"Barry." Wells's voice came through the earpiece, quiet and precise. "Your tracker is showing you directly outside the Petersburg substation. Did you locate the metahuman?"
"Not exactly." Barry kept his pace even, eyes ahead. "I spotted Donahue when I passed the substation — looks like he left ten minutes early tonight, heading home on foot. There's someone on the street behind him. Following him. Deliberately staying in the shadows."
"Can you get a photo?"
"Working on it."
He pulled out his phone and angled it, but the man tracking Donahue knew what he was doing — he kept to the gaps between the streetlights, face turned away from any angle that might catch it clean. The shot came back blurred and useless.
"Night vision," Barry muttered. "I need a night vision camera. Where am I supposed to find one of those at—"
"I have one."
Barry glanced sideways. Jude's hand was already in his bag.
"Why do you have a night vision camera?"
"Is it so strange? Someone who works a street stall all day, goes home to an empty apartment, and has a lot of free time — is it really surprising that they accumulate unusual equipment?"
The bag produced what appeared to be a standard phone. Then, in Jude's palm, it stopped being one. A series of faint clicks — precise, mechanical, each one half a second apart — and by the time he handed it to Barry, it had become an ultra-high-definition camera with a night lens attachment. No transformation cost, no system expenditure. Just Satsuki's nanobots doing what they did, converting mass into utility with the quiet efficiency of something that had long since stopped finding this remarkable.
Barry took it without another word, hit his threshold speed, and was gone.
The route was roof-level — not because the golden lightning was guaranteed to draw attention at this hour, but because the probability was never zero, and in a city that was increasingly home to enhanced individuals with unpredictable perceptions, never zero was worth accounting for. He ran wide, came at the target building from an angle that put him behind and above the two figures, dropped his speed to something that read as a faint heat shimmer at worst, and got the shot.
"Can you run on walls now?" Jude's voice came through the earpiece, only faintly incredulous.
"I figured it out during a rescue a few weeks ago," Barry said, keeping his voice low. "If the initial upward velocity is high enough and the climb time is short enough, gravity doesn't have enough window to zero out the momentum. You just have to commit." A pause. "I also tried it on water. That one worked too, actually."
The photo went to Wells in seconds.
"Central City PD database," Wells said. "Nothing. No criminal record."
"That's not right," Barry frowned. "He was following someone."
"I know. Give me a moment." Keyboard sounds. Then silence.
Then longer silence.
"Doctor?" Barry's voice tightened. "Dr. Wells — are you still there?"
Nothing.
"Doctor?"
Cisco's voice replaced his, careful and measured.
"Barry. Caitlin and I just got back to the lab. I pulled the search results myself." A breath. "The man's name is Farooq Gibran. He's in the Central City Picture News archive — not the criminal database. He was one of the victims injured when the particle accelerator exploded."
The sentence landed with weight.
"He was struck by the energy surge, same as you. Critical condition, same as you. The difference—" Cisco paused. "He had two friends with him that night. They weren't hit directly. When Farooq went down, they tried to help — CPR, standard response. The moment they touched him, the current transferred. Both of them died on the scene."
Barry stood very still on the rooftop.
The reason for Wells's silence was not complicated. His guilt, whatever shape it had taken over the years, had just been handed a name and a face and a date.
"He hasn't committed any crimes yet," Caitlin said. "If he's following Donahue, he's building toward something — but he hasn't crossed the line. There may still be an opening."
"I'll talk to him." Barry was already moving. "Get him away from Donahue first."
He came back to street level and found Jude in the shadows — wearing a black robe and a white mask, tracking Farooq through the darkness with the unhurried patience of someone who had done this before.
Barry stared.
"Where did that come from?"
"Same place as the camera. Someone who spends all day at a street stall and has nothing to do at home sometimes accumulates a cosplay outfit suitable for scaring children at short notice. Is this really so surprising?"
"It's a bad way to behave as an adult."
"You're judging me while you run on walls and rivers."
Barry clocked Donahue's position, calculated the route, and moved. A flash of gold — there and gone. Donahue, walking the sidewalk under the impression that he was making his own way home, abruptly found himself standing at his own front door with no memory of the last thirty seconds and the distinct, unsettling sense that something had happened to time. He patted his own head, shrugged, and went inside.
On the street, Farooq Gibran stopped walking.
"Where did he go?"
He turned in a slow circle, scanning. The target had simply ceased to be present on the street. No car. No alley. No explanation.
Then the red lightning arrived and resolved into a person.
"Don't worry about Donahue," Barry said. "He's home. He's safe. I'm not here about him." He kept his voice level, easy — the voice of someone who wanted the next thirty seconds to stay calm. "I just want to talk, Farooq."
Farooq looked at him. His eyes were bloodshot, the skin beneath them bruised dark with sleeplessness or worse. He was trembling — not from fear, Barry thought. Something else.
"You're the Flash," he said. "I've seen you on the news."
"That's me."
"I don't care who you are." The trembling intensified. His hands, Barry noticed, were giving off a faint static — hair-thin arcs of electricity ghosting between his fingers and dissipating before they fully formed. "Stay out of my way."
"Farooq." Barry took one careful step forward. "I know what happened to you the night of the particle accelerator. I was there too. I know what it feels like to wake up changed and not understand why." He held his ground, voice quiet. "I want to help."
"You don't understand anything."
The words came out raw, and then the rest of it followed — too long held, too heavy to carry one more second.
"Do you have any idea what I saw when I woke up?" Farooq's voice cracked. "My friends were right there. They were trying to help me and the moment they touched me—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "They were trying to save me."
His whole body shook with it.
"I'm so hungry," he said. "All the time. I can't stop. I'm so hungry."