Supergirl's Sacrifice, page 12
At Curtis’s groan of dismay, Cisco hurried on: “But look, it’s just a matter of communicating with the present—our present—and getting them to fire up the—”
“Cisco.” Curtis shook his head, his expression doleful. “Get real. We don’t even know if there’s a present to return to! Oliver fired that arrow and now we’re here. For all we know, it didn’t work.”
“It worked,” Cisco said defensively. “We both did the math.”
But a part of him—a big part, if he was being honest—went cold at the very notion. He’d never even considered the possibility that Curtis had just suggested. What if the arrow hadn’t worked properly? What if they’d screwed up and the future was nothing more than a toxic, uninhabitable wasteland being roamed by Anti-Matter Man, with all their friends dead?
“There were still variables,” Curtis reminded him. “Especially on the Earth 27 side of the breach. Who knows what happened? We sure didn’t predict this!”
“I concede your point. I also do this.” He stuck his tongue out.
“Who can argue with that kind of logic?” Curtis asked dryly.
“Look, it’s simple,” Cisco told him. “We’ll just pull a Back to the Future and send instructions to the others in the present. Easy-peasy.”
“You see a Western Union office around here anywhere?” Curtis spread his arms out to encompass the entirety of the world around them. “We could walk for months and never hit civilization.”
“Not months,” said a new voice. “Maybe a week, if you’re fast.”
With a high-pitched scream, Cisco startled and jumped behind Curtis, grabbing Mr. Terrific by the arms and spinning him to stand between Cisco and the newcomer, who was breaking through some of the bushes behind them.
The man was a Native American, tall and lanky, wearing a tan, fringed buckskin shirt with a high black collar and buckskin pants. Over his left chest was pinned a shiny tin star, and a gun belt with two holstered pistols hung low over his hips.
“We come in peace!” Cisco wailed.
The newcomer rested his hands on his hips, not far from the grips to his pistols. Then he spat laconically into the bushes, eyed the two of them up and down, and said, almost too casually, “So. You fellas are from the future, eh?”
25
Barry left Oliver to handle evacuation on his own for a moment and zipped back to the workshop. Brainiac 5, J’Onn, and Kara were waiting for him.
“Anti-Matter Man comes from the antiverse,” Barry began without preamble. “Which means that he’s from a universe with a different vibrational frequency than our own. Usually when someone transitions from one universe to another, their vibrations synch up with the new universe. But since he’s composed of anti-matter, I think his vibrations are still partly attuned to the antiverse. That’s causing the interference you’re experiencing, J’Onn.”
Kara and J’Onn both nodded thoughtfully but immediately looked over at Brainy for their cue. The superhero from the future offered a single, curt gesture of agreement. “Flash’s surmise seems . . . likely.”
“I can stabilize his vibrations, though,” Barry went on excitedly, “just by altering the air patterns around him, forcing his body to adapt to the vibrational frequency of Earth 38.”
“But you can’t fly,” Kara pointed out. “And I can’t carry you up there, because I have to help stabilize J’Onn while he makes contact.”
Barry pondered this. There wasn’t time to figure out another solution. “We’ll have to call Superman back in.”
“No need,” Brainy said. “Superman’s evacuation work is paramount, and there is another way. Here.”
With that, Brainy slid a ring off his finger and held it out to the Flash. Barry took it. It was golden, with a black face emblazoned with a stylized letter L. He gave Brainy a quizzical glance.
“My Legion flight ring,” Brainy said, as though that explained everything.
Actually, in a way it did.
Despite the dire circumstances, J’Onn couldn’t help but crack a grin as he and Kara sped back up into the sky, this time joined by the Flash . . .
. . . who whooped and hollered with sheer delight as he soared alongside them, borne aloft by the thirty-first-century technology in the flight ring.
J’Onn and Kara shared a knowing, almost parental look. They’d both been flying for so long that it had become as second nature as walking or running. The unmitigated pleasure of flight, of the loosening of gravity, of the wind and the sky, had long since faded into mundanity for them. Watching the Flash giggle as he swung into an eddy of air or gasped when he happened to look down reminded both of them of the incredible privilege and joy their power could bring them.
