Caitlin couldn't sleep, and she didn't dare move around or speak, so she could only force herself to ignore the man lying beside her. She never once considered bolting for the door — she couldn't get away from him anyway. Neither was she angry at Jack Kadere. His temper and his behavior had always been impossible to predict, and sometimes he did bad things that turned out, in the end, to be good deeds.
Take the Reverse-Flash, for example.
When he first went after the Reverse-Flash, everyone thought he was being unreasonable. The facts had proved him right. Maybe he'd only done it for his own amusement, but there was no denying that he'd helped Barry. Helped all of them. If the Reverse-Flash had been allowed to keep up his act, God only knew where it would have ended.
So Caitlin felt guilty toward Jack Kadere, because she'd helped set a trap to catch him, and she'd misjudged him.
Then again, human thinking was a strange thing. A person could do good deeds their whole life, and one bad deed would make them a villain — remembered and unforgivable forever. Meanwhile, someone who did bad things their entire life could be forgiven for all of it the moment they did one good thing, as though putting down the butcher's knife made them a Buddha on the spot.
So, on top of being dragged out of her home in the middle of the night and threatened with mind control, Caitlin could only conclude that Jack Kadere was too self-centered. He never considered anyone else's feelings, and he had no interest in fitting into normal society.
Thinking in circles like that, she lost track of how long it had been before she finally drifted off.
When she opened her eyes again, Jack Kadere was gone.
Caitlin lay there stunned for a moment, then found her clothes, dressed, and walked out — only to find an extra person in the control room.
"Who are you?" she asked cautiously.
"Laurie."
"Then you and Jack Kadere are…"
"Breakfast is over there. You need to keep doing what he told you to do. He also said to tell you not to worry about S.T.A.R. Labs — he's gone there. Once you succeed, he'll let you go."
Laurie turned and walked out.
Caitlin called after her a few times. When Laurie showed no sign of stopping, she gave up and went to eat breakfast, then got back to work on the Velocity serum.
At S.T.A.R. Labs, Cisco Ramon had already built the super-lightspeed particle matrix for Jack Kadere and was busy fitting it, along with the nanotechnology, into the new suit Jack had just finished.
"Done!"
A moment later Cisco clapped his hands in excitement. "With the particle matrix, not only is the suit's energy output vastly increased, the speed boost is insane. An ordinary person wearing this thing could move almost as fast as Barry used to. And the nanotech means it can live as a bracelet and cover your whole body in three seconds. My God, this is the most perfect piece of equipment I've ever built. No — it needs a name. It needs a catchy name."
"It's still missing self-repair," Jack Kadere said, studying the bright red suit. "The material's not top-grade. The odds of it getting wrecked are still too high."
"Suit self-repair? Nobody's got that tech. That's a serious challenge, man."
"Also, change the color. Bright red is hard on the eyes. Make it black and gold — black base, gold trim."
Jack Kadere used the Speed Force to sketch out a design in a couple of seconds. Cisco looked it over and was about to get started when an alarm went off on the computer.
"A bank robbery?" Cisco glanced at it and reached for his phone to call Barry, pulling up the surveillance feed at the same time.
There had been a robbery at the bank, but the case was strange. The people inside were beating on each other as though they'd been possessed, faces twisted with rage — it was genuinely unsettling to watch. In the middle of all that scrapping, the robbers had simply walked out with the money.
"This one's weird. It's like… it's like everyone in there got possessed." Cisco didn't know which horror movie he'd pulled the comparison from, but he shuddered anyway.
"Rainbow Raider." Jack Kadere gave a quiet laugh.
"Rainbow Raider?" Cisco turned to look at him. "You know him?"
"What's Barry busy with?"
"He's probably dealing with personal stuff, honestly. He was with Iris when the tsunami hit, so… Iris figured out his identity. Sounds like the two of them even kissed at the worst possible moment. It's a movie plot." Cisco said it with feeling.
If Barry had gone back and looped through that timestream — changed things ahead of time — then he and Iris wouldn't have kissed, and his identity wouldn't have come out until the very end. As it stood, he probably had a headache coming, since Iris hadn't broken up with her boyfriend yet.
"I'll deal with Rainbow Raider. You get my suit colored."
"Huh? You're going to deal with it? Then you have to find him first—"
Cisco didn't finish. Jack Kadere was already gone.
Lightning streaked through the city. Before long, Jack Kadere found Rainbow Raider in a rented apartment.
"The Flash? You're not in your suit!"
The sudden appearance startled Rainbow Raider, but he recovered quickly and looked at Jack Kadere with confidence as a trace of red light kindled in his eyes.
Rainbow Raider's ability let him stir up a person's anger with direct eye contact — a strike at the emotional center of the brain, specifically the nervous system responsible for regulating behavior. That nerve was what normally kept people from acting on their subconscious impulses. Once it was affected, people dropped into rage and did all manner of irrational things.
It was close enough to mind control. Both were the psychic sort of power.
But as powers went, this one was the top pick for stirring up trouble.
So the instant Rainbow Raider used it, Jack Kadere copied it — and before it could take hold of him, he drove a hand-blade straight through the man's heart.
The red light died out of Rainbow Raider's eyes. He sank slowly to the floor, twitching.
Dead. It had been fast and decisive.
Jack Kadere turned around and went back to S.T.A.R. Labs.
Cisco Ramon was still sitting at the computer.
"He's dead. Get my suit colored."
Jack Kadere clapped him on the shoulder. Cisco asked blankly, "Th… that fast?"
"You think I'm Barry? The guy says he's the fastest man alive every day and gets his Ls every day."
Jack threw the retort over his shoulder and dragged Cisco off to color the suit.