-Broadcast-
Barry was gone before Gwen finished processing the fact that he had taken off his glasses.
The red arcs that had been building around him discharged all at once, and then he was a streak of red lightning going out the door — moving fast enough that the displaced air came a half-second after him, scattering papers from the desk, knocking the chair sideways, rearranging the smaller objects on the shelves by the simple fact of his passing. The door had not been fully open and he went through it anyway.
Gwen crossed to the window. Below, on the campus path, a red blur was threading between the streetlights toward the library building. She watched it detour twice — once around a pole-mounted camera, once around a building entrance with a security panel — before it disappeared through a side door.
He had mapped the surveillance coverage and was running around it on instinct.
That classmate, she thought, has been at this longer than I knew.
Borsalino stood in the middle of the disordered room and considered it. The boy had left in a hurry, as one did when one's idol had just watched a personal demonstration. It was sweet, in the way that someone young being eager was always somewhat sweet.
Then he became a golden halo.
From Gwen's perspective at the window, the room rearranged itself. The papers returned to the desk. The chair righted. Barry's display cabinet opened and the Spider-Woman figurine settled back onto its shelf, correctly positioned, facing outward. The signed newspaper — the one Barry had been holding when the lightning first came — ended up on the bedside table, placed with the care of someone who understood that things people treasured should be treated as treasures.
The golden halo slowed, and Borsalino was leaning against the window frame with a cigarette box in hand.
He lit one. The packaging was distinctive — dark blue with a gold-yellow band, the twelve-figure crest of the Twelve Generals series running along the bottom edge. Gwen recognized it: one of the top-end lines that had come out of a company that had, for reasons of commercial instinct, named its premium tiers after the twelve admirals who had made the Holy Roman Empire's peace possible. The Kizaru variant was in the top three for sales, which said something about either public taste or effective marketing.
The wretched old man was smoking a cigarette that had been named after the wretched old man.
Gwen observed this without commenting on it.
"You girl," Borsalino said, extending the box toward her. "Do you smoke? I don't have many left."
"I don't," she said. She had never liked the smell, and the expensive spice-blend in these particular cigarettes was not enough to fix that about them.
She looked at him more carefully. She had been comparing him to Barry in the back of her mind since arriving — trying to locate a family resemblance as explanation for his presence — and she had found nothing. Barry had been at Central City University for three years without any relatives appearing. If he had an uncle, that uncle's absence during the period when Barry had needed one most raised its own questions.
She had heard about Barry's background from the ambient current of campus gossip, which she had not sought out but which had reached her anyway. His father had been convicted of his mother's murder when Barry was small. Barry had testified that there was someone else in the room — described lights, described movement — and the court had not believed a child, and his father had gone to prison, and Barry had grown up under a name that other people used as an insult.
If there had been an uncle, there would have been a different story. There wasn't, which meant there wasn't.
"Are you actually his uncle?" she said.
Borsalino flicked the ash from his cigarette and considered the question with the expression of someone who has many things they could say and is deciding how many of them to say. "Not by blood," he said finally. "By proximity and circumstance."
"Then what's your actual name?" Gwen said. "You gave Barry's name at The Liberty. I'd like to know the real one."
He looked at her with the amused patience of someone who expects to not be believed. "Borsalino," he said.
She waited for the punchline.
There was no punchline.
She watched the microscopic things — heartbeat, pupil response, the slight tension that entered a face when it was managing a lie — and found none of them. He had said it the way people said true things: without investment, without performance.
She filed this in the category of problems she did not currently have the resources to resolve.
In school, she had spent at least three years memorizing the names of the twelve admirals in sequence, because they appeared on standardized tests with regularity and because historians considered them collectively to be the structural foundations of the current era — the Twelve Knights of the Round Table, some scholars called them, because each one had contributed something the empire could not have been built without. Their names were protected by regulation. No citizen could be registered under a name identical to any of the twelve without an official dispensation.
The old man in front of her smoked Kizaru-brand cigarettes. He had also just claimed to be Borsalino.
Gwen had decided to believe the simplest explanation: he was a man who was deeply fixated on Admiral Borsalino, had adopted the name as his own, and had apparently convinced himself it was real. This was not common behavior but it was within the range of human possibility.
"That name is too conspicuous," she said. "I'm calling you Old Man Yellow instead."
Borsalino did not object. He took a second cigarette from the box.
His Observation Haki flagged the approach before the sound of it reached the room.
A beat later, Barry was back, standing in front of them both with the sketch in his hand and a different expression than he had left with. He had been gone perhaps four minutes.
"I found it." He set the sketch on the table. A new line had been added in pencil — a street grid overlay, with the tunnel's position marked relative to the university and the river. He had been very precise about it.
"If I'm reading this right," he said carefully, "that tunnel runs under the old port district." He paused. "It's Joker Gang territory."