Barry Allen—The Flash—grimaced as he listened to the report from Star City. He stood in the center of the Cortex, the huge, circular chamber at the heart of S.T.A.R. Labs that served as a staging area for Team Flash. On the main monitor, Joe West was filling him in on the hunt for Ambush Bug. A hunt that was, by every metric that mattered, not going well.
“. . . not that I’m making excuses or anything,” Joe was saying, “but chasing a teleporter isn’t easy.”
“I’ve been there,” Barry said, remembering chasing Shawna Baez, the teleporting metahuman criminal also known as Peekaboo. He’d finally captured her by shutting down the lights in a tunnel, rendering her unable to see where to teleport. That didn’t seem to help in this case, though. Ambush Bug teleported willy-nilly, apparently not caring where he ended up. And there was no rhyme or reason to his “crimes,” making it impossible to predict his next move.
“I wish we could spare some manpower to help you out—”
“Person-power,” Iris interrupted him, clearing her throat significantly. Tapping away at a keyboard at a nearby workstation, she didn’t even bother to look up.
Barry nodded. “Sorry, yes, of course. Person-power.” Back to Joe: “But we have our hands full here, too.”
Joe nodded, his expression weary but understanding. “We’re doing the best we can. I just wish you hadn’t taken Felicity away from us.”
With Cisco and Curtis both lost in time somewhere, Barry had asked Felicity Smoak, Team Arrow’s resident hacker genius, to join him in Central City and help out. Ambush Bug was a problem, yes, but recovering Cisco and Curtis, then tracking down Anti-Matter Man, ranked much higher on the priority scale.
Oliver Queen—Green Arrow—stepped into the Cortex. “Felicity’s flight just landed. She should be here in a few minutes. How’d it go with the Legends?”
Barry shook his head. “No dice.” He quickly explained his conversation with Director Sharpe. “We’re on our own for this one.”
Iris turned away from her keyboard for a moment, worrying at her bottom lip. “You know, Wally—”
“He wasn’t on the Waverider when it disappeared,” Barry assured her. “He was on leave somewhere in the late sixties. He’s fine. And once we figure out how to get the others back, we’ll get him, too.”
“Unless he comes racing through that door on his own,” said Oliver, pointing to the archway that led out of the Cortex and into the rest of S.T.A.R. Labs. “That’s possible, right?”
Barry shrugged a little more diffidently than he felt. “Theoretically, yeah. Wally could generate enough speed to propel himself through time and return to the present. But it’s not easy.”
Even as he said it, he thought about how easy time travel could be. There was the Time Courier, of course, but also the amazing Cosmic Treadmill, the device he’d used in the thirtieth century to run to the sixty-fourth century. Those millennia had sped by like leaves blown by a derecho. But Ava Sharpe had been right—even if he had a million time machines at his disposal, they’d be useless if he didn’t know when in time to go.
“You know . . .” Oliver stroked his jawline, deep in contemplation. “This is just way too much of a coincidence. Anti-Matter Man attacks, the Crime Syndicate breaches to our world, and the Legends vanish, all around the same time? That’s a little much, isn’t it?”
Barry started to answer but was interrupted by a burst of laughter from Iris’s workstation. She looked up guiltily. “Sorry, guys.”
“What’s so funny?”
Iris gestured vaguely in the direction of her screen. “I’m searching for anything that might give us a clue as to Owlman’s whereabouts here on Earth 1. So, checking for anything out of sorts or out of the ordinary, I just stumbled upon this guy on Twitter who swears he saw Bruce Wayne right here in Central City.”
Barry chuckled at the thought of the world-famous Gotham billionaire playboy showing up in Central City without any sort of fanfare. “Yeah, right. Like he was just wandering down Kanigher Avenue?”
“Basically.”
“This is all very amusing,” Oliver said, “but can we focus?”
“Sorry,” Iris muttered.
“Yes, Owlman’s out there somewhere.” Oliver began ticking off the problems on his fingers as he spoke. “And Cisco and Curtis are lost in the time stream. And we still have to figure out what to do with ten thousand speedsters from Earth 27. And there’s the matter of Anti-Matter Man and who set him free.”
“Plus, we have to help Madame Xanadu,” Barry added. At that very moment, Caitlin Snow was down in the medical lab, running tests. Madame Xanadu had gone into a sort of coma after the death of her Earth 27 doppelgänger. Barry was determined to help her, as she’d helped him when Abra Kadabra had come to Central City.
“There’s a lot going on,” Oliver admitted. “And we’re down two of our best.”
“That’s why I’m here, darling!” Felicity Smoak crowed as she entered the Cortex, dragging a wheeled suitcase behind her. “Consider S.T.A.R. Labs at full geek capacity once more!”
