Supergirl's Sacrifice Read online

  My name is Barry Allen, and I am the fastest man alive. A freak accident sent a lightning bolt into my lab one night, dousing me with electricity and chemicals, gifting me with superspeed. Since then, I’ve used my powers to fight the good fight, protecting my city, my world, and my universe from all manner of threats. I’ve stared down crazed speedsters, time-traveling techno-magicians, and every sort of thief, crook, and lunatic you can imagine.

  With the help of my friends and my adopted family, I run S.T.A.R. Labs, a hub of super-science, and use it as a staging base to keep Central City safe from those who would cause it harm.

  I’ve traveled to not one but two different futures, and I’ve seen the amazing heights to which humanity will soar. In the present, I do everything I can to help get us there.

  I am . . .

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Control Number 2020931620

  ISBN 978-1-4197-3739-8

  eISBN 978-1-68335-572-4

  Copyright © 2020 DC Comics and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

  THE FLASH, SUPERGIRL, and all related charcters and elements © & ™ DC Comics and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

  WB SHIELD: © & ™ WBEI. (s20)

  Cover Illustration by Shawn M Moll

  Book design by Brenda E. Angelilli

  Supergirl is based on characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. By special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family.

  Published in 2020 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  Amulet Books® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

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  195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007

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  Disaster has struck on multiple fronts! In Central City, the Flash and Green Arrow only barely were able to stop the nearly omnipotent living weapon known as Anti-Matter Man from coming through a rip in reality to destroy Earth 1. They were too late to save Earth 27, unfortunately, and now Central City is host to ten thousand displaced superspeed refugees from a parallel universe.

  Meanwhile, in Star City, a serial bomber destroyed several buildings as part of a plot to steal teleportation technology and high-tech robot bees. Now the city—and Detective Joe West and Team Arrow—must contend with the madcap lunacy of . . . Ambush Bug! Plus, Cisco and Mr. Terrific have been blown out of this world and lost somewhere in time.

  Speaking of time . . . The Legends of Tomorrow have had their ship destroyed by a force no one understands. And meanwhile, Owlman—the evil Bruce Wayne from Earth 27—is lurking on Earth 1, preparing to do who knows what . . .

  EARTH 1

  THE FLASH (BARRY ALLEN)

  IRIS WEST-ALLEN GREEN ARROW (OLIVER QUEEN)

  DR. CAITLIN SNOW OVERWATCH (FELICITY SMOAK)

  DETECTIVE JOE WEST VIBE (CISCO RAMON)

  BLACK CANARY (DINAH DRAKE)

  SPARTAN (JOHN DIGGLE)

  MR. TERRIFIC (CURTIS HOLT)

  EARTH 38

  SUPERGIRL (KARA ZOR-EL/KARA DANVERS)

  SUPERMAN (KAL-EL/CLARK KENT)

  MARTIAN MANHUNTER (J’ONN J’ONZZ)

  BRAINIAC 5 (QUERL DOX)

  DEO DIRECTOR ALEX DANVERS

  GUARDIAN (JAMES OLSEN)

  THE LEGENDS OF TOMORROW

  HEAT WAVE (MICK RORY)

  AVA SHARPE

  AND

  OWLMAN (BRUCE WAYNE)

  TIME BUREAU HEADQUARTERS WASHINGTON, D.C., THE PRESENT

  In the privacy of her office, Ava Sharpe squeezed her eyes shut tight and groaned deep in her throat. She was the director of the Time Bureau, a beyond–top secret government organization devoted to policing the time stream and keeping history on track. The pressures that came with that job were almost unimaginable, and usually she dealt with them through a combination of rigid authority and no-nonsense organization.

  Sometimes, though, like right now, it felt as though she’d been caught in a rainstorm with nothing but an old newspaper for an umbrella.

  A part of her wondered if non-clones ever felt so completely overwhelmed. She had been designed and programmed by the original Time Master, Rip Hunter, to be the pinnacle of human perfection, but on days like this, she wondered if maybe Rip had dropped a codon here or there in his genetic manipulation, if the folks who’d grown her at Advanced Variant Automation Corporation had goofed up and made her slightly more susceptible to deep, deep frustration.

  No, she figured. Everyone felt this way sometimes. In fact, she reasoned, her annoyance was one of the things that proved she was human, albeit in convenient duplicate form. And if she was the height of human development, then maybe her frustration was the apex of all human frustration, too.

  Sure, that made sense.

  “Is it the tuna?” a voice asked.

  Ava looked up. She’d thought she was alone in her office, but at some point, as she’d been staring fruitlessly at the insides of her eyelids, Gary Green had sneaked in. Gary was long and lanky, his limbs dangling, as though they knew they didn’t belong and would run off on their own at the first sign of danger.

  She trusted Gary. She wasn’t quite sure why, but she did. What he lacked in competence, he made up for in loyalty and verve.

  “Is what the tuna?” Ava demanded.

  Gary swallowed hard, adjusted his glasses, and pointed wordlessly to her desk. A half-eaten tuna on rye rested amid the crumb remains of a bag of potato chips. “I lied,” he told her. “That sandwich was in the fridge for two days, not one. I thought it would be OK, but . . .”

