James got home a little after nine and went straight to his lab before he'd even taken off his jacket.
The message sat on his phone screen exactly as it had in the car. Four words, no context, no follow-up. He tried the number back immediately and got nothing, not even a ring, just the flat tone of a line that had been used once and then closed.
That was Selina's style. She said what needed saying and let the other person do the work of catching up.
James retrieved the Apokoliptian power cell from its shielded containment field. The one she'd given him after the warehouse explosion, sitting alongside the first device he'd stolen weeks earlier, both of them inert and quiet since the night of the raid.
He didn't need AEGIS to tell him something had changed. He could feel it in his palm the moment he lifted the device out of its casing. Warmer than it should have been. Not dangerously hot, but active in a way that the readings from three weeks of continuous monitoring had never shown.
"AEGIS, full scan. Compare against baseline."
"Scanning." A pause longer than usual. "Confirmed elevation in internal energy state. Fifteen percent above baseline and climbing at a slow, steady rate. No external stimulus detected in this location. The activation appears to originate from a source outside this facility."
"Define outside."
"Unable to pinpoint precisely without more data. However, the resonance pattern matches known Apokoliptian signatures. Cross-referencing against the network map compiled from the decrypted Intergang data."
James waited while the analysis ran. He walked to his second workstation while he waited, the one where he kept the map he'd built of the ten cities and their surviving cells, the map that had informed the three intelligence packages he'd distributed a day ago.
"Match found," AEGIS said. "The resonance frequency correlates most closely with the profile logged for Central City's cell during the original decryption. Confidence level: seventy-one percent."
James went still for a second, turning that over.
Central City. One of the three cells he'd flagged as most dangerous. The one with intact leadership, financial independence from the destroyed relay network, and enough salvaged Apokoliptian hardware to remain a real threat for months.
He'd sent his intelligence package to whatever contact network fed Flash information less than twenty-four hours ago.
"AEGIS, is this device reacting to something they're doing, or something happening to them?"
"Insufficient data to determine direction of causation. The resonance could indicate either an activation event on their end, powering up dormant hardware, or a destruction event, energy release from hardware being destroyed or damaged. Both would produce a similar signature at this range."
James set the device down carefully. Neither possibility was good. Either Central City's cell was preparing to deploy the tech they'd kept hidden, or something had already gone wrong there badly enough to register from four hundred miles away.
He pulled up every news feed he had access to for Central City. Nothing yet. No breaking coverage, no police scanner chatter flagged as unusual by his monitoring scripts.
Which meant whatever was happening hadn't gone fully public. Which meant there was still time to get ahead of it.
James looked at the clock. Nine forty PM. If he left now, driving, he'd arrive close to two in the morning. Too slow if this was already escalating.
He had a small equity position in a Central City biotech firm, minor, established eight months ago as part of his broader portfolio diversification, the kind of legitimate paper trail that gave him a reason to be in any city his instincts told him to visit.
It wasn't enough of a reason to explain arriving at midnight in a hurry, but it was enough of a reason to have a private jet reservation on file with a charter company that didn't ask questions when a client with his credit history called after hours.
He made the call. Ninety minutes to wheels up.
While he waited, he suited up. Not fully, not yet, but he packed the case that held his tactical gear and loaded a secondary bag with equipment he didn't usually carry outside Gotham.
Thermite charges. A spare grappling line. Two additional communication relays in case AEGIS needed backup processing power on unfamiliar ground.
He was operating outside his own city now, in a place where he had no established intelligence network, no factory base, no years of accumulated familiarity with the terrain. Everything he knew about Central City came from research and meta-knowledge rather than lived experience.
That gap concerned him more than he let himself dwell on.
Read more chapters, 30 days ahead of Webnovel Updates on Patreon marvelstark