Archive of Our Own

The first time Gotham ate one of Batman's batarangs, Jason assumed it was an accident. Old roof. Cheap repairs. Probably some kind of settling. He had other things on his mind, such as the man currently attempting to crawl away with two broken knees, and Batman landing between them with the expression Jason had spent a significant portion of his childhood learning to resent.

"Step away from him."

"Sure," Jason said. "Which direction?"

Batman did not appreciate this. Batman rarely appreciated Jason's attempts to involve him in a decision. Behind the helmet, Jason watched the roof. The little slit where the batarang had vanished had closed up again, but there was a slight bulge traveling through the tar toward the gutter. It moved against the slope. When it reached the edge, the downspout gave a wet, dissatisfied cough, and the batarang came back up. It had been folded in half. Jason glanced at the gutter, then at Bruce, who was too busy disapproving of him to notice his equipment being rejected. Huh.

"Venn comes with me," Batman said.

Harold Venn made a noise of heartfelt agreement. He had been significantly less enthusiastic about anyone coming with anyone when Jason had opened the refrigerated truck behind his warehouse. Sixteen people inside. Padlocked door. The refrigeration unit had been running because Venn had decided discomfort would make them easier to handle, and one of the women had spent four hours warming her son's hands under her shirt.

The boy was at Leslie's now. Jason had carried him there himself, wedged against his chest under the jacket while his mother stumbled alongside. They'd had trouble getting through the clinic door because the kid wouldn't let go of the collar. Leslie had finally coaxed him loose with a stuffed rabbit and the promise that the big man was going to find their bags. Jason had found those, too, dumped in a puddle behind the truck. One contained three changes of clothes and a packet of crayons. The boy's fingers had been a color Jason didn't like thinking about.

"Nah," he said.

Bruce moved. Jason had expected the reach for his gun, and Bruce had expected him to expect it, which made the first few seconds familiar enough to be almost boring. Wrist, elbow, the ugly little nerve strike Bruce always used when he was trying to persuade himself this was restraint. Jason drove a knee into his thigh, took a glancing blow across the helmet, and went backward toward the skylight. Its raised rim was just behind his heel; he felt for it, ready to push off, and found nothing.

The skylight slid three feet to the left with the furtive scrape of a chair being pulled closer to a conversation. Jason's boot hit solid roof. Bruce's hit glass. There was a crash, a bitten-off grunt, and then Batman was hanging by one gauntleted hand over the warehouse floor. Jason stared at the new, unbroken stretch of tar beneath his feet. Down in the gutter, something clicked appreciatively.

"Oh," Jason said. "You're doing it on purpose."

"Jason."

"Wasn't talking to you."

Venn had reached the fire escape. He hauled himself onto the top step using both arms, sobbing with the effort, and the ironwork lifted away from the wall. Very carefully. Like someone holding a spoon away from a toddler.

"Well, that's just embarrassing," Jason told him.

Bruce swung upward. Jason shot Venn twice in the chest before Bruce's boots touched the roof.

For a second there was only the sound of the brass hitting tar. Then Venn fell sideways, and the fire escape returned to its original position with a decorous little clunk.

"You had him," Bruce said.

Jason holstered the gun. "Yep."

"He was incapacitated."

"Also yep. You want to do the truck next, or are we sticking to things that happened in the last thirty seconds?"

Bruce came at him hard enough that Jason had to stop being funny about it. The next hit cracked his helmet display; the one after that would have broken his nose if he hadn't turned. Jason slammed his forearm into Bruce's throat and shoved off, drawing his second gun as Batman caught the front of his jacket.

Every chimney on the block inhaled. It was a big sound. Brick and soot and something much farther down taking an interested breath. Bruce's grip tightened. Jason felt the roof rise under his boots, an inch at first, then another, the entire building lifting beneath them. Across the narrow gap to the next roof, a pigeon clung to a television aerial and flapped for balance. A kettle began to whistle in the apartment below. Jason could hear someone banging it against the stove, then a woman yelling for her husband, and that cut through the ugly satisfaction of watching Bruce finally look somewhere other than his gun.

"Hey," he said.

The building paused. Bruce looked at him.

"Not you. Jesus Christ, do you think every conversation's about you?" Jason tilted his head toward the nearest chimney. "People live downstairs. Knock it off."

The roof sank. In the alley, a dumpster rolled forward and struck the Batmobile broadside. Jason couldn't help it; he laughed, which was when Bruce tried to cuff him. The cuff closed around a pigeon. Neither of them had seen a pigeon arrive. It was a large one, with an oily purple neck and an expression of profound disgust. It looked from Bruce to Jason, said, distinctly, "Fuck's sake," and burst into seventeen smaller pigeons.

By the time Bruce stopped having pigeons in his face, Jason was gone.

Three blocks away, he dropped from a fire escape into an alley behind a closed bakery. His ribs hurt. His helmet had begun showing the temperature in Roman numerals. A battered takeout carton sat on the bakery's back step, warm enough to steam. Jason stared at it for a while, listening for pursuit. He could hear Bruce on the next roof, boots crunching on loose gravel; then a door opened somewhere overhead, Bruce swore, and the footsteps receded into what sounded like a very large public swimming pool.

"I'm not eating mystery alley chicken."

The carton rotated. Somebody had put a sticker on the other side.

BEEF.

"That is not the part I was objecting to."

The bakery door creaked open an inch. From deep inside came the heavy, offended sound of an industrial oven shutting itself.

Jason picked up the carton. There was a plastic fork underneath it, and a napkin, and the front tooth of a man who had hit him with a crowbar that afternoon. He left the tooth. After a moment, he went back and took it too. God only knew what she'd do if she thought he didn't appreciate the effort.

There were things everybody in the Alley knew.

If the blue payphone rang, you could answer it. Sometimes it was a dead relative; sometimes it was a woman selling replacement windows. Nobody had worked out whether she was dead, but she was persistent. If the red payphone rang, you crossed the street. If it rang from your pocket, you took your coat off and left it there.

The laundromat on Keene gave you an extra sock on Thursdays. It was polite to take it. The owner had a basket by the door for anyone who didn't want to bring theirs home, and when the basket was full she carried it into the cellar. Her father had done the same before her. The cellar stayed quiet. People got their washing done.

You didn't walk under the railway bridge with an empty stomach. You didn't let your children play with the other children in the old schoolyard after the bell. You could let them play before the bell; they were nice kids, mostly, and one of them would help with fractions.

Jason had known all of this before he knew multiplication. Bruce had called it local superstition, then installed a motion sensor under the railway bridge. Three days later the sensor had turned up in the Cave, inside a boiled egg. Alfred had served it to him at breakfast. Jason could still remember the tiny clink of spoon against casing, Bruce's hand stopping halfway through the motion, the extraordinary difficulty of keeping orange juice inside his mouth while Alfred asked whether sir would prefer scrambled tomorrow. That had been a good morning.

What Jason hadn't known, growing up, was that any of this was personal.

Mrs. Alvarez's building had always let him in when it was cold, even after she died and her nephew changed the locks. The corner store's security mirror had sometimes shown him the cop outside before the cop reached the door. Once, when he was nine, a man had followed him into a dead end and Jason had come out of a different alley with five dollars in his pocket and blood on the soles of his shoes.

He'd thought he was good at running. He was good at running. Both things could apparently be true, although it was annoying to reconsider certain childhood victories. There'd been a shoplifting competition with Stevie Marsden once, and Jason had won because the corner store had developed a second back door while Stevie was still trying to get past the freezer. Stevie had called him a cheating bastard for a week. At the time, Jason had taken this as the bitterness of a lesser talent.

"Your grandmother ever get fed by a building?" he asked Eddie the next night.

Eddie, who was trying to pry a bullet out of the underside of Jason's kitchen table, stopped with the pliers still raised. "My grandmother got proposed to by a building."

"What?"

"The Orpheum. Before they split it into offices. Grandpa was pissed."

Jason opened his mouth, considered the questions available to him, and chose the one that seemed most immediately useful. "Did she say yes?"

"Nah. Bad commute. Why?"

"No reason."

Eddie went back to the table. He had worked for Jason for four months and had excellent instincts about when to accept an answer. Jason ate a dumpling out of a container he had personally purchased from a human being, using money. Outside the kitchen window, a neighboring gargoyle slowly rotated to face away from him. He had begun to suspect she'd been offended by the chicken thing; the fridge had offered him nothing but condiments all morning, then produced a perfectly ordinary carton of milk as soon as Eddie wanted coffee.

His phone buzzed. A photograph from one of his people down by the river: a white van, a temporary fence, three men in matching gray coats. Under it, a message from Bess.

Survey guys back. Mrs. O says the stairs hurt.