  Ava grunted and swept the detritus of her lunch into the trash can next to her desk. “It’s not the sandwich, Gary. It’s the situation. Things are out of hand.” The time is out of joint, she thought suddenly. Shakespeare. Hamlet. She grimaced. Most people would remember that from high school, or maybe an English course in college. Not Ava. She remembered it because it had been implanted in her brain, along with false memories of a childhood she’d never had.

  The only memories she trusted for real were the ones she knew she’d made herself since rolling off the clone “assembly line” and working at the Time Bureau. Those were the only ones that mattered. Her work. Her friends.

  Sara . . .

  Sara, who was missing . . .

  “Well, uh, Iris West-Allen called,” Gary said, wagging a slip of paper in the air. “Again.”

  “That’s the third time today so far,” Ava told him.

  “And five yesterday,” he said, nodding. “And four the day before that.”

  Iris had been calling with increasing urgency for a couple of days now, ever since some kind of hole in reality had opened up in Central City. From what Ava could tell, the Flash had handled that problem. She had bigger issues to deal with. She literally had no time for Iris West-Allen and Central City.

  The time is out of joint . . .

  “What did she say this time?” Ava didn’t really want to ask, but she knew Gary wouldn’t leave her alone until he’d delivered Iris’s message.

  Gary cleared his throat and consulted the paper. “‘Tell Ms. Sharpe that if a human being can move fast enough, it’s possible to vibrate one’s molecules to the point that one can phase through solid matter.’” Gary frowned. “That can’t actually be true, can it?”

  “It is,” said the Flash as he vibrated through the wall behind Ava’s desk. “Flash Fact!”

  Ava jumped out of her seat. Gary shrieked in a warbling falsetto and slapped at his waist, searching for a weapon that wasn’t there.

  “It’s a ghost!” Gary screamed. “It’s a ghost!”

  “It’s not a ghost!” Ava snapped. Her heart raced as she leaned against her desk for support. “You can’t just do that to people!” she told the Flash.

  He grinned under his cowl. “Well, you weren’t returning our calls. I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by in person.”

  Gary turned to run from the room, forgot to open the door, and banged into it full force. “Oh!” he cried.

  Ava sighed heavily. “Gary, go put some ice on your face. And don’t tell anyone about our guest here.”

  Pinching his nose to stanch the bleeding, Gary nodded somewhat morosely and slouched out of the office, closing the door behind him.

  “I’m very busy,” Ava told the Flash. “Make it quick.”

  Another grin. “Quick is what I do best. We’ve got some time travel troubles. Two of our teammates have been missing for a couple of days now, and we need to get them out of the time stream, wherever they are.” He paused. “Well, whenever, I guess.”

  Ava shook her head as the Flash explained further: While closing the breach in Central City—“Which saved the whole world from dying a horrible death, you’re welcome”—three people had been shunted into the time stream. Green Arrow had been tossed into the near f
uture and safely popped up a couple of hours later. But Cisco Ramon and Mr. Terrific were still missing.

  “We don’t know if they’re in the past or the future,” the Flash told her. “But we figure the Legends can do a sweep through the time stream looking for Cisco’s unique vibrational—”

  “I’m gonna stop you there, Twinkletoes.” Ava held up a hand to shut him up. “I can’t have the Legends help you because I don’t know where they are. Or when,” she added quickly. Stupid time travel.

  “What do you mean?”

  With a growl of annoyance, Ava snatched up a sheaf of papers from her desk. “These are temporal incident reports,” she said. “Something happened to the Waverider a couple of days ago. The team was in the temporal zone, researching this ‘Flashpoint’ aberration you told them about. And then we just stopped hearing from them.”

  The Flash’s lips pressed into a grim, set line. “No distress call?”

  “Nothing. They just . . .” She popped open the fingers on one hand in a poof ! gone! gesture. “It’s been days, and we’ve heard nothing at all. No telemetry from Gideon. No temporal beacon. Nothing.”

  “A couple of days ago . . .” the Flash mused. “That’s when the hole in reality opened up and Anti-Matter Man threatened to come through. Do you think the two are related?”

  “How would I know?” Ava threw down the papers. “All I know is, my top team is missing. Gone. Including, by the way, the woman I love. And we have no way of finding them.”

  “You have other methods of time travel, don’t you?” he asked.

  She raised her arm so that her sleeve fell back, revealing the super-high-tech bracelet she wore on her wrist. It was called a Time Courier, and it was designed to let her travel through time and space with ease. The technology was expensive and dangerous, so only specific, highly trusted members of the Time Bureau possessed and used them. As director, Ava always wore one, and it could take her anywhere at any time. But in this case . . .

  “We don’t know where to start looking, Flash. Same reason you just can’t go running through time to look for your friends. It’s a big time stream out there. And a big Multiverse, too. Forget looking for a needle in a haystack . . .”

  “This is like looking for the tip of a needle in all the hay in the world,” the Flash finished.

  “Something like that,” she said.

