Tempest: Chapter Five: Lost and Found
"You'll drive yourself mad if you keep looking at that footage," Dinah commented in a forlorn manner as she strode out of the zeta-tube at Mount Justice towards where Amara was standing in the same tensed position she'd been in when Black Canary had left the previous night (had she moved at all? It was difficult to tell).
But Amara didn't care, she wasn't going to stop looking, not until she found Roy. Even if it had been nearly three months already.
Her focus was entirely on the moving images from the security camera that had caught the last moments of Speedy.
The red-clad sidekick was running through the underground parking lot, flushed and half out of arrows, and then there was nothing. He then appeared in the edge of the frame of the next video before abruptly being pulled back.
"Amara, are you even listening to me?"
Green eyes blinked and the girl raised her eyes from the screen to look at Dinah Lance. Her blonde hair was falling into her tired blue eyes, but she at least looked a great deal better than Amara did.
"I'm listening," Amara said.
Black Canary rested her hands on her protégé's shoulders. "You need rest Amara, your mother and father are worried…and so am I. You're letting this consume you."
But how could she not?
"He's my friend," Amara said, her voice so quiet that it was nearly a whisper, but the level at which she spoke didn't matter, because the Cave was silent at all hours and any noise made by those within was greatly amplified (great acoustics for when Dinah used her Canary Cry on her during spars).
"Would he want you to exhaust yourself looking for him?" Dinah pressed, her face somber as she took in Amara's face.
Her green eyes were a little wild from too little sleep and her cheeks held more color than usual, something which only added to her fevered appearance, her fingers were twitching and she had to keep switching from putting her weight on her left foot to her right.
Amara scowled, her lips drawing into a thin line and a crease appearing between her eyebrows. "I think he'd want to be found, actually," she said shortly, turning back to the screen.
"How can we be sure LexCorps isn't behind this?" Amara added, gesturing towards the floating images of Speedy, but the images only seemed to blur together as she looked at them over and over again. "Speedy and GA were investigating them, right? They had motive."
Especially when LexCorps was headed by Lex Luthor who was well known for his dealings in Metropolis as a wealthy businessman that had always been at odds against Superman, however, it had been suspected that LexCorps' dealings were not all as legitimate as they seemed, which was why Speedy and Green Arrow had been given the task to look into them.
"There is no evidence that LexCorps is involved in Speedy's disappearance," Dinah explained patiently. "Amara, I will call your mother if I have to."
Amara's expression soured at that. "You are a very manipulative mentor, Black Canary."
"Maybe you're just incredibly stubborn, Storm Chaser," Dinah offered instead. "C'mon, Flash is waiting on the other side of the zeta in Central City and if you don't show up there in the next five minutes, he is going to come here and physically haul you back to your room."
Amara's scowl deepened at that and she reached over to grab her jacket, throwing it over her shoulders, turning the hood up so it almost fell it her eyes, giving her the impression of an extremely petulant child, which wasn't entirely inaccurate given her age and how she was currently feeling.
"Fine, but I'll be back in the morning," Amara retorted as the holographic computer faded away and she strode towards the zeta-tube.
"Recognize –Storm Chaser, B00."
She appeared two miles away from where she lived, but two miles didn't really matter if you could fly in a cloud, or if you were in a family of speedsters, and luckily for Amara, both applied to her.
"Hey, kiddo."
Barry was smiling at her, but he rarely wasn't; her father was a very easy-going man, that much had been obvious to Amara to start with.
"Ready to catch some shut-eye?" he asked her, cocking an eyebrow and Amara's cheeks flushed. She had hardly been at home since Roy's disappearance and she knew both her parents worried about her, but she couldn't stop.
"Um, yeah," she said and he offered his arms to her, something he had done since the moment they had met, since Amara had been nervous around him to start with.
And Amara wrapped her arms around her father's neck, his arms sweeping under the crook of her legs and around her back, and then he was running and the wind was whipping her face and she'd left her stomach behind by about three blocks.
She'd almost forgotten how it was to be carried by someone who could run as fast as Barry Allen could, and it was almost as exhilarating as the first time Amara had attempted to fly.
So Amara tried not to think of how upset Barry and Iris were going to be in the morning when they found her bed empty and her gear gone.
"Amy, time to get up!"
Iris rapped on the closed door once before opening it and freezing as she looked within.
Amara's bed was made, looking as though it hadn't been slept in, even though Iris had watched her daughter climb into at nearly midnight when Barry had brought her back. Her closet doors were open and Iris could see a few articles of clothing missing and Iris' heart-rate was elevating at the thought of Amara running around in the middle of nowhere searching for her lost friend.
