James shook her hand, "James Carter. Passing through."
"From where?"
"Metropolis this morning. Gotham originally."
Iris West. The name registered with the specific quality that names sometimes did when they were attached to people his meta-knowledge had filed as significant. Barry Allen's Iris. Future wife of the Flash, though Flash himself was still fairly new to Central City and neither of them was anywhere near that chapter of their story yet.
She was a journalist. Sharp, clearly. Willing to spend three weeks on a story about chemical runoff in residential neighborhoods.
"The industrial plant story," James said. "Do you have copies of the documentation?"
She narrowed her eyes. "Why?"
"Because if the documentation is solid and the story is solid, the plant killing it doesn't kill it permanently. It just means the Keystone Gazette isn't the right venue."
"I'm a Keystone Gazette reporter."
"You're a journalist," James said. "Which is different. The Gazette is where you work. It isn't the only place a well-sourced story about water contamination affecting residential areas can land."
Iris looked at him for a long moment. "Are you in media?"
"Investment. But I know people." He thought about Clark Kent, specifically, and the conversation they'd just had about access and results. "If your documentation holds up under a second look, I might be able to point you toward an outlet that won't kill it an hour before publication because someone made a phone call."
"You'd do that for a stranger in a diner."
"You'd spend three weeks documenting water contamination in neighborhoods that probably can't defend themselves against an industrial operator. We're both apparently just like that."
Something in her expression shifted. Not softened exactly. More like it recalibrated.
"The documentation is solid," she said. "I built it to hold up. I always build it to hold up."
"Then it'll find its way into print somewhere. That's how this works when the work is done right."
She picked up her phone again. Looked at it, then at him. "You said investment. What kind?"
"Various. I focus on identifying value before it's visible to the broader market."
"And you're in Keystone City for dinner."
"The pie is excellent."
Iris West looked at him and then laughed, a short, genuine laugh that had no performance in it. She moved her laptop to make room and nodded at the seat across from her with the ease of someone accustomed to turning strangers into temporary colleagues in diners.
"Tell me about Gotham," she said. "I've been thinking about pitching a series on how cities with high crime rates affect long-term business investment. First-person source from someone building something real there would be useful."
"That sounds like more than a casual dinner conversation."
"I don't really do casual." She opened a new tab on her laptop. "Is that a problem?"
"No," James said, and moved his plate across the aisle.
They talked for two hours. Iris West was exactly what she appeared to be, which in James's experience was rarer than it should have been. Sharp, persistent, genuinely committed to the idea that accurate information mattered and that the work of finding it was worth doing carefully.
She asked follow-up questions that showed she'd actually heard the previous answer. She pushed back when something he said didn't quite hold together and accepted correction gracefully when he pushed back on her in return.
By the time the dinner crowd had thinned to a handful of late-staying regulars, James had given her three genuinely useful on-record quotes about Gotham's investment climate and she had given him a clearer picture of Keystone City's industrial regulatory environment than most people who'd lived there for years would have been able to provide.
He also, carefully, mentioned Clark Kent's name in the context of the Planet's business coverage. Mentioned that the Planet had a history of running stories with serious environmental dimensions when the documentation was airtight.
Iris wrote the name down. "I know of him. His superhero coverage is good. Didn't know he touched environmental business stories."
"He's broader than the beat he's known for."
She nodded, filing the information with the efficiency of someone whose mental inbox was always organized. "I'll reach out."
James left the diner at seven thirty with Iris West's direct contact information and the specific, settled feeling that he'd just met someone who was going to matter. Not in a vague, intuited way. In the way his meta-knowledge confirmed, quietly, with the certainty of remembered story.
She would matter to Barry Allen first, and to the wider world in ways that hadn't started yet. But James had a number for her now and she had context for him, and in a world moving as fast as this one, that was how foundations got built.
He drove the final leg back to Gotham with the city's lights appearing slowly on the horizon, the skyline he'd been operating in for seventeen months now familiar in the specific way that only came from knowing a place at ground level, from its rooftops and its streets and its worst hours.
His phone showed three messages that had come in while he was driving. Two were business. One was from a number he didn't have saved, but the area code was Gotham, and the message was four words.
Device is getting warm.
Selina.
James read it once. Set the phone in the cupholder. Looked at the road ahead.
He had a lot to do when he got home.
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