We moved on Jay on the eighteenth.
Not the conversation I'd expected, in the end. Cisco had built a containment frame at the back of the breach room — a circular floor-array of pulse emitters, a ring he'd been sketching in his notebook for two weeks under a code name nobody but him had asked about. The ring generated a Speed-Force-suppression bubble inside an eight-foot radius. It would hold a mid-tier speedster for about ninety seconds, by his estimate.
Barry led him into it on a pretext.
Jay walked into the ring smiling about a problem in the breach detector calibration that Cisco had genuinely needed help with, because the way you got a paranoid speedster to walk into a Speed-Force-suppression cage was to give him a problem he was good at solving and an audience he wanted to impress.
The ring lit.
His face did three things in a quarter-second.
The third one was his real face.
Caitlin had a hypo of meta-dampener-class sedative at the door. She crossed in from his blind side, ducked the first instinctive swing he didn't have the speed left to land, and put it in his neck.
He folded.
We had ninety seconds. We needed twelve.
Cisco closed the secondary containment around him and locked the ring.
Jay was in the Pipeline by lunch.
Joe found out at 2 PM.
Joe yelled for forty minutes.
Then he sat down with Barry in the cortex, hand on Barry's shoulder, and said, You did it the right way. I would have done it the wrong way. You did it the right way. And Barry had let him say it.
Cisco sent me the we are okay text at 2:47.
I drove out to the warehouse training site that night and stood inside the cinder-block walls and let myself breathe for the first time in a week.
---
Zoom went silent.
That was the strange part.
I'd expected an immediate retaliation — a hostage push, an attack on Joe, something to underline the next time we see each other he'd promised in the Mercury corridor. Instead the city was quiet. Cisco's monitors registered no Earth-2 incursions for three days, then five, then a full week. The breach detector at Evans and 38th flickered once on the 22nd and didn't flicker again.
It was either a wounded animal denning up or an animal cooking a much larger meal.
We assumed it was both.
We used the time.
Cisco sealed Jay's containment cell with three additional layers of suppression. He spent four hours a day, every day, refining the design. Jay refused to speak to any of us. He sat against the back wall of the cell with his knees up and his eyes on the floor. He ate the food we passed through. He drank the water. He slept. He did not perform anymore. The mask had come off at the moment the ring had lit, and he had not put it back on.
I went down once.
I stood at the wall of the cell and did not say anything for a minute.
He looked up.
His eyes were grey. The same grey they'd always been. The face under them was the face of a tired man in his mid-forties who had run out of the energy to lie.
"Mr. Griffin."
"Hello."
"You knew."
"For some time."
"Since when."
"Since before you stepped through the breach into our cortex. I knew the day you arrived."
He nodded slowly.
"You played it well."
"You played it better than I expected."
"That's two professional compliments. Should I expect a third."
"No."
He smiled.
The smile was a small one, almost wry, the kind of smile a man gives when the game is over and he respects the man on the other side of it.
"What was it that gave it away," he asked.
"You're not going to leave this cell, Garrick. I'm not telling you my methods."
"Mm."
"Goodbye."
"Mr. Griffin."
I paused.
"You have," he said, "no idea what is coming next. Even now. And by the time you have an idea, it will be too late."
I held his look.
"Then that's mine to deal with."
"Yes," he said. "It is."
I went up the stairs.
I did not go back down.
---
Caitlin trained four times a week.
We met at her apartment on Mondays and Thursdays. The other two sessions she did alone, and texted me afterward what she'd accomplished. By the eighth session she could put a snowflake on a coaster from twelve feet away. By the twelfth she could ice a glass of water into a slushy at six. By the sixteenth she could form a small handheld shield of layered ice, six inches across, that held shape for forty seconds without supplemental concentration.
She told the team about her abilities on the twenty-second.
She told them in a controlled demonstration in the cortex, with Cisco in the room and Barry in the room and Joe in the room. She iced a coffee cup. She unfroze it. She made a snowflake on the conference table. She let the snowflake sit there and not melt for two minutes, which was the point — that she could not let it melt, that she had control over both the doing and the not-doing.
She did not say my name in the demonstration.
She said I've been working with someone once, and that was enough.
Joe nodded at me from across the room when she said it.
It was the first time he'd nodded at me in a week.
---
The gifts I had not planned.
They happened because I'd been reading Iris's website on the morning of the twenty-third looking for something specific about a meta-name she'd published, and a sidebar story had caught me — a roundup of unusual gift suggestions for the techie in your life — and I'd realized I had not considered any of it. Christmas was thirty-six hours away. Joe was speaking to me. Caitlin was in a controlled-friendliness phase. Cisco was a co-conspirator. Barry was something I didn't have a name for. They had all of them, in different ways, kept me alive in this last month.
I went out.
I bought four things.
Barry got a pair of running shoes I'd had to ask the salesman three questions to confirm were the right ones — distance-runner soles, gel layer, a polymer outer the salesman had said was new this year, very forgiving on impact.
