The balcony came off the fourth floor while I was two streets away.
I heard the tear before I saw it — the wrong sound of masonry giving in the wrong direction — and when I looked up the concrete slab was already rising, slow and wrong, bolts tearing free like weeds out of soft ground. Three people in the living room behind it. A woman in a bathrobe. Two kids clinging to her legs.
Unbreakable Warrior burned across my shoulders. Felt like wearing a suit made of hot glass. Every breath pulled against my cracked ribs, and the ribs pulled back harder.
I phased through the front door of the building at street level and took the stairwell three flights at a run. Fourth floor. Their apartment door. I kicked it.
The living room floor was tilting.
Not much. Three degrees, maybe. Enough that the coffee table had slid toward the open balcony and the mother was on her knees trying to hold the younger boy in place against the drag.
"Window's coming off," I said. "Hallway. Now."
She stared at me.
The older kid moved first — grabbed his brother's sleeve and ran. I scooped the mother up under one arm, and in Unbreakable mode she weighed about as much as a bag of laundry. Out of the apartment. Down the hall. The balcony went behind us, a whole section of wall folding outward into open sky, and the building groaned.
Stairs. Street. EMT post a block east.
I set her on the sidewalk next to her boys and left them for people wearing vests. Phased into the next building. Up the stairwell.
Somewhere above the city, Firestorm was still climbing.
[Unbreakable Warrior: 43% remaining.]
[Physical strain: severe.]
I dismissed it without stopping.
Sixth floor. Seventh. An old woman wedged behind an overturned china cabinet — the cabinet had lifted off the floor and pinned her against the wall like a bug under a glass. I braced my shoulder against its weight, wood buckling under the enhanced strength, and pulled it sideways far enough to get her free. Her ankle was bent wrong. She didn't cry. I carried her down in a fireman's hold because the Unbreakable shell didn't care about the angle.
Thirty-two minutes of that.
Thirty-four buildings. Fifty-seven people I could account for. God knew how many I couldn't.
Then the sky changed color.
I was on a rooftop helping an EMT lift a kid onto a stretcher when the light above us went from that bruised singularity-dark to a pale blue-white. I looked up.
The hole was closing.
Not slowly. Fast. A seam zipping shut at a speed that made the air pop in my ears.
And something was falling out of it.
---
[BARRY]
Barry was at the epicenter.
Not in the singularity — nobody could be inside a thing like that and stay assembled — but on the tallest roof downtown, inside the edge of the pull, where the wind was going up instead of down and loose things within a quarter-mile were lifting into the sky in a slow helix.
Firestorm was a white dot now. He'd been a column thirty seconds ago. He was a pinpoint now.
"Four seconds." Cisco's voice through the earpiece. Cracked.
Barry kept his eyes up.
"Three."
The pinpoint flared.
"Two."
The wind reversed.
It was the only word for it. The lifting stopped, violent, and everything that had been going up started coming down at once — paper, glass, a streetlamp that had pulled out by the roots and was now dropping from two hundred feet — and Barry went flat against the rooftop as the debris storm scraped the air above him.
"One."
White flash.
When he opened his eyes the hole was smaller. Much smaller. And closing.
Two things were falling out of it. A larger one. A smaller one trailing after.
He ran.
Sixty stories down the side of the building at something under the speed of sound. Street level. The first falling body was halfway to the pavement. White hair. Tweed.
Stein.
Barry caught him — cradled him, the old man limp and breathing in his arms — and looked up.
The second thing never made it out.
The seam of sky was almost shut. He saw the shape inside the closing. Arms. A head.
Ronnie.
Not falling. Not coming through. Just — stopped there. Inside the last inch of the tear.
Barry took a step. The body's insistence that he could run fast enough to do something. He could. He always could. He'd always been able to —
The seam closed.
The sky was sky.
Ronnie wasn't in it.
Barry stood on a sidewalk with a sixty-nine-year-old physicist in his arms and a car alarm going off behind him and no idea what to do with either thing.
---
[HARRY — STAR Labs, 9:14 PM]
The medical bay light was down to the low wall-mounts.
Caitlin was on the edge of the gurney. Not lying on it. Sitting with her hands folded between her knees. Her cardigan still on. Her ponytail coming undone on the left side where she'd kept pushing at it.
Dry eyes.
That was worse than crying.
I walked in without asking and sat down on the gurney next to her. Half a foot of space. Didn't speak.
Some rooms you don't word your way into. You just put a body in the chair and wait.
After a long time she said, "He knew."
"Yeah."
"He kissed me before he went up. He knew he wasn't coming back."
"Yeah."
"I'm so tired of saying goodbye to him."
Her shoulder went once. I reached over — slow — and put my hand on top of hers where it was folded in her lap. Didn't squeeze. Just weight.
Her fingers turned and took mine.
Cold. Colder than her hand should have been. I logged it. Said nothing.
She cried quietly for a while. The long kind. The kind that doesn't make noise.
When her breathing evened out she pulled her hand back and tucked it into her cardigan sleeve.
"Thank you," she said.
"Anytime."
"I know."
She looked at me then. Red eyes. Not forgiving. Not soft. Just — here.
"Whatever else is true. You came back in the morning. You stayed tonight. That's enough for now."
I nodded.
[Primary threat resolved. Host integration: Partial.]
[Survival achieved.]
I closed the System.
Outside the medical bay window, Central City was turning its lights back on, one block at a time.
Reading more than one of my novels? Good news — one Patreon, all of them.
patreon.com/TheFinex5
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰
― DECREE ―
More chapters reign FREE upon unwrittenrealm.com.
The throne acknowledges.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