Mr. Terrific nodded slowly, but still seemed unconvinced. “We just seem to be stretching ourselves pretty thin.”
“Then we stretch as far and as thin as we need to,” Superman said.
In the S.T.A.R. Labs medical bay, Caitlin Snow helped Madame Xanadu back into her bed. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” she apologized. “We don’t usually let super villains kidnap people who are recuperating. Or, you know, not even recuperating. We just generally try to avoid letting super villains kidnap people as a matter of policy.”
“He did not kidnap me,” Madame Xanadu said, settling onto the bed. “I went with him voluntarily.”
Caitlin blinked rapidly, positive she’d misheard. “I’m sorry . . . What did you just say?”
Madame Xanadu gestured with both hands, her fingers inscribing complicated kaleidoscopic patterns of woven light in the air. Caitlin stared into the shifting, shimmering brightness, her eyes wide and unmoving, her jaw slack.
“It is time, Caitlin Snow,” said Madame Xanadu. “And time is a trap.”
3
“Is Central City sending help?” Dinah Drake asked. The situation in Star City had quickly degenerated from lunacy to outright panic. Ambush Bug was no longer just a demented pest—he was now an absolute threat.
Joe grimaced. He understood perfectly well why Team Flash couldn’t afford to send someone to Star City to help out. The threats to the universe and the Multiverse of course superseded Ambush Bug’s smaller-scale threat. But he still chafed at the wholly rational, utterly horrific calculus that meant the lives of those in Star City could, would, and had to be sacrificed in the name of the greater good. He wouldn’t surrender. He wouldn’t give up. Not for any reason.
If the universe died, then and only then would the people of Star City die. That was Joe’s promise to himself.
“We’re on our own,” he said, sucking in his breath. “Felicity’s gonna do what she can from Central City, but other than that . . .”
Wild Dog, Diggle, and Dinah took it about as well as he’d anticipated. Dinah rolled her eyes and huffed out a breath, crossing her arms over her chest defensively. Dig shook his head and stared at the floor.
And Rene snorted in disgust and threw his Wild Dog mask against a table. “Are you kiddin’ me, hoss? We got a psychopath ready to sting the whole city to death, and your posse can’t spare five minutes to help out?”
Joe pondered how, exactly, to explain it to them. The breaches. The foe at the End of Time. The Reverse-Flash. It was all so enormous that it almost defied comprehension. The threat to Star City was so much easier to juggle.
“We can handle this,” Joe promised with a confidence he did not feel. He used the big monitor to call up Bert Larvan, the Bug-Eyed Bandit’s brother. He’d been helping Joe and the others anticipate Ambush Bug’s moves and was working on a way to track the Bug using his intimate knowledge of his sister’s tech.
“Do you have good news for me, Bert?” Joe asked when Larvan’s face filled the screen.
“I’ve made some progress,” Larvan said. He looked tired, his eyes bloodshot and sunken into purplish folds of skin. “We know he’s using the bees as his teleport targets. I think I might be able to identify the bees as he uses them.”
“What good’s that?” Wild Dog scoffed.
Joe shushed him. “That means if he teleports away, we’ll know where, right?”
Larvan cast a baleful eye through the camera, no doubt hoping his angry gaze would fall on Wild Dog. Rene, for his part, loitered against one of the Bunker’s workstations, cleaning dirt from under his fingernails with a ridiculously large, sharp knife, not paying any attention at all to Larvan’s glare.
“Yes, Detective West. That is precisely what it means. This Overwatch person you have me working with seems to think he can repurpose a weather satellite to locate the bees along Ambush Bug’s path.”
Joe permitted himself a small smile at Larvan’s assumption that Overwatch was a man. Sometimes people’s prejudices made keeping a secret identity easier. “Great. That will at least give us something. In the meantime, Bert, how many bees did he get? Can we calculate how long it’ll take for them to swarm over the city?”
Larvan considered. “Brie designed the bees based on actual biological bee anatomy, but with enhanced stamina. Mr. Schwab received one hundred and thirty-seven of Brie’s bees . . .”
“Great,” Joe said. “We can start to—”
“. . . but,” Larvan went on, “he has Brie’s schematics, remember?”
“What are you saying, Bert?” Joe said.
Wild Dog answered before Larvan could. “He’s saying Ambush Bug can make more. Probably already has. Right?”
Larvan hesitated a moment, then nodded once, curtly. “It wouldn’t be difficult. The bees are actually designed to assist in creating more. Given the proper materials, the swarm could double itself every six hours.”
Joe buried his faced in his hands. “How long has Ambush Bug had these things?”
“Don’t do the math,” Dig advised. “It’s too depressing.”
“So,” said Dinah, “what do we do now?”
Joe had no answer. None at all.
4
Sara Lance woke, stretched, yawned, and then remembered that she was in the thirty-first century.
Waking up in a different time period was not necessarily a new thing for her. As the captain of the Waverider and the leader of the somewhat snarkily dubbed “Legends of Tomorrow,” Sara had roused herself in a plethora of eras. She’d been knocked unconscious and revived in medieval France, passed out and woken up in twenty-second-century Germany, and even groped her way toward awareness in the year 8892.
But this was different. Everything was different now.
The guest quarters she’d been assigned were spare, the walls polished silvery metal that curved and enclosed like living inside a large, rounded pyramid. A planter buoyed on antigravity
