"Locked room," Barry said. "Doors and windows sealed from the inside, key broken off in the lock. The restaurant was the Darbinyan family's private stronghold — they'd replaced everything with bulletproof glass. Completely airtight."
"You said meta," Cisco said.
"Right. Because otherwise it would just be a very expensive locked-room mystery novel." Barry exhaled. "More than a dozen victims, all killed by poison gas. No delivery equipment on site. No canisters, no dispersal system, nothing that could store or release that volume of compound in an enclosed space."
"Ventilation?"
"We checked the ducts, pulled the overnight surveillance on the system, sent a camera rig through the whole network." Barry shook his head. "Clean. Whoever did this didn't use the vents. Which means either they can turn invisible, or—"
"Invisibility and poison gas are completely unrelated abilities," Caitlin said. "That would be a combined power set."
"Doesn't feel right," Cisco agreed. "Not the same category of meta."
"And here's the thing." Barry leaned forward. "The victims weren't all killed simultaneously. They were taken out one by one, sequentially, while sitting at the same table together. Like someone was working through the room in order."
Cisco went quiet for a moment.
"A meta who can direct poison gas on a targeted basis." He reached for his coffee. "That's molecular-level precision."
"Someone is dead, Cisco."
"I know, I know. I'm saying it's impressive is all—"
"What were the specific compounds?" Caitlin cut in.
"Don't have it yet. I came straight here." Barry rubbed the back of his neck. "I took lung tissue samples from two of the victims. I need to get back and run the analysis."
"Go," Wells said. "We'll work the meta angle from here. Send us whatever the biopsy produces."
Outside, Jude had the monitor running on the tablet balanced against his cart's handlebars, watching the S.T.A.R. Labs feed with mild interest.
"Am I the only one who finds the bulletproof glass genuinely funny?" he said.
Satsuki's headlights blinked twice.
"You're imagining them desperately shooting at the windows while the gas fills the room."
"They installed it themselves." Jude shook his head. "For security."
Some fates were truly something.
Barry left the lab intending to go directly back to the precinct, made it approximately forty meters down the road, and stopped.
The food truck was parked on the corner.
Buying something won't take long.
He jogged over.
Jude set down his phone. "Skipping out on work again?"
"I'm on my way back, actually." Barry scanned the cart. "Is that pizza?"
"Sausage. New product." Jude slid a slice onto paper. "I do other flavors too, but if you have any Italian colleagues, don't mention my name when you're eating those."
"I have a pretty good idea what the other flavors are."
"Smart man." Jude held out the slice.
Barry took it, then stopped. His eyes had drifted to the phone Jude had set on the cart's ledge. Something on the screen caught him.
"Can I see that?"
"This?" Jude handed it over. "Don't get excited — ever since the department went public with the meta announcement, there's been a flood of videos online. Half of Central City has apparently developed superpowers in the last two weeks. Most of it is people with phone cameras and too much free time."
"Sure, but—"
Barry was watching the clip.
A bald man in prison clothes, back to the camera, walking slowly under streetlights. Then, in the space between one frame and the next, his body dissolved — unmistakably, completely, and without any special effects budget — into a thin stream of green smoke that drifted away into the dark between the trees.
Barry's mouth did something that wasn't quite a word.
He recovered. "This is the guy. This is the gas meta from the restaurant." He looked at Jude. "I was just in the lab trying to figure out how someone could move poison gas through a sealed room with no equipment, and you have the answer on your phone."
"Social media," Jude said pleasantly. "It's a remarkable thing."
"Where did this come from?"
"My group chat. Someone filmed it on the street, posted it to a couple of platforms—it's been up for a day at least. The problem is it's sitting in a pile of a hundred other videos of people pretending to have powers." He tilted his head. "You'd have to know what you were looking for."
Barry stared at the clip one more time, then handed the phone back, grabbed his pizza, and started moving.
"Caitlin," he said into his earpiece, already accelerating. "The gas meta isn't controlling gas — he is gas. He can transform. I need you to run the biopsy samples for any trace of organic compounds in gaseous state — DNA markers, anything biological that shouldn't be in lung tissue." He paused. "Yes, I'm serious. I'll explain when I get there."
He ended the call.
And then — because the universe had a particular sense of timing — he glanced left out of pure habit as he passed the mall entrance.
Tall. Thin. Bald, with the particular shape of a head that matched what he'd just been watching on a phone screen. The prison clothes were gone, replaced by a dark trench coat, but the build was unmistakable.
Barry stopped walking.
That can't actually be him.
His feet had already turned.
"Cisco, Caitlin—" he murmured, low. "Something's come up. Keep running the analysis, I'll check in."
Back inside the lab, Wells smiled at something Cisco said, excused himself from the hall, and moved into the corridor.
The moment the door closed behind him, the smile left his face completely. What replaced it was something older and quieter and considerably colder — the expression of a man who had been performing warmth for fifteen years and found it easy to stop.
He opened the hidden room off the corridor. Rolled inside. The door sealed behind him.
Three seconds.
A bolt of crimson lightning erupted from the side of the building and vanished into the city.