Sand came through the ceiling.
Literal sand. A column of it pouring down through the atrium skylight of the Central City Museum of Natural History on a Tuesday afternoon at 2:14 PM, and then the column stopped pouring and assembled itself into the rough shape of a man. Seven feet tall. No face to speak of — a crude depression where a face should have been, sand settling and resettling around the idea of eye sockets.
He wanted the Dawn Stone exhibit.
I didn't know why. Nobody knew why. You didn't bother asking why with the Earth-2 ones. They came through wanting something specific, and the something specific was usually portable and valuable and couldn't have been the actual reason they'd risked a dimensional crossing.
Barry was fighting him from twenty yards out.
Barry punched. Sand parted. Barry punched again. Same result. You can't punch a man who's built out of the floor of a desert. Flash was a hammer looking for a nail and this wasn't a nail.
I was on the second-floor gallery, leaning over the rail.
"Cisco," I said into the earpiece.
"Copy."
"He's not solid enough to hit. He's solid enough to grip. Tell Barry to grapple, not strike."
"On it."
Barry adjusted on the next pass. Came in low, got both arms around the sand-thing's waist, lifted, ran. Momentum did what punches couldn't — the sand-thing's upper body couldn't hold shape against the drag, and by the time Barry had pulled him through four consecutive marble pillars the construct was a loose cloud again. Lost cohesion. Fell to the floor as a pile.
A man was lying in the middle of the pile.
Skinny. Hollow-cheeked. Breathing. Unconscious.
I came down the gallery stairs.
"Barry. Leave him."
"Leave him?"
"Extraction point in sixty seconds is the Pipeline. Let me package him first. Contamination risk — Earth-2 biology on an Earth-1 civilian."
Barry hesitated.
The hesitation lasted exactly as long as it needed to. Barry trusted me about nine specific things, and one of them was not touching something biological without sterile protocol. I'd cultivated that trust for a reason.
"Okay. Yours. Make it fast."
I knelt next to the skinny man. Put my hand on his chest. The gesture looked like a vitals check.
[Sand Manipulation — Earth-2 variant.]
[Signature: Exotic. Anchored to local environment.]
[Extraction blocked: target biology incompatible with native storage.]
I pulled my hand back.
The System had never said that before.
"Incompatible."
I filed it. Let my face stay bored.
Stood up. "He's stable. No biohazard. Pipeline transport is fine."
That was the third one this week.
Three Earth-2 metas, three times the System had refused the extraction, each time with a slightly different flavor of no. Sand Demon. A lady with light powers who'd hit a strip mall on Monday. A nameless man on Sunday who'd turned half a parking garage to mist.
The hunting ground I thought I'd been handed was locked behind a fence I hadn't known was there.
---
Cisco was hunched over a keyboard in the cortex at six that evening with his palm against his right eye.
He hadn't moved in twenty minutes.
I'd been pretending to read a file on the couch across from him.
He exhaled. Let the eye go. Looked up. Saw me watching.
"Don't."
"Don't what."
"Don't do the concerned-uncle thing. Cait already did it this morning. I'm at my limit."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were about to."
"I was."
He barked a laugh, short and surprised. Rubbed his eye again. "Dude."
I put the file down.
"How often now."
"I don't want to say."
"Cisco."
"Four, five times a day. Couple of them this morning put me on the floor."
"For how long?"
"Couple minutes. I come back up, it's fine. It's not fine."
"Anything else?"
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it.
"I'm seeing stuff."
I kept my face neutral. "What kind of stuff."
"Places. People. I don't know where. Sometimes it's the cortex but — different. Like someone redecorated. Sometimes it's Central City but the sky is off. There was one where I was in the sand fight, but I was watching me fight it from above, and it hadn't even happened yet. And then — today — it happened. Exactly like I'd seen it."
He was looking at me the way a person looks at someone who's supposed to tell them it's fine.
I didn't tell him it was fine.
"How long's this been happening?"
"Three weeks. Maybe more. Got worse after the first real breach."
I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees.
"Cisco. This isn't pathology. This is a power."
"That's worse. That's so much worse."
"I know."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"How do you know?"
"Because I've seen it before. The shape of this. I was, uh —" I let the sentence do the thing my sentences did when I wanted to sound like a man choosing which truth to share. "Let's say the first year after my coma involved a lot of reading about people who'd been through what I'd been through. You learn to see the pattern."
Half a lie. But he hadn't seen my hand on the skinny sand-man's chest. He hadn't seen the System's quiet efficiency. What he heard was a guy who went through something weird learned to spot it in other people, which was the exact comfort the part of him that was panicking needed.
His shoulders dropped a quarter inch.
"Can you help me."
"Yeah."
"I don't want anyone else knowing yet."
"They won't."
"Cait can't know."
"Caitlin won't know until you tell her."
He looked at me a long time.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. When."
"Tomorrow. After hours. Just us."
He nodded.
I let him go back to his screen. Put the file back up in front of my face. Behind it, I wasn't reading anything.
---
Later, 1 AM, I stood in front of the cortex's main console and pulled up the camera feed from breach site three. Watched the recording of this morning's disc-flicker at Evans and Thirty-eighth — the fourth such event in six days.
Dimmed the overheads.
Let the blue light from the frozen rupture image wash across my face.
[Dimensional access: Not yet achievable.]
[Target window: Cisco Ramon — vibe capability developing.]
[Strategy: Cultivate.]
Another universe. Another rule set. A whole new pool of metas I apparently couldn't touch directly with my own hands.
But I didn't need to touch them with my hands.
I just needed to go there.
And if a man was going to pry open the wall between my universe and the next one, I was going to be the one standing closest to him when it happened.
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