Rocky Raymond //Book Five// - COMPLETED

Chapter 20 - Seeing Red

MacKenzie's POV

"Killer Frost, seriously?" Caitlin snaps, looking at the whiteboard in the speedlab. I look over -- I'm sitting at one of the desks with my feet up and a textbook and pencil in my hand. I see that she's talking to herself. I look down again at my english textbook. "I can't take it anymore!"

"Uh, Caitlin, is everything..." Ralph asks as Caitlin turns around. "Oh. Alter-ego confab. Seen enough episodes of Sister, Sister to recognize a sibling spat when I see one."

Caitlin takes the device off her forehead

"So, I'm trying to help Cisco with his meta-human cure, but every time I start working on it, Killer Frost takes over and messes with my equations." Caitlin says. "Like this. She changed all my heterozygotes into asterisks."

"Oh, I thought those were just tiny snowflakes." Ralph says. "Wait, why doesn't Mack just help you."

I look up from my textbook

"I'm engineering." I tell him. "I also need to study for my test -- I'm pulling a C minus in english."

"Aren't you supposed to be a genius?" Ralph says

"Again, engineering." I say, pointing to my head. I point to my text book. "English literature."

"Ah." Ralph says, nodding. He looks back at Caitlin. "So, Frost isn't on board?"

"No, and I don't exactly know why." Caitlin says, walking over to where I'm sitting

"Can't you just ask her?" Ralph asks

"Oh, I've tried." Caitlin says. "But every time we start talking about it, she starts singing Barney's I Love You song."

"Ooh, that's cold." Ralph says

"Yeah." Caitlin says

"What about Cisco?" Ralph asks. "Is he having any luck?"

"Not yet." Caitlin says. "He went to the Tannhauser off-sites so he could concentrate. He says it's quiet there."

"Yeah. Quiet like a tomb." Ralph says

I laugh

Caitlin ruffles my hair before stepping down the steps and back to the whiteboard

"So I think if I can isolate the genetic marker that bonds human DNA to dark matter, I can reverse engineer the process and unravel it to create a cure." Caitlin says

"That's great." Ralph says

"Yeah, except I need meta-DNA that hasn't fully bonded with dark matter yet." Ralph says

"Of course, because as we all know with genetic modification we...Why?" Ralph asks

"Because that's the only time when I can identify where the marker is in the genome." Caitlin says

"Okay, so you need DNA from a meta-human who was created recently?" Ralph says

"Yeah, ideally in the last eight months, but everyone I can think of has been killed by Cicada." Caitlin says

"Right." Ralph says. "So where the heck do we look?"

Caitlin sighs, shrugging

***

"Kira May, Dwayne Geist, Carl Bork." Iris announces in the cortex. "All three metas who were killed by Cicada last night."

"So Cicada's killed almost as many people in the last hours as he has in the last eight months?" Caitlin says