by Barry Lyga
She drew in a deep breath, held it for a moment, then blew it out and took the notebook. “Give me five minutes.”
Joe exchanged a triumphant look with Dinah as the doctor ambled over to the monitor and started tapping at a keyboard.
“Puppy dog eyes,” Dinah whispered to him with a mix of admiration and curiosity. “Do they always work?”
Joe couldn’t suppress the tiniest of deep-throated giggles. “Every time.”
Soon enough, the doctor returned. She’d printed out a strip of paper from the machine, which she now marked up with a pen. “Here. I’ve marked your dates and times on here. There was no unusual brain activity, as you can see for yourself.”
Joe and Dinah held out the paper between the two of them, their eyes scurrying back and forth along its path. There were occasional peaks and valleys in Brie Larvan’s brain activity, but nothing exceptional, and nothing that coincided with the bombings and break-ins.
Their eyes met and they shared a mutual sigh of defeat. Joe was surprised how depressed he was to learn that Brie Larvan was not somehow telepathically controlling her bees and causing all this ruckus in the first place.
“Now if that’s enough proof for you, Detective,” the doctor said, “I do have other patients. They may be comatose, but they still need me.”
Her tone was now brusque and wide-awake. Joe thanked her for her trouble and left her to her cold, dark ward with its cold, dark patients.
18
Iris awoke with a start. Since they spent so much time at S.T.A.R. Labs, they’d finally gone ahead and converted some of the old storage rooms into actual bedrooms. They weren’t pretty—they tended toward cinder block walls and bad lighting—but the beds were a lot more comfortable than the ones in the medical bay.
She was alone. In the dark. Or so she thought.
Something . . .
Something was here. Someone—
Out of the darkness, a pale light flickered. And there was Barry, standing before her.
He looked haggard, exhausted. His cowl was torn partly away, and his costume was marred with scorch marks.
“Barry? What happened?”
He reached out to her. Something was wrong. Barry seemed . . . vague. Insubstantial. As though he wasn’t really there. It wasn’t the same effect as his vibration—it was almost like a bad TV reception, where there was so much static that you could barely see the image.
The tips of his fingers fell short of her by inches. She heard a low-pitched crackle around them as they jagged in and out of sight.
“I love you so much,” he said, tears streaming down his face. “It’ll all be OK. I promise. I will never stop loving you.”
And then he was gone.
She was used to Barry disappearing in the blink of an eye, but this was somehow different. She had the sense that he hadn’t run off, but rather that he had just . . . disappeared.
She sat up and flipped on the lights. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Iris shuddered and hugged herself tight. What was going on here?
A dream? A crazy nightmare?
She couldn’t be sure. She thought she’d been awake, but maybe she’d been dreaming that she was awake. That happened sometimes.
That had to be it. She swung her legs out of bed and scrubbed her hands over her eyes. Too much going on. Not enough sleep. A world to save. It would mess with anyone.
Well, she was definitely awake now. Time to get back to work.
19
Ambush licked his lips and guided the microforceps carefully. He had a magnifier hooked up to the desk now, its lens pointed right into the guts of one of the robotic bees. According to the schematics he’d been given, the bees could be reprogrammed by deactivating and then reactivating the miniature transmitter at their core three times in a row. It had to be done quickly, though, within a second or so: off, on, off, on, off, on. Rapid fire. Anything else would achieve nothing.
A bead of sweat formed on his forehead at his hairline and drizzled down his temple to his cheek, then traced a path along his jaw. He wanted to swipe at it, but he had just managed to pry apart some of the super-delicate fiber cabling in the main body cavity. Through the magnifier’s lens, he could just barely make out a connection to what looked like the transmitter. At these sizes, it was tough to tell. He’d never met this “Brie Larvan,” but she was clearly a technological genius.
And she must have had incredible patience and very steady hands.
The bead of sweat shivered and trembled on his chin. He ignored it and risked looking away from the magnifier for a moment, glancing up. He’d taped a large blowup of the schematic on the wall just in front of him.
Yeah. This was the transmitter.
