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

and sparked. But even with the distraction of the shadows, she could tell . . .

“It’s empty,” Ray complained. “Totally empty.”

“Isn’t Cisco supposed to be here?” Oliver sounded puzzled.

Ava. Oh, no, Ava. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was so stupid. . .

“It’s a trap,” Sara breathed.

“No,” said a voice like shards of glass clashing against each other in a spinning vat of hot oil. “Time is a trap.”

There, behind her as she spun around, was the Time Trapper.

40

All I know, J’Onn had said after his telepathic probe of Anti-Matter Man, is that whoever or whatever it was, the enemy from the future used a special machine to open the breaches through the Multiverse for Anti-Matter Man. A machine powered by a person. I caught a glimpse of a man within that machine, running in a circle. Moving fast. Like you do, Flash. Only, he was a yellow blur.

“Hey!” Mick yelled from outside the sphere. “The big guy’s gone!”

Moving fast. Like you do, Flash. Only, he was a yellow blur.

Barry’s mind raced. A trap, yes. And they’d fallen for it. Divided their forces, sending the weaker members to rescue Cisco, while their strongest members were useless here because . . .

“Wally . . .” he whispered.

There in the heap of debris within the sphere lay not Eobard Thawne but Wally West, Kid Flash.

Barry’s adoptive brother. Joe’s son. Iris’s brother.

He was a yellow blur.

They’d assumed that yellow blur was Thawne, but it had been Wally all along. Abducted from the time stream, no doubt, when he’d gone on “shore leave” from the Legends of Tomorrow in the late 1960s. Dragooned from the Summer of Love to the End of All Time, where he was put to work as a speedster battery to power the Time Trapper’s evil machinery and devious schemes.

“Flash!” Superman barked. “There’s a situation and we need to—”

“I need a second!” Barry yelled back up. He knelt down by Wally. Kid Flash’s costume was torn in places but still relatively intact. Barry disconnected the lightning emblem from the chest piece and exchanged it for his own. Cisco had designed the suits to upload data to the logos; swapping one out allowed the new user to read the data on that “drive.”

A pair of lenses dropped down to cover his eyes. According to the readout scrolling at superspeed across them, Wally’s vitals were low but stable. He’d been running at top speed for weeks at a time. Barry couldn’t figure out how, but somehow his weight and metabolism had remained stable, even as he burned endless amounts of calories.

I bet the Time Trapper did something to his body so that it kept replenishing itself as he ran.

Wally was breathing, shallow but steady.

“We got a situation up here!” Mick cried out.

“And I’ve got one down here!” Barry yelled back.

Mick peeked over the edge of the sphere, his expression hardening when he saw his former teammate laid out, unconscious. A moment later, a green, floating stretcher, complete with neck brace and restraints, materialized into existence around Wally’s limp form.

“Mick!”

“I’m gettin’ the hang of this thing. And Volthoom is keepin’ his yap shut for once.”

As Mick cautiously airlifted Wally out of the sphere, Barry zipped up the curved wall, emerging into the eternal black night at the end of everything. The Time Trapper, ever present over at his own chunk of drifting ground on Needle, had disappeared.

He—it?—was not the towering giant Sara had spied from afar upon their arrival. Instead, he was a human-sized figure in a bedraggled, torn purple robe with a hood that opened only into a series of overlapping shadows. Impossible to see his—again, its?—face. Had it ever been that titanic figure? Had that been an illusion? Could it reduce its size, like Ray?

And why was she thinking such things at a time like this?

“Down!” Oliver shouted, and Sara reflexively ducked out of the way as an arrow whizzed through the space where her head had been. Good old Oliver, counting on her instincts. He’d used her body as a screen, nocking and drawing an arrow when the Time Trapper couldn’t see it, firing from behind a blind.

The arrow sailed through the vacuum. Without windage or friction to worry about, it traveled in a straight line, unerringly headed at the black space in the opening of the Time Trapper’s hood.

The Time Trapper had no time to dodge. The arrow was already there.

It can’t be this easy, can it? she thought from the ground, where she’d flung herself.

And just before the arrow struck its target, it . . . vanished.

The Time Trapper did not so much as flinch.

Oliver swore. He’d already nocked another arrow and sent it sailing through the air. This one, too, disappeared faster than a soap bubble on hot grass.

“You sent them away.” She picked herself up off the ground, dusted herself off.

“No. The arrows never existed. All of time is at my command.”

Oliver heaved out an annoyed sigh. “Maybe Mick was right.”

“Wait.” Sara held out an arm. Oliver had been ready to charge the Time Trapper and pummel him with his bow.

But the Trapper had just shown them his power. If he could make Oliver’s arrows vanish, he could do the same to them, right? And yet he didn’t. He simply stood before them, passive.

Attacking him would get them nothing. But maybe—just maybe—they could talk to him.

“What do you want?” Sara asked. Behind her, she could hear Oliver’s breath, fast and hot in his transsuit. Ray stood off to her side, fists clenched, waiting for a command. Or an opening.

The hood of the cloak tilted slightly, but she still could not make out a face. “Want? Want is for the short-lived. I have all that I need at my disposal. And soon I shall have everything else as well.”

41

The shortest, quickest path from Central City to Star City cut through two major interstates and a couple of minor state expressways. That day, those roads thundered out of nowhere, shaking as though two competing earthquakes had collided just beneath them.

The rollicking, quaking shock waves blasted