Barry's hand was on the pulley chain when the television spoke.
"— we have just been informed by Star Labs personnel to evacuate the site immediately. The storm has caused a critical failure in the particle accelerator's primary cooling system. Officials are attempting an emergency shutdown, but as of this moment, there is no confirmation of a successful restart—"
The broadcast cut to static.
Barry stood very still, chain in hand, and looked at the screen. Then he turned and looked out the window instead — the high floor gave him a clear sightline over the rooftops toward the city center, toward the accelerator complex, toward the thing that was about to—
The light arrived before the sound.
It erupted from the Star Labs site like something that had been waiting underground for a very long time: a column of white fire and plasma that drove straight up through the storm clouds and kept going, punching a hole in the dark sky, illuminating the underside of the cloud layer in shades of gold and white. For a moment the city center was brighter than noon. Then the shockwave expanded outward in a ring, visible to the naked eye as it tore through the low clouds, lighting the sky in a moving wall of luminescence that rolled toward the suburbs and kept rolling, kilometers in every second.
The electromagnetic pulse followed immediately behind it.
Block by block, the city lights died. The blackout swept outward from the accelerator in a perfect circle — downtown first, then the surrounding neighborhoods, then the outer districts — until the entire lit skyline folded into darkness in the space of a few seconds, leaving only the burning column at the center and the fading fire-glow in the clouds above it.
Joe saw it from the highway.
He had Mark pressed against the passenger door with a folded jacket against his abdomen and was doing ninety toward the hospital when the sky behind him turned white. He checked the mirror. The column of light was visible even from here, reflecting off the wet road, the clouds above the city going incandescent.
Then the power went out across the skyline.
"Hold on," he told Mark, and pressed harder on the gas.
He almost didn't notice the fireball.
It appeared in the clouds to the northeast — the agricultural plane, still climbing into the storm when the electromagnetic pulse reached it. The circuitry overloaded in an instant. The fireball was brief and complete, the debris trailing down through the rain in pieces.
The Mardon brothers, Joe thought, distantly, and kept driving.
On the farm, Jude stood under the barn overhang and watched the sky.
Not in the direction of the falling plane. In the direction of the accelerator.
A pillar of light. An explosion. A shockwave rolling outward through the clouds.
He'd seen this before — or something that looked exactly like it, from the other side. The event that had registered in his home universe on the day Drake and Camilla disappeared. The same signature, the same scale, the same quality of wrongness — an energy release that didn't belong to any conventional physics he recognized.
The particle accelerator in this universe exploded and the energy crossed over into another universe?
He turned that over carefully.
But I arrived just before the explosion. And I'm standing here watching it happen right now.
The timeline folded back on itself as he thought about it. The explosion in his home universe had already occurred before he smuggled himself across. But he'd arrived in this universe before the explosion happened here. Which meant he'd witnessed the effect before the cause. Which meant—
Am I in two universes at the same time?
"System," he said. "Did you move my transit window deliberately? Push me back to before the explosion?"
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION Negative. This is a spacetime distortion phenomenon native to the Flash universe. The System did not alter your transit timeline. Please note: you possess an independent personal timeline, unaffected by fluctuations in the universal timeline. Your temporal continuity cannot be disrupted by external spacetime events. You are unique.
The phrase independent personal timeline tugged at something. He'd seen a notification like that before — the Laughing Battle, the business trip, the moment the system had taken stock of the universe's structure using his individual timeline as the baseline.
[Confirming world structure based on the timeline of the individual "Jude."]
He scratched the back of his head and stared at the burning sky.
"My head is so itchy," he muttered. "I feel like I'm growing a second brain."
Barry was still holding the chain when the light hit.
He had two or three seconds to understand what he was seeing — the accelerator, Wells's life's work, the future Wells had promised arriving faster than anyone imagined, all of it detonating in a single catastrophic moment — and then the metal rack in front of him stopped making sense.
The reagents in their containers were floating.
Not spilling — floating, rising gently upward against gravity, the colored liquids lifting free of their glass in slow, defiant arcs, suspended in the air around him as the electromagnetic pulse washed through the room and the air took on a charge that made every hair on his body stand at attention.
He had time to look up.
The ball lightning dropped through the open skylight on the chain he was holding.
The arc crossed the gap in a fraction of a second — golden, branching, filling his entire field of vision — and then it was through him, every nerve in his body firing simultaneously, the reagents crashing back down as the shock flung him backward into the metal rack and the world went dark.
When the police officers downstairs finally made it up to the analysis room, they found him lying in a spreading pool of chemicals, still and burned, the golden afterimage of the strike still flickering faintly beneath his skin like something that hadn't quite finished with him yet.
The hospital corridors ran on backup power — dim, amber-lit, the shadows thicker than usual. The emergency room had been bracing for casualties from the moment the lights went out across the city.
The officers came through the doors fast, gurney rolling, voices clipped.
"Direct lightning strike," one of them said to the doctor who met them at the entrance. "He was in the precinct, rooftop analysis room—"
"He's not dead?" The doctor looked at the young man on the gurney. The burns were severe, the vitals wrong in several directions at once.
Then he saw it — a pulse of gold moving under the skin of Barry's forearm, a current that shouldn't have been there, that didn't match any presentation he'd ever seen in a lightning trauma case. It branched and flickered and was gone in half a second.
He blinked. Looked again.
Nothing.
"Get him into bay two," he said. "Now."
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