The past was getting hot.
Cisco and Curtis—after some discussion—had decided that standing still and waiting was a poor course of action. They had to do something, preferably something that took them away from the disturbing sight of the tower of skulls.
They headed in the opposite direction, moving away from the scene of the slaughter. It turned out that the direction they’d chosen was west—the sun stuck to their backs for part of the walk, then arced straight overhead. Now, after hours, it lay before them, taunting them.
Broiling them alive. Or so it felt. Other than the occasional Joshua tree, there was no shade. Cisco dearly missed skyscrapers. He stripped off his Vibe jacket and tied it around his head to keep the heat off his scalp and the nape of his neck, but he suspected he already had a grade A sunburn settling in.
Curtis had done the same with his FAIR PLAY jacket. They looked absurd.
“So,” Curtis said out of nowhere, “with a tower like that, we’ve got to be in North America. The Plains bison were almost extinct by something like 1890, so we have to be somewhere around there, maybe a decade in either direction . . .”
“And how do you just happen to know so much about bison?”
“One of my PhDs is in historical ecology.”
“Of course it is.” Cisco cracked his neck to one side, then the other. “Hold up. I want to try something.”
He sat down on the lush carpet of grass and closed his eyes. The muscles in his face tightened, then twitched with some sort of effort.
Cisco breathed in slowly though his mouth, then out just as slowly though his nose. In, out. In, out. Reaching with his Vibe powers. Feeling the frequencies of the universe around him.
Looking for a frequency that was the same, but not quite . . .
He had discovered—quite by accident—that he lived in a specific timeline, one in which Barry Allen had chosen not to change the past and save his mother from the Reverse-Flash. That other timeline—the one that had experienced something called Flashpoint—still existed, off in its own Multiverse, and so far as Cisco could tell, the only way to contact it was through his powers, interlocking with the powers of the transuniversal version Vibe in that timeline.
But as much as he reached out, “TV Vibe” was not responding.
“I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish anyway,” Cisco said as Curtis helped him to his feet. “Even if I could contact him through time, space, and more time, it’s not like he could do anything for us.”
They trudged on in miserable silence for a while longer.
“So,” Curtis said, once again out of nowhere, “not to be that guy or anything, but if we don’t find some water in about six hours, we’re setting ourselves up for a pair of pretty unpleasant deaths. It can take up to a week to die of thirst, during which time we’ll be totally helpless. Our tongues will swell in our mouths, we’ll lose more than half our body weight, and our brains could possibly rupture in our skulls.”
Cisco stomped to a halt. “Man, for a guy who calls himself Terrific, you are one heck of a downer!”
Curtis leaned against a tree. “I’m just being realistic. Food is one thing—we’re both typically overfed twenty-first-century Americans, so we can survive probably three, four weeks without food. But we need water, especially after all this heat and exertion.”
Cisco closed his eyes. He was accustomed to being able to suss out the solution to any problem, no matter how complicated or thorny. He’d built machines to traverse the Multiverse, for God’s sake! And yet here he was, stuck in the world’s biggest backyard, and Mom was nowhere to be found with a pitcher of lemonade. Or even a garden hose.
“Can you breach us somewhere?” Curtis asked.
Cisco dreaded the question. He’d been thinking of how best to use his powers since they’d first realized that they were trapped in the past. Unfortunately, he couldn’t imagine how those powers could help. He needed to know where he was breaching, and no matter what year it actually was around 1890, there would be nowhere known to him. Other than some global landmarks that hadn’t changed in millennia—the Grand Canyon, for example. And breaching to the Grand Canyon didn’t seem like much of an improvement, even assuming that the Grand Canyon was within his range.
He could also breach them to an alternate universe, but the odds were good that any other Earth was just as useless to them at this point in time.
“Whatever this point in time turns out to be,” he muttered, after filling Curtis in on his thoughts.
“If we knew more precisely when we were, would that help?” Curtis asked.
“Couldn’t hurt.”
Curtis untied his jacket and rummaged in a pocket, producing a handful of wires, circuits, and other electronics. “The remains of the T-sphere we cannibalized to build Oliver’s arrow,” he explained. “Plus, we still have our phones. Even without a network to run on, they have computational power. Once the sun sets, we can try to use proper motion to determine when we are.”
“That’s not exactly going to be a precision measurement,” Cisco pointed out.
Curtis wiped sweat from his brow. “You got a better idea?”
Cisco pondered. “Depending on the year, maybe there’s something I’m familiar enough with that I could breach us to. Something helpful.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Curtis said. “In the meantime, we have another problem: I’m worried about your water intake.”
Stiffening defensively, Cisco crossed his arms over his chest. “Why mine? You think you’re tougher than me? You think you can last longer than me?”
With a chuckle, Curtis shook his head. “Let’s be honest—we both saw the insides of a lot of lockers in high school. I’m just worried that if we don’t get some water in you soon, you’ll be too weak to use your powers.”
“Oh.” Cisco self-consciously licked his lips; they were dry, and his tongue didn’t do much to wet them. He was absolutely parched, and the more he tried not to think about it, the worse it got.
“So,” Mr. Terrific went on, “I have an idea. It’s a little . . . eccentric, but I think it’ll work.”
“I used to put a little eccentric on my business cards, man. What have you got?”
Curtis cleared his throat and pointed straight up.