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Chapter Text

The small shimmering black spot in the near distance could have been any number of things: an oil deposit forced upward by shifting earth; obsidian created from a volatile explosion of sodium or potassium that turned nearby silica to glass; shale, catching the sun just right. Jax was starting to get a knack for these things though, after two years skirting the Barrens and, more often than not, leaving the border behind entirely. Even from this distance, he was pretty sure he knew what it was.

“Uranium?” he asked, looking that way.

The sun was behind them, not that Firestorm could feel it, and the wind was gentle. Hovering in place wasn’t too difficult at the moment; they were only about fifty feet or so above the ground, so the headwinds were low, and the air hadn’t even started to thin. The low sloping hills of Mesa Valley were empty around them, without anyone in sight. The road between Obsidian Springs and Goldenridge was some miles to the east yet and, as low as they were, they couldn’t even spot Obsidian Springs, still some forty miles north and east of them. Goldenridge should have been easier to see, twenty miles south and east of them, but the small township was located on one of the two mesas at the desert’s edge and thus stood a good two hundred feet higher in elevation than its surroundings. Firestorm wasn’t high enough to see it, though the sight of the familiar mesa was comforting.

There was no rush, and no hurry, and no worry about being seen or having to interact with strangers.

He could feel Gray squinting the same direction Jax was looking now, probably about a mile below them and closing, though Firestorm’s eyes didn’t actually move. “Hmm,” the professor said thoughtfully, radiating caution and intrigue. “It’s possible.”

Jax rolled his eyes. That was professor-speak for ‘probably, but I’m not committing until I know more—but I do want to know more’. He angled them toward the black spot, standing out from the barren brown desert stone around it. He couldn’t yet make out any cracks in the earth radiating from the obtrusion, which meant this either wasn’t a recent earthshift, or it’d been a small one. Given how close they were to town at the moment and how often Firestorm patrolled this area, Jax would have put money on the latter. If it was old, they would have spotted it months ago.

Well, he would have put money on it if he’d had any to spend. “Wanna put stakes on it?” he found himself asking his partner instead. Betting money was useless, but there were other things they could barter for amongst themselves. He was pretty sure he knew the answer, but sometimes Martin was in a mood to play along.

“I do not understand why you continually insist on these games,” Gray said with amusement, only slightly chiding. The annoyance he felt was faint and overshadowed by fondness, so Jax was in the clear, but he hadn’t struck gold either.

“Not much else to do out here,” he said. He was flying just slow enough that he could speak without worrying about the wind snatching his words away, but that still meant they were rapidly approaching the spot. Granted, Gray heard through his—Firestorm’s—ears, so he didn’t have to put any volume behind his speech, but there was no rush. The sun was high overhead and there wasn’t a caravan or traveler in sight. They had the day to themselves, as usual.

“Jefferson…” Gray said in response, slow and cautious and dredged in guilt.

Jax’s own guilt flared in response. He hadn’t meant it like that. “C’mon, man,” he said out loud. “You know I didn’t mean it like that.” Two years. Two years here, and Gray still felt guilty about it sometimes, as though Jax hadn’t been a willing participant, as though Jax hadn’t wanted, needed, the move just as badly as he had.

He might not have been through the same things Gray had, not to the same extent at least, but he’d seen the aftermath well enough. He’d been the aftermath, his version of Firestorm born in a storm of blood and pain and fear and the previous Firestorm’s death. Half-death, in a manner of speaking, because Gray had survived.

Gray cleared his throat. Jax realized he was hovering again and resumed their slow flight toward the black patch on the ground. “Yes, well,” Gray said, stuffy and uncertain in his tone but full of love in his mind. “Even so.”

Jax breathed in the feeling of that love deeply, echoing it back toward his partner. Goldenridge hadn’t had any travelers passing through in weeks but Firestorm, as the resident Hero, still had to make occasional trips to Obsidian Springs and they were coming up on the time frame for another one of those trips. He couldn’t blame Gray for being anxious at that; they both hated the crowds and the attention showing up in Obsidian gave them.

And now Jax was getting morose too. He refocused on their destination, increasingly certain that the black mineral peaking from the earth was pitchblende. Uranium deposits were higher here in Mesa Valley, both the pure element and the common mineral forms, which was half the reason Firestorm had settled down in the nearest township. They could do some good here, without drawing the attention that operating in a proper city would have brought them.

He flipped on the Geiger counter clipped to Firestorm’s belt. It was a cheap model and they had to be careful not to run through batteries too quickly, but all they cared about was verifying the presence of radioactivity. Firestorm’s radiation absorption both was and wasn’t a passive ability: it was always on, and Jax could turn it up, but he couldn’t really tell how much he was absorbing. With potential radioactive deposits like these, there was always the risk that all he was absorbing was general environmental background radiation. Sure enough though, the small box started beeping madly even before Firestorm’s feet touched down.

Jax grinned. Jackpot. He clicked off the Geiger counter again. “Soak it in, Gray,” he said, gloating a little and joking at the same time.

Gray laughed. “I don’t believe we set any terms,” he reminded Jax.

No, they hadn’t. Jax didn’t care. It was good to be useful and he enjoyed the simple pleasure he got from keeping Mesa Valley—and as much of the Barrens as they could—free from damaging radiation.

“What do we want to transmute this into?” he asked. For all his grumbling about money on occasion, Firestorm didn’t really need anything. They could turn the everyday rocks around them into solid gold, or, more valuable: lithium, single-crystal silicon chips, or ready-made stainless steel alloys. Their powers had wreaked havoc on Goldenridge’s economy when they’d first settled in until they’d eked out an arrangement with the locals. Now, no one in the town really needed to work for a living.

That, combined with the stability of the solid rock the mesa provided beneath them, had turned the township into a near-utopia. Firestorm couldn’t do much about illness and injury, couldn’t provide clothes or food, but they could provide nearly everything else, and pay for the things they couldn’t. The townspeople had responded by providing them shelter and tempering their questions and it was everything Jax and Martin had needed at the time.

“The Ackerman’s daughter started building her own homestead, I believe,” Martin said. “Perhaps steel for nails?”

“Good idea.” Jax almost wracked his brain for the most useful steel to make nails from, something the blacksmith would be able to shape, but caught himself in time. Between lessons from Martin and the smith himself, he probably could have had a degree in metallurgy, but he didn’t need to remember the perfect nail making material at the moment.

Transmuting simple compositions was easiest. Pitchblende was uranium dioxide, ignoring impurities. That was only two elements and a single crystal structure to worry about. Switching those two elements to pure iron was easy. Transmuting finished products was a lot harder. Firestorm could, technically speaking, transmute this lump of pitchblende into nails off the bat, but that would mean individually constructing nails in his mind, keeping them all the same shape and size—and keeping them functional. It was so much easier to convert the pitchblende into an easily workable metal, like pure iron, let the blacksmith shape it, then convert each nail individually as needed.

“How about aluminum for the flight,” Jax suggested, “then iron for Henry?”

Gray wasn’t going to let him get out of the impromptu quiz though. “What kind of steel would you recommend for the nails?”

Jax huffed, but he didn’t mind the questions. There really wasn’t anything else to do. If his mom could see him now…

“Low carbon steel?”

“Common,” Gray agreed, “but we don’t have to worry about cost.”

“So, something corrosion resistant?”

“A stainless would be most useful.”

Neat, but boring. Jax had a lot of experience with stainless steels. Goldenridge was probably the most corrosion-resistant township on the continent.

“Alright,” he agreed. “Ready for this?”

Gray ‘nodded’, both of them priming Firestorm’s powers. Jax reached forward and laid their fingertips on the pitchblende. Together, they concentrated on the transformation of the uranium dioxide to pure aluminum, something light and easy to carry. Shoving forward with Firestorm’s energy, the transformation overtook the mineral.

Of course, it wasn’t that easy; the aluminum was still stuck in the ground around it. Extracting the radioactive elements of the valley always took a few steps. Next, they touched the soil around the shimmering aluminum and converted any silicon dioxide into dihydrogen oxide—water. This was a trickier transmutation. Nearly all soil contained some amount of silicon dioxide, and they weren’t interested in converting the entire Earth’s crust. This time, they had to purposefully contain their transmutation to a small radius around the most recent earthshift.

It wasn’t enough to remove the soil entirely, but it softened it up (and got it wet), the water easily flowing into the dry dirt around them. With that, and the light weight of the aluminum, it wasn’t hard to get a good grip on the lumpy, misshapen metal and tug it out of the earth. This piece wasn’t big, maybe about the size of a particularly uncomfortable pillow, but even that wasn’t the end of it.

Setting aside the aluminum, Jax flicked on the Geiger counter again. Luckily, Firestorm only absorbed radiation and didn’t give off any of their own, otherwise this next part would have been tricky. Slowly, the counter started beeping again, which meant they hadn’t gotten all the uranium; Jax read the display closely, but it wasn’t quite within safe levels for passing humans, which meant digging through the dirt to find the pitchblende they’d missed.

Sifting through wet soil wasn’t exactly what he’d pictured when he’d been young and wistful about the life of a Hero, but, older and wiser now, Jax was finding that he didn’t mind so much. It wasn’t quite the same as gardening, but there was still something soothing about kneeling in the dirt and pushing his hands through the soil, knowing what he was doing might save lives.

“There.”

Gray had spotted a glint of the black mineral that Jax had missed, and he reached for it now. Again, Firestorm reached for their power and again a lump of aluminum now existed where once uranium had been. Jax tossed it aside with the larger piece, then checked the Geiger counter again. The counts were still decently high, but that piece had been fairly small. Either there was a larger lump just under the surface, or the residual radiation had been high enough that Firestorm hadn’t absorbed it all yet.

“Ten-minute break?” he asked, clicking the counter off again.

Gray knew why he was asking. “The five main families of stainless steels?” he shot back, even as Jax clambered out of the small hole left by the pitchblende after he’d removed it, and the digging he’d done to find the smaller piece.

Jax groaned good-naturedly, grinning. “C’mon, Gray,” he said. “You’ve got harder questions than that.” Stainless steel compositions were among the first he’d learned, after memorizing the periodic table.

“Very well then,” Gray said, equally amused. “Allotropes of sulfur?”

Oof, that was a hard one (and fairly useless). Jax settled down into the dirt cross-legged, and fell into the easy rapport of letting Gray quiz him about transmutations and crystal structures.

The earthshift was small but the rumble was still enough to wake Sara with a start, shooting upward in her bed roll and blinking at the grasslands around them. She and her client had taken shelter for the night under a small thicket of trees and the moon shone now through the branches above her, lightly illuminating the scene. There was no sign of an immediate threat but Sara knew better than to bunk back down. She’d spent too long traveling the unmined regions of the continent to grow complacent now.

A few feet away, her client was stirring in his bed roll as well, though the two horses tied down just behind him slumbered without care. Sara checked that her knife was still sheathed at her belt before giving him the proper attention. He was the one paying her, but you could never be too careful.

“Earthshift,” she said, once the expression on his face shifted from half-asleep to merely confused.

Hunter only nodded though, sitting up properly as he started to scan the area around them.

There was no telltale cracking of the dirt immediately next to their sleeping rolls, which was reassuring but meant they’d have to do some searching. Or just pack up and leave. Sara cast another glance at the sky, even as she stood. The night was still pitch black, without any indication yet of the sun, and the moon’s position told her they still had several hours to go before daybreak. That was one of the disadvantages of traveling with horses; it was best not to ride them in the dark.

Granted, the advantage of speed tended to outweigh the restricted travel time, and it wasn’t as if humans couldn’t stumble in the dark either, so Sara didn’t let herself dwell on it. They’d stay camped here unless the most recent earthshift posed a serious threat. There were a lot of rare earth mineral deposits in this stretch between the Desert Run River and the Arset Mountains, which meant a lot of fluctuating magnetic fields but not much danger. Of course, there was also the occasional calcium deposit, which tended to explode if it got wet, the frequent iron deposits, which randomly burst into flames, or the periodic aluminum deposit, which was, thankfully, relatively harmless.

More rare deposits were harder to predict, but Sara had seen a mound of toxic beryllium the size of a small dog tear from the earth once, stood too close to explosive potassium a time or two, and knew several people—her sister included—who’d been too close to one of the rarer catastrophic earthshifts of unknown minerals that changed people permanently. Sara still had the scars from one of those potassium explosions; Laurel’s screams could now shatter the earth.

Caution was best.

“Do you have a Geiger counter?” Hunter asked now, as he stood to join her.

Sara shook her head. She relied mostly on her eyesight and gut instinct, but she had a rare flashlight if she needed to get a closer look at something in the dark. Luckily, radioactive minerals were rare in this part of the world. She knew they were a bit more common south of the Desert Run River, but they were days of travel away from that part of the world yet. Still, it was good to see Hunter’s reaction to an earthshift was also an overabundance of caution.

“You?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“We can move camp,” she offered. He was the one paying for her services; she’d go where he went.

In the dim light of the moon, Sara could just barely make out his frown. “No,” he said, looking up at the moon’s position. “Let’s try and find it. Could be useful.”

Interesting. She’d caught sight of a few tools here and there when they set up and took down their camps, but she hadn’t been sure if Hunter had been an overly prepared traveler or an actual Geologist. It would have been useful to know that she was traveling with someone who actually knew what he was doing, but well, she was also being paid not to ask questions.

She nodded anyway. It was unlikely, but she wouldn’t say no to a good gold deposit, or something a little more useful like titanium or copper. They hadn’t discussed that in her contract, so she might even be able to bargain for half the profits from something like that.

“You take north of the tree,” she said. “I’ll take south.”

Hunter didn’t argue—a useful trait in a client—and they set out, combing through the tall grass. Sara’s eyesight was sharp, but she was still almost on top of the crack in the earth before she spotted it. She froze instantly. Earthshifts presented in three common ways: mineral protrusions, which sprung up above the ground and were typically elemental or simple minerals; underground pressure, which didn’t expose any minerals but tended to force up groundwater or even oil sometimes; and cracking, like miniature earthquakes that didn’t care how close you were to a fault line. This earthshift was the third kind, though thankfully small, as she’d thought earlier.

The first kind were really the most dangerous, depending on the mineral or element forced upward, but that didn’t mean those minerals couldn’t be exposed during the third kind of earthshift. It only meant they were that much harder to see if they were, deep within whatever crack formed.

Sara raised her hand. “Over here,” she called out. With another client she might have guided them away, or even urged moving camp for the night, but Hunter had shown intelligence and a willingness to take her orders thus far. She wasn’t particularly concerned, so she’d let him make the judgement call.

Hunter took a moment to study the branching crack, testing its edges and pressing down lightly on the earth around it. The crack was maybe half Sara’s height in length, less than a hand across at its widest. It’d be fairly easy to twist an ankle in, but no one was falling in and the ground around it seemed stable.

“We should be in the clear,” Hunter said, gauging the distance between the crack and their camp, but he still looked to Sara when he was done, as if wanting her opinion.

He hadn’t asked a question though, and Sara was here to protect him from human threats, not earthshifts. She nodded; he was the client.

“See you at dawn, then,” she said, moving back to her bed roll. He kept them moving from sun up to sun down, but Sara didn’t mind. At this rate, they’d make it to Central City by day’s end tomorrow, and they’d start approaching the mined-out suburbs around the city by lunch. Protecting clients was so much easier when she didn’t have to worry about the threats underfoot.

Touching the knife at her belt once more, just to be certain, Sara folded herself back into her bed roll. Hunter could spend his time examining the crack or not; she didn’t care, she was going to get her sleep.

“Ready, my love?”

Kendra hummed distractedly in response. “Hmm?” She wasn’t really paying attention. Skyfall Tower had the perfect roof to stretch out her wings and soak in a little sun. Her extra set of limbs were stretched as far as she could force them without getting uncomfortable, the primaries spread as wide as they could. Tip to tip, she was reaching past her typical wingspan by a few inches.

“Kendra, darling,” Carter said, and this time she noted the exasperation in his tone.

Go, go, go. Carter was all about the next trip, the next set of clients, the next paycheck. Kendra wasn’t in any hurry. She hummed again, keeping her eyes closed, and flexed her back muscles. True, the concrete of the rooftop wasn’t entirely comfortable against her stomach, but she’d stretched her bed roll beneath her and the sun more than made up for it. It was a beautiful day, and they’d spent the past month walking with a caravan from Bexley to Akerton with only a few days pause in Bravefort during the middle of the trip. Couple that with the full day of flying they’d done yesterday to get back to Bravefort from Akerton without clients this time and Kendra thought she deserved a little sun.

“I thought you wanted to get home,” Carter said, gently chiding.

Oh, alright. That would do it. Kendra rolled her eyes, but she was smiling softly as she folded up her wings and rolled onto her side to properly glare at her husband. “And how long do you intend to stay home, this time?” she asked.

Carter didn’t fall into their usual arguments though, which told her that he was either as eager as she was to sleep somewhere familiar again or that they’d earned enough on this past trip that he wasn’t fretting about money. Probably it was a combination of both.

“There’s talk of a family traveling east to Carnelian City,” he said instead. “They could use a guide.”

“Can they afford a pair of guides?” Kendra shot back.

Carter only grinned cheekily at her, which told her he’d already scoped the situation out fully, which told her he would win this argument. Bummer. “There’s eight of them, and they’re all second-generation residents here, which mean none of them have really spent any time in the Barrens proper.”

Bravefort wasn’t really a properly mined-out city, but the residents did enough digging that the earthshifts that happened here were minor and well controlled. There was the occasional uranium protrusion that typically got boxed up in lead until Firestorm did his bi-monthly drop by, and the odd explosion or other effect, but Kendra hadn’t heard of anyone spontaneously developing powers from rare minerals in years, and mining related deaths had been declining steadily during that same time frame. It was no bustling municipality, but its spot in the middle of the Barrens and on the edge of a small river gave it plenty of travelers passing through, which fueled a healthy economy.

Second-generation residents, therefore, wouldn’t be ready for the more common earthshifts in the Barrens proper that would hit as they journeyed east to Carnelian City. They’d pay well, and with eight of them, more than one guide would come in handy.

“That’s a little out of the way,” Kendra said anyway, just to be contrary. She was sitting up properly now, legs crossed beneath her, but she’d relaxed her wings again and let them drape on the concrete to soak in the sun.

Carter wasn’t swayed; she hadn’t expected him to be. He did, however, move to take a seat beside her and start preening. Kendra couldn’t say she hadn’t been hoping for that. The combination of the morning sun and his fingers… Oh yeah. She melted under her husband’s touch.

“When are they leaving again?” she half-mumbled, eyes closed again.

It sounded like she was giving in, but they both known she’d been okay with picking up another commission from the start of the conversation. Carter knew what she was really asking: how much longer do we have to relax before you have to stop preening me?

He huffed in amusement, the warm air from his breath ghosting over the back of her neck. “An hour,” he mumbled back, leaning forward to press a gentle kiss to her nape.

Kendra grumbled, faux-irritated, and ruffled her wings, forcing Carter to pull back. “I suppose we better pack up then,” she said.

“I suppose,” Carter agreed from behind her. She could hear the amusement in his tone at her reluctance, but there was a little longing there too. They’d had the whole day to themselves yesterday, but they’d spent most of that flying. He was eager to get home then, even if he’d taken a commission along the way.

Still, Carnelian wasn’t bad. With eight clients… maybe a five-day journey on foot, giving her and Carter plenty of time to rest their wings, and pick up another paycheck along the way, and then the two of them could be home in Obsidian Springs after another day of flying. Kendra was very much looking forward to that, if only for a single night in their familiar beds and the cooler temperatures of the more northern climate.

“Point the way,” she offered. There weren’t many mutants—or other non-humans—in Bravefort, but she wasn’t interested in hiding. There was no need for them to take the stairs down when the skies were freely available and her wings were freshly preened.

