Meteor Freak
Episode 19: Gotham City
Date: Tuesday, November 22, 2011.
Location: Gotham City, New Jersey
Tyson glanced at his phone screen. Kara.
"Lex just called me again." She skipped straight to business. "He's been digging into the third Stone. The one Wayne Enterprises is putting it on display at a public event. Some charity gala in Gotham called the Save the Rainforest Costume Ball."
"He's putting a Stone of Power on display at a costume party?"
"Lex thinks Wayne doesn't know what it is. Just another artifact in his collection. The man buys ancient relics the way other people buy watches. The ball is high-profile. Gotham elite, celebrities, old money. Invitation only, but Lex says he can get you on the list. You show up as a guest, find the Stone, and get out before anyone notices."
"A costume ball," Tyson said. He leaned against the truck. "So I get to don a mask."
"You won't stand out, but neither will anyone else who might be looking for the same thing."
A room full of Gotham's wealthiest, all anonymous behind masks and costumes. The Stone sitting somewhere in the venue like bait on a hook.
"One other thing," Kara said. "Batman operates out of Gotham. He's some kind of hero, vigilante, whatever you want to call him. I don't know what his powers are, but you can bet he's going to be there."
Tyson smiled.
"Is that going to be a problem? And can you even get to the East Coast in time? The ball starts at nine."
He looked up from the phone. Gotham City's skyline cut against the grey November sky, all gothic spires and brutalist concrete. He'd run from California, following Interstate 80 east across the country. Then caught 95 south until the signs started reading Gotham.
"I'm already here," he said.
The silence on Kara's end was heavy she clearly hadn't expected him to be so close. There was only a bay separating them.
"Then I'm sure if you make a move for the Stone, Batman will interfere. He's territorial about Gotham. Anything that looks like a theft at a Wayne event, he'll be on it."
"I'll figure it out," Tyson said. "Is there any sign of Clark?"
She didn't answer immediately. The silence lasted long enough that he straightened up from the truck.
"Kara?"
"He came near the house," she admitted, "Last night. I didn't see him, but the perimeter cameras caught movement. Something fast, high altitude. It circled twice and then dropped low over the east side of the property."
"And?"
"And then he pulled back. Hard. Changed direction mid-approach and was gone in less than a second. The east side has meteor rock scattered in the garden."
"So it worked."
"Yeah, but he knows where I am. He scouted me. That wasn't random. He came looking, hit the Kryptonite, and retreated. I haven't seen him since."
"So he'll go for the Stone," Tyson said. "If he can't get yours, and he knows you're dug in, he'll go for the one that's sitting in a display case at a party with no Kryptonite anywhere near it."
"That's what I think, too."
"Then, it's on me. This ball becomes my trap."
"Be careful," Kara said. "I mean it."
"No worries. I went toe to toe with a Kryptonian a few months back."
"That doesn't count. I wasn't trying to hurt you."
Tyson laughed. "That wasn't a sex joke. I didn't mean you."
"Then what Kryptonian did you fight?"
"There was a situation back in Smallville. Meteor Freak got his hands on Clark's powers. Full suite. Strength, speed, the whole package. I fought him."
"You fought someone with Kal's powers. And you won?"
"Got my ass kicked, actually. But a little Kryptonite evened the odds. Turns out the weakness transfers with the power set."
"Hm." She was quiet again. "You seem confident about this."
"Only way to be. Everyone's counting on me. Plus I'm stronger now then I was then." It was just the truth of the thing. Kara was dug in behind meteor rocks in Metropolis with one Stone. Lex was pulling strings from Smallville. The second stone Stone was sitting in Gotham behind Batman and whatever security Bruce Wayne's money could buy, with Clark Kent circling somewhere overhead like a hawk that had spotted a field mouse.
He was the one who had to walk into the room. And get the third from Isobel, somehow.
"So, if I manage to get two Stones of Power, what exactly do I need to do to get you to give up the third?" he asked in a slightly flirty tone.
"Goodbye, Tyson." But she didn't hang up. He could hear her breathing on the other end, and something in the way she'd said it, the deliberate formality of goodbye instead of just cutting the call, told him she was smiling. Or close to it.
"Because I was thinking—"
Click.
He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen. Call ended. He stared at it for a second, then shook his head and pocketed it, turning back toward the skyline. Somewhere in that mess of a city, Bruce Wayne was preparing to throw a party. And in about seven hours, Tyson was going to walk into a room full of masks and try to steal something that some of the most dangerous people on the planet also wanted.
He pushed off the truck and started walking toward the city. He needed to find a tailor.
Half a block later, he pulled the phone out again. The pause before making this next call was deliberate. He needed the transition, the mental gear-change between a conversation where someone actually gave a damn about whether he came home in one piece and the one he was about to have, where every word would be a chess move. It was a completely different type of conversation.
Tyson dialed another number while he walked.
Whether she'd pick up was a gamble. It rang three times, four, and then the line connected.
It was Lana's voice, but Isobel who spoke.
"Hi, dear. How's the apartment?"
The warmth was perfect. The cadence was perfect. If he hadn't known better, he'd have believed it was Lana checking in on him.
"Mostly patched," Tyson said, matching her tone. Easy, comfortabl, like a man talking to his girlfriend. "Going to need to get a contractor in for the ceiling though, couldn't patch that hole properly on my own. Miss you. How's the girls' trip?"
"Oh, you know. Brianna has been insufferable about the drive. It's all very tedious."
"Well, I just wanted you to know, sweetie. I found out something about that stone you were looking for."
The act held, but the silence on her end had a different texture. When she spoke again, the domestic warmth was still there, but underneath, it was hungrier.
"You haven't been a bad boy, have you?"
