After the gas man got locked away in what was generously being called a supervillain prison, Central City settled into an unusual stretch of quiet.
Jude was starting to genuinely appreciate the place. The villain density here had a certain rhythm to it — predictable arcs, contained damage radii, and a Flash who actually showed up. He was even beginning to think the Drakes had made a sensible call moving here.
Assuming nothing goes sideways. Which, historically speaking, is a bold assumption.
On the Drake front: still nothing. The fan network had been at it for weeks and had turned up exactly zero leads. The group chat had devolved into a comfortable noise of shared history trivia, cat pictures, and urban legends — a girl who'd escaped a military lab, apparently wired with landmines; some broke ex-billionaire who'd ended up working a factory floor; a certain speedster allegedly sneaking into a power plant at 3 a.m. to steal electricity.
Jude scrolled through the feed and shook his head slowly. "Central City's citizens are something else."
Colorful legends aside, the important thing was that nobody in them had died. And as for the Drake and Camilla — Jude had been turning the problem over long enough to reach a working theory.
They slipped into another universe
It was the only explanation that fit. The system insisted they were in Central City; the city insisted otherwise. The gap between those two facts pointed in exactly one direction. He wasn't particularly worried about their survival — if Drake could navigate Gotham, a parallel Central City wasn't going to finish him off. All Jude had to do was push the timeline forward, get familiar enough with this universe's shape, and eventually activate his interdimensional smuggling skill again.
Or wait for Cisco's abilities to fully awaken. That would make the whole thing considerably less complicated.
Progress-wise, he was sitting at roughly fifteen percent on the timeline's approval meter — three metahumans handled: the weather manipulator, Danton Black, and Kyle Nimbus. If the pattern held, he was looking at something like seventeen more before this arc closed. Possibly fewer if a major villain counted for extra weight.
Not something to stress over right now. Barry wasn't fast enough yet, and Satsuki's targeting system was still calibrating to keep pace with his increasing speed. You couldn't track a speedster the model hadn't benchmarked yet.
Jude was still scrolling through the chat when a familiar shadow fell across the serving window.
"Hamburgers today?"
He glanced up and slipped his phone back into his apron pocket. "Switching to fast food for a bit. Trying to see if I can close up earlier." He raised an eyebrow. "You're out early."
"Finished my run at eight."
"Still clockwork. Didn't you take your sister out today?"
"Lisa's on a trip. Seaside city — apparently the scenery's worth the drive." Leonard Snart's eyes moved to the grill without any particular urgency. "Did you need to see her?"
"Just confirming a timeline. Nothing urgent."
Jude smiled at his regular and reached for the spatula. "How many, Snart?"
Snart glanced at his watch — an automatic gesture, like breathing. "Four. We have things to do this afternoon. I'd rather not be weighed down." A brief pause. "Three minutes?"
"One minute eight."
Snart's mouth curved slightly at the corner. It was as close to approval as the man got.
Nine months of patronage had turned Leonard Snart into something Jude's food truck didn't have many of: a genuinely reliable repeat customer. It had started because Lisa wanted to try something new; it had continued because Jude's cooking had a particular quality that defied personal preference. You could dislike an entire cuisine and still find yourself finishing the plate. Some people had a talent for music. Jude had a talent for making food taste like exactly what you needed right now.
Snart had noticed early on that the truck owner was not simply a cook. He hadn't found any concrete evidence to confirm the suspicion, but the instinct remained, filed away and waiting.
What he appreciated more immediately was that Jude didn't ask questions. Four hamburgers purchased by a man who mentioned they "wouldn't be enough," and Jude simply took the money and worked the grill. No probing. No small talk that led somewhere inconvenient. A rare quality.
He'd also taken steps to make the inherently uncontrollable — a food truck that drifted around the city on no fixed schedule — controllable. He'd spent a few weeks mapping the network of people who came to Jude for bulk purchases, understood the informal distribution chain, and inserted himself into it. Now whenever Jude broadcast a location drop, Snart received it at the same time as everyone else.
Making the uncontrollable controllable. Always the preferred approach.
One minute and eight seconds after Snart had checked his watch, Jude set a paper bag on the counter.
"Four hamburgers. Eat them before they cool down."
Snart picked up the bag and left without ceremony.
The rest of the morning stayed quiet. Jude leaned against the truck and pulled up the Star Labs feed on his phone — Wells had Barry running a split-attention drill, speed-chess on one side, ping-pong with Cisco on another, and some kind of medical simulation game with Caitlin simultaneously. The Speed Force kept pushing Barry's body faster, but the brain was a different system entirely. Novice speedsters ran into that wall constantly: the body outraces the mind, and then someone makes a decision like I wonder if I can dodge a bullet by running into it.
Barry was working on it. Which meant today would probably be fine.
Today will be peaceful, Jude thought, and immediately heard the universe clear its throat.
"Hi there — one hamburger, please."
He looked up.
Oh.
She was — there was no diplomatic way to put it — striking. Long golden hair pulled back in a ponytail, a white blazer over a soft pink dress, features balanced in a way that worked across cultural aesthetics. Bright eyes, warm smile, the kind of face that made a person want to check whether they'd met her before because surely they would have remembered.
She was also wearing glasses, which gave the whole picture a slightly bookish, academic edge that somehow made it worse.
"Sorry, I've been on a diet and exercise kick lately," she continued, looking at the menu board with something like guilt, "but the smell from your truck is absolutely — wait."
She stopped.
Her eyes locked onto Jude's face.
"Jude?" Her expression shifted from mildly tempted to genuinely astonished. "What are you doing here? I've been looking everywhere — where have you been?"
Jude's brain went to work.
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