Selina blew across the barrel of the revolver and leaned against the shaft wall with the composed satisfaction of someone who had completed a task they'd assessed as manageable and found they were right.
Will looked at her and felt something in his chest loosen that had been locked for the past twenty minutes. He was aware he was on the edge of some emotional response that would be embarrassing in the current company, so he converted it into a single controlled exhale and left it at that.
"You alright?" Selina moved toward him, dropping from the overflow port to the mesh in one clean step.
"Fine. Completely fine. Never better."
He was lying. Three, possibly four ribs on his left side had given way when the bio-human had closed its hand around him — he'd felt the structural failure before the pain arrived, the specific sensation of something that had been load-bearing ceasing to be. Breathing was producing a sharp, localized feedback that he was managing by keeping his breaths shallow and not thinking about it.
Selina looked at his face and understood that he was lying. She didn't push it.
Bullock was conscious, technically. His eyes were open at approximately fifteen percent. When Gordon got him upright and moving, a thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
"You're still breathing," Will told him. "That's the main thing."
"Wonderful," Bullock said, with the conviction of a man saying a word he's not sure applies.
"Harvey Bullock." Will stepped closer. "For what it's worth — what you did back there was what a great cop does."
Bullock opened his eyes a fraction wider.
"James Gordon is a great cop," Will said. "So are you."
Bullock looked at him for a moment, blood on his chin, hat gone somewhere in the water, absolutely wrecked in every measurable way.
"Kid," he said. "You've got terrible timing."
Then he smiled, which reopened the cut, and Gordon quietly pulled him forward before he could bleed on anything important.
"Why did you need the handcuffs?" Gordon asked.
Will explained it in brief — the mesh was too strong for unaided human force, the bio-humans had enough mass and enough uncontrolled energy in their landing that the impact should theoretically have broken it. Cuff one ankle to the mesh before they came down, the sudden arrest of momentum does the work.
"The problems with this plan," he added, "include: how do you cuff something that's actively trying to kill you, and also the mesh turned out to be structurally sound, which is apparently a first for Gotham city infrastructure."
"It's not a terrible framework," Selina said, tilting her head. "It just needs adjustment."
"We don't have cuffs anymore."
"We have rope." She patted the coil at her hip. "And we have two bio-humans that haven't been shot yet."
The discussion was interrupted by the lights coming on.
They activated from the top of the shaft downward — large work lamps recessed into the wall, each one clicking on in sequence until the whole vertical space was illuminated. The transition from near-total darkness to full brightness was violent. All four of them covered their eyes, waited, readjusted.
When Will could see properly again, there was a man standing on the third-level platform above them.
Short — genuinely short, in a way that his white laboratory coat dramatized by pooling slightly at his feet. Bald, with a beard that had been shaped into a neat goatee that was doing its best given the face it was attached to. Hands in his coat pockets. An expression that occupied the space between professional cordiality and something else, something that was working to stay beneath the surface.
The third bio-human hadn't killed them. The lights had been turned on by someone who knew the switch. The whole system — the herding, the positioning, the confined space — it hadn't been the bio-humans operating on instinct.
It had been this.
Will exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Of course," he said.
Hugo Strange looked down at all of them with the patience of someone who had been waiting for the audience to arrive and was pleased they had.
"Welcome to my testing ground." He opened his arms slightly — a gesture that might have been hospitality in a different context. "I trust my subjects have given you an adequate demonstration."
Selina raised the revolver and fired three times.
The platform was forty feet above them and the angle was impossible. All three shots deflected off the walls or went wide. Gordon put his hand on her forearm and she stopped, though her expression indicated she hadn't found this satisfying.
"The two of them," Will said, nodding toward the bio-humans still positioned at the far wall, "got quiet the moment a gun came out. You said they're your finest work. They just stopped when they saw a weapon."
Strange's smile adjusted slightly. "Fear is biological architecture. Without the capacity to perceive danger, a living thing dismantles itself. When survival stops meaning anything—"
"Your bio-humans don't reproduce," Will said. "So the survival logic doesn't hold for them anyway."
The smile held, but something behind Strange's eyes shifted — a recalculation happening behind the composure. His gaze moved from Will's face and then back to it, with the quality of a man confirming an identification he'd already made once before.
The expression he'd been controlling since he appeared slipped, just slightly, and in the gap was something Will couldn't fully read — not pleasure exactly, but something adjacent to it. Recognition without context.
"You know this face," Will said.
"I have seen it." Strange withdrew his hands from his pockets. "More than once. I have, in fact, been attempting to locate the person attached to it for some time. I don't know your name — I make a policy of not retaining personal details about clients, which is part of why they feel comfortable coming to me." He paused. "But the face I know."
Clients.
Will moved that word to the front and held it there. The body he was in had been to Strange's laboratory, or had been sent there by someone, or had been connected to Strange's work in some capacity before Will had arrived in it. The stab wound. The people looking for him. The lack of any traceable identity.
And Strange had said: I've been trying to find you.
Whatever this body had been involved in, Strange wanted it back.
"Then you know I'm useful to you," Will said carefully. "Which means there's a conversation worth having before—"
Strange's hand came out of his coat pocket.
The device was small — a remote, single button, matte grey.
"You're right that I find the body useful," Strange said pleasantly. "Whether it needs to be living for my purposes is a separate question." His thumb moved. "In ten minutes they will have no emotional capacity remaining. Pain, fear, hesitation — gone. What's left will be considerably more direct."
"Wait—"
"The biological material I require survives death. You should find that reassuring, in a philosophical sense."
He pressed the button.
The change was immediate and wrong.
The two bio-humans had been hanging at the edge of the light, moving with animal wariness — watching the weapon, shifting weight, the way dogs circle something they're unsure of. That behavior required a nervous system that was still running assessments.
The assessments stopped.
Their faces went blank in a way that was distinct from calm. Blank in the way a screen goes blank — not absence of activity, but the activity rerouted entirely, all processing redirected to a single instruction.
The drooling started. Large, rhythmic drops falling from slack mouths onto the mesh. Their lips were slightly parted, their eyes oriented forward without focus.
Strange turned and walked away from the platform railing. The darkness absorbed him in four steps.
Selina didn't wait.
Two shots — both eyes on the nearest bio-human, close range, well-placed. The eyeballs ruptured. Blood tracked down the cheekbones.
The bio-human did not react.
No cry, no recoil, no rage response. It stood there with destroyed eyes and a face that communicated nothing, the calibrated pain feedback simply absent, and then it processed the information that a loud sound had occurred and began moving toward the source of it.
"Okay," Selina said.
Both of them were coming now — not running, moving with the deliberate, unstoppable momentum of something that no longer has reasons to stop. Forearms down, knuckles grazing the mesh, covering ground.
Will looked at what they had.
Rope. A revolver with four rounds remaining. Two injured people, one barely conscious, one breathing through broken ribs. A shaft with smooth walls and one overflow port fifteen feet up that one person could access.
He looked at the mesh under their feet.
He looked at the rope.
He looked at the bio-humans.
"Selina," he said. "I still think borrowing their momentum is the right idea."
She followed his eyes to the mesh, then to the rope, then back to the bio-humans.
"You're going to need to be very fast," she said.
"I know."
"And very stupid."
"I'm aware."
Gordon had been listening. He looked at Will, then at the approaching bio-humans, then at Bullock leaning against the wall with his eyes half-open.
"Tell me what you need," he said.