That got him on his feet. Mrs. Okonkwo lived on the third floor of a building that had been four stories tall for as long as Jason could remember, except during the summer of his eleventh year, when it had briefly had nine. The stairs complained, but never to her. She brought them linseed oil. When her arthritis was bad, the third floor met her halfway. Jason had spent whole afternoons sitting on the bottom step while she washed him and his mother a bag of apples, talking through the open door about the people up the street. The step had rocked under him when his feet didn't reach the floor.

"Trouble?" Eddie asked.

"Maybe. Keep an ear out for these assholes." Jason passed him the photograph. "Don't go near them if they're carrying stakes."

Eddie examined the picture. "Vampires?"

"Surveyors."

"Oh, fuck."

The surveyor on the corner of Keene and Mercy had hammered six brass spikes into the pavement when Jason arrived. Across the road, a delivery driver stood at the back of his van with a tray of bread in his hands, staring at the intersection. Traffic had stopped in both directions. Nobody was honking. Jason left his bike beside a shuttered kiosk and walked toward the surveyor, trying to work out what had made the street look so unfamiliar.

There should have been a seventh streetlamp beside him. Jason could remember it perfectly: green paint over rust, a bend in the pole where an armored car had hit it, the little face that sometimes pressed out through the glass to watch the buses. Now there was an empty square of concrete. A woman stood beside it with her groceries clutched against her chest, unable to finish crossing the street. She put one foot forward, hesitated, and drew it back. Jason had seen people do that at the edge of a roof. Here there was nothing but six feet of clear, dry pavement between her and the curb.

"Ma'am," Jason said, "you want to get inside."

She looked at the blank square. "My husband kissed me there."

The surveyor sighed. "We're not removing any approved memorials. If you'd like to contact the redevelopment office—"

Jason hit him with the butt of his pistol. The surveyor went down. His colleague dropped the hammer and reached inside his coat. Jason broke his wrist before he got it out, then relieved him of a gun, a thin bone knife, and a little brass instrument full of teeth. The teeth were still attached to bits of gum. He turned the instrument over, very slowly, and the delivery driver put his tray back in the van and shut the doors.

"Right," Jason said. "That makes this easier."

He put the man on his knees beside the first one. The woman with the groceries hurried into the corner shop. Its door closed behind her, and every shutter along Keene slammed down in succession.

"Who sent you?"

"This is a municipal project," the first man said through a mouthful of blood. "We have permits."

"Great. Who sent you?"

"Gotham Civic Renewal. You can check with Wayne Enterprises."

Of course he could. Jason crouched beside the nearest spike. Small, precise marks ran down its sides. Where it entered the pavement, the concrete had peeled back in a thin ring, showing something pink and wet underneath. He touched it with one gloved finger, and twenty feet above him, an apartment window began to cry. The glass stayed intact. Tears the size of his fist rolled down the brick, soaking the pavement around his boots. He took his hand away, but the tears kept coming. Behind the window, a woman lifted her curtain and looked down at him, one hand pressed against the glass.

Something in Jason's chest gave a sick little pull. He knew that feeling. He had felt it in a coffin, though he had spent a long time afterward trying to convince himself he'd imagined the coffin, the wet roots between his fingers, the way the dark had crowded close when he couldn't get enough air. He pressed his fist against his sternum until it passed. The surveyor was watching him now, a calculation beginning behind the fear, and Jason disliked that almost as much as he disliked the teeth.

"What do these do?" he asked.

The surveyor looked at his gun. "Ground stabilization."

Jason pressed the muzzle against the man's unbroken knee.

"Second try."

"They establish a fixed boundary! That's all, that's—look, I install the markers. I don't know what the central unit does."

"Where's the central unit?"

"Old water exchange. At Mercy Point. Please, I have a family."

Jason looked at the instrument in his other hand. One of the teeth was small, with a silver cap.

"Who did you take these from?"

The man didn't answer. Down the street, something heavy began to drag itself through the sewers. He heard it too. His eyes moved toward the drain, and for the first time he seemed to notice the shutters, the empty road, the fact that every traffic signal at the intersection was facing him. He shifted closer to the spike. Whatever he knew about the thing under the street, he thought the brass would keep it away, and he was still holding that belief when Jason wrapped his jacket around the nearest marker and pulled it out.

"Oh, you fucking idiot," Jason said softly. "You're not from here."

Batman found the two surveyors tied to a parking meter forty minutes later. One had a broken jaw. The other was shouting that he wanted to go to jail, anywhere, immediately, and would confess to several additional crimes if that helped expedite matters.

The meter had expired in 1893.

Robin knelt beside the empty holes in the pavement. Something had licked them smooth from underneath. "These match the installation diagrams."

Bruce was already looking at the project information on his gauntlet. Gotham Civic Renewal was a legitimate Wayne Foundation initiative. Old water exchange, utility surveys, stabilization of the riverfront. Adrian Voss had come with credentials from three universities and recommendations from two engineers Bruce trusted. His demonstration had involved a junction near the docks where eleven people had disappeared in the previous year. After the equipment went in, the road stayed the same length from one day to the next. Delivery times improved. A father of two came home after an absence of fourteen months, convinced he'd been gone for an afternoon. Bruce had interviewed him personally before approving the expansion.

"Hood took the equipment," Robin said. "And he sent this."

Bruce's communicator chimed. A photograph of a brass spike, followed by a close-up of the teeth.

your new guy does a shit line in dentistry.

Then:

touch my neighborhood again and I feed him to it.

Tim looked up. "Do you think that one's literal?"

The parking meter turned toward Bruce. It did not bend. It turned from the base, dragging two screaming men a quarter-circle around the pole. Its little window clicked from EXPIRED to BRISTOL. Bruce stared at it while Tim quietly shifted his boots onto the adjacent paving stone.

"Okay," Tim said. "That's specific."

Dick's apartment in Blüdhaven had developed a spare room. He'd discovered it on Monday, between the bathroom and the kitchen, in a place that had previously been occupied by his neighbor's bathroom. There was a bed, a bookcase, and a little blue rug. On the bed sat the stuffed elephant he'd lost at Haly's when he was seven. One ear was still coming loose where he'd worried the stitching, and its trunk had the faint, familiar dent left by his mother's needle when she'd tried to sew a split shut. He picked it up. Put it down. Picked it up again, turning it over in hands much too big for it now.

Dick had stood in the doorway for a long time. Then he'd gone downstairs and bought a smoke detector, because whatever else this was, he knew better than to trust the wiring in his building.

On Tuesday, the room acquired an outlet. On Wednesday, a second elephant, slightly larger and apparently constructed from things that had once been pigeons.

"The first one was great," Dick had said carefully. "Really nailed it the first time."

The second elephant was gone when he got home. His downstairs neighbor had found a free sofa, though, which might have been related.

Consequently, when Tim called to ask whether Gotham had ever behaved strangely around him, Dick needed a moment to decide which part of the question was the problem.

"Strangely how?"

"A parking meter called Bruce suburban."

"Oh. Yeah, she's always been weird about that."

There was a pause on the other end. Dick took his laundry out of the dryer. All his socks were paired. He'd put an odd number in, but this seemed like something to appreciate quietly.

"She?" Tim asked.

"You know. Gotham."

"You knew?"

"Tim, my first winter there, a gargoyle climbed through my bedroom window and tried to eat my fever. Alfred had to get it off me with a broom."

"Bruce said that was a hallucination from the fever."

"It bit the broom in half."

Another pause. In the background, Bruce said something Dick couldn't make out, and Tim answered, "Well, apparently there was physical evidence."

Dick put down the sock he was holding. "What's happened?"

Tim told him about the surveyors. Halfway through, Dick's washing machine stopped turning. It wasn't on. He looked toward it, then at the sink, where the tap had begun to drip steadily into the same small circle. The water didn't spread. It accumulated, darkening, until there was a little black hole in the porcelain with something shifting at the bottom. When Tim got to the teeth, the pipe beneath it gave a low, sustained groan, and Dick abandoned the laundry on the counter.

"Okay," Dick said. "I'll come over."

The kitchen door slammed.

"For the evening."

It opened again, halfway.

"I have work here tomorrow!"

From somewhere inside the wall came a noise very much like a person sucking their teeth.

Dick rubbed his face. "I know. I know what she's like. I'll buy a return ticket."

"Who are you talking to?" Tim asked.

"My apartment. Give me an hour."

Jason went to Mercy Point through a butcher's shop that had been boarded up since 1978. The front door admitted him to the old water exchange's western gallery. He didn't question this. When he was small, the butcher's shop had usually taken him to the public library, where the children's librarian would give him crackers and pretend he wasn't there when closing time came. Once it had taken him to a beach. He'd liked the beach. The ocean had been vertical, but you couldn't have everything.