Central City was nothing and everything like Star City all at once, and Sara was never quite sure how to feel about the place every time she visited. On one hand, there weren’t many major cities on the continent, and all of them had the same feeling of security. The ground beneath them was mined out and earthshifts were rare to non-existent. Nobody had to worry about sudden mineral protrusions or the earth cracking beneath their feet. Star City was a port city, solidly sat on the North Ocean. Central City had its share of docks too, situated as it was near the source of the broad Desert Run River. They were both sprawling municipalities, with suburbs often outstretching the mined regions.

Star City felt darker though. It was about the same size, but with twice the population. There were more slums, less safety from the people, even if the earth beneath one’s feet was stable. Farther north it was literally darker too, with less sunlight day to day. Central City was brighter, and surrounded by flat grasslands, which made it feel bigger. The people had more room to spread out, less room to squabble, and it showed. Even closer to the so-called Protectorate, run by the closest thing the continent had to a standing army and a viable threat, it was cheerful here.

Of course, that didn’t mean Central didn’t have its share of troubles. The inn Hunter had led them to was on the outskirts of the industrial district, covered in soot and grime and filled with a tough crowd. Hunter looked wary as he sat across from her at the rough, hand-cut table in the corner. Sara’d snagged the corner seat, giving her a good range of view of the rest of the dining floor, but she had a feeling it wasn’t the other patrons that were giving Hunter pause.

“You said something about extending my contract?” she asked, not willing to put up with his dithering. He’d paid for a few more days while he went about business in Central City, but she needed to know if she should get ready to make the trip back north again or if they were going to be here a while.

Hunter nodded, firm. He sat at 90 degrees from her instead of across the table, not quite willing to fully expose his back to the other patrons either. “I’m interested,” he said, low and careful, “in mining lithium deposits from the Barrens.”

Sara blinked but held back any other expressions of her surprise. Lithium was an expensive metal, and there was good profit in that, but getting into mining anywhere was risky business and Hunter wanted to do it in the Barrens. The desert on the continent’s western coast was dry and lifeless, with frequent earthshifts. Most people stayed east, north, or south of that region; earthshifts elsewhere weren’t really less common, but at least there was arable farmland, green forests, and no need to worry about where your next drink of water was coming from.

She frowned at him. “You don’t really seem kitted out for a mining operation.” Plenty of people dug out their own homesteads as much as they could, given that it had the dual benefit of letting them sell off whatever they found and reducing the possibility of catastrophic earthshifts in the future. If you wanted to make a profit though… one man with a shovel wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t the only oddity to Hunter’s statement, but it was what Sara chose to focus on for now. (Why lithium, specifically? How did he know how to find it?)

“Not yet,” Hunter agreed. “But I was thinking of a smaller operation. I know how to track down the lithium myself, go straight for the deposits instead of digging around in the dirt. What I need is a scientist to help with the mining, muscle to help guard the product, and guides to cross the Barrens.”

He was giving away a lot of information, and from the smug expectation in his expression he knew it. This wasn’t some spur of the moment decision; it was a well-thought-out plan. It seemed ridiculous to believe that he knew where to find lithium somehow, but if Sara ignored that, if she was willing to believe in that absurdity, the rest of it…

“You’ve already got people in mind,” she realized.

Hunter nodded. “Leonard Snart and Mick Rory,” he said plainly. “A pair of thieves. They operate mainly out of Central, sometimes out of Riverston, to the east of here. I cut them in on the profit, and they’ll be more than enough to ensure the cargo stays safe.”

Thieves as muscle. An interesting choice. “And they can help you sell it when you get back,” Sara pointed out carefully.

Hunter watched her just as carefully, both of them feeling out how the other thought about that.

“The law doesn’t exist in the unmined country,” Sara pointed out. “You’ll get no argument from me. But what’s to stop them from just taking the lithium themselves?”

“That’s where you come in.”

So this was a proposal.

“And the scientist and the guides?”

“Ray Palmer, Hero certified originally in Star City—I believe you’re familiar with him.”

Ray. Yeah, she knew him. Their time in Star City hadn’t overlapped by much, but she remembered him as being cheerful and optimistic and very intelligent. Book smart more than street smart, but with a bit of training from Oliver and the suit he’d built he’d learned to hold his own in a fight. He was a smart choice for a trip to the Barrens; his ability to fly alone could get them out of trouble in an emergency. Plus, his friendly nature could be useful if Sara’s less diplomatic tendencies failed. He wouldn’t be intimidated by the pair of thieves either, even if maybe he should have been.

Sara nodded in respect at the choice. Hunter’s idea that he knew how to find lithium easy as pie still seemed ridiculous, but his plan to go get it was looking better and better by the moment.

“For the guides, there’s a married couple operating out of Obsidian Springs, Kendra and Carter Hall.”

The Hawks. Their reputations preceded them, though Sara made it a point to stay aware of such matters, and they were a solid choice as well. She didn’t know if they were metahumans or non-humans, but they were fliers too, which came in handy in their line of work and would be an added bonus for their trip. Sara’d heard rumors they weren’t half bad fighters either.

Hunter was certainly putting together quite the team. If it came right down to it, and there was a scramble for the lithium, Sara couldn’t say who would come out victorious. One on one, she was confident she could take any of them in a fight, but Snart and Rory would likely stick together, as would the Hawks. She might have been able to finagle Ray’s support, but more likely he’d throw himself in the middle trying to break up any fight. He might even succeed.

Still ignoring the entire motive behind the trip, Sara found herself seriously considering it. Hunter had shown on their way to Central City that he knew what he was doing, and he wasn’t disproving that with the plan he laid out before her now. She waved over a waiter, indication enough to Hunter that she was thinking things through and willing to keep talking. Hunter waved off the thought of alcohol, but Sara ordered a cheap beer for herself and some chips for the both of them.

“What’s my cut?” she asked, once the waiter had disappeared into the crowd again.

“Ten percent each, for everyone involved,” Hunter said, with an air of determination that said he wasn’t interested in bargaining.

Sara did the quick mental math: her, Ray, the two thieves, and the two guides. That left forty percent of the profits in Hunter’s hands. Lithium wasn’t cheap, but he must have been pretty confident in how much they would find.

“And if there are no profits?”

“There will be.”

Sara didn’t want to believe him so easily, but Hunter’s conviction was hard to shake. He hadn’t set out on this trip to go find lithium, he’d set out to go get lithium.

“You’re paying us all the same,” she said. “What’s to stop me from siding with the thieves and leaving you stranded?” She wasn’t really considering it but she wanted to know his failsafe plan. If Snart and Rory did turn on them and cut Hunter out, they might be willing to offer her fifteen or twenty percent to get her on their side.

“You told me when I hired you that you didn’t back out of contracts,” Hunter reminded her.

So her reputation was the failsafe. Sara quirked an eyebrow at the man in front of her. “And you believed it?” It was true, of course, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t prod at Hunter’s trust in that.

Hunter didn’t waver in the face of her skepticism, only stared her down.

Alright then, point him. Sara waited for the waiter to set down her beer and the chips, then took a slow, careful sip as the man walked away, watching Hunter all the while. He didn’t show any signs of impatience.

“It’s a good plan,” she allowed after a moment. “But it relies on me actually believing that you know where the next lithium deposit is going to pop up.”

“It does,” Hunter said plainly. He didn’t move to make any argument in his own favor.

Sara leaned back, impressed despite herself. He really did seem one hundred percent convinced. “Lay the whole thing out for me,” she said.

Hunter did. Snart and Rory were here in town. They’d recruit them, sell the horses, then buy a couple of canoes and travel down the Desert Run River to Riverston, a small city on the river’s edge with a population of about twenty-five thousand people. There they’d pick up Ray, who was currently doing the traveling Hero thing, bringing supplies and humanitarian aid with him as he traveled. Back on the river they’d paddle downstream again to Obsidian Springs, an even smaller town with a population of about ten thousand and the Hawks’ home base. All in all, it was about four or five days of travel down Desert Run before they would actually set off into the Barrens.

From there, Hunter was confident the lithium deposit was in the southwest region of the barrens. On foot, it was about at least ten days of fast, steady travel from Obsidian Springs to Bravefort, pretty much the only city in the Barrens, though there were townships here and there. (Bravefort itself was more of a town than a city; like Obsidian Springs, it was only about ten thousand in population.) Hunter’s best estimates put their destination somewhere between sixty to eighty miles southwest of Bravefort. That meant another four days of travel, and probably a few more days to root through the desert for the lithium, plus a couple more days to mine it out.

Assuming they all returned to Obsidian Springs as a group, then came to Central to sell the lithium, and that the lithium didn’t slow them down on the way back, it was, at minimum, a two-month journey—and that was anticipating no complications, no bandit attacks, no earthshifts that set them back, and no trouble recruiting the others, which was quite unlikely. It’d be the longest contract Sara had taken in some time.

But it sounded doable. It sounded more than doable. Stopping in Bravefort on the journey there and back meant they wouldn’t have to carry as many supplies. Having three fliers in a group of seven could cut travel time considerably too, even if the three of them couldn’t necessarily carry the four others.

Sara was leaning forward on the table now, her mug nearly empty, the chips nearly eaten. “You’ll still need more supplies than you can carry,” she said. Hunter had laid a map of the Barrens across the table and they were both studying it; it was disappointingly nondescript, but it would function until they hired on the Hawks. “Particularly the mining equipment. Wagons slow things down too much. I’m thinking pack mules.”

“Two or three of them,” Hunter agreed. “But Palmer’s shrinking technology should be an asset as well.”

Sara had forgotten about that; Ray had still been perfecting the ability to shrink things other than himself last she’d seen him. “You don’t just want his expertise on mining the lithium, you want him to carry it.”

“He’s a neutral party,” Hunter said. “Snart and Rory won’t have to worry about us making off with it.”

“You’ll just have to worry about them attacking him instead.”

Hunter gave her a careful look. They’d been dancing around her agreement all conversation. “That’s what I have you for,” he said.

True enough.

“You’re confident you know where the lithium is?”

“I’ve got a twenty-mile radius,” Hunter said. “And I can narrow that when we get closer.”

Against all common sense, Sara believed him. She grabbed her mug, swallowing down the last of her warm beer, and shoved the bowl of chip crumbs toward Hunter.

“Ten percent of the profits,” she said. “I serve as your bodyguard, not any of the others’, and I protect the lithium when we find it. Otherwise, same terms as previous.”

Hunter ignored the last of the chips. He held out a hand. Sara took it.

“Alright then, I assume you know how to track down our thieves.”

Hunter stood. “I do,” he said, and then asked her to repack their bags as he went to sell the horses.

Readjusting their packs was easy enough. It took twenty minutes in the room they’d booked for the night to ditch the saddles and distribute things evenly between two packs—Hunter might have been her employer, but she wasn’t going to carry his things for him. She slung one over her shoulder, then grabbed the other in hand, heading down the stairs. The inn wasn’t too disreputable, but when everything you owned fit into one bag, you tended not to leave things where they could get stolen.

Hunter didn’t seem inclined to argue with that philosophy. He took the second pack easily enough when she met him at the stables, slinging it over the shoulder that didn’t hold his own small personal bag, still haggling the price of the horses with the stable master. They were lucky enough that they didn’t have to go searching for someone interested, but, then again, that was probably why Hunter had led them to this inn in the first place.

Walking away, he counted out a small bag of coins and tossed it her way. “Payment,” he said, “for the first leg of the trip.”

She’d just agreed to a two-month or longer contract working with the man—it would have been poor taste to count it out to verify it was what they’d agreed upon earlier. She’d made the decision to trust Hunter; it was time to honor that. She tucked the bag into one of the pockets that lined her belt and followed after her boss.

There wasn’t much of a need for conversation, and in the middle of the day there wasn’t much of a danger of attack. Sara’s eyes stayed alert, but she was mostly relaxed as they walked through Central City. Hunter haggled once with a street urchin for directions, tipping probably a bit more than necessary, and she was glad to see it. She trusted her judgement of his character, but it was good to have proof in front of her.

The bar they ended up at might as well have been called the thieves’ den for all it screamed that it didn’t care about the law. The patrons didn’t quite fall into a hushed silence as Sara and Hunter entered, but it was near enough. It was immediately obvious that they were the outsiders here, and between Hunter’s pistol and Sara’s knives—at least the visible ones—that they posed a small threat.

Sara found herself grabbing at a purse-snatcher’s fingers as they tried to sideswipe her, twisting them in warning before letting go. It was a useful ploy to ferret out lawmen and test the merit of any stranger. An unexperienced lawman or naïve stranger wouldn’t have noticed. An experienced lawman—or thief—would have probably done more than she had, whether that was an outright arrest or breaking a few fingers (by either the lawman or the thief). The Flash had established a friendly community in Central City, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. Worst case for the purse-snatcher was a street urchin spent a few nights getting fed in jail or had to learn how to use their other hand, and any purse-snatcher worth their salt was already ambidextrous.

Hunter went straight up to the bartender. Sara stopped a few feet away, watching his back. Conversation had started back up again when she’d let the purse-snatcher go, though she doubted it was as animated as it could get in these parts.

“Got a job for Snart, if he’s in town,” Hunter said, just the right combination of disinterest and need in his tone. Not too desperate, but not taking no for an answer either.

“What kind of job?”

“The kind that pays well.”

Sara smirked at that. The bartender wouldn’t get anything out of Hunter. The two bantered back and forth for a short while, but it was clear that the bartender would give in eventually and that Hunter wasn’t going anywhere until he got his answers. Sure enough, after a few moments Hunter flipped the woman a silver coin and she nodded him toward a table in back. Sara made sure to stay a few steps behind Hunter as they headed that way, not so much to hide her association with him but more to give herself the room to lunge into a fight, if needed.

No one accosted them on the way to the table though, and Snart, presumably, was alone where he sat, back to the wall.

“Heard you were looking to hire some thieves,” Snart said as they approached.

It wasn’t implausible to assume the street urchin Rip had asked for directions from had hurried on ahead of them and received another payout by tipping off Snart to their arrival, but Sara could respect the approach. It didn’t much work on her, but she could see how Snart sitting alone and waiting for them could come off as intimidating and all-knowing to the inexperienced.

“You and your partner,” Hunter confirmed, appearing as unruffled as Sara by Snart’s opening move.

Snart leaned forward. It could have been genuine interest—and maybe it was—but Sara would have bet the entire coin purse Hunter had just given her that it was entirely a calculated move so he could gather as much information as possible, whether he was interested or not.

“I’m listening.”

“You want to talk about this here?”

Snart cast a half-derisive, half-commanding look over the crowd beyond them. “No one here would steal a score from me,” he said. It was confidence and smugness all rolled into one; Snart knew he was good, and he knew everyone else here knew it as well.

Sara hoped that confidence wasn’t misplaced. Unlike Ray and the Hawks, she didn’t know Snart and Rory, by reputation or otherwise. For the most part, she kept herself uninvolved with city criminals, spending most of her time in unmined territories. Hunter had seemed confident in his choice, and Snart was certainly putting on airs of confidence, but she knew better than to trust the façade any thief presented.

Hunter hesitated, but they were on Snart’s turf and he knew it. He leaned forward a little where he’d taken a seat across from Snart, lowering his voice. Sara, standing behind him, could just make out his words, but the folks at the next table over probably couldn’t.

“I’m tracking down a lithium deposit,” he said. “I know where it is, but I need muscle to bring it back here, and contacts on the black market to sell it afterwards.”

Snart raised an eyebrow. “Black market lithium? Risky business. Why not just find a reputable merchant?”

“I’m hoping to avoid questions.”

The unspoken from you as well brought a small frown to Snart’s face. It had been a valid question though. Sara’d guessed the answer was Hunter didn’t want others encroaching on his mysterious lithium-finding technique, but she hadn’t actually asked for clarification. Even though she’d already agreed anyway, she was interested to see how far Snart would push Hunter for answers.

“And you want me and Mick for muscle and sales?”

There was an unspoken question there too: why not just approach us after you get back with the lithium?

“I need both,” Hunter said bluntly. “Why involve more people than necessary?”

Snart tilted his head, as if to say, fair enough. “Our cut?”

“Ten percent of the profits. For each of you.”

“That’s not saying much.”

“Market price is nearly 100 gold coins per pound,” Hunter said. “I imagine you can get more than that on the black market.”

“Lithium’s light. Average earthshift typically yields no more than twenty pounds of material.”

Sara didn’t know where he was pulling that number from, though it didn’t seem too out there. For all she knew he could have been making it up, but it didn’t matter. The point still stood: lithium was expensive, sure, but if they were only out for a few pounds of the stuff that wasn’t much profit, and Snart didn’t even know about the two-month journey yet.

“This isn’t your average earthshift. I’m anticipating somewhere between two to three hundred pounds of lithium.”

Running the math in her head, that came out as two to three thousand gold coins for each of them, eight to twelve for Hunter’s forty percent. That would set Sara up comfortably for a few years. From the looks of him, Snart felt similarly.

“And the transport?”

“The deposit’s in the Barrens,” Hunter said, not mincing words. “You don’t have to worry about the mining, and we’ll get guides for the trip, but the extra muscle would come in handy. You could sell it in Central again if that’s what you prefer, or anywhere along the way.”

“So you’d handle the route here and back again.”

“Down the river to Obsidian Springs,” Hunter said. “Cross to Bravefort, then a few more days to the deposit.”

Sara could see Snart running the same math she had, only a few hours before. He frowned thoughtfully, then flicked his eyes up at her.

“And you?” he asked. He hadn’t been paying her much overt attention until then, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t noticed her.

Sara grinned ferociously, showing her teeth. “I’ve been hired to protect my client,” she said.

Snart had been in the business long enough to know what that meant; he and his partner were there to protect the caravan, she was there to prevent any double-crossing. He grinned back at her, biting and cold.

“Well then,” he said, gaze drifting back to Hunter, “I can see you know what you’re doing. But I don’t do business with strangers.” He leaned back in his seat, and Sara knew he was hooked.

Now it was just negotiating.

Hunter recognized it too. He held out his hand. “Rip Hunter,” he said. His grin wasn’t quite as mean as hers or Snart’s, but there was a steel in it too, something that held violence just below the surface.

This, Sara was certain, would be an interesting trip.

Trust, as an idea, was way more complicated than the singular word could ever hope to convey. Leonard trusted that Rip Hunter knew where to find lithium in the desert. He trusted that the man would let him and Mick keep twenty percent of the profits without double crossing them. He trusted that Hunter’s other hire, Lance, would slit his throat if he thought about doing so himself. He trusted that the trek would be dangerous, and the plan was solid.

But he didn’t trust Rip Hunter. There were, of course, plenty of things that the man wasn’t telling them, things that probably Lance didn’t even know. For one, how the man knew there was lithium in the desert, or, at least, the exact spot of where to find a good deposit of it. That was a mystery that someone would probably pay handsomely for.

Leonard wasn’t a businessman though. He wasn’t interested in figuring out if Hunter’s trick could be replicated and then setting up a mining operation himself. He was interested in getting an in now; it could be useful to establish himself as Hunter’s connection to Central City’s black market if the man planned on repeating his trick at any point in the future. Ten percent—twenty—wasn’t a high cut, but with the number of people Hunter planned to involve Leonard figured it was a fair bargain, and the percentage didn’t much matter when the numbers themselves were so high.

Leonard didn’t trust Rip Hunter. But he trusted the profit they were chasing and the glint of determination in Hunter’s eyes. It wasn’t quite greed, money didn’t seem to be Hunter’s only objective, but it was something, and Leonard knew better than to ignore it.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Mick, at his side, grunted. His partner hadn’t been there for the original meeting, and Hunter had given him the night to get his affairs in Central City in order. It was good Leonard hadn’t had any plans for the coming weeks yet, but Mick was still a little annoyed at the early awakening.

