The question had been sitting on the table since the Mercury Labs theft: why did the man in yellow want a tachyon prototype?
Joe had asked it first, during the debrief after the break-in. Barry, Cisco, Caitlin—none of them had an answer, because none of them had even known Mercury Labs was running faster-than-light particle research. It was the kind of project that Christina McGee would have kept sealed until 2015 at the earliest, until the results were mature enough to defend publicly. The theft had forced her hand before she was ready.
Wells had paused for a long moment before answering.
"S.T.A.R. Labs and Mercury Labs have always been competitors—and Christina has always preferred to work without an audience. She shares nothing until she's ready to share everything. So I don't know the full scope of what she was building." He folded his hands. "But from a theoretical standpoint, I can identify one application."
He looked around the room. "The person who stole it was a speedster. If you could engineer a stable matrix to harness and direct faster-than-light particles—tachyons—you could, in theory, make a speedster faster than light itself."
The room had gone quiet in a particular, heavy way.
"Barry's top speed before the Speed Force depletion," Cisco said slowly, doing the calculation without being asked, "barely cleared twice the speed of sound."
"And the speed of light is roughly 847,000 times the speed of sound," Wells added.
"Okay, but realistically—"
Wells held up a hand, cutting Cisco off. "A human body isn't a tachyon. The biological limits would probably cap the gain somewhere far short of light-speed. Ten times the speed of sound, perhaps twenty. Maybe more."
"Doesn't matter," Cisco said. "Ten times, twenty times—it doesn't matter how much faster. The point is that nobody could match him. Nobody could even come close. If he wanted to do something, he'd do it before anyone could react."
Barry, sitting without his speed, had listened to that conclusion in dead silence.
Tonight, that prediction came true.
Barry was on the rooftop of S.T.A.R. Labs, on his knees, every nerve in his body screaming. He'd been hit so many times in the space of a single second that his mind couldn't process them as individual impacts—just a single, shattering wall of force that had dropped him like he was nothing.
"Without the Speed Force," the yellow blur sneered, "you are nothing."
The voice was distorted, vibrating at a frequency that didn't belong to anything human. A boot connected with Barry's ribs and he went down again, gasping, the rooftop cold and gritty against his cheek.
Ten meters away, Cisco was clinging to the edge of the dome with one hand, Caitlin's wrist locked in his other. The height was dizzying—dozens of meters of nothing between them and the unforgiving ground. Cisco's grip on the edge was slipping, millimeter by millimeter, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to beat the physics of supporting two people with one hand.
At the edge of the roof, a wheelchair sat tilted at a nightmarish angle, Dr. Wells gripping the rim with white-knuckled hands, completely unable to use his legs to correct or save himself.
"Barry Allen." The figure paced slowly, unhurried. "Both of your friends are still alive. For now." He considered the wheelchair with what seemed like mild curiosity. "Although, I'm more interested to see how long Jude holds up."
A light push.
The chair rolled. Wells lunged for the roof edge and caught it—suspended, helpless, paralyzed legs dangling in empty air.
"Let them go." Barry forced himself upright, his voice ragged. "Whatever you want from me—come at me directly."
"You don't understand your position."
The yellow afterimage arrived before Barry could even blink. The pain was instant and total—dozens of strikes in the space of a thought, each one precise, each one designed not to kill but to break. Barry convulsed and went down again. His vision spun.
When did this start?
It was barely ten minutes ago.
After the Firestorm discussion had wound down, the lab had settled into something that cautiously resembled peace.
There had been too much, too fast, for too long. Everyone was running on accumulated exhaustion—Caitlin most visibly, but Cisco wasn't far behind, and even Barry, still depowered and restless, had been carrying the weight of it. Professor Stein had headed out to walk the neighborhood near his wife's building. Shawna had driven him; she was heading home anyway.
"So we're basically just... waiting?" Caitlin asked.
"Pretty much." Cisco leaned back and surveyed the room with the satisfaction of a man checking items off a list. "Blackout is still sedated. Captain Cold and Heat Wave grabbed the painting and went quiet—they'll surface eventually, but not tonight. Rainbow Raider is in Iron Heights. Piper's back home with his parents. Firestorm's situation is stable and has a plan. Every active metahuman problem we had is either locked up, calmed down, or temporarily handled." He paused. "Except for the man in yellow. The one who killed your mother."
"I'll catch him." Barry said it with the flat certainty of someone who has said it so many times it's become a fact he's decided to make true. "I'll put him behind bars. I'll clear my father's name."
"Oh? You've been looking for me?"
The voice came from the doorway.
It was low, wrong, vibrating at a frequency that didn't match anything the human larynx should produce. Barry's blood ran cold before his brain had fully processed what he was hearing. He turned.
A blurred shape in yellow stood at the entrance to the lab. The outline of a man, radiating static, surrounded by the ghost of speed.
"How about I save you the trouble, Flash?"
No one moved. No one spoke.
And then the world lurched sideways—the lab vanishing, replaced by the cold open air of the S.T.A.R. Labs rooftop, the city spread out below them in every direction, the dome only half-repaired overhead.
When Barry's eyes finally focused, Cisco and Caitlin were already at the edge, the Reverse Flash holding them there as casually as a man setting down two objects he was tired of carrying. One step behind them was open sky.
And then Barry saw it—attached to the chest of the yellow suit, glinting against the fabric.
The tachyon prototype.
"I know you've been searching for me for a long time." The Reverse Flash tilted his head. "Your adoptive father, too. He's sharper than I expected—if he didn't have a daughter, I'd almost say he had no weaknesses."
The words hit Barry like ice water. "What did you do to Joe? What did you do to Iris?!"
"Nothing dramatic. A simple demonstration of what was possible—a reminder of what I could do, if your continued existence became more trouble than it was worth." The yellow figure took a step forward. "You had the Speed Force then. It made you a variable I preferred not to provoke directly."
He stopped.
"You don't have it anymore."
He let that land.
"Which changes things considerably."
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