“We’re here.” J’Onn hated to interrupt the Flash’s “joy ride,” but they’d ascended to Anti-Matter Man’s altitude.
He and Kara, the more experienced flyers, hovered neatly in midair. The Flash wobbled by them, drifting up an additional ten feet before finding control of the flight ring again and lowering himself to their sides, bobbing up and down like a cork in turbulent waters.
“Let’s do this,” the Flash said.
Barry channeled his thoughts into the flight ring and ziiiiip! He was gone, flying in a circle counterclockwise around Anti-Matter Man, moving at something close to the speed of light. Brainiac 5 had assured him that the ring—forged of something called Valorium—would let him fly as fast as he could run. That seemed to be true, as the clouds whipped by, blurring into an endless smear of black against the red sky.
He started vibrating his molecules, shivering against the air itself. His plan was to have the very atmosphere around Anti-Matter Man subtly vibrate at a counter-frequency that would cause him to align with Earth 38 completely, allowing J’Onn to enter his mind.
That was the plan. It was pretty much guesswork and mad science, but then again, that’s what a lot of his plans seemed to be these days.
He kept flying. While he was at it, he crossed his fingers.
Couldn’t hurt.
Holding Kara’s hand for strength and support, J’Onn furrowed his brow and raised the index finger of his free hand to his temple, ready to bash down the doors to Anti-Matter Man’s psyche, if need be.
Instead . . .
Pain
Question
Pain
Answer
J’Onn’s teeth clacked together, straining against the sudden agony of—
—birth—?
Pain
A voice cried out to him, but he was too far from it. Too far and too gone. He was submerged in a viscous fluid that clung to him.
Pain
Memory?
The fluid caressed his raw, naked skin. He could feel himself being built, the cells assembling themselves, drawing crude fuel and material from the surrounding gel, sucking it in through his pores, disgorging it as flesh and muscle to lay upon the framework of bone and tendon.
Pain memory question answer
He moved a hand. The nerves there, exposed, roared with pain. He touched something akin to glass. He was in a tube.
Daring to open his eyes, he was assailed by light, and the fluid smeared his newborn vision, but he could see men out beyond the glass. Men, circling the tube, circling him, speaking . . .
“. . . reverse nucleic acids and neuronic . . .”
“. . . multidirectional growth enhancement . . .”
“With a specific preprogrammed apocalyptic . . .”
“. . . greatest weapon the Weaponers have . . .”
He closed his eyes. Tried to shut himself away from the world and the pain, but the pain was the world and there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
“J’Onn? J’Onn!”
Kara was increasingly worried, bordering on panicked. Shortly after raising his hand to his temple, J’Onn had seized, then dropped out of flight. If she hadn’t been holding his hand, he might have fallen more than just a couple of feet before she halted him. But she reeled him in and cradled him in her arms, still drifting a few hundred feet from the hulking, titanic figure of Anti-Matter Man.
Wind whipped at her, tossing her hair, billowing her cape. The air sang with Barry’s vibrations.
A quick check with telescopic vision told her that Kal was delivering the population of Smallville to his desert staging area. Oliver was returning to the workshop, where Brainy was poring over a tablet, muttering to himself. Should she take J’Onn back there?
He was so still, his body slack and unmoving in her arms. If not for the sound of his heart beating—its rhythm so oddly syncopated, so alien and Martian—in her ears, she would have thought him dead.
“J’Onn. It’s Kara. Please wake up. Please.”
J’Onn opened his eyes again to a burst of light. He thrashed in violent response but was held in place by a series of strong straps across his chest, waist, and legs. A man stood nearby, bald, wearing a translucent yellow visor and a white military jacket.
“You will not understand what I say,” said the man, “but I feel the need to say it nonetheless. You are our greatest achievement. Our greatest weapon. Made in our image, the greater to strike fear into our foes. Bringer of chaos! Bringer of death! Destroyer of the plus-matter worlds! And yet . . . And yet they say now that we’ve made you too powerful. That you are too mighty to use, lest you be turned against us.”