"You know me. I wouldn't make a good house husband. Can't cook. I fold the shirts weird."
Isobel dropped the pretense. The voice didn't change, but the woman behind it stopped pretending. "You left Smallville."
"Gotham City," Tyson said. "Stone of Power is going to be at the Save the Rainforest Costume Ball tonight. Wayne Enterprises is hosting. Think you'll make it in time? You'll have to find your own way onto the guest list."
"Why are you helping me?" There was no flirtation in her tone now.
"I'm helping me," Tyson responded. "The Stones are the ultimate power, right? So I'm going to acquire it, then I'm going to get the one from the Luthors, then I'm going to take the one from you and use that power to expel you from Lana's body."
There was a pause, then Isobel laughed rich and genuine. "I do so admire a man with initiative. But don't overreach, mon cher. Greater men than you have made that mistake with me. They didn't enjoy what followed."
Tyson put the act back on. "See you tonight, sweetie. Don't forget to get a nice dress. It is a costume ball, after all."
"Oh, darling." She drew it out, savoring every syllable. "I always dress for the occasion."
This time, it was Tyson who hung up.
— Meteor Freak —
The section of Gotham City he walked looked like someone had built a cathedral and then forgotten to stop. Gargoyles crouched on ledges thirty stories up; beneath them, the sidewalks stayed in permanent shadow. The buildings were the problem; or the marvel. Art Deco flourishes, concrete everywhere. Gothic revival competed with industrial modernism on every block, and somehow both lost. The fog from the river breathed into the streets and crept through downtown.
Tyson walked through it. The fog parted around him and closed again behind his passing. The skyscraper hosting the ball stood apart from its neighbors. Searchlights swept the sky from the rooftop, and a steady line of limousines and town cars crawled along the street below, disgorging passengers at a carpeted entrance flanked by topiary cut into the shapes of jungle animals. Parrots, jaguars, even a gorilla.
He bypassed the ground-floor entrance entirely; superspeed and stairs carrying him to the upper level in silence, and he stepped out into the ball, unnoticed.
His costume was simple and deliberate. A black tuxedo, well-fitted, with a white dress shirt and vest beneath. White gloves. A black cape that fell to mid-calf, lined with red silk. And the mask, white porcelain, covering the upper half of his face, with narrow eyes. The whole ensemble had a theatrical quality, something pulled from his memories of an old anime, but in a room full of people dressed as rainforest creatures and mythological figures, it registered as tame; almost classical. The kind of costume that said its wearer had either no imagination unless you recognized the character, or that he had too much confidence to need anyone's recognition.
The ballroom occupied the entire upper floor of the skyscraper, with floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides that turned the Gotham skyline into a living backdrop. The ceiling had been transformed into a canopy with real trees, transplanted and suspended. Vines hung down from between the branches, some real, some silk. The dance floor dominated the center of the room, surrounded by tables draped in emerald cloth at the edges. An orchestra played from a raised platform while guests moved through the space.
Tyson had arrived early on purpose.
The ball didn't officially start for another forty minutes, but the venue was already filling. He wanted eyes on everything before the room got too crowded. The Stone, whenever Wayne decided to unveil it. Batman, if the man was here and not perched on a rooftop somewhere. Isobel and the girls. Clark. Hell, he wouldn't be surprised if the Joker popped up. Gotham had that energy.
Staff moved between tables with trays of champagne and hors d'oeuvres while the other early arrivals mingled in small groups. Tyson found a spot near the back corner, giving him a wide view of the elevator bank and both main entrances. A waiter passed, and he lifted a glass off the tray and sipped.
The crowd filled in over the next half hour. Most of the men had played it safe. Suits. Some with interesting patterns or fabrics, a few with themed accessories, but the real effort had gone into the women's outfits. Princess gowns. Dresses shaped like flowers with layered petals of silk fanning from the waist. One woman had come as some kind of jungle goddess, with a headdress of real feathers.
It was a room of men who'd attended and women who'd showed up.
His own costume, the cape, the porcelain mask, stood out among the male guests. A few glances found him and lingered. He ignored them and watched the elevator.
He saw them the moment the doors opened.
The three women stepped out together. Lana walked at the center; her dress like something from the court of Isobel's time. Black velvet bodice, fitted close, with a squared neckline just off the shoulders. The sleeves were full to the elbow and then tight to the wrist. The skirt topped by a deep burgundy sash cinched the waist. Her mask was black and gold, curving upward at the temples into points that suggested horns or perhaps a crown. Lana's dark hair was pulled up and pinned with what looked like an antique comb.
Chloe flanked her left. Her dress was lighter, deep forest green with cream accents at the collar and cuffs. The cut was similar in period, with the structured bodice, but where Lana's costume carried authority, Chloe's had something playful about it. The fabric was softer, the neckline higher, the sleeves slashed to show the silk beneath. Her mask was silver, delicate, covering just her eyes and the bridge of her nose.
Kyla took the right. Her dress was the darkest of the three, deep indigo, almost black, until she moved and the light caught the blue undertow of the fabric. The bodice was embroidered with silver thread, the skirt the fullest of the three. Her mask was plain dark leather, unadorned. Black hair braided and wound into a coil at the base of her neck.
All three of them stood out, not just for the unique outfit choices, but for the pink aura, visible only to Tyson's sight.
Isobel found him immediately.
Across the length of the ballroom, through the shifting crowd of masks and costumes, she looked straight at his corner like she knew exactly where he was standing. Maybe she did. Tyson could see auras; maybe Isobel could do something similar. Or maybe he just stood out among Gotham's elite.
Her eyes held on him across the room. Tyson didn't move. He kept his posture loose, the glass in his hand, his weight against the window frame. No aggression. No challenge. Just presence.
