The signal we landed on was a phrase, embedded in a normal sentence.
I might be off-site Friday.
It meant I'm hunting tonight. The hunt would happen between roughly ten PM and three AM. I'd be reachable by phone the entire time. Cisco would say in any STAR Labs conversation I missed that I was running a security audit at a client site, the same private-sector contractor cover I'd half-built and never fully used in the months before the singularity. Caitlin had been told the cover existed. She had not been told any specific date it would be used.
That had been Caitlin's term.
She'd come in that afternoon, the day after Cisco signed his list, and she'd sat at the medical bay table across from me and she'd said, I'm not going to be the one Cisco reports to. I want you to do this. I want him to keep his side of it. I don't want to be in the loop in real time. I want to be told within three days. After the fact. With evidence. So I can go look at the file, and look at the person, and decide whether I can live with it. If a week ever goes by where I can't live with the file, you and I have a different conversation.
She'd asked one more thing.
I want you to teach me what you know about the Frost.
I'd said yes.
Not because I think I have powers, she'd said. Because I think I'm going to. And I'd rather learn it from a person who's done their own and lived than from a person who's dying of theirs.
I'd said yes again.
We'd shaken hands on it. Same as Cisco. Different agreement, same handshake. The cardigan-cuff frost had bloomed when our hands touched and she'd said sorry, and I'd said don't be, and that had been Tuesday.
The Friday after that, I extracted a power-leech named Kemp out of a back room over a tattoo parlor in Keystone. He'd been emptying meta-cells in two adjoining counties for six weeks. The extraction took eleven seconds. [Power Drain Resistance — 60% extracted. +900 PP.] I was home by 2 AM. I texted Cisco at 9 the next morning.
I might be off-site Friday.
He replied: noted.
He sent me a follow-up at lunch: can you grab subs on the way in, the bitter pot is broken and Cait is spiraling.
I grabbed subs.
That was the first one.
By Wednesday of the following week we'd done it three times. By the second week we had a rhythm. By the third week, the texts had become so routine that they'd shed the formality and Cisco was sending me you good? the next morning instead of noted, and I was sending him yeah back, and the file with Kemp's name and the file with the next two had been emailed to Caitlin within the seventy-two hours and Caitlin had read them and had not asked to talk.
The cover was working better than the previous arrangement, which had relied entirely on me being good at lying about my evenings. The new arrangement required only that Cisco be good at confirming a story. He was very good at confirming a story.
---
The teleporter hit downtown on a Thursday.
A sour-faced man named Petrov who'd been pinched on a CCPD parade three years back and had spent the time since teaching himself precise blink-jumps over the city. He'd come back angry. He started his angry at the precinct on Beaufort and Ninth at 2:14 PM and by 2:22 he'd put four officers in the hospital and a CCPD cruiser through the front window of a wedding-cake bakery.
Cisco's voice in my ear at 2:24.
Petrov, downtown, Beaufort and Ninth, blinking, Barry's running late from an errand. You're closest.
"Copy."
I was on the seventh floor of an office tower three blocks east doing absolutely nothing of consequence. I went out through the stairwell door. Phased through the alley wall at the bottom. Was at Beaufort and Ninth in two minutes by foot.
Petrov was on top of an overturned cruiser when I came around the corner. He was shouting at a CCPD captain, who was sheltering behind a hot dog cart, who was shouting back. Petrov had a brick in one hand. He kept blinking — short blinks, six feet at a time — to dodge sidearm fire from two patrolmen on the other side of the cart.
"Cisco."
Yeah.
"Tell the patrolmen to stop firing."
On it.
The fire stopped a second later. Petrov noticed. Stood on the cruiser. Waved the brick.
"Yeah!" he yelled. "Yeah, you better!"
He was twenty feet from me. He didn't see me. He hadn't checked his line of sight east. People who teleport often forget to look at the directions they're not teleporting in. I'd noticed this before.
I phased into the side of the cruiser.
Came out of it with my hand around his ankle.
He blinked. The blink fizzled — phasing locked his outgoing trajectory — and he came down on the cruiser roof, hard.
I let him have one swing with the brick. It hit my Unbreakable shoulder and broke in half on the impact.
Sleeper hold. Five seconds. Down.
I cuffed him with the meta-dampeners CCPD had been issuing the friendly metas in their reserve program. Stood up. Waved at the captain behind the hot dog cart.
Clean, Cisco said in my ear.
"Clean."
Barry came around the corner three seconds later in a yellow streak. Slowed. Took in the scene. The brick. The cuffs. The unconscious Petrov.
"Did you —"
"He blinked into a phase. Came down on the car."
"Huh."
"Sorry to step on it."
"No. No, that was clean. That was —" he looked at the broken brick — "how clean was it, exactly?"
"He swung. I let him hit the shoulder. It broke."
"Right."
Barry nodded.
He didn't push. Barry hadn't pushed in months.
