"Everybody judges me," Cisco said cheerfully. "Anyway, that's how I caught this. Around eleven tonight there was a hazmat and medical call to the CCU physics building. Basement level."
Barry kept his expression carefully neutral, even as something cold settled low in his chest.
"Basement level," he repeated.
"Yeah," Cisco said, oblivious to anything beneath the question. "Whole building got a partial lockdown for like an hour while fire and EMS cleared it. Campus safety app blasted out an alert calling it an electrical fault in a restricted research lab, no further details, situation resolved, and everybody's fine, blah blah blah, the usual non-answer."
Caitlin turned her laptop slightly so Barry could see the screen, a short official bulletin from the university with almost nothing useful in it, followed by a much longer thread of student social media posts speculating wildly about explosions, chemical leaks, and at least one theory involving a secret government experiment that Barry found darkly amusing given how close it actually was to something real, just not in the direction any of them had guessed.
"I only really paid attention because of the location," Caitlin said. "That basement level has restricted grant-funded labs. I've collaborated with CCU on biometric projects before, and I remember hearing that one of those labs belongs to a neuroscience professor doing some kind of independent cognitive research. I don't know him personally. I just remembered the department mentioning it once."
Barry kept his voice level and mildly curious, nothing more.
"Do you know if anyone was hurt?"
"Unclear," Caitlin said. "One ambulance responded. No confirmed transport that I've found, which either means it was minor, or whoever was involved refused treatment."
Cisco leaned back on his stool, grinning in the specific way he grinned right before he said something that sounded more perceptive than he probably meant it to.
"You know what's wild," he said, "is nobody at CCU actually wants to say what kind of research happens down there. I asked a friend in the engineering department once and she just kind of shrugged and said 'above my clearance,' which, for a university physics basement, is either really cool or really concerning."
'Both,' Barry thought, and didn't say it out loud.
He already knew exactly which basement lab they were talking about, because he'd photographed every inch of it himself months ago, back when it had still belonged entirely to a man who had no idea anyone had ever been inside it.
"Any idea who runs the lab?" Barry asked, keeping the question as casual as he could make it.
"Some professor," Cisco said, waving a hand vaguely. "DeVoe, I think? Or something close to that. Honestly I only half remember it from when Caitlin mentioned it before."
Barry nodded slowly, filing the confirmation away without letting anything show on his face.
"Weird night," he said instead, and let the conversation drift naturally toward something else, Cisco pivoting almost immediately into a story about a different scanner call from earlier in the week involving a runaway parade float, which was somehow both completely unrelated and exactly the kind of thing Cisco would remember in perfect detail.
Barry stayed another twenty minutes, long enough that leaving wouldn't look pointed, and then made his excuses and drove home with his mind already several steps ahead of the conversation he'd just had.
---
He didn't touch Gideon's deeper tools the moment he got back to his apartment, even though every instinct told him to. He sat with the problem first, turning it over slowly instead of reacting to it the way urgency usually demanded.
"Gideon," he said eventually, "pull only public information. Local news coverage, campus safety bulletins, anything already circulating openly. Nothing that requires touching a restricted system."
"Understood," Gideon said. "Restricting search parameters now."
The results came back thin, exactly as Barry expected from a university that had every institutional incentive to say as little as possible about an incident in a restricted research lab. No name attached to any injury. No official statement beyond the same vague electrical fault language Cisco had already relayed.
"That's everything publicly available," Gideon said. "Do you want me to escalate access to closed systems, hospital admission records, university security logs, anything that would confirm specifics?"
Barry considered it for a long moment before he answered, less out of hesitation and more because he wanted the decision to hold up under its own weight before he committed to it.
"Go deeper," he said. "Hospital admission, campus security footage, the building's power logs for that circuit. Same architecture you used against Checkmate."
"Explain your reasoning," Gideon said, the same neutral prompt it always used when it wanted Barry to think out loud rather than simply state a conclusion.
"Two days ago Moira Queen personally reviewed a file with my name on it and closed it herself," Barry said. "That's the single most hostile read my cover story is ever going to get, and it didn't leave a ripple. A hospital admission log and a damaged security camera aren't going to be the thing that finally trips an alarm. If I couldn't be caught by her, I'm not going to be caught by a university's IT department."
"Confirmed," Gideon said. "Risk assessment for this query is negligible by comparison. Proceeding."
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