She studied him for a long moment. Then her expression subtly shifted, though the mask hid most of it, and she started walking. Chloe and Kyla fell into step behind her without a word. The crowd parted for them. Not deliberately, but bodies shifted, conversations angled away, and a path opened through the press of guests like water flowing around stones.
The orchestra, which had been playing something ambient and forgettable, transitioned. The new piece had structure. A waltz, maybe, or something adjacent to one. Tyson wasn't cultured enough to tell.
He set his drink down. A waiter passed with a tray of champagne flutes, and he lifted two. When Isobel reached him, he didn't greet her first. He turned to Chloe and offered her a glass. Then Kyla. Both women took them without speaking, though Chloe's mouth quirked behind her silver mask in something that might have been Madelyn's amusement or might have been Chloe's own personality bleeding through.
He turned to Isobel, who looked confused that she hadn't been addressed, greeted, or attended to first. He extended his hand.
"May I have this dance?"
Isobel looked at his hand. Then at his face. The mask hid her eyes but not her mouth, and her mouth was Lana's, and it curved into a smile.
She placed her hand in his.
He led her toward the dance floor. The crowd had thinned there as the music shifted, and Tyson guided Isobel to a spot near the center where the overhead canopy was thickest, and the tiny lights in the branches cast everything in warm amber.
He had no idea how to dance to what the orchestra was playing. Something formal. His hand found her waist and her hand found his shoulder, and they were supposed to move, and he had absolutely no idea how.
But Isobel did.
She stepped, and he caught it. He didn't know the steps, but he was fast enough to figure it out. Superspeed wasn't just about running. It was processing. His mind registered the direction of her weight shift as her foot rose, read the tension in her fingers against his shoulder, decoded the micro-adjustments in her posture that telegraphed the next movement. By the time she completed her first step, he'd already mapped the pattern. By the third measure, he was moving with her. By the eighth, it looked like he was leading.
He wasn't. He was following at a speed that made following look like initiative. His feet found their marks just before hers demanded them there. His hand guided her waist in directions she'd already chosen. To anyone watching, and people were watching, it looked effortless. A man who knew exactly what he was doing.
"You're civil," Isobel said, "for a man of this era."
"I dont't have the same base of comparison that you do, but thanks. I try."
They turned through a sequence that brought them close, her chin near his collar, and then apart again as the music swelled. Her hand was warm in his. Lana's hand, not Isobel's. He had to remind himself that the distinction mattered.
When the turn brought them close again, her temple grazed his jaw, and the angle of it, the specific tilt, the way her head settled against him, was pure Lana. It wasn't the witch's performance, pretending to be her, it was the same way Lana tucked into him on the couch when she was tired. Whatever Lana used in her hair, Isobel hadn't bothered to replace it. Maybe she didn't even know it was there, like a piece of Lana this thief hadn't thought to wipe away. He wondered how many other pieces of Lana were still showing. Tiny habits. Unconscious gestures.
"Every time we meet," Isobel said, "I understand more why this body longs for you."
"Starting to fall for me, too?"
She laughed. The sound was low and genuine, and it pulled at Lana's features in a way that was familiar, but not quite. "I would not give up my quest for the Stones of Power for a man."
"Would you give up Lana for them?" The laughter stopped. Isobel's hand tightened on his shoulder. "If I collect the Stones," Tyson continued, "would you free Lana in exchange?"
They moved through another turn. The music carried them, and Isobel was quiet long enough that the silence said more than words would have. When she spoke, the playfulness was gone.
"It's not that simple. The spell I used only worked because Lana was of my blood. My descendant. I couldn't take just any body so easily."
"So easily," Tyson repeated. "Meaning with difficulty. What if I could get you another body?"
Isobel's mouth curved. "You're fond of this one. Since that's the case, maybe I'd like to keep it."
Tyson twirled her. The skirt of her dress and burgundy sash fanned out, and when she came back into his arms, the face looking up at him was not Lana's.
The proportions altered in ways that added up to someone else entirely. Kara's face looked back at him from behind Isobel's mask. Kara's mouth. Kara's blue eyes.
"I understand why," Isobel said with Kara's face.
For one half-beat of the waltz, the music went somewhere far away. Kara on Lana's body. Lana's body in a dead witch's hands. A woman he was fighting for, wearing the face of a woman he was trying not to think about, piloted by a woman who'd been dead for centuries before he was born. The wrongness of it stacked so high it should have collapsed under its own weight, but it didn't. He could hold this. He could hold anything. But there was a version of him, the one that existed before Smallville, who would have stopped dancing and put his fist through the nearest wall. That version was still in him. He didn't let it win.
Tyson didn't miss a step. His hand stayed steady on her waist, his expression neutral behind the porcelain mask. He took the display of power for what it was, a demonstration. Isobel could use Tina Greer's power, which Tyson had given to Lana. He should have expected that. But it made little difference. She couldn't hide from him with that pink aura.
"I'm not above getting my hands dirty," he said. "If I could get you another body and the other Stones, would you give up Lana?"
Her features rippled and settled back into Lana's as Isobel considered him.
"With an appropriate body," she said, "I would consider it."
"What about Chloe and Kyla?"
"What about them?"
"Madelyn and Brianna. They're riding along in my friends the same as you. If I'm negotiating for Lana, I'm negotiating for all three."
"You presume I control them."
"You summoned them, didn't you? You led the coven, do you not? They followed you into death, and they followed you back out of it." Tyson turned her through a slow rotation, keeping his voice low enough that the nearest couple couldn't hear over the strings. "Don't play modest. It doesn't suit you."
She'd never been modest about her power, and the acknowledgment pleased her. "Brianna and Madelyn are my sisters in craft, not my servants. They have their own desires. Their own hungers." She drew the last word out, letting it sit between them. "Brianna in particular has grown quite fond of her new vessel. The girl is... spirited. She enjoys that."
