Part 3 — Escape
Epilogue
---
The project had made it through stage five and no further.
The terrarium sat between them on the floor of Barbara's room in a state of honest incompletion — the plants placed, the driftwood positioned, the soil layered correctly underneath — but neither of them had the energy left to seal it and begin the data log. They agreed on this without discussing it, the way people agree on things when both of them are thinking the same thing and talking about it would just take more time.
Ben came down the stairs with his jacket back on, the bandaging on his left wrist straight, and stopped on the bottom step.
Jim Gordon was in the hallway below, already reaching for his police radio with the particular movement of a man whose body has learned to respond to certain sounds before his mind has finished processing them.
"This is Commissioner Gordon. Over."
Ben stayed where he was.
The voice from the radio was young and slightly too controlled, the way voices get when someone is delivering news they'd prefer not to deliver. "Sir, we need you here. There's been a breakout at Arkham. One patient got away. Thirteen people are dead. Batman is in pursuit."
The hallway went quiet enough that Ben could hear the rain starting outside.
Something moved through him that wasn't fear. It was colder than fear and more focused — the particular anger that arrives when something you knew was going to happen happens, and the knowing doesn't make it any easier to hold. Thirteen people. Thirteen people in a building designed to contain more than one man, and the containment had failed the way it always failed, because the system treated that building as a solution rather than an executing ground
"Which inmate?"
Jim's voice had already changed register — still controlled, but carrying the specific weight of a man who had done this job long enough to know the answer before the radio gave it to him.
A pause on the other end. Brief, but there.
"The Joker, sir."
Jim closed his eyes for a single second. Then he reached for his keys. "I'm on my way." He raised his voice toward the stairs without looking up. "Barbara, I'm heading out. Lock up when your friend leaves."
The door closed behind him. The sound of his car starting came through the wall a moment later.
Ben came the rest of the way down the stairs.
He stood in the hallway and let the thought run its course, because stopping it partway through was worse than finishing it. The Joker was out. Thirteen people were already dead. Batman was somewhere in the city running a pursuit that would end, if it ended well, with the Joker back behind the same walls he'd just walked out of. And in some number of months — six, twelve, eighteen — they would be back here again. Different night but same radio call.
Should he go out. Find the Joker first. End it in a way that actually ended it.
He turned the option over once and set it down.
Batman was already in the field, and whatever else he was, he was experienced and capable and this was his city in a way that Ben's wasn't yet. Going out now meant operating in the same space as Batman without knowing where he was or what he was doing, and that was how mistakes happened. The exposure wasn't worth it.
Not tonight.
He picked up his jacket from the hook by the door and stepped out into the rain.
---
The dock was quiet except for the water moving against the pilings and the faint sound of traffic somewhere across the harbor.
Carmine Falcone dropped his empty wine glass off the edge of the dock without watching it fall. He put both hands in his pockets and stood at the water's edge in his white suit, looking at the Joker with the expression of a man who has done the preparation and is now ready to have the conversation.
The contrast between them was stark — the white suit and the purple one, the stillness of Falcone against the barely-contained energy of the man across from him. Two different philosophies about how power worked, standing four feet apart on a Gotham dock at two in the morning.
"I'll be direct," Falcone said. "I'm a businessman. You're a businessman, in your own particular way. I have a job that needs doing, and you are, by any reasonable assessment, the right person for it." He paused. "You get to kill the Batman. I provide the tools and the resources. In exchange, a small favor."
The Joker's expression shifted in a way that had nothing to do with amusement and everything to do with offense. "I don't need anyone's help dealing with the Bat." The warmth that had been in his voice in the asylum corridor was entirely absent. What replaced it was flat and direct, the voice underneath the performance. "I've been managing that particular relationship since before you knew his name."
"I know you don't need it." Falcone's tone didn't change. "I'm not suggesting you do. I'm suggesting a partnership. My resources, your capabilities. The Bat is a problem we both share and a problem we both benefit from solving. The favor I'm asking is small relative to what you receive." He held the Joker's eyes. "I'm not asking you to work for me. I'm asking you to work with me."
The Joker was quiet for a moment. In the dark, with the harbor moving behind him and the rain beginning to spot the surface of the water, he looked at Carmine Falcone with the specific attention of someone taking a genuine measurement.