Leonard shot his partner a cross look, tossing another parcel into the canoe. He wanted an actual opinion, not just Mick’s usual irritation.

Mick rolled his eyes. “Don’t know why you’re asking me, boss,” he said. He was lounging in their canoe already, not bothering to help load the supplies.

Unlike the rest of the crew Leonard usually ran with, Mick’s tone when he said boss was mostly sarcasm. They were more equal partners than anything, even if Leonard usually called the shots and came up with the plans.

“You know why I’m asking,” he countered. Mick’s intelligence didn’t tend to catch anyone’s eye, but that was half by design. If an interested party wanted to try and out think Leonard Snart, he’d prefer that they did so while forgetting about his right-hand man. Mick was more muscles than brains, true, if you wanted to get technical about it, but he knew what he was doing.

Mick shot him an unimpressed look, then glanced over at the second canoe a few feet down the riverbank. You could fit four people in each one, two in the middle, one at the front, one at the back, but Hunter had elected to divide them up anyway. It split the supplies between two boats, in case of catastrophe, gave everyone plenty of room to spread out, and meant they could pick up passengers. Notably, the ATOM, Hunter’s Hero recruit and apparently science nerd to help him mine the lithium. (That’d be annoying, but, well, with two boats, Leonard could avoid him well enough until they had to ditch the river and start the trek into the desert.)

“Chick’s got style,” Mick ended up saying.

Leonard huffed a laugh at Mick’s casual way of summing up the competency and precision Sara Lance strolled through life with. It was an apt assessment. He had enough honor that he preferred not to back out of deals he made unless the other party reneged first, but even if he had wanted to double cross Hunter, Lance gave him ample reason to rethink that decision. Hunter had made a smart move, hiring her first before approaching the two of them. She seemed more inclined to the Hero way of life too, even skulking around in the shadows as she did; pulling her away from Hunter wasn’t likely.

“Yeah,” he said. “Best to keep our hands to ourselves.” At least, if they wanted to keep their hands.

Mick grunted again. The payout from the venture was enough that slitting a few pockets open along the way wasn’t necessary, and probably wouldn’t be for some time. Mick took the warning for what it was: Leonard didn’t intend on double crossing anyone. Not yet, at least.

“All set?” Lance asked now, crossing over to them.

“All set,” Leonard confirmed. He eyed Lance’s figure appreciatively but carefully. Of course, there was a second meaning in him telling Mick to keep their hands to themselves. Lance was an impressive woman but with her, he figured look but don’t touch was the best way to approach things. She seemed like the type to want to choose her dance partners herself.  

She pulled out a rolled-up map, splaying it open for him. “I don’t think I need to tell you we plan to stay on the south bank of the river,” she said.

Leonard inclined his head in agreement. The Protectorate, the wanna-be empire north of Desert Run, was familiar enough to everyone in Central City. The Flash kept their men from coming too close, and they rarely had encampments on the river’s edge, but it was best not to tempt fate. The further west they traveled, the more likely they would be to encounter stray troops from the militant group, at least for a while. Luckily the Protectorate’s land claim wasn’t too big; it stopped reaching westward at around the same point as Obsidian Springs.

The most dangerous point in the trip, at least in regards to the Protectorate, would be the bend in the river before Riverston. A lot of travelers, Leonard himself included over the years, tended to ditch any boats at the small township at the first bend and cut across the rest of the distance on foot, but they’d need to keep the boats until Obsidian Springs, so that wasn’t an option for this trip.

“We’ll do a five-hour stretch,” Lance continued, “then break for food around here.” She pointed at the map, somewhere a little past the city of Shallen. “Another five-hour stretch should get us to Cobblestown before nightfall.”

Leonard frowned at her. “We bunking in an inn?” From the supplies he’d thought not, and inns cost money, especially ones strategically located a day’s trip downriver from Central. Cobblestown wasn’t much to look at, but it knew its strength as a stopping point on the trip to Riverston, or further west.

Lance shook her head. “Depending on daylight we’ll paddle past it and make camp for the night. Any issues with that?”

Leonard had none, and he knew Mick would follow his lead, but he glanced toward his partner anyway. There was no need to come across as easy-going, even if this part of the trip was simple and well-planned out. He could paddle for two five-hour stretches, and, going down river, it’d be easy enough to break now and then and let the water do the work.

“Good,” Lance said, rolling up the map. “Follow our lead and we can be in Riverston in a few days.”

Optimistic thinking, but Leonard didn’t buck against it. Most people went north or south from Central City, or east to the coast, but the portion westward along the river wasn’t that undeveloped. A bit more lawless and isolated, perhaps, than the rest of the continent, but it wasn’t going to be until they left the river behind before the going would really get rough. River bandits were few and far between these days, and the four of them could handle themselves.

Sure enough, it was smooth sailing for the first half of the day. They passed Shallen without trouble, skirting around the fishing boats and travel barges that congregated near the city, and stopped about an hour after that for lunch. Lunch itself was cold—no point in starting up a fire—but pleasant enough fare, and Leonard spent the half-hour on the riverbank reflecting on his new traveling companions.

Lance and Hunter, rowing the first canoe together, had set a pressing but manageable pace. He and Mick had stuck close to their canoe when the river got crowded, and let the space grow between them when there were fewer people around. Neither Lance nor Hunter seemed worried about the two thieves cutting and running. Hunter had also bought supplies for all four of them with his own funds, as they’d agreed in their contract, and he hadn’t skimped. There was enough food for three days, fishing supplies to supplement what they had, and a good smattering of first aid, weatherproofing, and earthshift preparation equipment.

Leonard’s arms ached a little, as they set off again, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. They rowed for another two hours before they ran into trouble: small rapids on the southern side of the river, and a barge stuck on the rocks. Leonard smelled trap, but he didn’t remember these particular rapids last time he’d made this trip. Granted, it had been a while since he’d been down river, but they were still likely the result of a more recent earthshift, or a few of the things with overlapping effects.

Hunter and Lance had slowed their canoe to fall back alongside them. This stretch of the river was fairly straight, so they were still a quarter mile or so from the obstruction.

“We stopping?” Leonard found himself asking.

The both of them seemed to fall more on the side of do-gooders than scumbags, but they hadn’t exactly struck him as the charitable type. There was a risk here, and he wasn’t sure it was worth taking.

“On the bank, here,” Lance said though, pointing to a less-rocky portion of the southern bank.

Leonard didn’t argue. Stopping here didn’t mean stopping to help, it meant Lance didn’t want to sail past without assessing the situation. Dragging the canoe onto shore, however, brought with it another surprise: a small rumble beneath his feet, enough that he stood up straight to steady himself.

The small crew of four exchanged glances. Earthshift, and one of the bigger ones if it was rumbling like that—a sign of a more spread-out event. That helped explain the rocks Leonard didn’t remember being in the middle of the river last time, which made it less likely this was some kind of trap, but it didn’t mean the crew of the barge didn’t pose a threat. Desperate people could get stupid quickly.

“River’s wide enough,” he said. “Could shoot past him.”

There was another rumble and a sharp crack; a couple hundred feet away, a rock split off a portion of the northern bank that was more cliff than beach and tumbled into the water below.

“Might be best to wait out the earthshift,” Lance said as the trembling quieted.

“You know this region better than us,” Hunter admitted. “What’s common?”

“On the river?” Leonard exchanged glances with Mick. “Mostly transition metals, the common ones.” Harmless enough, or, at least, not explosive. “But there’s plenty of alkali and alkaline earths mixed in.”

“Mining ‘round these part’s usually sulfur and selenium,” Mick cut in.

Less so around the river, but, yeah, that pretty much summed it up.

“Nonmetals,” Hunter said dismissively.

Leonard frowned. Nonmetals were stable—no chance of them popping up randomly—but they could get disrupted easily enough by the metals around them and the explosions that came with alkali and alkaline earth elements didn’t mix well with sulfur minerals. Not to mention the minerals themselves, even if the pure elements never breached ground.

“If those were explosives,” Lance said, “the boat would be gone already.”

Leonard put Hunter’s dismissive attitude aside and refocused on the conversation. “Right,” he said. “The rocks look new, which suggest protrusions, but that crack suggests otherwise.” He nodded his head toward the rock that had fallen in.

Beneath their feet, the earth trembled again. Off in the near distance, Leonard could see the rocks in the river shifting. Not a good sign.

Earthshifts weren’t earthquakes. They were highly localized, typically a result of one specific lump of metal or mineral moving through the ground, and didn’t produce the aftershocks associated with earthquakes. If this one was lasting this long, that was a big chunk of ore moving around beneath them.

“Might be better to get by those rapids sooner rather than later,” he said with some urgency. It would mean abandoning the barge to their fate, but Leonard could live with that—literally.

“Might be safer to wait it out,” Lance countered. “The epicenter seems to be in front of us.”

There was another cracking sound, and the earth shook. Mick stumbled to the ground, Hunter and Leonard managed to control their falls to drop to a single knee, and only Lance remained steady enough to keep to her feet. In the river beyond them, a jagged chunk of silvery metal protruded sharply upward, ten feet in the air and probably three feet across at the base. It was sharp around the edges, but not pointed like a knife. It was as if some had taken a club, big enough for a giant, and run it over sandpaper until it wasn’t smooth to the touch.

The silvery color didn’t narrow things down much, but Hunter was already taking something small out of the shoulder bag he always kept on him.

“Non-magnetic,” he said shortly, clambering to his feet.

It seemed the worst of it was over and their debate about waiting it out had been for nothing. Of course, there was still the matter of passing the barge, which had been clipped again by another, smaller chunk of metal. Leonard could hear faint shouting, and the river was still righting itself from the flow disruption the protrusion had caused.

“And non-explosive,” Lance said pointlessly.

Well, those two properties narrowed it down a bit. Mick was already eyeing the protrusion appreciatively: there was another reason to stop, even if they were chasing down a bigger payday. Was it worth it, to try and scrape a chunk off to sell at the next port, fund their trip a little better?

Sunlight glittered off the metal and the cries from the grounded ship seemed to increase. A sinking feeling crept over Leonard. “Zinc,” he said, unhappily.

Hunter shot him a look, then appraised the protrusion again. “Could be,” he allowed.

Mick’s excitement waned a little. Zinc was useful enough, but it wasn’t nearly as profitable as something like nickel would have been. It, like most other metals, was dangerous too in the right conditions—and a sunny day fit those conditions exactly.

“Looks pure,” Lance said.

Yeah, this wasn’t an ore or a mineral, this was a metal through and through.

“If it is zinc, even skirting around it could be hazardous.”

“I’m not interested in lugging the canoes around it.”

“We’d have to go pretty far inland to avoid the rays anyway.”

Zinc had a nasty habit of both scattering and concentrating sunlight. Get hit with the wrong reflection at the wrong time and a nasty sunburn would spring up quickly.

“We’ve got ponchos in the canoe,” Hunter cut in. “Gear up; we’ll shoot past it.”

“And the barge?”

Hunter shot Lance an unhappy look, but Leonard watched with interest. Which side of the divide would Hunter fall on, speed and safety, or care for others?

Just to rock the boat a little, Leonard tossed out a third option. “Someone’s gonna sell that zinc down river,” he pointed out. “I don’t know how much you budgeted for this trip, but we might as well get a piece of it.”

The three of them watched Hunter expectantly. Technically, they could each do what they wanted here. So long as they ended up making their way down the river together, Hunter couldn’t stop them from skimming some zinc (or whatever the protrusion actually was) off the top on their way by. But he was the one who hired them, which put him marginally in charge of the trip.

Hunter’s frustration was evident, but Leonard felt that made his eventual answer pretty clear. He wouldn’t have been so conflicted if he didn’t care about the people on the barge.

“Ponchos on, guns out,” he said. “We’ll leave one canoe and the supplies on the bank. If they shoot first, we leave them and the zinc behind.”

“Sounds fair,” Leonard agreed. He eyed Mick, who nodded back at him. If the other group shot first, Mick’s gun would make sure they wouldn’t be following them down the river.

They shifted all the supplies to Leonard and Mick’s canoe, then paddled slowly down river. A few hundred feet away, they made their way to shore again. This time, it was clear they’d been spotted. Someone on the barge pointed a bow at them, arrow nocked, but they didn’t shoot first. Leonard kept his gun at his hip, leaving it to Mick to row. Hunter did the same in the other canoe.

This portion of the river was narrower than most, only around a hundred feet across; it was what had made the sudden appearance of the rocks so dangerous and kept them in range of the bowman even from the shore. It also put them in shouting distance.

“We’re willing to provide aid,” Hunter yelled, as Leonard and Mick beached their canoe and began to drag it ashore, “in return for some of the profits of that metal.”

“You can have the damn metal!” someone shouted back. “So long as you can get us off these rocks!”

Fair enough. Leonard didn’t trust it, but fair enough. He stepped back into the river where Lance was holding the other canoe in the shallows with her oar. She handed the second to Leonard, who sat beside her. Mick got in behind the both of them. Slowly, warily, with Hunter’s hand steady on his pistol, and Mick’s heat gun at the ready, they paddled out to the barge.

The man at the stern with the bow and arrow didn’t let his guard down, but someone tossed them a rope as they approached and helped them tie off.

“We’ve got two men bailing out the bottom,” the rope-thrower called down, “and another down with a nasty sunburn.” So it was zinc, then. “We should be able to patch it from the inside though, with a few more hands.”

That meant more than just shoving the boat from the outside; that meant leaving the canoe for the barge.

Hunter didn’t bother to wait for their thoughts on this. “Rory, Snart, help with the patch job. Lance, stay with the canoe.”

Leonard didn’t necessarily like that division of labor, but there weren’t many better options. “And you?” he shot back, keeping his voice low.

“It’d be useful to start hacking at the zinc, reduce the risk of sunburn.”

Another fair point. Leonard nodded at Mick. They’d go with Hunter’s plan for now.

The barge wasn’t big, so it was easy enough to clamber aboard. The hold down below was cramped though, made more so by the introduction of him and Mick, neither of whom could be considered small men. One man was passing buckets up to the top, another was frantically trying to use tar to patch the jagged hole in the side with spare planks of wood.

Leonard nodded Mick toward the man with the bucket, then sidled over to the man with the tar. “That better be damn good tar if you think it’ll hold this bucket together.”

“It’ll hold,” the man snarled at him, seemingly uncaring about where he’d come from. He shoved a plank into Leonard’s arms. “Hold this across the gap.”

Leonard complied. There was a cry from up top, but it didn’t sound much like what he’d expect from Hunter or Lance so he ignored it. The man he was working with flinched, but ignored it too. Shortly after it sounded like Hunter had started to saw at the zinc pillar.

They patched the top of the hole first, standing in six inches of water. By the time they got down to the floor, Mick and the other man had gotten the water down to two inches. At that point, it was difficult to scoop it out with a bucket and Mick—with a wary glance at Leonard—headed back up top. Leonard was carefully aware that he was alone in the hold with two strange men, but he kept most of his mind focused on his task. It took two of them to hold the planks down underwater, with the river still flowing and the boat bucking beneath them, and the third to get enough tar to hold it in place. They were running low on tar by the time they were done, and Leonard’s legs were wet from the river, his chest wet from sweating under the poncho.

“Thanks for the help,” the man with the tar said, slumping back.

The other man pulled out a knife. “Yeah, thanks,” he echoed. “Only now you’re going to help a little more.”

A fight would be tricky in this close quarters, but Leonard wasn’t impressed with the man’s attempt at intimidation. “I don’t think so,” he drawled idly. He leaned back against one wall, keeping his hands visible.

“Oh yeah?”

“You’ve got two people up top,” he said. “I’ve got three.” Wasn’t much of a contest, in his opinion, unless something had gone drastically wrong. Even ignoring Hunter and Lance, he trusted Mick to be able to handle himself.

Sure enough there were a few shouts up top and the characteristic noise of Mick flaring his heat gun. From the lack of screams he hadn’t actually hit anyone, but apparently he’d chosen to make a point rather than just bash everyone’s heads in. Leonard approved.

“Sounds like my partner has things well in hand.” He smirked.

The two men on him didn’t much like that. The knife jabbed dangerously close to his chest.

The way Leonard saw this going, he had two options: get himself out of this, or wait for the others. Initiating a fight led to a risk of getting stabbed, or at least sliced, but he was confident he could beat out the other two men; on the other hand, if he ever was going to put his trust into Hunter and Lance, this seemed like the ideal low-risk situation to let them take charge. He didn’t move.

A few moments later, Lance dropped down from the upper deck. The man without the knife flinched back, turning to face her. The knife itself didn’t waver, but the man holding it was distracted too. Leonard sprung, disarming him quickly while Lance handled the other.

Silence reigned as the two splashed down into water still covering the bottom of the boat. Leonard looked up to see Lance’s harsh glare focused on him.

“Not interested in helping?” she asked.

“Sounded like you had it handled.”

Lance’s glare told him she knew exactly what he was doing and she didn’t approve. Leonard didn’t care. He and Mick might have been hired on as the muscle, and yeah, maybe he’d done a crappy job in that regard, but it had been worth it. He needed to know how much Hunter or Lance would have his back if they got into a real scrap.

“You coming?” Lance asked now, still frustrated but waiting for him at the ladder.

“Hold on,” Leonard said. He kicked out at the last few boards they’d tarred into place. The sticky substance hadn’t quite hardened yet and one of the planks gave under his heel. He turned back to Lance. “You got a problem with that?”

She met his gaze for a hard moment, unfazed, then looked down at the two stirring in the water. “Get his head out of the water,” she said, then made her way upward.

Fair enough. The man Lance had handled was slumped against the wall but Leonard’s foe had slipped into the water. He’d probably wake in time, but with the boat filling again Leonard could understand the logic of Lance not wanting to chance it. His work would stop the barge from following after them; murdering one of the crew might, however, entice them to seek revenge. Plus, you know, it was murder, or manslaughter at least. That bothered some people.

He grabbed the man by his hair and dragged him up to slump next to his compatriot.

This little venture, he figured, was a success, even if Lance and Hunter were pissed at him for it. No injuries to his crew, he got the measure of his employer a bit better, they got some zinc to pad their pockets, and he knew that he and Mick would have someone other than each other watching their backs in a real fight. All in all, Leonard couldn’t have planned it much better himself. There was nowhere to go from here but up.

Chapter Text

There was a minor sandstorm kicking up dust in the valley by the time they set out for Obsidian Springs. Well, not so much of a sandstorm as just some higher winds than normal, but regardless, the dust in the air reduced visibility significantly and even from a thousand feet up he couldn’t see the small town on the river, even if the winding blue streak of the river itself was visible to the east and west of the high winds.

It was minor, but it did not improve Martin’s mood any.

“No worries, Gray,” Jefferson said, hovering in the air above their homestead. “We’ll go in nice and slow.”

Frustration ran its way through Martin’s brain; it was his paranoia that was particularly bad this morning, but Jefferson—and Obsidian Springs, by extension—was the one to suffer for it. Most days he kept his guilt under control. Today was, unfortunately, not most days.

“I am sorry, Jefferson,” he said. “I know you prefer to be well-rested when we make this trip.”

“How many times have we talked about this? Your nightmares are my nightmares.”

Yes, well, that was rather the problem, wasn’t it? Martin cast his eyes over Mesa Valley again, or what little of it he could see. Dread held him at bay, torn between retreating into Firestorm and remaining alert. No travelers were visible on the road, but it was possible the sand shielded any approach.

“Can we… Might we, ahem, travel low, today?” he asked. It was a stupid request. Goldenridge didn’t need their protection, and though the journey between their two towns took several days on foot, anyone could simply avoid the road and Firestorm wouldn’t spot them. Less likely given their position in the air, true, and the mesas gave Goldenridge an additional measure of protection and…

And Martin was spiraling again. He knew how unnecessary his request was but he couldn’t stop picturing worst case scenarios.

