A chasm like this would have stopped most people cold — meta-humans included — but Jack Kadere was busy deciding which ability to use.
Jump straight across? At this distance, divine power or the Speed Force could both manage it. Too boring.
Fly? Firestorm's abilities or the Weather Wizard's would get him there. Still not interesting enough.
"Let's try Killer Frost."
Jack Kadere grinned, and the temperature around his body plummeted. Frost crept across his shoulders, his breath turning white.
He ran for the edge and launched himself off the cliff.
Wind roared past as he dropped. Jack aimed both palms downward and pushed, driving the cold outward. The air beneath his feet crystallized instantly — a solid platform of ice that caught his weight mid-fall and arrested his momentum. His hands swept forward, and a long bridge of ice materialized out of nothing, arcing upward through empty space, carrying him in a smooth glide toward the cave mouth on the opposite cliff face.
His foot touched stone. He stepped off.
Behind him, the ice bridge cracked, broke apart, and tumbled into the gorge below. The pieces shattered against the rock walls on the way down, the sound fading into distance.
"Not bad." Jack chuckled and walked inside.
The tunnel was dim and dead quiet. He followed it for five or six minutes before it opened into what looked like an abandoned staging area — several large pieces of decommissioned equipment clustered in the center, and beyond them, a wide open space carved from the rock.
At the far edge of that space stood a cage made of metal fencing. Inside it, a girl sat chained by one wrist to a length of heavy chain bolted to the wall.
Her eyes were wet, red-rimmed, tears still tracking down her cheeks. Baby fat softened her face — round cheeks, a slightly full jaw — and every line of her expression was fear layered on exhaustion layered on despair. She couldn't have been older than her early twenties.
Jesse Chambers Wells. One day she'd tap into the Speed Force and become Jesse Quick.
That day hadn't come yet.
Jack strolled toward the cage. Jesse flinched at the sound of footsteps, her whole body going rigid — but then she registered that the figure approaching wasn't Zoom. It was someone she'd never seen before.
The fear broke into desperate, frantic hope.
"Help me — please, help me, Zoom took me, you have to get me out of here —" She was shaking, pulling against the chain, her whole upper body bouncing with the effort.
"Shh. Calm down before you knock yourself out with those things."
Jack's eyes drifted south for exactly one second. Jesse was around the same age as Thea. Her thighs didn't quite measure up to Thea's, but from the chest up she had Thea thoroughly outclassed — full and heavy enough that her panicked thrashing was genuinely distracting.
"I — what?"
Whether it was Jack's total lack of urgency or the comment itself, Jesse went still for a moment, blinking at him.
"Where's Zoom?" Jack walked up to the cage, tone casual, like he was asking about the weather.
"I don't — I don't know." Jesse shook her head hard. "Save me first. Please. If he comes back —"
Jack glanced around the space, then asked how long Zoom had been gone and what he'd been doing lately. Jesse wanted nothing more than to bolt, but she forced herself to answer — stumbling over words, glancing toward the tunnel entrance every few seconds. The gap between wanting to leave and not being free yet was eating her alive. Her voice cracked twice. Her hands were trembling.
Hope was the cruelest thing you could give someone in a cage, because the minutes between receiving it and reaching safety were harder than all the ones that came before.
Jack didn't drag it out. Once he was satisfied Zoom wasn't nearby — a mild disappointment, that — he reached for the cage door and tore it open bare-handed. The lock sheared clean off. He stepped inside, grabbed the chain, and snapped it with a sharp twist.
"Thank you — oh god, thank you —"
Jesse threw her arms around his neck, squeezed hard for one breathless second, then let go and grabbed his sleeve. "We need to go. Now. Right now."
Jack shrugged, scooped her up — one arm under her knees, the other behind her back — and ran.
Yellow lightning exploded through the tunnel, out of the cave mouth, and straight off the cliff edge. At this speed, gravity barely registered. Jack leaped the gorge in a single bound, hit the far side at a sprint, and kept going without breaking stride.
---
S.T.A.R. Labs. Harrison Wells's office.
Jack appeared in the doorway with Jesse still in his arms.
Harrison Wells looked up from the computer. He'd just finished writing out the nano-shrinking technology formula. His gaze landed on Jesse, and everything else ceased to exist. He shoved away from the desk, crossed the room in three strides, and grabbed his daughter like she might disappear again if he blinked.
"Jesse!"
"Dad!"
She buried her face in his chest. His arms locked around her, one hand cradling the back of her head, his jaw clenched tight enough to ache. Neither of them let go.
Jack set his mouth in a flat line, stepped around them, and walked to the computer. The formula was on the screen — dense, multi-layered, far beyond anything he could have produced himself. Whether it was complete and accurate, he had no way to verify. If he could have understood all of it, he wouldn't have needed Harrison Wells in the first place.
Wells had already prepared a storage device. Jack transferred the formula, pocketed the drive, and turned.
"I brought your daughter back. I'm taking this." He held up the device. "And if you've given me anything less than the real formula — if a single variable is wrong — I'll show you that Zoom is nothing compared to what I can do."
Wells nodded, still holding Jesse.
"Dad, who are they?" Jesse pulled back enough to look at Jack Kadere and Black Siren, who stood near the door with her arms crossed. Neither of them looked like the heroic-rescue type. "Who is she?"
Wells cupped Jesse's face in both hands. "That doesn't matter. What matters is you're safe. I've already made arrangements — we're leaving Central City. Heading for Atlantis."
On Earth Two, Atlantis hadn't sunk beneath the ocean.
"Smart move," Jack said.
"Why?" Jesse frowned. "My friends are here. My whole life is here. Do we really have to leave?"
Black Siren smirked.
Naive girl. Stay and wait for Zoom to snatch you again?
"We're leaving," Wells said. No room for negotiation.
Jack paused, a thought striking him. "One more thing. You have the Velocity-6 serum formula. Give it to me."
Wells's expression darkened. "Why would you want that? The formula is dangerous — it causes progressive cellular degradation. Even with a natural connection to the Speed Force, overuse will destroy your speed permanently."
"Just hand it over."
Jack knew exactly what Velocity-6 did. Zoom had abused the serum until his body started breaking down, which was why he'd become so obsessed with stealing The Flash's Speed Force — he needed it to survive. And Zoom at least had a natural connection to the Speed Force to begin with. An ordinary person injecting the stuff fared far worse. Eliza Harmon — the Mercury Labs scientist who'd dosed herself and gained speed that rivaled The Flash — had pushed past the serum's limits until her Speed Force lightning shifted from yellow to blue. Seconds later, she disintegrated.
Jack didn't want to inject himself. He wanted to reverse-engineer the formula, strip out the side effects, and use his own Speed Force energy as a stable foundation to grant speed to others. The serum was a starting point — crude, lethal in its current form, but a starting point all the same.
And he really didn't like yellow lightning.
Wells studied him for a long moment, then pulled up a second file on the terminal and transferred it without another word.
Jack pocketed the second drive and turned toward the door, Black Siren falling into step beside him.