Vera Pyra (The Flash) (Book One)

Chapter 7__Power Outage

Almost everyone was at STAR Labs.

Wells rolled into the Cortex to see Cisco, Caitlin and me. "Where's Barry? He's late."

"Late is kind of his signature move," I told them.

"Hey, you guys wanna see my signature move?" Cisco asked.

Barry zoomed in, leaning against the doorway, drinking coffee. "Sorry, guys. I got a little held up." He smiled. "You had to be there."

Wells looked at Caitlin and Cisco. "I'm gonna need a moment or two alone with Barry and Vera." Caitlin and Cisco walked out, leaving. "Now, may I remind you, we had an agreement that we would help with your heroics out there while you would help us research and develop your abilities in here." I sat down. "Right?"

Barry nodded. "Yeah. No, I know. I guess I've just gotten a little caught up with being able to help people. Put bad guys away. Feels good."

"Imagine how good it would feel to cure diseases, stop aging, reverse paralysis," Wells told us.

"All good causes," I told him. "So, how can I help you do that? You need more MRIs? More blood?"

"I need more focus," Wells answered.

"Okay," I told him.

"Focus is the key to progress," Wells told us. "Focus is what brings you strength, what brings you speed." He looked at me. "Believe it or not, Vera, but the other night when you two took down Tony, you reached the same level of speed Barry did." I couldn't help a smirk. "Engulfed with fire like that, you can be just as fast as he can, as long as you have the focus to do it. You two need to kick it up a notch."

Barry's phone vibrated. He pulled it out to look at the text. "There was a homicide. I'm sorry. I've gotta go."

"This is not just about you," Wells told us. "Remember that."

~

The homicide was of someone that had been electrocuted with no possible way that it had been electrocuted.

Barry had taken pictures and brought them back to STAR Labs.

"Facial reconstructive software," Cisco told us, sitting at the desk next to Caitlin. "It was designed for archaeologists, and it should help us ID your crispy corpse."

"Question is, how did he get electrocuted in the first place?" I asked. "Is there a metahuman that can control electricity?"

"It'd take a serious electrostatic discharge to cause that tissue damage," Wells told us.

"Guys, according to the software, there's an 82 percent chance your victim looked like this," Cisco told us, showing us a picture of what looked like an expressionless, faceless face.

"82?" I repeated.

"It was zero when you walked in here," Cisco told us.

Caitlin smiled a small smile.

"Can you cross reference with the DMV database?" Barry asked. "Get a name?"

Cisco nodded. "Absolutely. This software can do just about anything. Now that Felicity reprogrammed it." He pulled up a picture of a man. "Casey Donahue. No wife, no kids. Used to work at the Petersburg electrical substation."

"That can't be a coincidence," Caitlin told us.

"That's weird," Cisco told us. "Someone just used his ID to enter the substation."