by Barry Lyga
And then there was Barry. Barry, Barry, Barry . . . The only one of his three children not of his flesh and blood, yet still bound inextricably to his heart.
Barry understood the alternate timelines, the parallel worlds, the universes beyond universes. Barry knew how it worked. He didn’t need tools to see inside atoms—he could envision them in his head. Whenever Barry started to ramble on about brane theory and quantum weirdness (that was actually a scientific term!), Joe tended to tune him out, but he always did so with a smile on his face. It was good to see your kids loving something and excelling at it. He could still remember the first time Barry had come home from school with shining eyes and an A-plus on a science project. Unlike Iris, Barry was a quiet kid, but that day, he jabbered like an auctioneer hyped up on caffeine, his jaw going a mile a minute. Barry had found his love and his calling, and at the same time, Joe discovered something inside himself: a great swell of pride so powerful that it brought tears to his eyes and nearly knocked him off his feet.
On that day, in that moment, Joe knew for the first time that it didn’t matter that Barry was the offspring of Henry and Nora Allen. On that day, in that moment, Joe knew that Barry was his son.
Joe thought all this in the time it took for Black Canary to engage the autopilot on the whacked-out sci-fi contraption she called the Arrowplane. And then there was a roar of engines, a lurch in his gut, and they were airborne—and Joe suddenly remembered that he really, really, really hated flying.
13
Cisco stole away for a moment to return to Madame Xanadu’s bedside. He sucked in a breath as he stood beside her. She seemed to have sunk into a true sleep, though fitful, and he didn’t want to touch her and risk waking her.
He didn’t want to touch her, period. That last vibe had been painful and disorienting, and he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t somehow harmed Madame Xanadu in the process. But he needed more information about Anti-Matter Man, and with her not-friend gone with the wind, he couldn’t think of a better way to get it.
“Sorry if this hurts,” he muttered, speaking both to her and to himself. He held a hand out, hovered it over her for a moment, then lowered it to touch the exposed flesh of her left arm.
And . . .
And . . .
And . . . ?
Nothing.
He frowned at his hands as though they were malfunctioning gadgets. He cracked his knuckles and tried again, this time touching her with both hands.
Still nothing.
Madame Xanadu snorted in her sleep, but otherwise . . . nothing.
Barry said she had magic powers. Not metahuman, but actual magic. What if she’s blocking me somehow?
Another thought occurred to him. He reached into his pocket and withdrew the glowing green ring that Barry had taken from Power Ring. Or what if it’s this? What if this thing is stopping me somehow?
The ring pulsated gently in his hand, but it was not the comforting gentleness of a parent’s embrace or a friend’s reassuring touch. It was the gentle pad of a lion on the veld, stalking its prey, the quiet, metered slither of a snake in the grass.
Cisco had faced Reverse-Flash and Zoom and Abra Kadabra. He knew evil when he saw it, but he’d never thought that evil could be in something inanimate, in something that wasn’t alive.
Or is it? he wondered. Is this thing alive?
“Cisco, report to the Cortex, please.”
He’d never been so glad before to hear Iris’s voice over the internal PA system. He locked the ring in one of the facility’s Danger Boxes, special lockers designed to contain the mysterious and just plain weird stuff they came across. Then he hustled up to the Cortex.
“Where’s Dig?” he asked, looking around.
Iris was pacing before the monitor, running one hand through her hair while she twirled a pen with the other. She had voices bombarding her through her headset, over the speakerphone, and now from Cisco. She seemed uncharacteristically on edge. Then again, it was something like two in the morning by now, and she’d been working to coordinate emergency responses since sundown. She was entitled.
“Dig?” she asked, distracted. “He’s with Barry at the breach site. They’re gathering readings or something . . . No, no!” she shouted into the headset. “I need those ambulances at the stadium, not at the park! Divert them immediately!” She smiled apologetically at Cisco. “I need you to coordinate Barry and Diggle on this end. I can’t break away from FEMA right now.”
Cisco nodded and used one of the auxiliary control stations. He found Barry’s signal with the S.T.A.R. Labs satellite and settled in.
• • •
Barry and Diggle set up the monitoring equipment no more than ten feet from the breach. The air blowing through had gone from fetid and hot to too cold. Anti-Matter Man was still quite a distance away, but now Barry had a better idea of his size. Like the stranger had said, he was at least one hundred meters tall, maybe more. And he was walking steadily toward the breach, in no hurry.
He’s not even alive. Not even really a he. But all I feel coming through the breach is sheer malevolence. Sheer evil.
“It’s like every bad nightmare I ever had has come to life and is making its way toward me,” Diggle said with a deep and profound worry in his voice.
“That might be the most accurate thing anyone has ever said,” Barry told him, and shivered. “Let’s finish setting this up.”
The monitoring equipment was mounted on a spring-loaded, gyroscopic tripod that had been designed to keep its balance no matter what. They used a series of threaded spikes to screw the tripod’s feet into the ground. Dig grasped one of its legs and shook it, hard; the gyro worked—the monitoring lens didn’t waver from its target, the breach.
“S.T.A.R. Labs, this is Flash. Are you reading the equipment?”
