Cisco waved a hand. "People have snacks. Interesting snacks. Snacks they didn't have before and can't quite explain where they came from."
"You're describing the food cart."
"I'm describing the effect of the food cart. There's a difference."
Caitlin considered this, took another bite, and said nothing, which was roughly equivalent to agreement.
The namagashi had, in fact, been Cisco's doing — he'd found the cart two streets from the lab that morning and bought with the focused efficiency of someone who'd learned to act immediately upon locating a moving target. Since he'd started bringing things back, the lab had a slightly different quality to it. Not warmer exactly — the circumstances hadn't changed, Barry was still unconscious, Ronnie was still gone, Wells was still whatever Wells was — but Caitlin had stopped eating her lunch in silence facing a wall, which was something.
Small things, but Cisco was a person who paid attention to small things.
"Snacks? What snacks?"
Joe West appeared at the lab entrance with Iris behind him, and Cisco's attention snapped across the room immediately.
"You have yomogi mochi." Cisco pointed at Joe's hand. "Where did you find the cart? I looked for it this morning and it was already gone."
"Police station entrance." Joe looked at the mochi in his hand as though he'd forgotten it was there. "Gone by the time I left, though."
"Dad." Iris had already walked past him toward the center of the room, toward the hospital bed and the monitoring equipment and the man in it. "We came to see Barry."
"Right. Yes." Joe followed, adjusting. "I was just—it's occupational habit, pattern recognition, seeing connections—"
"He wanted the snacks," Iris said.
"—I wanted the snacks," Joe confirmed. "Yes."
Caitlin, who had been watching this exchange, looked at the plate of pastries near Cisco's workstation and then at Cisco. "I could run another analysis. Make sure everything's properly tested. If you gave me the plate—"
Cisco picked up the plate and held it against his chest. "The last 'test' you ran on the kakuni puff pastry produced zero data and zero remaining sample. I know what's happening."
"Scientifically thorough."
"Caitlin."
"Fine."
Joe had come to stand beside Barry's bed in the particular way he stood there every time — not quite at ease, not quite braced, somewhere between the two that didn't fully commit to either outcome. The monitoring equipment ran through its steady cycles. The numbers held within their established ranges.
"Still nothing?" he asked.
"Neurologically, he's healthy." Caitlin joined him at the bed, falling automatically into the clinical register that was cleanest for her. "Brain activity is normal. There's no structural reason he isn't awake. The cellular regeneration has continued — the earlier anomalies have largely resolved. In theory, he could wake up at any point."
"In theory."
"That's the accurate qualifier, yes."
Iris had sat down in the chair beside the bed — Joe's chair, the one that had formed a slight depression in the shape of him over three months of evening visits. She reached out and touched Barry's face with the unconscious ease of someone performing a gesture they'd performed ten thousand times in other contexts.
Cisco and Caitlin both clocked it at the same moment and both looked away at the same moment, with the synchronized tact of people who have been sharing a workspace long enough to develop nonverbal coordination.
Those two, Cisco thought, with the private certainty of someone who has been watching a situation develop in slow motion, are going to figure it out eventually. Probably after considerable unnecessary suffering.
In a rented apartment four blocks from Star Labs, Jude was watching the same lobby on a laptop screen and reaching the same conclusion.
He'd spent the better part of a week threading his new Master-Level Computer skills through the relevant networks — the CCPD, Star Labs, Mercury Labs, the city's municipal infrastructure grid — setting up passive monitoring feeds that would flag anything significant before it became a crisis. The work had also turned up what he'd suspected: hidden cameras, professionally installed, covering Joe's house, the precinct bullpen, the Star Labs lobby. A surveillance network that predated the accelerator explosion and had been running continuously since. The Reverse Flash's eyes.
He'd noted the locations and stayed out of frame.
He'd also found something else in the Star Labs network — an artificial intelligence, semi-dormant, embedded in a subsystem that the active staff hadn't accessed and probably didn't know existed. He'd looked at it, catalogued it, and left it completely alone. Contacting it meant creating a data trail. Creating a data trail meant Thawne's surveillance might eventually trace it back. Not worth the information.
He closed the surveillance window and opened his notes.
"Boss. Boss." A voice from floor level. "I'm hungry. You should cook something. Meow."
Jude closed the laptop.
He looked down.
The entity looking up at him was, technically, a cat in the same way that a Doraemon merchandise display was technically a cat — which is to say, it shared certain categorical properties with cats while having resolved the specific question of cat aesthetics in a direction that was entirely its own. Round limbs. Purple fur across its head and upper body. Two small black eyes arranged in a permanent mild cross-eyed expression. A face that had apparently been designed by someone who found conventional cat faces insufficiently abstract.
It was also, demonstrably, waiting.
"What," Jude said, "did you just say to me?"
"I'm hungry. Cook something. Meow." The Palico Jude named Yomogi appeared to briefly consider whether this was going too far, evaluated Jude's expression, and recalibrated. "I'll cook something. For you. Meow."
"Better."
Jude picked it up.
Yomogi hung in the air, round limbs cycling with the serene inefficiency of something that had never needed aerodynamics, and watched him with its cross-eyed gaze.
"I need you to understand something," Jude said. "I spent a month and a half accumulating enough asset points to bring you here. A month and a half of standing behind a food cart in shifting weather selling nikuman to homesick students while being periodically chased by gang members. One million asset points."
Yomogi did not appear to find this information particularly relevant to its current situation.
"When you arrived, you were functional. You cooked. You tidied up. You had a reasonable relationship with the concept of effort. You didn't shed." Jude held it closer and stared directly into the crossed eyes. "Explain to me, in whatever degree of detail you feel is appropriate, how we got from there to you demanding room service."
He turned the cat's face back when it tried to look at something more interesting.
"Look at me. I am talking to you. When did you last do anything of your own initiative? When did you last cook without being asked three times first? More importantly—" he applied gentle pressure to its midsection "—when did this happen? This right here. Explain this."
Yomogi's expression conveyed, with remarkable efficiency for a face that had very limited range, that it had its own perspective on recent events and felt that a full accounting of the snack situation would be more complicated than Jude was currently prepared to hear.
It said: "Meow."
Jude set it down.
"We're going to have a conversation about standards," he said.
"Meow," the Silly Cat agreed, and walked toward the kitchen with the unhurried confidence of something that had already decided how the conversation was going to end.