You feeling sick?
Jude's brain processed that question and produced no functional output.
How dare you ask me that. You've lived here for one year. ONE year. And you've already stopped being able to see what's wrong with this picture?
A thousand complaints backed up behind his teeth. They'd been accumulating since the moment he stepped off the train, and now they had a queue and a number system and absolutely no outlet.
His eyes landed on the gun in Drake's hand.
Drake followed his gaze and looked slightly embarrassed, which was remarkable given everything else that was happening. "I was going to just give you mine, but then I remembered Old Jack was having a sale today. Lucky timing—he had a barely-used Glock 17 left. Nine dollars with 9mm rounds and a full magazine."
"A sale." Jude heard himself say the word. "The bus driver is running a gun sale."
"Arms dealing's his side business. Lots of people buy from him. Quality varies—some of the inventory comes from police, so occasionally you get complications." Drake pressed the Glock into Jude's hands. The metal was cold and heavier than he'd expected. "But this one's clean. Old Jack wouldn't burn me."
He stuffed extra magazines into Jude's coat pocket with the focus of someone packing a lunch.
At the front of the bus, Old Jack navigated a left turn one-handed, barely glancing at the road, while his right hand distributed hardware to a line of passengers two or three deep. Money changed hands. Glocks, revolvers, something that might have been a sawed-off if you didn't look too closely. He steered the bus through an intersection without apparent effort or concern.
This is fine, Jude thought. This is an ordinary morning.
"Why doesn't the bus have windows?" His voice came out slightly higher than intended.
The doors opened. More passengers boarded—leather jackets, visible hardware, the specific body language of people who considered eye contact a negotiating position.
"It used to," Drake said. "But after the bus in East End broke a dozen times, the transit authority stopped replacing them."
"A dozen—" Jude stopped. Something else had snagged. "We live in the East End?"
His knowledge of DC Comics was patchy—he wasn't the kind of fan who could recite storylines and geography from memory. But the East End he knew. The East End was one of those things you knew without trying, the way you knew certain kinds of weather by what they did to the air before they arrived.
If Gotham was the crime capital of America, the East End was the place where the city had stopped pretending it wasn't. The poorest district. The most openly dangerous. Poverty, drugs, prostitution, weapons trafficking—not hidden, not even bothering to hide. Beggar gangs owned the alleys. Crime syndicates owned the streets.
And Crime Alley was here. Originally called Park Row. The alley where Thomas and Martha Wayne had been shot in front of their son, the night that had turned a child into something that wore a bat and prowled rooftops. The single most famous address in all of Gotham, famous entirely because of how terrible it was.
The East End wasn't just dangerous. It was the reason people had a word for places like this.
"Where else would I live?" Drake said. "The Diamond District?"
The doors opened again. Hollow-eyed, jerky-moving, the particular thousand-yard stare of people who had traded whatever they used to be for whatever kept them functioning—they shuffled toward the back and dropped into seats.
Jude took stock of the bus.
Gangsters. An arms dealer driving. What he was fairly sure were three working girls. A handful of addicts. Roughly a dozen people with visible weapons and the expressions of people who used them regularly.
It was like someone had combined sulfur, saltpeter, charcoal, and shrapnel into a sealed metal container, put it on wheels, and added seventeen strangers with competing interests.
You couldn't guarantee it would explode.
But one spark.
He looked at Drake, who was sitting comfortably with his new Glock resting on his knee, watching Gotham go past through the empty window frame.
Please, Jude thought. Please let this man know what he's doing. Just this once.
SCREECH.
Old Jack hit the brakes with both feet.
The bus lurched. Everyone pitched forward. Jude's face nearly found the back of the seat in front of him, and then the impact hit—metal against metal, the shriek of a bus frame arguing with another bus frame—and half the passengers went to the floor. Jude's Glock skittered away under a seat. Someone's elbow found his ribs on the way down.
"DAMN IT!" Old Jack was already standing, voice carrying to the back of the bus without apparent effort. "You can't drive?! Running a speed trial through the East End, hoping to arrive in hell early?!"
The other driver—middle-aged, smoker's voice, apparently with equally strong opinions—leaned out his window. "FUCK YOU! Keep yelling and I'll put a bullet in your whole situation! Get out of my lane!"
They went at it simultaneously. Cross-talk profanity delivered at volume and velocity, creative and specific, the kind of argument that had form to it—call, response, escalation, counter—like they'd done this before. Maybe with each other, even.
The traffic moved around them.
Cars drifted into the oncoming lane, crossed the solid line, navigated around the two crashed buses without slowing down. No horns. No one stopped.
Because this was Gotham, and everyone on this road was already late to something.
A dealer had a delivery schedule. Someone had a body that needed to be elsewhere before business hours. Life in the city did not pause for fender benders, even ones involving active hostilities.
"YOU BASTARD!" Old Jack's hand went under his seat.
He came up with a shotgun. Black, double-barrel, very clearly not something a transit authority would endorse. His beard was damp with righteous fury.
"Oh god," Jude said, very quietly. "This is real. This is actually happening in actual reality."
He found his Glock on the floor and held onto it. He'd owned it for fifteen minutes and already it felt like a personal relationship. A commitment. The only thing between him and whatever this morning was going to become.
Around him, passengers produced their weapons with the unhurried calm of people at a starting line. Revolvers. Semi-automatics. One man near the back had something compact and automatic that Jude didn't want to identify too precisely.
Nobody panicked. Nobody yelled. Nobody seemed to register this as an interruption to their Tuesday.
Drake patted his shoulder. "It's okay. We'll get off and find cover. Old Jack will finish up and keep driving. You'll still make it to work on time."
Jude looked at him.
"On time," Drake said again, like that was the sentence's load-bearing word. "Don't worry. This happens."