Inside S.T.A.R. Labs, Cisco's forehead was damp.
His fingers hadn't stopped moving since the call came in — flying across the keyboard, navigating the city's power grid infrastructure with the particular focused desperation of someone trying to disarm something while it was already going off. The progress bar on his screen was moving. It was almost there. Twelve seconds. Ten.
Then the screen went dark.
Not flickering. Not a rolling outage. Every piece of electronic equipment in the lab extinguished at once, as if someone had simply decided that electricity was no longer a concept that applied here. The overhead lights went with them. The backup systems went with them. For a moment, S.T.A.R. Labs existed in complete darkness.
Wells looked up at the now-blank surveillance monitors.
"It's too late," he said.
The emergency lighting kicked in after a beat — a separate system, dedicated generator, fully isolated from the main grid. Scattered amber and white panels came alive along the corridors and above the workstations, casting long shadows across the equipment. It was enough to move by. It wasn't enough for much else.
"Cisco." Jude's voice came through the comms. "Everything's gone dark out here. Farooq hasn't stopped. How long until the power cuts?"
"It already cut." Cisco's jaw was tight. "The lab is down. The city is down. He drained the entire Central City grid — the main supply, the backup generators, all of it. The man is a walking nuclear battery. I genuinely want to know what his cells are doing right now because it should not be physically possible."
"Don't rush on the generator restart. Take your time."
"I'm not rushing," Cisco said, which was not entirely true.
Jude looked out at the substation yard. Central City's skyline had gone flat black — no streetlights, no building windows, no traffic signals. The particle accelerator explosion had done something similar once. The city knew how to go dark; it didn't make the sight less unsettling.
What made it more unsettling was that Farooq had stopped absorbing.
He was turning around now, all that stored energy humming in his body like a pressurized system looking for release, and his eyes had found Barry.
"He's going to go off," Jude said quietly into the comms.
Barry swallowed. He didn't have a gun — hadn't retrieved one for Jude either, and wasn't going to; lethal force against someone who hadn't killed anyone yet wasn't the call he wanted to make. The Speed Force gave him options that didn't require a trigger. He just needed to find a steel pipe, or something equivalent, and a clear angle.
Run. Throw. Don't be the projectile.
"Don't panic," he told himself, which was something people said when they were, in fact, panicking. "Find the pipe. Run the numbers. You've done harder things than this."
He started running.
The golden current swept Jude off his feet and deposited him outside the substation gate before Jude had fully processed the intention.
"Jude — go back to the lab. His discharge would kill you. I can take one hit. You cannot."
"I'm glad you're thinking about my safety." Jude straightened his robe. "I'm less glad about the lone wolf energy you're putting out right now."
"I'm not—"
"You are." Jude pulled the backup earpiece from his ear and held it out. "More importantly: when Farooq finishes recharging, his next move is Wells. The lab isn't safe either. Make sure they're ready to move — if you go down, we can't afford to lose the whole team in one night."
Barry's expression darkened. He took the earpiece without argument and put it in.
"Stay connected," Jude said. "And don't get hit again."
Barry nodded once and was gone — a streak of gold light crossing the yard and vanishing into the transformer grid.
Jude pulled out his phone. The lab's monitoring systems were offline, but the nanobots were still on site, still transmitting; he routed the feed directly and watched the substation in real time from thirty meters away.
He called the lab.
Cisco had already found the isolated generator and brought it back up — partial power, key systems only, enough. Caitlin answered.
"Jude? Did Barry take the earpiece?"
"Yes. Listen — if comms go dark again, don't wait for them to come back. Get out of the building. Don't be noble about it."
"Mr. Jude." Wells's voice arrived from somewhere off Caitlin's screen, measured and almost wry. "We are not helpless. I have spent years being averse to weapons in this laboratory, but I am not so principled that I would do nothing in a genuine emergency." A brief pause. "Cisco, you're back just in time. We need to modify some tranquilizer delivery systems. We have raw materials. Caitlin, start on the compound."
"On it," Caitlin said.
In the yard, Jude's phone showed a burst of blue-white.
Farooq had released.
The discharge bloomed outward from his body in sustained arcs, covering a radius of several meters in crackling, branching electricity — less a targeted attack than an ambient field, the energy he'd spent weeks absorbing now expressing itself all at once. Moving through that without contact would require knowing exactly where the edges of the field were at any given instant.
Barry knew. He was already moving at the field's perimeter, a golden blur circling in tight, controlled patterns — close enough to assess, far enough to stay out of arc range. Looking for something.
There.
A rusted steel pipe, half-buried under a equipment housing, visible in the nanobot feed. Barry spotted it from his angle, adjusted his vector, and pulled up short.
He was holding it. Jude hadn't even seen him pick it up.
The gold lightning stilled. Barry stood at the edge of the discharge field, steel pipe in hand, looking at Farooq Gibran one more time.
"Farooq." His voice was quiet. Whatever else happened tonight, he was going to try. "You still have your life. We can still help you. That doesn't have to be over."
Farooq stared at him. His whole body was still humming, the field still active, the light still casting hard shadows across the transformer yard. When he finally spoke, the rage in his voice had aged into something heavier.
"My life ended with Jack and Dalia." He said the names carefully, like they were something that could still be damaged. "I woke up and I was a murderer. And then I turned on the TV and found out that I was a meta."
His jaw tightened.
"I watched other people with abilities rob banks and hurt people. And I thought — this thing isn't only a curse. It can be pointed. It can be used." He looked down at his hands, at the arcs still running between his fingers. "So I learned. I practiced. I spent months teaching myself to control it."
He looked back up at Barry.
"I didn't come here to become a criminal. I came here to make one specific person answer for what he did."
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