The proposal came out of Jay's mouth on a Wednesday morning at 10:14, three days after Zoom had broken Barry's elbow on national television.
Cisco was in the cortex on his second coffee. Caitlin was at her station with Barry's latest bloodwork on the screen. Barry himself was on the bench by the wall in a sling, jaw set, watching nothing in particular. I was at my workstation pretending to file a report.
Jay had been quiet all morning.
He cleared his throat now. Stepped to the middle of the room.
"I want to put something on the table that you're not going to like."
Caitlin looked up.
"Okay."
"On my Earth, when we were trying to catch up with Zoom — when we knew he was faster than any of us and we didn't have time to wait for the natural progression — we synthesized a serum. We called it Velocity. Cellular speed enhancement. Temporary. Not pretty. But it worked, sometimes, for a few minutes at a time, and a few minutes was sometimes the difference between survival and not."
Cisco's eyes had gone slowly wider as he spoke.
"You can synthesize that."
"I can give you the broad framework. The chemistry's beyond me — I'm a scientist's son, not a scientist. But Caitlin can do this in her sleep."
Caitlin blinked.
"How dangerous."
"Very."
"Specifics."
"Cellular degradation if used too often. Cardiac arrhythmia at high doses. Eventual permanent damage, if you push it."
"Eventual, like —"
"Eventual like don't push it."
Barry spoke for the first time that morning.
"Make it."
Caitlin's head snapped around.
"Barry."
"Make it. I'll be the test subject."
"Barry."
"I can't outrun him as I am, Cait. I can't. I tried twice. I lost twice. He's going to keep coming until I beat him or until he kills me, and I can't beat him, so —"
"So we don't solve it by injecting you with something Jay's people couldn't perfect on his Earth —"
"What's the alternative."
"There isn't one yet. There never is yet. There has to be one. You can't —"
"Cait."
"Don't Cait me."
I leaned forward.
"Caitlin's right that injecting Barry today is a bad call. Jay's right that the framework is worth understanding. We can do both — research it carefully, get it ready, don't use it until we've exhausted everything else. Set the floor at only if no other option works. Doesn't preclude having it in the cabinet."
I'd said it slow. Gave Caitlin the eye contact while I said it.
She took the offering.
"Floor at last resort," she said.
"Last resort," Barry said. Reluctant. But he nodded.
Jay nodded too. The picture of a man relieved that cooler heads were prevailing.
I almost respected the work.
He'd done everything he needed to do in eight minutes. Planted the I had Velocity origin story. Made his Earth the place where the science came from. Made himself indispensable to whatever happened next. Made Caitlin the hands that built it. Made Barry the body that wanted it.
The setup was in.
The trap had a name now.
---
I worked late that night.
Officially, I was reading meta-criminal files at my desk in the cortex. Unofficially, I was running a parallel research thread on a private screen of my own laptop — pulling everything Cisco's monitoring system had logged of the Velocity-9 user the city had pulled out of a stairwell last June.
Marisol Vega.
I'd nearly killed her by extracting from her without thinking. I'd gone home that night and not slept until five. I hadn't used the power I'd taken from her. Velocity Rush sat in storage at Sync 15% and I left it alone the way you leave a knife in a drawer you don't use.
I pulled her hospital records. She'd been discharged in August. Her cellular degradation had stabilized at the level it was at when she'd come in. She lived in a halfway house now. The Velocity addiction had broken when the power went, and the bursting blood vessels in her eyes had healed badly but they'd healed.
I closed her file.
Pulled up the city alert log.
Three new speedster signatures had been logged in Central City in the last seventy-two hours.
None of them were Barry. None of them were Zoom.
Three different signatures. Different harmonics. Different durations. The first had been in the warehouse district at 2 AM Tuesday morning. The second had been on the freeway at noon Tuesday. The third had been at three this morning, near Mercury Labs, and had lasted forty seconds and burned out.
Whoever they were, they were burning fast.