"Kyla," Tyson said.
"Yes. Your little wolf." Isobel smiled. "Brianna finds the animal inside her fascinating. She's always had a taste for wild things."
"And Madelyn?"
"Madelyn is practical, wadering. She follows where power leads. If I release my claim, she would release hers. Eventually. She has no great attachment to the blonde one beyond convenience."
"Eventually isn't good enough."
"Then sweeten the offer." Isobel's fingers traced a small circle against his shoulder. "You speak of bodies. Of Stones. You speak as though you have resources. So resource, mon cher. Convince me that what you offer is worth more than what I already hold."
The music shifted into something slower. Around them, some couples separated and drifted toward the tables. Others drew closer together. Tyson kept Isobel at the same distance, his hand firm on her waist, neither pulling her in nor letting her drift. Keeping the distance was the hardest part. He remembered what it felt like to pull Lana close. His body wanted to do that now. His hand on her waist was having a conversation with his brain that his brain was losing, because the waist was the right shape and his body didn't care who was driving. But he didn't. Not because Isobel would read closeness as weakness, though she would. Not because it preserved tactical spacing, just in case things turned south, though it did. Because if he pulled her in, he'd be holding Lana, and if he was holding Lana, he'd have to feel everything he was keeping bottled up, and he couldn't open that up. Not in front of this woman who wore his girlfriend to this costume party.
"Three bodies," he said. "Three Stones. And I stop being your enemy."
"You were never my enemy." Isobel looked up at him through the mask, and her smile widened. "You were always my opportunity."
"Does that mean we have a deal?"
Isobel stopped dancing. Her hand stayed in his, her body still close enough that he could feel the warmth through the bodice, but her feet were planted. The waltz continued around them.
"You assume much," she said. The flirtation was gone. What replaced it was harder. "You assume you'll retrieve the Stone before me. That you'll find the third as well." Her fingers tightened around his. "Others have always sought the Stones of Power. Men with armies. Men with faith. Men who believed their cause was righteous and their claim was destiny." She tilted her chin up. "They are all dead. And I am here."
"You're here in a borrowed body. Let's not oversell it."
Isobel's mouth pressed flat, displeased. For a moment, the mask couldn't hide what was behind it. Then it passed, and the smile returned, thinner now.
"You are bold. I have always appreciated boldness in men." She released his hand and stepped back, smoothing the front of her skirt with both palms. "But boldness without wisdom is just noise. You offer me bodies. Stones. These are words. Pretty words from a pretty mouth." She looked him over, slow and deliberate, the way someone appraises a horse at market. "I dealt with men like you in my time. Charming. Powerful. Certain that their strength entitled them to dictate terms. I outlived them. Every single one of them."
A couple drifted too close, and Isobel shifted, angling her body so that the conversation stayed private. "I will not refuse your offer. Nor will I accept it. Not on the strength of promises alone." She reached up and adjusted his mask, a single finger pushing the porcelain a fraction of an inch higher on his cheekbone. "Bring me something real, mon cher. A Stone. A body. Something I can hold in my hands. Then we will talk of deals."
The room had filled while they danced and talked. By the time Isobel stepped back from him, the ballroom held three or four hundred people, and the ambient noise had risen to the point where the orchestra was competing with conversation. She smoothed her skirt one final time, gave him a look that promised nothing and suggested everything, and turned away. She moved through the crowd, and Chloe and Kyla returned to her flanks. The three of them disappeared into the press of costumes and masks.
Tyson retrieved his drink.
The entertainment had escalated. Dancers took the raised platforms at the corners of the ballroom. Some stepped into cages suspended from the tree-branch framework overhead, dancing somewhere between acrobatics, burlesque, and krumping. He didn't pay much attention until he looked at the cage dancers more carefully.
All black men. All black men in cages wearing outfits made of reeds.
He turned away from the cages shaking his head. This wasn't the time to dissect the subtle messaging there. His mind was still on Isobel.
On what he hadn't done.
He could have tried to absorb her power. The thought had crossed his mind the moment their hands touched. His ability worked through contact, and he'd held her for the better part of a waltz. But the what-ifs had kept him from using his power. If he drained Isobel's magic, what happened to the spirit riding Lana's body? Did it fade? Did it take Lana with it? Or worse, did the absorption pull the possession into him, hand his body over to a four-hundred-year-old witch? There were too many unknown variables. Too many ways it ended with someone dead who shouldn't be.
So negotiation it was. Bring her something real, she'd said. A Stone or a body.
The bodies were mostly a bluff. But it was a possibility. Smallville kept producing meteor freaks, and more would surface. It was just a matter of finding three who were women, far enough gone, irredeemable enough, that handing them over to a witch for possession could be justified.
Justified.
This whole situation had sent him down a slope he couldn't see the bottom of. Or maybe he'd already hit it. He'd killed Dr. Walden to protect Clark's secret, and that secret wasn't so useful anymore now that Clark was flying around doing damn near exactly what Walden had been afraid of. Now Tyson was standing in a ballroom planning to abduct women and deliver them to a dead witch for body-snatching.
He was beginning to fit right in in Gotham. In fact, he might be the worst thing he'd run into yet.
The orchestra cut out. The sudden silence pulled every head in the room toward the main stage, where a spotlight had snapped on, catching a man in a tailored tuxedo and a woman in a sequined gown as they walked to the microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" The MC spread his arms wide. "Gossip Gerty of Good Morning Gotham and I welcome you to the gem of our evening!"
The woman beside him stepped forward.