Cisco got a vintage solder kit I'd found at a hobby shop on Beaufort. The seller had inherited it from a grandfather who'd worked at a radio factory in the seventies. The handles were turned wood. The case was steel. Cisco's eyes when he opened it on Christmas Eve had a specific moisture that he was going to deny if anyone called him on it.
Caitlin got cold-resistant gloves. The kind they made for extreme-environment researchers — fleece-lined, three layers, with a phase-change material on the inside that absorbed a person's body heat and held it. She'd looked at them at the Christmas Eve gathering at her apartment for a long beat before she'd looked up at me and said Harry. Quiet. She had not said anything else. She had taken the gloves into her bedroom and left them on her dresser and come back to the living room without them, and that was the whole conversation, and it had been enough.
Joe I didn't know how to handle.
He was at the gathering at Caitlin's. He'd brought a casserole. He was wearing the Christmas tie his daughter had bought him three years ago, which he'd worn every Christmas Eve since. His arms were no longer crossed when he spoke to me.
I didn't have a gift for him.
I'd looked. I hadn't found anything that wasn't either too small to bridge what was between us or too presumptuous in a direction he hadn't given me permission for.
I'd written a card instead.
I gave it to him at the door on the way out.
"For what."
"Read it later."
"Harry —"
"Later, Joe. It's not a long one."
He put it in his coat pocket.
He texted me on Christmas morning.
Three words.
Card received. Thanks.
I sat at my kitchen counter with my phone in my hand and a cup of coffee going cold in front of me and read the three words three times.
It was a small movement. The smallest possible movement, in fact, in the direction of we are not yet okay but we are talking. The card had said one sentence. Thank you for the second chance. — H. I had drafted versions of it that were longer. I had thrown all of those out. Joe responded to small things done well.
I made breakfast.
I ate it standing at the counter.
I worked out at noon on the apartment-building fitness room equipment that nobody used on Christmas. I ran four miles slow. I lifted weights I could lift without thinking. I got home at two and showered.
The team had invited me to Caitlin's for Christmas dinner.
I had said no.
I had said no because I knew that if I went I would spend the evening at the edge of a room of people who had stopped being suspicious of me only forty-eight hours ago and who did not yet have the reflex of including me by default. Iris would talk to me first because Iris was kind. Eddie would talk to me second because Eddie knew his own debt. Cisco would migrate over because Cisco was Cisco. Barry would orbit. Joe would maintain the distance Joe was still maintaining.
Caitlin would do the work of being the host.
I would feel my own absence in the room more sharply than I would feel my own presence.
I had said no, and they had let me say no, which was a small grace.
I spent Christmas Eve on my apartment roof.
It was cold. The temperature had dropped to twelve degrees that afternoon and the wind was coming in off the river hard enough that my breath condensed in front of me and stayed condensed for two seconds before the wind took it. I was wearing the coat Caitlin had told me to wear more often, the one that actually keeps you warm, and the gloves I'd bought myself the same week I'd bought hers, and a watch cap pulled down past my ears.
The fireworks started at midnight.
I'd forgotten Central City did fireworks for Christmas. I'd remembered for New Year's. Christmas was apparently a smaller display, a five-minute thing on the pier they did because the mayor's wife liked it. The first volley went up over the river and broke into a green willow and a chrysanthemum, and the green light walked across the apartment buildings on the river side and made the windows on those buildings briefly green.
I watched.
I did not feel especially cold.
I did not feel especially warm.
I felt the specific quiet that came from a season that had not killed me, with people in it who had not killed me, in a city that had stopped being an unfamiliar place a long time ago.
The fireworks ended.
I went downstairs.
Made tea.
Sat in the chair by the window and watched the streetlights and the slow occasional car.
My phone buzzed at 12:47.
Cisco.
merry christmas you weird bastard
I looked at it.
Merry Christmas, Cisco.
you sure you don't want to come over. cait made too much.
I thought about it.
I thought about it longer than the previous three hours of sitting at the window.
I'll come for dessert.
OH THANK GOD i was running out of jokes.
Be there in twenty.
I put the tea down.
Got my coat.
Went down the stairs at a pace that was not fast but was not slow either.
The cold air on the street was the same cold air I'd been on the roof in, and the city was the same city, and the man walking to a friend's apartment at one in the morning on Christmas to eat a slice of pie with a group of people who had spent the last month deciding whether or not to keep him was the same man who had taken nineteen powers from criminals over the course of a year and was about to have to figure out how to live in a room of people who had decided to keep him anyway.
Both of those things could be true.
I started the car.
I drove the speed limit.
A block from Caitlin's I caught a red light and sat at it with my hands on the wheel and the heater finally kicking in, and somewhere across the city Jay Garrick sat in a cell underneath a building that the city did not know existed, and somewhere across a wall the city did not know existed Zoom was either healing or planning, and tomorrow morning Cisco's monitors would either ping or not ping.
The light went green.
I drove the rest of the way to Caitlin's.
The light over her front steps was on.
I went up.
I knocked.
The door opened.
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.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