"If you're an accomplished criminal — or working hard to become one — then Gotham is your city. It will satisfy every fantasy you've ever had about scale and method.
Petty fraud, armed robbery, the occasional lunatic wiring you up with explosives and making you solve his idiotic riddles to the sound of a clock ticking you toward oblivion — Gotham has it all.
The lower East Side where gangs breed like rats. The sewers where things worse than rats live. Blackgate Prison. City Hall. And, of course, Arkham Asylum, wrapped in its rusted razor wire like a bad secret no one bothered to bury properly. Plenty of people like you have checked in. None of them were disappointed.
Oh, you're worried about some man in a rubber bat costume interfering with your plans? Ha. This isn't a comic book.
Idealism doesn't bloom in poisoned soil.
One last thing — many people believe Falcone ordered the hit on the Waynes. A smaller group thinks it was the Court of Owls, given that Wayne Enterprises' revitalization plans were threatening a lot of powerful interests. My advice? Don't look into it. Don't even ask.
Enjoy your stay."
Will Quinn woke from the dream the same way he always did — lurching upright, sheets soaked through, the inside of his skull feeling like something was expanding against the bone.
He sat there for a moment, breathing.
Then he got up.
The floorboards groaned under his bare feet. The hallway hit him immediately — damp walls, mold working its way through the plaster, and underneath it something sour, like a tin of peanuts left to rot for a decade. He stood there, chest tight, forcing himself to take shallow breaths until his lungs stopped protesting.
The corridor was narrow enough that he could touch both walls without fully extending his arms. Noise leaked from behind every door — a television hissing static, two people arguing in overlapping voices, a woman making the professional sounds of someone being paid to sound enthusiastic.
He pushed into the bathroom at the end of the hall.
The light stuttered, yellow and weak, throwing the room in and out of shadow. Will ran cold water from the tap and scrubbed his face hard with both hands, standing over the rust-stained sink until the fog behind his eyes thinned.
Three months. He'd been in this body for three months, and the mirror still made him flinch.
The face looking back at him was — objectively — better than the one he'd been born with. Sharp-featured, European, a jaw that could've belonged to a cologne advertisement under better circumstances. Dark brown hair gone frizzy from neglect. Grey eyes threaded with red, sunk deep in their sockets. His skin had the ashen, used-up quality of someone who hadn't slept a full night since the Cold War.
He looked like a vampire who'd recently lost a fight.
Still. Better than three months ago.
Three months ago he'd woken up face-down in a drainage gutter off the lower East Side — naked, possessionless, and bleeding from a stab wound through his left side. The wound had been stitched closed by someone who'd learned surgery from watching a YouTube tutorial on embroidery. The sutures were crooked, the surrounding skin still hot and swollen.
Whoever this body had belonged to, they'd had enemies. The kind of enemies you don't go to a hospital over.
Will had filed that away and moved on, because the first useful thing he'd found — buried in a trash can, half-soaked from the previous night's rain — was a newspaper.
He'd read the masthead three times.
The Gotham Gazette.
He'd sat there in the gutter, naked and bleeding, and stared at those two words for a very long time.
Gotham.
He knew the word. He knew what it meant the way most people knew what it meant — through movies, mostly. A handful of scenes. Christian Bale doing a voice that sounded like gravel being processed through a garbage disposal. He was not, had never been, a DC fan. If he'd been given a choice, he'd have taken Queens. He'd have taken Metropolis. He'd have taken anywhere that had a flying man in a cape available for emergencies.
Instead he got this.
"You could've just let me die," he said, to no one in particular, tilting his face toward the water-stained ceiling. "But sure. Sure, this is better. Thank you."
He extended one finger at the ceiling.
The ceiling did not respond.
The one thing anchoring him — the single thread he hadn't let go of — was Batman.