"The famed Heart of Isis," Gossip Gerty announced, one manicured hand gesturing toward the palettes, "and a second ancient gemstone, on loan from the collection of my close, personal friend, Bruce Wayne." Two armed guards emerged from the wings, each bearing a velvet-draped palette. On the first hung a silver necklace supporting a diamond the size of a grapefruit. On the second palette sat another stone.
A figure stepped onto the stage from the opposite wing. Batman moved into the spotlight beside the jewels, and Tyson got his first real look at Gotham's protector in the flesh.
The suit was rubber. Hard, molded rubber, with sculpted musculature that looked more like a costume shop mannequin than body armor. The cowl sat heavy on the head, the ears slightly too tall, the neck looked stiff as a board. And the chest piece had nipples. Sculpted, anatomically placed rubber nipples, like two tiny headlights.
Tyson laughed out loud. The sound escaped before he could stop it, sharp enough that a woman in a peacock mask turned to stare at him. He covered his mouth, shoulders shaking.
That's what had Gotham's criminals running scared?
The MC swept his arm toward the side stage, and a procession emerged.
Six women walked single file onto the stage, each in a costume built around a different flower. A chrysanthemum in gold and copper. A lilac in pale violet. A rose in deep red. An orchid in white and magenta. A dahlia in sunset orange. A lily in cream. Every one of them was stunning.
"Tonight, on auction," the MC announced, "an opportunity to dine with one of our fabulous flowers, with the famed diamond draped around her neck!"
From the bar, Tyson shook his head.
"Half-naked black jungle dancers," he muttered. "Auctioning women." He took a breath. "What's next? Well, I guess it could be worse. Like if they auctioned the black guys."
"Ooo, look at all these luscious lovelies! Let's start the bidding!"
A man at a front table raised his paddle. "Ten thousand for Chrysanthemum."
Another, three tables back. "Twenty thousand for Lilac."
A third, standing near the bar with a cigar he wasn't supposed to have lit indoors. "Thirty thousand for Rose."
"Boys, please." Gossip Gerty wagged a finger at the crowd. "Show some gusto."
A drumbeat interrupted the bidding.
Every head turned toward the top of the grand staircase. Two figures in gorilla costumes flanked a massive ceremonial drum, and one of them had begun pounding it with both fists. The second gorilla stopped and danced to the music. Pulled off their paw mitts. Reached up and removed the gorilla head.
Red hair spilled out.
The woman who stepped out of the gorilla costume was tall, pale-skinned, with a figure that the green bodysuit she wore underneath did absolutely nothing to conceal. The suit covered her from throat to ankle, but fit like it had been painted on. Her lips were red. Her eyes were green. Elbow-length gloves in darker green covered her arms. She lifted both gloved hands. Each one cupped a mound of glittering dust.
She blew.
The dust spiraled outward from her palms, spreading through the ballroom in lazy, fairy-light coils.
The crowd blinked. Whispers died mid-sentence. A woman near the stage swayed on her feet. A man at the nearest table set down his champagne and stared at nothing, mouth slightly open. Across the ballroom, hundreds of faces went slack, glazed, like sleepers caught in the same pleasant haze.
The dust hit Tyson. Nothing happened. He looked at the stage. At the Heart of Isis hanging around the Rose's neck. At the second Stone on its velvet palette, virtually unguarded now that the security detail was staring into the middle distance with matching vacant smiles. At the crowd of four hundred people; every single one of them was affected.
This was his chance.
He moved.
Emily Dinsmore's speed froze the world. He crossed the ballroom floor in a fraction of a heartbeat, weaving between frozen bodies. The stage was forty feet away. He was there, closing his hand around the Stone, slipping it inside his jacket in the same motion.
He was back at the bar.
On the stage, the woman in green tilted backward, her body arching in a slow fall down to the jungle-clad men on the ballroom floor positioned to catch her, and she rolled off them and onto her feet like she'd rehearsed it.
She walked forward. A line of men dropped to their knees ahead of her, forming a bridge of bent backs across the ballroom floor, and she stepped onto the first one. She crossed the human bridge like they were stepping stones on a garden path. The crowd parted ahead of her. Not the unconscious parting that had opened for Isobel earlier. This was deliberate. People stumbled over each other to get out of her way and get her into their sights at the same time.
She stopped in front of Batman.
"Hi there."
The MC stumbled forward, one hand reaching for the microphone he'd dropped. "And you are..."
"Poison." She smiled. "Poison Ivy."
Batman stared at her. His hand came up, slow and clumsy, and took hers. The fingers of the rubber gauntlet closed around her green glove, and the Dark Knight of Gotham looked, for all the world, smitten. The exposed jaw beneath the cowl had gone slack, the hard line of it softened into something dazed and stupid.
Tyson shook his head.
This couldn't be Batman. This was supposed to be the man who kept Gotham's worst nightmares in check. The Dark Knight. The urban legend that made hardened killers check their closets before bed. The king of plot armor, the man who always had a plan, who always had a contingency for the contingency. And here he was, slack-jawed and puppy-eyed, getting swindled and seduced by a woman in a green leotard who'd walked across a bridge of kneeling men.
The crowd watched in drugged adoration as Batman helped Ivy up onto the stage. The MC stumbled toward them with the microphone.
"I'll take it from here, pal," Ivy said.
The MC nodded and backed away, nearly tripping over the velvet palette that now held nothing but an empty impression in the fabric. Nobody noticed. Every eye was on Ivy.
She lifted the Heart of Isis from the Rose's neck. The woman in red didn't resist, didn't even seem to register the loss. Ivy then draped it around her own throat. The stone sat against her collarbone, enormous and glittering, and she touched it once with her fingertips before turning back to the crowd.
"Some lucky boy is about to hit the honeypot. I'll include an evening of my company for the winner. I'll bring everything you see here." She gestured at herself, slow, head to toe. "Plus everything you don't. And I'll bring my imagination."