The cable connected to the transmitter with the tiniest possible plastic clip, a little sliver of white. He’d been warned not to break the clip, which would permanently disable the transmitter and make rebooting impossible.
So . . . he had to disconnect and reconnect the cable rapidly, but also gently enough not to break it. And ideally without touching anything else inside the bee.
“How advantageous,” he muttered to himself.
Fortunately, he would only have to do it once. Once one bee rebooted, it would send a signal to the rest of the swarm, rebooting the rest of them.
He managed to wedge the ultrathin end of the forceps under the plastic clip. He took a deep breath and then blew it out entirely, emptying his lungs. With a perfectly steady hand—the same kind of steadiness that rigged high explosives—he pried the clip loose. The cable came free.
OK. He had to move quickly. Closing the forceps to snag the clip, he guided it back into place. It clicked into position with a nigh-imperceptible jostle. Deep breath. Blow it out. He pried the clip loose again, then slid it back into place almost in the same motion. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.
One more time. One more breath. He slipped the clip out of its slot . . .
And the bead of sweat on his chin dropped, shaken off by his exhale.
It splashed onto the desk several inches from the bee, but its motion caught his attention, sudden movement out of the corner of his eye. Reflexively, he glanced in that direction, taking his eye off the bee’s innards for a single, crucial instant.
The clip missed the slot. Hit something else. A contact formed between the cable and the transmitter, arcing through the metal of the forceps.
“Wait—” he said aloud, realizing he’d have to start over. But just then, he heard a sound.
A buzzing sound.
He jerked back from the desk, his vision swimming as it tried to adjust to the macro world, no longer focused through the magnifier. Blinking rapidly, he then rubbed at his eyes to clear them. The sound got louder and he spun around in his chair.
The swarm. Oh God, the swarm!
Behind him, the rest of the electronic bee swarm—which had been inert and deactivated—rose up from the carrying case he’d used to smuggle them out of the A.R.G.U.S. lab. His eyes widened in surprise and very real fear as he felt behind him for the special remote he’d stolen along with the bees. It was a master cutoff for just such an emergency.
He realized, to his horror, that he’d left the remote next to the carrying case. On the other side of the swarm.
“Whoops,” he said.
And then the swarm attacked.
20
“So, we’re hosed,” Cisco said mordantly.
The sun had risen over the river, and everyone who’d stayed in Central City had gathered back at S.T.A.R. Labs: Barry and Oliver, Cisco and Caitlin, Mr. Terrific and Spartan. Iris stumbled into the Cortex, bearing H.R.’s favorite mug, which he’d left behind. It was a massive bowl with a handle, emblazoned with the legend TOO MUCH IS NEVER ENOUGH. She seemed put off and more tired, not less, for her nap, but her mien told everyone not to ask questions. Nightmares, Barry figured.
“Are we hosed again?” Iris asked, yawning. “Already?”
“I did all the math,” Cisco said, “
and there’s no way to close the breach. The quantum foot—” He pulled at his ponytail. “Argh! The PDD won’t be able to generate enough ionic energy to stimulate artificial quark sublimation because there’s too much transuniversal interference at the intersectional vortices.”
Iris mimed something flying over her head.
“I double-checked the math,” Mr. Terrific offered. “It checks out.”
“Thanks for the backstop, but no one asked you,” Cisco said grumpily.
“Manners,” Barry chided.
Cisco groaned. “Sorry. Bad mood. Bad day. If I didn’t love my flowing ebony locks so much, I’d be tearing my hair out. I practically invented interuniversal transit, and I can’t figure this out!”
Oliver stood under the big monitor, gazing up at the live feed of the breach, within which Anti-Matter Man grew larger and larger. “Not to reignite an old, sore topic, but . . . if we can’t close this breach, we need to come up with a plan to deal with Anti-Matter Man. Preferably in a permanent way.”
At the word permanent, Team Flash all glanced in Barry’s direction. He gave it a moment’s thought. “According to the stranger we met, Anti-Matter Man isn’t really alive. I have no problem ending him,” he said. “Anti-Matter Man isn’t a person. He’s a weapon that looks like one, is all. We should probably be calling him it.”
