by Barry Lyga
Something cold tiptoed up Joe’s spine. “Bert? What, exactly, is going on here?”
Larvan grinned. “I am simply offering proof of concept, Detective West.”
Rene and Joe exchanged a glance. Years of instinct and experience communicated between them just as wirelessly as Bert’s signal to the bees.
“How are you controlling them?” Rene asked. Exactly the question Joe wanted answered.
“I’m using an old implant of Brie’s. I had it in my briefcase when you brought me here.” He tapped his ear. “It looks like a hearing aid, doesn’t it?”
Then he dropped his hands to his sides. The bees remained hovering in midair, then began orbiting him as though he were their personal sun. Their little bodies whizzed and buzzed in the air.
“Don’t even think of drawing your weapons,” Bert told them, still grinning. “You don’t stand a chance against the new Bug-Eyed Bandit.”
23
On-site at the treadmill, Curtis yawned. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. He’d been pounding energy drinks and chewing caffeinated gum in order to stay awake, but it was worth it—the treadmill was finished. A part of him wished they had time for a test run, but . . . How did you test powering a run to the future through an impenetrable Iron Curtain of Time? Especially without alerting the enemy?
He scratched the back of his head as he stared down at the control pad they’d wired up to the treadmill. Something seemed off. He caught the attention of Bruce Wayne’s evil doppelgänger from Earth 27, who crouched nearby, wrenching a couple of bolts tighter. “Owlman? Why is there this accelerator circuit patched into the frequency modulator?”
Owlman answered without missing a beat: “Redundancy. Clearly, on this Earth, you expect everything to work perfectly the first time. In my experience, that’s rarely the case.”
Curtis blinked a few times. It didn’t make much sense, but he was both too tired and too eager to stop to question it. “Atomic batteries to power; turbines to speed,” he said. “Let’s fire this sucker up.”
Standing in a corner of the Safe Lab with Sara Lance, Mick held the ring with his thumb and forefinger. It ached and pulsed like a rotten tooth, shooting arcs of pain up his fingers and down along his arm. This was not, he knew, going to feel good.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Sara asked. “I can feel that thing’s evil from where I’m standing, and I’m not even touching it.”
Mick had never been one for planning things out or thinking things through. He was more your basic charge ahead and see what happens sort of crook. The ring looked too big for his ring finger, so he slid it onto the middle finger of his right hand, where it caught for a moment on his knuckle, then kept going. Almost as though it wanted to be there.
Pain.
Pain raced up his arm.
Slender, brachiated green tendrils crawled from the ring, puncturing his flesh, then emerging, only to re-puncture it again as they slithered up his arm, like a series of threads being sewn into his skin. He gritted his teeth and groaned into the agony, fighting it.
“Mick?” Sara said. “Mick, take it off. It’s OK; take it off!”
Shaking his head, sweat streaming down his face, he leaned into the anguish, accepting it. It was like holding his hand over a flame, something he’d done innumerable times since childhood, when he’d first discovered his love of fire. The flame could roast his flesh, but he never moved his hand. It was a point of pride. It was a measure of strength.
If flames couldn’t cow him, some junky piece of jewelry from another Earth wouldn’t knock him to his knees, either. He permitted himself a grudging, groaning wordless cry of distress, then clenched his fist.
There was a voice in his head. VOLTHOOM! it said. Demanding his subservience. Offering him everything he’d ever wanted. VOLTHOOM! A world consumed by fire. Endless heaps of treasure—gemstones sparkling like waves in sunshine, cold gold coins feigning fire, stacks and stacks of cash . . . VOLTHOOM!
mick I am yours you are mine we are together let me in let me in let me in and the world is yours I promise you don’t fight me don’t resist me I am everything I can give you everything mick mick it’s within your grasp just let me in let me in let me in
“There’s only one of us in charge here,” Mick grunted, wiping sweat from out of his eyes with his free hand. “And it’s me!”
With a final cry, he raised his right hand above his head. The ring glowed. The tendrils dissipated and a sheath of verdant light enveloped him. The voice in his head quieted to a whisper, like a ringing in his ears—ever present, but possible to ignore.