The bidding erupted.
"Fifty thousand for Poison Ivy!" A man at the front tables, his paddle up before the words finished leaving his mouth.
"One hundred thousand for Poison Ivy!" Another, three rows back, standing on his chair.
"One million," Batman chimed in.
Tyson didn't call out. He was quietly seeing the opportunity standing right there on the stage, wearing green and a stolen diamond. Poison Ivy was a woman. She had a power. A power rooted in pheromones and plant manipulation, potent enough to put an entire ballroom under her thumb with a handful of glitter. She was exactly the kind of vessel Isobel would want. Strong. Beautiful. Dangerous.
But was she bad enough?
Was she Irredeemable? That was the line he'd drawn for himself. If he was going to hand women over to a dead witch for possession, they had to be far enough gone that the morality was clear. Meteor Freaks who'd killed. Who'd chosen it. Who'd keep choosing it. People, the world would be better off without; or, at least, better off being possessed by witches, than running around as themselves.
Ivy had drugged four hundred people tonight. She'd stolen a diamond worth millions. She'd turned Batman into a lovesick puppet. But was that irredeemable, or was it just another day in Gotham?
It didn't immediately make her irredeemable in his eyes. So that was a no.
He considered bidding. The black card in his jacket said forty-three billion dollars, give or take, and the number was absurd enough that he could outbid Bruce Wayne's drugged-up million without blinking. But getting into a bidding war with the richest man in Gotham was stupid even when the richest man in Gotham was operating on pheromone autopilot. It drew attention. And with superspeed he could nab Ivy without paying for her. Why waste the money?
"Is it getting nippy in here?" Gossip Gerty said into her microphone. Tyson thought it was a play on Ivy's painted-on dress, but she wasn't wrong. The temperature in the ballroom had dropped ten degrees in the last thirty seconds.
The wall exploded.
A truck smashed through the elevated bridge beyond the ballroom's far side, punching through glass and steel and decorative stonework. The vehicle plowed into the room trailing a wake of swirling white mist that rolled across the floor and froze everything it touched. Tables cracked. Champagne glasses shattered where they stood. The jungle canopy overhead sagged as ice crawled up the framework.
How the hell did they drive through the wall of a skyscraper?
Standing on top of the truck, backlit by the mist, was a man in a suit of chrome and blue armor. His skin was pale to the point of translucence, and he held a massive pistol that glowed with cold light.
"Did I use the wrong door again?" Mr. Freeze said.
Batman moved. Whatever hold Ivy's dust had on him, the sight of Freeze cut through it. His hand snapped to his belt and came back with a batarang that spun across the ballroom. It caught Freeze's pistol dead center and knocked it from his grip. The gun sailed into the crowd. A guest caught it on reflex, fumbled it, and a thug in a hockey mask rammed the man from behind. The pistol bounced into the air. Another guest grabbed for it. Missed. A second thug batted it sideways. The gun pinballed between hands and bodies like a fumbled football, bouncing off shoulders and outstretched fingers while security guards poured in.
They swarmed Freeze. A dozen armed guards and twice as many guests who were either brave, stupid, or still too drugged to understand what was happening.
"When technology fails," Freeze said, watching them come, "brute force."
He hit the first guard with a punch that launched the man six feet backward into a table. The table didn't survive. Freeze grabbed the next one by the vest and whipped him sideways into a cluster of guests, scattering them like bowling pins. A third guard swung a baton. Freeze caught it in one armored grip, snapped it, and backhanded the guard across the room.
The fumbled pistol arced back toward the truck. Freeze caught it without looking. "Alright, everyone." He leveled the gun at the crowd. "Chill."
He fired. The beam hit a cluster of guests near the stage and flash-froze them where they stood, three men and two women locked in mid-scream, ice crystals blooming across their skin and clothes. He swept the beam left and caught a row of exotic flower arrangements, turning orchids and birds of paradise into glass sculptures that shattered when the bass from the impact tremors hit them.
"I should have been a decorator," Freeze said.
He stepped off the truck and started for the stage.
Batman was already in motion, but so were the… Icemen. A squad of armored thugs in frost-blue gear poured out of the truck's cargo bay and hit the ballroom floor running. Batman met the first three with a combination that would have been impressive if the rubber suit hadn't limited his range of motion so much that he couldn't bend his spine. He dropped one with an elbow, kicked the second into a table, and caught the third with a spinning backhand that sent the man sliding across the frozen floor. Four more replaced them. Then six. The Icemen kept coming, and Batman kept fighting, but he was losing ground, pushed further from the stage with every exchange.
The remainder of the Icemen spread through the ballroom. A squad peeled off from the main assault and rushed the stage, closing in on Ivy from three sides. Two of them grabbed for the Heart of Isis around her neck. A third leveled a compact freeze pistol at her chest.
Ivy didn't flinch. She didn't even look concerned. She lifted one gloved hand, fingers splayed, and tilted her head at the nearest Iceman with something between amusement and pity.
"Boys," she said. "You should really learn to stop and smell the roses."
The gorilla costume she'd shed at the top of the staircase split open, and something green erupted from the pile of fake fur. A stalk as thick as a man's torso punched through the costume's chest cavity and shot upward.
It was a Venus flytrap the size of a city bus.
The first Iceman didn't even have time to turn. A stalk whipped sideways and caught him around the waist. He screamed as the stalk lifted him ten feet off the ground and held him there, kicking.
The second Iceman fired his freeze pistol. The beam hit the main stalk and ice bloomed across the surface, but the plant shuddered once, and the ice cracked and fell away. A secondary vine lashed out, knocked the pistol from his hands, and wrapped around his ankles. He went down hard, dragged across the stage on his back, clawing at the floor.
