"Based on Eobard's current state, Eddie hasn't fully flatlined yet," Cisco said, the assessment rolling out on autopilot before his brain could fully catch up to the horror of the situation. "But he doesn't have long."
"Good. That simplifies things."
Jude produced the gourd from his coat, tilted it, and let a single drop fall onto Eddie's chest.
Eddie's eyes fluttered open. His hand came up weakly, trying to push Jude away. "Reverse Flash—" he managed, the words barely audible, but the meaning was clear: you're going to bring him back.
Nobody stopped it. The whole accelerator tunnel went quiet with the particular silence of people watching something they know is wrong and cannot make themselves interrupt. They could see Eobard Thawne at the edge of their vision, his body already re-solidifying as Eddie's vital signs returned, the timeline knitting itself back together around his ancestor's renewed heartbeat. They knew what came next. They just couldn't watch Eddie die.
On the far side of the tunnel, Eobard Thawne's expression transformed—relief, then elation, then something almost gleeful. He actually laughed.
"Yes! Do it! Let's go!" He was practically vibrating with renewed energy. "Jude, I might actually let you live for this!"
"You're celebrating a bit early."
Jude rolled his eyes, reached down, and cleanly removed the gun from Eddie's trembling hand.
Then he pointed it at Eddie again.
The tunnel went into a completely different kind of silence.
"Jude—" Barry started.
"What are you—" Caitlin began.
Jude sighed with the deep, enduring patience of a tutor watching a class fail a simple question for the third time.
"Do any of you people read riddles?" He shook his head. "Think it through. Why does Eddie have to die to deal with Eobard?"
Nobody answered. They were all just staring at the gun.
Jude lowered the barrel. Not toward Eddie's head. Not toward his chest.
Lower.
Considerably lower.
The accelerator tunnel fell into a silence so absolute that the hum of the ventilation system became the loudest thing in the room. Every face underwent a rapid, visible journey through confusion, comprehension, and finally, a kind of awed horror. Question marks accumulated in the air like a weather event.
Across the tunnel, the elation drained out of Eobard Thawne's expression like water out of a slashed tire. What replaced it was the , terrified look of a man who has just understood something he cannot stop.
Eddie's body hadn't fully stabilized yet—which meant Thawne's Speed Force was still inaccessible, which meant he couldn't move fast enough to intervene, which meant—
"Don't worry," Jude said. He turned and gave Thawne a smile that held absolutely no warmth. "It'll be over in a second."
Two shots. Clean. Precise. The marksmanship of someone who had practiced for years and understood exactly how to accomplish a great deal with a minimal expenditure of effort.
Eddie didn't scream—the Thousand Days' Intoxication had taken the edge off his nervous system's ability to register new information. He made a sound. It was brief.
Everyone else made a sound. It was not brief.
When they looked back at Eobard Thawne, he was gone. Not flickering, not dissolving—gone. Mid-snarl, mid-motion, erased from the present moment with the totality of a candle being snuffed out in a vacuum.
"The Intoxication will keep Eddie under for a while." Jude produced a piece of chocolate and held it out to a pale, wide-eyed Cisco. "Take him to surgery. When Barry's fast enough to confirm Reverse Flash is permanently resolved—then give him this. It'll handle the... other matter." He straightened up and turned toward the exit. "I have somewhere to be. See you."
"Wait—what?" Cisco looked at the chocolate, then at Eddie, then at the empty space where Thawne had just been. "Can that actually be—I mean, is that reversible?"
No answer. The pistol dropped out of thin air and clattered onto the floor.
Jude, already carried forward by the golden current, was gone.
"Is this still not finished?" he asked the timestream, speaking to no one in particular. "Aren't you worried the Time Wraiths are going to find us?"
"You're exempt." The voice came from inside the lightning bolt itself—familiar, carrying the particular weight of someone who had said these words to him before, somewhere else in the timeline. "The Time Wraiths can't track you. The alterations you make don't register to them the way a speedster's changes do." A pause. "You told me this yourself."
"I don't remember telling you anything."