Tonight the passage smelled of iron and burnt hair. He came out between two dead pumps, gun raised, and found a man in a gray coat trying to push his arm back into a wall.

The arm had gone in up to the shoulder. From the elbow down, it was visible in a framed photograph of the exchange's opening ceremony. A crowd of serious men in old-fashioned suits had stopped looking at the camera and were staring at it.

"Help me," the man whispered.

Jason looked at the brass spikes in his tool belt. "What did you do?"

"I stepped outside the—there was a line on the floor. I only stepped over it to take a call."

In the photograph, one of the men produced a pair of garden shears. Jason grabbed the surveyor by the back of the coat and hauled. The wall stretched. For one second he saw through the paint into a crowded room full of people standing much too close together, all of them facing away from him. Then the surveyor came free, shrieking, and the photograph fell off the wall. His arm was still attached. There was a bite missing from his phone, and the little crowd in the photograph surged toward the edge of the frame. Jason turned it facedown before anyone could climb out.

"Lobby," Jason said. "Sit down. If anybody asks, you're waiting for a bus."

"What bus?"

"Do I look like public fucking transit? Go."

He let the man stumble away, then examined the floor. A thin white line ran across the gallery entrance. Beyond it, everything was unpleasantly still. No pipes settling, no little shifts in the tile pattern, no pressure at the back of his head telling him where the nearest door ought to be. Even the mold had straight edges.

Jason stepped across, and his heart missed a beat. He stopped, one hand pressed flat against his sternum. The next beat came hard enough to hurt. For a moment he was sixteen again, choking on dirt, somebody else's fingers hooked inside his mouth and pulling out the mud because he couldn't do it himself. Except there hadn't been anybody else. He remembered that now. He remembered looking down at the fingers and seeing roots, and he had to swallow twice before he could get his tongue away from the roof of his mouth.

A voice came from the far end of the gallery. "Mr. Hood."

Jason raised his gun.

Adrian Voss stood behind a glass partition, wearing an expensive suit under a gray coat. Two guards flanked him. There were more coats hanging on hooks along the wall, each with a strip of white stitching around its hem, and beneath the hooks lay a row of dead rats. Every rat had been opened from throat to groin.

"You've been interfering with my crew," Voss said.

Jason shot him. The bullet stopped inside the glass. It didn't flatten. It hung there, still spinning, an inch from Voss's face. Both guards ducked anyway.

"Oh, fuck off," Jason said.

Voss looked briefly rattled, which was something. "That won't work."

"I can get a bigger gun."

"I expect you can. However, before you waste any more ammunition, you might like to consider the people downstairs."

One of the guards pressed a switch. A screen above the partition showed a tiled room containing eleven people. Three in work clothes, a woman in a nurse's uniform, an elderly man sitting on an overturned bucket. The rest were younger. One had blood down the front of his sweatshirt and was holding a rag against his mouth.

Jason went very still.

"Nobody needs to suffer any further," Voss said. "Your city has a remarkable capacity for repair. My difficulty has been finding a specimen that will retain that capacity when removed from its native environment."

"So you started pulling people's teeth."

"Local tissue holds an impression. Unfortunately, it's transient. The connection breaks."

Behind Jason, the gallery door began to thump against its frame. Voss took a small mirror from the desk beside him. Its frame had been made from fragments of jawbone, teeth pointing inward, and where Jason should have been reflected there was a coffin under a tangle of pale roots. Open. Empty. Voss tilted it toward the guards; their reflections appeared normally. He brought it back to Jason and smiled.

"Whereas you came back."

Jason's finger tightened on the trigger.

"Three nights ago, one of my cameras caught an entire street turning itself around to accommodate your motorcycle. Yesterday, a section of pavement regenerated within minutes of your removing the markers. And tonight you walked through a sealed exterior wall." Voss smiled. "I'd very much like to know what she put inside you."

The door hit the frame again, harder. Jason checked the screen. The boy in the bloody sweatshirt had tried to stand, and the nurse was helping him, one hand tucked firmly under his elbow. Behind them, the old man had begun to shiver. Jason looked from the camera to the guard's knife, then up to the pipes crossing the ceiling. The sprinklers were old. The one directly above the white line had a red paper tag hanging from it, dated earlier that year.

"Here's how this goes," he said. "You let them out. You turn all this shit off. Then I kill you, and we can both stop having this conversation."

Voss's smile thinned. "You aren't in a position to make demands."

"I do all kinds of things I'm not qualified for."

He fired into the overhead sprinkler. Voss flinched. Water hammered onto the floor between them, running toward the white line. One of the guards shouted and lunged for the valve. Too late: the paint blurred, a narrow gap opened, and the gallery door came off its hinges. Jason threw himself behind a pump as something entered the room. He saw the end of it first: five long, jointed lengths of brick, each tipped with a church bell. They bent around the pump without touching him. The bells rang once, very softly, and the glass partition burst inward.

The guard at the valve got as far as screaming. Then the bricks folded, and he disappeared between them.

Voss fled through a door that opened onto a bright white room. The second guard followed him. The door shut before Jason could shoot, and a new line burned across its threshold.

The thing wearing the bells struck it hard enough to make the whole exchange tilt.

"Hey!" Jason shouted. "Downstairs. People downstairs!"

For a second, nothing happened. Then one enormous brick joint curled toward him. Mortar cracked. A bell leaned close to his helmet, and he could see the clapper inside it: a length of human bone, tied with a scrap of blue ribbon.

"Yeah," he said, because he was damned if he was going to sound afraid of his own neighborhood. "I know. He's an asshole. Help me get them out first."

The bell touched the top of his helmet. It was very gentle. He stayed still beneath it, aware of its immense weight, of the scraps of mortar falling onto his shoulders. Then it lifted away, the floor opened, and a narrow set of steps unfolded into the dark below him.

Batman and Robin arrived in time to see twelve people come out of a drinking fountain.

It wasn't a large drinking fountain. It stood outside the exchange, beside a decorative plaque, and most days it didn't work. Tonight it was producing terrified civilians one at a time, each of them emerging from the narrow gap between the basin and the tap with an expression suggesting they would never discuss the experience willingly.

Red Hood came last. He had a crying teenager clinging to his waist and a damp pigeon on one shoulder.

"Don't," he told Bruce.

"What happened?"

"Occult organ trafficking. Your contractor's a prick. There's at least one left inside with him. Gray coat, gun, probably about to have a very educational evening."

Bruce moved toward the exchange. Jason caught his cape.

"You go through the lobby, you tell the guy there he's still waiting for the bus. Don't get creative. He's having a tough day."

"Release me."

Jason did, with a shove. Bruce turned, but the teenager made a small, panicked sound and Jason was already facing him again.

"You're good," he said. "You're out. Here, see him? Little guy. Yellow cape. That's Robin. He's going to take you to the ambulance."

Tim stepped forward. The pigeon looked at him, ruffled itself, and slid under Jason's collar.

"Thanks," Tim said, to no one in particular.

Jason's helmet turned toward him. "Don't take it personally."

"Bruce gets a parking meter and I get pigeon contempt?"

"You get the family discount."

Tim helped the boy toward the paramedics. Behind him, Bruce entered the exchange, and Jason bent forward with one hand braced against the fountain. Tim watched over the boy's head while an EMT settled him on the ambulance step. Hood stayed there for several seconds, helmet bowed, his free hand pressed under the edge of his jacket. When he straightened, the water in the basin had turned red.

Dick's return ticket turned to a dead leaf at the county line.

"Petty," he told the train window.

His reflection, eight years old and wearing a red sweater he hadn't owned in more than a decade, stuck its tongue out at him.

Gotham Central had an extra platform tonight. Something huge lay under the tracks, breathing through the gaps between the sleepers. Commuters stepped over the rising bolts with the weary competence of people who had already had a difficult day at work. One man dropped half a bagel through the gap. The bolts settled.

Dick got off the train and found a gargoyle waiting beside the vending machines. It was the one from his bedroom. He recognized the chipped ear. It had picked up a covering of moss since he'd last seen it, and somebody had looped a child's beaded bracelet around its foreleg. As he approached, it carefully pushed the bracelet up under its folded wing, where he couldn't reach it.

"Hey, buddy."

The gargoyle turned its back.

"Seriously?"

It turned farther.

Dick crouched beside it. "I was eight. I didn't choose where the circus stopped before that. And I visit."

The gargoyle spat a broom handle at his feet.

"Okay. Fair. I'll call Alfred."

His duffel shifted against his shoulder. Inside it, something made a soft, unpleasant clicking sound.

The gargoyle's head went around a full circle.

