Night came down over Gotham the way it always did. Dark clouds churned overhead, and a fine rain began to patter against the windows of the East End precinct.
Three figures moved across the precinct rooftop. They had used grappling hooks to swing over the parapet from the adjacent parking structure. The squad leader paused and swept his gaze across the empty rooftop as rain beaded on his vest. His eyes finally settled on the heavy iron door leading down to the stairwell, and there they stopped.
A plastic mannequin stood in front of it.
This was no ordinary store dummy. It wore a full GCPD patrol uniform, complete with badge and utility belt. A handgun rested in its rigid plastic hand, pointed at nothing in particular. A card had been taped to its chest, positioned so it could not be missed.
I am born in an instant,
My might proclaimed by thunderous sound;
I turn order into chaos,
My fury no one can withstand.
What am I?
A question mark was drawn in the corner.
The assassin on the left let out a short laugh through his nose.
"They're guarding the door with a dummy now? What is this, a haunted house?"
He reached out to tear the card off the mannequin's chest.
The squad leader's hand shot out and grabbed his wrist.
"Don't."
The leader crouched down and studied the mannequin. His finger hovered a centimeter above its hand, tracing the faint line of something almost invisible.
A wire.
It was extremely thin, nearly transparent in the rain, and wound tight around the handgun's trigger.
"It's a pressure-release trap," the leader said quietly. "Move the card and the trigger gets pulled. It's probably tied to something we can't see."
He pressed down on the muzzle of the gun with two fingers, holding it steady while he kicked the mannequin sideways with his boot. The plastic figure toppled, hit the wet concrete, and skidded to a stop near the parapet.
The wire went slack.
Click.
The squad leader's pupils contracted to pinpoints. He opened his mouth.
"Fall—"
The word never finished.
Behind where the mannequin had been standing, a thin metal filament had already released. The lever dropped, and an M67 fragmentation grenade rolled out of a shallow recess cut into the concrete, its pin already pulled. It clattered across the rooftop, spinning twice, and came to rest directly between the three assassins.
Time did something strange. It did not stop, but for the span of a single heartbeat, everything seemed to hang in place. The grenade lay on the concrete. The three men stood frozen, staring down at it. Rain continued to fall, tapping softly against steel, cloth, and flesh.
Then the grenade detonated.
BOOM.
A sphere of fire and shrapnel expanded outward from the point of detonation in a fraction of a second, and the stairwell entrance disappeared behind it in a flash of orange and white. The squad leader took the full force of the blast. He had been the closest, standing barely two meters away when it went off. The shockwave lifted him off his feet and hurled him backward into the rooftop railing. He collapsed against it as blood bloomed across the front of his vest. Shrapnel had ripped through the fabric, gone through his jacket, and torn into the flesh beneath. A choking sound escaped his throat as his strength gave out and he slid sideways.
The other two had good reflexes. They threw themselves backward the instant they saw it, diving flat. It saved their lives, probably. But "flat on the ground" and "outside the blast radius" are two very different things, and they were only the first. Dense fragments caught them mid-dive. One took a chunk of shrapnel across the back of his thigh, the muscle splitting open. The other caught a piece across the shoulder blade. They screamed and rolled across the concrete, leaving dark smears behind them.
The echo of the explosion rolled down into the building, rattling windows two floors below.
---
"Assault team, half of you with me!" Gordon grabbed an ammo box with one hand and broke into a run toward the stairwell. He pointed up. "We defend above! Go!"
He was right to move fast. Edward's security perimeter only covered up to the second floor. Everything above that was unprotected. If attackers breached the upper levels, they'd have a clear path down to the holding cells where Raven was secured. And if there were other infiltration methods, guarding against them from above was the only way.
Marco watched Gordon disappear up the stairs with five officers in tow, and felt something close to respect. The man had just volunteered for the hardest position in the building, and he'd done it without hesitation.
"Upstairs is yours," he said under his breath, then turned and headed for the holding room.
