Selina pressed the handcuffs into his palm.
"Whatever you're thinking, do it. I'm in your hands."
"And you?"
"Buying you time."
Something flashed in her eyes — not fear exactly, but the sharp clarity of someone who has made a decision and is done revisiting it. She handed the revolver to Gordon, uncoiled the whip from her hip, and turned.
"Commissioner Gordon. I need you."
Gordon, who was technically a detective inspector and had been called Commissioner twice tonight by people who seemed to know things they shouldn't, found the title oddly motivating. He filed the thought away for later — if there was a later — along with everything else he intended to do with the position. First: clean house. Second: declare open war on every criminal organization operating in Gotham. Third: get Barbara out of the city before any of that started.
"You have my full support," he said, and he meant it.
Selina went forward.
The whip snapped out — barbed end leading, tearing a clean furrow through the nearest augmented man's shoulder. The skin peeled away in a wide strip, muscle and the white of bone beneath it visible for a moment before the blood came.
On a human being, that injury meant the floor and unconsciousness. On twelve feet of Strange's experimental biology, it meant: attention redirected.
The augmented man turned toward her.
That was what she wanted.
She fought the way she always fought — not trying to match their output, which was impossible, but staying perpendicular to it. She was between them when they tried to converge, above them when they tried to reach down, already elsewhere when a fist the size of her torso came through the space she'd occupied. The shaft rang with the sounds of impact after impact that didn't land, and one impact that landed on the wrong target entirely.
She caught a shoulder, used the augmented man's own upward momentum to launch herself higher, came down on the second one's shoulder just as the first swung blind. The force of the blow hit its own companion across the face — a hurricane-force impact that sent the creature skidding across the grate and into the shaft wall at full velocity. The concrete absorbed it badly. A crater. A sound like a building falling.
Everyone's ears were ringing.
Will's heart was somewhere in his throat. He knew what she was running on — nothing enhanced, nothing artificial, just a trained body with real limits. He could already see it in her landings: a fraction slower, the adjustments slightly behind where they needed to be.
She couldn't hold this for long.
He was right. Mid-air, between the second jump and the third, Selina's calf locked.
The cramp hit like a nail through the muscle. She lost the exit angle, came down wrong, felt the ankle fold under her, and went to the ground.
She stayed down. One hand on the grate, other hand clutching her ankle, face tight.
The augmented man raised both fists overhead, fingers interlaced, and brought them down as a single mass toward the back of her head.
Gordon was already moving.
He'd discarded the jacket somewhere — it caught on something and he left it there. He came in low, one knee dragging the grate, and fired.
The first shot entered the right eye socket. The eyeball was gone. The augmented man didn't stop moving.
Gordon was still sliding forward, closing the distance he shouldn't be closing, and fired again.
The barrel was three feet from the entry wound now. The second round drove itself through the channel the first had opened, past whatever the first had failed to reach, and found something more important.
Still moving. Still upright. The fists were still coming down.
A beat.
One more.
Gordon fired the third shot from a position that put him directly under the creature's swing radius, kneeling on one knee, arm fully extended, and put the bullet through the existing damage and into the brain stem.
The augmented man fell.
It fell the way large things fall — not immediately, but with an inevitability that arrived all at once. The impact shook the grate and sent water flying in every direction.
Gordon didn't stand up.
He stayed kneeling, gun arm still extended, and didn't stand up because his legs wouldn't permit it. He was shaking in a way he hadn't shaken in a long time. Cold sweat had taken his hair apart. His shirt was soaked through.
Three bullets. He'd walked himself inside the kill zone to make them count. If the third shot hadn't worked — if Strange's modifications had made the brain stem less critical — he would have died before he could draw back.
Barbara almost had no father tonight.
"Thank you," Selina said.
She was limping toward him, one hand extended.
He took it and let her help him up.
"You're the one who saved us," Gordon said. "You can't be much older than my daughter."
"She'll be proud of you." Selina said it quietly, and something moved behind her eyes when she did.
Gordon: steady, worn through, willing to die for strangers in a sewer on a Thursday morning because it was the right thing to do. She'd been watching him all night. She'd watched him take the gun when the augmented man was on top of her and make the calculation without hesitation.
Falcone was her father. That was the biological fact. But the way Gordon looked when he talked about Barbara — that was something Falcone had never been and never would be.
She filed the envy away before it could go anywhere. There was still one creature left.
The one she'd sent into the wall had recovered.
It was standing again, both hands pressed to the sides of its skull, the emotion-suppressor program overriding whatever pain response it still had. Gordon's gun was empty. Selina's whip was the only tool left in the room that had worked, and her ankle was wrong.
"I'll go," Gordon said. He stepped forward.
"Both of you, here — I've got it."
Will's voice came from behind them.
They turned.
He was crouched beside the dead augmented man, looping the handcuff chain through a section of the grate frame, running the other end around the creature's wrist.
"Throw me the whip."
Selina understood it before he finished asking. She coiled and threw one-handed, good wrist, and it landed clean.
The plan was clear enough: thread the whip through the handcuff to extend the anchor, tie it to the dead creature's mass, then redirect the live one's attack force into the same point on the grate — using twelve feet of dead augmented man as the lever that human strength couldn't provide.
He just needed a moment to rig it.
He didn't get one.
He looked up and the surviving augmented man was already at arm's reach from Gordon and Selina. One extension of the arm and both of them were paste.
Will dropped the whip.
He stood up.
He started clapping.
"HEY. OVER HERE. YEAH, YOU."
He added a whistle. He added a shout that had no specific content, just volume and sharp consonants. He clapped again, harder, and jumped once to add motion to the signal.
The augmented man turned its head.
Will kept going. Arms out, palms up, voice at full projection, making himself the loudest and most visually present thing in the shaft.
The creature oriented. Dropped to all fours. Covered fifteen feet of grate in two seconds.
Will looked at it coming and his brain, unhelpfully, offered him the image of a Kodiak bear in full charge — the shoulder mass, the ground-eating speed, the total absence of anything behind the eyes that was going to negotiate.
He kept clapping.