The Legends of Forever Barry Lyga (mystery books to read .TXT) 📖

her White Canary togs, Sara set her lips in a grim line. I need a ship. And a crew. And then I’ll find them. I swear.

“Breep!” Computo chirped for attention. “Captain Lance, your presence has been requested in the medical bay, if you don’t mind.”

Sara grabbed her jacket, threw it around her shoulders, and headed for the door. “On my way, Gideon!” she shouted.

“I mean Computo,” she muttered under her breath as she stepped into the corridor.

5

Cisco was being torn apart, shredded, disassembled.

Strangely, it didn’t hurt at all. He observed as though from afar, as though watching on a screen somewhere. The laceration of his self happened on a level beyond the physical. Beyond even the metaphysical. It was, perhaps, something superphysical. Spiritual. His entire concept of self had been dissected, his history left bleeding in the open air.

There he was in school, with Jake Puckett dunking his head in the toilet until Cisco cried uncle and agreed to let his bully copy his homework. And there he was again, mooning after Melinda Tores, the love of his life, never to be with him after his brother, Dante, thought it would be funny to lie and tell her that Cisco intended to become a priest.

Days at school, working hard. Nights at home, poring over tech magazines and journals, wishing that someone in his family would bother to notice him, would look up from their worship of Dante and his magical fingers at the piano.

Flashing forward, strips of history and time flayed from the corpus of his life and were left crumpled and sodden on the floor of the past. College and his roommate, Sebastian. Graduating. The job at S.T.A.R. Labs. And then so much more . . .

Cisco saw it all in an instant, his entire life arrayed around him in an infinity of facets, as though he were embedded in the center of a jewel made of concentrated time itself. Each facet was stripped away, pulled from him, examined.

And then it all came together again, the jewel collapsing into him. With the return of his own history came the return of his physicality, the return of pain. He screamed in agony as every punch, pinch, kick, scrape, cut, bruise, and contusion in his life revisited him at once.

Every heartache. Every tear. Every moment of sadness and anger and self-recrimination. His soul swelled with pain.

And then it was over. He was intact and real again, collapsed on a rough metal floor rusted with age. Around him, an energy field crackled and spat blue-white sparks.

“Yes, you will do nicely, Cisco Ramon.”

He managed to lift his head enough to look up. The perspective was wonky, but through the energy field, he spied a figure in a bedraggled purple cloak standing over him. A hood shrouded the face in utter darkness, and the voice from within grated, echoing along itself.

“You time-napped the wrong superhero, dude,” Cisco said with much bravado, in contrast to how he felt. He didn’t have the energy to summon a breach right at the moment, but once he did . . .

“You are precisely the right person, Cisco Ramon. Indeed, in the whole of the Multiverses, you are the exact individual I require. One out of trillions.”

Multiverses? Multiverses? Plural?

So it turned out this guy knew about the TV world, then. Cisco forced out a single, wry chuckle. “Shows what you know, buddy. There’s an excellent Xerox of me out there.”

The voice spoke again, lacking emotion, the syllables and phonemes sliding against one another. “The doppelgänger you speak of surrendered his powers for a time, and their return has left him somewhat weaker. You are the sole possessor of the powers I need. And now you are mine.”

Cisco licked his lips. “You’re lying.” But deep down, he knew it was true. He’d tried to commune with the TV Cisco when he was trapped in the past but had felt no reciprocal vibe in return. TV Cisco was powerless—or at least, powered less.

Why? Why would he do that? Why would he render himself defenseless in the face of so much danger?

“Well,” Cisco said with what he hoped was a muscular, defiant tone, “when my buddy Barry gets here, you’re gonna wish you’d never heard the name Cisco Ramon. Ever been punched in the face fourteen thousand times at the speed of light? Maybe if you let me go, he won’t run over here and pummel you into the dirt.”

The voice emanating from the solid shadows within the hood did not so much as chuckle, but Cisco thought he detected amusement nonetheless.

“I am eager for your friend to arrive, Cisco Ramon. Indeed, I rely on it.”

6

Barry vibrated through the walls of the Time Bureau and into Ava Sharpe’s office. It was empty and dark, with a half-eaten ham sandwich abandoned on a crumpled square of wax paper in a cone of light from the desk lamp. Barry tapped his left ear to activate his comms bud.

“Superman? Do you see her?”

Hovering above the clouds in order to conceal his presence on Earth 1—the people here were used to metahumans, not godlike aliens—Superman spoke with a calm resignation. “I don’t like to invade people’s privacy with my X-ray vision, but I suppose these are extenuating circumstances. I see a woman matching your description in the northern stairwell. And Flash?”

Barry was already speeding in that direction so quickly that no one at the Time Bureau would be able to see him. “Yeah?”

“Be kind,” Superman said.

• • •

As director of the Time Bureau, Ava found that privacy had become a rare commodity. The demands on her—pardon the pun—time were constant, intense, and unrelenting. Like endless hail. That was on fire. And bristling with sharp spikes.

The northern stairwell was one of the few places that afforded her a measure of privacy. No one used it because it was too distant from the central command theater. Plus, there were no bathrooms nearby.

So when she needed a moment to herself, a moment of humanity and vulnerability and mourning, she