He didn't finish the sentence about the mad dog.
The punch came fast — straight to the stomach, professional form, the kind of strike a man delivers when he's been waiting all day to deliver it. Jude doubled over, held up by the soldiers on either side.
Eiling looked down at him and smiled. "Whether you're innocent is for me to decide."
He really is cooperative, Jude thought, through the pain.
He stopped talking. Let the soldiers walk him out of the station and into a military vehicle, and said nothing further on the drive to the base.
Eiling, it turned out, was a man of routine. He issued his instructions at the base — keep an eye on the detainee, no sleep, interrogate through the night — and then went home himself to rest. He'd almost certainly written off finding Bette through Jude at this point. The hunt had become secondary. This was the personal matter now.
I hope he sleeps well, Jude thought, as the vehicle pulled in through the base gate. It might be the last untroubled night he gets for a while.
3 a.m.
Jude's screams echoed from the interrogation room — raw, wretched, the kind of sounds that communicate genuine suffering to anyone within earshot.
They were playing from the room's loudspeaker.
Jude himself was sitting at the interrogation table, phone out, studying the board.
"Iron chain link, add a horse card here, wine on the flank, bring in the sword—" The game's audio fired: "Those who dare invade these lands will be met with ruin!" The match results screen appeared. Jude tucked the phone away and looked across the table at the soldiers. Most of them were already gone — foreheads on the table, eyelids sealed, breathing slow and deep. One of them, clinging to consciousness by the thinnest possible thread, managed a single confused observation.
"I'm... dead? But I was at full health—"
"That's just how it works sometimes," Jude said. "Get some sleep."
The man's forehead met the table with a soft thud.
The sake gourd at Jude's hip had done its work about two hours ago — a careful pour into the room's ventilation, just enough to turn the air into something that tasted faintly of premium rice wine. The soldiers had breathed it in with no idea what was happening. By midnight they'd been listing in their chairs. By 2 a.m., gone.
The loudspeaker continued to broadcast its performance.
The door opened.
Jude didn't hear it over the audio. He turned only when she spoke, and found himself looking at a figure in black tactical gear who had stopped dead in the doorway, staring at a room full of unconscious soldiers and one man playing a mobile game.
"Jude. What is happening in here."
"Bette." He was on his feet immediately, pulling her inside and closing the door. "What are you doing here."
"Barry came to the lab and told everyone Eiling had you. Joe got forced out. I knew this was my fault." She looked around the room — the slumped soldiers, the loudspeaker cycling through its recording, the phone on the table. "I came to get you out."
"Nobody stopped you?"
"They all tried. I didn't listen."
"Bette." He put a hand over his face briefly. "If Eiling catches you here, we're both completely finished. You understand that?"
"I used to be stationed at this base. I know every corridor, every camera blind spot, every shift schedule. I knew what I was walking into." Her voice was firm. Then she paused and looked around the room again. "But why are the soldiers like this? And why does this room smell like—"
She inhaled.
The sake gourd was still emitting a faint trace — barely anything, a ghost of the earlier concentration. But Bette's system wasn't calibrated for it. Her legs went sideways. She caught herself on the table's edge, blinking hard, the room suddenly unsteady.
Jude had the stopper back in the gourd in under a second. He pressed Bette into a chair and held a small dark stone under her nose.
The smell hit her like a slap — sharp, unpleasant, the aggressive opposite of whatever had just been in the air. She recoiled, inhaled again by reflex, and felt her head clear in a rush.
"What—"
"The soldiers were apparently cutting loose a little tonight. The alcohol fumes in a sealed room will do that to you." He was already pocketing the sobering stone. "You've got a high tolerance, but the concentration in here was unusual. You're fine now." He moved toward the door. "You need to go back to the lab. Now. Before the shift rotation."
Bette steadied herself against the chair. The sequence of events she was trying to reconstruct wasn't quite assembling into anything coherent. "I'm not leaving without you."
"If I walk out of this base, I become a fugitive. That's what Eiling wants."
"If you stay, he'll come back in the morning—"
"Eiling is finished by tomorrow. I need you to go home and not disrupt this. Please."
They were still at it when the air in the room cracked with a faint static charge and a golden streak deposited the Flash into the interrogation room, slightly out of breath from moving at human-visible speed through a military installation.
"Bette." Barry's whisper carried the restrained urgency of someone who has been running damage control for the past hour. "You can't do this. Come with me. Right now."
Jude looked at the ceiling.
In a single day he had interacted with, or been in close proximity to: a military general, two police departments, a wanted jewel thief, a metahuman fugitive, and now the Flash, all of whom were currently either unconscious in this room, hiding in this room, or standing in this room uninvited.
The city's entire population of remarkable people had somehow passed through one interrogation room.
"Cisco noticed you were gone," Barry continued, still to Bette. "We guessed you came here. I could hear the—" he glanced at the loudspeaker, "—recording from about fifty meters away, so the room wasn't hard to find." He looked at Jude. "Eiling's going to be back in a few hours. Just let me take you both out—"
Jude's foot connected with Barry's shin.
"Enough." He kept his voice below the loudspeaker's audio level, but only just. "This room is already a disaster. Stop adding to it. Take Bette back to the lab, sit on her if you have to, and wait for news in the morning. That's it. That's the plan."
Barry opened his mouth.
"Go."