The third Iceman tried to run. The flytrap's central head closed around him from the shoulders up, and lifted. His legs kicked twice, then went still. The bulb pulsed once, twice, and a muffled sound came from inside that might have been a scream; or a note of pleasure from the carnivorous plant.
"Okay," Tyson said, still standing at the bar. "Maybe evil, but not quite irredeemable, yet."
The flytrap wasn't done. Its secondary stalks kept growing, spreading across the stage and down into the ballroom, and Ivy stood at its center with the Heart of Isis glittering at her throat.
A tendril shot sideways into the crowd.
It wrapped around a man in a tuxedo, a civilian, someone who'd been trying to crawl toward the nearest exit. The vine coiled around his chest and yanked him off the ground. He screamed, arms flailing, feet dangling three feet above the shattered tile. The tendril started pulling him back toward the central bulb. Toward the head.
"Yeah, the thugs are one thing, just a guy in the crowd is another." Tyson's hand came up. Fire bloomed on the vine holding the man.
The flame lit on the tendril six inches above the man's chest. The plant tissue blackened and curled, the vine snapping like a burned rubber band. The man dropped, hit the floor, scrambled on all fours, and ran. The severed tendril whipped back toward the main stalk, leaking green fluid.
"Irredeemable," Tyson said.
He stepped away from the bar and started for the stage.
He made it four steps before Isobel appeared in front of him, stepping out from behind a frozen champagne tower.
"The stone, Tyson." She held out her hand, palm up. "Give it to me."
"No."
The word came out flat. Final. He kept his weight balanced, his hand inside his jacket where the stone sat heavy against his ribs.
"I wasn't asking." Her voice was pleasant. Conversational. The kind of tone someone used when they were explaining something obvious to someone slow. "That stone is mine. It was always mine."
"I'm holding on to it until we can complete our deal."
Behind them, the flytrap took another Iceman apart. The sound was wet, like someone pulling the legs off a crab. Freeze's pistol discharged somewhere near the far wall, and a section of the jungle canopy collapsed in a shower of frozen leaves and sparking electrical cable. Batman grunted. Someone screamed. And Isobel stood in the middle of it like she was waiting for her table at a restaurant.
The flytrap was eating people. Freeze was freezing them. Batman was losing a war of attrition against an army of hockey-masked thugs. And Isobel was standing three feet away, making demands like she had any leverage that mattered in the next ten seconds.
The simplest solution was the fastest one. Literally.
Grab Ivy. Get out.
The decision formed before he could fully break it down and examine it. He couldn't examine his motives right now; it would mean standing still in a room where a plant was eating people. But the shape of the reasoning was there. He could use an ally in Gotham who knew the terrain. And he needed… the uglier part, the part he didn't want to admit… a woman with a metahuman ability whose moral ledger was deep enough in the red that handing her over to a dead witch could be justified if everything else failed. Ally and insurance policy. Both at once. The fact that he was calculating her value as a person and her value as a bargaining chip in the same instant made him feel exactly like the kind of man Isobel thought he already was.
It wouldn't solve his witch problem. Isobel would still be riding Lana's body, still scheming toward whatever endgame involved the Stones of Power. But priorities.
He reached for the speed.
Sound dropped in pitch, the world stretching into a low groan. A batarang Batman had thrown froze mid-spin. Freeze's pistol beam crawled through the air, a bar of pale blue light inching toward a cluster of guests who wouldn't feel it for another lifetime.
Isobel's mouth was open. She was mid-sentence, her lips shaped around a word he'd never hear, one hand still extended palm-up in that imperious demand for the stone. Her eyes tracked him, or tried to.
Chloe and Kyla were twenty feet away, half-hidden behind an overturned table crusted with frost. Their hands were up. Chloe's fingers were spread wide. Kyla's lips had been moving. Spells. Both of them. Already cast, already in flight, two projectiles of magical energy crawling through the syrup-thick air that would converge exactly where he'd been standing.
Sneaky.
Tyson was already gone. He cut right, angling for the stage. Ivy was forty feet away, standing at the center of her botanical nightmare with the Heart of Isis. The flytrap's tendrils moved around her, mid-reach, mid-coil. Ivy herself was turning, her head rotating but not moving, her lips parted as if saying a command or laughing.
Thirty feet. Twenty. He could see the clasp on the necklace. He could see the individual facets of the diamond. Ten feet. Five. His hand came up.
Something hit the ceiling. Punched through. The impact point was directly above the stage, and the debris field exploded downward in a cone of shattered concrete and bent rebar that spread through the air like a super-slow-motion flower blooming. And through the center of it, dropping like a missile, was a figure in blue and red.
Clark.
The recognition hit in that moment of near-frozen time. That jaw. Those shoulders. Tyson had stood next to this person in a barn. Had lied for him to his face. Had killed a man to keep his secret and then watched him fly away from Smallville like the secret didn't matter anymore. Had raced him down a highway for the sheer joy of finding out who was faster. And now that same person was dropping through a shattered ceiling with nothing behind his eyes but finding his target.
Even here, even in the stretched-taffy world of superspeed where everything else was frozen sculpture, Clark Kent was moving, closing the gap between the shattered ceiling and Tyson's position with a speed that made Tyson's own look like a jog.
It was too fast. The gap between them had always been there; Clark was faster than their race to Grandville, but this was something else. Like whatever governor existed on Kryptonian physiology had been pulled out and thrown away, and what was left was the raw, unthrottled engine underneath.
Tyson couldn't dodge. Not at this speed difference. Telekinesis would barely register against a Kryptonian moving that fast. Like throwing a pillow at a freight train.
But Walden's power wasn't a pillow.