Dick looked down at the bag. "Oh, don't tell me."

The zipper opened. A small, pale hand emerged holding his return ticket. A second hand followed, then a face with the bright black eyes of something that lived under a pier and ate bait. It had wrapped itself in one of his spare shirts. For a moment, the creature and the gargoyle stared at each other. Dick felt the strap tighten across his shoulder as the thing in the bag gripped it from inside. Then every departure board in Gotham Central went black.

"Absolutely not," Dick said. "Both of you. I mean it."

The creature bared twenty or thirty tiny teeth. The gargoyle opened its mouth until its lower jaw rested on the floor.

"I'm on the train again in four hours. We can all be normal for four hours."

A man passing with a briefcase snorted.

Dick zipped up the bag. "Okay, yeah, I heard it."

Jason chose the diner on Hester because it served breakfast all night and the waitress had once chased a demon out with a pot of decaf.

Ruth looked him over as he came in. He had taken the helmet off in the alley, mostly because it had started giving him directions to places demolished before he was born.

"You look like shit."

"Always a pleasure."

"Booth or counter?"

"Booth."

"The red one bites."

"I know."

"Not you, it doesn't. Other people, it bites. Keep your feet in."

He took the red booth. Ruth brought him coffee, a glass of water, and a plate of eggs without asking what he wanted. The salt shaker shuffled closer to his hand. Jason pushed it back. His stomach felt like he'd swallowed a fist.

Dick came in six minutes later carrying a duffel and looking pleased in a way Jason distrusted immediately.

"How'd you find me?"

"Asked the gargoyle."

"Traitor."

Something scraped resentfully across the roof.

"Not you, the other one."

Dick sat opposite him. "There's more than one?"

"It's Gotham, Dick. There's an entire architectural movement."

"Right, but you have—okay, never mind. Hey."

Jason drank some coffee. "Hey."

They'd seen each other three times since Dick learned he was alive. One of those had involved gunfire. Another had involved Bruce, which had been worse. Dick seemed to be trying to make the fourth one contain eggs, and Jason could tolerate that for the time being. He nudged the bottle of hot sauce toward the middle of the table, and Dick's eyes dropped to it. For a second Jason thought he was going to make something out of that, too. Instead he shrugged out of his jacket, crammed it beside him, and reached across to steal a piece of toast. Jason slapped his hand with the flat of his knife. Dick stole the toast anyway.

Ruth brought another coffee. Dick thanked her, smiled, and reached for the sugar. The red booth nipped his wrist.

"Ow!"

"I told you," Ruth said to Jason.

"He put his hand on it."

"You knew he would. Look at him."

Dick examined the little crescent of tooth marks. "Is she still mad about Blüdhaven?"

Every spoon on the table bent.

"I'm gonna go with yes," Jason said.

Dick put the sugar down very carefully. "Tim called me. He said you got those people out, but you looked hurt."

"Tim's observant."

"You can tell me to fuck off."

"Fuck off."

"Sure. After breakfast."

Jason almost smiled. He hated that Dick caught it; he could tell from the way his brother settled more comfortably into the booth and then immediately regretted settling more comfortably into the booth.

"Can you ask her to stop?"

"You can't solve all your problems by getting your little brother to talk to the furniture."

"Apparently I can solve this one."

Jason tapped the table with two fingers. "He's visiting. Be nice."

The vinyl stopped trying to creep up Dick's jacket. Ruth returned with a plate of pancakes and a fresh spoon. "That's better. You boys staying out of trouble?"

"No," Jason said.

"Good. The men in the gray coats were bothering my dishwasher."

Dick glanced toward the kitchen. A very long, damp face withdrew behind the serving hatch.

"The person," Ruth clarified, "not the machine. They wanted to know where his family came from."

"What did you tell them?" Jason asked.

"Upstate."

Under the table, Dick's bag began to click.

Jason looked down.

Dick put a foot on the zipper. "That's nothing."

"Your nothing's chewing through your bag."

The pale creature poked its head out, sniffed, and looked at Jason. Its pupils expanded until there was almost no face left.

It made an adoring little croak.

The diner tilted. Coffee slid toward Jason. Outside, a fire hydrant burst straight upward, stripping bark off the nearest tree, and the street sign turned around so sharply it unscrewed itself and fell. A man at the counter lifted his plate before the eggs could slide off and went on eating with it in his lap. The dishwasher's damp face reappeared at the serving hatch, took in Dick's passenger, and withdrew at once.

"Hey!" Ruth shouted. "I just had that leveled!"

Dick grabbed the creature by the back of the borrowed shirt. "No. This is my brother. We're not doing that."

It reached for Jason with both little hands.

The diner's windows bulged inward.

Jason put his palm flat on the table. Beneath the laminate, something pressed back. It was much larger than his hand. He could feel the ridges of it through his glove, and under those, a slow movement that traveled up his arm and eased the knot below his breastbone. He let his weight settle against the booth. The table stopped tilting, though the spoons continued to slide until they all touched his wrist.

"I'm not going anywhere."

The windows relaxed.

He swallowed. His chest had stopped hurting quite so much.

"Oh," Dick said, very quietly.

Jason looked up. "Don't."

Dick kept his mouth shut. For once.

His phone rang instead.

Bruce had found the lobby surveyor sitting with his hands clamped over his ears while a bus idled on the other side of the glass doors.

The bus was inside the building. There was no driver. All the passengers had turned to watch the surveyor, and several were leaning their heads against the windows, flattening their faces in ways that suggested an absence of bone. One of them held a small suitcase on its lap. The suitcase was moving. As Bruce approached, every head turned toward him, and the movement inside the case became frantic enough to shake the seat.

Bruce told the man to stand up.

The bus doors opened.

"He's waiting," Bruce said sharply.

They closed.

Getting him out of the building had required Bruce to say this four more times. He was in a police car now, handcuffed to the door because he'd tried to climb into the trunk when the officers offered him the back seat.

Voss was gone. So was most of the equipment. The room behind the gallery partition had been empty except for a chair, a telephone, and a square hole in the floor through which Bruce could see a different building's ceiling.

He had suspended the entire renewal project. That stopped the money, the official crews, and the delivery trucks. It did nothing about the men currently placing brass spikes around three city blocks, because those men had not been on the payroll he'd reviewed.

Barbara had found them on traffic cameras. She had also found the truck they had moved out of the exchange before Jason arrived.

"Old municipal slaughterhouse," Bruce told Dick. "Voss has another installation there. I need Hood's account of what happened inside."

Dick looked across the table. "Old slaughterhouse. Voss."

Jason set down his fork. "That figures."

"He says that figures."

"Give him the phone."

Jason held out his hand. Dick passed it over.

"You going to be useful or irritating?" Jason asked.

"Voss believes the anomalous activity has a single conscious origin. He intends to force it into a limited physical area, then remove portions for sale. His financial records show deposits from six overseas buyers."

"Useful. Good start."

"He identified you as a potential point of access."

"Yep."

"What did he do to you?"

Jason looked down at his coffee. The reflection in it showed a small boy with a split lip, trying very hard to look older.

"Nothing he gets to do twice."

"Jason."

"Ask better questions."

There was a short silence. Then Bruce said, "What happened when you crossed the perimeter?"

Jason answered that one. He told him about the missed heartbeat, the line, the glass, the water. Bruce listened without interrupting, which probably meant he was doing something infuriating at the same time.

"You need to get out of the city," he said when Jason finished.

There it was.

"No."

"If you're connected to it, Voss can use you. I can have you at the Cave in twenty minutes. Zatanna is on her way."

"You can have me?"

"You know what I meant."

Jason's fork sank slowly into the table.

"Sure," he said. "Listen carefully, because apparently I'm only saying it once before we start breaking shit. I'm going to the slaughterhouse. I'm getting that thing out of my neighborhood. Then I'm killing Voss. You can help with the middle part."

He hung up and passed the phone back.

Dick glanced at the fork. Its tines were completely buried now.

"She's not great at boundaries either, huh?"

Jason barked a laugh. "You should see the takeout."

On the way to the slaughterhouse, Jason stopped beside a pharmacy and threw up black river mud.

Dick kept lookout. He did it without fuss, turned toward the street, one hand loose beside an escrima stick. The thing from Blüdhaven sat in the mouth of his duffel and watched Jason with such obvious concern that the nearest drain began to growl.

"Would you quit," Jason told it. "It's looking. It can look."

The drain subsided.

He wiped his mouth. There were little white roots tangled in the mud. He recognized them.

"Jay?"

Jason leaned back against the brick. For a moment, the wall was warm under his shoulders, and the smell of pharmacy disinfectant became the smell of wet earth.

He remembered more than he wanted to.

