"Don't — don't listen to him." Barry Allen forgot all about his lost speed and grabbed for Bette's attention. "Bette, you have no idea what he's done to Central City. You don't know what he'll do to you. He's dangerous. Extremely dangerous."
He pressed harder, voice rising. "The particle accelerator explosion changed you — it changed me too. Doctor Harrison Wells built the accelerator. If anyone can help you, it's him."
Jack Kadere watched Barry fumble through his pitch while Bette wavered between them, and smiled. He turned away and began pulling on the armor.
"Really need to redesign this," he muttered, latching one segment at a time. "Suiting up like this is embarrassing."
He lifted off the ground.
"Wait — I'm coming with you!"
Bette made her decision all at once. She didn't know if the military could fix what had happened to her. She didn't know if Harrison Wells could either. But she'd watched Jack Kadere strip The Flash's powers out of him with her own eyes, and that was more than anyone else had shown her.
She'd been an EOD specialist. Now she was the bomb.
She didn't want this life.
"No—" Barry shouted after them, but Jack was already airborne with Bette in his arms, rising above the rooftops and shrinking into the distance.
Barry stood there — stripped of his speed, stripped of his suit, stripped of everything — and slowly became aware of the people on the sidewalk staring at him.
"Oh my god, there's a pervert out here."
"Shameless!"
He covered himself with both hands, hunched over, shuffled to the curb, and flagged down a cab. He stared at the floor mat the entire ride, pretending he couldn't hear the driver's silence or feel the rearview mirror pointed at him.
---
One hour later, Barry Allen walked into S.T.A.R. Labs with someone else's jacket wrapped around his waist. His friends stared.
"You're saying Jack Kadere drained your speed?" Cisco said, after Barry had changed into real clothes and gotten through the whole story. "How is that even possible?"
"You could ask the cab driver who dropped me off," Barry said flatly.
The Flash. Taking a taxi. The sentence didn't even make sense.
"Is it temporary?" Barry looked between them, unable to keep the fear out of his voice. "My speed — is it coming back, or is it—"
Cisco glanced at Caitlin. Neither spoke.
"We don't know yet," Harrison Wells said, measured and even. "But we will figure it out."
Barry's face went gray.
---
At the villa, Laurie had been waiting.
She finally saw Jack Kadere return — but a woman she'd never seen stepped off the landing pad beside him.
Thud.
Jack released Bette, and she swayed on her feet, lightheaded from the flight. Open-air travel at that altitude and speed wasn't built for comfort, and she'd spent the entire trip concentrating on keeping her hands away from the battle suit's surface. One careless touch and she'd have turned the armor into a shaped charge.
Jack disappeared into the garage to strip off the suit. By the time he came back out, Bette had steadied herself and was exchanging pleasantries with Laurie, surveying the property with the automatic sweep of someone trained to assess her surroundings.
"This your place?" she asked casually.
"Watch."
Jack picked up a pebble from the ground. Bette's eyes widened — the stone began to glow with a light she knew intimately.
Fwsshh!
He flicked it into the air. Halfway up — bang — it detonated, scattering dust and a faint smell of ozone.
"You — how do you also—" Bette stared at him.
"Being my enemy is about the unluckiest thing that can happen to a person." Jack dusted off his fingers. "Your ability has a ceiling, by the way. Roughly three to four times stronger than where you are now, and you'd have full control — choose whether something detonates or doesn't. But reaching that level would eat your entire life. So let's talk about your actual problem instead."
"How can you help me?" Bette said immediately.
"General Eiling is hunting you." Jack tilted his head. "If I absorb your energy first and then he catches you — no powers, no leverage — do you think he lets you walk away?"
Bette's expression hardened. She shook her head. "So what's the alternative?"
"Kill him," Jack said simply.
"Done." No hesitation.
"Come find me when it's finished." Jack waved her off.
Bette paused for half a second, then turned and left.
Running into her had been pure accident. Jack only intervened because he'd seen Barry trying to recruit her — and anything Barry wanted, Jack found it entertaining to take. Whether Bette actually managed to kill Eiling was irrelevant to him. If she pulled it off, her ability was interesting enough to be worth a favor. For Bette, the power was a curse. For Jack, it was a toy.
Through superposition, he'd already refined the copied ability past its original limits. He could choose whether an object detonated. More than that — continued superposition shifted the detonation from instantaneous to remote-triggered or timed. The applications for that kind of unpredictability were obvious: it was a saboteur's dream.
The question was who deserved to be the first test subject.
---
While Jack considered his options, Barry Allen — who already qualified as a test subject and then some — was sitting across from a friend in a coffee shop, laying out the full scope of his recent disasters.
"So that's where things stand." Barry managed a weak smile. "Oliver, I need your help."
Oliver Queen sat across the table, listening.
The so-called legend of Starling City. Born into the Queen Consolidated fortune, Oliver had spent his twenties as a tabloid fixture — parties, yachts, women, the full playboy rotation. Then the Gambit went down, and Oliver Queen was declared dead.
Five years on Lian Yu changed everything about him. Nobody knew the details. Nobody knew that the man who came back carried an entirely different skill set than the one who'd left, or that he'd returned as something more than a billionaire's prodigal son. He'd come back as the Green Cuck— no. Green Arrow.
And Oliver Queen's homecoming hadn't exactly gone to plan either.
He'd returned to Starling City with a mission: save it. Atone for his father's sins. Work through the list of names in the notebook his father left him and dismantle the rot from the inside. Noble, driven, ready.
Then he discovered the city didn't need him.
The Huntress was already out there — righteous and absolutely ruthless. On top of that, a team called the Birds of Prey had carved up organized crime so thoroughly that the streets were running out of criminals for Oliver to fight. The two factions clashed with each other more than anything else, but between them, Starling City's underworld was being ground to dust without Oliver lifting a single arrow.
He couldn't operate as Green Arrow because there was nothing left to shoot at. The trail of names in his father's notebook went cold — leads severed, targets already dealt with. He was left playing the part of the idle rich heir, going through the motions of a dissolute lifestyle because he genuinely didn't know what else to do.
Barry had met him before becoming The Flash, during a case that took him to Starling City. He'd stumbled onto Oliver's secret identity by accident. The case itself hadn't amounted to much, but Barry had walked away impressed — here was a man who'd forged himself into something extraordinary through sheer will.
Right now, Oliver Queen was the only person Barry could think to call.