I made it eighteen feet down the corridor before he came back.
Barry was a solid weight in my arms — speedster metabolism doing what it did to a body that had bled and concussed and held a pose against the corridor wall for twenty minutes. He was not light. The Unbreakable cooldown was still locked. I was carrying him on Force Mastery and my own back muscles, half a man's weight on each, and my own body was running on the long fumes of an A-tier fusion I'd burned twice in the last hour.
The corridor lights flickered.
Then they didn't flicker.
Then the wall in front of me folded inward in a smear of blue, and Zoom was standing in the new gap before the dust from the masonry hit the floor.
I stopped walking.
Set Barry down against the wall, fast, with my left arm. Kept my right hand free. Got between Barry and the gap.
The mask considered me.
"You walked," it said. "Five hostages out, my two men down, my speedster on his feet, and you walked toward the door. Slowly. With him in your arms. As though I were going to allow that."
"You ran."
"I retreated."
"You ran."
The mask tilted.
"Insolent," it said. The wet machine voice had a thread of something in it that hadn't been there before. Not amusement. Not anger. Curiosity, of the variety a person extended to a small predator they'd previously thought was a rodent.
He took one step forward.
I held my ground.
I had two A-tier powers and one B-tier behind me on cooldown locks I couldn't break, and my full inventory was: phasing, basic strength, Plasma Core (one discharge left before the cooldown punished me), Force Mastery (limited duration before the PP cost knocked me on my back), Terror Scream (untested in combat), and a small handful of the older single-tier abilities that wouldn't slow him down.
Against a man who'd put Barry's spine through a knee.
The math said die.
The math also said: Barry just touched him. Barry made him scream. He came back through the wall because he couldn't leave that as the last note. He needs you to be a corpse before he leaves. Which means he is fighting for something he wants. Which means he can lose it.
That was a different math.
"Try me," I said.
He blurred.
I'd been waiting for the blur.
He came at me from my left side because he'd telegraphed left in the last three exchanges I'd watched him have with Barry on cameras, and right-handed speedsters who'd spent years in proxy bodies had drift in their dominant approach lines.
I phased.
He went through where my torso had been.
He came out two steps past me on my right, and I was already dropping the phase and lit a Plasma Core disc on my open palm, the last one I had. I threw it underhand at the back of his head before he finished the turn.
He saw it coming.
He dodged.
The disc hit the corridor wall behind him and went off in a dome of white-orange light that scorched the paint. The blast wave hit him in the back. He was off-balance for half a second.
I used the half-second.
Force Mastery on the chunks of wall debris from his entry hole. Three large pieces of cinderblock. I lifted them all at once and threw them at him in sequence — not at his center of mass, where he'd dodge, but at the air around his feet, so the dodges landed him on broken footing.
The first piece he dodged into a clear stretch of floor.
The second piece he dodged into a small crater I'd made on his left.
The third piece I aimed at his chest and held it half a second longer, and he spent that half-second adjusting his weight to the broken footing, and the piece of cinderblock hit him in the ribs.
Not hard. Hard enough.
The mask snarled.
He came at me at speed.
Terror Scream.
I'd never used it on anything alive. I opened my mouth and let it out at full discharge — the back-of-the-throat vibration that had cracked my apartment plaster — and aimed the cone at the smear of blue lightning closing on my chest.
The smear hit me at the same instant the cone hit it.
I went into the wall behind me. The wall took the impact. Most of my ribs took the rest. The Unbreakable cooldown was still locked and the impact felt like every rib I had was being introduced to every other rib I had for the first time.
But Zoom was on the floor.
Three feet from me.
Hands on the sides of his mask.
The mask was wet — something dark was leaking out from under the eye-holes where there were no eyes.
He was making a sound that wasn't language.
The Terror Scream had landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to be able to land. Whatever the wet-machine voice had been hiding, the scream had reached past it and touched it.
I shoved off the wall.
Picked Barry up by the collar of his suit.
Started backing up.
Zoom got to his hands. Dragged himself one step. Then another.
The mask lifted.
"You," he said, slowly, and now the voice sounded like a man's voice underneath the machine. "You. I am going to remember you specifically."
"Good."
I kept backing up.
He stayed on his knees.
Ten feet between us. Twenty.
He raised his head.
"The next time we see each other, Mr. Griffin —"
"I won't be alone."
"Neither will I."
He stood.
He held my look for one full second.
Then a breach opened in the corridor wall on his right — a small one, jagged, the kind a wounded speedster opened by tearing — and he was gone through it.
The breach closed.
I held Barry against the wall with my shoulder for ten more seconds before I let myself believe.
---
Cisco found us at the front of the building.
I'd carried Barry the rest of the way out by half-phasing through two interior walls instead of taking the corridor route, because I did not trust the corridor anymore. We came out into the lobby in a state that was probably going to look very bad on the security cameras — me with bloody knuckles and a torn jacket, Barry semi-conscious on my shoulder, both of us covered in concrete dust and one of us streaked with the soot from a plasma blast he hadn't been around to see.
Cisco was at the front doors with the van behind him, engine running, Caitlin in the passenger seat with the back of the van open and a stretcher unfolded on the pavement.
He took in the picture.
"You're alive."
"Just."
"Where's —"
"He went through a wall."
"Which —"
"Doesn't matter, Cisco. He's gone."
Cisco helped me get Barry onto the stretcher. Caitlin was on Barry the second he was flat, hands moving fast, lights of the streetlamp catching her hair where she'd put it up in a clip on the drive over. Her hands were shaking. The shake was steady — the controlled shake of a person whose adrenaline was on a leash because the leash was the only thing letting her work.
"Vitals are bad but stable. Concussion. Possible cellular trauma from speed drain. I need him at the lab in the next ten minutes."
"On it." Cisco was already moving to the driver's side.
I started to climb into the back of the van.
Cisco caught my elbow.
"Not you."
"Cisco."
"You need a different medical bay. Look at yourself."
I looked.
The plasma had blown some of my own jacket out at the cuff. There was a long shallow burn across the back of my left hand from a piece of debris I hadn't noticed taking. My ribs on the right side felt like something had loosened. Blood from a cut on my forehead I hadn't registered was running down behind my ear into the collar of my shirt.
"Joe and the others?"
"At Caitlin's apartment for triage. Iris is with them. Nobody dead. Nobody hospital-grade. They'll keep till morning."
"Okay."
"You ride shotgun. Cait drives. I follow with the kit. You're not going to bleed out in the next ten minutes but you are not driving."
"Copy."
I climbed into the passenger seat next to Caitlin.
She did not look at me as she pulled away from the curb.
She did not need to.
Her left hand on the wheel had a thin frost rim along the cuff of her sleeve.
She drove the speed limit because she was that kind of doctor under pressure, and I leaned my head against the cold window and tried to count breaths.
Somewhere above us, the eastern sky over Mercury Labs was lit up by the building's own emergency lighting.
I closed my eyes.
[Combat Complete. +1,200 PP. Total: 7,200.]
[Plasma Core / Force Mastery / Terror Scream — all witnessed by hostiles.]
[Threat designation Zoom: Wounded. Estimated recovery time: 48-72 hours.]
[Recommendation: Recover. Prepare. He will return.]
I dismissed all four lines.
Outside the window, Central City was awake at three in the morning the way it got awake when sirens had been going somewhere downtown for an hour. People in bathrobes on apartment balconies. A 24-hour deli with all its lights on. A taxi at the corner of Eighth idling at a red.
The lights were ordinary. The city was ordinary.
The next time we saw each other, Zoom had said.
I had bought myself a week. Maybe two.
It would have to be enough.
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