The coffin had been very expensive. He knew that without seeing it. Soft lining, thick wood, a pillow under his head. Bruce had paid to have him put somewhere nice after he'd finished dying on another continent.

The roots had come through anyway. They'd gone into his chest first. Between the ribs, through the split in his skull, threading the ruined places together with the patient, ugly persistence of weeds. He had become aware of pain before he had become aware of himself. Then sound: a train braking, an argument through a thin wall, somebody calling a kid in for dinner. Hundreds of voices. Thousands. Close enough to touch.

His heart had needed help. Something had closed around it and squeezed. Again. Again. He'd tried to turn away from the pressure and discovered he couldn't move his head. There was something soft against his cheek, something harder beneath it, and a scrape inside his chest with every forced beat. The roots held on while he fought them. They held on when he stopped. Somewhere a radio played the same four bars of a song he'd heard through his mother's bedroom wall, over and over, while his fingers slowly began to curl.

When he'd tried to breathe, the roots in his throat had dragged out a plug of dirt, and he'd screamed into the satin until a voice somewhere above him said, That's it, baby. Be mad.

He had known that voice. Not as one person. Mrs. Alvarez shouting at a landlord; the woman at the corner store chasing him off when the police came around; his mother, on a day when she could get up. All of them speaking through the ground.

The coffin had broken under his hands. After that: crawling, coughing, a hand made of cemetery grass holding the back of his head while he vomited on his own grave. He'd been feverish for days. There had been a room somewhere, a bed with a radiator beside it, soup he could never remember anyone bringing. Once he'd managed to stand, he'd tried the door and found himself looking down a long staircase that turned away into darkness. He'd sat on the top step, too weak to go farther, and somehow been back in bed when he opened his eyes again.

He had spent years trying to account for those days. Drugs, brain damage, somebody else's experiment. He'd gone a long way looking for answers and learned a great many expensive ways to hurt people in the process.

Now the wall behind him curved slightly, keeping him upright.

"It was you," he said.

The pharmacy's neon sign flickered. For a moment every green tube was full of small, branching veins.

Dick had turned around. "Jason?"

Jason looked at the roots in the gutter.

"She brought me back."

Dick didn't say anything. His mouth opened, then shut, and he sat down on the curb beside him. The creature in the bag tucked its hands under its chin.

"The coffin," Jason said. "I thought—there was so much shit I couldn't remember right."

He rubbed the heel of his hand against his sternum. His heart beat on, stubbornly. It had beaten across oceans. In deserts. In rooms where the only person who spoke his language was being paid to break his arm until he learned to stop them. Whatever Gotham had done, she'd done it well enough to last.

Now someone was hurting her, and he could feel where she'd touched him.

Dick's hand settled beside his on the curb. Close. Jason could have moved away from it.

He didn't.

Across the street, the pharmacy door opened. A paper cup of water slid over the threshold, followed by a packet of antacids and a tube of expensive lip balm.

"She thinks you're dehydrated," Dick said eventually.

"She thinks you're a slut."

Dick choked.

The neon sign buzzed with unmistakable approval.

By eleven, Gotham had begun to take offense at everything.

A hired security team drove into the slaughterhouse district and came out of the same intersection from six different directions. Five of the vehicles contained the same four men, becoming increasingly upset. The sixth contained four men who looked nearly right and didn't blink.

The real team stopped. So did the others. The captain leaned forward, peering through the windshield at the nearest copy of himself, and watched it lean forward in answer. He raised his right hand. It raised its left. A mirror, then, some kind of projection; he could work with that, he could keep his men calm if he had an explanation. He lowered his hand. The copy kept its hand raised and smiled. The captain called Voss. "We have a situation."

"Stay inside your vehicles. The tires are treated."

The copy on the other end of the street raised an identical phone.

"Sir."

"Do not step onto the pavement."

An engine cut out. Somewhere behind them, a door opened, and the captain heard one of his men say, "That's my wife." His wife had been dead for nine years. The captain twisted in his seat, reaching for the door lock, but the man was already climbing out. Across the intersection, five identical doors opened. Five identical men stepped onto the pavement. In the rearview mirror, the captain watched the woman choose between them.

By the time Jason and Dick reached the intersection, there were five empty vans and one van containing a very old tree. The tree had grown around the steering wheel. A gray sleeve protruded from the bark. Dick approached the driver's window, looked inside, and came back to Jason with his mouth set in a thin line.

"Don't ask me," Jason said. "I shoot people. That's a gardening problem."

Farther down the street, an ambulance was trying to reverse away from a crosswalk that had acquired depth. The white stripes rose one by one, long rectangular teeth lifting out of the road. Behind the ambulance, a taxi stood on its nose, front wheels turning in empty air.

Jason broke into a run.

"They're invited!" he shouted.

The road paused.

"The ambulance. The cab. They're with me."

The teeth sank. The taxi dropped with a crunch that sounded expensive. The ambulance driver stared through his windshield, both hands locked on the wheel.

Jason came up beside him. "You local?"

"Metropolis," the man said faintly. "Covering a shift."

"Rough night for it. Stay behind us. If the road does that again, say you're bringing me a casserole."

"A what?"

"Food in a dish. Come on, man, keep up."

He turned back toward the slaughterhouse. His helmet display was failing completely now, giving him a view of the street as it had looked at six different points in the last century. He pulled it off and handed it to Dick.

Above the rooftops, something moved. At first Dick thought it was a trick of perspective: a taller row of buildings behind the first, windows sliding past windows. Then a church steeple bent at the middle. A hundred distant rooftops rose together, unfolding upward and inward, and he saw the underside of something that had been pretending to be a skyline. Along its length, familiar places opened and closed: the hospital's eastern entrance, the clock above City Hall, a row of little shops where he'd bought a birthday present for Alfred. It had been crouching around them the entire time. He looked down at the street because looking up any longer was beginning to hurt.

"Jason," he said.

"Yeah."

"How big is she?"

An apartment block turned its blank eastern wall toward them. It was no longer blank. Something opened behind the brick, enormous and wet, and focused on Jason with a pupil the width of three apartments. Jason lifted a hand. The eye followed him, turning as he moved along the sidewalk, and the people at the bus stop under it shuffled closer together to give him room. From the duffel came a tiny, awestruck squeak.

"Don't encourage her," Dick told it.

Tim was eating a sandwich under a railway bridge when they found him. He had a tablet balanced on one knee, a coil of cable over his shoulder, and the tense, immobile posture of somebody who had received very specific instructions. Above him, the girders flexed. A long tongue unrolled from a crack in the masonry and tasted the air beside his ear. He moved the sandwich six inches to the left. The tongue followed it. Tim moved it back and took another deliberate bite, eyes fixed on the screen.

"Keep chewing," Jason said.

Tim took another bite.

"Where's Bruce?"

He pointed up.

"Where's Voss?"

He pointed down the street.

"You going to finish that?" Dick asked.

Tim gave him a look of such naked hatred that Jason had to brace himself against a bridge support to laugh. The support moved obligingly under his hand. Up above, Bruce dropped from the parapet and landed between Jason and the road, his cape settling around boots splashed with something that looked like chalk.

"We have a route in," Bruce said.

"Congratulations."

"Robin found a service tunnel. Voss hasn't secured it."

Tim swallowed. "Because the street entrance's plugged with sixty feet of concrete, and the other way in floods when you open it. Maintenance hatch on the river side. The tunnel comes out under the east wall, inside the perimeter."

Jason looked past him. The slaughterhouse stood behind a fence topped with wire, a low, square building surrounded by white lamps. Everything inside the fence was rigidly ordinary. Beyond it, the surrounding warehouses leaned closer with every passing minute. Their loading doors hung open, showing depths that went far beyond their rear walls. Something breathed through all of them at once, and Jason felt each breath drag against the old injuries in his chest.

"Where's the hatch?" he asked.

"Under the river."

"Of course it is."

A woman in a dark coat stepped out from behind a bridge pier, carrying a top hat upside down. The hat contained a bus ticket, three pennies, and an eye. The eye was staring fixedly at her.

"Don't ask," Zatanna said. "I tried a location spell."

Jason looked into the hat. "You have to buy a ticket like everybody else."

"I was beginning to gather that. Hello, Jason."

He had last seen her at a League Christmas party. He'd been fifteen and she'd let him put his head inside the hat, which at the time had contained a respectable number of rabbits. Now she was looking at him with an expression he couldn't stand, and he could practically see her deciding which question to ask.

"Rough reunion," he said. "Skip ahead."

She did. He appreciated that.

"May I see your hand?"

