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

“We have to make something happen. Fast. And we just lost our expert.”

With a diffident grunt, Joe turned back to the screen. Ambush Bug’s swarm would soon hit a critical mass, and the bees would descend.

“We need to put out an alert. Can A.R.G.U.S. get us access to the Emergency Broadcast Signal?”

Dig nodded slowly. “What are you thinking?”

Worrying at his lower lip, Joe took the question very seriously. What was he thinking? He would get exactly one shot at this. “I’m talking every TV, cell phone, and computer in Star City lighting up, telling people to get indoors, preferably somewhere without windows or outside access. Seal up cracks. People with bee allergies need to have their EpiPens and meds at hand.”

“Won’t that cause a panic, hoss?” Now that he was juiced up with epinephrine, Rene bounced on his toes, ready for action, as though he’d never been stung.

“Probably,” Joe conceded. “But so will that swarm descending on the city. This way we reduce the number of targets for the bees.”

“That’s not sustainable in the long term,” Dig pointed out.

“No, but it buys us some time. And right now, time is the most precious resource we can hoard.”

He looked around the Bunker. Rene nodded. Dig did, too. Dinah shrugged and mimed something that seemed to mean, OK by me.

“I am the Screamstress Dinah of the Royal Northwest Collective!” Dark Canary howled, utterly unbidden. “First of her name, and Dark Canary, Warbler of Horrors, Wielder of the ScreamSong!”

No one spoke for a moment. Shackled on the floor, Bert Larvan giggled into the silence.

“We’ve heard from the peanut gallery,” Dig said. “I think the ayes have it. I’ll call Lyla and get going on that message.”

31

The time trapper sensed the press of tachyons and neutrinos as a phalanx of time travelers neared his realm. The Flash and his compatriots. They smashed through the time stream with all the finesse of a cannonball through a waterfall.

They were coming for him. From the deepest past, his enemies forded the time stream, breaching the Iron Curtain of Time with their makeshift vibrational bludgeon. Brute force arrayed against the Time Trapper’s elegant plan and contingencies.

And now he experienced another emotion for the first time. This one was . . . joy.

Soon it would all come to fruition. The Multiverse would end, as it was fated to do, and the Time Trapper’s plans would culminate in, at last, victory.

And then . . .

And then the Time Trapper would rule the remainder of the Megaverse.

Yes, joy!

Cisco Ramon was his. The final piece of the infinite puzzle.

First had been a speedster’s energies, to power the machinery that released Anti-Matter Man. Which led to the weakening of the vibrational barriers between universes, in order to swap matter and energy from one dimension to another.

Then, Cisco Ramon’s power to see into the other half of the Megaverse.

Soon.

For a being as powerful as the Time Trapper, his limitations chafed. He could reach through history but not travel there himself. He could summon beings from the long-ago past but not visit them in their own eras. As much as he trapped those who dared rise up against him, he, too, was trapped. Trapped at the End of All Time. Ensnared in the never-ending moment of the finality of all reality. Locked out of the universes, he now trapped them in turn. All to meet his final goal.

Without so much as a flinch, the Time Trapper made a careful adjustment to his machinery. All around him, the dead stars hummed their last radio waves into the void. Scattered hydrogen atoms converged. Everything was coming to an end.

But for the Time Trapper, the end would be the beginning.

32

“Superman,” Barry said, and came to realize that his words, his voice, somehow slipped between moments. He looked over to his left. The Man of Steel still flew beside him, still held the Time Sphere in his hands. His expression was one of intense concentration, grim determination.

Did you feel that? he wanted to ask Superman. There’d been some sort of . . . jostle. A judder. The kaleidoscopic tunnel of the time stream around them had shaken, almost imperceptibly.

“My super-vision caught a glimpse of something outside the time stream,” Superman said, as though he’d plucked the question from Barry’s mind. “We just passed the year 200,650. There was some kind of quantum event . . . I couldn’t really make it out.”

And then in the next instant he said, “I don’t think so.” Perfectly conversationally.

The really weird thing, though, was that Barry had been about to ask: Do you think it had something to do with us? And Superman had answered as though—

In the next instant, Barry was shocked to hear himself say out loud, “Do you think it had something to do with us?”

He was asking questions after getting the answers. Causality had been flip-flopped, spun around on its axis, tossed in a blender. Effect no longer necessarily followed cause. They’d been in the time stream so long that time itself was losing its grip on them.

“I think the Time Trapper moved it farther into the future!” Superman shouted suddenly.

“Did we already go through the Iron Curtain of Time?” Barry asked. “Is it really this easy?”

Answered before asked.

“Yeah, it’s disorienting,” Barry told him.

“I think I see the Iron Curtain somewhere around the year two million. Is this . . . is this causality spiral giving you a headache?”

Barry tried to ignore the temporal discrepancies. He just kept running.

The Iron Curtain of Time loomed before them. Causality was beginning to take shape again as the “quantum event” from the year 200,650 faded into deep history. They were more than two million years in the future now, and the barrier athwart the time stream did, indeed, seem like a curtain—a grayish, rippling wall that stretched to infinity in every direction.

“This is it!” Superman yelled.

Yeah, with only billions more years to go once we get through it, Barry thought.

Still, getting through the Iron Curtain was the important part, he knew. The rest of it was just, well