I hit the copper roof and slide and there's nothing to grab and the edge is coming up fast and I get three fingers into a seam and they strip the glove and tear bloody but I slow enough to catch the iron gutter with my other hand.
I hang there, three hundred feet above the smog layer, bleeding down my arm, listening to the sirens above me.
Below, a cargo train moves along the elevated transit line, slow and heavy, heading down from the Canopy into the lower city.
I let go.
I drop twenty feet into the open coal car. The black rocks hit me like a fist. I roll, protect the flask against my ribs, and lie there in the coal staring up at the twinkling lights of Vexar's estate going away behind me.
Two ingredients. One left.
* * *
The harbor district at midnight. Black trench water that isn't really water, more like old oil and chemical runoff. The docks half-rotted, the smell so bad it makes my eyes water even through the bandana.
Luna Serpents come up at night to feed on slaughterhouse drainage. I stand at the edge of a pier with two bismuth rounds left in the cylinder and wait.
The water bubbles. A cold white glow spreads under the surface.
It comes up to feed.
Forty feet of wrong biology. White scales where they're not translucent. Bioluminescent glands behind the jawline, swollen and pulsing.
The serpent mercury is in those glands. Base solvent. The vehicle that carries Bane through the bloodstream without burning up.
I shoot it in the skull with the first round.
The serpent goes absolutely berserk and destroys the pier.
I go into the water.
The cold is a physical event, like getting hit by a car. The oily sludge coats my duster and drags and the wounded serpent is somewhere below, large and furious.
I kick toward where its carcass is rolling at the surface, get a hand on a rough scale, haul myself up.
I find the gland. Drive the brass syringe in. Pull.
Silver mercury floods the barrel. Immediately the edges of my vision start to shimmer.
The hallucinations come with the mercury, always, even from outside the body. Faces in the dark water around me. Mouths moving with no sound.
I cap the syringe. Slide off the carcass. Drag myself onto a rocky embankment.
I lie there for one minute exactly, watching the faces in the water talk to me about things I don't understand.
Then I get up.
Three ingredients.
All three.
I walk back through the hallucinating dark toward the cathedral, and I don't stop, and the faces follow me for four blocks.