“Of course,” Jefferson said, accommodating as always. His tone was gentle and without judgement.

It was not the first time Martin had asked Jefferson to go out of the way to assuage his paranoia. He doubted it would be the last.

They hovered in the air for a moment longer. The sun was only just above the eastern horizon to their right, casting a gentle glow over the desert morning. There was an air of anticipation in Jefferson’s emotions. Martin knew exactly what he was waiting for, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to speak.

The frustration in him grew. Obsidian Springs, was, officially, the city that had licensed them. It was Obsidian Springs they supposedly operated out of, and Obsidian Springs they supposedly protected, even if the reality of it was that they mostly patrolled the valley and they spent far more time in Goldenridge.

If you were going to be this hesitant every time, you should have moved farther south! Martin chided himself unhappily. He didn’t have this problem every time, but last night’s dreams had been… unpleasant, to say the least, reminding him of things he would much rather forget.

Calm concern and gentle patience simmered beside Jefferson’s anticipation. He was waiting for Martin. He was always waiting for Martin, always so gentle and patient with him, even during the times when he got irritated in turn.

“We can, we can… can get moving, Jefferson,” Martin managed to say.

Still Jefferson hovered there for a moment longer. “Low and slow, Gray, low and slow,” he reminded him. “You just tell me if I’m moving too fast.”

Ridiculous. “I have the utmost faith in you.”

The small burst of self-pride and affection that followed bolstered Martin’s mood slightly. Within Firestorm, metaphorically, he breathed in deeply, calming himself. This was a trip they’d made dozens of times before. It’d been three weeks since their last official trip, though they’d patrolled the valley plenty since then and flew over a few times. There was no putting if off anymore.

Jefferson leaned forward, dropping in altitude further and further as they left the safety of the mesas’ height and flew directly over the unpaved road.

It was just over sixty miles between their two towns. At top speed, Firestorm could traverse that distance easily. Their more typical relaxed cruising speed was close enough to sixty miles per hour that they could make the trip in a little under an hour. Jefferson was flying slower than that now, which meant it wouldn’t be a short trip, but their low altitude also cut back on any headwinds they’d have to fight against.

Of course, there was still the minor sandstorm to contend with. Sand wasn’t exactly something that vaporized easily. Firestorm’s suit protected their body, but their face was left exposed to the grit in the air. Jefferson kept their head down, but he was still blinking frequently and the sensation of the sand—heated by their flames or not—was irritating the both of them.

After about ten minutes of flight, Martin found the strength to speak. “Perhaps, perhaps not quite so low.”

Jefferson pulled them up to a hover. “You sure, man?”

“Yes, yes, I’m certain. We will—I will still be able to see through the storm from above it.” Straight down, at least. “You keep your eyes ahead. I will search for any trespassers.”

“If you’re sure,” Jefferson said. He was already flying upward though, and Martin could feel his relief.

They resumed the trip in not-quite-comfortable silence. Martin didn’t feel awkward around his partner, but any hope of conversation had been overridden by his need to remain alert, even as the mile markers passed without a traveler in sight.

Even the sight of the empty road couldn’t dissipate the itchy, paranoid feeling. Martin could tell it wasn’t helping his partner. Jefferson’s calm was fraying at the edges more and more the longer they flew, Martin’s anxieties chipping away at him. An hour passed, and the town crept into view, and Martin still couldn’t relax as the city sprawled before them.

The river in the north wasn’t helping, not with the knowledge of what lay beyond that. You chose not to move further south, he chided himself again. Deep breaths. Calm thoughts. Even if General Eiling did know where they were, he didn’t have the resources to bring them in. Even if he did have the resources, he didn’t have the ability to separate them.

Firestorm was safe. Obsidian Springs was safe.

It took Martin a moment to realize that Jefferson had stopped flying, still five miles out from the center of the city proper and five hundred feet in the air now.

“You all good?” the young man asked him now.

It was obvious it wasn’t a general question; Jefferson had felt him spiral, and felt him pull himself back from that spiral.

“Yes, yes,” Martin said, a little shaken regardless. “I am… we are good to proceed.”

“Town’s all clear,” Jefferson said, instead of flying onward. “Doesn’t look like much has changed, and there’s definitely no military operation.”

That did help, because Jefferson was right. The sprawl and activity of Obsidian Springs looked the same as it always did, though from their distance it was hard to make out individuals.

“A loop or two, then,” Martin said, regaining his strength, “before we visit the shed?”

“You got it. Shall we put on a show?”

Obsidian Springs was their city. It was the least they could do for the citizens who’d been willing to sponsor them.

“Enjoy yourself, Jefferson,” Martin said, and meant it wholeheartedly. His young partner deserved that and more, for all the support he gave him.

With a grin, Jefferson dove forward. There was a focus to his flight that Martin appreciated, and a methodical way he made sure they caught a glimpse of every corner of town, from the farms and fishing boats along the northern edge to the marketplace in the center to the livestock roaming the southern edge. But inside that, within those parameters, there was plenty of joy and enthusiasm. Loops and whirls, twists and turns—Jefferson pulled off every trick in the book they’d practiced, and attempted a few more, to entertain the people of their city.

Firestorm’s primary function was protecting the valley from bandits and raiders and cleaning up any radioactive earthshifts, but they helped their people too, when they could. Obsidian Springs wasn’t quite the haven Goldenridge was—at almost five times the population, it couldn’t be—but crime was low and usually of the indoor variety, which didn’t give Firestorm much need to step in.

They did, however, have a few regular duties, and Jefferson led them now toward one of them, on the southwestern edge of town and the small metal shed that seemed almost out of place on the outskirts. There were a few buildings beyond it, livestock farming mostly, small paddocks of goats and chickens, the occasional attempt at farming, but most farms were closer to the northern part of town, along the river. The minor sandstorm that plagued the road that morning had been mostly limited to the southern half of the route. Here, sixty miles from where they started, visibility had improved and spotting the familiar shed was easy.

The shed itself didn’t belong to any particular homestead, it belonged to the city. After another small circuit of the region, Jefferson landed them twenty feet away or so, though the guard on duty should have noticed them long before then. Martin rarely recognized the individual; radiation guard duty was not a sought-after post, and even with all the precautions taken the city liked to rotate the position as frequently as possible. Despite that, the guards were all familiarized with the procedure for Firestorm’s arrival.

The young woman on duty today nodded at their arrival, already reaching for the keys on her belt. She wore a typical lawman’s uniform that suited her well, hair pulled back and out of her face. Despite the no-doubt dull duty—very few wanted to steal radioactive materials; there’d only been one attempted heist in the two years Martin and Jefferson had lived in the region—she was well alert and chipper at their approach.

“Firestorm,” she said, grinning a little. “It’s good to meet you.” She didn’t seem phased by the flames Jefferson kept sprouting from their head.

Jefferson nodded back plainly in greeting. Martin could feel his mixture of nerves, determination, and general wariness. He might not have disliked being in Obsidian Springs as much as Martin did, but he shied away from strangers almost nearly as much, especially strangers in uniform.

Both of them knew they had no reason to doubt this woman. Neither of their subconscious minds seemed to care.

“How many cases today?” Jefferson asked, straight to business. Martin could feel his worry rising and knew it wasn’t just his bad mood for the day that made Jefferson want to hurry up and get this over with.

“Only three in the past few weeks,” the guard relayed, opening the shed.

The shed itself was lead lined and sealed tight; the guard had to tug at the door to open it fully, and she quickly stepped to the side so she wasn’t directly in the door frame. Martin felt Jax flare their radiation absorption capability but he couldn’t blame the young woman for being nervous. There was no way for a regular human to tell when they were being irradiated, and though Firestorm could absorb radiation in proximity, they couldn’t direct radiation toward them.

Of course, the lead lining the shed wasn’t the only precaution in place. The boxes inside the shed were made of solid lead themselves, hinges, hatches, and all. They were of varying sizes to hold the different sized earthshifts that sprung up and all but three of them were open at the moment.

Jefferson stepped inside, moving for the largest closed box first, and moving quickly. No one in Obsidian Springs knew of their transmutation abilities (Martin had no idea what kind of rumors spread in town about the strange wealth in Goldenridge as a result and he didn’t much care so long as the secret was kept). As such, they had to transport each box out of sight, remove and transmute the radioactive ore, and then return the boxes for later use.

That meant entering a dark shed that could be easily locked with a uniformed lawman at their back each time. Even knowing they were fused already, and that Firestorm would have no trouble breaking free, it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

“I’ll be back shortly,” Jefferson told the young woman, taking the largest box out of the shed.

She shut the door behind them, nodding. “Of course.” She looked interested—they’d never given anyone in Obsidian Springs any excuses as to what they did with the radioactive material either, only that they were immune to its effects—but she didn’t ask questions.

Jefferson lifted them upward, the heavy weight of the box only slowing them down slightly. Despite their advanced speed in the air, it wasn’t worth the time to bring the box all the way back to Goldenridge, or their own home on the mesa opposite the one Goldenridge had been built on. Instead they took it to an isolated stretch of land, opened the box up, and transmuted the pure uranium that happened to be inside to pure oxygen.

Often, when removing radioactive materials, they liked to transmute them into useful goods for the town that sheltered them, but there really was no need. They could transmute anything nonliving to anything else that was nonliving, it was just that the specific time they set aside to look for radiation was also a decent time to set aside to practice their transmutation abilities. When working for Obsidian Springs, however, time was a bit more of the essence, both practically and for their mental states, and there was no need for either of them to discuss that.

Jefferson handled the three boxes quickly and quietly, without either of them conversing with the other much. The second box held barely a softball’s worth of pure uranium again; the third box held a more sizeable chunk of pitchblende. Jefferson transmuted the former to pure nitrogen, the latter into carbon dioxide, just to complicate things a little.

Martin appreciated them moving things along quickly, but finishing up with the shed meant moving into the town proper and that, well… He wasn’t much in the mood for that.

“Won’t be too long, Gray,” Jefferson mumbled under his breath as he flew them toward city hall.

Nonsense, Jefferson. We have a duty to these people, we shall stay as long as they need.

Well, that was what Martin wanted to say. What he should have said. He found himself ‘swallowing’ instead, trying to bring words to his metaphorical throat. If he’d had palms they would have been sweating as he gazed down at the city below them. The guard had been friendly and curious and cheerful, but she hadn’t helped anything, nor had stepping into the dark shed and turning their back on her three times in a row.

He couldn’t think of anything to say, in the face of that. He knew his heightened paranoia and alertness couldn’t be doing Jefferson any good at the moment but, while he wasn’t quite on his way to a panic attack, he couldn’t bring himself to calm down either.

He hummed instead, a mindless, wordless acknowledgement of Jefferson’s words. With luck, there would be little in town that they’d need to see to and they could resume their usual patrols of the valley and the Barrens beyond that instead.

“Leaving already?”

Ray grinned at Mr. Abbott. He and the fisherman had hit it off well since the moment he’d stepped foot on Riverston’s shore and the other man was at the top of the list of people Ray would probably look up next time he was in town. “These supplies won’t carry themselves downriver,” he said.

“Thought it was the boat that did that for you?”

Ray laughed. “Someone’s gotta take them off the boat.”

Mr. Abbott eyed the small barge Ray had chartered warily, tied up at the end of the dock. “And I see you got yourself a little barge. You sure it’s up for the task?”

“I thought your rowboat didn’t take passengers?”

Mr. Abbott scowled good naturedly at him; Ray could tell he was holding back a grin. “No one ever teach you to respect your elders, boy?”

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time I see one.”

Mr. Abbott huffed out a laugh at that, surprising himself from the looks of it. He was at least double Ray’s age and they both knew it. Ray had heard enough stories during his four short days in Riverston to learn that the Abbotts had worked hard and done well for themselves, enough that Mrs. Abbott now passed her days knitting and baking and giving away more than she sold and that Mr. Abbott’s small fishing boat was more of a way to spend the time and catch the occasional dinner than to bring in any more income.

“You be safe downriver, you hear?” Mr. Abbott cautioned him now. “Those western folks aren’t always so civilized as us here.”

Ray kept his grin on his face, nodding at the words he knew came from concern more than bigotry. Truthfully he could have said the same for Riverston, which wasn’t quite lawless but was still part of the territories west of Central City that didn’t really fall under anyone’s jurisdiction.

There was the northeastern part of the continent that was looked after by Star City’s governing body; the southeastern region ruled by the joint parliamentary body of the twelve largest cities in the area, headed by Gotham and Metropolis; the eastern democratic realms and collection of port cities with National City as its capital; and the northern part of the central plains that fell under, well, Central City’s jurisdiction.

And then there were the smaller and less populated southwestern kingdoms, which weren’t so much kingdoms as they were cities and surrounding farmland ruled by inherited positions. There was the plutocracy of the northwestern edge of the continent, isolated through geography more than anything else. The Protectorate, the one militant force on the continent, occupied the region just south of the Arset Mountains and north of the Desert Run River Ray was traveling downstream now.

After that, all that was left were the assorted tribes and clans of the southern portion of the central plains and the land to the west of those plains: the Barrens.

Riverston, whether the citizens there liked it or not, was part of the Barrens. It was connected enough to the rest of the continent to follow along the officially recognized hero program, and its law mimicked the laws of Central City and the rest of the north-central plains, but it was its own entity, separate from the rest. To claim that they were more civilized than the few cities west of them wasn’t quite a lie, but it was more a case of isolation than civilization, Ray had always figured.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Abbott,” he said now, patting his pocket where the ATOM suit sat, “I can handle myself.”

Mr. Abbott tipped his hat at him. “Safe travels all the same,” he said.

“Thanks,” Ray said. “Give my best to Mrs. Abbott.”

“Will do, son.”

They parted ways and Ray found himself glancing eastward. It was barely past dawn, the early morning light just creeping up over the river, but it was a hundred miles downstream to Obsidian Springs, his next real stop. If he left early enough he could stop just a little under half-way through the trip at Lwellen Port, really the only other township between the two. He hadn’t accounted for that in his travel plans, but he had a few extra relief supplies and he hadn’t ended up finding a barge willing to keep traveling the river through the night.

He lugged his current box to the stack of others already on the barge, listening to the bustle of fishermen and passenger barges getting ready for the day. He enjoyed the camaraderie he could hear but the sounds also struck up something melancholy in him.

He still remembered what Felicity had said to him the day he’d told Team Arrow about his plans to leave Star City.

“Whatever you’re looking for out there, I hope you find it.”

Yeah, Ray did too. The problem was, he didn’t quite know what it was he was looking for. Somewhere to belong, he supposed. A place that didn’t constantly remind him of Anna.

A thud from another passenger hopping onto the barge pulled him from his melancholy thoughts. He was being ridiculous. He was here to help people, and that meant loading the rest of his supplies for the trip down river before checking in with the city leadership to make sure there were no last minute tasks they could use the ATOM for. He could wallow in his own grief another time.

“I’m sorry, who are you again?”

Rip held back the urge to sigh, or roll his eyes. The bureaucrats in Riverston thought too much of themselves; if they’d actually had brains, they would have realized Rip probably could have gotten the information he needed from any stranger off the streets. Instead, he’d been polite enough to come to the city officials for his inquiries. That politeness was running out, and not just for him; from the looks of it, Sara Lance wasn’t too thrilled with the bureaucrats stonewalling them either.

The two of them exchanged glances, huddled away from the noonday sun under the balcony that stuck out from the second floor of city hall. Sara looked expectant and impatient, shifting her weight from foot to foot in a manner that did not at all reduce the clear threat she posed. She’d taken to wearing her knives more openly on her belt since they’d left Central City. Rip thought it was part threat to the other half of their crew, part practical precaution as they left laws behind.

Well, he’d wanted a team, hadn’t he? Even if Snart had already proceeded to test the boundaries of that team, he was yet to be disappointed in Sara’s performance as his hired bodyguard. He inclined his head toward her. Let her take the lead, see what she could rustle up.

She grinned a little too gleefully at the nod, stepping forward. The dirt scuffed beneath her sturdy shoes; the man in front of her took a small step back.

“Who are you?” she retorted back to the unfortunate city official who’d been on duty that day. “First of all, information about the whereabouts of any Hero, when known, must be given to any inquiring citizen. It shouldn’t matter who we are. Second, Ray’s a friend—I’ve worked with him before in Star City. And no,” she continued, cutting off the man before he could finish opening his mouth, “you can’t see my Hero license. If I did have one, I never claimed to be here on official business, so that’s irrelevant. If I didn’t have one, that doesn’t change the fact that you have no right to withhold information from us, as I said.”

The man pulled backward further, looking rightly intimidated by Sara’s fury.

Her words, Rip knew, weren’t quite the truth. The actual Hero law stated that the location of sanctioned Heroes was freely available to enquiring citizens with the exception of those citizens who presented a clear and obvious threat. Sara with her knives, and him with the pistol on his hip, didn’t quite fall under that category, but a case could be made if one wanted to be particular about it. Of course, out here in the Barrens he doubted anyone studied Hero law that closely. Riverston didn’t have a Hero of its own—the Flash could drop by in a manner of minutes if they really needed something—and as far as Rip was aware the next town down river that did was Obsidian Springs, though he didn’t know too much about that situation.

The official’s gaze flickered his way, as though expecting any help. Rip only raised an eyebrow. As it stood, Sara spoke for him.

“Well, he, um…, you see, he was…” The man’s gaze flickered back to Sara. He flinched minutely, then straightened his shoulders a little. “He left,” he said. “This morning. And he didn’t inform us of his travel plans so if you’re expecting any more information from me—”

Rip was already turning away. Sara followed him a moment later without a word spoken. They merged back into the press of foot traffic on Riverston’s too-narrow streets, the result of poor city planning and a distinct lack of carriages and wagons.

“What now? He could have been lying.”

“He wasn’t. Well, he probably was, but I know where Palmer was headed. I just hadn’t expected him to move on so quickly.”

“So we catch him in the next town, then?”

Rip sent Sara a look. “How familiar are you with the river towns in this region?”

“My route was mostly from Star to Central, and everywhere in between.”

Fair enough.

“Here.” Rip stepped off the main street into the nearest side alley, pulling out the map he had stashed in one of his belt pouches. It wasn’t the best map—it showed nothing of the Barrens other than an empty spot below the river—but it was decent enough for one traveling up or down stream the Desert Run River. “We’re here,” he said, pointing to Riverston. “There’s a small town here, Lwellen Port, more of a stopping point than anything. Anything else between us and Riverston is little more than a conclave, or undeveloped settlement.”

Luckily, Sara picked up on things quickly. “So… we either stop in Lwellen Port to look around for Ray, which might delay us, or rush to Obsidian Springs and possibly pass him on the river.”

Jaw tight, Rip nodded. That about summed it up. “According to the plans he filed he’d planned a good number of his relief supplies to be delivered to Obsidian Springs, so he should be there a few days. But I’d expected him to still be here too.”

“Best bet’s rushing it then,” Sara said. “Skip Lwellen Port entirely and wait for him in Obsidian Springs.”

He thought similarly.

“Might as well get going now then,” Sara continued. “Not much point in sticking around.”

“My thoughts exactly, Miss Lance.” He folded up the map and pocketed it again. “Shall we?”

The sand in Carter’s wings was starting to get bad again. He hadn’t flown in two days, had barely left the ground the three days before that, and had barely stretched them out the entire five-day trip either. He flared them now, flapping aimlessly without strength or intent to leave the ground, grimacing as he pulled at the underutilized muscles.

He needed to work better at vetting their clients.

“Next time you need to find us better clients,” Kendra said, coming up behind him.

Carter grimaced again, but folded up his wings so she could approach. “They paid well,” he said, turning to face her.

Kendra rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah? Was it worth all the disgusted looks at our disfigured forms?”