I pulled the energy curves Caitlin's system had generated and overlaid them onto the curve I had from Vega's last seventy-two hours before her stairwell extraction.
Same shape.
Different person.
[New target identified: Unknown speedster. Velocity-9 signature. Cellular instability: Severe. Estimated time to terminal degradation: 4-7 days.]
I read the line twice.
Velocity-9 was on the street. Already. Not Caitlin's lab version. The real synthesis. Somebody on Earth-1 had the formula in their hands and was distributing it before Jay had even named the drug to the team.
Which meant Jay hadn't introduced Velocity to Earth-1 this morning.
Jay had introduced Velocity to Team Flash this morning.
The drug had been here.
He'd seeded it.
I sat in the cortex with my hand on the back of my neck and watched the empty cursor blink.
That was a piece of information I didn't have time to admire.
---
The third signature had been at Mercury Labs at three AM and had lasted forty seconds.
Whoever they were, they were already dying.
I closed the laptop. Locked it.
Stood up. Stretched my back until something popped in the lower vertebrae.
Cisco was still awake on the couch across the cortex. He had a comic book across his face. I had thought he was asleep. He pulled the comic down, looked at me upside down.
"You leaving?"
"Going home."
"It's eleven-thirty."
"I know."
"Get some sleep, Harry."
"I will."
I drove out of the parking lot and turned the wrong way. Toward Mercury Labs. Toward the warehouse district. The notebook on my passenger seat had a fresh page in it that said V-9 already on streets. Jay seeded. and underneath that third signature, Mercury, 3 AM, 40 sec — find them.
The streetlamps on the bridge over the river had been flickering for a week. The city had not fixed them. I drove under the flickering ones at a steady speed and kept my eyes moving.
Somewhere in this city, a person who had taken something they could not undo was running themselves to death and didn't know it yet.
I had two reasons to find them.
The first was the hunt. The System knew it. The System had logged it. I could feel the weight of an empty slot in my storage waiting to be filled, and a Velocity signature was a power I could already pattern-match against the quarantined one I had — clean Velocity Rush that wasn't going to crack me open the way Vega's had, because I'd be ready for the cellular instability this time, and I'd let it sit at low sync until I figured out how to stabilize it before integration.
The second reason was the part I didn't write in the notebook.
Whoever was running themselves to death hadn't taken Velocity-9 because they wanted to. They'd taken it because somebody had handed it to them. Somebody on Earth-1 with access to Jay Garrick's Earth-2 chemistry. And whoever had handed it to them probably didn't know yet that the third signature had already burned for forty seconds before going out, which meant the third signature was probably already a corpse, and it was very likely that there were going to be more.
I needed to talk to one of them before they died.
I needed to find out who was selling.
I parked four blocks from Mercury Labs. Killed the engine. Sat in the dark of the car for a minute with the keys in my hand.
[Plasma Core: Ready.]
[Force Mastery: Ready.]
[Unbreakable Warrior: Ready.]
[Recommendation: Engage cautiously.]
I dismissed all three lines.
Got out of the car.
Walked toward the building.
Three nights ago a person had run forty seconds at Velocity-9 speed past this corner and nothing on the street remembered it. I needed to find what did remember it. There would be a print somewhere. A disturbed dumpster. A shoe scuff on a fire escape. A camera that had caught something the camera's owner hadn't reviewed yet.
Somewhere in the next three to four days, the second of the three new signatures was going to come back online — burning out their own cells for the rush of it, ignorant of the bill arriving — and when they did I needed to be the one in the alley waiting for them.
I needed it because I needed the power.
I needed it more because somewhere upstream of the dying speedsters, somebody was making the drug and selling it.
And somewhere upstream of the somebody making the drug, a man in a tweed jacket was sleeping in a guest room in STAR Labs with both hands folded on his pillow, breathing slow.
I turned the corner.
Mercury Labs was a tall dark shape at the end of the street.
A length of yellow caution tape from a city repair job earlier in the week had come loose at one end and was hanging off a streetlamp, lifting in a low wind.
I started walking the perimeter.
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