I know this took soooooo long! I'm so sorry! I've been swamped but TADA! Here it is - another chapter! So, I won't take any more of your time. You know the drill. XOXO

Chapter 5

Central City, S.T.A.R. Labs, 7:30 pm

This couldn't be. Caitlin stared at her station, not knowing what else to do. She had compared the hospital results with her own tests. The tox screen from the hospital was clean and aside from the swab she took, so was hers. Her gut was screaming at her that she was missing something. But she had gone over everything three times. She shook her head to stop herself from obsessing over what she didn't have.

If that wasn't disheartening enough, the mice she had rescued were not faring well. The one she injected with the lowest dose of the toxin was also dead. She had opened it up and saw what amounts to the murine equivalent of multiple organ failure – unlike the ones that died at higher toxin doses regardless of route of exposure. Those mice died of asphyxiation – much like Barry would have if she hadn't been able to get to him. The other mouse she had exposed through tainted aerosol was still wheezing even after she had given it another dose of epinephrine and the one she had exposed by direct contact was barely plodding along. It all seems to point to the fact that she had only prolonged their suffering. Death seemed to be the inevitable conclusion.

When faced with that, all the rest of her conclusions – the fact that there seemed to be a dose threshold above which the toxin killed faster than most and that there was a latent period between exposure and clinical disease – seemed useless. Nevertheless, she plugged-in her necropsy findings into the disease model she had been working on ever since they had taken this case three weeks ago. And as expected, the results of the simulations were not encouraging. She'd have better luck with the Ebola virus.

She was just one step away from utter despair when her computer beeped. She had run samples of the toxin she had purified from the different organs she had collected from the mice which expired earlier. She had used an automated fluorescent assay to compare them to each other just to see if there were any differences or just anything she could exploit to arrest the toxin's effects. And it looked like the results were ready.

Caitlin took a deep breath before she dug in.

xxxxXXXXxxxx

Frustrated. That was what Cisco was quickly becoming. After the almost endless search for an air-gapped computer (because he didn't want any surprises sneaking into the whole S.T.A.R. Labs network from within the confines of his firewalled firewall, particularly when a counter-surveillance expert seemed to be in their midst), and its subsequent partial dismantling (he had destroyed all communication devices and their controller chips from the dinosaur-era laptop – it had a floppy disk drive – he had found in the Lab's decommissioned off-the-grid internal network!), Barry's hard drive seemed intent on not cooperating. He plugged it in but nothing happened. He tried to switch up USB ports to no avail. The drive seemed to boot up once he switched cables, though, but forever-and-a-half later, all he had to show for all that pain was a non-encrypted directory containing a couple of grocery lists, a few cat vines and a back catalog for The Forensic Examiner. In other words: nothing, nada, zilch.

"What's the problem?" Felicity asked when she saw him throw a pencil at the screen. She had finished appropriating all openly available traffic cams that were broadcasting through the city transportation office's website, and the lull of having nothing else to do left her feeling jittery. This was the first Arrow-related business they've had in months and it felt like they were all grasping at straws. She had to start working on something else before she lost it.

"I don't think there's anything here," he huffed, although what peeved him more was the fact that he felt like he wasn't helping enough.

Felicity went over to where he was stationed and began to look at his screen over his shoulder. "Wait," she said when she noticed a discrepancy between the seemingly small files and the disproportionately large chunk of disk space those consumed. "Have you tried doing a command line search for hidden files?"

"Yes," Cisco said, "but there's nothing there."

"How about hidden partitions or volumes?"

"No, not yet," he replied as he perked up. His fingers were on the task before she even blinked. They waited as the ancient system answered the query.

"Still nothing," he announced gloomily.

"Maybe it's hidden and encrypted," Felicity mused.

"That could be possible," Cisco replied. Ever since he and Joe had started looking into Dr. Wells on the DL, he had strongly advised – ahem, ordered – his friends to encrypt everything they touched in the guise of securing their communications from anyone looking for any metahuman data they might have. Maybe Barry did just that.

