Rooftop to rooftop, Ethan ran.
Where the gap was narrow he pushed off on wheels. Where the surface was flat he switched to legs — long, ground-covering strides, the Bat-Rex chassis carrying four passengers with the particular efficiency of a body that had been designed for something that moved fast and didn't ask questions about the terrain. Seventy miles an hour on the flat sections. More on the downslopes.
Behind him: nothing. And then, gradually, further behind him: still nothing.
Good, he thought. Run, then. I'll be somewhere else.
He permitted himself, for approximately four seconds, the specific satisfaction of outrunning something that could catch rockets. Then he put it away and started thinking about the next problem, because there was always a next problem and the window for thinking was the run.
Solomon Grundy — pale, enormous, currently holding a rocket launcher that had become less useful in the last few minutes — pressed one hand against the side of his face where a green fist had introduced itself at high velocity.
It had, he reflected, been a very fast fist.
He had gotten too enthusiastic in the pursuit, broken formation, gotten ahead of the group, and the dinosaur had peeled off from its escape route just long enough to hit him in the face before resuming. If Bane hadn't caught him mid-stumble, he'd have gone down hard.
Killer Moth and Bird arrived at his shoulder looking like men who had spent the last half hour being shot at by someone with impeccable aim from a moving platform and had not enjoyed the experience.
"Are we still chasing?" Bird asked.
"No," Bane said.
The relief was immediate and collective and nobody acknowledged it out loud, because Bane's employees had learned that acknowledging relief in front of Bane produced a specific look that meant your relief was premature.
Bane stood in the center of the street — not the side, not near cover, directly in the open center — and looked at the rooftop where the Bat-Rex had disappeared. The city around him was beginning to produce its pre-dawn sounds: a distant siren, a delivery truck somewhere, the particular quality of quiet that Gotham had between three and five in the morning when even its nocturnal population was reconsidering its choices.
He looked like someone waiting for something that hadn't arrived yet.
"Killer Moth," he said.
Moth straightened. "I'll have a full analysis on your desk — the physical transformation, the unknown capabilities, the tactical pattern—"
"Don't bother." Bane's voice had changed register — not louder, but more concentrated, the way a lens focuses rather than amplifies. "The analysis can wait. What we need is time, and time requires that Batman be busy." He paused. "Give him something to do. Something that keeps his attention here, in the city, on the immediate crisis. Something that makes us harder to find."
"And the confrontation?"
"Will happen on better terms." He turned. "The Batman ran because he isn't certain he can beat me. And I ran—" he said this without apparent discomfort, as a statement of operational fact — "because I'm not yet certain I can beat him. He's more careful than I modeled. He gave me nothing. Not a real blow, not a real exchange — he maneuvered, he performed, and he left. That's not the Batman I studied."
He began to move — building-edge to building-edge, each jump longer than the last, the Venom giving each landing a weight that cracked whatever it found.
Somewhere in the distance, a police siren rose and fell like an animal acknowledging something passing through its territory.
"The war changes shape," he said, to the earpiece. "Prepare. Maintain radio contact." A pause, very brief. "And do not engage the police. Don't damage the streets unnecessarily." His voice carried something that was almost, in the dark, almost tender. "This city will be mine. I'd rather inherit it intact."
Thud.
Four people hit the alley floor with the collective impact of a group that had not been set down so much as deposited, and the sound echoed off brick walls that had absorbed decades of similar sounds without comment.
The city continued around them, indifferent.
Cheshire sat up first. Looked at the sky above the alley mouth — still dark, first grey edges of dawn just starting. Looked at her hands. Both present. Looked at the Tattooed Man-shaped absence in the group.
"I don't remember Batman being able to do that," she said.
Deadshot spat something red onto the alley floor. "He clearly spent a long time deciding between Batman and Dinosaur Man." He delivered this as a straight factual statement, the way a man delivers a joke when he is too tired to inflect it. "Years, probably. The internal conflict must have been significant."
"WHERE ARE MY PANTS," Killer Croc announced.
"You're not wearing pants. You haven't been wearing pants."
"WHERE'S MY MONEY."
Deadshot let his head fall back against the wall. Above them, Gotham's pre-dawn sky had the washed-out quality of a photograph taken in the wrong light — not dark enough to be night anymore, not bright enough to be morning. The in-between hour.
He thought about the earpiece, still in. He thought about Arnold Wesker, currently sitting against the opposite wall searching his jacket pockets with the focused distress of a man who had lost something important.
He thought about Floyd Lawton, twenty-seven years old, professional, currently alive when three people who had been sitting near him were not.
He thought about Zoe.
