The pressure in Danton's back eased.
The hand withdrew. The yellow figure crouched beside him on the floor, regarding him with something that had shifted from interrogation into something closer to genuine interest.
"You gained the ability after the explosion," it said. "And you believe it was the experiment that caused it."
"The experiment gave me the splitting ability." Danton kept his breathing shallow, rationing it. "That's all I know."
"That's not all that happened." The figure's voice had dropped its edge. "Dark matter entered your body during that explosion. Your experiment didn't create the ability — it activated what was already there, gave it a form." A pause. "You didn't make yourself into a metahuman. The explosion made you into one. Your experiment just woke it up."
Danton said nothing. He filed it.
"What's interesting," the figure continued, almost to itself, "is that I find myself not wanting to kill you anymore. I'm approximately eighty percent certain that, in some meaningful sense, I'm responsible for what you became." It tilted its blurred head. "I made your fate, Black."
"My research was my own," Danton said.
"Say what you like." The figure seemed unbothered. "One last question. The evidence — where did you get it?"
"You have my phone."
The yellow figure unlocked the screen using Danton's unresisting hand and opened the files. It paused at one folder.
"Encrypted. What's the password?"
A beat.
"Her birthday?"
Danton said nothing.
The figure didn't push. It opened a video file instead.
A recorded voice filled the quiet room — Danton's own voice, younger, more careful, speaking with the deliberate precision of someone committing something to the record:
"Yesterday, one of our cybersecurity staff was let go. He made the mistake of pulling documents the company had buried — too directly, too obviously. His recklessness cost him. But it also led me to things I wouldn't have known to look for. I made a copy of what he found. It relates to an infringement case from three years ago."
The recording continued. Date stamps. File numbers. Case descriptions. The voice of a man cataloguing wrongdoing with the methodical patience of someone who had decided, at great personal cost, that he couldn't stop.
The yellow figure lowered the phone.
"Remarkable patience," it said, with what sounded almost like admiration. "And I think I understand what kept you quiet so long. Someone as intelligent as you — the only thing that could hold you back was loyalty." It looked at Danton. "Stagg was your friend."
Danton lay still.
He was not surprised that the figure knew. He was staggered by the precision of it — how completely the fabricated diary had absorbed that detail, that old and mostly forgotten friendship, and built something around it that felt more true than invented. If Danton Black had once genuinely liked Stagg, then his decade of silence made perfect sense. Not weakness. Not self-interest. A man who didn't want to be the one who sent a friend to prison, right up until the friendship proved itself a fiction.
"You only saw him clearly after he threw you out," the figure said.
It slid the phone back into Danton's jacket pocket. Something in its posture had settled.
"I came here thinking you were a piece someone else had moved onto the board. An interference. But you're not." The blurred face turned toward him. "No one is directing you. No one is getting in my way." It paused. "I find I don't particularly want to kill you, Black. You're the kind of person I appreciate — intelligent, willing to bend the rules when it matters, and not without vulnerabilities." Something in the voice carried a thin thread of what might have been warmth. "I have a weakness for people like that."
Danton exhaled slowly. The tension in his body began, carefully, to release.
I'm going to survive this.
The high-frequency blade entered his back for the third time.
"But you're too intelligent, and you've seen too much." The voice was almost gentle. "The moment you saw me tonight, your death became unavoidable. I can't allow you to describe my abilities to anyone. I hope you understand — it's nothing personal."
Danton's vision went wide and strange. He found himself looking at the ceiling, at the soft light still burning in the living room lamp, and his mind — against his will, without any direction from him — moved upstairs.
Elizabeth.
The yellow figure seemed to read it.
"She slept through all of it," it said. "You didn't wake her. She's fine." A pause, and the voice dropped further. "Rest."
Danton closed his eyes.
The figure moved through the room methodically, retracing its steps. It had swept the space on arrival; now it was verifying the exit. No edged weapons used. No firearms. Every wound internal, invisible to a surface examination. A few drops of blood on the floor — the figure crouched, cleaned them with a cloth, considered the result, and nodded.
Consistent with a minor nosebleed. Nothing that would flag under UV.
It ran water at the sink, rinsed its hands, and stepped back.
Crimson lightning split the room.
In the space between one moment and the next, Danton's body disappeared. The blood was gone. The yellow figure was gone. The living room lamp burned on, unchanged, as though nothing had moved through this house at all.
Seconds later, a bolt of red lightning crossed the city in a straight line from the residential street to the waterfront. A body arced high over the dark water and fell.
The lightning vanished.
The bay received what it was given, and was quiet.
Inside the concealed space behind the smart wallpaper on the building's rear exterior, Jude was watching the tablet feed with the focused attention of someone who was not breathing correctly.
"Has he left? Tell me he's left."
"The feed's clear, boss," Yomogi said from the shelf beside him. "Looks like he's actually gone, meow."
The three of them — Jude, Yomogi, Satsuki — released a collective breath.
On the screen, a basement door opened from inside the house. A figure climbed the stairs back to ground level, moving carefully, one hand braced against the wall.
Danton. His original body. Alive, pale, and somewhat the worse for wear, but moving under his own power.
"I didn't know he had that kind of range," Jude said quietly.
"If the decoy hadn't been convincing, Reverse Flash wouldn't have taken it," Satsuki replied through the earpiece. "He read the clone as the real body."
"The kid sold it well." Jude watched the figure on screen settle into a chair in the basement, head bowed, visibly recovering. "All right. Once they're stable in there, we can—"
He stopped.
On the nanobot feed, the yellow figure reappeared at the front doorstep.