The Legends of Forever by Barry Lyga (books to read for beginners .txt) 📕

pants and shirt, as well as the strange clasps that served in place of buttons. And wait. . . had he said qPhone?

Sure enough, the man brandished a perfectly round gadget with a glowing screen.

“You’re from an alternate Earth, aren’t you?” Joe asked. “You fall through a big blue swirly thing?”

The man considered. “I did notice some sort of strange fog around me on my morning commute. What are you saying happened?”

Joe passed a hand over his face. “Sir, I’m gonna ask you to wait right here. I’m going to call the local police and get you to a shelter. We’re in the middle of two or three crises right now.”

As Dig had indicated, a fuzzy black cloud had gathered overhead. It wasn’t all that big, but it was certainly big enough to notice even from the ground. A few passersby on the sidewalks had taken note and stopped to gaze upward and snap a photo or two.

“We think Ambush Bug’s massing his swarm for his attack,” said Dig. “Remember how Bert said the bees could construct more of themselves?”

Staring up, Joe imagined the bees pollinating one another, so to speak, creating more and more bees, which would create even more bees . . . Until there were millions of them, enough to descend on Star City and sting everyone in the city within seconds.

Some of the victims would just be annoyed and given a jolt of pain. Probably most of them. But some of them, like Ambush Bug himself, would have an allergic reaction to the synthetic apitoxin. People would go mad, like the Bug.

And many would die.

Barry, he thought as he dialed SCPD on his cell for the accidental universe-hopped Flash, you and your pals better figure this out fast.

“I’m inbound with a bee sample,” Joe told Dig. “We’re gonna figure this out.”

Overhead, the swarm of bees massed and bunched, a buzzing black cloud threatening to rain pain and death.

Joe slammed a foot down on the gas pedal and wished he had a siren to blare.

14

Winn led them through a series of identical corridors, all of them shining like highly polished silver. A large globe the size of an overinflated basketball zipped down the corridor. It was made of shiny metal, with a section cut away to reveal a transparent screen on which yellow waveforms undulated against an orange background.

“Breep!” the globe announced. “Mr. Schott, may I assist you?”

“Hey, Computo,” Winn said. “I need to get into the infirmary.”

The waveforms danced for an instant. “I have been authorized to permit—breep!—access to the infirmary to you. Please enter. And have a nice day!”

The Legion’s medical bay was so pristine and empty that Barry thought he’d been led into the wrong area of the headquarters. Long and narrow, it had the same curved, metallic walls he’d seen elsewhere in the building. Against one wall, something that looked very much like a cloud bobbed gently in the air, a downy cocoon. Holograms drifted nearby, showing what appeared to be MRI results, vital statistics, and more. Barry made out a human figure within the cloud.

“Her name’s Zari Tomaz,” Winn said soberly. “We don’t know . . .” He trailed off.

Barry gazed down at her. Bruises along her jawline and temple seemed almost healed, but Zari lay far too still, her eyelids not even flicking in the way that betrayed REM sleep.

“I don’t understand. They don’t have her on an IV drip. Or a—”

“She’s fine,” Winn said quickly. “I mean, not fine fine, but, you know, fine. They don’t use things like IVs here in the future. They have some kind of microscopic robot—they call it an Imskian surgimech—that crawls through her bloodstream. It keeps her cells fed and also breaks up blood clots and prevents bedsores. It’s kinda amazing and . . .” He realized Barry was glaring at his enthusiasm for the tech. “And I wish it wasn’t necessary.”

Before anyone else could speak, the door behind them hushed open. Turning, Barry blinked at a welcome, familiar sight.

“Sara!” Oliver exclaimed.

“And me!” proclaimed Ray Palmer, holding out his arms.

Sara Lance—the White Canary, leader of the Legends of Tomorrow—ran to them and threw her arms around Oliver. Ray stood, turning from side to side, arms still outthrust, eager for a clutch. “No hugs for Ray? Really?”

“Drop it, Haircut,” Mick Rory said as he elbowed his way into the room.

Ray targeted Superman and strode over, offering a handshake. “Hi! Ray Palmer, shrinking scientist extraordinaire. Love the costume. I’m a big fan of the whole red-and-blue color scheme.”

The Man of Steel accepted the handshake. “These are the time travelers you were telling me about?” he asked Barry. “The ones from the Time Bureau?”

“Some of them,” Barry said, stepping away from Zari. “Ray, what happened to the others?”

Ray and Mick shared a cloudy look. “We need to talk.”

Meanwhile, Oliver and Sara had finally broken their clinch. “Oliver! What are you doing here?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Green Arrow replied. Stoic to the last, even Oliver Queen couldn’t maintain his grim facade in the face of discovering Sara was alive. He held her tightly again. “We were all so worried.”

“Especially Ava Sharpe,” Barry put in.

“How did you know to come to this time period?” she asked.

“We didn’t.”

Between the three of them—with some assistance from Winn—they explained the crisis in the twenty-first century, Barry’s acquiring the Time Courier from Ava, and their slamming into some sort of barrier in the time stream.

At the mention of Ava, Sara became pensive. “I . . . She must be so . . . I’ve been gone so long . . .”

“It’s only been a few days for us.” Oliver put an arm around her. She shook it off.

“No time for that,” she said, clenching her fists and tilting her jaw up. “Sounds like we’ve got a serious Big Bad to deal with.”

In clipped, economical phrasing, she explained how she and the others had ended up in the thirty-first century.

“That burst of energy you experienced must have been our enemy reaching back to crack open the moon in the antiverse,” Barry