The night had gone deep and quiet.
Bane and his men left their safehouse and moved through the Narrows — Gotham's lowest district, where the buildings leaned against each other like drunks and the streetlights that still worked were the exception. The pavement was wet. The whole neighborhood smelled like standing water and old concrete.
Most people's mental image of a supervillain was a specific type: massive, physical, the kind of person who looked like they could eat a car. Built like geology rather than biology.
Bane was, in fact, exactly that kind of person.
Even so — even in the Narrows, even past midnight — Gotham had people with nowhere else to turn. And nowhere else to turn sometimes looked like a mountain of muscle in a luchador mask.
"Excuse me."
A small voice. Bane stopped.
A girl stood in the middle of the sidewalk — six, maybe seven, dressed in clothes that had been washed too many times in water that wasn't quite clean enough. She was holding a stuffed animal pulled from somewhere that hadn't been a store. She looked up at him the way children look at things they've decided not to be afraid of yet.
"Can you help my mom?"
Bane looked at her. His men stayed back.
"She has cancer," the girl said. "She needs medicine. She's in so much pain." A pause. The stuffed animal's ear bent under her fingers. "People say only God can help her now."
She held his gaze.
"Can you help?"
Bane was quiet for a moment. Then he raised one hand, and the two men who had started moving toward her stopped.
"Where do you live?"
She pointed at the building behind her. A rowhouse with a door that didn't sit quite straight in its frame anymore.
Bane walked inside.
He was in there for several minutes.
When he came back out, he was wiping something from his hands with a cloth that had been clean when he went in. He tucked it away without looking at it.
"Your mother won't suffer anymore." He looked at the girl, who had not moved. "Bury her."
A long silence.
"Don't go asking strangers for help again," he said. "In this world, suffering finds its own way to your door. You don't need to go looking for it."
He turned his face toward the east, where the skyline swallowed the last of the stars beneath a dark that had no bottom.
"There is no God in this city."
He began walking again.
"But Bane is here."
Gotham's nights had their own specific texture. Not silent — Gotham was never silent — but organized around a particular kind of quiet, the way a graveyard is quiet: settled, permanent, indifferent.
Grey rain came down in a thin mist that tasted faintly of rust and chemicals. Under the neon it caught color. The fog that rolled off the river carried industrial residue from the refineries upwind, and the two mixed somewhere above street level into something that wasn't quite either.
Deadshot stood on a rooftop and watched the city grin at him through the haze.
Below, a car blew through a red light and caught a pedestrian with a wall of standing water from the gutter. The pedestrian — without a notable pause — reached into his jacket, produced a submachine gun, and emptied half a magazine at the receding taillights.
Tac-tac-tac-tac-tac.
Deadshot watched this.
This city, he thought, is completely out of its mind.
He reached into his kit bag and assembled the anti-tank launcher and mortar with the relaxed efficiency of someone doing something they've done several thousand times. He thumbed a range to the building across the street, adjusted for wind, and checked the angle.
"I have to remind you, Deadshot." The voice came through his earpiece. "The contract specifies zero casualties."
"Ventriloquist." Deadshot set the mortar on the parapet. "You've been running Gotham crime for years. Since when do you put superhero clauses in a job brief?"
"People with dark intentions ought to look like it."
"Right." He settled the launcher against his shoulder. "If you weren't a regular client, I'd think you were on Batman's payroll. Speaking of which — what's that new doll you've got? He didn't give you a Robin suit, did he? With the bare legs and the traffic-light color scheme?"
Crack.
The mortar round arced skyward in a clean parabola. At almost the same moment, the rocket left the launcher.
The Ventriloquist's voice arrived over the earpiece half a second later.
"Fatalities result in payment deductions."
"Yeah, yeah, I know, relax—"
Both rounds arrived at the rooftop of the target building within a fraction of a second of each other. The result was less an explosion than a structural editorial — the top floor was opened like a tin can being peeled back, the roof gone, the space below exposed to the open air and the rain. Inside, figures scattered like disturbed insects.
Deadshot unslung his sniper rifle. Took position. Acquired targets.
"There," he said. "I told you I'd deliver Mad Hatter to you in one piece."
He did not fire.
"However." He let a beat pass. "My employer — due to your evident lack of faith in my professionalism — I find myself no longer motivated to complete this contract."
A pause on the other end.
"…Excuse me?"
"Mad Hatter just got the scare of his life. He'll go to ground within the hour. Re-acquiring him will be significantly more complicated — call it ten times the work. And this is Gotham, which means the contractor pool willing to operate here is already limited." He watched a figure below him sprint for a stairwell. "You wouldn't want this job to go unfinished, would you?"
Silence. Then, with great restraint:
"Get to the point."
Deadshot tilted his head back toward the rain, enunciated clearly, and said:
"I want more money."
The night spread itself over Gotham like something being slowly revealed — patient, total, shameless.
Cheshire moved through the empty corridors of Gotham Heights High School with the unhurried attention of someone taking a late evening walk, heels silent on the linoleum, one hand trailing the lockers. Outside the windows: sirens, shouting, the sound of a city that had been startled and hadn't settled back down yet.