Carter would have been happy to oblige her with a good argument if that had been what she had been looking for—he was full of pent-up energy himself—but there was an undercurrent of bitterness in her tone that told him that wasn’t the best idea at the moment. He took a step forward and reached out to gently cup her cheek instead. “There is not a single part of you that is not absolutely beautiful,” he said.

Kendra smiled, soft and full of light; only a touch of the bitterness lingered in her eyes. She nuzzled at his hand briefly, then pulled away. “My wings might disagree with you there, at least today.” She stretched out too, flaring them widely.

Not sure if she wanted a preening or a good long flight, Carter chose to move his hand away from her face and run it through her hair. “I see nothing wrong,” he said gently.

She huffed and rolled her eyes at him, then shoved him back. Gently, but forcefully. Carter laughed as he stumbled backward, but Kendra was already in the air, the wind from her take-off buffeting his face. Alright then, if that was how she wanted to play things.

He leapt after her, flapping hard against today’s strong headwinds. They were at the northeastern edge of Carnelian City and the winds were moving southwest today. The Barrens stretched out before them to his left, their home farther north than he could see. Kendra had a decent head start, so Carter went for height over distance. She started to pull ahead before she realized what he was doing and he dove straight forward, gaining speed as he tucked in his wings.

Some birds of prey could get up to two hundred miles an hour when they dove. He wasn’t, and never would be, that fast, but he was still faster than Kendra, flying horizontally and flapping against the headwinds. Of course, there wasn’t much to mask his dive either. Kendra, seeing him coming, rolled to the side.

Carter found himself laughing as he shot past her, grateful the two of them had the chance to just relax and be themselves after a stressful journey on foot through the Barrens. It’d put good money in their pockets, but he wasn’t altogether sure it’d been worth it.

He leveled out only a few feet below Kendra—and several more feet ahead of her—flapping hard to pull himself out of the dive and back up to her level.

“I win!” he called back.

“Who says we’ve crossed the finish line?” Kendra shot back. But, though she flapped quickly to pull level with him, she didn’t try to pass him. For a moment, they flew in silence, wings straining with effort and pushing themselves faster than they normally did just for the hell of it.

Eventually, Carter glanced back at the city they’d just left behind. At the speeds they’d been going, relishing the flight, it was little more than a speck on the horizon, albeit still a large speck. It was just under two hundred miles from Carnelian City to Obsidian Springs; in the past ten minutes they’d spent racing each other they’d probably gone just under ten miles. It wasn’t a speed they could maintain for the whole trip, especially after a few days without flying, but their average time crossing the distance was usually about seven hours.

If they were going to turn back, there was no time like the present.

“We don’t really have any supplies on us,” he reminded his wife, a little reluctant. He didn’t have much of a desire to return to Carnelian City.

Kendra scoffed too. “What supplies do we need? We’ve got our stuff, our canteens, and you pocketed the money, right?”

The thing about having giant wings sprouting out of their backs was that it was very difficult to carry any conventional sort of pack. When guiding others they often rented an extra mule or shoved their gear in an available wagon. If those they were guiding didn’t have either, they had shoulder bags they could use, or they plotted their routes carefully to have plenty of stops. When flying the distance on their own, though, they traveled as light as they could, which usually meant Carter carried their maps (hard to replace) and money (he was a bit more practical than Kendra about spending it) and Kendra carried enough food to get them by for a day or two if needed, plus some first aid supplies. They each carried a canteen, and had long since gotten into the habit of keeping it full whenever they came across a source of water.

He shot a reluctant glance back toward Carnelian City. There were some stops between here and Obsidian Springs. Goldenridge was really too close to their home to be of much use—it was five hours into the trip—but there were other settlements and the occasional small watering hole. They didn’t technically need to pack up for a trip through the desert. And he didn’t really want to.

“Are you coming or what?”

He’d drifted behind again. Practicality and reason told him it was safest to go back for supplies. Experience told him they could make the trip in a day easy, even if they were exhausted at the end of it. He winged forward, pulling alongside Kendra again.

“Alright,” he said, “but we’re stopping a few hours in for a proper lunch.”

“And then home,” Kendra agreed, wistful.

Home. Yeah, it was about time they got back. Carter grinned at his wife and settled in for a long flight beside her.

The afternoon sun was glaring heavily into their faces from the cloudless sky by the time Mick finally spotted Obsidian Springs on the distant riverbank. He shot Leonard, behind him in the canoe, a glance at the sight of it. They’d never come this far west and though there’d been no turning back for a few days now—probably since Len had agreed to the trip—setting foot in the city would really be it.

Mick liked the heat, but committing to a two-month trip through the desert, hearty payout at the end or not, wasn’t something he was convinced was the best idea. He’d always thought Len enjoyed the thrill of the heist more than the rewards at the end, though the rewards were more than enough incentive to get planning.

Of course, the reward had always been enough for Mick; he just went along with Leonard’s plans because they worked, more often than not, and because the other man was loyal to those who were loyal to him. He didn’t mind the elaborate scenarios that paid off in the end, especially not when they only served to increase their reputation. They had a good thing going, the two of them and whoever they tended to hire on for the more elaborate jobs. It was the only reason he’d been okay with this whole stupid scenario, trusting Rip Hunter to procure what he claimed he could.

Still, while backing out wasn’t really an option at this point, this was still Len’s last chance to talk Hunter out of the trip, if he had any thoughts about doing so. Once they left Obsidian Springs—once they started the walk through the desert—turning back would be nothing more than cowardice, and a waste of a trip.

Len smirked back at him, tipping his head in acknowledgement that he’d seen it too. His oar stilled as Mick’s did. “Your kind of town,” he murmured under his breath.

Mick scoffed. “They’ve got their own Hero here, remember?” Yeah, Obsidian Springs would be more lawless than Central, but the law still functioned here.

Len raised an eyebrow at him. “Exactly.”

Mick stared at him blankly for a moment. What did he…? Oh. Right. Firestorm. Yeah, okay, he could see that. A slightly more lawless town, and a town where the resident law enforcer was constantly on fire. Yeah, Mick could get behind that.

He shot Obsidian Springs another look though, even as he dipped his oar into the water again. The river was smooth and wide here. Despite their proximity to the city, the water was open enough that maneuvering around the other boats wasn’t a chore and there was a small distance between them and the other canoe in their posse. “Not exactly your kind of town, though,” he countered.

Len would appreciate the lack of any competent lawman as much as he did, and he wasn’t talking about his partner’s more icy preferences.

“Eh,” Len said from behind him, noncommittal. “Different kind of loot.”

Mick grunted out his amusement. Different kind of loot indeed. He doubted there were any fancy museums to rob in Obsidian Springs, no highly secure manors or mansions to infiltrate. No, Len’d be bored out of his mind in a month if they stayed here. Good thing they weren’t staying then.

The speed of the canoe in the river picked up a little, Len rowing a bit more forcefully, so Mick matched his partner’s speed without feeling the need to discuss it, letting the conversation die out as they pulled up alongside the idiots who’d been stupid enough to hire them. (Mick didn’t have any plans to betraying Hunter or Lance, and he was pretty sure Leonard didn’t either, but honestly, who hired thieves as muscle, even if Hunter did want Len’s contacts to sell the merch at the end of it all?)

“Where are we setting ashore?” Leonard called out, cool and casual as usual. Hunter hadn’t much liked their attitudes since the incident with the barge in which Len had chosen to hang back but that hadn’t changed his partner’s attitude. Captain Cold was as chill as ever, always appearing relaxed even when Mick knew he was wound tight as a spring.

It was part of Len’s skillset: he relaxed, so people relaxed around him, but his mind was always working and always alert.

Hunter showed some of his displeasure now, shooting a disdainful glance their way—not so much at Len’s words, Mick figured, but more on his tone. Lance, on the contrary, seemed amused. She too hadn’t much liked Len stepping back to let her handle things, at least not for a few days, but when idiot bandits had tried to rob them one night on the shore and he’d pulled his gun nearly as quick as she’d pulled her knives she’d loosened up a bit.

Mick figured she might even be smart enough to go toe to toe with Len, which was a rare compliment from him. She wasn’t bad looking either.

“Eastern docks,” Hunter said now. “We can shore up on the riverbed, they’ll take our canoes there.”

Len nodded and eased up on the oar. Mick followed suit, and their canoe drifted in just behind the other. They beached themselves easily and Mick dropped his boots into the water to drag the boat ashore a little further. Hunter went to settle things with the dockmaster nearby while the remaining three of them gathered their supplies. They didn’t have much yet. They’d pretty much only carried enough for the river trip, knowing they’d stock up in Obsidian Springs.

The beach was more wet sand than mud, so they left the canoes behind to move to more solid ground, even as they waited. There were houses along the river to their east, fishermen more than vacation houses, but even so they weren’t quite in the city proper. It was probably a good half mile still to anything that could be called a town and if they went a half mile south instead of west they’d be in the middle of farmland, helped along by a few irrigation canals from the river itself and still probably more livestock farms than crops. Not that Mick knew anything about that. He didn’t have issues with the trip, but he was a city boy through and through; he preferred the crowds and the throngs of Central and he knew it.

There probably wasn’t even anywhere to get a decent beer around here. They probably wouldn’t even be able to pack alcohol on the trip—he shuddered just thinking about it.

“What were you saying about my kind of town?” he muttered under his breath.

Len shot him an amused glance. He was slouching somewhat, hands in his pockets, despite the unfamiliar territory. Mick saw the act for what it was—Len wasn’t worried about danger here. (Mick didn’t blame him for that assessment; they’d be hard to sneak up on.)

“Maybe not here,” Leonard said. “But there,” he nodded his head toward the town proper. “You’d be running the underground in a week.”

Mick liked the sound of that. Wasn’t much interested in it, but he liked the thought that he could, and that Len thought him capable—thought more of him than any scum criminal who had to flee all the way out here just to eke out a living.

Lance shot them an amused glance, Hunter headed back their way pocketing the money from the canoes, and they shelved the conversation to head into town. Mick didn’t know if he expected to see the Hero or not, but he kept an occasional eye to the sky as they walked too, looking for Firestorm, and pretty much let Hunter lead the way. Len would speak up if Hunter was leading them wrong; Mick didn’t need to pay attention to all the idiots they stopped to ask for directions from.

There wasn’t much to see though. Obsidian Springs was a small town of little more than ten thousand people, and it showed. Rare was a street paved, and those that were were cobblestone roads. They didn’t get asphalt out here. There were no factories nearby. Plenty of blacksmiths and other metal workers, but anything more complicated than shaping metal was done upriver and shipped down to the people who needed it. They’d certainly seen their share of shipping barges along their own route.

Of course, that also meant that anything electronic was nowhere to be seen. Obsidian Springs was mined out, but just barely. Mick noted a few bars and pubs and breweries here and there, but they didn’t seem to be conglomerated in any one portion of town, just spaced throughout the place. Towards the center there were a few concrete structures smattered about, a few stone built homes, but for the most part clay seemed to be the building material of choice. There were wooden structures too, with the river providing just enough water for nearby trees, but they weren’t prevalent either.

He caught notice of the people too. The four of them drew a few eyes, just for being out of towners, he supposed, but nobody seemed overly concerned by their presence. Mick imagined they got a lot of visitors here, just being a river town; it was much the same in the other places they’d passed through so far.

“Eyes up,” Lance muttered.

Mick refocused, then dismissed her words. They were approaching the town center, where Hunter probably wanted to head to hear news of his Hero recruit, but Mick didn’t think that merited the need to pay closer attention. Lance could handle any of these yahoos with a hand tied behind her back and in a town with its own Hero—not to mention the one visiting—no one would attack travelers in the town square. Especially not travelers as heavily armed as them.

He and Len took up posts just outside the city hall, leaning against the clay structure as the other two headed inside. Len was gazing around—casing the region, probably—but Mick just pulled out his lighter, flicking the device on and off and watching the flame dance. He was mindful that they weren’t alone at the moment, so he didn’t bring the flame near his skin to feel the heat, but the bright colors and life of the dancing flame was enough for now.

It was only Len moving at his side that brought him back to reality and he looked up to see Hunter and Lance approaching, looking much more pleased than they had back in Riverston.

“We got a location?” Len asked.

“Southwest part of town, out by the farms,” Lance said.

The Hero was tall and slender without being thin, wearing some kind of weird blue and dark red suit when they finally tracked him down. Mick knew he’d done a thing here or there in Central—he was a traveling Hero, apparently, though he’d spent most of his time in Star City—but if he’d ever run into him before, he couldn’t recall. At the moment he was chatting with some of the locals, his ridiculous haircut ruffled by the desert winds, his face a little red from the desert heat, and a stupid grin on his face. There was a small carboard box open at his feet and one of the locals he was talking to had a small package in their hands.

Hunter fidgeted but held back from interrupting, so Mick rolled his eyes and pulled out his lighter again. He could admit he wasn’t much of one for patience. Either get the job done or move on. Still, Hunter was running the crew this time. Mostly.

Haircut didn’t notice them right away, but the locals, who were facing their way, picked up on their presence after a short while. Well, Mick guessed that was what happened. He wasn’t paying attention, but Haircut turned their way with a grin and a wave that turned even more sincere when he caught sight of Lance.

“Sara! What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you, actually,” Sara said. “Interested in a job proposition?”

The Hero frowned inquisitively. “A job?”

“I’d like to hire you for your expertise,” Hunter said. “Can we talk in private?”

The way Mick saw it, Heroes could be pretty dumb. The job was good money, but it was still anyone’s guess on whether that would be enough to entice the man in front of them. All that being said, he didn’t much care what the Hero decided on. He’d get the same cut regardless and though he was pretty sure Hunter wanted the Hero’s expertise when it came to the actual mining, he was confident they could do the job without him. So he didn’t much listen as they bartered back and forth about finding somewhere to talk. He swept his gaze south instead.

They weren’t quite at the edge of town, and there were still plenty of houses and farms behind them, but he could see glimpses of the desert they were about to traverse just beyond that. Already the dirt beneath their feet was drier than it was near the river and the vegetation sparser. There were still some tough grasses along the roads, more savannah than desert, but trees were rarer—as were wood constructions.

It’d be a change of pace, that was for sure. Mick just wasn’t convinced yet it would be a good change.

The night Ray agreed joined their little group was fun and enjoyable. The two of them had never been close in Star City, but it was nice to catch up with someone from her past—her after-being-an-assassin-past but before-being-a-bodyguard-for-hire-past, at least. He wasn’t Oliver, or Laurel, or even Digg, who’d she’d found herself getting along with quite well, but he was familiar and someone she didn’t have to worry about trusting and it was nice to exchange stories and hear about how everyone else was doing. They each had different stories of the last time they’d seen old friends; Sara spent most of her time closer to Star City than Ray did, but his suit made travel quicker for him, so he visited more often.

Sara even found herself agreeing to help distribute the rest of his relief supplies, so he didn’t have to fuss over them and hold them up to get done with the job he’d set out to do, while the other three worked on tracking down their guides.

Obsidian Springs’ roads were well-worn and well-maintained both. Despite its location and general isolation, it wasn’t a troubled town. Ray’s relief supplies were less about bringing people out of poverty and helping them get enough to eat and more about delivering electronics and rare metals and things that could really only be found in a city big enough for factory work and mass production. Walking the dirt roads around the edge of town and traveling from farm to baker’s shop to blacksmith to general store got Sara involved in a way of life she’d almost forgotten about. Not the big city living of Star City or Central City, not the desolation of traveling between them, just… small town life.

It was quaint, and pleasant, and Ray was good company, able to charm the people with small talk in a way Sara knew she wasn’t suited for. Her clothes got dustier the further from the river they traveled and the sun beat down overhead from a cloudless sky, but the evening’s cool and the river’s breezes kept her from getting too uncomfortable, and the beer when they finished for the night and tucked in to dinner (just the three of them; Snart and Rory had gone off on their own) was decent stock.

Rip filled Ray in on more of the plan than he had before, and Sara lounged in her chair, sipping the cool beer (electricity wasn’t common in Obsidian Springs, but they had hydroelectric power and the bar was on the river; it was enough to keep a keg or two cool and Sara’d paid for the drink with her own funds). Ray’s part in the plan was more technical than she really cared to know about. Lithium was a risky metal to transport—and to mine, for that matter—and Rip’s intention was for Ray to handle most of the logistics of that.  

Sara didn’t care about the specifics. She trusted Ray enough to tune out the conversation, and she left the dinner with the two of them debating the details of something she was pretty sure had nothing to do with their actual goal. They’d gone off on a tangent at some point, so she could only assume that Ray was fully on board with the plan.

“Nearest gambling joint?” she asked the barkeep on her way out.

The woman gave her directions, and Sara tipped her a copper. It was probably a reputable gambling joint, given the state of the bar she’d just left, but if Snart and Rory weren’t there, someone at the place could probably direct her onwards again.

She found them at the third place she checked, Rory playing a game that was more chance than skill, Snart watching another game quietly from a corner. She slid into the seat next to him.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” she said quietly, under her breath.

Snart smirked at her. He did that a lot; he was constantly smirking in a way that suggested that he knew something you didn’t—that there was no point in going up against him, because you’d lose. Sara still wasn’t quite sure what to make of him, or his partner. She respected what he’d done with the barge, during their journey downriver, testing the bounds of their agreement like that, but she wasn’t sure she liked it. Granted, he hadn’t asked for any of the funds from the zinc they’d sawed off and sold, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d pocketed something valuable that had been in the barge’s cargo hold.

Snart was a schemer, but he was an opportunist too. It was a dangerous combination, the ability to plan things out for the long term but also seize upon random fortune when it sprung up, and have things come out in your favor either way.

She needed to see him in action, Sara knew, before she could really decide if she trusted him to hold up his end of the bargain.

“Haven’t been paid yet,” Snart reminded her in his usual low drawl, quiet in a way that seemed more effortless than her own attempt.

She scoffed. As if he didn’t have a decent amount of funds on him; he’d let Rip pay for the journey, no issue, but she knew, even if the stunt with the barge had helped him trust them more, that he still didn’t trust them much more than she trusted him. He’d have something on him. Not much, but enough, if he and his partner got stranded or separated during the trip.

“Didn’t take you as a gambling man.” It wasn’t true, not entirely, but Sara wanted to hear his response.

“It isn’t gambling if you know how to play.”

Sara read between the lines. Certain games, like the game Snart was watching and unlike the game Rory was playing, did rely on a healthy combination of mathematical calculation and the ability to read your opponent.

“A card counter, eh?”

Snart tipped his head. “If the occasion calls for it.”

He was smart. Sara needed to keep that in her head; it’d do best not to underestimate him. “I assume you know where we’re staying tonight?”

He shot her a look. For all that Sara didn’t trust him, didn’t know him, and wasn’t sure what to make of him, she could read him surprisingly well. Or maybe he was just that good at being expressive on purpose when he wanted to be.

She smirked back at him. “Fair enough.” They were all adults here. “Just saying the room’s already paid for.”

He relaxed again in his chair, a minor admittance of defeat—at least for this round—and she bid him farewell, throwing a wink at Rory when he caught her leaving. He smirked back at her, glancing between her and his partner, but was quickly absorbed back into his game.

The glow of the sun was still visible on the horizon as she stepped outside again. It was a nice night, and the quiet murmur of the city settling down was comforting background noise. Sara thought about patrolling, in a manner of speaking, getting the lay of the land, but they didn’t have plans to stick around. There was no point in her getting to know Obsidian Springs. Apart from the journey back, she wouldn’t be spending any time here.

She wondered if Rip would want her to stick close, but she doubted there were any threats here, and anyway, Ray was right there. The two of them could handle themselves. She headed east of the city instead, keeping close to the river, and sidled along a path that ran just south of the row of homes along its edge. The soil was wetter here, and trees more plentiful. It was almost a different world than the desert that lay a few miles south.

