Jude had one small regret as he floored the accelerator.
Not about the plan — the plan was sound. The regret was purely aesthetic. No music. Barry had been present the last time Satsuki had arrived in truck form to collect a meta, and that experience had apparently left a lasting impression; Jude had heard him bring it up on three separate occasions since. The ghost semi that materialized out of nowhere on a farm at night, no warning, no explanation. Given that, playing anything on the speakers now would just create an association problem.
A semi without music is like a ship missing half its soul, he thought, and pressed harder on the gas.
Satsuki's speed control was exact — they both knew the target number. Fast enough for impact. Controlled enough not to cross the line from incapacitation into something permanent. Master-level driving skills meant the collision angle was calculated rather than approximate, the approach vector optimized for maximum force distribution against Farooq's position while minimizing the blast radius toward Barry.
The headlights hit both of them at the same instant.
Farooq reacted on instinct — his whole body surging with blue-green current, stored energy converting to discharge in a single panicked release. Barry, still on the ground, felt the electrical field around him shift into something more chaotic and read what was coming. He scraped together the last of his Speed Force, pushed forward several meters on pure reflex.
The truck hit Farooq.
The impact sent crackling arcs in every direction, current shattering through Satsuki's chassis and throwing sparks across the entire vehicle. From the cab, a figure in a black robe and white mask dropped cleanly, rolled twice on the pavement, and came up on one knee without apparent injury.
Farooq's discharge reflex fired at full output as he made contact with the front grille — a sustained, maximum-power release that lit up the entire block. It was unclear whether the current damaged the electrical systems inside the cab, but the truck's momentum began to bleed off, decelerating through its own arc damage. It covered another twelve meters before the front end met the substation's perimeter wall and stopped.
Farooq rolled sideways and hit the ground groaning.
In the cargo compartment, Satsuki was working.
The single-person energy block production unit — compact, Cybertronian-adjacent in its engineering, capable of converting virtually any terrestrial energy form into stable liquid storage — was running at a throughput it had never been designed to sustain. Farooq's discharge, still arcing between his body and the truck's conductive frame, was feeding directly into the conversion cycle. Empty containers filled in seconds. Clear purple liquid energy, dense and luminous, sealed and ejected in a continuous stream.
Yomogi caught each one as it came out of the machine and pitched it through the open door of the wallpaper room, her movements quick and precise, ears alert.
"It's coming out! It's really coming out!" she called, delighted.
The light in the cargo compartment was extraordinary — container after container glowing as it filled, the accumulated output of a meta energy absorber being systematically drained and stored. Satsuki estimated the yield would be sufficient for decades without any calculation she'd care to make precise.
Then the color changed.
She caught it immediately. The next container to eject was wrong — not the familiar pink-purple of high-concentration liquid energy, but something else entirely. Gold. Not metallic gold, not reflective — luminous gold, the color of electricity seen from inside, flowing and shifting within the container like it had a pulse. Not gas, not liquid, not solid. A contained field that the conversion unit had processed but couldn't fully reduce to its standard output format.
Satsuki held it up.
The machine converts almost everything. If it can't convert this to standard liquid energy—
She looked at the golden light moving inside the container.
"...Is this the Speed Force?"
She set it down carefully and looked at the next one. Also gold. And the next. The conversion unit was still running, still producing, but everything after a certain point in Farooq's drain had come out this way — the Speed Force energy he'd pulled from Barry before the truck hit him, now being systematically recovered.
Yomogi pitched container after container through the wallpaper door, unfazed by the color change, operating on the simple logic that Boss had said to throw them in and she was throwing them in.
Satsuki stood with one of the golden containers and tried to calibrate the energy density.
She gave up after a moment. The number wasn't cooperating with her reference points. The total yield of every standard energy block she'd ever processed, combined, was somewhere in the neighborhood of a rounding error compared to what a single Speed Force container was registering.
How does a human body hold this much?
Approximately sixty seconds after the impact, the drain completed.
Farooq's energy reserves hit zero. He had crawled maybe four meters from the truck before his body stopped cooperating — eyes rolling back, legs giving out, the street coming up to meet him.
He looked, as Jude had occasion to note while jogging over, extremely dead.
He was not, in fact, dead. Probably. But the window was narrow.
One hand under Farooq's shoulder, Jude ran a quick assessment by feel: ribs, at least three, likely more. Active bleeding from the nose and mouth. Organ involvement was plausible given the impact. Pulse present but not enthusiastic. Time to spontaneous organ failure: minutes, not many.
"Tougher than he looked," Jude muttered, reaching into his pocket. "Less tough than I'd hoped."
The small gourd. A single drop, tilted carefully past Farooq's lips.
The effect was immediate and visible. Ribs resolving — the audible pop of bone realigning. Bleeding stopping. Color returning to a face that had gone the shade of old paper. And then, thirty seconds after that, the slow, even rhythm of someone deeply, profoundly, completely unconscious.
Farooq began to snore.
Thousand-Day Intoxication: even unadulterated, a single drop restored sixty percent maximum health on contact. The trade-off was the intoxication itself — he'd need the sobering stone before he'd be functional enough to interview, let alone arrest. But he was alive, his organs were intact, and he was going to stay that way until someone made a decision about what to do with him.
Barry made it to his feet on the third attempt.
He hadn't been injured — the Speed Force drain had left him depleted, which was a different problem from structural damage, and his body was already compensating. He stood, looked at Farooq snoring peacefully on the pavement, looked at the truck's front end pressed gently against the perimeter wall, looked at Jude crouching beside a man he'd just run over and then immediately healed.
He opened his mouth.
He closed it.
He tried again.
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