The man tugged at his ear in frustration. “They are fools, but I am but one man, and against the voice of the Weaponers, no solitary Qwardian may stand. Not for long, at least. I’ve come to think of you as my child. Which is emotional pap and absurd nonsense, but at least it is true.”
The man peered deep into J’Onn’s eyes. “There is nothing in there to speak to. I speak for and to myself. For my own posterity. Goodbye.”
J’Onn tried to scream, but he could not so much as whisper. His eyes closed of their own accord and—
• • •
Kara’s super-hearing picked up a skip in J’Onn’s heartbeat. What was happening? She’d never seen him in such a state before. It had been only a few minutes since he’d gone catatonic, but she had no idea how long it was safe for him to be like this. Or even if he’d already passed some crucial threshold. What if contact with Anti-Matter Man’s mind had destroyed J’Onn’s own psyche? What if it was already too late and she was wasting time, just floating here in the air, buffeted by the noisome winds blowing from the breach behind Anti-Matter Man, holding the brain-dead body of her mentor, her friend?
No, she thought. I won’t believe it. He’s doing something. I just need to give him more time.
Dark.
It was dark.
The darkness of tombs and wombs, the darkness of the bottom of the ocean, of slumber, of eternity.
J’Onn steeped in the darkness. He did not bother to open his eyes—there was nothing to see. There was nothing to hear, not even his own breath or his own heartbeat.
Time had no meaning. Time was for the living and the light. Time was a trap.
After all time and after no time, then—
A voice. A voice in the dark, like a twisted lullaby, calling him to wake, not to sleep. A voice like oil and gravel.
“They imprisoned you in a moon.”
J’Onn’s ears roared and burned at the first sound they’d heard since forever ago. He wanted to scream but could not.
“How mythic,” the voice went on. “They thought this would keep you from the world. They thought too small. And I . . .I thought large. And long.”
He did not open his eyes, but he saw nonetheless. Sudden light, strong enough, powerful enough to shine through his eyelids. The first light since the last light.
Now J’Onn opened his eyes to the violence of sight. Enveloped in darkness, a metal coffin around him, one side of it cleanly vaporized. Before him, a swirling red-and-gray cloud rippled and convulsed, exuding a bright, cold light. Within the light, a shadowy figure stood, silent and ominous, its body cloaked, its head hooded.
Then, as his eyesight adjusted to use for the first time in so long, he peered deeper into the bright abyss. A ruined sky of black and blue hovered over a denuded plain, choked with debris and shaken by occasional bursts of dark, throbbing energies. He could see dying stars and shattered planets overhead, and a smear of dirty red light.
There, in the distance, behind the figure, was a massive machine, a nightmarish sort of gyroscope, spinning disks intersecting and grinding against one another, throwing off powerful sparks and coruscating energies.
And at the center of that machinery—a figure moving so fast as to be a blur, its outline barely distinguishable. Arms pumping, legs churning . . .
The cloaked and hooded figure raised a hand and pointed to him.
“Now you are mine. They made you for destruction. And then they left you. But I have use for you. Speak your name.”
And J’Onn opened his mouth and said . . .
“Anti-Matter Man!”
Kara wobbled in midair as J’Onn lurched in her arms, jerking into a sitting position with no warning whatsoever, his eyes wide and glowing. His shape shifted slightly, flickering for a moment into something like Anti-Matter Man before returning to its natural Martian form.
“Anti-Matter Man,” he said again. “I am Anti-Matter Man!”
“No!” Kara admonished him. “You’re J’Onn J’Onzz. You’re Hank Henshaw.” She shook him gently, wanting to rattle him, not harm him. “You’re my friend.”
J’Onn’s head swiveled as though he were blind, his gaze falling on clouds, lightning, the ground, then finally coming to rest on Kara. The sight of her seemed to jostle him into some sort of awareness. He blinked repeatedly and worked his lips silently, then, finally, said, “Kara?”
