The hospital had no power and too many people, which meant it had exactly the conditions Jude needed to move through it without anyone paying attention to him.
He folded the bicycle down and tucked it into his coat before he even reached the entrance, then merged with the crowd pushing through the lobby doors. In the dark — the backup generators were running at triage priority, leaving most corridors in amber half-shadow — an unfamiliar man drawing no attention was not a difficult thing to arrange. He let the flow carry him in.
His targets were straightforward: find Joe, find Iris. The room with the most police officers at the door would have Mark in it; the room with the most emotional tension radiating from it would have Barry Allen. Both men would lead him to both rooms.
Barry's fine, he reminded himself. Wells won't let him die in this. Too important to the plan. But he wanted to see it confirmed, and he wanted to check on Mark, and the hospital was giving him something else to think about besides both of those things.
The lobby was overwhelmed — not by the power outage alone, which the nursing staff could have managed, but by the sheer volume of wounded coming in from the accelerator site. About ten minutes had elapsed since the explosion, and the injured were still arriving: burn cases, shrapnel cases, blast trauma, ordinary people who'd been close enough to the Star Labs perimeter when the column of light went up. Nurses moved through the dark with flashlights, voices tight, cutting paths through the crowd for the gurneys.
Jude watched a stretcher go by and thought about the Horn of Abundance sitting inert in his inventory. Could have used that tonight.
He made himself stop thinking about it and took the stairs.
The hospital's not at breaking point, he decided, thinking it through as he climbed. It feels worse than it is because of the power outage and the crowd. During the Laughing Battle, casualty volumes like this were a Tuesday. Central City wasn't built for this yet. Once the metahuman population grew, the city's infrastructure — medical, emergency response, everything — would have to grow with it. Tonight was a preview of a very different city.
He found Joe exactly where he expected: standing outside a closed ward door with three other officers, the cluster of police presence making the room obvious from halfway down the corridor.
"— bullet didn't damage any organs, and you got the bleeding stopped in time. He's going to be fine, Joe."
One of the other detectives had a hand on Joe's shoulder. Joe was staring at the door.
"I know," he said. "That's not what's bothering me." He exhaled slowly. "Mark's been on the job for thirty years. After something like this, he's not coming back — not to active duty. He'll retire. I just wanted to get him through his last case clean, start to finish. Instead he ends up on an operating table."
"Those Mardon brothers went down with the plane," another officer said, jaw tight. "The explosion got them. Which means they can't stand trial, which means—"
"Which means the case closes with a whimper," Joe finished. "Yeah."
The other officer shifted. "Speaking of which, Joe — about Barry—"
Something in the man's voice made Joe go still.
He didn't get an answer in words. His colleague stepped slightly to the side, and behind him, backlit by the dim emergency lighting, was a young woman Jude did not recognize.
She had fair skin and long dark-gold hair and was very clearly in the middle of crying and trying not to.
"Dad."
Jude stared at her.
Wait.
He ran a rapid internal audit of everything he knew about Iris West. The show had given him a clear mental image: Joe West's daughter, which meant — given Joe West — she should look—
That is a blonde white woman.
He stared at the ceiling for a moment, recalibrating.
Right. Comics. Not the show. Comics-canon Iris West is white. Of course she is. This universe runs on comics-canon, not CW casting. He thought about the version of Iris he'd been picturing for the last three episodes and felt mildly betrayed by his own assumptions. I spent nine years watching that show. Her father is Joe West. In the show, Joe West is—
He let it go. This universe had its own rules. The woman in front of him was clearly Joe's daughter, was clearly here for Barry, and was clearly the Iris West of this particular timeline regardless of what she looked like.
Fair enough, he concluded. Moving on.
"Barry was struck by lightning," Iris was saying, her voice very low. "He's unconscious. I came as soon as I heard."
Joe pulled her in without a word. His arms went around her and stayed there, and Jude watched the man's face do the particular thing that faces do when someone is holding themselves together for someone else's sake. Joe West, in every version of every story, was the load-bearing wall of his family. He didn't get to collapse. He held on so other people could.
Jude looked away and opened the system shop.
He'd been meaning to purchase a healing ability for a while. Barry wasn't going to need it — Wells had that situation managed — but the hospital had dozens of patients tonight who didn't have a time-travelling speedster watching over them. He scrolled through the listings with the quiet, focused attention of a man doing a practical calculation.
Everyone in this building has family, he thought, watching a nurse hurry past with a flashlight. That's the part that doesn't change, whatever universe you're in.
His eyes stopped on one entry in the list.
There it is.