Part 3 — Escape - Chapter 4
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The suburban streets of Gotham at evening had a particular quality that the busier parts of the city didn't — quieter, but not reassuringly so, the kind of quiet that came from people being inside behind locked doors rather than from any actual absence of trouble. The streetlights were on, casting their amber light across sidewalks that needed repaving, past front stoops where nobody was sitting.
Ben walked with his phone out, checking the address against the buildings he passed.
He was still running the fight through his head. The ultraviolet discharge had surprised him — the reserve had felt low when he found it, like the form hadn't been used in a long time and the energy had been sitting dormant. Which raised the question of how much was actually available when the reserve was full. Chromastone might be capable of considerably more than what had happened in the warehouse, and he was walking away from it to go do a biology project, which was — he checked himself before the thought finished forming. Skipping school was not a solution. It was the kind of thinking that sounded reasonable for about thirty seconds before you followed it to where it actually led.
He sighed and looked up at the building in front of him.
It was a two-story brownstone row house, the kind that occupied the middle ground between modest and comfortable without fully committing to either. The brick facade had been painted over at some point, the paint now aged to a dull cream, the window trim dark green. A fire escape ran up the right side of the building, its metal slightly rusted at the joints, a potted plant sitting on the second-floor landing that had no business surviving Gotham winters but apparently had. The front steps were clean and the small iron railing beside them had been recently painted. A light was on in the second-floor window.
It wasn't the kind of house that announced itself. It was the kind that had been maintained carefully by people who understood the difference between what a place looked like and what it was worth.
Ben went up the steps and knocked.
Footsteps from inside, descending stairs. The door opened.
Barbara Gordon stood in the frame, her dark red hair loose now rather than pulled back, falling past her shoulders and catching the light from inside in a way that made it look nearly black. She'd changed out of her school clothes — a comfortable sweater, dark jeans, socks. She looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone confirming that the person they expected was, in fact, the person standing there.
"Hey," she said, and stepped back to let him in.
Ben stood in the doorway for a half-second, feeling the specific awkwardness of entering someone else's home for the first time, and then stepped inside.
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The Batcave ran on its own internal clock, indifferent to the hour above ground.
Batman sat at the main console, the display filling the space in front of him with data he had been looking at long enough that the patterns had started to feel familiar in the way that unsolved problems become familiar — present everywhere, yielding nothing.
The energy spikes had been consistent. Every documented sighting of the creatures over the past two years had been preceded by a spike in the same frequency range, appearing on his instruments for a window of seconds before vanishing. Long enough to confirm the pattern. Not long enough to get a clean reading, and not long enough for any tracking algorithm he'd run to establish a point of origin.
He'd tried six different tracking approaches. All six had come back with the same result, which was no result.
He pulled up the image he kept returning to — the circular faceplate with the hourglass design, captured from the security footage and cleaned up through the cave's image processing until it was as sharp as the source material would allow. It sat in the center of the display, the design precise and deliberate, clearly manufactured rather than biological.
Every creature carried it in the Same design , same proportions.
He stared at it.
An invasion didn't announce itself with a consistent symbol on every unit. An invasion moved quietly and tried not to be noticed. Whatever this was, it was either coordinated in a way that required a unifying marker, or the marker wasn't tactical — it was intrinsic. Part of whatever the creatures were rather than something applied to them.
He filed the distinction and stood.
The Batmobile was running before he reached the driver's seat.
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The laboratory beneath the desert facility was wide and loud in the way of places where many things were happening simultaneously and nobody had decided to organize them into something quieter. Long workbenches ran the length of the room in parallel rows, each one carrying a different stage of something — containment units humming at various frequencies, holographic displays showing structural diagrams that rotated slowly above their projectors, robotic arms on ceiling-mounted tracks moving between stations with the unhurried precision of automated systems that didn't take breaks. Personnel moved through the space in the gaps between benches, carrying equipment, consulting tablets, occasionally speaking to each other in the clipped shorthand of people who had been working on the same problem for long enough that full sentences were no longer necessary.
It was controlled chaos — every individual element purposeful, the overall impression overwhelming.
Rojo walked through it with her eyes moving everywhere at once, her head turning from one bench to the next with the open, unguarded delight of someone encountering something genuinely new. Her black lipstick curved upward. She reached out once toward a piece of equipment on a nearby bench, caught herself, and settled for leaning closer to look at it instead.
Helena walked through the same space without turning her head once, eyes forward, pace unchanged.
Flag and Steel moved the same way Helena did, the lab registering as context rather than spectacle.
Steel spoke without breaking stride. "If these creatures disappear before anyone gets a clean look, how are we supposed to find them?"
"I can answer that."
The voice came from behind them. They turned.
The man approaching was compact — five foot six, moving with the particular energy of someone whose mind ran faster than their feet and had made peace with the discrepancy. His sideburns were heavy and his hair reached his shoulders, dark and slightly untidy, the kind of hair that belonged to someone who thought about it occasionally and then found something more interesting to think about. His lab coat was white and slightly rumpled, his trousers brown, his shoes the sensible black of someone who spent most of his day standing. He carried a tablet under one arm and wore the expression of a man about to show you something he was very proud of.
Waller acknowledged him with a nod. "Doctor."
He reached Flag and extended his hand. Flag shook it.
"Dr. Aloysius James Animo," he said, "but James is fine. Nobody calls me Aloysius or Animo voluntarily." He pulled his hand back and looked across the assembled team with the brisk satisfaction of someone moving through a checklist. "First — on behalf of everyone here, thank you. The data we've collected from the null division's work with the prototype suits has moved our understanding of the nanomachine architecture forward considerably. We're still years from independent manufacture, but we know significantly more about what we're working with than we did six months ago."
He tucked the tablet under his other arm.
"But that's not why you're here, and I've kept you standing long enough." He turned and gestured for them to follow, already moving. "Come on. The talking part is over."