The hatch came up easier than I expected.
Twelve years of sealing didn't survive a Force Mastery pull at full grip, applied straight up against the rusted seam. The bolts came out of the concrete in a small puff of grey dust. I caught the cover before it clanged on the parking-garage floor and lowered it down silent.
Three rungs of a vertical ladder. Then a horizontal crawl that was tighter than the schematic suggested. Then another short drop into a room with the dead-air smell of a basement nobody had used since 2003.
Mechanical room. Mercury sublevel two, room three.
[Night Vision: Active.]
The Night Vision came up in the back of my head and the room resolved from black to grey-green. Six dead boilers. A water tank. A bank of breaker panels that hadn't been current with the building since the second Bush administration.
Through the wall to my right: room four.
I put my palm flat on the wall.
Phasing required focus. Not concentration — focus. The kind of attention you brought to picking a lock by feel. The wall was old plaster over wire mesh over cinderblock. Phasing through the cinder was the slow part. I'd set my entry point to be a section of wall behind the eastern row of chairs in room four — closest to the door I wasn't going through. The wall I'd come out of would put me directly behind Joe.
I checked my watch.
47 minutes left on the clock.
Barry was still at the front of the building doing whatever he was doing to draw eyes. Comms in my ear were silent on the cue we'd agreed: when Barry was three minutes from contact, Cisco would say ten. I had that long.
I started the phase.
It went through the plaster like wet paper. It hit the cinderblock and slowed.
I kept the focus.
Plaster and mesh on the other side. Then the inside of room four.
I came out of the wall behind Joe.
The room was bigger than the camera frame had suggested. Not six chairs in a row — nine chairs in two rows, the back row of three behind the front row of six. Joe was front row, second from the right. Ten hostages. Not nine. The camera had cropped one out.
The other thing the camera had cropped:
Two metas. Standing at the front of the room, between the hostages and the door. Backs to me. They'd been just out of frame in the broadcast.
One of them was tall. Suit. Blue — actual blue, a quiet pulse of pale blue light under the skin around his collarbones. Power dampener type. Earth-2 register.
The other was shorter. Wirier. Bald. He turned a small object between his fingers — a ring or a coin — and the air around him hummed at a frequency that made my back teeth ache.
I had not planned for two.
[Threat Assessment: 2 metas. Combat priority.]
[Power Dampener field: 4-meter radius.]
I hadn't moved. Joe hadn't seen me. I'd come through the wall behind him and his eyes were front. I had maybe four seconds before one of the metas turned to scan the room.
The dampener was the first problem.
If I went at him with phasing, his field would lock me solid wherever I was. I'd come out of the wall halfway, half in the cinderblock. Bad way to die.
I needed the dampener disabled before I phased again.
Force Mastery. Eight-meter range.
I lifted my right hand a half-inch from my hip. The blue-coated meta's collar reacted — his power-feel was reading something — and he started to turn. I caught the metal folding chair behind his ankles with Force Mastery and yanked it sideways three feet at speed. His foot caught the leg. He went down onto his back.
The hum-meta turned faster.
Plasma Core.
I'd never used it on a person. The cooldown after it was long. The cost was high. I was about to be down to a much shorter list of options for the rest of this fight.
I lit a small disc on my right palm — about the size of a tennis ball — and threw it underhand at the hum-meta's chest.
It didn't kill him. It was small enough not to. It hit his sternum and flashed and threw him backward into the wall. His head bounced. He went down.
The blue meta was already up off the floor. Power-dampener field reached for me.
I closed the distance instead of dodging.
The dampener field slammed into my powers like a wet curtain. Phasing went out. Force Mastery went out. Night Vision went out — the room flickered back to dim. Plasma Core went out. Unbreakable Warrior was already up, and Unbreakable Warrior was a fusion that had taken from a meta with field-resistance built in, which I'd only just learned about because the System's notification came up exactly as the dampener tried and failed to push Unbreakable down.
[Unbreakable Warrior: Field-resistant. Sustained.]
I had one second.
I used it to put my fist through his solar plexus.
He folded. The dampener field collapsed.
The room came back to me. Phasing, Force, Plasma — all back inside two seconds.
Joe was looking at me over his shoulder.
He'd turned during the fight. He'd seen the throw. He'd seen the disc of plasma. He'd seen the punch. His eyes were doing the math of a forty-eight-year-old detective who'd watched his colleague's adopted son fight gods on streets where Joe wasn't allowed to fire his gun.
He didn't say anything.
I ducked behind his chair. Cut his restraints with a knife from the kit on my belt.
"Northwest stairwell. Service hatch behind the dumpster. Cisco's waiting in a van."
"How many of you got me from."
"None of them. Joe. Move."
He moved.
He was up. His hands were on the next chair. He had Officer Park free in three seconds. Park got Officer Vance. The chain cascaded the way ten cops handle ten chairs when they have the muscle memory and the adrenaline.
I covered the door.
The hum-meta on the floor was breathing. The dampener-meta was breathing. Both were going to wake up with a story that wasn't about me, because I'd hit them both from angles they hadn't logged.
Above us, the building shuddered.
