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

Barry knew this was true. The Cosmic Treadmill had allowed him to sync up his vibrations with the sixty-fourth century. Then, when he’d relaxed those vibrations, he returned to his home time.

“Reverse-Flash’s vibrational energy powers the machinery that reaches back through time,” he said slowly, beginning to perceive the edges of an idea. “If we can generate enough vibrational energy . . . we could possibly penetrate the Curtain.”

“You weren’t able to break through,” Ray pointed out. “So that machine must be amplifying Reverse-Flash’s vibrations. We’d need . . .” He surrendered. The numbers, the concepts, they were too massive, too enormous and broad even to contemplate.

“Are there any members of the Legion with vibration powers?” Barry asked. “Or who could amplify my own?”

Winn tapped his chin as he thought.

And thought.

And thought.

And—

“Any day now,” Oliver said testily.

“Sorry!” Winn yelped. “Look, there’s a lot of Legionnaires, OK? It takes a minute.”

“There’s no one,” Superman said. “As I said—I used to be a member, when I was younger. I know the team well. No Legionnaire can amplify your powers or produce the necessary vibrations on their own. It’s up to us.”

“You’d need more than a thousand Flashes,” Winn said very unhelpfully, “with a whole mess of vibrational energy . . .”

And then Green Arrow started laughing.

Bemused, Superman looked over at the Emerald Archer. “Would you share with the rest of us?” he asked. “We could all use a good laugh right about now.”

Oliver Queen wiped his eyes and gazed around the room at the geniuses and superheroes staring at him as though he’d lost his mind. “Sorry. It’s just funny because . . . I’ve figured it out.”

Flash’s jaw dropped. The hologram of Rond Vidar inclined its head skeptically.

“No, seriously,” Oliver promised. “I’ve got it all worked out. I know how to get through the Iron Curtain of Time.”

15

The time courier opened a path into the S.T.A.R. Labs Cortex. Barry stepped through with Oliver and Superman, right into Iris’s waiting arms.

“Hey!” he said in surprise. “You were standing in the right place!”

They hugged and he gave her a long kiss.

“Did you get there? To the End of Time?” Iris’s eyes shined with hope.

“No,” he told her. “But don’t worry. We have a plan.” His eyes flicked to Oliver. “Sort of.”

“And we brought friends,” Oliver said, gesturing to the portal opened by the Time Courier.

White Canary and Heat Wave stepped through into the twenty-first century. The Atom followed them in a new, sleek version of his costume. “Hey, everyone!” he said. “Check it out! They put me together with some Imskian tailors in the thirty-first century and redesigned my costume. Cool, right?” He struck a weight-lifting pose.

Mick Rory smacked him on the back of his head, then inhaled deeply. “Ah, car exhaust, beef jerky, and old plastic. It’s good to be home.”

“We do have a plan,” Barry promised. “Thanks to Oliver. We need to talk to James Jesse.”

Iris recoiled. “The Trickster?”

Oliver grinned at her. “No. The other one. The one from Earth 27.”

“We need vibrational energy to break through a barrier in time,” Barry told her. “I can’t generate enough, and Wally’s still somewhere in the sixties.” They had no idea where Wally had chosen to take his vacation from the Legends, so they couldn’t just go get him, unfortunately.

“So we’re going to use the speedsters from Earth 27,” Ray interjected. He laughed out loud, surprising Iris, Mr. Terrific, Caitlin, and Felicity. But Superman only smiled in response, and Oliver and Sara both cracked modest grins.

Mick pawed through a bag of fries someone had left on a counter.

“We’re going to build a gigantic treadmill,” Barry said, “and put ten thousand speedsters on it and have them run us through the Iron Curtain of Time!”

16

The energy cage around him was translucent enough that Cisco could see through it. Surrounding him was a flat, dead plain, pockmarked here and there by crumbling boulders and shallow pits. Above, the sky was speckled with hard black circles surrounded by dim halos of light. They were dead stars, Cisco realized, throwing off the last vestiges of their heat and light as their nuclear fuel waned, the atoms at their cores finally fusing to cold, dead iron.

“Like you, I can perceive the other reality. I was born when Flashpoint was reversed. The ripple effect of the time stream’s damage warped the very fabric of space-time, pushed along on a wave until it crashed on the shores of the very End of Time itself.”

Cisco thought it made sense—he tried to imagine the time stream as a heavy length of rope anchored at the End of Time. When TV Barry caused and then reversed Flashpoint, it was as though he’d given the rope a jerk. That jerk had rippled along the rope until it hit the wall. With nowhere left to go, all of that energy had had to do something.

“So, when a mommy time paradox meets a daddy wall of entropy, they kiss and make a little . . . whatever the heck you are?” Cisco asked.

“I am the Time Trapper. For I have taken your timeline and trapped it within another reality altogether. Your timeline should have merely been an aftereffect of a decision not made, of Barry Allen’s potential to not disrupt history. But by creating me, he made it possible for your reality to be so much more. I captured it, trapped it, and exploited its existence, spinning what should have been a single timeline into an entire Multiverse of its own, a near-identical twin of the other Multiverse. And thus was born . . . the Megaverse!”

Fuming, Cisco said, “So, in other words, the TV Barry Allen screwed up, messed with history, then re-messed with history, and we’re the ones who get punished for it? Not cool.”

He’d heard enough. He had the power to escape from this cell, and now that he had gathered some crucial intelligence on his foe, he was going to use that power.

Furrowing his brow, Cisco focused on the space just beyond the energy field. All around him—through him—the