Jude arrived at Star Labs the next morning in a good mood, which was unusual enough that he noticed it himself.
He had, in the span of roughly twenty-four hours, identified a metahuman ally who had every reason to stay loyal, neutralized a minor criminal who had been actively degrading that ally's judgment, recovered his money and his car, and gotten Clay Parker sent back to Iron Heights with a sentence that had grown considerably in his absence. The paperwork had been tedious but people always find patience for things they're enjoying, and the image of Clay's face through the visitation glass had sustained him through all of it.
If you're going to set a trap, there's no shame in doing it properly.
He walked in.
Nobody looked happy.
"Cisco. What happened?"
Cisco held up three fingers and sighed.
"Last night. Three things." He put one finger down. "First — the Doctor was attacked at his house. Someone smashed through the ceiling glass and the chandelier. Came within a few feet of seriously injuring him."
Jude's expression shifted. "Is he alright?"
"Second—" another finger, "—Mercury Labs was broken into. Prototype stolen."
"What prototype?"
"Faster-than-light particle accelerator. Two metahumans. They walked in, took it, and walked out."
"Okay," Jude said slowly. "That's relevant to us."
"One of the two metahumans was a speedster."
The room went quiet for a moment.
"Third." Cisco's face was the specific grimness of someone delivering news they'd spent the night sitting with. "The other metahuman was Girder. Tony Woodward. One of ours — he was in the containment cells downstairs. The speedster went straight through the cell, pulled him out, and used him to brute-force Mercury Labs' security door."
"Through the cell?" Jude frowned. "How? Those containment cells are built around each individual's ability — how does a speedster bypass that?"
"Girder's cell was designed to neutralize strength and physical durability. It was never designed with a speedster in mind." Cisco exhaled. "The footage — I don't have another way to describe it. The guy's image degraded, like a bad video feed dropping to lowest resolution, and then he was just inside the cell. Some application of the Speed Force we haven't seen before. Phasing, maybe."
"Something like that," Barry said, staring at the screen. He said it quietly, like someone acknowledging a thing they'd filed away to deal with later. "I just haven't used it."
"Girder's body was found at the scene outside Mercury Labs," Caitlin said. "Either the speedster decided he was a liability once the prototype was out, or he wanted no witnesses. Either way—" She stopped. "He and Barry had history. He was a bully. He did awful things. But he didn't deserve to die for it."
Jude stood in the middle of the room and felt the familiar calculation of this city doing its work on him. One problem resolved, two appear. Farooq neutralized, then Roy. Roy handled, then Girder gone before anyone could account for it.
Team Flash had no way to predict that a speedster in yellow would surface openly, in Barry's city, and use one of their own containment prisoners to rob a particle physics laboratory. The chain of causation was clear enough in retrospect — Farooq's original fate, in the timeline without Jude's interference, would have led him to Star Labs, which would have led Wells to release Girder, which would have led to Girder's death by electrocution. The outcome was the same. The path had just shifted.
This is what I did.
"Don't." He put a hand on Cisco's shoulder, then Caitlin's, then Barry's. "None of us could have seen this coming. Nobody anticipated a second speedster, let alone one doing this." He looked at Wells, who had rolled out of the adjacent lab during the briefing. "How are you actually?"
"Functional," Wells said, without evident concern. "I wasn't directly beneath the impact point. The chandelier is a loss. The glass ceiling section will need to be replaced. As disasters go, it was mostly financial."
He said it with the calm of someone who had processed the near-miss and moved on, which was either composure or something else.
"We failed to keep him safe," Cisco said, half to himself. He was looking at the containment cell schematics already pulled up on his secondary monitor. "We put him in there and told him he'd be secure, and we didn't deliver on that. I'm going to rebuild the other cells from scratch — different parameters, cross-ability redundancies."
"There's something worth considering," Shawna said carefully, trying to find her footing in the room. "A lot of people apparently already know that Star Labs holds metahuman criminals. Whoever the speedster is, he knew exactly which cell to go to. That might help narrow down where this came from."
"The cooperation between this lab and the CCPD is essentially public record," Wells said. "After the accelerator explosion, we made considerable effort to rebuild public trust through transparency. The police department even registered the containment facility officially. Anyone paying attention knows it exists."
"Which makes it worse," Jude said.
He looked back at the footage running on the main screen. The yellow figure, the red lightning threading through the image like static, the way the blur resolved into a shape and then vanished again.
"Barry." He watched Barry watching the screen. "You think this might be the man who killed your mother."
Barry looked up sharply.
"That's not a reach," Jude said. "You've mentioned your childhood. There was a man in yellow, there was lightning, there was a speed that shouldn't have been possible for that era. This—" he gestured at the screen, "—fits the description." He paused. "But to catch him, you need your speed back first. That's the sequence."
"The shock increments have been sufficient," Caitlin said immediately. "Physiologically, he should be recovering. We think the block at this point might be psychological. His body is ready. His mind hasn't caught up."
Barry's jaw tightened. He looked at his hands.
"One thing at a time," Wells said. His tone closed the subject. "At noon, the Painting are back in Central City — Barry, after that, you go back to the treadmill. The immediate priority is Snart and whoever he's bringing to tomorrow's job." He turned slightly. "As for who attacked me and where the Mercury Labs prototype has gone — we wait for the police investigation. We don't have the bandwidth to chase that ourselves right now."
He looked around the room.
"What I hope," he said, with feeling that might have been genuine, "is that we've seen the last new meta criminal for at least a few days."
Nobody said anything.
The Central City track record on that particular hope was not encouraging.