Finding herself a small clearing and a big stick, Sara fell into her forms and let the time flow past her. It was dark and she was sweating heavily by the time she was done. The peace of knowing herself—or at least her body, if not her mind—had settled in, helped center her. She set aside her worries about Snart and Rory, about crossing the desert, even on whether or not there really was lithium at the end of their journey. She had a goal, and she was going to achieve it.

She would accept nothing less.

Rip and Ray were gone from the dining area by the time Sara slunk in, but the tables and chairs weren’t entirely vacated even if dinner had stopped being served. The bar-inn combination was in a fairly well-lit part of town on the river’s edge, lanterns lining the street outside, and no one batted an eye when she slipped inside and made her way to the stairs. They’d only gotten two rooms, but sleeping rough was commonplace for her; she didn’t mind sharing a room with Rip and Ray while Snart and Rory took the other one. After her workout, sleep was easy and comfortable, even with a knife beneath her pillow, and she woke with the dawn before either of her roommates in the other bed.

Being on the river, the bar had excellent plumbing. No water heater, but great water pressure in the river-water shower, and Sara took a few extra moments to feel the stream on her face, knowing it’d be the last she’d get for a while. By the time she was done, Rip and Ray were up and about; Rip had ordered some breakfast up to the room, which turned out to be rolls with a goat cheese spread and smoked fish. (There was a lot of fish in Obsidian Springs.)

“Did our companions return last evening?” Rip asked her.

Sara took a bite of her roll and shrugged. Rip sighed, buckling his belt and checking his pistol and holster. His frustration was amusing; he probably trusted Snart and Rory less than she did, for all that he’d chosen and hired them himself.

“Remind me who we’re meeting this morning?” Ray asked. His hair was wet from his own shower, and he was eyeing the rolls with interested.

“Carter and Kendra Hall,” Rip announced. “Guides for hire.”

“They’re metahumans, the both of them,” Sara told him. “We don’t run the same region,” she’d always kept north of Central City, not wanting to drift too far from her family, “but their reputation precedes them. They know what they’re doing.”

Ray nodded at the information, taking the second roll.

Despite said reputation, Sara wasn’t surprised Ray hadn’t heard of them. He stuck to cities, and when he didn’t he could fly anywhere he wanted. It was no wonder he knew nothing about local guides.

“We keeping the room for the night?” Sara asked Rip.

He frowned. “There’s no guarantee they’ll agree to the trip,” he said. They’d found out that the Halls—the Hawks, as they were locally known—had only returned yesterday, about the same time they’d been recruiting Ray. Even if the pay was good, the married couple might not want to leave so soon after returning home.

Sara figured Rip should just consider himself lucky that hadn’t just left on a trip. She nodded in agreement, chewing, and swept her gaze over her few belongings in the room. Nothing she’d cry over losing. She had her best knives on her, the rest was replaceable.

Ray, though, was a bit more naïve than most. She swallowed and glanced his way again.

“Got your suit on you?”

He patted his breast, where he must have had a pocket on the inside of his worn, brown, leather jacket. “Never go anywhere without it.”

He was grinning, but there was a seriousness thrumming through his words. He knew what the suit was worth, and he knew the damage it could cause in the wrong hands. For all his naiveté, she’d do best not to underestimate him too, though there was no threat in doing so as there was with the thieves.

Sara nodded. “Alright then, shall we?”

Snart and Rory, whether they’d stayed the night there or not, were waiting for them in the lobby. From there it was a matter of making their way to the office the Hawks operated out of and waiting for the two to arrive.

Carter and Kendra Hall were both slender and well-muscled, wearing tight but flexible clothing. Their wings apparently sprouted permanently from their backs, but they were folded down tight enough that Sara only caught glimpses of large brown feathers as they approached from the front. They were both taller than her, Kendra by a few inches, Carter by a few more than that. They both had weapons strapped to their thighs. They both had brown hair and alert, wary eyes.

In short, they looked capable, prepared, and in sync. They moved together, flowed around each other with an ease that spoke of a close relationship, and were used to navigating their wings indoors. They listened to Rip’s proposal without really asking any questions until the end, at which point they exchanged glances and Kendra began to pummel Rip for details.

They were exactly the kind of details Sara would want a guide to ask, focusing on the route, the destination, the number of people traveling, the supplies that would be needed and so on. Sara tuned out Rip’s responses, focusing on the Hawks: the glances they exchanged here and there, the pointed focus in Kendra’s tone as she sought answers.

It was hard to say, but Sara was pretty sure they’d agree to the trip. At the very least, they weren’t acting like guides exhausted from a hard trip and not interested in heading out again anytime soon. Eventually, Kendra’s questions subsided and she stepped back to let her husband step forward.

Carter pulled a map from one of the pouches of his belt, much more detailed than the one Rip had. “Obsidian Springs is here,” he said, pointing. “From what you’re saying, our ultimate destination is somewhere around here.” He gestured to the region southwest of Bravefort.

Rip nodded.

“Alright then,” Kendra said. “If we’re gonna do this, our best bet is to carry enough supplies to get us to Bravefort, then restock whatever we’ll need for the actual mining there. If you’ve got any tools already we can take them, but for the most part it’ll be easier on the trip if we buy what we need there.”

Now they were talking actual travel plans. Sara tuned in, studying the more detailed map.

Carter was already nodding in agreement. “There’s a road from Obsidian Springs to Goldenridge,” he said, gesturing. “That’s about seventy miles. It’s safe, clear, and patrolled fairly regularly by Firestorm. Plus, if you do forget any supplies, or underestimate what we need, there’s a general store at the foot of the mesas travelers often restock at.”

Sara, though, wasn’t quite as certain as their two guides about what they were saying. The mesas in question were a lot clearer on Carter’s map than Rip’s and she wasn’t sure she liked the looks of them. “This road?” she asked, pointing. “The one that goes directly between the two mesas?”

Off to the side, but not so distant that they couldn’t see the map themselves, Snart and Rory exchanged glances. “Prime location for an ambush,” Snart said, exactly what Sara was thinking.

The sixty miles between Obsidian Springs and Goldenridge was open and clear, and Sara had no problem with that, but the last few miles of the road before it gave way to the rest of the Barrens fell between the two mesas and might as well have been the same as walking along the bottom of a canyon. With Goldenridge on the top of one of those mesas, there was a definite threat of attack from above.

Carter, however, scoffed at both their concerns. “An ambush from who?” he asked, which was a stupid question. He was a guide in the Barrens; if he didn’t know about the risks of bandits and attacking nomads than she wasn’t sure she wanted him guiding them. “It’s once we get past Goldenridge—”

“Hold up,” Sara cut in. “We’re not just going to walk into an ambush because you assume there won’t be one. What about going around the mesas?”

“That would add days to the trip,” Carter said dismissively. “There’s no need—” His wife put a hand on his arm, silencing him.

“Look, it’s really not the risk you think it is,” she said.

Well, at least one of the guides was listening to her concerns. “You two can fly,” Sara reminded them. “I’d think you’d understand better than most the dangers of an attack from above.”

“Of course we do—”

Kendra cut off her husband again.

“Carter,” she said, a little sharp. He subsided, teeth gritted. “Sorry,” Kendra continued, turning to them. “I guess we forgot you guys don’t know much about the area. Have you guys heard of Firestorm?”

“Local Hero,” Rip said bluntly. “Operates out of Obsidian Springs.”

“First one used to operate out of Central City,” Snart agreed. “Haven’t met this new one.”

“Officially, he does,” Kendra agreed, answering Rip. “Unofficially, he actually lives out in Goldenridge, and spends most of his time patrolling the valley.”

“The valley?” Ray asked.

“Mesa Valley,” Kendra clarified. She gestured to the portion of the Barrens that fell in between the mesas and Obsidian Springs. “This is the safest seventy-mile stretch in the desert, including the two mesas. Goldenridge is probably the safest town on the continent, what with one Hero for little more than two thousand people. The desert’s rough, yeah, but he keeps bandits away from the mesas. There’s little risk of attack, walking that road.” She and Carter exchanged glances, Carter relaxing a little, but Sara didn’t know either of them well enough to pick up on what it meant.

She studied the map again, and spoke when it didn’t seem like Rip would. Well, he had put her in charge of his security. “So, if what you’re saying is true, we’re basically in the clear until we pass Goldenridge, so we’ve got, what, four days of safe travels before the going gets rough?”

The guides looked at each other again.

“Not… not exactly,” Kendra said.

“The biggest threats in the Barrens aren’t always the people,” Carter said. “It’s the earthshifts.”

“What’s native to this region?” Snart asked with interest.

“Uranium deposits.”

An uneasy silence settled over the small group at Carter’s pronouncement. All earthshifts carried with them their dangers, but radioactivity was one of the harder ones to deal with, mainly because there was nothing you could do. If something radioactive popped out of the ground your best bet was to get the hell out of there before it could do too much damage.

“You’ve got some poisonous cadmium deposits the further west you go,” Kendra added. “And there’s a fair amount of sodium, lithium, and magnesium scattered about, as well as rubidium and cesium, though you probably knew about that. Plus, you know, your usual iron, aluminum, titanium, and so on. The biggest concern is the uranium though.”

“We’ll post night shifts, then,” Rip decided. “And make sure to pick up a Geiger counter.” He nodded at Kendra and Carter, as if to thank them for the advice.

“Look, you want our honest opinion?” Kendra asked.

Rip studied her for a moment, but Snart spoke up before he could.

“No point in having a guide that keeps things from us,” he drawled. It sounded casual, but Sara could pick up on the derision hidden in his words: for a thief, Snart was a surprisingly honest man and he seemed to appreciate it when others were honest as well. In this case, Sara was more than happy to agree with him. They didn’t need guides who would hide safety concerns out of fear of offending their clients.

“If you’re going to be spending any time in the Barrens, you’ll want to hire Firestorm,” Carter said, blunt and honest.

Sara blinked at the assessment. Well, they’d asked.

Snart scoffed. “We’ve got plenty of muscle, birdbrain,” he said. Rory’s hand was hovering over his heat gun.

“It’s not about muscle,” Kendra said. “I take it you don’t know what Firestorm’s powers are?”

Rory grinned. “He lights himself on fire,” he said, in a tone that suggested he was happy to see it. “Or, at least, the first one did.” His grin turned a little menacing. “First one was fun to spar with.”

Snart huffed out a laugh. “Fun for some of us,” he said, shooting his partner a glance that Sara figured was more fond than annoyed. Rory only rolled his eyes, still grinning madly.

“We don’t know much,” Carter cut in, “Firestorm’s a secretive type, but we’ve worked with him once or twice. He’s…”

“He’s a little strange,” Kendra said, probably more delicate than how Carter would have put it, if Sara’s impression of their characters was accurate, “but he’s good at what he does. His fire is nuclear based, which means he’s immune to radiation poisoning.”

Now that was a handy powerset, especially out here. Probably why he’d moved, or, at least, why he’d chosen here to settle down, out of everywhere on the continent.

“The valley’s kept clear of uranium, but the further south we go the more likely we’ll run into some he hasn’t found yet, or some fresh deposits,” Carter said.

“Which isn’t a huge problem for people just passing through,” Kendra cut in before they could say anything, clearly anticipating their protests. “It sucks, and we’ve probably been exposed more times than most would like, but it isn’t too hard to just avoid them, or up and leave if one springs up, even if you do have to worry about your supplies being contaminated. For mining towns, though…”

Sara could see how that would be a problem.

“North of Bravefort,” Carter continued, “most establishments have at least one radiation suit, a lead-lined shed or a dumping ground out of town, and an agreement with Firestorm. He’ll drop by on occasion and take care of anything that’s sprung up near any settlements. South of Bravefort…”

“It’s not necessarily the distance that’s the problem, it’s the amount of settlements he has to cover; he’s only one man, and he focuses his efforts on this region, mostly. He is based out of Obsidian Springs.”

“If you were settling in for a long-term mining operation, I’d say forget about costs and just get the supplies you need. But since you’re—we’re—going to be crossing the Barrens and setting up temporary camp there…”

“Like we said, Firestorm’s worked with us a few times here and there. He really would be useful in a pinch, and he knows how to fight if that’s a concern.”

Sara considered the map again. “You said the distance wasn’t a problem—I take it he’s fast in the air?”

But Rip cut in, anticipating her thoughts. “Irrelevant,” he said, also frowning at the map. “If we’re going to add him to this team he’s going to make the trip with us, not just cut in at the end.” It was easy to see that Rip didn’t like the sound of either option, but he wasn’t outright dismissing the possibility either. Sara knew he’d meticulously planned out this operation; adding in someone new and someone they didn’t know much about wasn’t part of that plan.

From a certain point of view, his perspective made sense. If he was trying to keep the operation a secret—and it certainly seemed like he was, asking Snart and Rory to sell the lithium on the black market when they were done—then it was a bad idea to spill the plan to someone and then wait a month before reconnecting with them, Hero or not. It still seemed almost too paranoid to Sara. Why not keep certain details from Firestorm, and just ask him to meet them at a certain location?

Well, then again, Rip didn’t have an exact location. They could reconnect in Bravefort or another point along the way, but not necessarily at the end destination. Whatever the case, Sara wasn’t going to argue. She wasn’t sure she agreed, but she wasn’t going to argue.

It was interesting, too, the way Rip was already referring to them as a team. Ray seemed to be meshing well enough with him, but Snart and Rory, despite their days of travel together, still functioned more as a separate unit, and the Hawks hadn’t even agreed to join them yet.

“Adding another member better not cut into our paychecks,” Snart warned.

Rip scowled at him. “You’ll get your ten percent.”

That wasn’t a yes or no on the case of Firestorm. Sara studied him, but he was studying the map. After a moment, he looked up at Carter and Kendra again. “Does your agreement hinge on Firestorm’s involvement?”

They exchanged glances. Rip had already named his objective and his price earlier in the discussion; they were getting ten percent each, not ten percent as a unit, a hefty sum. There weren’t really any other details to consider.

“No,” Carter said, eventually.

Rip nodded. He stretched out a hand over the map. “We can discuss involving Firestorm further on the trip,” he said. “For now, let’s see about getting the supplies we’re gonna need.”

Carter and Kendra exchanged glances again, a shorter delay this time, and then Carter stretched out his hand and shook Rip’s.

Well, that was about it. Whether or not Firestorm joined them, all the pieces of Rip’s plan had fallen into place. They were all gathered at the starting line. The only thing left to do now was begin the race.

Chapter Text

“Hey, Firestorm!” Sampson called out, chipper as always despite the dawn sun only just rising over the distant horizon. “What can I do you for? Heading out?”

Jax smiled softly at the sheriff. There were other people in town he was closer to, but he probably spent the most time with Sampson, and he never minded a second of it. Sampson had been the one to welcome them into Goldenridge, the one to settle down any questions and concerns, the first one they’d told about their transmutation ability, and even Gray trusted the man nearly wholeheartedly, despite all the secrets still between them (namely, that he didn’t even know Martin Stein existed).

Nearing sixty and still as spry as a thirty-year old, Sampson kept the town running and was a good friend.

“Yeah,” he told the older man. “Southward, just patrol this time. Flew up this morning as the sun did; doesn’t look like there are any travelers coming up from the Barrens.” It wasn’t a guarantee; there were places to hide in the desert, however few, and they’d be gone a few hours—on horseback, if someone really wanted to catch Goldenridge by surprise, they’d be able to. But they knew Sampson appreciated the updates.

The sheriff nodded. “Sounds good, sounds good,” he said. “You be careful out there, you hear?”

It was a common phrase, and Jax grinned every time he heard Sampson utter it, as he did now. “Sampson,” he said in return, tone flat and unimpressed, his usual reply as he flared their fire in demonstration. They could take care of themselves.

Sampson rolled his eyes, also grinning, and the exchange moved on. “The Tompsons had a little trouble with their paddock the other day, goats kept getting out. Don’t know if they need a new lock or just a fix to the old one. Jenny Wiley announced her pregnancy last night at the tavern, I know you have a habit of dropping off gifts for that sort of thing.” He shot Firestorm a look that said it was unnecessary but appreciated. “Oh, and Pete said Abigail came in last night, complaining of a rockfall no one’s looked at. You probably know better than most how this old mesa’s crumbling, but maybe pay a look, put her mind at ease, y’know?”

Jax listened to the list intently. It wasn’t a daily thing, and the issues were usually minor, but he liked helping out where he could. It felt good and helped keep him involved in other people’s lives.

“Abigail first,” Gray said.

Jax had to hold back a snort. Gray did not like Old Lady Abigail, as the kids called her. She was the number one perpetrator of false reports of something wrong, and she liked to chat. Jax had told Gray time and again that she was just lonely, but Gray always said she could find someone else to bother then.

“Sure thing, Sheriff,” he said out loud. “Check in when I get back?” Gray was reacting to his amusement with stubbornness and the impression of crossing his arms, and Jax was tempted to roll his eyes.

“Edith’ll be on duty if you come in late,” Sampson said. “But sure, yeah. ‘Preciate it.”

Jax gave a small wave, then ducked out of the sheriff’s office. Truthfully, it wasn’t much. There were three lawmakers in Goldenridge, and it was rare that they were in the building at the same time. It was one of the few buildings built out of wood instead of stone and its age showed in the weathered boards and the way it creaked in the winds. There was one desk, two chairs (one behind the desk, one against the wall for visitors), and the holding cell had been used a grand total of three times in the two years Firestorm had been living on top the other mesa. Two of those times the guest in shackles had been an out-of-towner who’d stirred up a little trouble once he’d reached the top of his climb.

He shut the door carefully behind them, mindful of the way it stuck a little in the frame. “Really, Gray?” he muttered under his breath.

“You know as well as I that the excuse of other things on our list will get us out of an hour-long conversation,” Gray replied stuffily.

Jax did roll his eyes now that he was alone, setting off down the street. “She’s not that bad,” he argued. “You know she just wants the company.”

“Well, she can seek it elsewhere.”

“Didn’t your mom ever teach you to respect your elders?” It was more joke than admonishment. Abigail wasn’t really that old. Maybe sixty or seventy, which put her at right about Gray’s age.

“A lesson I can see you haven’t taken to heart,” Gray said, also joking.

Jax laughed out loud, light and easy. Fair enough. “C’mon then,” he said, still grinning. “Let’s get this over with.”

Rip Hunter’s little crew were easy enough traveling companions, at least compared to some of the other groups Kendra had guided through the Barrens before. So far, they’d kept track of their water and food usage, didn’t complain about setting up their own tents, and were largely quiet as they walked.

Keeping to her and Carter’s advice, Hunter had decided to buy most of the mining supplies in Bravefort. For the moment, all they traveled with was about twelve days’ worth of food for eight people—an overestimate, but always worthwhile in the desert—personal gear and clothes, and three three-person tents. Carrying packs was harder with their wings—she and Carter tended to load up pouches around their belts and carry shoulder bags instead—but they carried their own weight, and no one complained about their slightly smaller bags. One mule carried all three tents and half the sleeping rolls. A second carried the remaining sleeping rolls and half the food. The personal gear was carried individually, and the remaining food was distributed.

Aside from the tents, it was always the water that took up the most space, but they’d gone light on that, as she and Carter usually did, planning to restock in Goldenridge. Typical travelers could do the seventy-mile stretch in five days. People a bit more fit, without small children or the elderly slowing them down, usually did it in less than four. Their new crew seemed to operate along those lines. The first day, leaving with the dawn, they were probably three miles or so past the twenty-mile marker down the road before they stepped off it and camped for the night, and that was with an hour break at the hottest part of the day for lunch and a cool down.

