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

It had to be a hallucination. It couldn’t be real.

She was in one of the bedrooms at S.T.A.R. Labs. She sat up and turned to him, shock written across her face.

“Barry? What happened?”

He reached out to her but could not close the gap between them. The tips of his fingers fell short of her by inches. A low-pitched crackle hissed around him as she jagged in and out of sight.

“I love you so much,” he said, tears streaming down his face. “It’ll all be OK. I promise. I will never stop loving you.”

And then she was gone.

He was seeing things. That was it. He was losing his mind. He’d run so hard. His body was cannibalizing itself now. Translating from matter into pure energy. The first physics formula he’d ever learned: E=mc2.

Meaning mass converts to energy at a ratio equal to the speed of light squared.

The speed of light was nothing to him. He was faster than light. Faster than any single thing had ever been.

Something new came into his view. Another hallucination? Random sparking in his brain, summoning images to distract him from his fate?

A dirty city street. A man, distracted. Familiar.

“Joe?” Barry said.

Yes. Yes, it was Joe.

Joe snapped his head up and said, “Barry?”

Barry wept at the sight of his adoptive father. He should have been there to help Joe, too. But he had to tell him. He had to let him know . . .

“Joe, I’m sorry. I’m going to make it all work out.”

“What?” Joe put his hand out to touch him, but in that same instant, he vanished.

Barry howled, the flesh around his mouth gone thin and taut. It was happening. It was all happening around him. The world turning in its rhythms. The universe expanding, redshifting, moving on.

He was in the Cortex at S.T.A.R. Labs. Madame Xanadu before him. And holding a knife to her throat . . .

“Owlman?” Barry said, his voice tremulous and thready. “But that must mean . . .”

That must mean I’m almost there. I’m almost to the present.

His body had converted partly to energy, flaming and radioactive. If he stopped in the present, he would combust and kill everyone around him.

He had no choice—he cut loose the cables, letting the Time Sphere drop out of the temporal zone and into the present.

And he kept running.

58

Sara yelped as the Time Sphere jerked and tumbled around her, jostling everyone inside. Mick’s elbow ended up in her gut, and Wally’s hand swatted her in the head.

They had been at the End of All Time. Barry had begun running and then everything was a blur. And when she said everything, she meant everything. She’d eventually shut her eyes against the mad, chaotic smear presented to them, ground her teeth together, and thought of Ava.

Now the Time Sphere felt as though it had collided with something hard. Something real. She risked opening her eyes but saw only Mick’s armpit, which wasn’t much of an improvement over time travel.

A sound. A voice.

“. . . on fire! Put it out! Put it out!”

59

Supergirl held a cold pack to her forehead, where a large bruise was already forming. “Good thing I took most of the wall with my thick skull,” she joked.

Caitlin stood nearby, examining Supergirl’s head X-ray. “I don’t think you have a concussion. There are some weird brain anomalies, but I guess that’s just what Kryptonian brains are supposed to look like.”

Iris clucked her tongue, irritated. “I don’t know which one of you I’m more annoyed with,” she said. “You both took crazy risks that—”

“Wait!” Supergirl jumped up. “Do you hear that? It’s like . . . like a clock . . . ticking . . . too fast . . .”

With a harrumph, Iris said, “Don’t try to distract me.”

“No!” Supergirl said. “Seriously!” She grabbed Iris and Caitlin by the wrists and tugged hard. Once upon a time that would have ripped their arms out of their sockets, but right now all it did was propel them toward the door that led out into the corridor.

At the same time, she shouted, “Everyone get down!”

The Time Sphere materialized in the center of the S.T.A.R. Labs Cortex out of nowhere, steaming and burning upon reentry into the physical world. If Supergirl hadn’t flung Iris and Caitlin out of the room, the Sphere would have collided with them and incinerated them in an eyeblink. Felicity, wearing earbuds and typing on her keyboard, didn’t notice it at first, then yelped as the heat and light exploded nearby, and she dived under her own desk.

The room lit up instantly, shadows chased into the corners. Smoke rolled out from the Time Sphere, and flames crackled. Reflexively, Supergirl ran to it.

“Kara!” Iris yelled from the doorway. “Get back!”

Rolling, the Time Sphere shuddered along the floor, heading for Felicity. Supergirl threw herself in its path. Fire sizzled around her. The ends of her hair burned.

When she touched the metal skin of the Time Sphere, pain seared her flesh. A touch of her invulnerability and superstrength had returned—just enough to keep her from passing out from the pain. Grunting and straining, she dug her feet in and held the Time Sphere in place so that it couldn’t destroy the Cortex or hurt her friends.

“Hurry!” she yelled.

“It’s on fire!” Iris cried. “Put it out! Put it out!”

She wasn’t asking someone else to do it—s he was telling them to help her do it. She was already on her way to the emergency fire extinguishers.

Mr. Terrific dashed through the door and sent a T-sphere to the wreckage; it pumped a foam out from above, helping Iris, Felicity, and Caitlin as they hit the Time Sphere with the fire extinguishers from different angles. Soon, it was out.

Supergirl stumbled away from the steaming hulk of metal. Her hands were burned and her face was covered in soot, but she waved away Caitlin when the doctor approached her with a worried expression and a medical gleam in her eye.

“They might need help,” Supergirl said, panting slightly. “Don’t worry about me. Worry about them.”

As