“Are you all right?” Sara asked. He could tell she wanted to touch him, to put a calming hand on his shoulder, but the green energy coruscating around him warned her off.
“Never been better,” he snarled. He lowered his clenched fist to eye level, glaring at the ring perched there. “Lemme tell you something, Captain: I don’t know what this thing is or where it comes from, but no matter how bright it gets or how dark it gets, nothing bad is getting past me as long as I’m wearing it.”
Sara nodded. “Good enough for me. Let’s go.”
The Earth 27 speedsters lined up single file outside Central City, ten thousand strong, ready to take their places on the treadmill.
Felicity had taken a break from her duties helping Joe West’s team in Star City, long enough to work up an algorithm that determined the optimal placement for speedsters on the acre-sized treadmill belt Curtis had cobbled together with the guy who looked creepily like Bruce Wayne. And a creepy Bruce Wayne, to boot. The real Bruce Wayne was handsome and sort of playfully useless in that way some rich men projected. This guy was good-looking, too . . . but his pulchritude only barely concealed a seething, squirming rage and a brute confidence that gave her the heebie-jeebies. The faster she could see the back of him, the better.
The treadmill was practically the size of a football field, with a series of internal railings so that the speedsters could stand in rows, one behind the other. The faster speedsters would be at the front, accelerating, with the slower ones toward the back, using their speed to keep up and generate the necessary vibrational energies.
She and Curtis guided the speedsters into position with the help of James Jesse, who knew or was known to many of them. Some of them, she knew, could only reach subsonic speeds. Others could hit Mach 2 or 3. It wasn’t, though, so much about the speed as about the unique vibrations speedsters produced when they ran. Those vibrations would need to be channeled through the special shock absorbers Curtis had constructed under the treadmill belt. They would be converted into a frequency waveform and funneled into a heavy-duty cable that Superman had buried between the treadmill and S.T.A.R. Labs.
It shouldn’t work at all, she knew. It was the very maddest sort of the mad science, the kind of thing that would make Cisco Ramon throw his hands up in the air and stomp out of the room in search of Cheetos and Mountain Dew to soothe his offended ego.
But it had to work. They had no other options.
“Are we ready?” she asked James.
The Not-Trickster, positioned near the control pad mounted to the side of the treadmill, gave her a thumbs-up.
Felicity scouted a hundred feet down the side of the treadmill, where Mr. Terrific stood at another control pad. She waved for his attention, then fired the thumbs-up down to him.
He nodded. In sync, they both put their hands to their control pads’ touch surfaces and rotated clockwise. The pads’ screens went from yellow to green, and a whistling, whining sound filled the air.
“OK, SPEEDSTERS!” It was Curtis’s voice, projected and amplified so that everyone within a mile could hear it clearly. “GET READY TO USE YOUR SPEED MANTRA! WE BEGIN RUNNING IN 5 . . .”
Felicity checked power levels.
“4 . . .”
She double-checked the conduit connectors. They were solid.
“3 . . .”
A murmuring began on the treadmill: 3X2(9
YZ)4A. Over and over again, spoken by ten thousand tongues: 3X2(9YZ)4A.
“2 . . .”
The hair on the back of Felicity’s neck stood on end. The air had become supercharged with static electricity, like the moment before a lightning strike. She smelled the scent of ozone.
“1 . . . RUN!” Curtis cried.
And twenty thousand feet began to run.
24
In the sixty-fourth century, Citizen Hefa of the Quantum Police made her standard patrol of the planet Earth, checking her quark-fed macrolemetry for any subatomic deviations or disruptions.
There were none. Earth was atomically stable and temporally fit. As usual.
She spent a moment double-checking the data feed from the Prison Spire, where the techno-magicians who had bedeviled two centuries were imprisoned in sleep-stasis. Aliskaiszisamis, Bisebbseidseibseobsebdseidseiseboose, Prupesuptoupchupanupgeoup, and Voikitlakit all still slept. And the man once known as Abhararakadhararbarakh—Abra Kadabra—was now harmless, metamorphosed into an ancient plaything called a puppet when his own “magic” was turned against him by the Flash.