  He pursed his lips and pondered. “OK,” he said, and she wondered how much superfast thinking he’d done in those couple of seconds. Yes, she was the peak of human development, but the Flash was beyond human. “There are some things we can still try. I’ll stay in touch.”

  He started to vibrate through the wall, then stopped. “And Ms. Sharpe? From now on, please answer when we call. It’ll make things go easier.”

  She nodded mutely and watched him phase through her office wall, running off to do . . . whatever it was super-people did when they needed to save the world.

  The world, she feared, desperately needed saving.

  The time is out of joint, she thought again, then finished the quotation out loud:

  “O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”

  From the Star City Gazette, Jack Ryder’s opinion column:

  REIGN OF ERROR!

  TELEPORTING MADMAN BAFFLES COPS, CITIZENS FOR TWO DAYS

  For two days now, Star City has been under attack. This may seem like old hat to most denizens of the city, but this attack is different from the usual fare we’ve dealt with over the years. There is no man-made earthquake, no outlandish clan of ninjas running pell-mell through downtown at night. There are no firefights on the streets or explosions.

  What there is, however, is Ambush Bug.

  This green-clad, antennae-bearing chaos agent has spent the past two days turning Star City into his own personal gallery of japes, practical jokes, and madcap lunacy. No one is safe, from the kids playing baseball in Kirby Park (who were subject to a lengthy rundown as Ambush Bug teleported from home plate to third and back again, throwing the ball to and from himself) to the mayor’s office, where aides confirm that the mayor’s custom bulletproof limousine was, in fact, stalled out when a large pear was inserted into the tailpipe.

  Your intrepid columnist reached out to some of your fellow Star Citizens to get their opinion on this “Ambush Bug.” In fact, I was able to get ahold of Rene Ramirez. You may remember him as Mayor Oliver Queen’s aide during Queen’s tenure running the city.

  “This isn’t like Central City, where crazy things happen all the time,” complained Ramirez. “This is Star City. This is a serious town!”

  As soon as he finished speaking, Mr. Ramirez was hit with multiple water balloons that seemed to appear from nowhere.

  Others were not quite so saturnine.

  “Is it even illegal, what he’s doing?” said a citizen who preferred to remain anonymous. “Playing pranks on people? You ask me, this town could use some lightening up.”

  At that moment, Ambush Bug appeared from thin air and dumped a quart of diet soda on your columnist’s head, chortling, “Get it? Lighten up? You could definitely stand to switch to diet, Jackie Boy!”

  (I report this next fact purely in the interests of full disclosure: My weight is currently 183 pounds, well within the acceptable range for a man of my height.)

  However amusing one may or may not find his pranks, Ambush Bug’s “reign of error” has had serious consequences for Star City. Concerned citizens have taken to patrolling the streets in loosely aligned vigilante gangs, with violence breaking out on many occasions. Local hospital emergency rooms are at capacity with not only victims of the Bug’s pranks but also those who’ve been injured in the cross fire when citizen posses have attempted to capture Ambush Bug on their own.

  Given Oliver Queen’s experience with matters that transcend the normal and the everyday, your intrepid columnist reached out to the former mayor for his thoughts, but all attempts were left unanswered. No one knows exactly where Oliver Queen is, in fact.

  1

  With the weather in National City finally turning from a grim winter to a pleasant and long-overdue spring, the tables outside Noonan’s were definitely in demand. But when Kara Danvers arrived for brunch—late, of course—she was pleased to see that her friends had already gotten a table. Good positioning, too—far enough from the restaurant entrance that they wouldn’t be bothered by customers coming and going, but still far enough from the street that the road noise wouldn’t bother them, either.

  “There she is!” James Olsen cried, and leaped to his feet, applauding.

  Before Kara could demur, the others followed suit—Lena Luthor, Hank Henshaw, and of course her sister, Alex. They all stood and clapped wildly. James even managed a piercing whistle.

  Kryptonians can blush just like anyone else, and Kara’s cheeks flamed red and hot with mingled embarrassment and pride. All around her, patrons at other tables were joining in, even though they didn’t really know why. There was just something infectious about applause, she supposed.

  She essayed a brief little curtsy, which only spurred her friends on to even more applause.

  “That’s enough, you guys. Come on!” She waved them into silence and pulled over a chair. “Sheesh. Talk about embarrassing!”

  “The youngest winner of the Wheeler-Nicholson Award in history!” Alex said. “That’s something to cheer about.”

  “I was going to bring a big banner,” James told her, gesturing as wide as his arms allowed. Given his height and arm span, that would make for a pretty darn huge banner. “About yea big. Lena voted it down.”

  “I knew you’d be thrown by even some clapping.” Lena, Kara’s best friend, leaned over and patted her hand. “I did my best to keep them all under control.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  The Wheeler-Nicholson. After the Pulitzer, it was the most prestigious award in all of journalism, and now her name was added to the roster of those who’d achieved it. Maybe she should let her friends make a big deal. Just this once.

  Kara looked around the table. Alex. James. Hank. (Or John. Or, more accurately, J’Onn, the Martian Manhunter.) Lena.