"Who pulled us out of the water?"
Will watched Gordon's face when he asked it. His tongue moved over dry lips. The image was still there — the shape above the surface, hard-edged and bat-winged, hovering in the pink dawn light. Not moving. Just there.
If that hadn't been a dying hallucination, then Batman existed in this world after all — just differently. More hidden. More careful.
"I don't know either," Gordon said. "Bullock and I found something to hold onto, but eventually we went under. When I came to, we were on the rocks. Already ashore."
Will sat with that.
Something had been in the water with them. Something had put them on the shore. And Gordon, who was observant and honest and had no reason to lie about this, hadn't seen what it was.
He had one hour.
He borrowed money from Gordon, a flashlight, a length of rope. Gordon watched him put these things together and asked what they were for.
"Nothing illegal. I genuinely can't tell you more than that, or you'll try to have me evaluated again."
Gordon let him go.
The cab driver didn't want to take him.
Wayne Manor had a reputation. Ghost stories, mostly — the kind that accumulated around any large abandoned property in Gotham, fed by the city's appetite for the Gothic and the terrible. The occasional urban explorer with a camera had documented the place for online audiences, but nobody went out there at midnight voluntarily.
Three hundred dollars changed the calculation.
"Fast?"
"As fast as possible."
"Buckle up."
The cab crossed the Robert Kane Bridge and left the city behind, the skyline shrinking in the rear window. The road out to Gotham's northeastern edge was empty this late. The driver was eating crackers from a bag he'd produced from somewhere and not sharing.
The headlights found the manor gate first — wrought iron, rust eating it from the top down, leaning at an angle the hinges had given up on years ago. Behind it, the house.
Will had a mental image of Wayne Manor from every version he'd encountered. Clean lines, impressive scale, the kind of English Gothic architecture that implied old money and a family butler who'd been there for decades.
What he was looking at was a building that had been grieving for a long time and had given up hope of recovery. Every window was dark. The stone had gone green in the wet. Something had colonized the eaves.
"I'll wait here," the driver said, and locked the doors.
The well was where it should be. Covered with boards nailed down across the top, the wood punky and dark with age.
Will looked at it for a moment.
This was the well Bruce Wayne had fallen into as a boy. The place where the bats had come up from the dark and imprinted themselves on a frightened eight-year-old's nervous system forever. The wound that had been waiting, eventually, to become a weapon.
He broke the boards with a rock and knotted the rope around a dead tree that looked solid enough to hold his weight.
He went down with the flashlight in his teeth.
The bats came up to meet him.
He'd thought he was fine with bats. They were small, they were more afraid of him than he was of them, they were an interesting mammal. He'd thought about all of this in the abstract. He thought about it considerably less in the abstract when several thousand of them came pouring out of the dark below him in a sound like continuous tearing.
He closed his eyes and held the rope and let them pass.
When they were gone he went the rest of the way down.
The cave opened up after a short passage — a genuine limestone formation, stalactites coming down from the ceiling, the floor uneven and dark. His light swept across it.
No equipment. No computer banks. No car stored under a tarp. No armored suit in a case.
Just a disused mining operation from sometime in the last century: a rusted iron ladder bolted to the cave wall, some collapsed shoring timber, a few lengths of old chain. The smell of guano and standing water and rock.
He stood there for a moment in the flashlight beam.
No Batman.
He'd known that. He'd known it for three months. The comic had confirmed it. Richie Panto's hand had confirmed it. And now the empty cave confirmed it, in the quietest and most final way.
He climbed back out.
"Find what you were looking for?" the driver called through the cracked window.
Will got in and didn't answer. He put his head against the glass and watched Gotham's outskirts pass in the dark.
He had less than an hour. No money, no leads, and no Batman.
He wanted to go back to the Senate. Whatever was coming, he wanted it to come somewhere he recognized.
He gave the driver everything left in his pockets when they pulled up. Gordon would understand about the money.
He turned toward the building and stopped.
Oswald was sitting on the steps.
Both of them were bandaged in different configurations. Both of them stared.
"How did you—"
"Hospital," Oswald said, waving a hand. "Maroni thought I was still out. Didn't leave many people watching." His jaw was wired and plastered and his voice came out resonant and slightly muffled, like speaking through a wall. Whatever he'd called Maroni before, the word he used now was different — shorter, cruder, the kind of thing you said about someone you'd stopped fearing.
"You didn't find the money," Oswald said. It wasn't a question.
"No."
"I didn't think you would. It was impossible from the start." He paused. "I mean that as a compliment. Thank you for what you did."
"I drank two of your beers," Will said. "We're even."
Oswald laughed, and then winced because of the jaw.
They sat down on the steps.
Ten minutes to midnight. The street was empty. Somewhere further into the district a dog was barking at something.
"The Cobblepots," Will said, after a while. "One of the Four Families. How does someone from that line end up as Maroni's runner?"
"That's not a good story." Oswald touched his nose — the prominent hook of it, the feature that had made him a target his whole life. "I'll tell you sometime."
"Sure," Will said. "Sometime."
They both understood what that meant.
The clock tower two streets over began to toll midnight.
Footsteps came fast around the corner. Both of them looked up.
Will's heart started moving before his brain caught up.
Selina. Moving quickly, slightly out of breath, scanning the street until she found him.
"There you are. Why didn't you leave word with Gordon before you disappeared? I've been all over this neighborhood."
She grabbed his wrist and pulled him off the steps, throwing a brief, unreadable look at Oswald, and didn't stop moving until they were in the alley beside the building.
"I'm sorry," Will started. "About the partnership — I don't think I'm going to survive tonight, so—"
She put something in his hand.
He opened it under the flashlight.
Checks. Nine of them. Fifty thousand dollars each. He counted twice.
Four hundred and fifty thousand. Plus the five hundred thousand Strange had returned directly to Maroni in cleaned bills.
The full amount.
"Where did you get these."
"Strange's laboratory." She tilted her head, pleased with herself. "Third level of the sewer system. Think about it — not the bottom level where the augmented men were, too dangerous. Not the upper levels, too accessible. The third level is where you put something you want found only on your own terms."
"You broke in and took the money."
"I was going to." The pleased expression shifted slightly. "He was already there."
A pause.
"He was waiting," Will said.
"Not for me, as it turned out."
"I was waiting for you," said a voice from the far end of the alley.
Will turned the flashlight.
Hugo Strange stood in the beam, hands in his coat pockets, goatee neat, expression carrying the faint warmth of someone who had reached the end of a long calculation and found it correct.
Will opened his mouth.
Something sharp entered his neck from the left side.
One second: pressure. The next: a current that wasn't electricity but felt like it, moving outward from the injection point through his shoulders, down his arms, into his legs. The flashlight left his hand. The ground came up.
Selina stood where she had been standing. The injector was still in her hand.
The last thing Will processed clearly, before the alley went dark, was her face — not triumphant, not cold. Something else. Something he didn't have enough time left to name.