The hotel room was small, the Wi-Fi was functional, and the TV worked. Jude had stayed in worse.
Long-term rental tomorrow, he told himself, settling onto the edge of the bed with his laptop. Tonight, news. Figure out where Drake and Camilla landed.
Information-gathering had become routine over the past few years — one of those skills that develops not through study but through necessity. Local newspapers for major events, TV news for timeline calibration, and when he had enough context about a story's plot beats, the headlines usually told him exactly where in the sequence he'd arrived. It wasn't glamorous intelligence work. It was pattern-matching, and he'd gotten reasonably good at it.
He turned on the TV.
"— Dr. Wells announced that the first particle collision experiment at the accelerator will begin on schedule tonight—"
Jude stared at the screen.
"Damn it."
He knew what the particle accelerator meant. He'd watched enough of the show to know what tonight was: the night the Flash was born. Which meant it was also the night the particle accelerator exploded.
His mind went immediately to Drake and Camilla.
If they'd settled in this version of Central City — and given that the accelerator's public launch was the city's biggest event in years, the kind of spectacle that drew tourists — there was a real possibility they'd gone to watch. The observation deck. The press event. The wrong side of a shockwave.
What if I just stopped it?
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION The birth of "The Flash" is a foundational event in this universe's timeline. Interference with the particle accelerator explosion will constitute unauthorized timeline disruption. Detection will be immediate. You will be forcibly deported and barred from re-entry. Additionally: you are not the only party monitoring tonight's event. Attempting to act unilaterally against an entity of that caliber would be inadvisable.
Jude exhaled slowly. Right. The Reverse Flash was somewhere in that building, running the whole operation, and had been for years. Whatever Jude's abilities were, picking a fight with a time-travelling speedster to prevent an event the universe considered mandatory was not a winnable scenario.
"Fine," he muttered. "I'll find the Drakes the hard way."
He combed through the rest of the news. Nothing jumped out — no incidents involving unknown individuals, no hospital admissions that matched, no police reports with the right details. If Drake and Camilla had arrived in this world, they were doing so quietly.
Which left the city's records databases.
They'd almost certainly have no legal status here — same situation Jude was in. That meant a limited set of outcomes: homeless, working off the books, or eventually flagged by the police. All of those were searchable, given time. But the sooner he built his own paper trail, the better. He'd need an identity if he was going to operate here for any length of time, and his computer skills worked the same in every universe.
He opened his laptop with the quiet confidence of a man about to do something impressive.
He closed it six minutes later.
"Why is it still paper?"
He sat there for a moment with his hands over his face. He'd checked everything — the precinct records system, city hall, the county archive — and the answer was the same across all of them: full digital implementation was still months away. Everything was physical files and carbon copies. His advanced intrusion skills had nowhere to intrude.
I could break in physically, he considered. But that's a whole other problem.
He'd circle back to the identity question. For now, there was nothing more he could do from a hotel room.
Out on the street, the evening was already picking up the particular restless energy of a city on the verge of something big. The accelerator launch had pulled people out — tourists, journalists, locals who'd been following the Star Labs coverage for months. Jude moved through it, thinking about safe houses and long-term rentals and how to track two people in a city of hundreds of thousands without any functioning records access.
Reverse Flash is running the whole show tonight. Better to stay well clear of Star Labs entirely.
He was still turning that over when two men walked past him on the sidewalk. One was older, Black, broad-shouldered, moving with the unhurried confidence of a man who'd seen most things. The other was white, younger, carrying a coffee cup named Mark with the grip of someone who needed it.
Jude slowed. The older man was familiar in a way he couldn't immediately place.
"Do we really have to go out just the two of us?" Mark was saying. "We should at least pull a couple guys from the precinct."
"Not yet." The older detective shook his head. "We're not even sure Barry's right about this. We follow the lead ourselves first. If it holds up, then we ask for backup."
"Fine, but we could at least take a car—"
"Already arranged. We've got ground to cover tonight."
Jude fell into step half a block behind them, far enough back to be invisible, close enough to hear.
I know who you are, he thought, looking at the older man's back. I just can't place it yet.
He followed them to the car. The engine turned over, and as it pulled into traffic, Jude found his own way to keep pace — not difficult, given city stop-lights and his general familiarity with how trailing worked in practice.
Through the window, Mark's voice drifted back: "So where exactly are we going?"
"Farm country," Joe said. "East side, probably."
"How'd he narrow it down to a farm?"
"The feces in the tire tracks." Joe sounded like a man who had long since made peace with the sentences his job required him to say. "Barry tested it. Cow dung."
"...Of course it was."
"Tetramycin," Joe continued. "It's an antibiotic compound used in cattle feed — prevents livestock from getting sick. Barry says it shows up in the dung of cows that have been fed with treated grain. Not every farm uses it."
Mark was quiet for a moment, working through it. "So we're not looking at every farm in Central City."
"Four candidates. Barry narrowed it down to four. He's confident we'll find a Mustang GT500 with a blown tire and bullet holes in the bodywork sitting in one of those four barns." Joe patted his partner on the shoulder. "I told you — you'll be home for dinner."
"Okay. Let's go."
While Joe and his partner worked overtime, Barry Allen was already across town.
He'd arrived at the Star Labs press event early — which was, for Barry, something close to a miracle — and he hadn't come alone. The young woman beside him had linked her arm through his with the comfortable ease of long familiarity, her hair catching the plaza lights as they walked. She was laughing at something he'd said, which made him slightly pink around the ears.
Iris West had that effect on bookworms.
"So how was the trip?" she asked, steering them toward the entrance. "Did you actually find anything interesting out there, or were you just looking for an excuse to annoy my dad?"