Iris glanced to her daughter's desk where beside the picture of Amara with her parents was a picture of Amara in her Storm Chaser uniform beside Black Canary and Green Arrow and Speedy, all four were grinning (Speedy a bit reluctantly). Barry had been a bit leery about Amara having the picture out in the open –secret identities and all– but all of Amara's friends (therefore anyone who would be likely to spend time in Amara's room)- were either related to someone in the Justice League, or were the sidekicks of Leaguers.
"Barry!" she called, rushing out of the room and down the stairs.
"Iris?" The worry in her husband's voice jarred her as he brought her to a stop with his eyes alone. "What's wrong?"
"Amy's gone," she gasped. "She must've taken some clothes and left in the night!"
She watched the color drain from her husband's face, and then his Flash uniform was out of the ring that contained it and then she was up in his arms and they were out the door and he didn't set her down until they were in the zeta-tube.
"Recognize: Flash, 04; Iris West-Allen, A14."
Barry's eyes were hidden behind his red cowl, but Iris knew that her husband's eyes were narrowed and darting around the Cave as Black Canary rushed forward, a muscle jumping in her jaw.
"She's gone, Barry," Dinah said, "she must have come in the early morning and grabbed her gear."
But then Barry was gone in a flash of red that darted through Mount Justice, searching for any trace of Amara Allen that could be found, even though there was none.
"I didn't think she would be so foolish to go off on her own, I'm so sorry," Dinah apologized, her words as regretful as her expression.
"It's not your fault," Iris disagreed, giving her a weak smile that broke quickly. "Amara is…an unrelenting force of nature."
Her abilities became her. Amara Allen was a tempestuous storm and the calm clouds after a heavy rain, she was relenting and relentless depending on the situation.
"I guess she got that from you," Black Canary joked and Iris choked on a laugh before falling silent quite suddenly.
"Do you think she'll find him?" she whispered, her voice echoing.
Dinah didn't speak. If she was honest, completely honest, she didn't think Amara had the kind of skill required to discover where Roy was, but she was sure the girl could get into contact with someone who did. Amara was nothing if not resourceful; Dinah gathered that this was a skill she had picked up when she had spent time with the Weather Wizard.
But before she could keep her silence further, Barry had appeared in front of them looking uncharacteristically annoyed.
"She left her phone in her room and her extra comm.-link in her makeshift one here," he said with grudging respect. She was his daughter, and she was going to be grounded as soon as he saw her again, that was for certain, but he had to admire her ability to work off the grid.
But she was still grounded, massively grounded, maybe grounded until she was sixteen…that sounded like a plan.
"She learned from the best," Black Canary sighed.
"Is it possible she could reach out to Ollie?" Iris' eyes implored her and they reminded Dinah startlingly of whenever Amara begged her for a mission, her fingers clasped together and her eyes huge as she said please over and over again. Maybe the only thing that Iris West-Allen shared with her daughter was her green eyes that were a few shades off of Amara's, but Amara was every bit Iris and Barry's child even if she hadn't been born to them.
"She could," Dinah had to concede, "GA is Speedy's mentor, and he's probably the only one working harder than her on finding him…"
"But?" Barry pressed.
"He's also the one she knows we'll look to," Black Canary said. "I'd think she'd try her hand at finding him on her own first before turning to someone else for help; she's stubborn, not prideful, and she'll do whatever it takes to find him."
Iris gripped Barry's hand tightly.
"That's what I'm worried about," he muttered. "She's ten, Dinah, ten years old, all alone in the world…she's our daughter, we have a right to be worried."
"You do," Black Canary said gently, "but she's my protégé, Barry, she's my responsibility as well…we will find her, I promise we will."
Though whether or not it would be before they found Roy remained to be seen. Roy may have tried to seem aloof, especially when they had first met, but the pair of them worked well together and had an easy banter. Dinah and Oliver had been relieved that they hadn't been antagonistic towards each other, since they'd have to work together, as Black Canary and Green Arrow did.
Barry probably could have scoured the whole country looking for Amara, but even if he did, she'd be out of the door before the night was done.
As Jay would say, "Better for her to get it out of her system."
But Amara was ten years old and alone. Barry didn't like the idea of her being without him or Iris or Dinah, especially in a world that she knew so little about, even if she thought different.
She would come back, that much Barry knew, how long it would take was the real question.
She was a darting shadow in Gotham that Robin was trailing after quite intently. Batman had sent him after her after catching sight of her leaping over rooftops. At first, Robin had thought she was Catwoman (she had a nasty habit of showing up in Gotham unannounced), but she was far too small in stature and her hair was a slate grey, very different from Catwoman's black.