"I might have something for that," she said as she went back to her backpack and took out a brand new thumb drive. She needed a disposable drive because anything plugged into Cisco's air-gapped computer was going to have to be destroyed and discarded. She opened the package, plugged the USB device into her own station and copied a few programs from her hard drive into it.

Felicity walked back to Cisco as soon as the transfer was done and handed the device over. He plugged it in and booted it up. They waited for a couple of seconds for the interface to pop up. "Run this first," she said as she pointed to the first program on the list, "This is a test suite that will help you detect possible blocks of encrypted data on the drive. It's going to take time but after that, we can hopefully figure out his encryption system and break it."

"Or – and I know this is kind of brute-forcing it – we could just install all of these encryption recovery tools and then remount the drive again and again to see what works," Cisco suggested as he pointed to the other programs she had copied into the disc.

"Or that. Be careful though. It's tough enough to get into it now. It's going to be an even greater hell with corrupted data," she warned.

Cisco nodded his acknowledgement, as he detached Barry's hard drive and began the install.

"Maybe you should start with the open source ones. They're popular and easy to get," Felicity suggested after some thought.

"Not to mention, free," Cisco agreed, knowing Barry wouldn't drop serious cash on a proprietary version if there was a good enough one with a GNU license.

Felicity's answering chuckle was interrupted by Oliver calling her name, "Felicity."

She whirled from where she stood to see Oliver so tensed up in front of his computer screen. It looked like something got his spidey sense tingling after all. "Got a tingle?"

She visibly cringed when her brain finally caught up with what her mouth had just said. Luckily, everybody seemed too absorbed with their own tasks to mind her gaffe. She went over to him anyway to see what was up.

"Look at this," he said as he stood to give her his seat.

She wasn't sure what she was looking at. It looked like Barry picking up his phone to take a call.

"There," he noted as he hit the space bar to pause the feed.

Felicity threw him a quizzical look.

He rewound the video. "Look at his face, Felicity."

The feed was nowhere near HD quality but it was enough to make out his face. "Okay, so he looks happy to be hearing from someone," she observed.

"Mmm-hmm… then there. See that? That flicker on his face – like he's suddenly worried," he pointed out.

"He has a pretty animated face," she commented, not entirely convinced of what Oliver thinks he's seeing, "It's just Barry being Barry."

"No, something isn't right. Look at his face again," he said adamantly.

Felicity gave him the benefit of the doubt. After all, if there was something to catch here, Oliver's eagle eyes would. She went through the footage frame-by-frame. And sure enough, there was this split second when Barry stiffens and his eyes visibly widen. She wouldn't have caught it if Oliver hadn't pointed it out. But then again, that reaction, in and of itself, could mean anything.

"Okay, where are you going with this?" She asked him, deciding to follow his gut on this despite her doubts.

"I don't know. It wouldn't hurt to look at his phone, though," he answered. And then he added, "But that's not all. I went through the footage twice. Look at him when he gets back to his lab."

Felicity continued watching. When Barry shuffled back into the frame, it was like he was wearing a mask. The blank look on his face was more telling to Felicity than anything else. His eyes were so flat that Barry looked there but not exactly there. Just like with Thea before Tommy kept her from killing Sara, she thought, remembering that damn video of Malcolm Merlyn's almost botched plan to murder the Canary.

Oliver was thinking the same thing when he spoke again, "We've seen that before. I think there's a good chance he'd been drugged. And…"

"That's easy enough to check with Caitlin," she said, not intending to interrupt him, but doing so in her bid to rid her mind of the unpleasant memories. "I'm sorry. Please continue," she apologized when Oliver pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows at her.

"…and then he does this," he said as he resumed the feed's frame-by-frame playback.

She watched Barry plug something – a thumb drive or dongle of some sort – into his computer with his right hand. It was a small enough movement that could easily have been overlooked, especially if the viewer had been focused on Barry setting down his slushie and opening a file folder with his other hand. The action wouldn't have been considered suspicious under more normal circumstances but it couldn't hurt to be more thorough. She would rather err on the side of due diligence.

"All right," Felicity said as she laid her hand over his and met his eyes, "This could be something."