Mick Rory grumbled a bit here and there and lounged as the others set up camp, but he kept pace with the rest of them easily enough. Leonard Snart had the good graces to put up the tent he’d be sharing with his friend, but otherwise he wasn’t much interested in setting up camp either. Ray Palmer was chatty and friendly, a welcome break from the wary strangers they often found themselves guiding. Sara Lance was aloof and distant, but better suited than the rest of the group for the rough life, Kendra figured.

Rip Hunter, meanwhile, was aloof in a different way, mysterious without meaning to be. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but he wasn’t interested in stopping either. He’d spent a good few hours in the morning grilling her and Carter about Firestorm as they walked, the others listening in, some with more interest than others.

Day two, so far, wasn’t shaping up any differently, minus the detailed questioning about Firestorm. Clouds provided a respite from the sun, but it wasn’t the hottest season of the year, so it wasn’t entirely necessary. This close to the river, they still got a few breezes here and there; it was after passing the mesas—fifty miles south of their current position—that the heat would really set in.

Her wings started twitching uneasily here and there after lunch. It wasn’t quite the same as the sensation one got when they were being watched, but it was similar. It was as if the winds—particularly the winds behind them—weren’t what she was expecting them to be. She’d taken up guard at the rear of the group, Carter at the front (at this point, there wasn’t much need to guide; the road to Goldenridge, while not paved, was easily visible, with markers every five miles).

She wasn’t the only one who started to fidget. Lance, too, was playing with a small knife at her side.

The attack, when it came, still managed to catch them all by surprise.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here?”

Kendra whirled around rapidly at the scornful tone, wings flaring in alarm. Five people had somehow managed to sneak up on them from behind and stood in a loose line before her now. They were dressed for desert living and traveling light; each of them had a decent water skin and a few pouches around their waists that could hold dried jerky, nuts, or fruit, but none of them carried a pack.

“You should know better than to go on banditing people here in the valley,” she called out, instinct, before she could help herself. The cant of the desert bandits fell off her tongue easy and rough all at once, and she knew there was a snarl on her face. Her wings, wide and flared, blocked Ray and Rip behind her, and Carter behind them. Lance was off to her left now, Snart and Rory to her right. (The mules were behind Lance, barely agitated by the commotion.) From the corner of her eye, she could see that her traveling companions had drawn weapons, same as she had: the dirk she kept strapped to her thigh was in her hand, ready to be used.

Truthfully, Kendra wasn’t that concerned. She felt little fear. They were a large group and a group of fighters. They’d need to be seriously outnumbered for anyone to pose a real threat. She and Carter had been doing this dance with desert bandits for years; they knew the moves, and they knew how to adjust those moves based on the rest of their party. The threat they posed was obvious; best case scenario, she could talk the bandits down and they’d part without any injuries on either side.

The lead man chuckled, dark and cruel. He hadn’t drawn a knife, but he played with the edge of his sheath, tracing up and down the pointed end. There was a gun too, on his other hip, and Kendra didn’t doubt he was a quick draw. “Don’t see no flames to protect you now, do you?”

Firestorm’s influence in the valley was well known. Kendra’d been hoping the only reason these bandits were attacking now was because they were too stupid to know that. But these men seemed organized, and organized bandits in the valley might mean…

At her side and past her still outstretched wing, Snart twitched. “Think again,” he said, with a nod at his partner.

Rory raised his heat gun. Flames billowed forth, hot enough that her wings instinctively tucked inward again.

A woman to the side of the leader surged forward. She crossed her arms like an X in front of her, and a shield formed that blocked the fire. Snart was already firing his own gun though, ice shooting out just to the side of the shielded woman. There was no time to think or question the thieves’ decision to attack.

Lance was moving already too. A knife spun forward, tumbling through the air and embedding itself in the shoulder of the leader. He smirked and pulled it out. Kendra finally managed to lunge forward at that point, but he parried the blade of her dirk with the smaller knife, still dripping with his blood. He didn’t seem fazed by the injury. That, paired with the shield popping out of nowhere and the bandits sneaking up on them suggested one thing: metahumans.

That, of course, led to a whole host of other problems, but those were questions for after.

Kendra dove into the fight before her, slashing and hacking at the lead bandit. She was only tangentially aware of the fights happening around her: Snart and Rory had a new opponent who seemed to be able to deflect both fire and ice streams; the metahuman who could create shields was forcing herself toward Rip and Ray, the former with his gun out and firing at the current shield; Lance was one on one with another woman off to the side; Carter was struggling against the last man who seemed to slide on the ground like it was ice. She picked up enough only to know that the rest of the fighters were mostly occupied and that she didn’t have to spend too much effort watching her own back but also that her group was also occupied and she couldn’t relax entirely.

There wasn’t much of a chance to. Kendra was decent at combat, but the man she was facing was just as good if not better and even when she did swipe at him, the longer reach of the dirk giving her the edge she needed, he barely seemed to notice the scratches she gave him.

A moment later, Lance came tumbling toward them. She somersaulted into the middle of their fight and popped up between them, another small blade finding the lead bandit’s shoulder even as she parried his latest blow.

“Switch!” she called out.

Kendra didn’t—couldn’t—question it. She spun and swept forward with a wing before the woman Lance had been fighting could group up on Carter. As she engaged her new opponent, she noted out of the corner of her eye that Snart seemed to have the battle against the energy deflector well in hand, having given up on his ice gun entirely, and Rory had joined Rip and Ray against the shield creator. No one was out of the game just yet, in the seconds that had passed, but things were already tipping in their favor.

She lashed out with a kick as the woman got her feet under her, then fell back-to-back with Carter, their wings pressing against each other.

“Doing okay?” he asked, breathless and grinning.

So he wasn’t worried either. Kendra grinned back, even though he couldn’t see it. “Not a scratch on me,” she confirmed.

He laughed and pulled away.

The fight was over shortly after that. Snart must have taken out the energy deflector, and the other three men the shield creator, because before she knew it Ray was at her side, Rip was helping Carter, and Snart and Rory surged forward to take on the leader with Lance. They didn’t really get a chance to—the man Carter was fighting slid across the dirt, scooping up his companions one by one and depositing them fifty feet away or so. He snagged the shield creator first, and by the time he got to the energy deflector, the woman Kendra had been fighting and the leader were sprinting after him.

Lance threw a dagger that definitely hit its target, almost faster than Kendra could track, but the bandits vanished into thin air before the target even reacted to the hit. The seven of them pulled up short, but the adrenaline didn’t immediately fade.

“Carter!” she snapped out, wings surging open again.

“Got it,” he said, and she left the group behind, taking to the air with quick, powerful strokes. (Standard procedure, but she didn’t really need to make sure Carter was good to watch those on the ground; they’d just proven they could handle themselves.)

The effort of a standing take-off put a strain on her wings, but she didn’t hesitate. In a matter of seconds she was airborne and rising above the group. The low sloping hills of Mesa Valley stretched out before her. There was no sign of the bandits, or anyone else for that matter.

Kendra stayed aloft for a few more moments, feeling the beating of her heart slowing and sheathing her dirk, to clean later. Whether it was invisibility or teleportation though, their attackers were gone. She’d put money on some sort of invisibility, though clearly not a type that would be useful in a fight. If it had been teleportation, there was no reason for the bandits not to come back with reinforcements.

But her thoughts were getting ahead of her—that was supposing they had reinforcements to go collect. She let herself lose altitude quickly, falling feet first and only flapping enough to ensure she didn’t break her legs on impact. The group was collecting themselves too, patting down injuries and sheathing weapons.

“Any sign?” Lance was the first to ask.

“They’re gone,” Kendra confirmed.

The group seemed to relax as one.

“That was rash,” Hunter said, once his gun had been holstered again. His tone was harsh but seemed to be directed primarily at Snart. “I hired you to defend against threats, not create them.”

Snart raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “Way I hear it, any metahumans out here are already threats. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“We could have attempted to bargain,” Hunter said. “We outnumbered them—”

Carter didn’t let him finish though, eyeing Snart with an expression that was half wariness, half respect. “How did you know they were metahumans?”

“I didn’t.”

Kendra sent Snart a surprised glance. He smirked, easy as always, and shrugged. “One, they came out of nowhere. Ain’t a lotta people who can sneak up on me these days. Two, the skinny guy in the back looked like he had yellow eyes. Could’a been the glare from the sun, but…” he shrugged again. “And three, from all you’ve said about Firestorm, you’d have to be either supremely confident in your ability not to get caught or extremely stupid. Stupid they might have been, but they weren’t complete idiots.”

He was… well, he was right. Even if bandits managed to successfully attack a group in the valley, kill them all, and make off with their supplies, Firestorm patrolled often. Every now and again a day or two would pass where he was occupied elsewhere, and tracking people wasn’t easy in the dry grasses and cracked earth of the Barrens, but the chances of getting away were slim to none unless the bandits had a hideaway in Obsidian Springs, and that was a town that didn’t put up with bandits.

Obsidian Springs was no paradise or anything like that; it had its share of issues. But Firestorm’s presence, and his work keeping the valley clear, had brought a little life and pride to the town that hadn’t been there before. People didn’t often rob others in this portion of the world. In such a small town, with such a definite loyalty to their Hero, it was so easy to get caught.

Kendra glanced around. Sara seemed convinced by Snart’s tale, or uncaring at the least, already wiping down the two blades she’d used. Rory, likewise, wasn’t paying much attention. Ray was listening with a frown, Rip with a deeper one, but neither seemed inclined to argue. Carter did, a little, so she shot him a glance to shut him up.

Moving on assumption maybe wasn’t the best course of action, but doing so had probably helped in this situation, and Snart had been right. She’d save any admonishments for later, and she and Carter could talk about their issues with his approach in private. Hunter had hired the two of them as guides—Snart and Rory were the muscle. It wasn’t their place to question how the two thieves defended the group, and anyway, it wasn’t anything she hadn’t been thinking herself. (There was no real way to tell if Snart being right had been chance or skill. Not unless something like this happened a second time.)

She nodded once, then looked around the group again. “They probably won’t come back,” she said. (Especially not if they’d gone to report to their leader, as she feared.) “But we should probably still stay alert. Is everyone good to keep moving?”

There were murmurs of assent and nodded heads all around. Good. It was a bad sign that their journey had started off to such troubles, especially in Mesa Valley, but Hunter’s recruits seemed more than capable of handling whatever was thrown their way. Kendra kept her eyes and ears alert as they rounded up the mules and started walking again. Sara and Snart were talking in low voices about the fight. Ray, while they’d been collecting the mules, had put on his Hero suit.

They were all walking a little closer together than before, but Kendra didn’t think it was just to clump up and watch each other’s backs. She and Carter had had plenty of experience before guiding multiple small groups at once, people who didn’t know or trust each other but who were too small in number to pay decently on their own. They’d guided as many as fifteen or twenty at a time before, often composed of smaller groups of two or three or four clustered together for the trip. Hunter’s group was meant to work together, had been hired together, unlike those groups, but they had still started off as strangers.

Not so much now, anymore, at least by a little. It was reassuring, probably to more than just her, to know that the hired thieves would do their jobs—and were good at it—so long as they got paid in the end. It was both comforting and a little threatening to know that Hunter’s hired personal bodyguard was extremely skilled with a knife; Kendra had never once betrayed a group that hadn’t first betrayed her, but if she’d had any thoughts along that line Sara’s presence alone would have stopped them in their tracks. It was good to know, too, that even Hunter and Ray—who hadn’t necessarily been hired for his fighting skills—knew how to handle themselves in an ambush. If she and Carter had been guiding a family with kids, it would have been a much tougher fight, and she wouldn’t have escaped without injury.

Carter dropped back slowly to walk at her side, sending her a look with trepidation underlining his gaze. She matched it, then jerked her head at the group they were guiding. They could talk later, when they wouldn’t be so easily overheard. There was no point in stirring the pot if they were wrong in their suspicions. Still, it was good to know that she and her husband were having similar thoughts on who might be behind the attack—and what it meant for the Barrens as a whole that they were bold enough to do so in the valley, under Firestorm’s watchful eye.

Despite troubles early into their journey—or perhaps because of them—the group Rip had hired made good time for the first leg of the trip. Obsidian Springs was roughly seventy miles to Goldenridge, the next outpost along the way. They’d made just over twenty the first day, just under the second, and had powered through almost all the remaining thirty miles the third, camping out only a mile or so before the entrance to the canyon between the mesas that gave the valley their name.

Rip had been uneasy being so close to an elevated position they could easily have been attacked from, but the Hawks had gotten more and more relaxed the closer they’d gotten, and he’d chosen to trust them. Besides, between the attack and pushing things the next day, the group was exhausted. They were keeping watch at night, everyone taking a two-hour shift. Mostly. There were enough of them that not all of them needed to do so, and Mick Rory had made it clear that he wasn’t participating.

Regardless, as Rip woke on the fourth day, a mixture of apprehension, caution, and relief swirled through him. The team was coming together, slowly but surely, and they were finally on their way. But there was an obstacle in front of him, a decision to make, and he wasn’t talking about the three-mile stretch between the mesas.

Firestorm. Rip hadn’t planned on Firestorm. He wasn’t sure he needed him. He really didn’t want to bring an unknown in on his plan. But if Firestorm was a resident of the Barrens and a Hero, he’d be likely to want to help if he knew everything, so that was really only an issue because Rip wasn’t sure he could trust anyone, even a Hero. Especially a Hero he knew so little about. In comparison, Ray Palmer was an open book, even with his own share of memories he’d rather forget.

Rip didn’t even know Firestorm’s name. As far as he’d gathered, no one did. He’d done his research on every person he’d brought along; he’d scouted out reputations and histories. Firestorm was an unknown, and an unknown was dangerous. Then again, so was the threat of radioactivity. Even supposing they could quickly leave the area after a uranium earthshift, there was always the danger of their belongings being irradiated. There was always a danger of radiation directly where he needed to dig. Rip wasn’t sure that was a risk he could take either.

“Thinking hard?” Sara asked, low and discreet, sidling up next to him as he dismantled the tent he’d been sharing with her and Ray.

Rip cast a glance back toward the looming mesas, wondering how to reply.

“Ah,” Sara said, before he could. “The Hawks seem pretty confident we’re in the clear here.”

“Not that.”

Sara cast a glance back at the mesas too. “Firestorm?”

Rip hummed in assent.

“Is it the cost?”

She was feeling him out, and Rip couldn’t blame her. From what she knew, there really wasn’t much of a reason to oppose Firestorm’s inclusion beyond the fact that he’d end up with part of the profits too, which really only cut into Rip’s share. He couldn’t have cared less about cost though.

“Because if the only reason you’re reluctant is because you didn’t hand-pick him, I gotta say, that’s not a great reason. We’re all strangers here.”

Valid points, or, at least, they would have been, if Sara had known the true reasons he’d been so careful about selecting his group and exactly how much time he’d spent finding the perfect group of strangers. “You’re right,” he said reluctantly, making a decision. Bringing Firestorm along would serve more than one purpose: it’d get his new companions to stop questioning him, Sara most of all. “But what if he doesn’t agree?” It wasn’t a question that had given him pause, but he voiced it like it was the source of his troubles and the reason for his hesitation. Let Sara think that he was worried about Firestorm not joining instead of worrying about his inclusion.

He finished tying the rolled-up tent, standing. The other tents were dismantled, the scattered belongings packed up.

Sara pursed her lips thoughtfully, holding the mule steady for him as he stepped over to add the last tent to its pack. “We were planning to do this without him anyway.”

“And if our destination is swimming in radiation?”

“Then you better find out some other way to pay those two,” she said, with a thumb in Snart and Rory’s direction.

Rip shot her an unamused look.

She snorted. “No, seriously, the way Kendra explained it, he’d be happy to stop by if we asked him to. Even if he says no to joining us for the trip, we can maybe reconnect with him in Bravefort or something just in case. Would probably take longer, but…” She shrugged.

Fair enough. It hadn’t been Rip’s actual concern anyway, so he let the matter drop. The shadow of the mesas loomed over them as they set out, and Sara drifted back to talk to Kendra, holding their rear. Carter moved to the front, not that there was any need for a guide here: the two Hawks had been right, the road between Obsidian Springs and Goldenridge was easy traveling and clearly marked. This close to the canyon, there was a marker every mile, instead of every five miles as there had been for the majority of the journey so far.

It wasn’t, however, immediately obvious that there was a town nearby. The path between the mesas was perhaps a little more worn than the rest of the road, but there were no structures or other indications of human settlement. Not at first, at least. A mile into the canyon, neck itching the whole time as if they were being watched, Rip finally spotted it. About a hundred feet up, on the wall of the eastern mesa, there was just the barest hint of a trail visible beyond the craggy rocks and rough vegetation.

“Not a bad place to settle,” Sara muttered to him from his side.

Rip hummed in acknowledgement, knowing that she’d probably seen him notice the trail, and that she’d probably noticed it herself a while back. She was right: the mesas were an ideal location for security purposes, giving anyone on top the high ground and plenty of time to spot any incoming threats. If the people of Goldenridge knew what they were doing, and hadn’t gotten too complacent, having Firestorm around, they probably already knew that Rip’s little group was there.

Nobody came to greet them as they walked, the canyon a mile wide in some places and narrowed down to a few hundred feet in others, but then, why would they? They didn’t know that the group intended to talk to Firestorm and recruit their Hero for themselves.

Closer to the other end of the canyon, they finally came across the supply depot that the Hawks had discussed. It was a decent-sized building, made of stone the same color as the canyon and tucked up against it in a way that suggested its builders had only made three walls. The foot of the trail up the mesa was nearby too, much more obvious than Rip’s brief glimpse of one of its switchbacks had been. They pulled the mules up to a hitching post, and the group started to exchange glances.

“We’re good on supplies,” Kendra said. “Just need to pick up some water.”

And they didn’t need all of them for that. Rip looked up, and up, at the mesa top above them. It was only two hundred feet or so, but the trail didn’t go straight up. It was winding instead, meandering a thin line along the edge of the cliff with multiple switchbacks. The fliers of the group (Kendra, Carter, and Ray if he put on his suit) could make it to the top in a matter of seconds. The rest of them, particularly guiding the mules, would take longer. Not too long, but between getting up there, tracking down Firestorm, filling him in on the plan, and getting back down, they’d lose at least an hour or two of travel time.

Which, okay, that wasn’t much, but Rip wasn’t convinced he wanted to do that.

“Firestorm’s worked with me and Carter before,” Kendra continued, after it was clear he was still thinking. “I could ask him to come down here, save some time?”

Rip looked over at her, a little torn. She was a stranger, but he’d handpicked her. He’d have to trust her at some point. He nodded. “I’d appreciate that,” he said shortly.

There wasn’t much to do as she stretched out her wings and took flight, but Rip took the break for what it was. The group had exhausted themselves yesterday, so a break to rest their legs and get something to drink after the few miles they’d walked that morning wasn’t unwarranted. Snart and Rory were lounging against the hitching post, Ray was wandering a little, exploring, Carter had headed inside the supply depot, and Sara was wandering too, looking more wary than curious.

Rip thought about heading inside the depot too, but he’d rather be waiting when—if—Kendra returned with Firestorm. He set his mind to mentally walking through the rest of the trip as he waited instead, for lack of anything better to do. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before Kendra returned, though she was alone.

“We’re in luck,” she said, “he’s not out on any patrols at the moment. He’ll be down in a minute.” She hadn’t even finished speaking before Rip caught sight of a flaming figure above the mesa, rocketing down to join them. Firestorm was faster in flight than the Hawks, it seemed, unconstrained by the need to flap wings and propelled by his flames instead.

He landed a little way from Rip and Kendra. To Rip, it seemed like he was eyeing the rest of the group warily, but it was hard to tell: his eyes were pure white, without any iris or pupil, and though they seemed to move where he looked the movement was difficult to track.

“Kendra said you had a proposition for us?” he said, head still flaming, voice echoing slightly.