"You also told me you could take people to another universe. That's later—you don't know it yet." The voice was quiet for a moment. "Do one last thing for me. Save Ronnie."
"...Fine."
He checked the system panel while the current pulled him forward. Connection to this universe: 90%. The Reverse Flash's erasure had contributed a staggering 35% to that total—the man had been woven so deeply into this timeline's history. But the collateral effects of everything Jude had done were still reverberating, still magnifying, still producing consequences in the downstream centuries that the universe had definitely not signed off on. He could feel the resistance building—not from the Time Wraiths, but something older and more fundamental. The universe, doing what universes do when a foreign element has overstayed its welcome.
Ten percent to go, he thought. And it's getting harder.
The lightning shoved him.
He came out of the timestream high in the sky above Central City.
Very high.
Below him, the city was being pulled upward—and not metaphorically. A wormhole had reopened during the chaos, and it hadn't closed cleanly. What had formed above the skyline was an accretion disk, matter spiraling inward along the rim of a singularity, dragging everything in the city upward with the patient indifference of a very large drain.
Voices from below drifted up, distant but clear:
"—it's at least six-point-seven megaelectronvolts of accumulated energy, you'd need to run fast enough to control the perimeter and hit the exact center with—"
"—I know, I have to try to close it, no matter what—"
Barry, already suited up, was running. And two figures—Ronnie and Stein, for the last time—were pressing their hands together and merging upward into Firestorm, the combined form blazing as they drove straight toward the center of the vortex.
"Jude?!" Barry shouted upward, mid-sprint. "What are you doing up there?!"
"Long story!" Jude called back over the roar of the wind. "Just close the vortex before all fifty-two universes start comparing notes!"
Barry didn't fully process that, but Stein did. His face, even merged into Firestorm, went sharp with the urgency of a physicist who had just heard the correct order of magnitude.
"It's going to blow! Protect Jude!"
Jude was already moving. He opened the system with one hand and reached in. "Yomogi! Cat Shield! Now!"
Yomogi materialized from the storage space at an altitude of several hundred feet above a city in the process of being sucked into a wormhole, with approximately zero seconds of context for her situation. She looked around. She looked at Jude.
She pulled the shield out of her tail on pure instinct—a polished disk nearly as tall as she was, deployed by reflex alone.
"Boss, boss, it's really hot, meow!"
"Chicken leg tonight! I promise!"
The energy release when Firestorm hit the center of the vortex was the kind of thing that registers on weather sensors across three states. The sky went white. The accretion disk began collapsing inward at speed. The singularity shrank, and shrank, and shrank, and closed.
Jude got the shield up in time. Barely.
He put Yomogi back into storage the exact moment the shockwave passed, singed but intact, her loud complaints still audible as the system closed around her.
Below him, Firestorm was splitting apart—the energy expenditure too great, the matrix separating under the unimaginable strain. Stein began to fall. Barry caught him before he'd dropped ten feet.
Ronnie was falling the other direction.
Upward.
Jude grabbed him by the wrist, shoved a piece of healing chocolate between his teeth, and threw him—hard, downward, in Barry's general direction—with every ounce of force available to a man who has been flung through the timestream twice in the last hour and still has reasonable upper-body strength.
Ronnie arced downward toward the skyline.
Jude, having used the last of his available leverage, went the other way.
The vortex's residual pull caught him. He rose—and kept rising—and for a moment he could see the whole of Central City below him, lit up against the dark, the wormhole gone and the sky finally clear and ordinary above it.
That's a nice view, he thought. Shame it's going the wrong direction.
Then he hit the critical point—the exact altitude where the vortex's pull and gravity reached equilibrium and then tipped—and he began to fall.
He fell for a while.
Below him, a city slowly resolved out of the dark. Buildings he didn't recognize. Street grids that weren't Central City's. A skyline that felt both foreign and, in some deep structural way, familiar.
The ground came up to meet him with the reliable enthusiasm of ground everywhere.
"Camilla, look—there's someone in the sky!"
"Drake. What are you talking about?"