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

I never thought I’d get out of there!” He blinked some more. “Wait a sec—you’re dressed like . . . Please tell me that S on your chest stands for Supergirl’s pal.”

Superman struggled to catch his breath. “Actually . . . stands for . . . hope.”

“Well, I ‘S’ there’s a plan, because the Time Trapper is the biggest of the Big Bads.” He looked up into the sky, where the Trapper loomed like God’s older, angrier cousin. “Oh man. I didn’t know he could grow. Why do all the really powerful bad guys have to do that? Is it like an intimidation thing?”

Superman shrugged and put a hand on Cisco’s shoulder to steady himself. “Maybe they’re compensating for the smallness of their souls.”

“Could be. Well, go get ’im, Man of Steel!” Cisco jabbed a finger at the sky, now filling quickly with the form of the still-growing Time Trapper.

“Wish I could. But I used up my power to rescue you.”

Cisco tapped his foot on the ground, his nervous energy stirring up clouds of dust. “Usually I’d tell you you made a bad decision, but since it was me, I’m going to hold off. C’mon.”

He gestured and a breach opened. Cisco helped Superman step through.

46

“Anything, Kara?” Iris asked.

Supergirl sighed and touched the comms bud in her ear. She was two floors down and halfway across the building from the Cortex, in a dark and silent corridor. “Nothing new in the last two minutes, which was the last time you asked.”

With the tiniest fraction of her powers returning, Supergirl felt pretty confident in her search for Owlman, but she knew Iris worried about her friend putting herself in harm’s way. Especially when that could mean standing between a menace like Owlman and whatever his ultimate target happened to be.

But Supergirl couldn’t just stand by and do nothing while a threat potentially stalked her friends. Her X-ray vision was wobbly and her super-hearing wasn’t the greatest right now, but her senses were still sharper than any of the humans at S.T.A.R. Labs. In one more day, she’d be all powered up again. Right now, she’d make do with what she had.

“Sorry,” Iris said. “I’ll stay off comms so you can focus.”

Supergirl opened her mouth to thank Iris, but then thought she heard something. She couldn’t be sure. A breath? A heartbeat? Just a mouse in one of the walls?

Impossible to tell. She stopped moving, turned a slow circle, ears prickled, listening . . .

There it was again. A . . . hush? A shush? Wow, how did normal people live with such a small range of hearing available to them?

Was it behind her?

No. Nothing there. And she’d just come from that direction. She would have . . .

Oh man, she thought, realizing, I can’t believe I fell for the oldest trick in the . . .

She ducked to one side just in time as Owlman pounced from where he’d been lurking above her. He landed on the floor in near silence, making not a sound.

“Heard you coming a mile away,” Supergirl bluffed. “Super-hearing.”

“Ultra-hearing,” said Owlman, then sniffed. “Hh. I’m familiar with it.” He looked her up and down. “There’s something about you, though . . . Something about the way you stand . . .”

Supergirl tightened her lips and struck her most powerful and threatening pose, the one she used to face down fellow Kryptonians, Daxamites . . .

Owlman grinned. “I’ve spent years watching him. Studying him.” She knew who he meant—Ultraman. Kal’s evil doppelgänger. “He has a way of standing . . . Like he could take off at any moment. But you . . . You . . . Gravity got you down?”

He knew.

Supergirl went on the offensive, hoping to take advantage of the element of surprise. With any luck, he wouldn’t expect Non-Supergirl to attack, and that would give her a second to—

KRAK!

Her head seemed to explode with pain as he backhanded her with a solid, well-placed blow to her temple.

She shoved the pain aside and lashed out with a spin kick that Alex had taught her. It caught him off guard, and she enjoyed the momentary expression of shocked pain that flitted across his face.

“More to you than the powers,” he said, taking a step back. “Nice.”

Then, with a snarl, he leaped at her. She dodged to the side and let fly with a punch that should have flattened him, but he brought up his arm at the last second to block it. Supergirl used her cape, twirling it to distract him, then tried a front kick at his chest.

Owlman grabbed her ankle in midair. She was slower than she thought.

“Nice try,” he grunted, and swung her to one side, smashing her against the wall.

That wall was the last thing she saw before crumpling into unconsciousness.

• • •

Mr. Terrific returned to S.T.A.R. Labs just as Iris’s worry about Kara devolved into absolute panic. She hadn’t responded to comms hails in several minutes, and now Iris was beyond worried. Curtis immediately sent a coterie of T-spheres through the corridors, each of them equipped with infrared and ultraviolet sensors, as well as radar and heightened noise detection. “Don’t worry,” he told Iris with confidence. “My little buddies are on the job. They’ll find Kara, and if Owlman’s in the building, you can bet they’ll find him, too.”

Nibbling at her left thumbnail, Iris hoped he was right. Barry and the others had left hours ago, and while she understood that the vagaries of time travel made it imprecise if not impossible to predict when they should return, Kara’s radio silence—combined with the idea that Owlman had mucked with the speedster treadmill—made her more nervous than usual.

“This dude is like the Batman of his world, right?” Felicity asked. “Do you think that means that our Bruce Wayne—”

“Not a chance,” Iris said absently. “Earth 27 is a funhouse mirror version of ours, remember? Our Bruce Wayne is a rich playboy. Theirs is a badass. Opposites.”

“Right,” Felicity said. “But what if the effete-fop thing is an act? What if our Bruce Wayne is a secret badass?”

Iris threw her hands up in the air. “Sure, sure! And the president