Outside, beyond the windows, he could hear the rain beginning to fall harder. Beneath it, barely audible, was the sound of something hitting the ground. Then it happened again.
He did not have time to think about what that meant yet.
---
Almost simultaneously with the rooftop explosion, seven ropes arced out of the darkness on the precinct's east side.
They came from the roof of the parking structure next door. The assassins who threw them had been waiting up there, crouched in the rain. The grappling hooks sailed through the air and locked onto the upper edge of the precinct's third-floor windowsills.
Six assassins followed, sliding down the ropes in rapid succession. They hit full speed within two meters of the building, using their momentum to swing into the windows. The plan was simple: glass breaks, they're inside, they're already moving before anyone can react.
It was a technique that worked. It had worked in government buildings, military installations, and fortified compounds across three continents. Against ordinary windows, it was nearly unstoppable.
But these were not ordinary windows.
The first assassin hit the glass at speed. The glass shattered, that part worked exactly as planned. But behind it, hidden behind what looked like a standard black curtain, was a wall of welded iron bars. Dense, thick, bolted directly into the building's concrete frame. They had been installed hours ago, while the assassins were still planning their approach, and the curtain had been draped over them to make the windows look normal from outside.
The assassin's body hit the iron at roughly forty kilometers per hour.
The sound it made was not the clean crash of an action movie. It was a series of heavy impacts. His face hit first, and his skull cracked against the iron. Blood sprayed sideways. His momentum carried him, and something in his left shoulder gave way with a grinding snap that could be heard over the sound of the rain.
He fell.
The others hit the bars within a fraction of a second.
Crack. Thud. Crack. Bang.
Each strike landed at a slightly different angle, but the outcome was always the same. Orbital bones shattered. Ribs collapsed under the force. One assassin took the blow to the hip, and the impact drove the joint sideways, snapping the femur hard enough to rip through muscle. Others lost their grip on the ropes altogether. Rain and blood made their hands slick, and they fell screaming into the dark.
It was only a drop of about seven meters to the ground. For trained operatives, a fall like that was usually survivable. They knew how to land, how to roll, and how to let their legs and momentum absorb the impact instead of breaking them. But the ground below the east-facing windows was covered in tire-spike strips. They were laid in rows, flush against the concrete, bristling with sharpened metal caltrops. They were meant to stop a vehicle. Against a human body falling at speed, they would do far worse.
The first assassin hit the spikes feet-first. The caltrops tore through his boots and into the soles of his feet, and the momentum drove them deeper. He made a sound like all the air had been punched out of him at once and crumpled, his legs folding underneath him. The second one landed on his side and rolled directly into another row of spikes, the metal teeth tearing through his vest and into his ribs.
Neither of them screamed. There wasn't enough air left in their lungs.
---
Marco reached the holding room at a half-jog, breathing hard, the SG 550 held against his shoulder but pointed at the floor. He pushed through the door and found exactly the scene he'd been expecting, which was to say: chaos of the non-violent variety.
Raven was sitting cross-legged on the folding cot in the corner, looking utterly bored.
Dr. Quinzel sat across from Raven with a notebook balanced on her knee, scribbling furiously, firing questions at a rate that suggested she'd been at this for hours.
"Doctor." Marco's eyes dropped to the Glock 19 holstered at her hip. He'd seen her handle it earlier, during the briefing. She'd been competent enough with the basics. But competent and careful were two different things. "One more time. You know how to use that, right?"
"Of course." Dr. Quinzel drew the Glock from its holster and ejected the magazine. She checked it quickly, snapped it back into place, and raised the weapon. Slowly, she swept the gun across the room as she lined up the sights
The muzzle passed directly over Marco's chest.
"Muzzle!" Marco lunged forward and slammed her hand down toward the floor before she could finish the arc. The gun pointed at the concrete now, but his heart had jumped into his throat. "Watch where you're pointing that thing! Rule number one, you never, ever point a firearm at another person unless you're ready to pull the trigger. Are we clear?"
