He came through the wall of the precinct at 4:17 PM.
Not the door. The wall. Brick and rebar and a section of the front desk all came inward together in a single explosive shape and a man stood in the hole he'd made, blue lightning bleeding off his shoulders, mask pointed at the room.
Shift change. Forty-some officers in the bullpen. Joe was at his desk. Eddie was in the kitchen pouring coffee. I was in the visitor's chair across from Joe, dropping off a file that didn't matter, because I'd been positioning to be in the building when the alert came and that morning I'd felt the alert was overdue.
I got the alert one second before the wall came in.
[Speed Force signature: Local. Critical proximity.]
The screaming started.
Officers went for sidearms. Joe went for his. I put my hand on Joe's wrist before he could stand up.
"Don't."
"Harry —"
"He doesn't want you. He wants Barry. Don't make him want you."
Joe's jaw set. He didn't draw.
The man in the hole stepped through.
He moved through the bullpen at a walk. Not slow exactly — something about him was vibrating at the wrong frequency, so even at walking speed there was a smear behind him in the air. He crossed the room in five strides. He picked an officer up by the front of her vest with one hand. Held her up at his eye level. Dropped her.
She landed on her feet but went down to her knees.
He kept walking.
He stopped at the chest-height divider that separated the bullpen from the lobby. Leaned his hands on it.
"Where," he said, in that wet-machine voice, "is your hero."
Nobody answered.
He found me in the room with one slow turn of the eyeless mask.
The mask considered me for a long second.
I held it.
He looked away.
He'd looked at me — I noted, while my pulse did the thing — the way you look at a piece of furniture that you don't bother stealing because you've already cataloged what's worth taking from a house. The mask had logged me as not yet relevant.
That was a piece of information.
I did not move my face.
Yellow lightning hit the lobby a second later. Barry, in the suit, sliding to a stop in the doorway with his hair on end and a snarl on his mouth that was new since November.
"Hey!"
The mask turned.
"Oh," it said. "There you are."
It went for him.
What happened next happened in a smear that the human eye could only follow in pieces. Barry was airborne. Then Barry was on the ground in the middle of Powell Street, again, through a window that Zoom had thrown him through, glass and brick and a parked car all tumbling in slow motion outside. Zoom was on him before he landed. Picked him up. Put him down. Picked him up. Put him down. The cameras outside were already rolling because the cameras outside had been rolling since November fifteenth.
Twenty-two seconds.
Barry's left arm broke at the elbow with a sound I heard from across the room.
Zoom dropped him on the steps and looked up at the cameras. Held the moment. Made sure they got it.
Then he leaned down and put his masked face an inch from Barry's ear.
I was at the window of the precinct lobby at full Unbreakable.
I was fast enough to see his lips move under the mask.
He said: Come back when you're worthy.
He vanished.
Yellow lightning faded. Blue lightning was already gone.
Joe was beside me at the window. He hadn't drawn. His hand on the sill was bone white. He was very quiet.
He did not say anything for a long minute.
Then he picked up the chair beside him and threw it through the part of his desk that wasn't already broken. The wood split with a crack. He sat down where the desk had been. Put his face in his hands. Did not cry. Just held his face.
"Joe."
"Don't."
"Joe."
"Don't, Harry."
I didn't.
I went outside.
EMTs were already on Barry. Caitlin's car came up onto the sidewalk a minute and a half later — she'd been driving since Cisco's alert and the police barricade hadn't formed in time to stop her — and she was on her knees beside her patient before the EMTs had finished getting his arm splinted.
I stayed at a distance. Read the bullpen. Read the witnesses. Read the cameras for what they'd say tonight on the news.
[Target re-assessed: ZOOM.]
[Energy signature analysis: Speed Force consumption pattern detected. Subject appears to extract Speed Force from contact with target speedster.]
[Working hypothesis: Subject is depleted. Subject feeds on Barry's velocity through proximity and combat.]
I dismissed the System notification slowly.
I'd had the suspicion for a while. The Bible-half of my old life had said it explicitly somewhere — Zoom takes Barry's speed — but I hadn't been certain until I'd watched him put Barry's spine against a knee twice in a month with no follow-through that should have killed Barry, and now this, the same man playing the same game.
He wasn't trying to win.
He was trying to drain a battery.
I stood on the sidewalk while the EMTs loaded Barry into a bus and watched until the bus pulled away with Caitlin in the back.
Jay arrived as the lights went down.
He came out of the crowd with both hands out, the picture of a friend desperate for news. Joe — who'd come out of the precinct at some point — stepped past him without a word. Walked to his car. Drove off after the ambulance.
Jay watched him go.
Then he turned and saw me.
The face he gave me was the worried-friend face he'd been giving me since September.
I gave him the same one back.
His eyes held a quarter-second longer than they needed to.
He'd seen Zoom look at me through the mask.
He'd noticed the look.
He nodded once. Walked past me toward the cordon.
I drove home in evening traffic with my notebook on the passenger seat and a pen clipped to the cover. At the first long red light I uncapped the pen and wrote two words on a fresh page.
He fed.
Three lights later, under it: He saw me and chose not to take from me yet.
Then: Both confirmed.
I capped the pen.
The light turned green.
I drove the rest of the way home with both hands on the wheel.
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