Chapter 8: The Dodger's Collateral
The news called him the Dodger—a thief using bomb collars to make civilians steal for him, turning desperate people into unwilling accomplices in a spree of robberies that had the city on edge. The name was meant to be clever, playing on his ability to avoid direct confrontation by hiding behind hostages. Ben had a different word for him: coward.
The pattern was elegant in its cruelty. Target someone vulnerable—single parents, people with gambling debts, anyone who couldn't afford to lose what little they had. Fit them with a sophisticated explosive collar that would detonate if they deviated from instructions or if the remote signal was interrupted. Then sit back and watch desperate people commit crimes while the real criminal stayed safely anonymous.
Ben had been tracking the case through news reports and police scanner chatter, trying to predict where the Dodger might strike next. The show's timeline suggested the spree would culminate in a confrontation between the Hood and the bomber, but that was still days away. In the meantime, innocent people were being terrorized into becoming criminals.
His "random" evening patrol took him through the financial district, past banks and high-end shops that would be attractive targets. Ben's Prescience had been quiet all evening, no blue afterimages warning of immediate danger. Just the low-level tension that had become background noise in his life since developing the ability to see three seconds into the future.
He was passing First National Bank when a man in an expensive suit stumbled out of the front entrance, hands clutched around his neck, eyes wide with the kind of terror that came from proximity to death.
Ben's Prescience exploded.
Blue afterimages cascaded around the man like deadly flowers—thermal bloom, shrapnel pattern, civilian casualties radiating outward from a central point of detonation. The collar around the man's neck wasn't just a threat; it was three seconds away from becoming an execution.
James Holder. The name surfaced from Ben's memory of the show—a bank manager who'd been forced to steal for the Dodger, whose collar would malfunction and nearly kill him before the Hood intervened.
Except the Hood wasn't here yet.
Ben was already moving before his conscious mind processed the decision, feet carrying him toward a man who was about to die unless someone did something impossible.
"Help me!" Holder screamed, seeing Ben approach. "I can't get it off! It's going to—"
The collar's red LED shifted from blinking to solid, and Ben's Prescience showed him exactly what would happen next. Electrical signal racing through wires. Explosive charges igniting in sequence. A human being transformed into scattered pieces in less time than it took to blink.
No time to run. No time to think. No time for anything except the desperate, primal rejection that screamed through Ben's mind with volcanic intensity.
NO.
Something fundamental shifted inside him, like reality itself was bending to accommodate his refusal to accept what was about to happen. Ben's eyes burned with sudden heat, and the world around him took on an strange, crystalline clarity.
The detonation signal was racing through the collar's circuitry, milliseconds from triggering the explosives. Ben could see it with impossible clarity—electrons flowing through copper pathways, energy building toward critical mass, death arriving with the inevitability of physics.
This will not happen.
The signal... stopped.
Not blocked, not redirected, not interfered with. Simply ceased to exist, as if the universe had decided that particular sequence of events was inadmissible. The electrical impulse that should have triggered the explosion vanished from causality like it had never been sent.
The collar's LED flickered and died. Holder stood in the middle of the sidewalk, alive and breathing and completely unaware that he should have been scattered across three city blocks.
Ben collapsed to his knees on concrete that suddenly felt like it was tilting sideways. Blood dripped from his nose onto the pavement, and his head felt like someone had driven railroad spikes through his skull. The sensation was completely different from his Prescience overloads—not information overflow but something deeper, more fundamental. Like he'd just violated one of reality's basic operating principles.
"What did I do? What the hell did I just do?"
Police sirens wailed in the distance, growing closer. Someone must have called 911 when they saw a man stumbling out of a bank with an explosive device around his neck. Ben tried to stand and nearly fell over, his balance completely shot.
"Sir! Sir, are you alright?" An EMT was suddenly beside him, checking his pulse and shining a light in his eyes. "Were you injured in the incident?"
"I'm fine," Ben managed, though his voice sounded like it was coming from underwater. "Just... just got scared when I saw the bomb."
The EMT didn't look convinced, but he moved on to check Holder, who was sitting on the steps of the bank looking like someone who'd just stared into the abyss and lived to tell about it.
Ben watched through blurred vision as bomb squad technicians swarmed the scene, their equipment detecting no trace of active explosives in the collar that should have just killed a man. They'd find the device electronically dead, its memory banks showing no record of a detonation command that had definitely been sent.
"Excuse me, sir?" A police detective approached, notebook in hand. "I'm Detective Lance. Can you tell me what you saw?"
Laurel's father. Of course.
"I was walking by when that man came out of the bank. He was screaming about a collar, about not being able to get it off. I started to approach to see if I could help, and then... nothing. The collar just stopped working."
"You didn't see anyone else? No one with a remote control or radio equipment?"
Ben shook his head, which was a mistake because it sent fresh waves of pain shooting through his skull. "Just him. And then police sirens."
Detective Lance made notes with the weary efficiency of someone who'd seen enough impossible things in Starling City to stop being surprised by them. "We'll need a formal statement, but that can wait until you're feeling better. EMTs want to check you for shock."
Ben submitted to the medical examination, letting them take his blood pressure and check his reflexes while his mind raced with implications. He'd just done something that violated the basic laws of physics—erased an event from causality itself. The detonation signal had been sent, should have reached its destination, should have triggered an explosion.
Instead, it simply... hadn't.
"This isn't just precognition anymore. I have multiple powers. The transmigration didn't just give me the ability to see the future—it made me capable of changing it. Of negating events that should have happened. But how? And what are the limits?"
The headache was unlike anything he'd ever experienced, deeper and more fundamental than the overload pain from his Prescience. This felt like he'd strained something essential, pushed against boundaries that weren't meant to be pushed.
As the scene wound down and the various official personnel finished their work, Ben became aware of something that made his blood run cold. Detective Lance was talking quietly with another officer, their conversation just barely audible over the ambient noise.
"—electronics completely fried. No sign of what caused the malfunction."
"Bomb squad's never seen anything like it. Device shows no record of receiving a detonation command, but the victim swears it was counting down."
"Could be trauma. People see what they expect to see in situations like this."
"Maybe. But we've got three witnesses who say they saw the countdown timer. Now it's like the signal just... disappeared."
Ben closed his eyes and tried not to think about who might be monitoring police bands for reports of impossible incidents. In a city where vigilantes were becoming increasingly active, unexplained phenomena involving explosive devices would definitely attract attention.
The wrong kind of attention.
By the time the EMTs released him and Detective Lance finished taking his statement, Ben was steady enough to walk home under his own power. But the headache lingered, and with it the terrible understanding that he'd just crossed another line.
"I can negate events. Erase them from reality. The question is whether that makes me more capable of saving people when the Undertaking comes, or whether it makes me into something that needs to be stopped before I become a threat to causality itself."
Either way, he was no longer just a man with foreknowledge and developing precognitive abilities. He was something else entirely, and the implications of that transformation were going to complicate everything he'd been planning.
Starting with the fact that bomb failures which defied explanation would definitely end up on Oliver Queen's radar. And if the Hood decided that Ben Hale was worth investigating...
Well. That was going to be a very dangerous conversation.
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