He gave it to her. She turned his palm upward, touched the heel of it with two fingers, and said a word backward. The lines of his palm opened into streets. For a moment they were all looking down at a little piece of the Alley. Cars moved along the creases. A bus stopped beside his thumb. In the deepest line, a boy with a mop of black hair crouched by a curb, trying to tie a shoe with a broken lace. Jason could hear him muttering. He knew what the boy would do next—pull the lace out entirely, stuff it into his pocket, run with one shoe flapping—because he'd done it. Zatanna inhaled sharply. Jason pulled his hand back, and the streets closed.

"Don't do that again."

"I won't."

Bruce had come closer. "What did you see?"

"She's in the repair." Zatanna kept her eyes on Jason. "The healed tissue. Not something riding inside him. This is him."

Jason curled his hand into a fist. On the underside of the bridge, mortar trickled out of a seam and fell around Zatanna's shoes.

She stepped back. "And she's getting less patient."

"Can you break the perimeter?" Bruce asked.

"Not without knowing what he's done inside. He's pinned a piece of her to the ground, and she's pulling against the pins. If I just tear them out—"

A sound came from the slaughterhouse, a high metallic whine that rose beyond hearing. Every window in the nearest warehouse went white. Jason doubled over. It felt as if someone had taken hold of the inside of his ribs and begun to peel.

Bruce caught him before he hit the ground.

Jason shoved at his arm. "Get off."

"You're not going in there."

"Get. Off."

The support beside them cracked from top to bottom. Dick grabbed Tim by the cape and hauled him clear as a section of masonry dropped where his head had been. Zatanna said something sharp and backward; the falling stones stopped in midair, hanging around Bruce and Jason like a badly interrupted avalanche.

"Everybody move," she said.

Bruce lifted Jason bodily. For half a second Jason was too busy trying to breathe to stop him, and then he had one arm under Bruce's chin and his heel driven hard into the back of Bruce's knee. They hit the pavement together. Bruce rolled, trying to keep his weight off Jason's chest while securing his arms, which was just enough hesitation for Jason to headbutt him in the mouth. It hurt like hell. He didn't care. He got a boot between them and shoved, scrambling backward until he could close his hand around the fence.

"You don't get to do that," he said, hauling himself up by the fence. "I said no."

Blood marked Bruce's lower lip. He got to his feet, face rigid beneath the cowl. "You can barely stand."

"Then quit fucking making it harder."

Behind Bruce, the pavement split. It happened quietly. A narrow crack, then a widening gap, then something moving a long way below the street. Jason saw row after row of teeth, each one carved into the shape of a familiar building. There was the courthouse, its steps stained red. There was the hotel where he'd once slept in an air duct. Between them, a tongue the width of a subway platform unrolled toward Bruce's boots.

"No," Jason said.

The tongue stopped. Bruce looked down.

"He's mine to hit," Jason told the street. "Back off."

The mouth stayed open for a long, difficult second. Then the tongue withdrew, the teeth sank, and the pavement closed under Bruce's feet. A little gravel spat against his shin.

Nobody spoke until Tim, still holding half his sandwich, said, "I think the tunnel is our best option."

The river was full of faces. Jason remembered fewer of them, but he hadn't been down this way for a while. They turned under the surface as the five of them reached the old loading steps, pale foreheads and open mouths rising between pieces of rubbish. One of them resembled a man Jason had shot in March. The resemblance improved when it saw him and tried to swim away.

"Busy night," Jason said.

Dick set his duffel on the top step. The small creature climbed out, dragging the shirt behind it, and crouched beside the water. For the first time since Gotham Central, it looked worried.

Across the river, entire blocks were lifting. Not enough for someone at ground level to notice, perhaps, but from here Jason could see the narrow gaps beneath them, the long dark limbs that reached down into places the river should have filled. A ferry passed between two of those limbs. Its captain sounded the horn. Far below the surface, something answered.

Zatanna took off her coat and laid it on a dry step. "I can keep a passage open. I can't promise she'll recognize what I'm doing."

"She will," Jason said. He put a hand against the wet stone. "These are mine. Let them through."

Four rings of water formed below them. Inside each ring, the faces turned downward and vanished. The fifth, beneath Bruce, remained crowded.

Jason sighed.

"That one too."

The faces sank reluctantly.

Tim looked from the water to Jason. "Does that work everywhere?"

"I found out I could do it twenty minutes ago. Ask me next week."

Zatanna spoke, and the river folded back from the steps. A narrow path descended through the exposed silt, walls of black water held upright on either side. Fish drifted past at head height. Farther down, something wearing a diving helmet turned to follow them, although its body was moving in the opposite direction.

Bruce went first. Jason allowed it because someone had to step on anything that needed stepping on. Tim followed with the cable, then Jason, then Dick with his shirt-clad passenger. Behind them Zatanna walked slowly, one hand held out on either side, sweat already bright at her temples.

At the bottom, the hatch was sealed with a padlock the size of Jason's head. Bruce cut it with a tool from his belt. Something beyond the door knocked twice.

"Knock back," Jason said.

Bruce did.

"Three times."

Bruce added a third knock.

The answering knock was enormous. It traveled up the hatch and through the riverbed, rattling Jason's teeth. Then something on the other side moved away, slowly, dragging a very large number of feet.

Tim looked at the door. "Who was that?"

"Guy who works down here."

"Doing what?"

"I don't ask you about your extracurriculars."

They went in. The tunnel beyond was cramped and wet, but ordinarily so. Jason distrusted it immediately. There was nowhere to turn off, nowhere to slip into an unexpected doorway; the walls stayed the same distance apart no matter how badly he wanted more room. Halfway along, the ache in his chest became a hot, steady pain. He kept moving. Dick had stopped trying to talk, which made Jason wish he'd start again. All he could hear now was their breathing, the scrape of Tim's cable against the floor, and water hitting the closed hatch behind them. He touched the wall once, briefly. Nothing touched back.

They reached a grating beneath the slaughterhouse floor. Through it, Jason could see boots moving between lengths of hose. Men were arguing overhead. Somebody wanted to leave. Somebody else had been paid a lot of money and thought they should all remember that.

Then Voss said, "We have approximately twelve minutes before the larger organism begins to rupture. I suggest we spend them profitably."

Bruce looked down at Jason.

Jason showed him his teeth.

The slaughterhouse had kept its hooks.

They hung from tracks above the killing floor, each one supporting a glass vessel the size of a man's torso. Inside the nearest, a narrow street bent back on itself until both ends met. A tiny car drove around it in frantic circles. The next held a staircase, occupied by an old woman climbing toward a landing she could never reach. In a third, a dark patch of water pressed against the glass in the unmistakable shape of a face.

Jason stood under the grating and looked at them until his vision stopped shaking.

On the floor below the vessels lay a section of Gotham that had no business fitting inside a room. He could see the undersides of roads, the deep roots of apartment blocks, the buried remains of a subway station closed before he'd been born. It had been pulled upward through the concrete and spread open with brass hooks. Thick ropes of something red and fibrous twitched between the recognizable pieces. Each time the machine beside it turned, one of the hanging vessels filled a little more.

Voss stood at the controls with his sleeves rolled up. Four guards watched the doors. Another man knelt beside the exposed city, tightening a hook with a wrench, and Jason recognized the brass instrument strapped to his wrist: teeth set in a rotating ring, the little silver cap flashing as it turned.

The city jerked.

In the vessel above Jason's head, the old woman stumbled on the stairs.

He shot the man with the wrench through the grating.

The killing floor exploded into noise. Bruce tore the grating free, Dick went up through the opening in a twist of blue and black, and Tim shoved the cable into Jason's hand before scrambling after him. A guard swung his rifle toward Dick. Jason fired again, caught him below the collar, and hauled himself onto the floor as the first man's wrench hit the concrete.

For the next minute there was no room for anything but the fight. A rifle cracked beside Jason's ear; he went low, slid in the slick runoff beneath a hose, and put two rounds into the shooter's thigh before finishing him when he reached for a second gun. Across the room, Dick vaulted a control desk and drove both feet into a guard's chest. Tim ducked under a swinging pipe, slapped a charge onto a junction box, and kept going with the cable unspooling behind him. Bruce caught the pipe on the backswing and used it to drive the remaining guards away from the exposed section of city.

Voss had gone for a lever beside the machine.

Jason saw it and ran.

He was almost close enough when Voss pulled.

Every brass hook turned inward.

Jason hit the floor so hard he lost the gun. For one dreadful second he couldn't feel his heart at all. His hands scrabbled against the concrete; he tried to draw a breath and got a thin, strangled noise that might have been his own or might have come from the streets outside. Through the wide slaughterhouse windows, the city opened. Walls pulled apart. Behind them were more walls, and behind those, wet red folds and teeth arranged in patterns no human mouth had ever needed.

Voss crouched beside him with a knife.