Today the not-pushing had a different note in it. He'd cataloged the broken brick. He'd cataloged the precision. He'd cataloged that I'd done the math on a teleporter's blind spot and used phasing to break the man's exit vector, which was a tactical use of the ability he hadn't seen me make before.
He'd file it.
I let him file it.
"Cisco said you were three blocks east."
"I was."
"What were you doing at the office tower."
"Walked over for a coffee."
"That's not an office-tower thing."
"There's a coffee shop in the lobby."
"Huh."
"Was a cortado."
"Huh."
He looked at me a beat longer than the conversation required.
Then he half-smiled — the small Barry half-smile that didn't promise anything — and clapped me lightly on the shoulder, which was the exact gesture of acknowledgment he used now and which, in our private vocabulary, meant I noticed and I'm not going to make it a thing, and he was gone before the CCPD ambulance arrived.
---
Jay was in the lobby of STAR Labs when I came back.
Standing by the front desk with a cardboard tray of coffees. Four cups. One for Cisco, one for Caitlin, one for Barry, one for himself. Helpful Jay. Coffee Jay. The Jay who had, in the eight weeks since the Zoom attack, been the team's emotional support speedster. Helpful, available, never quite there when the metas hit.
He held a cup out to me.
"Didn't know what you took. Black okay?"
"Black's fine. Thanks."
I took the cup. Our hands touched briefly at the rim.
"You were quick getting to Beaufort."
"I was nearby."
"You and Cisco have a real rhythm now. Comms-wise."
"Practice."
"Mm."
He sipped his own coffee. Looked at me over the lip of the cup.
"It's nice to see," he said. "You and Cisco. I noticed last week you two were eating lunch together more. That's a good thing in a team. Trust."
"Yeah."
"He's a good kid."
"He is."
"I would hate to see anything happen to him."
He said it the way you said it. The tweed-jacket way. The grey-eyed way. The concerned-mentor-of-young-genius way, with no edges anywhere in the sentence.
The edges were under the sentence.
I held his look.
"So would I."
"Mm."
He took another sip. Held the cup against his chest.
"I'm glad we agree."
He turned. Walked toward the elevator. Pressed the button. The elevator doors opened at his touch — too fast, the way Jay's elevators always opened, like the building itself moved a little for him.
He stepped in.
The doors closed.
I stood in the lobby with a paper cup in my hand and a very specific cold spot at the back of my neck.
I went up the stairs instead.
When I got to the cortex Cisco was at his station.
I set the coffee down at his elbow without saying anything.
He picked it up. Sniffed it.
"Where'd this come from."
"Jay brought a tray. Black."
He held the cup at arm's length. Looked at it the way you'd look at a dead mouse.
"I'm not drinking this."
"I wouldn't either."
He set it down on the corner of his desk. Pushed it three inches farther from himself.
After a minute he said, without looking up: "He noticed something."
"Yeah."
"He said?"
"He said he was glad to see us closer. Then he said he'd hate for anything to happen to you."
Cisco's hand stopped on his keyboard.
He turned to look at me.
I'd never seen Cisco's face do that exact thing before. Not fear exactly. Not anger. The third thing — the thing that arrives when a person realizes the danger they've been theorizing about for months has now used their first name in a sentence with the word hate in it.
He picked up the coffee. Walked to the trash. Dropped it in.
Came back. Sat down.
"Okay."
"Okay."
"What do we do about that."
"We move the conversation up."
"Up how much."
I thought about it.
"To this week."
He looked at his screen.
"Tonight."
"Tonight if Barry's free."
"Tonight."
He typed a brief message to a chat I couldn't see. The reply came back almost immediately. He read it.
"Tonight," he confirmed. "9 PM. The four of us. Off-site. Caitlin's apartment."
"Off-site is good."
"He's not going to find us at Caitlin's."
"Probably not."
"Probably?"
"He's a speedster, Cisco. Probably is the best word in the sentence."
He swore.
He went back to his keyboard.
I went to my workstation and sat down and looked at the empty water-stain ring on my desk where the bitter coffee mug had sat for the last seven months and I felt a cold spot at the back of my neck that was not getting any warmer.
Tonight.
The room was going to know.
Most of it, anyway. Barry was going to know that Jay was Zoom, because Barry had known since Powell Boulevard and was waiting only for the moment a team was around him when he said it out loud. Cisco was going to know what Barry had been holding. Caitlin was going to know that we'd all been holding it. And the four of us in Caitlin's living room were going to come out the other side of it as the kind of unit you can't be when half of you is hiding things from the other half.
If we lived through the conversation, that was the gain.
If we didn't —
I got up.
Got my coat.
Cisco didn't ask where I was going.
I drove home. Pulled my notebook out from under the sink. Wrote three lines on a fresh page.
Jay knows I'm in the loop with Cisco.
He used Cisco's safety as a sentence.
Tonight, four of us, Caitlin's. We're done waiting.
I capped the pen. Put the notebook back. Stood at the window.
Outside, the afternoon sun was on the building across the street.
It looked like any other Thursday.
It wasn't going to be.
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