Now they all stared up into the monitor. Anti-Matter Man had gotten even closer. That bizarre combination of colors on his outfit and on his skin might have made sense on Qward in the antiverse, but here it was almost clownish. He looked harmless and benign, and he was a destroyer of worlds.
“Cisco,” Barry said into the pained silence, “I’m waiting for genius to strike.”
“I got nothing.” It obviously hurt tremendously for Cisco to admit it. “If I knew how the breach was opened, maybe I could reverse-engineer something. But the quantum noise is just too intense. Whoever established this breach did it in a hurry, without considering the way matter and energy flow between universes.” He threw some numbers and graphs from his screen onto the big screen, overlaid on Anti-Matter Man. “There’s interdimensional harmonics to consider. Transmaterial vibrations.”
“It’s like the difference between using a scalpel and a saw,” Caitlin offered. “One gives you a nice clean cut, easier to control and suture. The other just rips through and makes it harder to put things back together.”
Cisco snapped his fingers. “I got it!”
Everyone’s excitement lasted precisely as long as it took for Cisco to point to Caitlin and shout, “Analogy Girl! That’s your code name! No, wait—Dr. Simile! Yes!”
Oliver opened his mouth to speak, clearly annoyed, but Barry waved him silent. He knew how Cisco’s mind worked, and he recognized some necessary blowing off of steam when he saw it.
“You said the word harmonics before,” Caitlin put in. “Could we get Black Canary back here and use her Canary Cry? Stabilize the breach somehow?”
Mr. Terrific humphed and directed a T-sphere to the center of the room. “Checking your databases . . .” he said. “Pardon my hack.”
The T-sphere grabbed the streaming data from the S.T.A.R. Labs computers and did some calculations. As they all watched, it projected a holographic chart into the air.
“I see . . . gobbledygook,” said Caitlin.
“Fortunately, I speak fluent gobbledygook,” Mr. Terrific said cheerfully. “Good idea, Dr. Snow, but it won’t work. The harmonics of the breach are out of tune on both sides. You’d need to be on the Earth 27 side to make it work.”
“And then you’d be dead,” Oliver said with finality. “Look, we know who didn’t open the breach—your friends on Earth 27. So . . .”
“If the good guys didn’t open the breach,” Iris jumped in, “maybe the bad guys did.”
“So we have to go talk to the Crime Chumps of America again?” Cisco asked.
“Villains,” Caitlin said. “So trustworthy. So willing to help.”
The sarcasm was appreciated and also true. Still, they didn’t have many choices. “Look, we need whatever help we can get,” Barry said. “This is their world, too, now. If Anti-Matter Man gets here, they’ll die just like everyone else. They’re motivated.”
“And they’re super-evil,” Caitlin argued. “How can you trust them? At their power levels, I’m not even sure how long the Pipeline will hold them.”
“What about our own villains?” Iris said quietly.
Oliver folded his arms over his chest. “I hope you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”
“Let’s hear her out,” said Caitlin. “We need to close that breach, and we need to do it yesterday.”
Cisco snapped his fingers. “Yesterday! Time travel!” He looked at Barry hopefully.
Barry shook his head. “Nope. Not into the past. I could make things worse. You know that. The last thing we need is to cause our own Flashpoint.” At the confused looks from Team Arrow, he sighed. “I’ll explain later. It’s complicated.”
Complicating it even further was an idea that had just popped into his head—the past was dangerous, but what about the future? Was there a way out of this crisis by going forward in time, not back?
He couldn’t immediately think of one, but the idea nagged at the back of his mind. Probably because the stranger had mentioned the future and that had him thinking of Citizen Hefa and the sixty-fourth century. Just because he’d visited the future, though, didn’t mean the world would necessarily be saved. The future was malleable. There were many possible futures, and Barry had seen two of them, both good.
They weren’t guaranteed, though. He had to fight to make them happen. And that meant using every tool at his disposal. Even . . .
“Iris is right,” he said. “We need all hands on deck for this crisis, and there are some very strong hands at Iron Heights.”
“No!” Oliver slammed a fist on a desk. “Have you people lost your minds? We’re already in the midst of a massive catastrophe, and you want to unleash super villains on the scene?”