"There you are," he said.

Jason drove his elbow into the man's knee. It wasn't enough. Voss made a startled sound, stumbled, and stamped on Jason's wrist as he reached for the gun.

The knife came down. Bruce caught Voss's arm with both hands, hard enough to break the wrist, and then Voss was flying across the floor into the base of the machine. The knife skittered out of reach. Bruce knelt beside Jason, one hand on his shoulder, saying his name over and over as if that had ever fixed a fucking thing. Jason couldn't tell him to stop. He couldn't get the air. Under his cheek, the concrete was cold; he pressed his palm against it, searching for a pulse.

Dick had heard Jason scream once before. Jason had been Robin then. It had come over the comms during a bad fall, a short, furious sound followed by a great deal of swearing. Dick had been three rooftops away, and he'd made it in time to find Jason sitting on a broken ankle and telling Batman exactly what he thought of the medical advice on offer. This was worse. Jason wasn't making enough noise. Dick could see his mouth working, could see the rigid line of his neck, and for a second he was back in Bruce's study, listening to a story that had already ended by the time anyone thought to tell him.

Dick caught Voss as he tried to crawl toward the lever again and slammed him face-first into the floor. Something broke. He didn't check what. Across the room, Tim had opened the control cabinet and was pulling at a fistful of wires while Zatanna climbed out of the service tunnel behind him.

"The machine," Dick said. "Turn it off."

"It locks when it stops," Tim answered. "I need it to run backward. Give me a second."

They didn't have a second. Jason's fingers were dragging against the concrete, leaving bloody marks. Bruce had stripped off a glove and was trying to find his pulse. Outside the windows, things were hitting the perimeter, enormous things, each impact sending more glass vessels swaying overhead. In the nearest jar, the old woman had stopped climbing. She sat on the stairs with her face in her hands.

Zatanna reached the first hook. She spoke a short phrase, and the brass glowed red, then white. It lifted a fraction before dropping back into place. Blood ran from her nose.

"It's using her own resistance," she said. "Every time she pulls, it tightens."

Dick pressed harder on the back of Voss's neck. "Release it."

Voss made a bubbling noise. Dick hauled his face up.

"Release it. Now."

"Can't," Voss gasped. "Cycle—has to complete—"

Dick hit him again. Something tugged at Dick's trouser leg. The creature from Blüdhaven stood beside his boot, its borrowed shirt dragging in blood. It looked at Jason, then at the exposed city, and made a low, questioning sound.

"Not now," Dick said.

It tugged harder, then stepped onto the white line surrounding the machine. Nothing happened. Dick looked down at it. At the line. At the brass plate fixed to the machine, on which a very old map of Gotham had been cut into the metal. He'd seen one like it in the Cave, from before Bristol's wealthy families had begun putting Gotham on their correspondence when it suited them. The creature scraped a foot along the white paint. It came away on its sole, leaving a tiny bare patch, and the plate didn't so much as tremble.

"Tim."

"Working."

"This thing's built for Gotham."

Tim looked up. The creature was standing directly on the plate now, picking at one of the screws with a long black fingernail.

"Oh," he said.

Dick crouched beside it. Its face tipped toward him with an eagerness that, under other circumstances, he would have found extremely concerning.

"Can you help?"

It opened its mouth. Inside was a pier. A real pier, its pilings thick with mussels, water slapping against them. Dick knew it. He'd eaten terrible fish and chips there three nights ago after a twelve-hour shift, and a gull had brought him a watch. He could smell the oil from the fryer, hear the man at the counter arguing about a delivery. For one dizzy second he almost reached for the railing, then the creature moved its head and the entire pier tilted with it.

"Right," he said. "Okay. That's—yes. Please. That's my brother. I need him."

The creature leaned forward and bit through the brass plate.

Seawater poured out.

Blüdhaven did not enter politely.

The plate burst off the machine and struck the ceiling hard enough to bury itself. Water rushed through the opening, thick with weed and little silver fish, and the creature unfolded. Its hands spread across the floor. Its borrowed shirt tore. More hands emerged behind the first pair, then lengths of slick, jointed limb, then the underside of a pier that should have been thirty miles away. The white line under it stayed bright and useless.

Dick stumbled backward, dragging Voss by the collar. A pale hand caught the back of Dick's head before it could strike a pipe and set him upright with almost ludicrous care.

Then it punched through the machine.

The first hook snapped. Jason jerked against Bruce's arm and drew in a breath that sounded like it had been scraped out of him. Tim shouted something about the lower switch; Dick could barely hear him over the water, but Bruce did. He left Jason long enough to reach across the ruined casing and wrench the switch downward. The remaining hooks began to turn.

Zatanna caught the nearest vessel as it fell. It was too heavy for her, impossibly heavy, and Dick reached her just as her knees buckled. Between them they lowered it into the open city. Glass touched the exposed road, softened, and sank. The old woman's staircase lengthened out of sight. Her head came up, and she stared at them with an expression of furious relief.

"About bloody time," she said, and vanished into a doorway.

They caught the next vessel. And the next. Tim climbed onto the control desk to release the hooks overhead, shouting warnings as each came free. Bruce worked beside Jason, lowering a jar full of subway platform into the red, twitching gap. Somewhere in it a train was arriving; Dick heard the announcement, heard the irritated murmur of people who had no idea how close their evening commute had come to ending on a collector's shelf.

The last jar contained the little street with the car. Jason caught it himself, sitting up with his back against a pipe. His hands shook so badly Dick started toward him, but Jason had already tipped the vessel into the waiting dark. The car drove out onto a strip of wet road, honked at him, and turned a corner.

The floor closed.

For two or three seconds, everything stopped.

Then Gotham arrived.

Every wall of the slaughterhouse bent inward. Brick met brick above their heads, closing the windows, and the room became much larger than it had been. Dick could see streets inside the walls: shopfronts stacked at impossible angles, staircases descending into open mouths, thousands of lit windows with things moving behind them. They were standing somewhere under the city, inside the city, in a place it had previously chosen to disguise as a building.

Jason put his hand down.

Something enormous put its hand under his.

He breathed out. His shoulders dropped, and for one brief moment he looked so young that Dick had to turn away.

Across the room, Gotham noticed Blüdhaven.

The water rose. The brickwork flexed. A sound passed between them that made Dick's teeth ache and turned one of the dead guards' boots inside out.

"She helped," Dick said quickly.

The walls leaned closer.

"She helped Jason. Come on. You were here. You saw."

A pale limb curled possessively around Dick's waist.

Gotham's answer came through the pipes: three huge, discordant blasts that sounded, somehow, exactly like an insult.

Jason laughed. It came out badly, half cough, but he laughed again anyway. He was sitting on a slaughterhouse floor with blood down his chin, watching a piece of Blüdhaven try to put his older brother into its mouth for safekeeping.

"This is your life now," he told Dick.

"Can you please be helpful?"

"I was dead five minutes ago."

"You weren't—don't. Don't do that."

Jason's smile faltered. Dick hadn't meant to sound like that. He tightened his grip on the pale arm and looked at the place where Jason's hand met the floor instead of his face.

After a moment, Jason tapped the concrete.

"Let her take her ugly kid home."

The pipes gave a long, grudging rattle. Around Dick's waist, the arm loosened.

"Thanks," Dick said.

"Wasn't talking about you."

"I know. I still heard it."

Voss had made it six feet toward the service hatch. Jason watched him crawl. The man's broken wrist was tucked against his chest, his face swollen, his expensive coat dragging through a mixture of seawater and blood. He had left the knife behind. Jason could see it under the machine, a thin blade with a hooked end, made for getting under something and lifting it away. He got to his feet, steadied himself against the pipe, and started after him.

Bruce turned immediately. "Jason."

"Move."

"He's finished."

"He's breathing."

Bruce stepped between them. Behind him, Voss stopped crawling and rolled onto his side, looking from one man to the other. Recognition crossed his face. He had found something he understood.

"I surrender," he said. "Batman, I'm surrendering."

Jason drew his second gun. Bruce caught his wrist. This time there was no hesitation, no careful accommodation for his ribs. Jason twisted with the grip and drove his shoulder into Bruce's chest, but Bruce had expected that. He trapped Jason's elbow, stepped inside his stance, and struck the gun from his hand. It slid across the wet floor and stopped beside a drain. Jason hit him in the jaw. It wasn't elegant. Neither was the knee Bruce drove into his thigh, or the way Jason hooked two fingers under the edge of the cowl and hauled him sideways.