She held back tears. “Yes. It’s me. You’re OK.”
J’Onn stroked her cheek lightly with the pads of his fingers. “How . . . how long have I been gone?”
“How long?” Kara regarded him quizzically. “Like, maybe three minutes?”
J’Onn shuddered. With a gesture, he indicated that he wanted to try flying on his own. Reluctantly, Kara let him go, secure in the knowledge that if he fell, she could catch him.
He shook side to side but managed to remain airborne. In the next heartbeat, the wind died down a bit and Barry—clearly dizzy from his exertions—came to a rest nearby.
“How’d it go?” the Flash asked. “Did I get airsick for nothing?”
“We need to talk to the others,” J’Onn told them, his voice gaining strength. “We need to do it now.”
26
“We think we have a lead,” Joe told Iris. They were FaceTiming as Iris wolfed down a lunch of microwaveable pizza and Skittles in between dealing with the usual crises du jour. “We’re searching some of the high-end hotels and Airbnbs for a Schwab reservation.”
“Tell her it was my idea!” Diggle shouted from off-screen.
“I’m wondering,” Joe went on, ignoring Dig, “if Felicity could spare five minutes—”
“—to hack into the reservation databases and take a look-see?” Iris finished for him. “Sure. I’ll talk to her.”
“Thanks, baby.” Joe’s brow furrowed with fatherly concern. “Are you eating Skittles by the handful?”
“I need the sugar rush, Dad. Don’t you dare judge me. I’ve watched you guzzle coffee straight from the urn when you were on a hot case.”
Joe held up his free hand in apology. “No judgment here. Just, uh, make sure you brush your teeth, OK?”
Iris bared her teeth at him and grred.
Joe laughed. “Hey, uh, while I’ve got you . . . Barry is still on Earth 38, right? He didn’t come back already, did he?”
Iris cocked her head. “No. Why?”
Joe hesitated. She knew the look. She’d beheld that same expression hundreds of times as a kid, when Detective Joe West struggled to answer his daughter’s innocent question: “What did you do at work today, Daddy?” The answers often involved too much pain, too much blood, and too much heartache for a child.
“Dad. What’s going on? Is it about Barry? Tell me.”
Slowly, and with obvious reluctance, Joe told her about his odd encounter on the street with Barry, how the Flash had appeared, battered and bruised, and vanished just as quickly.
For a too-long pause, Iris said nothing, simply worried at her lower lip. Joe allowed her a moment to process it, then said, “Iris? Honey? What’s wrong?”
“I . . . I had a similar experience, Dad. I thought it was a dream.” And she told him about the day of Anti-Matter Man’s breach, how she’d lain down for a quick nap and awoken to a war-torn Barry before her, proclaiming his love before disappearing into thin air.
“What’s going on here?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know. But I think I know who to ask.”
• • •
Caitlin gave Madame Xanadu a clean bill of health. Or at least clean enough to walk down the hall to the room where Iris had had her vision of Barry. The seer wore a hospital gown and walked leaning partly on Iris, partly on a wheeled IV pole that had a bag feeding her a steady drip of fluids.
After too many minutes and too many halting steps, Iris and Madame Xanadu arrived at the room where Iris had napped. After glancing around the room for a few seconds, Madame Xanadu gestured toward the bed. Iris helped her sit there.
“Do you see anything?” Iris asked. “Sense anything?”
“Only your agitation and worry,” Madame Xanadu said somewhat wryly.
“He was standing right here.” Iris shook off Madame Xanadu’s asperity. She needed the woman’s help. Positioning herself where she remembered Barry standing, she faced the bed. “I was right where you are.”
Madame Xanadu shook her head. “It may have been your imagination.”
“My father saw it, too.”
“That does not mean it couldn’t have been your imagination.” Less acerbic now. More gentle. “Iris, if I had access to my draughts and cards, my candles and sachets . . .”
“We can get you whatever you need,” Iris said quickly. “This is S.T.A.R. Labs. We do ten crazy things before breakfast. And then after breakfast we really get started.”