"I should warn you," the voice in her earpiece said — the Ventriloquist, or rather, the small figure on the Ventriloquist's hand, which was apparently the relevant authority now. "The target, Mr. Zsasz, is a lethal combatant. I don't doubt your capability, but the priority is the student hostages. Separate him from the girls first, then engage—"
"Oh, is it?"
Cheshire's fingers traced down the curve of her waist to her hip, then up along the edge of her smiling-cat mask, adjusting nothing, touching everything. Her voice carried the warm laziness of someone who'd already decided how this was going to end.
"I actually think we can simplify this considerably. Don't you?"
"What are you talk—"
"She isn't talking to you."
The voice came from the shadows at the far end of the corridor. Then the shadow itself stepped forward.
The moonlight through the high windows was cold and even. It landed on Victor Zsasz without mercy — every scar on his body catching it differently, a map of tallied kills inscribed in raised tissue across muscle that had nothing soft about it. He was barefoot. He was barely anything else.
His eyes moved to Cheshire with the particular attention of someone examining a problem they've already decided they want.
"Why not let me see your face?" His head tilted. "A woman like you — it seems a waste."
"You know how it is." Cheshire turned fully toward him for the first time. "Cats never take off their masks." She let a moment pass. "Especially in front of exhibitionists."
The blade materialized in Zsasz's hand from nowhere — a short, thin thing, the kind designed for intimacy rather than reach.
Cheshire exhaled. She reached behind her back and produced a telescoping blade from one hand, then began pulling throwing stars from somewhere improbable — her neckline, her cuffs, the inner lining of her jacket — with the efficient calm of a hamster accessing hidden storage.
She tilted her head.
"Catfight?"
Victor Zsasz's smile bent into something crooked and pleased.
"Cat Quest."
Deep below Wayne Manor, in the Batcave's main operations bay, Ethan Cross sat in the command chair doing something Bruce Wayne had never, in the entire history of his career, done at this console.
He was running three hired contractors simultaneously through a voice modulator set to the Ventriloquist's register, while Arnold Wesker himself crouched in the corner of the cave trying to convince the environment that he was a dog.
"— fine, name your price. What? More money?" Ethan waved a hand at the screen. "Granted. Granted. Add it to the invoice."
He ended the call and turned around.
Tim Drake was standing in front of him holding a piece of paper.
Tim Drake — Robin, the third, sixteen years old, demonstrably the most analytically capable person in the room, and currently the person Ethan had been hoping to avoid for the last forty-five minutes. He held the paper up:
BATMAN I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU ARE PAYING OUTSIDE CONTRACTORS TO HANDLE BANE INSTEAD OF TAKING ME WITH YOU.
Tim looked at the Ventriloquist, who was doing an earnest impression of a resting dog in the background.
Tim's fist tightened at his side. He made a visible decision not to hit Arnold Wesker while Batman was watching, and continued writing:
AND NOT ONLY HAVE YOU BROUGHT A CRIMINAL INTO THE CAVE, YOU'RE CALLING OTHER CRIMINALS FROM THE OPERATIONS CONSOLE IN FRONT OF ME!!
Ethan set down the modulator. Exhaled slowly.
Tim went quiet despite himself. He watched Batman's posture and decided, with the instincts of someone trained to read body language, that something was different tonight.
After a moment, he asked:
"Is this about Jean-Paul?"
Azrael. The apprentice who'd died in his place — whose death was the story Ethan had handed Gordon to explain the rumor of Batman's death. A name that carried real weight, even for him.
"Not entirely." Ethan stood. "Listen to me."
He crossed the distance between them and put both hands on Tim's shoulders — turned him until there was no looking away.
"I'm retiring."
The word landed in the silence of the cave and stayed there.
"I— what?"
"Every season ends." Ethan kept his voice even — not distant, but careful, the way you'd speak to someone you didn't want to break something for. "You grow up or you don't. Batman is an eight-year-old's nightmare that no one ever woke up from. It's time to wake up."
He held the boy's eyes.
"I want to do one last thing for Gotham. And then I'm going to go live a normal life — the one I should have had. And so are you."
Tim said nothing.
"You're brilliant, Tim. You've got parents. You have a future that has nothing to do with any of this." A pause. "You have no idea how rare that is."
"You should be in school — actually in school, not between missions. You should be studying something you chose for yourself, and one day you should meet someone. She'll have gold hair or dark red hair, or something in between — she might be a Gordon or a Brown or someone you haven't imagined yet, but one day she'll have your name."
His voice dropped slightly.
"You'll be young and ridiculous together and it will be the best thing that ever happened to you. That's a life I can't have anymore." He released Tim's shoulders. "But you still can."
"We should both get out while getting out is still possible."
The sound that followed came from behind them both.
A tray hit the cave floor. Fine china and a silver tea service and the remains of whatever Alfred had been carrying scattered across the stone in a ringing, final crash.
Alfred Pennyworth stood in the entryway with both hands pressed over his face. His shoulders were shaking.
He wasn't trying to hold it in. He wasn't managing it. He was crying the way people cry when something they stopped believing in walks back through the door.
"Is it true?" His voice came out wrecked. "Bruce — is it true?" A breath. "Am I — am I actually awake right now—"
He couldn't finish the sentence.
"Bruce?"