"Yahtzee!" Cisco exclaimed, as he threw both of his arms up in triumph. He had discovered a hidden encrypted volume.

"You have Barry's key?" Felicity asked as she swiveled her head to face him.

His triumph, it seemed, was short-lived. Cisco's face fell. And then it lighted up again when he remembered the jumbled alphanumeric string littered with special characters that Barry had sent him a few days back. He may have mistaken it for a corrupted text then, but hey, it was at least 20 characters long – just the right length for a decryption key. "He may have given me a break-in-case-of-emergency key," he said as he retrieved the message from his phone and started typing it on the prompt.

"Great! When you're done, I need you to help me scour the CCPD network for crashers," she said to Cisco, who bobbed his head in acknowledgement. Then she turned to Oliver, "And you need to go find Caitlin and ask her where Barry's phone is."

Oliver gave her a quick nod then made his way to Caitlin's lab at the other far end of the cortex.

Caitlin was standing right inside with her back to him, so he rapped his knuckles against her door frame to announce his presence. That seemed to jolt her into facing him. He was just about to speak when the fear in her eyes made him stop dead in his tracks.

"He's going to die," Caitlin said – her voice laced with dejected disbelief, "And I don't know how to save him."

xxxxXXXXxxxx

John Diggle still couldn't wrap his head around this whole superpower thing but this was simple enough to relate to. It was always difficult when someone you know goes down – harder still when he's a friend. It just occurred to him that with Barry's superhealing in the mix, this could be the first time Caitlin and Cisco were facing having Barry in any kind of imminent mortal danger because of it. He sighed. He was just glad they asked for help and that he, Oliver and Felicity could give it.

He had just finished replacing one of Barry's IV's when he noticed some red bumps on the kid's neck. It was close enough to his hairline that some of the bumps have been obscured. On closer inspection, however, those which were plainly visible featured a row of what looked to be fine barbs protruding from his skin. He wouldn't pretend to know what those were so he refrained from touching them. He knew, though, to have Caitlin check them out and soon. They couldn't afford him spiking a fever.

After a quick check of Barry's vitals, he left the treatment room in search of the good doctor.

xxxxXXXXxxxx

Caitlin knew that she was on the verge of becoming overly dramatic – heck, her hands were trembling – but sheer terror had driven her past any sense of equanimity. The results flashing ominously on her tablet's screen told her just how sinister the toxin was and that there was no feasible way, in her knowledge, of stopping it. Everything pointed to a fatal endgame. All she was really doing was prolonging the inevitable.

"Whoa, where is this coming from?" Oliver asked as he approached her.

"I've figured out how the toxin kills and it's not pretty," she rambled as she began to frantically pace in front of him. "I haven't seen anything like this before. It's like setting off a ticking bomb. It won't quit. It just won't. It mutates. It evolves. It's killing him now as we speak…"

"Hey, hey, slow down," he interrupted as he caught her by the shoulders. He had never seen Caitlin as distraught as she was now. He could feel her shaking. "You've kept him alive all this time," he said, hoping to placate her.

"Yes, but not for much longer!" She exclaimed then sighed, "I don't know what else to do."

The anguish in her voice was plain. "You're not alone in this," he said as he tried to inject whatever strength he could into Caitlin's defeated form. "Look, I may not be a genius but Cisco and Felicity are. And whatever you guys need, John and I are also here to help. So show us what you've found so we could find another way," he said. He may have shaken her a little but that prompted her to look at him. "We're going to find another way." It wasn't exactly a promise but it would have to do.

She was stirred by the firmness in Oliver's voice. He was telling her that he believed enough for the both of them for Barry's sake. She took a deep breath. Okay, she could get behind that. She was about to make a reply but it died in her throat when Digg's voice came booming from the door, "Caitlin, you have to see this."

Can I just say how much Olicity killed me last night in that AWESOME Legends of Today crossover? I still can't stop squeeing! Oh, and don't hesitate to leave your comments/reviews/faves/follows below! They're always welcome and thoroughly appreciated! Kisses!