Citizen Hefa smiled. The Flash. He had saved two eras from the depredations of the techno-magicians and in doing so had solidified his reputation as one of the greatest heroes of all time. She thought of him often.
And then he was there.
The Flash stood directly before her, reaching out to her. His costume, torn in places, hung off him; his body had gone almost skeletal, his face drawn, eyes sunken.
“” she exclaimed, forgetting in her shock to revert to ancient English.
“Hefa!” he cried out. “I don’t know if . . . Help . . . Tell them . . . Iris . . .”
And then he was gone.
Citizen Hefa tapped her helmet and quickly scanned the immediate area down to the quark level. There were small perturbations in the strange and charm quark flavors, but nothing that could explain what she’d just seen.
Her helmet’s advanced temporal tech recorded everything around her and could reproduce it as a high-fidelity three-dimensional hologram. She replayed the last few moments to reexperience the Flash’s appearance and disappearance and look for clues.
But when she watched the recording, there was nothing there. Nothing at all.
It was as though he’d never been there.
25
Barry and Iris stood just outside the entrance to the circular collider tunnel under S.T.A.R. Labs. Lights flashed overhead and a siren bell sang out, echoing down the halls.
“That’s the signal,” Barry told her. “The speedsters are charging up the equipment and sending their vibrations to us.”
“Come back to me,” Iris said, brushing her lips against his. “Again.”
“And again and again and again,” he promised, returning her kiss.
Inside the collider tunnel, it was time for what Owlman had called chronal extraction and insertion.
Green Arrow, White Canary, the Atom, and Heat Wave waited in the Time Sphere that Eobard Thawne had originally built to attempt to return to the twenty-fifth century. He’d failed, and the vessel had been stored in the Starchives for years. It could, they hoped, provide protection for the human members of the strike team as they were thrust through Time itself.
Working with Superman, Barry had rewired portions of the S.T.A.R. Labs power grid to redirect the massive power influx to the collider tunnel. The speedsters running on the treadmill had their vibrational energy transmitted to the tunnel, where Barry would use it to propel himself and his team through the Iron Curtain of Time.
In theory.
It was all merely in theory.
He bounced on his toes, waiting for word from the Cortex that they were a go. Behind him, Mick Rory’s face loomed through the plastisteel dome of the Time Sphere. His bald head, awash in sweat, reflected and distorted light from the emergency bulbs set along the tunnel walls. Ever since putting the glowing green ring on his finger, he’d been terser than usual, his eyes bloodshot and rigid with focus.
“What made you decide we should let Mick take the ring?” Barry asked Superman. “You stared at him . . . Were you analyzing his DNA to see how susceptible he’d be to temptation?”
Superman’s smile was broad and honest. “I wasn’t using any superpowers at all, Flash. What you saw was a reporter sizing up a source. And deciding to trust him.”
Barry’s jaw dropped. Was he really going to trust a super villain with the most powerful weapon in the universe, all based on a reporter’s instincts?
Well, yeah. Look who you married, Allen. You’ve been trusting a reporter’s instincts for a long, long time.
“Let’s do this,” Barry said, and took up a runner’s pose.
Superman effortlessly lifted the Time Sphere over his head. “Hold on,” he warned the occupants. “This may get bumpy.”
“Stop yapping,” Heat Wave said, “and get moving. I got a deadline for my next book, and my editor doesn’t take excuses.”
Sure, Barry figured. That was as good a reason as any to save the world.
“Energy wave incoming!” Iris’s voice echoed loudly throughout the collider tunnel, amplified by a series of loudspeakers. “Lights are red across the board! You’ve got one shot at this before all the circuity melts down! Run, Barry! Run!”
You don’t have to tell me twice, he thought.
And ran.
26
Dark Canary drew in a breath, and the light on her choker went a deep black. Dig didn’t want to imagine what this particular iteration of her sonic powers would do to him, but the comment about turning someone’s bones to jelly rang in his memory like a strident church bell.
