“Do you read me, Lena?” Supergirl asked into her comms.
“Loud and clear, Supergirl.”
“Good.”
Supergirl took in her surroundings. She hadn’t been to Smallville in years. Kal used to bring her here all the time, when his mother was still alive. But when Martha Kent passed away, he’d come out to the old farm less and less.
Now Supergirl was back, only this time she was thirty feet underground, in Superman’s old workshop.
“I used this to tinker when I was a kid,” he explained to the others as he pulled old tarps off his lab equipment. “We can use it as a base for now. Everything should still be working.”
She was there with Kal, of course, and also Brainy, J’Onn, and Barry and Oliver, who gaped and stared around the room. It was a large chamber, chopped and carved right out of the Smallville soil by Kal’s own hands, the walls fused into solid buttresses by his heat vision. The equipment was a mix of Earth technology from a decade ago and Kryptonian technology. It was the precursor to the Fortress of Solitude, buried deep beneath the Kent Farm.
“You tinkered?” Oliver said, running his fingers over a bluish Kryptonian crystal cluster. “It looks like you were growing your own science fiction movie.”
“This is an atomic collider!” Barry yelped as he dragged a tarp off a piece of equipment. “I’ve never seen one this small before!”
“Oh, right.” Superman smiled with the fondness of memory. “I was trying to build my own time pool. I forgot all about that.”
The Flash zipped to the other end of the chamber and yanked on another tarp. This one slid away to reveal a clutch of humanoid figures, stock-still like mannequins. They all wore Superman’s outfit and bore his face from when he’d been a teenager.
“My Superboy robots,” the Man of Steel said wistfully. “They were supposed to help me fight crime, but they broke down due to air pollution.”
“That sounds like a design flaw,” said Oliver.
“Yes,” Superman said soberly. “Earth’s air pollution is a design flaw. Well put, Green Arrow.”
“I meant—” Oliver broke off at a sound in his ear. The Earth 1 contingent had been given DEO comms buds to wear, and now his was squawking as it connected to the Command Center.
“We have an update,” Alex Danvers said, her voice somber.
The Air Force had attempted a sortie against Anti-Matter Man, scrambling fighter jets from the closest airbase. Four jets had managed to lock onto Anti-Matter Man and launch missiles safely. All four had hit the target dead center.
It didn’t matter. When the smoke and flame cleared, Anti-Matter Man stood unharmed, still floating in midair like some sort of indestructible soap bubble.
“I knew that wouldn’t work,” Supergirl grumbled. “If Kal couldn’t stop him, what chance did the Air Force have?”
“They had to try,” her cousin reminded her. “They can’t go down without a fight.”
Lena was at the command pedestal, transmitting data to Brainiac 5, who crunched numbers faster than any computer and sent them back to her.
“According to our calculations,” Lena said, “Anti-Matter Man will cross the extinction threshold in less than two hours.”
Earth’s atmosphere had an effective volume of approximately 4.2 billion cubic kilometers. The chain reaction caused by Anti-Matter Man’s presence was therefore converting the air to toxins at a rate of . . .
For the first time in his life, Barry decided not to do the math. It was too depressing.
“Two hours,” he said.
“One hour, fifty-four minutes, and sixteen seconds,” Brainy said.
“To be precise,” the Flash joked hollowly.
Brainy tilted his head at Barry. “Hardly. If you want precision, I could give you the time to the nearest millisecond, but I’m not sure how helpful that would be, given the present circumstances.”
“Everyone!” Alex shouted in their ears. “Everyone pick a station and stay with it!” She was talking to the people at the DEO, but they could hear her in Smallville as she called out several agents by name, ordering them to coordinate military and civil defense organizations. There were most likely going to be many, many evacuations necessary, though to where no one could say for sure. Nowhere was safe.
“Brainy and Lena,” Alex said after a moment of shouting at her people, “figure a way out of this mess. Somehow.”
“All due respect, Alex,” Superman said, “but they did. It was just too late to close the breach. If I’d been able to hold off Anti-Matter Man for just a few more minutes, it might have made a difference.”
“You couldn’t have known what he was or what he would do,” Supergirl protested. “It’s not your fault.”
“Wait.” Brainy held up a hand for attention. “Speaking of the breach . . . If the Crime Syndicate opened the breach between Earth 27 and Earth 1, then who opened the one over Smallville?”
Everyone stopped to think about that for a moment. Barry felt like smacking his forehead. Why hadn’t that occurred to him?