He knew Batman existed here, or had the potential to exist here. That was the whole point of Gotham, wasn't it? The city was the myth, and the myth required the man. Find Bruce Wayne, find the future Batman, attach himself to that orbit somehow, and his odds of surviving this city climbed from negligible to merely poor.
It wasn't much of a plan. It was the only one he had.
Which explained the scene that unfolded on the lower East Side that morning three months ago: a naked man with a stab wound wandering the sidewalk clutching a damp newspaper over his groin, stopping strangers to ask if they knew how to get in touch with Bruce Wayne.
Nobody talked to him. Several people crossed the street.
The police arrived within twenty minutes.
The interrogation room smelled like old cigarettes baked into the walls over the course of several decades.
Will had been given a paper gown that did almost nothing, seated between a gang member with a mohawk lacquered into aggressive geometry and a man whose body odor had achieved something close to physical mass. Between the two of them, Will — the naked guy — somehow read as the most coherent person on the bench.
He was called in third.
The detective across the table from him was heavyset and methodical, somewhere in his forties, with a carefully trimmed mustache and a dark reddish-brown suit that had no business being as clean as it was given the building it was in. His hands rested flat on the table — wide knuckles, old scars crosshatching the skin, the kind of hands that had been in more situations than he'd put in reports.
"Name," the man said.
Will hesitated. "…Will. You can call me Will."
"Any psychiatric history?"
"No. Absolutely not. Someone stabbed me and I lost my memory, look—" He pulled the paper gown aside to show the sutured wound before the man could reach any conclusions. "That's a stab wound. I didn't stab myself."
The detective looked at it with the expression of a man who had seen significantly stranger things before his first coffee.
"That doesn't explain the public nudity. You've violated the Gotham Public Health and Safety Ordinance. Three days' holding. In that time I'll make attempts to locate your next of kin—"
"Hey, Gordon!" A uniformed officer cut across the room with a wave. "Drinks after shift?"
The detective — Gordon — glanced up briefly. "Barbara's had me on a strict program. Sorry."
"Shame." The officer moved on.
Gordon.
Will's mind caught on the name like fabric on a nail. He leaned forward, keeping his voice low.
"You're Gordon. James Gordon."
The man said nothing.
"Can you get me a meeting with Batman? The one with the black cowl, the ears on the mask—"
Gordon raised his left eyebrow.
The expression wasn't recognition. It was something more careful than that.
Will read it wrong. Of course Gordon knew who Batman was — the man lit the signal, that wasn't exactly classified. Maybe he just needed to be more specific about the value of the meeting.
"I have information. About the Joker." He paused. "You know who the Joker is."
The right eyebrow joined the left. The careful look solidified into something more certain.
Will's stomach dropped slightly. He switched approaches.
"Okay. Forget Batman. Just — take me to Bruce Wayne. That's it. That's all I'm asking."
For the first time, Gordon's expression changed.
He exhaled — a long, slow breath — and reached for the intake form he'd been filling out. He rolled it once, deliberately, and dropped it into the waste bin beside his chair.
"I'm going to call Arkham and have someone come—"
"No." Will's hand shot across the table and grabbed Gordon's sleeve before the word finished leaving his mouth.
Gordon's right hand moved toward his holster on reflex. He stopped when he saw Will's face — no aggression there, just naked panic.
He settled back, slowly.
"People with psychiatric conditions rarely recognize them as such," Gordon said.
"I don't have a psychiatric condition."
"You've mentioned Batman — a figure from comic books. You've claimed intelligence on the Joker — a name that means nothing to me. And now you're asking to see Bruce Wayne." Gordon's voice was even, not unkind. "Son, everyone in Gotham knows Bruce Wayne is dead. He died in Crime Alley. Same night as his parents."
The room went quiet.
Will sat back.
Outside, the precinct ground on — phones ringing, someone typing, the mohawk man arguing about his constitutional rights in the hallway.
He stared at Gordon's face and understood, for the first time, that this was not the Gotham he thought he knew.