The kettle whistled.
Caitlin didn't hear it for three full seconds.
Then her hand moved, reflexive, and killed the flame. Steam hissed off the burner and curled toward the ceiling fan she'd never bothered to replace. She stood in the dark of her kitchen holding a chamomile tea bag between two fingers and couldn't remember walking in here.
Ronnie's breathing came steady from the couch in the next room. Slow. Deep. The sound of a man who hadn't been dead twice.
She poured the water. Some splashed her wrist. She didn't flinch.
The tea went on the counter untouched.
"He saved Eddie."
The thought kept looping. Not the bigger one. Not the one about lying. Just that. Harry's phased hand catching a speedster's wrist mid-strike. The geometry of it. The impossibility. She'd been the one bandaging his ribs an hour later in the med bay and her hands had known what to do and her brain had been somewhere else entirely, somewhere running diagnostic on every memory she had of him.
Movie night. His hand on her lower back in the cortex doorway. The way he used to test his own pulse when he thought she wasn't watching.
"When we were together."
She'd asked it. Out loud. In front of Cisco and Barry and Joe. She hadn't meant to. It had just come.
He'd said no. Said what was between them was real.
She believed him.
She just didn't know what else she'd believed that had also been true.
A creak from the couch. Ronnie shifting. She moved to the doorway and stood there, wrapped in her cardigan, watching him breathe.
He was home. He was real. He was hers.
And somewhere across the city a man she'd loved last month was sitting alone with cracked ribs and a promise to explain himself in the morning.
Caitlin pressed her forehead against the doorframe.
Cold wood. That helped a little.
---
Cisco hadn't left STAR Labs.
The cortex lights were down to half. He'd killed the overheads and kept only the monitor glow, because his head was pounding and the fluorescents made it worse and also because sitting in the half-dark felt appropriate. Dramatic. He was allowed to be dramatic. It had been that kind of night.
Four monitors. Four feeds from four different cameras, all cued to the same thirty-second window.
He'd watched it sixteen times.
Harry phasing through the wall. Hand shooting forward. The catch. The elbow. Eddie hitting the floor, alive.
Sixteen.
He rubbed his eyes. The image was burned in now. He didn't need the screens anymore. He just didn't want to stop watching.
"Phasing."
Not just phasing. Phasing with intent. Phasing like someone who'd practiced. The hand had come through the plaster on the vector needed to intercept a moving target. That wasn't a guess. That wasn't a lucky reflex. That was somebody who'd done the math in the half-second he had.
Cisco pulled up a second window. Typed.
HARRY GRIFFIN — TIMELINE.
Hospital discharge, February. First visit to STAR Labs, early March. He scrolled. He'd already done this search three times tonight. He kept hoping he'd find something different.
A red dot pinged on the city map — he'd pinned every confirmed Harvest extraction over the past four months. Seven dots. Scattered across Central City.
He overlaid Harry's cell-tower data.
Two of the pings put Harry within six blocks of a Harvest site on the night of the extraction. The other five were alibi-adjacent but not clean.
Cisco leaned back in his chair.
"Mierda."
He said it out loud. To no one. His voice sounded small in the empty cortex.
He didn't pick up his phone. He didn't text Barry. He didn't call Joe.
He saved the overlay. Closed the laptop. Sat in the dark.
He'd liked Harry.
That was the part that hurt.
---
I hadn't slept.
I'd made it through the front door of the apartment sometime after one in the morning, kicked off my shoes, and sat down on the edge of the bed to unlace the second one. Woke up with the lace still between my fingers four hours later. That counted as sleep, probably. It didn't feel like it.
My ribs had stiffened. That was the worst part. When the adrenaline goes and the muscles cool you find out exactly what you did to yourself. My chest felt like someone had replaced the bone with a sheet of cracked glass. I tried a breath that went deeper than shallow. Immediately regretted it.
The System pulsed once behind my eyes. Calm. Neutral.
[Physical Adaptation active. Recovery rate +22%.]
Not fast enough to matter in a fight. Fast enough to matter by tomorrow. Good.
I got up. The movement cost me. Walked to the kitchen. Ate what was in the fridge — cold rice, some leftover chicken I'd cooked three days ago, an orange. Real food. The Unbreakable Warrior cooldown took calories out of me like a chainsaw took bark. The hunger after was always this specific kind of hollow. I'd learned to eat whatever was closest.
Sun was coming up behind the blinds.
I put the plate in the sink. Stood there with my hands on the counter.
"Tomorrow."
Barry's voice. Last thing said before he walked.
"We talk tomorrow."
I'd spent months building a persona. Reliable consultant. Slightly mysterious guy who'd come out of a coma with good instincts. Took a cover identity and turned it into a place to stand. Gone now. All of it. The version of me they'd let in the door last night had died sometime between the phase through the wall and the fall through the floor.
What walked in there in a few hours wasn't going to be him anymore.
I thought about the six powers I had. The three they'd seen. The three they hadn't.
I thought about how much truth was safe.
Not much. Enough.
Enough to keep them from hating me.
[Current Rank: D. Level 34. PP: 1,350.]
Overnight tick-up from combat. The System had a sense of timing I couldn't tell was cruel or just indifferent. I dismissed the notification and rolled my shoulders and tested the phasing. My hand went through the counter halfway to the wrist. Came back. Solid. Fine.
Still had the tools. Still had the moves. Just not the hiding place.
"They know you have powers. They don't know what. They don't know why. Give them something. Hold the rest."
I reached for my coat. My ribs screamed. I ignored them.
Keys. Wallet. Phone.
I locked the door behind me and went to face the morning.
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― DECREE ―
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