Cisco’s voice came back. “We’ve got the money, honey. Come on home.”
“You go through these things all the time, huh?” Dig said, gesturing to the breach.
Barry took in the breach once more. Everything through it seemed to have a dirty red film overlay, and there was a cloud of grit that swirled at the transition point. The edges of the breach were black and jagged.
“I don’t go through these,” Barry told him. “I’ve never seen one like this before. It’s kinda—”
Just then, there was a rise in the wind, a howl like a lost wolf. Still far away through the breach, Anti-Matter Man raised his arm, pointing almost lazily at Earth 1.
Bolts of black lightning crackled, spitting through the breach, right at Barry and Diggle. Even for the Flash, there was no time to think. He just grabbed John by the shoulders and dragged him out of the way at superspeed.
The lightning followed.
Oh, boy, Barry thought.
Dig wasn’t a small guy; he was big, with a big frame and lots of muscle packed on it. Muscle, Barry knew, weighed more than simple fat. What this all added up to was a heck of a lot of freight for Barry to be carting around. But he had no choice. He had to keep Dig out of the path of the lightning.
He couldn’t just pick Diggle up and carry him—the guy was too heavy for that. But he could push him. So that’s what he did—he got behind Diggle and pushed him along, running at superspeed and using his momentum to keep Dig in motion, too. Zigzagging through the streets, the lightning bolt followed them, a dark and crackling harbinger of death.
S.T.A.R. Labs. There would be something there that could shield them.
The building was across the river. Barry took a shortcut, running himself and Diggle over the water so fast that they didn’t have time to sink beneath the surface. Surface tension—it’s a Flash Fact!
He couldn’t see Dig’s face, but he imagined it was etched with terror and shock. They’d only been on the move for about two seconds, but that was long enough for Diggle to register what was going on—lightning, danger, the world becoming a blur, his feet suddenly wet . . .
Barry pushed across the river and risked a glance over h
is shoulder. To his relief, the bolt of lightning shorted out somewhere in the middle of the river, sparking out of existence without so much as a pop.
He brought them to a gentle stop on the opposite bank, close to the back of the S.T.A.R. Labs building. As he caught his breath, he looked over at Diggle, who was whipping his head this way and that, disbelieving the sudden change in location. “What happened?”
“We outran a lightning bolt. Well, I outran it.” Barry realized something. “Dude! You didn’t throw up!”
Every time Barry had to move Diggle at superspeed, the man puked up his guts. But they’d just raced across half the city at the speed of sound and there was nary a splash of vomit to be found.
Diggle nodded, grinning broadly. “Check it out.” He rolled up his sleeve to show off a flat square of material adhering to the inside of his left arm. “Military-grade anti-nausea patch. SEALs use them in rough weather. I figured I’d start wearing one and see if it kept me from hurling every time you decide to yank me across the country at Mach 7.”
“Good for you!” Barry told him.
“My feet, though,” Dig said with a strange expression on his face, “feel weird.”
They both looked down. The soles of Dig’s shoes had melted right off. His bare feet were sticking out.
“Not cool, Barry.”
Things had calmed considerably when they got to the Cortex. Iris told them that she had sent Oliver to help keep the speedsters under control at the stadium. Right now, aid workers were distributing rations to a starving mass of speedsters who’d burned through their daily allotment of calories in mere minutes while running for their lives. Police and fire were where they needed to be and handling things on their own. Iris sank into a chair and seemed to melt.
“I’m exhausted,” she said, “and I didn’t actually do anything!”
“You did a lot,” Barry told her, kissing her forehead. The night would become morning soon enough, and there would still be plenty for her to do. She didn’t have a speedster’s metabolism to keep her going. “Go get some sleep.”
“Nope. Not until Oliver is back and tells me the Earth 27 refugees are OK for now.”
“I’ll wake you when he gets here. I promise.”
Grudgingly, Iris heaved herself from the chair and went off in search of a bed. Caitlin finished applying a special salve to Diggle’s speed-burned feet, then joined Barry at Cisco’s control station, where he was bringing the monitoring equipment online.
“Give me some good news,” Barry said. “We need to close this thing. And fast.”
“Close it?” Caitlin asked. “What about the people over there on Earth 27? The ones who didn’t come through? We can’t just leave them there with that . . . thing.” She flung a hand out at the monitor. Anti-Matter Man loomed large, no longer distant and distinct. He was much, much closer now, close enough that—without the blockage of people streaming through the breach—they could make out details.
He—it?—wore a reddish jumpsuit with a purple belt and boots. The sleeves were short and trimmed white, as was the collar. His skin was pale blue, except for the left side of his face, which was black. Perfectly round, perfectly blank eyes were set into a face shaped like an upside-down pear.
Beyond him: the rack and ruin of Earth 27.
Barry hesitated before he opened his mouth. Caitlin hadn’t been there when the stranger with Madame Xanadu told them the sad truth about Earth 27—the planet was ruined. There was no home to return the speedsters to, and no way to survive there.