Oliver put an arm around her and squeezed her lightly. Felicity frowned with her eyebrows but embraced him fully, kissing him square on the lips.
“For the record, Green Arrow, that is how you say hello to your wife after three days, especially when you vanished into the time stream for a couple of hours.” She looked over at Barry and Iris, both of whom were amused. “Am I right?”
“That does seem to be the protocol, Oliver,” Iris deadpanned.
“We don’t make the rules; we just abide by them,” Barry added.
Oliver grimaced slightly and wiped at his lips. “Fine. Can we move on?”
“He’s so romantic, and he’s my man,” Felicity said with a mocking sigh. “Catch me up to speed. No pun intended. Or, wait. Actually, I won’t apologize for the pun. Since when did puns become a bad thing? Why is everyone always apologizing for their puns?”
“Iris has the details on the Earth 27 speedsters and the parameters for the Owlman search,” Oliver told her. “And Barry and I are trying to figure out the—”
A loud alert sounded. Iris startled and spun back to her console.
“What’s that?” Felicity asked.
“Before he got zapped into the time stream,” Barry told her, “Cisco set up some equipment to monitor Anti-Matter Man’s unique quantum signature. We’ve been running it through S.T.A.R. Labs’ satellites to make sure he doesn’t pop up somewhere else.”
“Uh-oh,” Iris said, scanning the readout on her monitor. “This isn’t good.”
“He’s back?” Oliver marched over to the console. “Am I going to have to fix this again?”
Iris shook her head. “No. Cisco must have patched his system through the breach equipment in the Multiverse lab. We’re following Anti-Matter Man through the entire Multiverse.”
Felicity sucked in a shocked breath. Barry zipped to Iris’s side.
She was right. The display showed Anti-Matter Man currently on Earth 27, the world he’d utterly destroyed. But according to the readout, a breach had opened there, one that led to . . .
“Earth 38,” Barry whispered.
Supergirl. Alex Danvers. Winn Schott and all the others . . . They were all in desperate danger.
“Get in touch with Supergirl,” Barry told Iris. “Tell her I’m on my way.”
“We’re on our way,” Oliver insisted.
Barry hesitated. “Oliver, this is—”
“This is big cosmic stuff and I’m a guy with a bow and arrow,” Oliver said. “I know. But you needed me last time and you’ll need me again.”
Barry glanced over Oliver’s shoulder. Felicity, gnawing at a knuckle, nodded, her eyes wide with concern, but her expression resolute.
“OK, then. We go together.”
The first and last time Oliver had traveled to an alternate Earth was a few years back, during what later came to be called the Crisis on Earth-X. Being abducted to a world where the Nazis won World War II and America was a fascist dystopia ruled over by his own evil doppelgänger had not been fun.
Barry assured him that Earth 38 was different.
They geared up, replenishing Green Arrow’s quiver with replacements Felicity had brought from Star City, and loaded the data they’d accumulated from the original Central City breach onto a thumb drive.
“We have the coordinates?” Barry asked, strapping on a quantum-tunneling device, which was now the only way they could traverse the barrier between dimensions to get to Earth 38, since Cisco and his vibe powers were gone.
“Yes.” Iris helped him type them into the quantum tunneler’s interface. Alex Danvers at the DEO had been very specific about where she wanted the Flash and Green Arrow to breach into Earth 38.
“We’ll keep looking for Cisco and Curtis,” Iris promised, pressing herself into Barry’s arms for a last hug.
Barry, Oliver, Felicity, and Iris had all gathered at the Cortex to say goodbye. Iris and Felicity would keep working on the problems haunting Earth 1 while Barry and Oliver tried to stop Anti-Matter Man once and for all on Earth 38.
“I believe in you,” Barry told her. “You’ll have it all worked out by the time we get back.”
“And when will that be?” Iris asked.
Barry and Oliver exchanged a glance. They both shrugged.
“We shouldn’t be long,” Barry said.
“That’s what you said when you went to Earth 27 that time,” Iris reminded him.
“Well, yeah . . .”
“And when you ran into the future,” she added.
“Good point. Assume we’ll be gone awhile. But we’ll be back.” He held Iris at arm’s length, then took her hands in his own and gazed into her eyes. “I’ll always be back.”
Felicity cleared her throat into the romantic silence and stared at Oliver pointedly.
“What?” he asked.
“Aren’t you going to promise to be back, too?”
“It doesn’t matter what I promise,” Oliver said very seriously. “Anything can happen.”
Felicity threw her hands in the air in disgust.
“That’s true,” Iris said.
Barry shrugged and gave her his best grin. “Doesn’t matter what happens. I’ll always come back to you.”
“That’s romantic, Oliver,” Felicity said.
“That’s absurd,” Oliver announced. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”