The blood drained out of Will's face.
He was already running through excuses when Oswald's hand closed around his wrist and pulled him flat against the wall beside the door.
"Hear that?" Oswald's voice dropped to nothing. "Wardrobe just opened. And now—" He tilted his head, listening. "Rustling. Like someone changing."
His hand moved silently to the door handle.
He held up three fingers. Counted down with his eyes.
Will nodded, and said a small private prayer that whatever was on the other side would be enough to pull Oswald out of the building. Bio-humans didn't sneak. They didn't undress quietly in borrowed rooms. This was something else entirely, and something else was exactly what he needed right now.
Three. Two. One.
They hit the door together.
The woman in the room screamed.
She was blond, or had been — a wave of golden hair that was, Will registered a half-second later, a wig. Underneath a waitress uniform she was down to her underwear, and the scream she produced at finding two suited men in the doorway was loud enough to rattle the light fixture.
Will recognized her. He'd noticed her downstairs — difficult not to, she was the kind of face that made people look twice. He'd looked twice, then made himself stop.
"Nobody told you this room was off-limits?" She crouched down, arms wrapped around her knees, face flushed — whether from anger or embarrassment was hard to say.
"Who are you," Oswald said, "and what are you doing in here."
He wasn't asking. He already had the brass knuckles out, turning them over in one hand, watching her with the flat attention of someone waiting for an answer to become unsatisfactory.
"You think I wanted to come up here?" She bit the corner of her lip, and the frustration in it read as genuine. "Maroni told me to—"
"Don't you speak about Mr. Maroni like—"
"Fine — Mr. Maroni told me to. I can call him if you don't believe me."
She moved to the side table, picked up the telephone receiver, and dialed. Will watched the distance between her and Oswald stretch — unhurriedly, naturally, the way water finds a lower level.
"Yes — you didn't tell your people? They think I broke in." A pause. She made a face, then held out the receiver toward Oswald. "He wants to talk to you."
Oswald stepped forward to take it.
Meanwhile, the girl had already moved to her bag. She produced a garment from inside and began stepping into it — dark, close-fitting, the leather catching what little light the room offered.
"I don't know what Maroni's obsession with leather is," she muttered, working the zipper up her side with some effort. "Some kind of cosplay thing."
A different kind of person might have gotten distracted. The suit helped — skintight black leather, the figure inside it arranged in a way that was doing the garment considerable justice.
But Will's attention had snagged on the design of it. The cut. The particular way it fit.
He knew that suit.
"Hey." He kept his voice casual. "Selina."
She stopped mid-zip.
It was a small reaction — just a fractional stillness — but it was there.
There it is.
"Don't touch the—"
Too late. Oswald's hand closed around the receiver.
Whatever she'd done to the handset, it discharged the moment he made contact — a sharp crack, and Oswald went rigid, eyes rolling white, then dropped straight backward like a felled tree. Will had already moved. He planted his foot in Oswald's chest mid-fall and kicked him clear of the phone cord, redirecting the trajectory so he hit the floor instead of the corner of the table.
Oswald lay flat, unconscious, looking mildly offended even in that state.
Will straightened up.
Plan's working. Now get him out.
"Alright." Selina had pulled the blonde wig off. Her real hair was short, silver-grey, pushed behind her ears. She walked toward him with the measured ease of someone who'd never once been the least dangerous person in a room. "The obstacle's removed. So now you can answer my question."
She closed the distance and put one hand against the wall beside his head.
Then the other foot came up.
Will found himself pinned — not by arms, but by legs, Selina dropping into a full split with one heel against the wall and the other at his hip, her weight holding him in place with a precision that was frankly impressive from a structural standpoint.
"How do you know my name?"
Will looked at the ceiling for a moment.
He was aware, in a clinical and unhelpful way, that this was an objectively extraordinary situation. He was also aware that the casino downstairs had been running for nearly an hour, that Hugo Strange was somewhere in the city with three things he'd made in a laboratory, and that none of the exits from this moment led anywhere good if he stayed in it.
He lifted her leg off the wall and stepped sideways.
Selina blinked.
She stood there for a moment, processing the outcome of a move that had never failed before.
"Help me get him out the window," Will said. "I'll explain when we're clear."
"You—" She looked at where he'd been standing. Looked at her own hands. "Excuse me?"
"The rope from your bag. Through the window, down to the alley. I'll catch him from below." He was already moving toward Oswald. "Come on."
They had him down in three minutes.
Selina rigged the line, Will descended the drainpipe and guided Oswald down hand-over-hand while she managed the tension from above. When the last of the slack ran out, she stepped off the sill and dropped — two full stories, landing in a crouch without a sound, arms out for balance, one smooth motion.
Will stared.
"Iron knees," he said, before he could stop himself.
She stood and brushed her palms together, and for the first time something that might have been amusement moved through her expression.
"Now." She turned on him. "We had a deal."
"We didn't make a deal."
"I helped you."
"I kicked the person electrocuting you unconscious."
"That's—" She stopped. "Fine. Mutual. But you still owe me an answer." She stepped in, and Will sidestepped again, smooth and unhurried, putting two feet of alley between them.
Selina went still.
She was used to being the variable in any room that couldn't be predicted. The person who set the terms. She had been since she was old enough to understand what her face did to people's decision-making, and she'd refined it since then into something close to an art form. Men in boardrooms, men in penthouses, men with guns — they all reached the same conclusion, eventually, that they would rather be close to her than smart about her.
This one kept moving away.
It was profoundly irritating.
She pulled the claws from her sleeve.
The casino wall blew outward.
One sharp crack of splintering wood, then a scream from inside that went on longer than it should have and ended badly. Glass followed. Then the doors — both of them — from the inside, as a mass of people hit them simultaneously and found them locked.
The noise from within changed character entirely.
Will grabbed Selina's wrist and pulled. She came with him — surprise more than compliance — and the three of them were inside the shadow of the alley before the second set of impacts started inside the building.
Will pressed against the brick and held still.
Through the gap at the alley's mouth he could see the casino's front face. Guests crowded the ground-floor windows. Palms flat on the glass, mouths open. Nobody was coming out.
Behind them, getting closer, something was moving through the interior in a straight line. The screaming reorganized itself around it as it went.
Selina stood absolutely still beside him, reading the same information.
"What is that?" she said, very quietly.
Will didn't answer.
When the police arrived forty minutes later, they cut the locks with angle grinders.
Gordon was the third officer through the door. He made it four steps inside and stopped.
He'd been a cop in Gotham for nineteen years. He'd worked the Narrows, the docks, the East Side. He'd processed crime scenes that had made younger detectives quit.
He put his hand over his nose and stepped back into the doorframe.
Behind him, a junior officer hit the pavement.
"God almighty," Gordon said, to no one in particular. "I'm going to be dreaming about this one."
He stood there for a long moment, looking at what the casino had become, breathing carefully through his mouth.
Then he straightened his tie, pulled out his notebook, and went back in.