“An excellent question,” Oliver said abruptly, before anyone else could answer. “But it’s irrelevant at this point. The breach itself isn’t the problem. If we defeat Anti-Matter Man once and for all, it won’t matter how he opened the breach.”
“True,” Barry said. He looked around Superman’s workshop. “We have a good setup here. I think it’s time to talk evacuation.”
“We can’t evacuate the planet,” Kara said. “It’s impossible.”
“I was just thinking the immediate area,” Barry said. “Whatever we get up to . . . up there”—he pointed skyward—“could get dangerous. Probably will. We should get civilians out of town.”
“Good call,” said Superman. “I’ll start assembling a transport vehicle. If you and Green Arrow could gather people up, we can shepherd them to safety together.”
“Meanwhile, J’Onn and I will work with Brainy and coordinate with Lena back at the DEO,” Supergirl said.
“Let’s do it!” Barry said.
Overhead, the sky was red.
Red sky at night, sailors’ delight, went the old bit of doggerel. Red skies in morning, sailors take warning.
Well, this sky was red no matter the time of day, and only getting redder. That would be worrying enough, Barry thought as he ran from house to house, if not for the other meaning of red skies in his own personal lexicon.
Red skies at all, the Flash will fall, he thought mordantly.
One of his very first experiences with time travel had been almost prosaic: a secret vault concealed in the walls of S.T.A.R. Labs, where Eobard Thawne—the villainous Reverse-Flash from the future—had stashed his gear and a computer AI named Gideon. And with Gideon came a hologram of a 2024 edition of the Central City Citizen, a newspaper that didn’t exist yet, which bore the headline FLASH VANISHES, along with an explanation that there had been a “crisis” and “red skies” and that the Flash had disappeared thereafter.
That story was written by Iris West-Allen.
In the time since, as her life had changed and Iris had decided to devote herself full-time to protecting the innocent by taking control of Team Flash, he’d wondered if perhaps he’d dodged some futuristic bullet. But the hologram was still there when he told Gideon to summon it forth. And the headline still foretold his disappearance. The byline was now for someone named Victoria Vale, but nothing else had changed.
The lyrics change, but the music stays the same, he thought as he ran into the Smallville General Store. It was empty. The people of Smallville were pretty good at following instructions. He and Oliver had broadcast an emergency decree throughout the town, and people were—in well-behaved fashion—streaming out of houses and stores and schools, heading for the transport Superman had arranged.
Barry looked up into the crimson sky mottled with black clouds, riven by the occasional burst of black lightning. A bolt of black lightning had chased him around Central City a few days ago. Only his tremendous speed had saved him.
And yet the lightning didn’t frighten him. It was the sky. The red, red sky.
I’m not ready to disappear, he thought. Not yet.
Oliver couldn’t run at superspeed, but he had a tactician’s mind and more than his fair share of stubbornness. He helped guide the fleeing citizens of Smallville, using gentle persuasion, a kind sort of force, and—when necessary—outright threats to keep the lines moving up Main Street and toward the gigantic platform Superman had rapidly assembled at the edge of town. On occasion, he fired a fireworks arrow into the air, hoping to draw people out of their houses and into the street, where they could be guided to safety.
He was working hard, his brow beaded with sweat. An elderly woman clutching her cat stumbled in front of him. Oliver dropped to one knee, caught her by the elbow, and kept her from falling.
“Thank you, young man,” she said, and smiled at him.
It had been a long time since anyone had called him young man, either in his Green Arrow getup or as Oliver Queen. It rocked him for a moment, and he couldn’t figure out why.
As he stood and helped her back into her place in line, he realized why: She was being sweet and polite to him. She assumed that he was doing the right thing, that he had a plan, and that he would save the day.
More, though: She assumed that he was in the same jeopardy as she was. That his life was on the line, too, and that he was still prioritizing her.
But the fact of the matter was that he had a way out. A readymade disappearing act. A magic trick made of science.
If things got too bad on Earth 38, if Anti-Matter Man prevailed and the planet was doomed, he and Barry could just “transmatter” back to Earth 1, safe and sound. They would live to fight another day.
It was eminently practical. It made perfect sense. He and Barry had the most experience with Anti-Matter Man. If anyone was going to be able to figure out how to stop him before he rampaged through all fifty-two positive matter universes, it would be them. So they needed to survive.
But still . . .
He thought of the grateful, hopeful look in that old woman’s eyes.
And a familiar feeling bubbled up in him: an emotional fire he thought he’d stamped out long ago, now suddenly threatening to burn anew from a single smoldering ember.
Oliver felt like a fraud.