That was Barry.
Barry was in the central corridor. Barry was doing the thing he was supposed to do. The shudder I felt through the floor was Zoom hitting a wall hard enough to remind me what the building was made of, and by the way the shudder repeated three times in two seconds, Zoom was hitting Barry against the wall, not a wall against Zoom.
"Cisco."
Yeah.
"Hostages moving via the maintenance corridor. Two-minute estimate to the hatch. Joe's leading."
Copy. Van at the dumpster. Engine running.
"Status on Barry?"
Bad.
"How bad."
Sublevel two, central. He's holding. He's holding small.
"Copy. I'm going up after."
Harry —
"I know, Cisco. Going up."
Joe paused in the doorway of room three. The other hostages were already through. Joe looked back at me through the gap.
"Where are you going."
"After Barry."
Joe held my look for two full seconds.
"Don't be stupid in there."
"Wasn't planning on it."
"That's twice tonight you've said that. It hasn't worked yet."
He went.
I gave him ninety seconds. Counted them. Listened. The maintenance corridor stayed quiet. They were clear.
I phased through the wall of room three back into the central corridor.
Came out behind a row of stacked equipment crates that gave me sightline down the corridor to the open door of what had been a clean room twenty years ago.
Inside the clean room, Barry was on his hands and knees.
His suit was torn at the right shoulder. His mask was off — Zoom had pulled it off, not Barry. His face was bleeding from a cut over his left eye that was running into his mouth, and he was spitting blood onto the floor every time he exhaled.
Zoom stood in front of him.
The mask tilted.
"Where," the wet-machine voice said, "are the others."
Barry coughed.
"There — aren't — others —"
The mask leaned closer.
"Lying."
Then Zoom turned his head.
Slowly.
He turned it toward the corridor. Toward the stack of crates. Toward me. The eyeless mask looked at the equipment I was crouched behind, and the eyeless mask was seeing me through it because Zoom's senses didn't run on light.
He'd known I was there for a while.
He'd just been waiting to see what I'd do about Barry.
The mask cocked.
"There you are," he said. "Mr. Griffin."
Plasma Core and Force Mastery came up in the back of my head. Unbreakable was still on cooldown — the field-resistant push had drained it; I'd burned the longer fusion to get past the dampener and now I had everything else but the armor.
Zoom took one step toward me.
The corridor compressed.
He was a smear of blue between heartbeats.
I phased.
He hit the equipment crates where I'd been. They came apart in chunks of metal and the noise was the noise of a small car accident. I came out of the phase six feet to the left, against the corridor wall, and I had Plasma Core lit on my open right palm and Force Mastery already gripped on the wreckage of the crates behind me.
He turned to look at me.
The mask considered.
"Plasma," he said. The voice was almost interested. "And telekinesis. And phasing. You have been hiding from me, Mr. Griffin."
I didn't speak.
I lifted the wrecked crate behind me with Force Mastery and threw it at his head — three hundred pounds of bent steel at fifteen meters per second, the maximum I could push at this range.
He dodged it.
It went past him and through the wall of the clean room and into the room beyond.
I was already throwing the second crate.
He dodged that one too. But the dodge was a hair slower. I had his attention now. Both hands were busy reading my powers and the half-second of attention that cost him was a half-second Barry was using on the floor of the clean room to unlock his own muscles and move.
Barry got his hand around Zoom's ankle.
The world cracked.
Lightning — not Barry's, not Zoom's, both at once, two speedsters making contact and the contact channeling through the cleanroom floor in a forking discharge that put every overhead light in the corridor out — and Zoom screamed, an actual scream, and moved in a smear that took him through the back wall of the clean room and out, out, out, until I could no longer feel him as anything but a fading distortion in the air.
The corridor lights came back on yellow.
Barry was on the cleanroom floor with his hand still raised in the air where Zoom's ankle had been a second ago.
His chest was rising.
I crossed the corridor in three strides.
Knelt next to him.
His eyes were open. His pupils were huge. He wasn't tracking on anything in particular.
"Barry."
"Got him."
"Yeah. You got him. Hold still."
"Got — got him — touched him —"
"I know. Hold still. Cisco. Medical. Now."
Cisco's voice in my ear: Caitlin's at the front. Two minutes.
"Two minutes."
Barry's hand caught my wrist.
His grip was weak. But his eyes had found mine.
"Did Joe."
"Joe's out. All ten are out."
He let his head fall back.
His mouth moved.
I leaned closer.
"What."
"Saw his face," Barry whispered. "When the lightning hit. The mask — slipped. I saw his face."
I held very still.
"Whose face."
Barry's eyes closed.
"Jay's."
The lights in the corridor flickered once.
Settled.
Above us, somewhere in the building, the alarm system finally caught up with the last twenty minutes of its life and started to scream.
I picked Barry up in both arms and started walking him toward the front of the building.
In my ear, Cisco said: Harry. Harry, you have to get out of there. The building's going to —
"On my way."
"Now."
"On my way, Cisco."
I walked faster.
Behind me, somewhere on sublevel two, a door I had not opened opened by itself in a draft of moving air.
I did not look back.
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.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