She has parents, he told himself. Good ones, probably better than me. She doesn't need me to survive this. She doesn't need me to exist at all. He had held this thought before, in other alleys, other cities, other moments of post-contract reckoning. It had always been a comfort, the kind of comfort that works by making your own survival irrelevant.
It wasn't working as well as it used to.
I want to see her grow up.
The thought arrived without fanfare, without the emotional architecture he usually built around anything this direct. Just the bare fact of it.
I want to be there. I want to see everything. I want to be in the room for the things that matter and I want to die old in a way she'll remember and I want—
Floyd Lawton, who had killed people on four continents and slept fine afterward, sat in a Gotham alley at four-thirty in the morning and admitted to himself, without qualifier, that he was afraid of missing his daughter's life.
That's a coward's reason, he thought.
Yes, he agreed with himself. It is.
Good.
He turned his head toward Arnold Wesker.
"Enough, Arnold." His voice was even. "Tell whoever's behind you that I'm out. Whoever they are, whatever they're paying — I'm out."
Wesker found his glasses. Put them on. Looked at Deadshot with the expression of a man who was going to relay this message and was not optimistic about the response.
The elevator doors opened on the top floor of the GCPD building.
A civilian administrative assistant — young, on the early shift, holding a manila folder of overtime requisition forms — looked up from where she was standing by the copier and found Batman standing in her hallway.
The folder hit the floor.
Ethan held his expression, stepped over the folder with the measured confidence of someone who had been in this building many times and found it entirely unremarkable, turned left at the stairwell sign, and took the stairs to the roof.
The grappling hook, he noted internally, looking at the device he'd borrowed from the Bat-cave's equipment inventory, is not intuitive. He had used it twice. Both times had involved a period of recalibration that he preferred not to think about.
Commissioner James Gordon was on the roof. He was standing at the Bat-Signal, a large man with a white mustache and the posture of someone who had been doing a difficult job for a long time and had stopped expecting it to get easier. He had the signal on. Then off. Then on again, the beam cutting up into the pre-dawn sky and then disappearing.
"I'm not playing with it," Gordon said, without turning around. "I was — I was testing the mechanism."
"Gordon."
"The mechanism needed testing."
"What did you need."
Gordon turned. He had the look he always had — not the look of a man who trusted Batman, exactly, because trusting Batman fully was not something Gordon's operational instincts permitted, but the look of a man who had decided that the alternative to trusting Batman was considerably worse.
"The streets," he said. "The Arkham situation. It's past the point where I can manage the optics." He rubbed the bridge of his nose under his glasses. "The mayor has decided to escalate."
Ethan waited.
"He's calling in the National Guard."
The National Guard — state-level military, the only regular armed force legally permitted to operate on American soil against domestic situations. Calling them into Gotham meant the mayor had looked at the current state of things and concluded that the existing law enforcement infrastructure was insufficient. Which was, by any fair assessment, accurate. The problem was what it implied about everything else.
The National Guard, Ethan thought. Against Killer Croc and the Mad Hatter and Victor Zsasz. He thought about the last time regular military logistics had encountered a Gotham-class situation and how long the after-action reports had been. That will go extremely well.
What he said was: "When?"
"Soon. A few days, maybe less." Gordon's jaw was set. "I can't stop him. It's a political move as much as anything — Krol wants to be seen doing something decisive before the election. The problem is that decisive and effective are not the same thing, and the people he's sending in don't know that yet."
"And the other thing."
Gordon looked at him.
"You said 'more complicated.' There's a second item."
Gordon exhaled. "They've put you on the target list. Lethal force authorized." He said it the way doctors say bad diagnoses — factually, without inflection, because inflection would be an indulgence. "I'll do what I can to manage it on my end. But you need to stay back, Batman. Stay visible enough to reassure people but out of the direct operational theater. Let the Guard run their deployment, let me handle the friction, and don't give the political element anything to point at."
Stay out of it, Ethan thought.
He held his expression.
Inside: the specific relief of a man who has just been given official permission to do the thing he was going to do anyway.
"I understand," he said.
Gordon looked at him. The Commissioner had spent twenty years reading people across desks and through interrogation glass, and something in Batman's tone made him narrow his eyes slightly.
"You understand," he repeated.
"I'll limit my involvement with the Guard's operations."
"Batman—"
"I won't get in their way."
"That's not what I—" Gordon stopped. Pinched the bridge of his nose again. "Fine. Fine, you can keep your hand in the Bane situation — like I could actually stop you if I tried. But keep your head down with the Guard. The last thing this city needs is a war between you and the federal—"
Bwee-bwee-bwee.
The Bat-communicator in Ethan's belt interrupted them both — the specific short-burst tone that meant incoming, priority, not a test.
They both looked at it.