Despite the pain from his ribs, he lurched up, scrambling to unholster his emergency backup weapon. Maybe if she was using the intense black version of her power, she couldn’t also deflect bullets like she’d done before. He could possibly save Dinah and the rest of the city.
At the cost of his own life.
Which . . . was less than ideal. He had a wife and a child he loved. He had dreams for his future.
But John Diggle had always been willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good. That drive had taken him to the military, to A.R.G.U.S., to serve as Oliver Queen’s bodyguard . . . and then to take on the mantle of Spartan when Oliver’s superhero lifestyle demanded some backup.
He had never imagined himself dying on the street under a threatening cloud of robot bees while fighting an alternate-reality version of one of his best friends, but then again, who ever got to pick their death?
“Hey, you!” he shouted, drawing her attention from Dinah. “I bet Earth 32 is glad to see you gone!”
She swiveled to regard him, her expression unchanged save for a slight narrowing of the eyes. She knew he was baiting her, but couldn’t help herself.
“I’ve killed men for less,” she told him.
“Well, get ready to kill me for more.” He opened fire.
The recoil set his ribs on fire and he jerked to one side, firing wide and missing her. Still, she had to dodge, losing her balance for a few moments. That gave him just enough time to race to Dinah’s side. She was groggy but awake, her face speckled with droplets of blood from flying pavement.
“I should have called in sick today, Dig.”
“You and me both, Dinah. C’mon.” Groaning in pain as his ribs flared, he helped Dinah to her feet. Only a few feet away was one of the wrecked cars, a possible refuge for a few moments.
“You hear that?” Dinah asked, her voice alive with panic.
Dig tried to answer, but the world was filled with a shrieking, high-pitched tone that swallowed all other sound. He clapped his hands over his ears and dropped to the ground atop Dinah just as the sound intensified. Every bone in his body shivered.
The car he’d thought to use for cover . . . melted.
He’d never seen its like before. The steel and glass of the car vibrated for a moment, then began to run like molten wax, oozing sl
uggishly until it formed a liquefied mass of color and glimmering melted glass before them.
“Oh, this is not good,” Dig mumbled.
Dark Canary smirked and inhaled deeply. The choker flashed its black light.
Pop!
“Never hit a lady!” Ambush Bug shouted, and decked Dark Canary with a sweet right hook. She spun around on one heel, knocked off-kilter by the force of the blow.
“Never, ever!” Ambush Bug said. “Oh, wait. Oh, darn.” He struck a pose, forefinger to his chin, thinking. “I always thought that was specifically referring to nobility, so you couldn’t hit, like, Kate Middleton. But maybe it’s supposed to mean all—”
“Ambush Bug!” Dig couldn’t believe he was warning off the lunatic who’d started all this nonsense, but Dark Canary’s choker was heating up and her expression as she glared at the Bug was not friendly.
Pop! Pop!
Ambush Bug appeared behind Dark Canary and tripped her. Her sonic blast went awry, blowing a hole in the ground before her. Hot tar fountained up into the air.
Dig and Dinah helped each other to their feet, each using the other as a fulcrum to lever up. “You ready, Dig?”
Dig’s ribs hurt too much to answer, so he just nodded, and the two of them charged forward while Dark Canary was distracted.
Together they tackled her to the ground. Dig leaned hard on her cheek with an elbow, pressing her to one side so that her sonic scream would be misdirected if she tried to use it. Meanwhile, Dinah slapped a set of S.T.A.R. Labs meta-dampening manacles on her wrists.
The choker light dimmed, then dulled, then went out entirely.
It hurt to draw in a deep breath, but Dig did it anyway. He deserved it.
A few feet away, Ambush Bug applauded. “Well done, brave members of the Fightin’ Arrows!”
Dinah rose on shaky feet. She cleared her throat and puckered her lips, ready to scream her Canary Cry. “Don’t move.”
Ambush Bug chuckled. “Look! Nothing in my hands!” He raised empty hands, palms out.