"What are you talking about?" Jude rolled his eyes. "The explosion happened in the middle of the night. I found you two the following morning, two days later. You're telling me you have no memory of the time in between?"
"It really wasn't that long." Drake shook his head slowly, working through it. "There was a huge fire—we were looking at it and got briefly blinded by the light. When our vision cleared, we were on the street. There was a massive vortex overhead. You dropped into it from above." He paused. "We never expected you to follow us here."
"That wasn't a vortex. According to the lab, the correct term is an accretion disk—matter orbiting the rim of a spacetime singularity." Jude worked through the implication out loud, fitting the pieces together as he spoke. "Which means it wasn't just a spatial phenomenon. It was temporal and spatial simultaneously. That's why the entire city was seeing the light from the particle accelerator explosion in Barry's universe—and that's why the two of you ended up somewhere you didn't intend to go."
The math assembled itself: the accretion disk, born from Barry's wormhole, had opened connections not just across space but across time. The Drakes should, by rights, have been pulled to the night of the accelerator explosion itself. Instead, they'd arrived nearly a year downstream, in a parallel version of the universe—delayed by timeline turbulence Jude didn't fully understand and probably never would.
He looked up at the sky, or rather at the direction where the system existed in his peripheral awareness.
"Couldn't you have just located them directly for me?" he asked. "I spent weeks turning Barry's Central City upside down looking for any sign of them."
[SYSTEM NOTE] The timeline and spatial architecture of this universe are complex, variable, and frankly overcrowded. Furthermore, the nature of this operation classified it as a cross-universe smuggling mission. Under those conditions, the system can lock onto a city anchor but cannot resolve for temporal or spatial coordinates within that city.
Routing you to the Central City of the primary universe was the most accurate and safest available option.
You were told everything that could be told.
Jude muttered something under his breath. In his heart, though, he conceded the point. Barry's Central City had been the right bet—the safest universe in the cluster, with the best available infrastructure for cross-dimensional search operations and two of the best people in the multiverse to ask for help. If he'd known to ask.
"In practice," he said, "this kind of thing is a lot harder than it sounds."
By the time he'd finished walking the Drakes through a condensed version of the last several months, the morning had reached nine o'clock and all three of them were running on accumulated exhaustion and adrenaline that had long since metabolized into the vague flatness that follows a crisis.
"I'm heading back to Gotham." Jude scrolled through his phone, finding the afternoon flight schedule. "There's a connection through Metropolis—I can be back tonight." He glanced up. "What about you two? What's the plan?"
Drake and Camilla exchanged the particular look of a couple that has just survived several things and arrived, through that shared experience, at a new set of priorities.
"We're going to stay for a while," Drake said. He reached out and pulled Jude into a hug that was slightly too tight for public spaces and completely appropriate under the circumstances. "I still don't fully understand half of what you've explained—the Speed Force, the Flash, parallel universes—but Central City seems like a good place."
"A year, maybe two," Camilla added. She was smiling, but with the cautious quality of someone who has recently had her definitions of 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable' substantially revised. "Although we did manage to arrive here and immediately get caught in the middle of a spacetime event, so perhaps this place has its own version of Gotham's chaos."
Drake considered that. "Actually—maybe just go back to Gotham now. According to you, it's considerably better than it was. I could probably find work there." He shrugged. "At this point, I might just be used to the slightly insane city."
"Speaking of which." He reached into his pocket. "The money I borrowed from you—after Superman's visit to Metropolis, I relocated to a cheaper part of the city and used what I had left over to insure the building."
"Venture capital instincts," Jude said.
"I wouldn't call it that." Drake shook his head. "It was just risk management. The insurance companies figured Superman had already done it once and wouldn't level the same city again so soon, so they happily took my premium. Turned out to be worth considerably more than the premium." He paused. "I've been watching those business coaches online for years—the ones who talk about 'going all in' and 'choosing wisely over working hard' and build entire philosophies around the idea that the real secret is mindset. Very confident. Very articulate. None of them have ever done anything demonstrably useful."
"And then I think about your insurance policy," Jude said.
"Policies, plural. Anyway—I have money now. When we get back to Gotham, I'll look into some of the reconstruction contracts. Your loan becomes an investment. We can sort out the details later."
"I thought you were still doing software."
Drake's expression was the expression of a man delivering information he has already made his peace with. "Nobody wants me for that anymore."
It was, Jude reflected, a remarkably honest thing to say.
The flight back to Gotham took the better part of an afternoon. Twelve hours after leaving Central City, Jude stepped off the plane into rain.
He stood at the airport exit and breathed it in—the particular wet-pavement smell of Gotham after dark, familiar in the way that only the place you've been living for a long time becomes familiar. Bruce had mentioned at some point that he was looking into ways to manage the city's persistent cloud cover, try to get some actual sunlight down onto the streets, and see if it helped with the general mood and the crime statistics.
He's not wrong, Jude thought. Though personally, I could do without repeating the last sunny Gotham I visited. The Joker toxin outbreak had given "lovely weather for it" a connotation he hadn't fully recovered from.
The streets were different now, though. More people out at this hour—and not the usual distribution. Some of them were in prison-issue clothing, moving in small organized groups, carrying equipment and materials. Paid by the hour, contributing to the reconstruction effort, apparently free to walk the streets between their work rotations.
There's an argument to be made, Jude thought, that any city whose nighttime workforce includes a visible percentage of its prison population is still something of a horror story. But the buildings are going up, so.
He was most of the way down the block when he spotted them.
Clyde Mardon first—unmistakable, even in the work gear. Then Farooq Gibran, walking beside him with the measured gait of someone who has learned to conserve energy between tasks. Both of them had apparently adapted, more or less, to the particular rhythm of a life that was half incarceration and half honest labor.
And behind them, Bette.
She was holding something in each hand—two small, measured portions of soybeans, which she appeared to be rationing with methodical attention. She's managing their intake. Whatever had developed in the months since Jude had sent her to Gotham, she'd apparently taken on a monitoring role for the other two. And based on the way she was doing it, she knew exactly what she was doing with the soybeans and why.
She's figured out how to control it, Jude realized. The ability. She's using it as a tool now instead of a liability.
Then Bette looked up and saw him.
Her face did several things in rapid succession—recognition, genuine surprise, and the kind of uncomplicated delight that shows up on a person's face before they've had time to compose it into anything more guarded. She took a step toward him, then stopped. Looked down at the two men she was technically supervising. Looked back at Jude.
Jude raised a hand and gave a small wave. Later, the gesture said. I'm here. We'll talk.
Bette smiled—quick, warm—and turned back to her charges.
Jude walked on through the rain, and Gotham received him back without ceremony, the way it always had.
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