They went into the wall hard enough to crack brick. Dick said both their names. Tim started toward them, then stopped as the floor between them rose in a low, unmistakable ridge. Gotham wanted to watch. Bruce got his forearm across Jason's throat, and the wall behind Jason softened. His shoulder sank into it, then his back, just far enough to take the pressure off his windpipe. Bruce adjusted instantly, bracing a foot and reaching for a restraint, but Jason had room to move now. He got his knife out, cut the strap holding Bruce's wrist launcher, and drove the hilt into the hinge of his jaw.

Bruce staggered. Jason shoved him away and bent for the gun. It wasn't there.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," he said.

The drain burped. Bruce was already coming back. Jason ducked the first punch, caught the second against his forearm, and felt the old familiar jolt of fighting somebody who knew every bad habit he'd ever had. Bruce had taught him to keep his weight forward. Bruce had taught him to protect his right side when he was tired. Bruce knew exactly how to make him choose between a hit to the head and a hit to the ribs. Jason chose the ribs, and let the floor tip him backward.

It was a small movement, barely an inch, the sort of thing he would have trusted without thinking when he was ten and running from a cop. Bruce's fist missed. Jason stepped where the concrete rose to meet him, turned, and used Bruce's momentum to drive him into a supporting column. The column embraced him. Brick closed around his chest and upper arms. Bruce struck backward with an elbow; mortar burst, and for a moment one arm came free. Then the column took a firmer hold. It was, Jason thought, a very familiar sort of hug.

"Jason."

The drain spat the gun into his hand.

"Thanks," he said.

He walked toward Voss. The man began talking. Money first, then names, then the places where he kept the rest of his research. Jason let him talk long enough to tell Tim which locker at Gotham Central contained the buyer correspondence. Tim was already on the comm to Barbara when Voss apparently mistook the delay for interest.

"I can help you understand what she did," he said. "What you are."

Jason stopped in front of him. Behind Voss, the wall opened. There was a mouth in it, broad enough to take him whole. It smelled of deep earth and hot metal. Teeth emerged, each one still wearing the ornamental carving of whatever public building it had belonged to. Voss saw it and began to scream.

Jason shot him in the head. The sound filled the room. Voss dropped. Behind Jason, Bruce went very still inside the column. The mouth remained open.

"No," Jason told it. "He's got all that weird shit in his pockets. You'll get indigestion."

The mouth closed, unhappily. Jason holstered the gun, picked up the fallen knife by its handle, and snapped the blade under his boot. Then he crouched beside the dead technician and removed the little wheel of stolen teeth from his wrist. Up close, he could see six of them, each one set into a socket too small for it. Blood had dried in the grooves around the silver cap. He wrapped the wheel in a clean bit of the technician's coat and handed it to Zatanna.

"People at the clinic," he said. "If there's anything you can do."

She took it. "I'll try."

Across the room, Bruce broke a piece of brick off the column.

Jason looked toward him. The city tightened its hold.

"Let him go."

Nothing happened.

"I'm serious. He's going to start with the explosives, and then we're all going to have to hear about collateral damage."

The column opened. Bruce stepped free with dust on his shoulders and a fury Jason knew down to its smallest details.

"This isn't over," he said.

"Yeah. I figured."

The slaughterhouse's loading doors opened behind Jason. Outside was Hester Street, although Hester Street was eight blocks away. Ruth stood in the diner's doorway with a paper bag in each hand.

"Your eggs got cold," she called. "I made sandwiches."

Jason picked up his helmet from where Dick had set it on a dead control panel.

"You hungry?" he asked his brother.

Dick glanced at Bruce, then at the street, then back at Jason. "Starving."

"Come on, then. Bring your horrible little boyfriend."

From somewhere beneath the floor, Blüdhaven made a delighted noise.

"Please stop giving her ideas," Dick said.

Gotham was mostly back where she'd been by morning.

The streetlamp on Keene returned, with fresh green paint and a small bunch of flowers caught in the bracket beneath its light. Mrs. Okonkwo's stairs carried her all the way to the corner shop and waited outside while she bought milk. The shopkeeper complained about the obstruction, but only after she'd gone home.

The security vans reappeared at the city limit. Five were empty. The sixth still contained the tree, which had begun to flower. When a recovery crew tried to tow it, the roots wrapped around the axle and the radio said, very clearly, "Mine."

They left it there.

The people from the exchange went home or to Leslie's. Zatanna managed to return four of the stolen teeth by lunchtime, which delighted the teenager with the bloody sweatshirt and thoroughly upset his dentist. The old woman from the staircase called in to a local radio show to complain about the disruption, but the host cut her off when she reached the part about Batman climbing through her basement.

Bruce called Jason nine times.

Jason let the phone ring. On the tenth call, his kitchen sink answered.

He wasn't sure what it said. The conversation took place mostly in the sound of water going down a very deep hole. Bruce didn't call an eleventh time.

Dick missed his train.

That was partly because Jason had fallen asleep in the diner, still sitting up, with his sandwich untouched in front of him. Dick had stayed. Ruth put a cup of fresh coffee down every forty minutes and threatened to charge him rent after the fourth one. The red booth allowed him to slide his jacket under Jason's cheek without biting.

It was also partly because Gotham Central insisted the Blüdhaven service had been discontinued in 1911.

"It hadn't," Dick told the station clock.

The minute hand turned away from him.

He got home by motorcycle after lunch. Blüdhaven welcomed him with every green signal between the county line and his building, then locked the front door for twenty minutes while something inside rearranged the spare room.

There were two beds now. Dick stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand, looking from one to the other. One had blue sheets. The other had red. Between them, on a shared nightstand, sat a mug full of little chocolate bars and a shell shaped remarkably like a motorcycle helmet.

"Oh, you are going to get us both murdered."

In the wall, the pipes purred.

Jason woke in his own bed with a brick on his chest. He lay still and looked at it. It was warm, clean, and wrapped in the sort of crocheted cover people put around hot-water bottles. Somebody had tucked his blanket around the edges. The last thing he remembered was Dick arguing with Ruth about whether coffee still counted as coffee after its third refill. His boots stood beside the bedroom door, laces undone, with a pair of slippers placed hopefully in front of them.

"Subtle," he said.

The radiator clicked. His ribs felt better. Not healed, but better than they had any right to feel after the night he'd had. He lifted the brick, set it beside the bed, and found a paper bag on the nightstand. Inside were two breakfast sandwiches, a bottle of water, and a folded piece of Batman's cape. Jason picked up the fabric and held it by one torn corner.

"You kept a souvenir?"

The radiator clicked again, more emphatically.

He laughed until his ribs objected, then got up and took the food into the kitchen. The city outside his window looked almost respectable in daylight. Traffic on the avenue. Somebody arguing about a parking space. A woman on the opposite fire escape trying to persuade a gargoyle to give back her laundry basket.

He stood there longer than he meant to.

When he'd crawled out of the grave, he'd thought somebody had made a mistake. There had been so much pain, so much anger, and nobody there to explain why the world had carried on without him. Even after he could think clearly again, he'd kept waiting to find the person responsible. Somebody with a laboratory. Somebody who wanted something.

The brick on his nightstand gave a small, settling crack.

Jason looked back at it.

"Could've left a message," he said.

Outside, a bus braked at the stop. Somewhere a woman called a kid in for lunch, and a familiar, battered door opened in the building opposite. For an instant he could see a narrow bed beside a radiator, a bowl of soup on a chair, the room where he'd spent those first days learning to breathe without help.

He put his sandwich down.

"Yeah," he said, after a while. "Okay."

The door closed gently.

His phone buzzed against the counter. Tim, sending him an address and a photograph of another gray-coated man getting out of a town car.

Voss's procurement guy. B bought the company overnight to get the personnel records. This one wasn't there. Thought you'd want to know.

Jason studied the photograph. "Huh."

A second message arrived.

That was meant for Dick.

Jason snorted.

sure it was, bristol.

He finished his sandwich, checked both guns, and shrugged on his jacket. At the front door he paused, one hand on the latch.

"Coming back," he told the apartment. "Couple hours."

The latch warmed under his palm. Downstairs, his motorcycle was waiting beside the curb. Someone had filled the tank. A gargoyle crouched behind the seat, pretending very badly to be part of the bike. Jason looked at it. It looked straight ahead, its little stone claws tucked underneath it and its wings clamped so tightly against its sides that grit trickled onto the tire.

"You can't come."

The gargoyle hunched lower.

"You're eight hundred pounds."

It spread its wings a little, suggesting an alternative. He thought about the photograph. Four bodyguards. An armored car. The procurement guy had a knife on his belt, with a thin hooked blade that matched the one Jason had broken at the slaughterhouse. Jason put his helmet on.

"Fine. But I get first go."

Above him, every gargoyle on the block turned its head.

"I was talking to this one."

A hundred stone wings opened.

Jason sighed, started the bike, and went to work.