There was only one person registered in the Justice League database that had that hair that color –barring the Weather Wizard, of course– and that was Storm Chaser, the protégé to Black Canary who was MIA for two weeks now.
"Stop!" he called when she leapt over another rooftop (how was she doing that so easily with her body seeming weightless on the air? Even he couldn't do that!), but she was too fleet-footed, and that was saying something as Robin was pretty quick on his feet.
Storm Chaser ignored him, sailing through the air to land lightly on her feet, sending a ripple of annoyance through Robin as he followed after her.
He didn't know why Batman had sent him after her in the first place; if it had been his mentor, he would have caught her much sooner (Robin was so going to get reamed for that later), but at the same time he was glad that Batman was trusting him to do things on his own.
And desperate times called for desperate measures.
He released the grappler and it snagged her arm, catching her off guard, though not as much as when Robin used it to drag her back from the edge of the building and she crashed to the ground with a painful grunt.
Green eyes fixed him with a stare that was nearly a glower as he came up beside her.
"You must be the Bat's little bird," she said with a smirk.
"Robin," the Boy Wonder corrected her, getting the feeling that she was going to give him a headache. "You should have stopped."
Storm Chaser blinked at him blankly from behind her mask and then she shook her head, dusting herself off as she stood, loosening the grappling line that had been wrapped around her arm.
Robin had seen her file in the Batcave, he knew all about who her father was, but her mother's information was so encrypted that he hadn't been able to crack it (he'd give it a few months before trying again). He knew she was his age, but it was still annoying that she had a good few inches on him.
"I don't have much time to chat," she remarked coolly and Robin could practically feel the wind picking up around them as much as he could see the tips of Storm Chaser's fingers sparking with electricity.
But then she suddenly tensed, her teeth gritting together and Robin could see a few drops of blood peppering the ground as she remained stationary.
"You're injured," he noticed.
"Really? It slipped my mind," Storm Chaser retorted, pressing a hand to her injured side, gingerly feeling the depth of the wound before coming to the decision that the pain was manageable.
"So," she continued, "going to try to drag me back to your mentor?"
He gave her an odd look behind his domino mask and she released a short laugh that cut off suddenly as she choked, the laugh having aggravated her wound.
"It wouldn't be the first time I've had to dodge a Leaguer," she said with a half-shrug. "Green Lantern almost caught me in Maine, and Flash has been after me from the start."
Her expression –though still mostly hidden– soured at that, owing, undoubtedly to the fact that the Flash was her adoptive father (this Robin knew, as it had been in her file as well).
She gave him a mocking salute that had Robin cocking an eyebrow as she moved to the edge of the building that overlooked Miller Harbor.
"You move very well for a bird with no wings," she added, feeling the need to get one last word in despite the fact that Robin hadn't said much to begin with.
Robin was sure she had winked, but in the layer of darkness and with the mask hiding all but her eyes it was difficult to tell.
And then she startled him by leaping backwards off the building, hovering briefly in midair before flying right into the dark clouds that hung over Gotham City.
Robin blinked his eyes a few times before shaking his head. All those bird references were annoying (it was even more annoying that the metahuman sidekick could actually fly when he could only glide).
Meanwhile, Amara had chosen the lesser of two evils and had taken a zeta-tube (immediately erasing any indication of her using it) to Star City and found the first payphone in sight and then she forked up a few coins, pressing them through the slot and punching in the number that Dinah had had her memorize in case of emergencies.
It was picked up almost immediately. "Who is this?" the voice demanded on the other end.
"It's me," Amara said, glancing around furtively. Normally she would have said her own name, but since she was in such a public place, that wasn't going to happen. "Storm Warning."
She grimaced as she said it, reminding herself of the boy she had been incapable of finding.
There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end. "Amy?" he demanded. "Where are you?"
"Um…" Amara looked around for any indicators of where she was. "I'm close to Hyde Park," she said. "Can I meet you at your storage spaces?"
"Yeah, sure," Green Arrow said immediately. "Adams Heights?"
"I'll be there," Amara promised before hanging up and stepping out of the phone booth to meet the eyes of a teenaged boy who was gaping at her appearance.
"What's the matter?" she snapped. "Never seen a cosplay?"
Amara was settled in one of the chairs, her shirt lifted to expose the wound that had been cleaned and was currently being stitched up by the steady hands of Oliver Queen.
"I thought you were going to call my dad," she commented, her face twisted into a wince.
"Oh, I will," Oliver said, "once we've got everything all sorted out."
Amara's eyebrows drew together in confusion. "What d'you mean?"
He didn't say anything at first, simply finishing with her stitching job which was a much better job than what she would have done.
"Did you find anything out?" he asked her.
