"Jason Woodrue — the Floronic Man — is an eco-terrorist in the most literal possible sense. Compared to what he has historically attempted, Ivy's hobby of turning people into trees is approximately as threatening as a strongly-worded letter about composting."
Gordon opened his mouth. Closed it.
Ethan, operating entirely on the momentum of a lifelong comics reader who had just been handed a license to be the most knowledgeable person in any room, kept going.
"The Green operates through two primary councils. The Parliament of Trees governs the woody growth — ancient, slow, thinking in centuries. The May Queen represents the vines and flowering plants — adaptive, fast, structurally subordinate to the Parliament, which is why most people underestimate her." He was moving through the file now, cross-referencing. "The Parliament's chosen avatar is Swamp Thing. Woodrue is a low-level proxy — the kind of appointment the Parliament makes when it needs a body in the field and isn't being particular about quality."
"But Ivy is different," he continued, without pausing for Gordon to process any of this. "Ivy is the May Queen's avatar. Which means in terms of raw elemental authority, she is Swamp Thing's peer. She outranks Woodrue categorically. She always has."
Gordon took off his glasses. Rubbed his eyes. Put them back on.
"Batman," he said, with the measured tone of a man who had been in law enforcement for thirty years and was currently experiencing the limits of that preparation, "your briefing style has changed."
"The information is accurate."
"I almost didn't follow it."
"Only someone very foolish would fail to follow it. I was quite clear."
Gordon stared at him.
"...Right," Gordon said. "Moving on."
He tapped the document envelope.
"There's something else about this file I want to flag. The people who handed it to me — patrol officers, standard shift — this is not the kind of analysis they're capable of producing. I know their work. This isn't it." He pushed his glasses up. "But I cross-referenced everything in it against our own intelligence and confirmed records, and it all checks out. The details are too specific — body posture, attack sequencing, the precise escape route — to be anything other than firsthand knowledge. It reads less like an investigative report and more like someone's operational notes."
"Because it is," Ethan said.
"I was going to say that." Gordon frowned. "The same thought. Simultaneously."
He let that sit for a moment — the flash of something he couldn't quite name, a sense of operating in sync with someone he'd worked alongside for years and trusted, despite everything, precisely because they kept doing this: finishing his sentences, seeing the same angle at the same moment.
He pushed the feeling aside. Jim Gordon did not do nostalgia on active cases.
"Someone deliberately suppressed this for days," Ethan said. "They wanted the right moment to introduce it — late enough that the investigation couldn't reach its own conclusions first, early enough to make sure it landed on the right desk at the right time. Whoever wrote this didn't want us to find Woodrue and Ivy. They wanted us to be pointed at them."
"Killer Moth," Gordon said.
"Almost certainly." Ethan set the photograph down. "Bane's intelligence operation. He's been thorough. The question of how a living tree the size of Woodrue was moving through Gotham undetected for weeks — the answer is someone was managing the surveillance gaps. And a scientist of Goldblum's caliber being kidnapped without the GCPD knowing his full profile until now?" He let that hang. "That's not incompetence. That's a managed information environment."
Gordon had the expression he got when he was angry at himself for missing something. It was a familiar expression.
"The whole thing is a diversion," Ethan said. "Bane needs time. He's using Woodrue and Ivy to create a situation that demands my attention and keeps me from pressing the pursuit." He paused. "Which means he handed me exactly what I needed."
Gordon waited.
"Woodrue's pattern is consistent across every documented incident," Ethan said. "He's not sophisticated in his ambitions — he wants to extend the Green to every organism on the planet. Every significant encounter follows the same arc: identify a mechanism to trigger mass transformation, acquire the technical capability, attempt deployment, fail, be stopped by Ivy and/or Swamp Thing. The variation is in the mechanism. Alec Holland's accident created Swamp Thing through a specific biochemical interaction with swamp water and a proprietary formula. Woodrue has been trying to replicate that process at scale for years."
"The scientist," Gordon said.
"Goldblum was developing a large-area biological dispersal agent for GothCorp. Military applications — wide-coverage, atmospheric delivery, designed to affect large populations simultaneously." Ethan looked at the ceiling for a moment. "If you give Woodrue access to that delivery mechanism and Ivy's biochemical expertise, you have the framework for something that could, theoretically, initiate mass transformation. Not permanently — Woodrue's never managed permanent results — but long enough to matter."
"So why do they need Goldblum alive?"
"Because it's not working." He picked the photograph up again. "The formula's incomplete. The transformation is unstable — temporary, degrading into tissue damage rather than genuine conversion. They need Goldblum to stabilize it." He set it down. "Which means they haven't deployed yet. Which means there's still time."
Gordon exhaled. "Slaughter Swamp."
"Slaughter Swamp."
Gordon pulled a map from the envelope. "That's forty square kilometers of protected wetland with no road access and restricted flyover zones from the airport. If they're in there—"
"They're in there."
"—finding them is a different problem from knowing they're there."
Ethan looked at the map.
This is where the comics knowledge runs out, he thought. I can tell you what Woodrue wants. I can tell you roughly where Ivy operates. I can tell you the arc of the story because I've read the arc of the story across thirty years of publication history. What I cannot tell you is the exact grid coordinate of a specific camp in forty square kilometers of swamp.
He thought about Swamp Thing. He thought about the Green, and what it meant for navigation — a network connecting every root system in the swamp, every photosynthetic cell, a distributed intelligence that would know exactly where its avatar and his associate were operating.
He thought about the one person who could translate that network into an address.
Harley Quinn, he thought. Ivy's best friend. The one person in Gotham who Ivy trusts completely and contacts whenever she's planning something. If Ivy is in that swamp, she'll have told Harley. And if Harley knows—
"I have a plan," he said.
Gordon looked at him.
"A genuinely excellent plan," Ethan said, with the conviction of a man who had just put two pieces together that he was personally very pleased about. "We need Harley Quinn. Former associate of the Joker, human GPS for approximately half of Gotham's criminal ecosystem, Poison Ivy's best friend in the world and the one person Ivy will always keep informed." He paused. "Ivy will have contacted her. She always does. Which means Harley knows exactly where in that swamp they are."
Gordon took his glasses off again. This was becoming a recurring gesture.
"Your plan," he said, "is to find Harley Quinn."
"My plan is to find Harley Quinn."
"Harley Quinn, who the GCPD has been trying to locate for—"
"I know where she is," Ethan said.
He did. It was one of those moments where being a comics reader and being a man who existed in the story these comics described produced an unexpected practical dividend. He knew Harley Quinn's behavioral patterns the way a person knows the habits of someone they've read about for years — the places she went, the schedules she kept, the routines she returned to regardless of circumstances because they were part of who she was rather than strategy.
He knew where she was.
He was genuinely surprised to realize how useful that was going to be.