by Barry Lyga
My name is Barry Allen, and I am the fastest man alive. A freak accident sent a lightning bolt into my lab one night, dousing me with electricity and chemicals, gifting me with superspeed. Since then, I’ve used my powers to fight the good fight, protecting my city, my world, and my universe from all manner of threats. I’ve stared down crazed speedsters, time-traveling techno-magicians, and every sort of thief, crook, and lunatic you can imagine.
With the help of my friends and my adopted family, I run S.T.A.R. Labs, a hub of super-science, and use it as a staging base to keep Central City safe from those who would cause it harm.
I’ve traveled to not one but two different futures, and I’ve seen the amazing heights to which humanity will soar. In the present, I do everything I can to help get us there.
I am . . .
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-3738-1
eISBN 978-1-68335-571-7
Copyright © 2019 DC Comics and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
THE FLASH and all related characters and elements © & ™ DC Comics and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
WB SHIELD: ™ & © WBEI. (s19)
ABBO41319
Cover illustraton by César Moreno
Book design by John Passineau
Published in 2019 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved.
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ROLL CALL
TEAM FLASH
THE FLASH (BARRY ALLEN)
IRIS WEST-ALLEN
VIBE (CISCO RAMON)
DR. CAITLIN SNOW
DETECTIVE JOE WEST
TEAM ARROW
GREEN ARROW (OLIVER QUEEN)
SPARTAN (JOHN DIGGLE)
MR. TERRIFIC (CURTIS HOLT)
OVERWATCH (FELICITY SMOAK)
WILD DOG (RENE RAMIREZ)
BLACK CANARY (DINAH DRAKE)
THE LEGENDS OF TOMORROW
WHITE CANARY (SARA LANCE)
THE ATOM (RAY PALMER)
HEAT WAVE (MICK RORY)
AND
MADAME XANADU
CHRONOCRAFT DESIGNATED WR-2055:
THE WAVERIDER
STATUS: IN THE TEMPORAL ZONE
Sara Lance, The White Canary, blinked in surprise as Ray Palmer burst onto the bridge of the Waverider, waving his hands excitedly. “Wake up!” he yelled. “Wake up!”
“The Legends,” a ragtag group of time travelers charged with monitoring and protecting Time itself, weren’t currently on a mission. Sara was in charge of the team—as “in charge” as she could be, considering the Legends’ resistance to order—but this was downtime, so she was lounging, having swapped out her white leather combat togs for a more comfortable and loose-fitting set of “relaxation wear” from the year 2190. Her dirty-blonde hair spilled over her shoulders, and those same shoulders were actually loose for once, not taut and tense.
Now her shoulders bunched a tiny bit at Ray’s intrusion into her peace and quiet.
“I wasn’t asleep,” Sara said irritably, gesturing for Ray to calm down. She hadn’t been sleeping in the captain’s chair, but she had been so deep in thought that Ray had managed to enter the bridge before she could react. Not good. He was a friend, not a foe, but she prided herself on her constant awareness, her inability to be ambushed. The training that she’d endured at the hands of the League of Assassins had left scars both physical and emotional, but one of the benefits to the tutelage of a secret society of ninjas was that you were rarely sneaked up on.
“Wake up anyway!” Ray cried. Off-mission, he wore stonewashed jeans and a T-shirt from the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour kickoff at Toad’s Place in 1989. “Gideon! Show her that stuff we were just looking at.”
“Of course, Mr. Palmer.” Gideon, the Waverider’s built-in artificial intelligence, conjured a series of holographic images. They floated around the central interface node on the bridge.
“This is huge!” Ray gesticulated wildly at the images. Tall and classically handsome, with a boyish mien and too-perfect hair, Ray exuded youthful enthusiasm to the point of hyperbolic excitement, but there was usually a basis for it.
Sara leaned forward, frowning as she scrutinized the images. She couldn’t quite make out what had Ray so riled up at the moment.
“They were right!” Ray crowed. “Barry Allen and Cisco Ramon were right!”
Sara clucked her tongue. “Did you think they were lying to us?”
Ray calmed down long enough to pull a wounded face. “Of course not! But they could have been mistaken.”
With a sigh, Sara hauled herself out of the captain’s chair and paced around the holograms. Time for business, she supposed. For an employee of the government’s top secret Time Bureau, there was no such thing as “off the clock.” Which, she knew, was a pretty bad pun for a time traveler, but it was still true.
“So, these images . . .” she prompted Ray.
“. . . are representations of the data Gideon and I have been compiling,” Ray responded. “According to Barry and Cisco, the universe we live in has a duplicate, a near-identical twin. Not a parallel universe like the ones we’re familiar with, but rather an entire alternate timeline. In that timeline, the Flash went back in time and saved his mother from being killed by the Reverse-Flash, and the temporal consequences were so great that it created something called Flashpoint.”
“Gideon!” Sara called. “Reference Flashpoint, please.”
