Will's legs went out.
He was on his knees on the grate, hands braced against the metal, and his legs simply stopped working. He wanted to move. His nervous system had other plans.
He knew the mechanism — adrenaline flood, prolonged, producing the specific muscle failure that came after the body had been running on emergency reserves for too long. Blood pulled toward the brain to keep the thinking going. Legs left to fend for themselves.
Great, he thought. I needed my legs and got a brain boost instead.
A whip descended from above him.
He looked up.
Bullock was draped across the dead augmented man's torso, face purple, breathing in short bursts, but both hands were working. He'd gotten himself up there by means Will didn't want to reconstruct, and he'd done most of the rigging already.
"Almost — almost there — your end — tie it off — dead knot—"
Bullock was the kind of man who looked like he'd never done anything useful in his life, and then showed up when it counted. Will had noted this before. He filed it more permanently now.
The living augmented man reached him.
It dropped one shoulder and turned its body to use the mass of its deltoid as the primary impact surface — a battering ram made of bone and Strange's experimental muscle, twelve feet of kinetic energy concentrated into one triangular point aimed directly at Will's sternum.
The knot hit.
"GET CLEAR—"
Both of them rolled.
The sound the two creatures made when they met was not like anything Will had a ready category for. Something between a structural collapse and a car accident, amplified and echoed through the shaft until it was more vibration than noise.
He lay on the grate and waited for his ears to work again.
The dead augmented man — which had weighed, Will had estimated, something in the range of a metric ton — had been torn apart by the impact. Two large sections. Both had traveled at speed.
He looked at where he'd been kneeling.
If Bullock hadn't finished the rig when he did, that was Will.
"You plan on staying down there?" Bullock's voice came from somewhere nearby, hoarse and exhausted. "Or are you going to look at what you did?"
Will turned.
The grate had a hole in it. Roughly person-sized. The water was already pulling hard through the opening, the current impatient.
He stared at it for a moment.
It had worked.
Selina and Gordon went first. Bullock followed without hesitation, the specific courage of a man who'd stopped calculating. Will stood at the edge and looked down.
Through the gap: darkness, the sound of enormous water, the smell of salt cutting through everything else. Somewhere down there, the tunnel met the sea.
The surviving augmented man was getting up.
Will had never had a choice. He closed his eyes.
Jumped.
The water caught him immediately. He was not a missile going cleanly through the pipe — he was a body getting tumbled, spun, compressed, his head making contact with the tunnel wall every time the passage curved, which it curved frequently. The snooker ball comparison came to him: the white ball struck badly, bouncing off every cushion in the wrong sequence.
He couldn't breathe. He couldn't see. He couldn't control any part of his trajectory.
And then: a sound. A bang, immediate and enormous, right at his ear.
Then nothing under his feet.
Cold air. Wind with salt in it. The temperature dropping ten degrees in half a second.
He'd stopped being inside something.
He didn't open his eyes right away. He waited until the falling registered and then opened them, and the horizon was there — ocean surface, sky above it the color of pink stone, the sun coming up below the curve of the world, painting the water copper and red.
Gotham's sky was never like this. In three months he hadn't seen a morning without grey cloud above it. He didn't know Gotham could look like this.
He reached for it, unthinking.
The water hit him before he could prepare.
He went deep. The shock of the cold, the compression of the impact, and then the specific helpless tumble of a body underwater with no sense of up or down. He swallowed water. It got into his lungs before he could stop it and his chest locked up around the burning.
Something grabbed him from behind.
Arms around his ribs, firm and purposeful, pulling upward.
Selina's voice came in and out of focus. He was on the surface. He was breathing, badly, coughing salt water. She was treading water for both of them with one arm, holding him against her with the other.
"Can you hear me. Stay awake."
He could. He couldn't do much else.
The ankle she'd rolled in the shaft was somewhere below the water, invisible, but he could feel the irregularity in how she moved — the asymmetry of her kick, the extra work she was doing with everything that still functioned correctly.
"Is anyone coming for us." Her voice was fraying at the edges. Cold. Exhausted. She wasn't complaining — it was a genuine question, information-seeking.
"I don't know." He wanted to say more and couldn't find the air.
He looked at her wrist where it crossed his chest. The skin had gone from pale to blue-white, the cold working through her faster than she was letting on.
Let go, he thought. You'll drown too if you hold on.
He couldn't get his mouth to open.
They went under together.
He was aware of it — the cold closing over his head, the burning in his chest getting worse, the sky going distant and refracted through moving water above him. Pink light broken into fragments. His eyes were still open.
A shape passed through the light above. Black, hard-edged, bat-like, hovering without moving.
He watched it.
Hallucination, he thought, clearly and without panic. People see things when they're dying. I've read about this. It's the brain cycling through what it wants.
Of course it would be a bat. Of course it would.
There's no Batman in Gotham.
He'd known that for months. The comic had confirmed it. Richie Panto's unbroken hand had confirmed it. This was his brain using its last minutes to show him something comforting.
He let his eyes close.
He came out of the nightmare fast, chest heaving, spine going rigid. His forehead barely missed the girl crouched over him with a bandage roll in one hand.
She flinched back.
"You're awake. Hold on — I'll get my father."
Seventeen, eighteen. Blonde hair in a high ponytail, Winnie the Pooh on the back of an oversized T-shirt. She was out the door before he could say anything.
Will sat up slowly.
The room resolved. Modest but clean. Morning — no, night — light through a curtained window. A bedside table.
A framed photograph on it: Gordon, a woman, a much younger version of the girl who'd just left, all three of them somewhere sunny.
"Gordon's house," Will said aloud.
He breathed once, properly, and let the relief settle.
He took stock: unwrapped bandaging on his hands where the grate had taken skin. Bandaging on his head from a contact point he didn't clearly remember. Ribs still unhappy about the augmented man's grip. He pulled back the blanket, flexed both legs, and — completing the inventory — confirmed that everything was accounted for.
He lay back.
Nine-tenths dead and out of it with minor soft tissue damage. He genuinely couldn't tell whether that was extraordinary luck or not.
Gordon came in a few minutes later, jacket off, the lines in his face deeper but his bearing unchanged.
"You look like you're functional," he said. "No major neurological damage from the look of it."
"You look better than when I first saw you," Will said. "Objectively more attractive."
Gordon's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite not. "Put your tongue away. I'm not a girl who needs flattery."
"The others?"
"Bullock's in hospital. Bad, but he'll live." Gordon moved to the window, looked out. "Your friend woke up before you. Left through the window without saying goodbye."
Selina alive. Selina conscious. Selina departing via window frame rather than front door, which was entirely in character.
Will exhaled.
Then something in Gordon's words landed differently.
Woke up before you.
He turned to the window. Night outside. He'd been in the sun when he — when the water—
"What's the date," he said. "What time is it."
"The thirteenth. Just past eleven at night. You've been out for about two and a half days." Gordon glanced at him. "Expecting someone?"
Will looked at the ceiling.
Maroni's deadline: three days from the night of the casino. Three days from the night of the eleventh.
It ended tonight.
In less than an hour.
"Expecting someone," he repeated, and almost laughed. "The person I'm expecting isn't someone you want to meet."