“I’m getting desperate,” Barry admitted. “So, yeah: If things get much worse, we might have to head to the metahuman wing at Iron Heights and see if we can get some help there.”
“I’m with Robin Hood on this one. You’re talking cray-cray!” Just to help Barry get the point, Cisco twirled his index finger around his temple in the universal sign for someone with a screw loose.
“When he’s not in a power-dampening cell, Clifford Devoe is smarter than all of us put together,” Barry argued.
“We’re not busting the Thinker out of jail!” Cisco wailed. “It took us too long to put him there in the first place!”
“Got a better idea?” Barry shot back. “Because that guy”—he stabbed a finger at the main monitor—“is getting closer by the minute. Minutes are pretty long for me, but for you guys, time is running out. Fast.”
Cisco shot a look at Mr. Terrific, who nodded grimly. “Give me and Mr. Wonderful over here half an hour. Seriously. Together, we’re smarter than that jumped-up history teacher in Iron Heights. We’ll figure this out.”
Barry set his lips in a line, looking from Cisco to Mr. Terrific and back again.
“Give them a chance,” Iris told him, touching his arm.
“Cisco’s never let us down,” Caitlin reminded him.
“And Curtis is the best,” Black Canary said, to a firm, agreeing nod from Oliver.
Barry relented. “OK. Thirty minutes.” He clicked a button, and a timer started on one of the auxiliary monitors. “To the very second. If half an hour from now, you don’t have a solution, I’m taking my chances with the Thinker.”
He took off, leaving a stunned gathering behind, their hair and clothes rippling in the wind of his departure.
Barry went to the Pipeline. He wasn’t going to let the Crime Syndicate loose, but Iris had made a good point about how if the good guys hadn’t opened the breach, maybe the bad guys had. He could at least take another crack at
getting the Crime Syndicate to open up. They were the most powerful people on Earth 27—they had to know something.
As soon as he entered the corridor in which the CSA sat in their cells, they all began hooting and hollering, pounding on the glass. Barry sighed and stood there, waiting patiently until—one by one—they tired and gave up. Ultraman, he noticed with some satisfaction, seemed to be the first to flag. With his incredible powers, he probably wasn’t used to exerting himself, so he tired out quickly.
“Ready to talk?” Barry asked, gazing at each of them in turn.
Superwoman said something that Barry would never, ever repeat to anyone.
“Nice language,” he told her. “Seriously, you guys are stuck here forever. Get used to those cages. Unless, of course, one of you wants to make a deal.”
Crafty lights went on in everyone’s eyes. Power Ring was the last to realize. Barry was now playing a game they were familiar with: The first one to talk got a deal. Everyone else would rot. It wasn’t nice; it was pretty evil, in fact. Just the kind of thing to get the attention of a group of brutal thugs from the twisted world of Earth 27.
“What’s the deal?” Ultraman asked.
“I’m not making a deal with this punk!” Johnny Quick shouted. It was still unnerving to hear Barry’s friend Eddie Thawne’s voice filled with so much rage and hate. “You can’t trust him! If any of you tell him anything, I’ll rip your hearts out at superspeed!”
“With what powers?” Superwoman snarked.
“Oh, I’ll get my powers back,” Quick swore. “I always do.” He pressed up against the glass and glared at Barry. “Just you wait, you punk.”
Barry sighed. “OK, so that’s one out of four who wants to stay in prison forever. Anyone else?”
Power Ring crawled over to the front of his cell. His appearance was wan and sweaty. “Can I have my ring? Please? Just for five minutes. I swear I won’t do anything bad with it. I just need to wear it. Please? I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I promise.”
Shuddering, Barry stepped away from the cell, even though Power Ring couldn’t reach through it. He’d seen addicts in the worst of their throes before, and he recognized that look in Power Ring’s eyes now. The ring he’d taken from Power Ring’s unconscious body had filled him with dread when he’d touched it. Now that dread ramped up considerably. He was glad Cisco had locked it up tight. Anything so powerful that it could wreck a man so thoroughly was too dangerous to play around with.