"Sorry." Dr. Quinzel holstered the Glock with an apologetic shrug that suggested she wasn't particularly sorry at all. "Force of habit."
"What habit? You're a psychiatrist, not a—" Marco cut himself off. He didn't have time for this.
Raven moved.
She swung her legs off the cot and stood, then drifted toward the doorway with unhurried steps. She passed Marco without looking at him, paused at the threshold, and tilted her head slightly.
"I'm going to get some ice cream from..." She trailed off. Her gaze dropped to the floor, and her expression changed. "Someone's coming from below."
---
Below the precinct, in the damp dark of Gotham's utility tunnels, a five-man team moved in single file.
These tunnels were part of the city's maintenance network. On paper, they connected to the precinct's basement through a service access point. In practice, they were exactly the kind of entry route that no one ever thought to guard properly, because who would? They were cramped, filthy, and navigating them required knowing which tunnels led somewhere and which ones dead-ended in a wall of solidified silt.
These assassins knew. They had the building's utility maps, obtained through channels that had cost someone a considerable amount of money.
The tunnel narrowed as they moved closer to the precinct's foundation. Water dripped somewhere ahead, echoing softly through the dark.
Then the passage widened just enough for them to slow to a halt.
Two tunnels branched off in front of them, splitting the path like a fork in the road. On the wall beside each passage, someone had painted a riddle.
The assassin closest to the right-hand tunnel leaned in and read the words aloud.
"I move unseen and formless, yet the power within me is vast. I can bring light to the world, or strike it down with thunder's blast."
He thought about it for maybe three seconds. "Zeus?"
The squad leader shifted toward the left-hand passage and leaned closer to the wall.
"I greedily devour all things, bringing light, heat, and destruction. Yet when I meet my nemesis' tears, I am reduced to wisps of smoke and ash."
He frowned. "That one... fire, right? Prometheus stole fire from the gods. I read that once."
The others nodded, mostly because they didn't want to be the one who admitted they hadn't.
"So what's this, some kind of religious thing?" The younger assassin glanced around the tunnel, half-expecting something to jump out at them. "Cult stuff?"
"It doesn't matter." The squad leader waved a hand, dismissing it. "No one can save them. We're here to do a job." He pointed at the right-hand passage. "This way."
No one argued. They moved into the passage on the right. The tunnel narrowed as they went, the ceiling dropping low enough that the taller men had to duck.
At the end of the passage stood a half-open iron door. It led into what the building plans identified as the precinct's underground boiler room. On the door, written in the same green phosphorescent paint, were two words:
Correct answer. Please enter.
The squad leader stopped and stared at it for a moment.
Someone in that building thought they were clever. They believed that riddles would be enough to slow a team of professionals, maybe even scare them off.
He reached out and pushed the door.
The hinges moved smoothly, offering no resistance, and the door swung inward. It continued to open until it reached a forty-five-degree angle.
There was no warning.
Three concentrated beams of ultra-high-intensity white light detonated at point-blank range. The brightness was too sudden to register as light in any familiar sense.
It was erasure.
The entire visual world vanished, replaced by burning white nothingness.
All five assassins reacted at the same time. Two of them cried out. One stumbled backward into the man behind him. For a fraction of a second, they were completely blind.
They couldn't see the floor.
They couldn't see each other.
And they couldn't see the grid of high-power capacitor cables that had been laid flush against the wet concrete beneath their feet.
The capacitor grid fired.
BZZZZZT!
Blue-white arcs of electricity erupted from the floor and wrapped around the five bodies in the span of a single heartbeat. The assassins convulsed as every skeletal muscle fired at once, locking them rigid and fusing them in place like statues.
Their jaws clamped shut. Hands curled into claws. One of them managed half a scream before his diaphragm seized and the sound collapsed into silence. Thin gray wisps of smoke began to rise from their bodies, drifting through the damp air of the tunnel. The electrical arcs held for four seconds. Then the capacitor grid shut itself down, and the blue light vanished.
Five bodies lay motionless on the concrete floor. Smoke still curled upward from them.