A translucent, almost featureless face materialized from thin air, the visual interface to Gideon. “I’m sorry, Captain Lance,” Gideon said soothingly. “There is no reference data in the Time Masters’ or Time Bureau’s databases for Flashpoint.”
“This is what I’m saying!” Ray said, walking through Gideon’s hologram. “In our timeline, there never was a Flashpoint.” He flung a hand out at the images he and Gideon had projected. “According to all this data, though, this alternate timeline actually exists. And when the Barry Allen of that other timeline tried to fix his Flashpoint mistake, there was a knock-on effect—the universe didn’t return to its original state. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before. And there’s no record of anything like it having ever happened. When the Legion of Doom created an alternate reality, we were able to set the universe back to rights. But this . . . It’s almost as though the entire universe experienced a timequake from inside the temporal zone. It’s a singular event, unique across the Multiverse!”
Ray was breathing hard as he finished, and Sara could scarcely blame him. As time travelers, she and her team had traversed the length and breadth of the universe, tinkering with Time itself. Occasionally they’d glitched up the time stream, but they’d always been able to fix it. Now there was another whole timeline out there that someone had tried to fix . . . and couldn’t.
<
br /> “What do we do about it?” she mused, staring at the data. An entire timeline . . . “Do we go back and try to prevent Allen from saving his mother in the first place? Restore the flow of time?”
“That’s what he tried,” Ray protested. “It didn’t work. Besides, I don’t even know how we would get into that other timeline in the first place. The Waverider is attuned to our timeline and designed to cruise this time stream. It would be like . . .” He drifted off as he cast about for a metaphor.
“It would be like being in a boat on one river and trying to hop it over land to another river,” Sara supplied.
Ray shrugged. “I guess that works. Or doesn’t, as the case may be.”
She wished Kid Flash—Wally West—were still with them. Like Barry Allen, Wally was a speedster, and he had a speedster’s unique perspective on time travel. He was also the Flash’s adopted brother and had spent a lot of time with the gang at S.T.A.R. Labs, where the Flash and his crew did all kinds of superhero science. Kid Flash’s input could be useful. He’d become part of her team a little while back but right now was on some well-deserved R&R in the 1960s.
And yeah, Sara, like the League of Assassins would have let you take a vacation when trouble was brewing.
Gnawing at her bottom lip, she considered her options. Was this alternate timeline a threat to their own? Usually, her crew made a point of erasing such mistakes, but there had been occasions where they’d been forced to create time instabilities rather than destroy them. Maybe this alternate timeline was a natural part of the order of the vast, unknowable universe. Or universes.
And maybe these kinds of metaphysical questions were a little much for a simple party girl from what had once been called Starling City.
“I’m canceling Kid Flash’s shore leave,” she decided. “Gideon, lay in a course for—”
The Waverider suddenly juddered, as though it were a sailing vessel that had run aground on a reef. Sara grabbed a handhold and, with her other hand, snagged Ray’s wrist to keep him from stumbling away and falling down.
“What was that?” Ray demanded.
“Gideon!” Sara commanded. “Sitrep!”
The ship was still shaking. Sara swung Ray into one of the bridge’s seats, then hauled herself back to the captain’s chair and buckled in. “Gideon! I said sitrep!”
“Situation report,” Gideon began as the Waverider continued its quaking. “We appear to have collided with a time bolus.”
“Now I’ve heard everything,” Sara muttered. She slapped some controls on the arm of her chair. “Route around it.”
“We appear to be caught within it, Captain Lance.”
Groaning, Sara adjusted some more controls. Gideon was an excellent pilot and a terrific resource, but at the end of the day, it couldn’t think creatively. The ship needed a human at the helm to truly exploit its potential.
“Ray!” she called. “Thoughts?”
From his chair, Ray scanned the available data. “It’s like concentrated temporal energy,” he said, his teeth clacking as the ship vibrated madly. “It’ll shake us to pieces.”
Just then, the door to the bridge opened. Mick Rory stood there, one hand clutching a handhold, the other clinging to a grease-dripping ham, egg, and cheese sandwich. His normally sour expression was even more sour than usual. A dollop of melted cheese had wound up on his bald head and was oozing down over one ear. As Heat Wave, he’d started out as a villain. Then he worked with the Legends until he made it about halfway to hero. Gruff and blunt, he could always be counted on to . . . well, to be gruff and blunt.
“Did we hit another dinosaur?” he demanded. “Because I’m not gonna be the one to hose the reptile guts off the windshield this time.”
Windshield . . . Sara snapped her head up from the data displays and looked through the large, reinforced windows at the nose of the Waverider. They resembled glass but were actually an exotic, transparent futuristic form of a metal called inertron. Toughest stuff in the universe, or so she’d been told.
The data screens were changing too rapidly to be any help. But through the window, she beheld a flashing, flickering kaleidoscope, a whirl and smear of colors whipping all around the hull. “What is this?” she asked no one in particular.
“Chronal bleed!” Ray called out from his station.
