Joe's face came up on every screen in the cortex at 2:14 PM Tuesday.
Not the Joe I'd had coffee with that morning. A pixellated, low-res Joe, sweat-wet at the temples, jaw locked, shoulders pulled back against the chair he was tied to. Behind him, eight other CCPD uniforms were tied to a row of gym chairs. The lighting was bad. The walls behind them were the unmistakable pale green of an industrial corridor.
The frame held for two seconds.
Then a man-shaped hole stepped into shot.
"Flash."
The masked face filled the screen.
"One hour."
A timer appeared in the bottom corner. 60:00. Counting down.
"Mercury Labs. Sublevel Two. Bring nothing but yourself. Bring no one. Speed for ten lives. The math is generous."
He vibrated the mask close to the camera.
"You have my word. You also have my word that if I see anyone else on the perimeter, the math becomes one for one."
The screen went black.
The cortex held still for half a second.
Then everything happened at once.
Iris was on her feet. Barry was on his feet. Cisco's hands were already moving on the keyboard pulling up Mercury Labs floor plans. Caitlin was at the medical bench grabbing kit. I was at the back of the room and had not moved, because the part of my brain that handled emergencies had already split the room into the people it could help and the people it had to manage, and right now the person to manage was Jay Garrick, who was leaning in the doorway with both hands in his jacket pockets.
His face was exactly the right amount of horrified.
The eyes were doing the thing.
"My God."
Barry didn't look at him. "Cisco. Mercury Labs. Now."
"On it. Floor plans coming up."
"Iris. Stay here. Please. Stay with Cisco."
"Barry —"
"Please. Stay."
Iris stopped. Closed her mouth. Sat down at the second console. Started pulling up news feeds.
Jay stepped into the room.
"Barry. Listen to me. He'll kill you the second he gets your speed. You know that. You give him what he asked for, you don't walk back out of that building."
"I'm not giving him my speed."
"Then he kills Joe."
"I know that, Jay."
The name landed harder than Barry meant it to. He hadn't planned for that. Jay's face flickered for a quarter-second — the helpful-friend mask hitching — and then it was back, smoother than before.
"Then we think. We don't go. We — we plan something —"
"There's no time to plan."
"There's an hour."
"There's fifty-eight minutes. And in fifty-eight minutes I am going to be in the room with him whether or not I have a strategy. So tell me what you have, Jay, or get out of the way."
Jay's hands came out of his pockets.
He looked at me.
It was a quarter-second look, the same length of look he'd given me by the elevator three weeks ago, and there was no concerned-friend in it this time. There was a man checking which other piece on the board was about to move.
I gave him a flat face.
He went back to Barry.
"All right. All right. Let me think."
I crossed the room to Cisco.
"Mercury sublevel two."
"Pulling it up."
"Layout."
The screen filled. Cisco was already overlaying.
"Sublevel two is the old experimental wing. Six rooms off a central corridor. The central corridor has four entry points from the level above — main stairs, fire stairs east and west, and a freight elevator. There's a service hatch on the northwest corner that comes up under a parking garage. Mercury sealed it twelve years ago. The seal won't stop you."
"Hostage room?"
"From his frame, the wall behind Joe is the eastern interior wall. So they're in room four. Six off the central corridor. Room four is —" he tapped — "the second from the south end."
"What's the closest entry that doesn't open into the central corridor."
"Room four shares a wall with room three. Room three is mechanical. Empty mechanical. Room three has its own door from the east side maintenance corridor."
"That's my entry."
I felt Barry's eyes on me.
"What."
I turned to him.
"He told you to come alone. He didn't say anything about anyone else. The math he made specifies what happens if he sees a perimeter. I'm not a perimeter. I'm interior."
Barry held my look.
"And what — you go in, you free Joe, you walk them all out the maintenance corridor, while I'm distracting him in the central?"
"Yes."
"Without him noticing you."
"I phase. I have Night Vision. He doesn't know about either."
"He sees you in there, what then?"
"Then it's the math. One for one. So he doesn't see me."
Jay's voice from the back: "It's a terrible plan."
The four of us looked at him.
He'd said it the way the helpful-friend would say it. The face of a man trying to save lives. The hand-wringing was very good.
"He's a speedster, Harry. You can't sneak past him. You walk into that hallway he sees you the second you cross his peripheral vision."
"I'm not walking into the central. I'm coming up through the service hatch into mechanical and going through the wall into hostages without ever entering the central corridor."
"He'll hear you."
"He'll be fighting me in the central." Barry. Quiet. "He won't be listening for sounds in the wall."
Jay's eyes flicked to Barry.
He knew. He'd known since Barry's tone said Jay a moment ago. He didn't yet know how much Barry knew. He was running calculations.
I watched him decide not to push.
"Okay," he said. Soft. "Okay. I — I think it's still a terrible plan, but I don't have a better one. I — what can I do?"
"Stay here," Barry said. "Coordinate with Cisco. We'll take comms."
Jay nodded.
Reluctance very nicely played.
He moved to Cisco's right shoulder. Looked at the floor plans. Made a comment about a thing on the screen that I didn't catch because I'd already turned to Caitlin.
She had a small kit ready.
"Field dressings. Cold pack. Two adrenaline shots in case Joe goes shocky after."
"Copy."
She held the kit out.
I took it.
Our fingers touched at the handle.
A small ring of frost formed at the contact point.
Both of us pretended not to see it. She let go. I clipped the kit onto my belt.
"Forty-three minutes," Cisco said. "If we move now you're at Mercury in ten on foot via the back lots."
"Then we move."
I went to the door.
Barry followed.
Jay watched us go from Cisco's shoulder, and the look he gave my back as I went through the doorway was the look of a man making a decision about who got eaten first when this was over.
I took the look with me.
In the parking garage Barry caught my elbow.
"Harry."
"Yeah."
"He's going to send something at you he didn't tell us about."
"I know."
"Anything you want to use today, today's the day to use it."
I looked at him.
"Yeah."
"Don't die."
"Wasn't planning on it."
He let go.
We separated at the loading dock. Barry to the front of the building, an honest entry through the main stairs at fifty-nine minutes past the hour. Me into a service van Cisco had sent that was about to take me to the parking garage at the corner of Eighth and Holt, where I'd find a sealed service hatch behind the dumpster on the northwest wall, and where I'd start being a man Mercury Labs' security cameras hadn't seen entering a building.
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