“Anti-Matter Man has already made it impossible to live there,” he said gently, for Caitlin was a doctor—her entire life was about healing people and making it possible for people to live better lives. “His mere presence breaks down positive matter. The atmosphere over there is poison.” He held out his hands, palms up, helpless. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Caitlin nodded, then shook her head, then nodded again, her expression troubled, her eyes clouded. “There has to be something,” she insisted.
“They’re all dead already,” Barry said. “I don’t . . . There’s nothing. All we can do now is close that mega-breach so that Anti-Matter Man can’t get through to Earth 1.”
“Working on it . . .” Cisco said from his position at the computer. He was fiercely mousing around, skimming the data streaming in from the monitors Barry and Diggle had set up at the breach site.
“Why don’t we just use the quantum football?” Barry asked.
A couple of years ago, when he’d been relatively new at being the Flash, Barry had defeated the Reverse-Flash at the cost of Eddie Thawne’s life . . . and at the cost of opening fifty-two breaches all over Central City. Metas came through the breaches, as did Zoom, an evil speedster from Earth 2. In order to close the breaches and force Zoom into a trap, Cisco had developed a gadget that could disrupt a breach’s quantum entanglement with its home universe. They delivered this delicate, meticulously developed, crucial payload by, well, throwing it at the breaches.
It looked like a football. It worked on the quantum level. Barry called it the quantum football.
Cisco, of course, hated the name. “It’s not a quantum football! It’s a Portable Disentanglement Device. PDD.”
“I don’t care what it’s called,” Caitlin said quietly. “Will it work? Can we stop more people from dying?”
Cisco paused long enough to look over his shoulder at her. “I’ll figure it out,” he told her. “I promise.”
14
Felicity met them in the Bunker, a sheaf of papers in her hands. Without so much as a hello or any sort of preamble, she started handing out the papers to the three of them.
“Nice to see you, too, Felicity,” Black Canary said.
“No time to greet.” Felicity waved her own sheet. “Check it out: I cross-referenced high-tech thefts with Ambush’s known demolitions over the past year. We know he swiped something from A.R.G.U.S. just now, but eight months ago there was an explosion in Hub City. That same night, there was a break-in at a decommissioned military facility just outside the city limits.”
“No one made the connection,” Joe said, skimming the paper. It listed details of the Hub City bombing and theft. “What does matter transmission mean?”
“Military jargon for teleportation,” Felicity informed him. “Nothing was stolen from the facility, but it looks like someone may have copied data about a top secret Army research project on teleportation.”
Wild Dog groaned. “More crazy powers. Every time you Flash people show up in town, things get weird.”
“Be nice, Rene,” Felicity admonished.
“Just show me something I can punch or shoot, Felicity.”
Joe shook his head. “There’s a time for that, but it’s not now. We need more information. We’ll start with the victim. We have to talk to this Lyla Michaels.”
“Good luck with that,” Black Canary said. “If she’s holed up at A.R.G.U.S., there’s no way to get to her.”
Felicity grinned. “You’d think, right?”
Joe stood in a copse of trees in a small park right across the street from A.R.G.U.S. headquarters. There was a breeze coming down the main boulevard, and the trees shivered slightly. He turned up the collar of his coat. Colder here. And even though the sun should be coming up soon, it still somehow seemed darker than near sunrise in Central City. Star City in general just seemed a little grimmer, a little dirtier, a little more dangerous than Central City. Six hundred miles apart, but worlds away.
As he watched, a woman stepped out of the building, cast cautious glances in all directions, then wrapped her coat tightly around her body and jogged across the street. Lithe and clearly trained in fighting, she then walked with purpose, subtly checking her blind spots for tails or danger.
Joe sidled to his left so that he was more in shadow. As Lyla Michaels approached, he took his hands out of his pockets to show that he wasn’t holding a weapon.
She darted into the copse of trees and looked
around. When she caught sight of him, her expression of relief spent only a moment on her face before melting through surprise into tight, hardened outrage.
“Who are you?” she demanded, putting one hand in her pocket. “I was supposed to meet my husband here.”
Joe held up both hands, palms out. “Ms. Michaels, please don’t take out whatever crazy thing you have in your pocket. My name is Joe West. I’m a detective. You know my son Barry Allen.”
Lyla’s mien flickered for a moment, but she didn’t move her pocketed hand.
“We had to spoof your husband’s phone number for a text message. You weren’t answering anyone else. And we’re trying to help you.”
“We?” she asked, eyes narrowing.
Aware that he was out in public and had to be careful with his words, Joe mimed shooting a bow and arrow, feeling like a complete idiot.
Lyla shook her head, her hand still in that pocket, clutching a heart-laser or a brain-zapper or a time-whatsis or whatever whacked-out tech A.R.G.U.S. had lying around. “This is an A.R.G.U.S. matter. We can handle it.”
“Yeah, but are you handling it?” he challenged. “Look, Ms. Michaels . . . This is what I do. I’m a detective. You guys are great at mad science and keeping secrets, but I find things. I find people. Let me help you.”
“We have a team that—”
“And they probably have to go through ten layers of government bureaucracy just to put their pants on in the morning, am I right?” He arched a knowing eyebrow, government employee to government employee.
Reluctantly, she chuckled. “And cops aren’t hamstrung by bureaucracy?”