Rip frowned. “Us?” He shot Kendra a look.

She waved him down, a little apologetic. “That’s just how he talks,” she said.

Well, they had told him Firestorm was a little odd.

“Us,” Firestorm said with a shrug. He didn’t seem bothered by the inquiry, but he didn’t seem interested in explaining himself either.

“I’ve got a trip through the Barrens planned,” Rip said briefly. “My guides told me you’re a good man to have along, if you want to avoid radiation poisoning.”

Firestorm seemed to relax a little. “Yeah, we can help with that. What, exactly, are you proposing?”

Rip filled him in. The others wandered over to the conversation here and there, but nobody attempted to help him with the explanation until he got to the introductions part, Firestorm wanting to know who, exactly, was part of their group. He nodded at Snart and Rory in a way that spoke of familiarity when they chimed in, but the thieves’ gazes were still mistrustful; they’d said earlier they’d met the first Firestorm, but never the second, and Rip couldn’t help but wonder what the relationship was between the two iterations. It was rare for any metahuman powers to be replicated.

“Sounds pretty simple,” Firestorm said at the end of it all. “But it’d take us away from Goldenridge and Obsidian Springs for a bit.” He bit his lip, thinking on it, then shook his head. “Obsidian Springs would be fine. And we can fly back and check in once or twice, especially before Bravefort.”

Rip wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that, but he didn’t argue.

“Let me talk to the sheriff, get his thoughts. Then we’ll let you know.”

Clenching his own jaw, Rip nodded. He couldn’t get a read on Firestorm, and he didn’t like that, but from everything the Hawks had said, they couldn’t afford for this Hero to turn them down.

“Wait,” Kendra said, before Firestorm could take off again. “Let me come with you. We ran into bandits in the Valley. They seemed…” She shot a glance around, as if watching her words in front of the group. “Organized.”

A dark feeling settled in Rip’s gut. The bandits had. He’d thought it had been his paranoia, but if the Hawks had the same suspicions, strong enough to share with the local Hero… Well. All the more reason to get moving. He watched Firestorm nod, watched the two take flight, then turned on his heel and strode off to join Carter inside the supply depot. Whether Firestorm agreed to join them or not, he didn’t want to waste any time.

Firestorm’s house—their sanctuary, their shelter, their retreat—was located on the second of the two mesas, slightly higher than the first and without a single carved path to the top. No one else lived there. No one else could get up there without a hard climb first. It was privacy incarnate, a place for them to unfuse secure in the knowledge that no one would see them do so. And, right now, they couldn’t risk going there.

There was a group below them in the canyon that would see them make the flight overhead. One of the local guides from Obsidian Springs was still at Goldenridge with them, catching up with someone she knew. There were eyes on them, people waiting for them.

Jefferson had long since stopped caring what people thought of them. He spoke in the plural when referring to both of them, the singular when he was voicing his own opinion, and didn’t care what people thought about the shift. Firestorm was strange and spoke funny, and the people who knew them and knew of them in this part of the world had adjusted to that. Jefferson even spoke ‘to himself’ sometimes, asked questions out loud as if offering them up to the universe. But they still had secrets to protect.

An in-depth discussion was different than a faintly asked, ‘what is that?’, offered up to the wind. The idea of being in close proximity with the very people they were now struggling to avoid the notice of would have sent a shiver down Martin’s spine, if he’d had a physical one at the moment. As it was, he knew his fear and worries were infecting his partner, a bucket of ice dumped down Firestorm’s spine instead.

“Are you serious, Gray?” Jefferson’s tone was incredulous as he stood them with their back to Goldenridge, his hushed exclamation dropped off the edge of the mesa for no one but Martin to hear.

Martin was surprised with himself too. But he had been a scientist once and he was startled to realize how much he’d missed that life, how much the longing inside him was nearly as strong as the fear. “Think of the opportunity this represents!” he said. “The ability to predict earthshifts is completely unprecedented. It could revolutionize more than just the Barrens.”

“You’d know more about that than me,” Jefferson muttered skeptically. He chanced a glance over their shoulder, but the guide who’d followed them up, Kendra Saunders, was still some distance away, chatting with Ms. Simmons. There was little chance she could hear them. Or, hear Jefferson, at any rate.

“All the more reason to accompany Mr. Hunter!” Martin exclaimed. He knew Jefferson well enough to know the source of the young man’s skepticism and could feel the distrust wrapped around his shoulders like a brace, keeping Firestorm taut with tension. He shifted tactics. “In any case, we are due for a run through the Barrens. And it is not as if we cannot return at any point, if only for a quick trip.”

“Didn’t strike me as the kinda man who’d be okay with us wandering off.” Jefferson’s tone was still a dull mutter, quiet through habit. He had returned their gaze to the horizon, which in this case happened to be east.

Martin sent a gentle nudge of physical intent through their bond, pretending as if he still had a physical body to control. Jefferson went along with it and turned their head to the south; the Barrens stretched out before them in that direction, the brown, dry expanse of land seemingly endless. The lack of water wasn’t an issue for them at the speeds they could fly—and with their ability to transmute the minerals around them to pure water. The heat didn’t wear them down the way it did others. The dangers of the desert were few, for Firestorm.

But there were still dangers. As if sensing the directions his thoughts had gone, Jefferson spoke again. “Besides, if he’s making moves—”

“Nonsense,” Martin interrupted. “Ms. Saunders is simply blowing things out of proportion. We do not work off of hearsay and rumors, Jefferson.” Even he didn’t believe his own words. If it had been rumors of General Eiling that had reached their paradise above the desert, he knew that the smallest bits of information would have been more than enough to get them both to act. But it wasn’t General Eiling that the guide was worried about. She probably didn’t know who General Eiling was. And her suspicion that the bandits in the Valley worked for anyone at all, let alone a man who seemed to be little more than a collection of fanciful rumors, was only that: a suspicion.

Jefferson shifted their shoulders, clearly trying to shake off the tension weighing them down. It only partly worked, their gut still tense and legs still ready for takeoff. They weren’t on fire, but it was a near thing. Martin found himself softening a little, even as surprise trickled in both directions that Martin wasn’t being the more paranoid of the two at the moment. “Which aspect of this request is what truly concerns you?” he asked.

A frown stole across Firestorm’s face, Jefferson furrowing their brow. He shook their head. “I don’t know,” he said. It wasn’t true, but Martin could tell that Jefferson was still collecting his thoughts. He gave his partner the time to do so, waiting patiently. “We don’t know them,” Jefferson settled on eventually.

It was only partly true. “I am aware of Mr. Snart and Mr. Rory’s reputations,” Martin said. “But… But Ronald and I were able to handle them before. And Mr. Palmer is a registered Hero. Besides, none of them will be able to match our speed in the sky.” Once he would have found the idea of running at the first sign of trouble nothing but cowardice. He’d long since learned the value in living to fight another day, so long as he wasn’t abandoning any allies when he fled.

Their shoulders rolled again and this time the tension really did seem to drop from their body. Jefferson cast another glance back over his shoulders. Ms. Saunders—or was it Mrs. Hall? They were not overly familiar with the Hawks, though they knew most of the guides based out of Obsidian Springs—had her head tossed back slightly in amusement, laughing as the sunlight glinted off her hair and wings. It gave her a golden glow that complemented the colors of the desert well.

A shiver of sensation ran through Jefferson at the sight. Martin found himself rolling his metaphorical eyes, even as a pang of sadness ran through him. Jefferson was so young. It wasn’t fair to him to be trapped in Martin’s situation, hidden away from the rest of the world. A trip through the Barrens wouldn’t exactly expand his horizons, but perhaps the chance to chat with others closer to his age than Martin’s, people other than the small community they’d made for themselves, people who traveled the world, would be good for him.

Jefferson turned them back to the edge of the mesa to speak. “What’s on your mind, Gray?”

Martin hummed wordlessly, an acknowledgement of Jefferson’s question if not an answer. Jefferson rolled his eyes.

“Alright, alright,” he said, a sliver of amusement threading through his worry. “Keep your secrets.” He hesitated, then turned around fully, facing Goldenridge once more. “You really want to do this?” he asked, barely more than a whisper under his breath.

Martin gave the question the full consideration it was due. He knew his answer but, as always, his decision would affect the both of them. It’d be weeks in close proximity with people who knew nothing of Firestorm’s dual nature—but that was their life these days. Sneaking away for some alone time, even taking to the air to chat, would not be difficult.

“I do,” he said firmly.

A grim smile settled on their face. “Alright then,” Jefferson said. His shoulders were squared again as he stared at Ms. Saunders, as if they were off to face the firing squad instead of joining a scientific expedition. Martin felt a little bad at that, but not enough to take back his decision. They were both determined to see this through.

The stretch of gently rolling hills from Obsidian Springs to Goldenridge always felt different than the trek through any other part of the Barrens. Even the attack that had been sprung on them out of nowhere hadn’t changed that. The road might not have been settled, but it was well-traveled. Beyond the mesas in front of them now stretched foreign territory. Carter knew it well enough to navigate—and well enough to know he didn’t really know the desert at all. The stars helped more than landmarks, earthshifts marring and changing sights before he could even get used to them. There was a road to Bravefort, but it wasn’t much of one, disappearing for miles entirely at times, meandering to nearby villages instead of taking a direct route at others.

Landing on the southern edge of the shorter mesa, on the other side of Firestorm from Kendra, Carter spoke. “Expecting any trouble?” he asked.

Firestorm looked his way, his pupil-less eyes searching Carter’s expression. “Beyond what you’ve already found?” he asked, voice echoing slightly.

Carter’s jaw tightened for a moment at the reminder. The three of them up here, they were the locals. They knew what the bandit attack meant better than anyone on the canyon floor. And he and Kendra knew even more than Firestorm. He shot his wife a look, eyes stretching past the man next to him. Kendra met his gaze in turn, jaw also tight, eyes hard. He gave her a slight nod. They’d keep what they knew to themselves for now. “Beyond that,” he agreed, to Firestorm’s question. “Last route we took was to Carnelian. Flew straight home from there without any clients a few days ago.”

Firestorm shook his head. “Haven’t made any recent trips ourselves. Patrols only, landed for a few earthshifts. That’s about it.”

So none of them knew what lay before them. They never really did, did they? Carter nodded at the Hero. “We’ll give you a minute to pack,” he offered, then spread his wings and took to the air.

Kendra followed only a moment later. He sensed that maybe she’d wanted to say something else, that he’d left Firestorm too early, but she didn’t argue, or even frown at him, as he tipped his wings and headed back down. They rejoined their group on the canyon floor and helped load up the water supplies on the mules and in people’s packs until Firestorm set down with them.

There was nothing but a slim pack on his back, no bedroll, no tent, no canteen of water hanging from his belt.

Snart spoke before Carter did. “If you’re expecting to share a tent, you can look elsewhere,” he said, droll.

Firestorm glanced his way with a small smile teasing at the corners of his lips. “We’ll be alright,” he said.

Carter caught the exchanged glances at Firestorm’s we, again. He exchanged his own with Kendra, but it wasn’t bemusement at the Hero’s nonchalance, or trepidation at his lack of preparedness. Firestorm was reclusive, but it was always amusing to see newcomers adjust to the Hero’s oddities. She rolled her eyes at him, tightened the last strap on the third mule in the line, and then moved forward to take the front mule’s lead.

“The next stretch of the land is double what we just hiked,” she said, projecting her voice over the entire group as she started to lead them all away from the supply depot. “Some people do it in a week, no stops, other people like to stock up at some of the townships and villages along the way and take two weeks.” She started on their usual speech about the desert and its dangers, about what they could expect to encounter along the way, and, above all else, the importance of staying hydrated.

Carter had heard it all before. He’d said it all before, though they’d long since fallen into habit of Kendra leading and Kendra being the spokesperson, between the two of them, once they got into the Barrens proper. People liked her better. (Carter couldn’t blame them for that.) He waited until everyone had started walking—Palmer on Kendra’s heels, Firestorm casually strolling behind Palmer, then Hunter, and Lance, and finally the two thieves—before he started himself, taking up the rear.

Silence settled in easily and without awkwardness. Everyone was more focused on putting their feet in front of them and avoiding the glare of the sun than they were on conversation. Only Palmer was really chatting on occasion, Kendra with a smile on her face that suggested she was enjoying the other man's company, as their feet started to put miles between them and the mesas. They skirted three earthshifts, none of them radioactive, and felt a fourth some point from the path that Firestorm flew off to go investigate, before the sky began to darken.

They set up camp after that, and little seemed to have changed since they'd set out a few days ago. Snart and Rory still kept to themselves, Snart doing most of the work of setting up their tent. Hunter, Palmer, and Lance were a well-oiled machine as they set up their own, but that was less cohesion and more competence. Palmer rambled, and seemed happy enough to get little more than grunts in response. Carter and Kendra were still in the process of setting up their own tent when Firestorm ambled over.

"Gonna do a sweep, be gone for a few hours," he said. "That a problem?"

Best Carter could tell, it seemed to be a genuine question. He exchanged glances with Kendra. There was no reason that it would be a problem. The seven of them had handled the attack in the valley just fine, with little but bruises and sore muscles between them. Beyond that, the two of them in particular had made the journey dozens of times on foot, and dozens more than that in the air. It wasn't safety that had Carter looking to his wife, though it would be annoying to have to move tents for a radioactive earthshift just because Firestorm wasn't a team player.

That was the question though: how much of a team player was he? Was this going to be a regular thing, him stepping aside?

"You've still got a Geiger counter, right?" Firestorm asked into the silence.

Kendra patted the leather pouch hanging off her hip that held it. "Small one," she said. "Same as last time."

Firestorm nodded. "If something does pop up, you can just shift yourselves for a bit," he said. "We can clear the radiation off the tents and supplies too."

Well. That was better than needing to pack up in a hurry. "It's not really our call," Carter said anyway.

Firestorm's head turned to where Hunter and the others were setting up a circle in between their tents for the evening meal—cold, since no one had been much in the mood to go search for fuel for a fire and asking Firestorm to hold their food as it cooked had seemed a bit rude. "What's your take on him?" Firestorm asked.

"He wants something," Carter answered bluntly. To an outside perspective, it might have seemed like a basic observation. Of course Hunter wanted something. Everyone who hired a guide in the Barrens did, even if all they wanted was safe passage. He knew what he meant though, and from the cautious look Kendra sent him, she understood him too.

A grimace crossed Firestorm's face that suggested he also understood. "Not just in it for the money, huh?" he asked. It didn't seem to be a question directed at Carter or his wife. After a beat Firestorm shook his head, then turned back to the two of them. "We'll check with the boss then," he said, light and easy, then nodded and strolled away.

Carter watched the ensuing conversation from a distance. It was short and uncomplicated, whatever was said. Firestorm flew away only a moment later. No one in the group hid the fact that they were all watching him go. (Least of all Mick Rory.)

"What are you thinking?" Kendra asked him.

Carter shook his head. "Nothing."

Kendra took a step closer to him. "What?" she repeated.

Holding his wings still was more of an effort than usual as Carter felt a sliver of irritation bite at him, but he knew it wasn't his wife he was irritated with. Snapping at her wouldn't help anyone. This was a weird job—they'd been hired as guides but they were also part of the group. Their payment would be the fruits of Hunter's mystical technique for finding lithium, not an agreed upon sum for a pre-determined trek. They didn't even know their final destination, just a general area to aim for.

Firestorm wasn't theirs to guide but it still felt odd, watching the group split apart, however slightly. "I don't know," Carter said, doubling down. "Probably nothing." He let his wings snap open. "I'm going to do a sweep overhead." Not a patrol—he wasn't splitting up—but he'd coast on the thermals above the group for a short while, make sure there wasn't anyone headed their way.

Kendra opened her mouth again. He took to the sky before her words could reach his ears.

The sunrise over the flat desert to the west of them was gorgeous: orange over orange in different shades, soft lighting making the landscape seem softer than it was, still a cool breeze in the air as the night turned to day. Ray watched their star rise quickly from his standing position in front of his shared tent, bare-footed in the dirt, and felt, for a moment, like he was alone in the universe. Then there was a twitch of movement out of the corner of his eye and he turned to see Firestorm, seated against a rock nearby.

The other man—the young man, from the looks of him—had one leg stretched out in front of him in the dirt, the other propped up and bent, left forearm resting on his left knee. His right hand held a rock he was twisting and turning, holding up to the light. "Gneiss," he said definitively, staring at the rock. "No way to tell the composition." He tossed it off to the side where it skittered across the dry earth for a moment before falling still.

Ray blinked, unsure if Firestorm had been talking to him. It'd been late when Firestorm had returned to the group the previous night, and Ray had already been inside his tent. Only the brightness of the Hero's flames had let him know that the man had returned at all. They hadn't had a conversation yet, and Ray didn't honestly know if Firestorm had even slept, let alone slept in a tent.

Then Firestorm looked his way, shifted his left arm to place his palm to the ground, and heaved himself to his feet. "Sleep okay?" he asked.

Ray blinked again. "Fine," he said, more on polite instinct than anything. "You?"

Firestorm was grinning. He shrugged one shoulder. "Sort of only half-slept," he said, lips quirked a little like there was something amusing about that. "Always takes me a while to adjust outside of my own bed."

All of the subtle tensions that had filled Ray at the unexpected sight of Firestorm—the odd statement delivered to no one—slipped away. "Yeah," he agreed easily with a grin. "Took me a while too. But…" He felt his head shake a little. "Not really sure where home is anymore, you know?" The words were wry but with a self-deprecating twist of amusement. He hadn't yet found what he'd set out to, leaving Star City, but he figured he was getting there.

Shaking from the earth beneath them interrupted any reply Firestorm might have given. Ray's legs braced himself against the movement, slipping into a stance that was relaxed and tense at the same time as the ground rumbled under his feet. Firestorm's flames flared and he slipped into the sky easy as breathing, rocketing up to dozens of feet in the air. If Ray'd been wearing his suit, he probably would have done the same.

Behind Ray, Sara shot from the tent, followed by Kendra and Carter out of theirs, then Hunter, Snart, and Rory after that. He pointed to where the earth was starting to bulge a little, directing their gazes, though half of them seemed to already have spotted the sight. Kendra pulled a Geiger counter out of her pocket as Carter took to the air.

"You should all get back," she said, clicking it on.

Ray retreated respectfully, wondering if anyone else would. Hunter was the first to follow him in backing away from the earthshift. Snart and Rory ambled much more slowly, and Sara was the last to leave. It seemed kind of stupid to Ray, though he didn't say anything. An earthshift wasn't the kind of thing one could fight, and sticking close to one that might be radioactive didn't make one tougher than one's companions. When he heard the characteristic clicks from the meter in Kendra's hand increase in frequency, he took a few steps further back.

Firestorm dropped to the sky in front of her. The earth was still rumbling a little, Carter still circling them from above. "It's a big one," Firestorm said to Kendra, just loud enough to reach Ray's ears, then turned to the rest of them and raised his voice. "We're absorbing the radiation! Best pack up quick and get out of here before it finishes emerging!"

Ray took a step forward, then paused when he realized he was the only one who'd done so. He looked around at the group, hesitant behind him, and wondered if they'd realized the Geiger counter had already slowed its clicking. This seemed like the kind of earthshift that would last a while, and if it was as big as it seemed, they probably didn't want to still be here when it emerged. Even the mules, used to life in the desert, were shifting restlessly.

Hunter was technically in charge, but… Ray shook himself, ignored the doubt from the rest of the group, and hurried to clear his things out of the tent. Sara was the first to follow him, accepting what he handed her as he stuck his upper half inside the tent to pull out the bedrolls.

"You trust him?" she asked under her breath.

He knew she was talking about Firestorm. Ray shrugged. Oliver might have called him a fool, but… "He's a Hero," he said simply. "What's not to trust?"