"I'm listening," he said.
---
The chaos at Arkham had organized itself into the particular controlled disorder of a major crime scene — police vehicles and hospital units distributed across the grounds, the floodlights running, personnel moving with the urgent purposefulness of people with defined roles and too much to do. Orderlies were being interviewed. The bodies of the dead had been covered. The men Batman had left unconscious in the corridor were being processed one by one, moved to vehicles, their masks removed for identification.
The Batmobile came to a stop at the perimeter and Batman walked from it toward the building at the pace of someone for whom urgency had moved past the point of being visible in the stride. The officers near the entrance registered him and moved out of the way, the instinct of people who have learned to get out of the way of certain things.
One officer stepped forward anyway, the particular reflex of someone newer to the job. "Sir, you can't be —"
"Let him through." Gordon's voice from twenty feet away, not loud. "He's with me."
Batman moved to where Gordon was standing, near the entrance corridor, an orderly beside him with the expression of someone who had been answering the same questions for twenty minutes.
"I need a full inmate count," Gordon was telling the orderly. "Every cell, every ward. The Joker may not have been the only objective tonight. Confirm that and report back."
The orderly moved off. Gordon turned.
"He got away," Gordon said. It wasn't a question.
"Third vehicle. Staged separately from the other two. most likely The other two were decoys — good ones." Batman looked at the corridor, at the evidence markers the police had placed around the signs of the night's work. "I was supposed to chase them."
Gordon absorbed this with the stillness of a man who is too tired to be surprised and too professional to stop working. "That level of coordination costs something. Planning, resources, inside information on our response patterns." He started walking and Batman fell into step beside him. "The Joker's gang was supposed to be finished. Most of them are either in here, in Blackgate, or dead. So where did twenty people with assault rifles come from?"
"Someone built them a new one," Batman said. "The underground movement you've been tracking — this must be connected to it. This wasn't the Joker organizing from inside Arkham. Someone organized this for him."
"Which means someone wanted him out badly enough to pay for it."
"And wanted him to owe them a favor."
They walked in silence for a moment, the sounds of the scene around them — radio chatter, the movement of personnel, the distant sound of a vehicle leaving the grounds — filling the space between them.
"The surveillance footage," Batman said. "I need access to it."
"Already told my people to preserve it." Gordon looked at him sideways.
"Show it to me."
Gordon nodded once, and they continued down the corridor.
---
The road into Gotham at this hour was nearly empty, the kind of emptiness that made the distance feel longer than it was. The highway ran straight and dark, and the only thing moving on it for a long stretch was a sleek black RV that gave no indication from the outside of what it was carrying.
Inside, it looked like what it was supposed to look like — a motor home, the interior fitted with the normal inventory of long-distance travel. The deception was the point. Nothing about the vehicle was meant to attract a second look.
Flag drove, Helena in the passenger seat, both of them in civilian clothes. The city outside was still a smear of distant lights ahead of them.
Behind the front seats, Lt. Steel sat on the sofa with his eyes closed in the way of someone who had learned to rest without sleeping, every muscle in his body maintaining a stillness that looked like relaxation and wasn't. Across from him, Rojo had found a bag of chips in the fridge and was working through them at a volume that was probably deliberate. Steel's expression didn't change.
"Look alive," Flag said, from the front. "We're approaching Gotham."
Steel opened his eyes. Rojo looked out the window, watching the welcome sign pass.
She sat back. "So much for working on my tan."
Waller's briefing had been thorough and repeated — two days of it alongside the Xenoskin familiarization, the same points emphasized each time. Civilian discretion. No public incidents. And no contact with the Batman. The last point had been stated first and reiterated last, which was how Waller indicated priorities.
Helena looked out at the Gotham skyline as it began to define itself against the night sky — the towers, the bridges, the particular quality of the city's darkness, which was different from other cities' darkness in ways that were difficult to specify but immediately obvious. She'd been here once before, briefly, and the impression it had left had not improved with time.
"Something wrong?" Flag asked, eyes on the road.
"No," Helena said. She watched the skyline for another moment. "Let's just get this done and get out."