“So, it’s a no on the dinosaur?” Mick asked. It took him three tries, what with the ship’s constant shaking, but he managed to get the sandwich into his mouth and take a bite.
“There’s some kind of pulse of temporal energy moving at trans-tachyon velocities. It’s moving so fast . . .” Ray paused. “It has so much momentum, it must have come from extremely far in the future. And this ‘time bolus’ is an artifact of its travel.”
“So what do we do about it?”
Even as she asked, though, the ship suddenly broke free. Sara checked her readouts. Something was wrong. They should have drifted loose once free of the bolus, but according to her instruments, they were moving into the future. Very quickly.
Once the ship stopped shaking, Mick sighed in relief. “OK, then. Back to watching the 1986 World Series. I love it when that ball goes right through Buckner’s legs.” He left the bridge and the door shut behind him.
“That was close,” Ray said. “We—”
“Ray!” Sara projected her readout onto the main screen. “Look at this. We’re not clear yet.”
“What’s going on, Gideon?” Ray asked.
“Mr. Palmer, we appear to be caught up in a chronal inversion. The energy projection from the future is so powerful that the universe’s need for equilibrium has created an equally potent stream going in the opposite direction. And the Waverider is caught in it.”
“Out of the frying pan . . .” Sara muttered. “See if you can engage the retro-thrusters and slow us down—”
“Collision imminent!” Gideon warned. “Collision imminent!”
“Now a dinosaur?” Ray asked, bewildered. “Or a—Holy . . . Sara! Look!”
Sara pulled her attention away from the controls and stared through the windshield. “Oh my God . . .” she whispered. “What is that?”
“It appears to be some sort of shield or wall,” Gideon supplied smoothly. “A barrier of some sort athwart the time stream itself.”
“How is that even possible?” Sara asked. She was trying to engage retro-thrusters, side-thrusters, but nothing could budge them from their course.
“It looks like a . . . curtain . . .” Ray started.
“Three seconds to impact,” Gideon informed them.
“A curtain . . .” he said again. Sara felt beads of sweat on her forehead as she stabbed over and over at the thruster controls, as though punching them harder would make them work.
“Two . . .” said Gideon. “One . . .”
1
“Star City is in trouble.”
Oliver Queen snorted and glanced over his shoulder. Down in the bowels of the Bunker, concealed beneath the Palmer Technologies building, he was alone with only Felicity Smoak, his partner in both life and in crime-fighting. They’d been married more than a year now, having exchanged their vows after an invasion of superpowered beings from an Earth that had been conquered by Nazis.
It felt ridiculous even to think such a thing, but it was true—it had happened. And it was also true—and obvious—that Star City was in trouble.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” he said with gentle sarcasm.
At her workstation, Felicity clucked her tongue. “Be nice, and I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.”
Oliver arched an eyebrow.
Felicity blushed. “Oh, wow. That came out wrong! Anyway . . .” She pounded at her keyboard for a moment. “There. How do you like them arrows, Green Apple? I mean . . .”
Oliver turned his attention to the gigantic computer monitor he stood before. It displayed a satellite image of the part of Star City closest to what had been called the Glades. A few years back, Malcolm Merl
yn had destroyed that area of the city, and the entire region was still recovering. On the edge of Star City, abutting the wreck and the chasm that had once been the Glades, was a series of rapidly abandoned apartment complexes. As leases ran out, tenants were fleeing as quickly as moving vans could move them. No one wanted to live in proximity to the spot where the city had imploded.
But the current problem, the current trouble, wasn’t just a question of urban flight or a declining tax base. When those sorts of problems came up, Oliver deferred to the city government. He’d been mayor once—it hadn’t lasted—and he had some measure of respect for the people who did the hard work of running this city.
Sometimes, though . . .
Sometimes, life required a more direct approach.
“Here’s an overlay for ya . . .” Felicity tapped a few more keys. Oliver nodded his thanks and studied the screen.
There were three gaps in the satellite map, open pits in the cityscape, like the empty spaces where teeth had been pulled. Felicity’s overlay put circles in those spots, along with data readouts. One week ago, there’d been buildings in those spots.
No more. Someone had blown them up over the past week, knocking them down with ruthless efficiency. Fortunately, they had all been empty at the time. No loss of life.
Yet.
“And here . . .” Felicity said, typing.
The overlay changed. Now four more circles appeared, this time over buildings that were still standing.
“Using the forensic information pulled from the three crime scenes,” Felicity said, “and then comparing building records from the municipal database, I project that the bomber’s next target will be one of these four buildings. All of them were built around the same time, and all of them have the same structural defects that made the first three so easy for him to knock down.”
Oliver sighed. Four possible targets. “I can’t let this guy rack up another win,” he said. “That neighborhood’s been through enough already, and the city has never really done right by it. We need to stop this serial bomber before he does it again. We’ve been lucky that no one’s been hurt yet, but our luck can’t hold out forever.”