"I found an oddity when I was looking through LexCorps finances," Amara said, covering the stitched and bandaged flesh and swiveling the chair to face the computer and sliding a new flash drive into its slot and pulling up the information that Green Arrow and Speedy had gathered before his disappearance. Her fingers darted across the keyboard. "It's called Europa Industries, only it doesn't exist in any of the databases I've searched for, so, red flags obviously."
"Obviously," Oliver agreed, "but I assume you did find something, otherwise you wouldn't reek like the Gotham swamp."
Amara's cheeks pinked with color. "That was an accidental detour." And it was also where she'd clumsily gotten herself injured. "Europa Industries had several addresses connected to its file; one in Gotham City, one in San Francisco, one in Maine, and the last one just outside Star City. I've checked all of them except for the one closest to Star City, and they're all empty plots."
"However, the last one is a sponsored private hospital," Green Arrow interjected, taking control of the keyboard and pulling up an image of a three-story white building with the name Compton General Hospital and the Europa Industries emblem, the white bull, rested beside it. "And that's likely where Roy is."
"You already knew all of that?" Amara asked sourly, looking greatly irritated, her cheeks puffing out as she glowered at him.
"Most of it," Oliver admitted. But then again he was more seasoned at being a hero and investigating things like what Amara had done when looking for Roy.
"Great," she muttered under her breath.
"Are you going to come with me to break him out?" he asked her and she immediately perked up.
Not soon afterwards was she on the back of Oliver's bike and they were racing down the street, heading out of town and into the night.
The time it took to reach the hospital in question lasted far longer than Amara could handle, but at long last they had reached their destination.
But something was off, very off.
"It's a bit quiet, don't you think?" she whispered to Oliver as she pulled herself off the back of the bike, pulling her night-vision goggles over her eyes. Hospitals were open at all hours with differing shifts so that doctors and nurses and any other employees were always available.
Oliver nodded in contemplation, extending a comm.-link to her before putting in his own. "Air duct?"
He nodded towards the duct in question and Amara's eyes gleamed. "On it."
Honestly, it was child's play and a bit concerning how easily she could sneak into a hospital, but as duty called…
She moved carefully and as silently as she could before she came out into an opening that led out into the nurse's station.
"It's deserted," she said.
"Amara Pamela Allen," a third voice seethed that belonged to the one person she had dutifully ignoring for the past two weeks, coming no doubt from the JLA frequency that all Leaguers had (when Oliver said he was going to call her Dad afterwards, this wasn't her idea of 'afterwards').
"Dad!" Amara squeaked, bracing a hand against the nurse's station counter. "What're you—?"
"What do you think you're doing?" he demanded and Amara could hear the wind whistling past him.
"Not now Flash," Green Arrow snapped, "you two can work out your family problems after this. Storm Chaser, do you see anything at the front doors?"
Amara looked to the locked double doors. "Oh, crap."
"What is it?" both men asked.
"Looks like a wired explosive," Amara said, seeing the laser tripwire before twisting to look to the windows. "Same at the windows…overkill."
"Do you see anything that would indicate why it's deserted?" Oliver's voice echoed in her ear.
"Hang on, there's a computer here…" Amara muttered, moving around the counter to insert her hacking flash drive into the slot and a blue screen appeared shortly before it unlocked completely.
Searching…Searching…
Her eyes swept over the words, stopping briefly over the word Cadmus. She frowned; why did that sound so familiar? Then she shook her head, focusing on the task at hand.
"It says it was classified as a hazardous location," she said. "Everyone cleared out in a hurry."
"Do a sweep for Speedy, your goggles have thermal scanning, don't they?" Green Arrow asked.
Amara could practically feel Barry glaring at her from beyond the building (because he had to have made it to their location by now).
"Um…yeah, hang on…" She raised her hands to her goggles, twisting a knob at the side, switching it so she could view heat signatures.
Her heart jumped and then she was rushing up the stairs, breathless with anticipation at the sight of the only heart signature in the building.
"Roy!" she gasped when she finally saw him.
He was unconscious and half-naked with his torso exposed and his feet bare. An IV drip and something to keep him under were set up beside him and he barely stirred as she pressed a hand to his chest, her knees nearly buckling in relief.
"He's there?"
"He's alive?" Oliver choked.
"He's alive," Amara breathed as she pulled the needles out of his arm. "C'mon, Roy, we're getting out of here."
"What are you—"
Two bodies were flung suddenly through the window and the laser went off shortly before the entire building exploded and all four were hit with a wave of heat and thrown back.
"I think I broke my arm," Amara hissed, looking towards Roy's still-slumbering form. "You owe me big time, mister."
And she grimaced as the Flash rested his hands on his hips and gave her his best glare. She was so dead.