Tyson waited. Let Clark close. Let the distance shrink from thirty feet to twenty to ten, close enough that he could see the set of his jaw and the flat nothing behind his eyes, and then his hand came up, and the shockwave detonated outward from his palm.
The blast caught Clark center-mass. It knocked his trajectory sideways, turning a direct collision into a glancing redirection that sent Clark careening off at an angle.
Clark's shoulder still caught Tyson's left arm on the way past, a glancing blow from a body moving at a speed that made bullets look lazy, and the word "glancing" did a lot of heavy lifting because the impact hit like a wrecking ball. His arm went dead from shoulder to fingertips, the nerves shutting off like someone had pulled a plug. The force launched him sideways, his feet left the ground, and his body spun end over end across the ballroom floor.
He smashed through a table. He burst through a second table and hit the far wall. The wall held, which was the first piece of good news he'd had in three seconds. The impact drove the air from his lungs and left him crumpled at the base of the wall in a pile of shattered wood and frozen tablecloth, his left arm hanging at his side like a piece of meat someone had stapled to his torso.
Clark was gone. Launched by the blast out through the east wall, out into the Gotham skyline.
For a sliver of a second, Tyson tracked the trajectory. A diminishing streak of red against night-gray sky, and then nothing. He wasn't gone for good. The energy blast had bought distance and some time; it wasn't a victory.
The thing that stuck with Tyson was Clark's face. Up close, in the last instant before the blast connected, his expression hadn't been angry, it had been empty. The friend, the farm kid, the guy who couldn't tell a lie convincingly, that person wasn't flying the ship anymore; or if he was, he'd stopped looking out the windows.
Tyson's left arm wouldn't move. The shoulder joint felt wrong, loose, probably dislocated. If Clark had hit him center-mass instead of clipping the shoulder... He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to. He pushed himself up with his right arm, his back against the wall, his teeth clenched. He could still feel the stone in his pocket.
But Isobel was heading his way. She stepped over frozen debris and shattered furniture without looking down, staring straight at him as if she'd just watched a safe crack itself open.
"You can't even lift your arm," she said, and knelt beside him. Her hand went for his jacket, fingers hooking into the lapel, pulling it open to expose the inner pocket where the stone sat. "I don't know what just hit you, but let's not pretend this is a negotiation."
"You're right," Tyson said. "Sorry."
He reached toward his jacket with his good hand, fingers moving for the inner pocket where the stone sat. Isobel's attention followed the movement, her lips curving into a smile, certain of her victory.
At the same time he reached for the Stone, he reached for Emily's speed.
The world stretched. Sound died. Isobel's expression locked in place, that almost-smile frozen on Lana's borrowed face.
Tyson slipped sideways, around her body. His dead arm dragged at his side, but his legs worked fine, and his right hand worked fine, and that was all he needed. He came up behind Isobel and went to work.
Right pocket, nothing. Left pocket, his fingers closed around something hard and warm, a shape he recognized by touch alone because he had one just like it. The Stone of Power. He pulled it free and shoved it into his own pocket, felt it click against its twin.
Next, from her hands, his fingers found leather, cracked and old, the binding held together with thread that felt like it might be sinew. The spellbook. He pulled it free.
He ran.
Across the ballroom, through the frozen chaos, past the suspended debris and the crawling freeze beam and the mid-swing batarang and the flytrap's tendrils locked in their slow coil. He put sixty feet between himself and Isobel, crossed behind the wreckage of the bar, and dropped out of superspeed.
Sound crashed back. The ballroom roared. Screaming, cracking ice, the thrash of Ivy's plant.
Tyson set the spellbook on the bar, grabbed his left wrist with his right hand, and pulled down.
The shoulder popped back into the socket with a sound like someone stepping on a walnut. Wet. Crunchy. Pain flared white-hot from the joint, radiating down his arm and up into his neck, and then it was gone, replaced by a flood of relief that almost felt good. His fingers tingled. He made a fist. Then picked up the spellbook.
Across the ballroom, Isobel turned.
She patted her coat. Left pocket. Right pocket. Inner pocket. Her hands moved faster, slapping at the fabric, and the exact moment she understood was written across her face. The smile vanished. What replaced it was an ugly fury that didn't belong on Lana Lang's face.
She raised her hand. Pale light gathered at her fingertips, the same sickly luminescence he'd seen from Chloe and Kyla's spells, and she pointed it at him across sixty feet of ruined ballroom.
Tyson grabbed Ivy.
The speed took him across the stage in a blink. He scooped her up and was gone, out through the hole Freeze's truck had made.
Isobel's spell hit the spot where he'd been standing. The bar exploded into frozen splinters.
The ballroom was emptying around her. Freeze's truck reversed through the hole it had made, engine screaming, Icemen clinging to the sides as it fled into the Gotham night. Batman's grapple line sang somewhere above, pulling him after the retreating vehicle. Guests stampeded for every exit. Chloe and Kyla pushed through the crowd toward her.
Isobel lowered her hand.
She looked at the empty stage where Ivy had been. At the shattered bar where Tyson had been. At the settling dust where the jewels had been. At the hole in the wall where all of it had gone.
"Countess?" Chloe said, reaching her side. "What happened? Where did he—"
"He took it." Isobel's voice was quiet. Controlled. The kind of controlled that preceded something breaking. "Both stones. The book. The woman. All of it."
She smoothed her skirt with both hands, and her expression settled into something far worse than rage.
Patience.
Tyson wanted this body, their bodies. And he was doing exactly as he said he would. Lana's memories told her the man was reliable. This was not a loss. He would gather the Stones of Power for her, bring them new bodies, and all she would need to do would be to claim them.
— Meteor Freak —
One second, Pamela Isley stood in the grand ballroom of the Gotham Botanical Society, the Save the Rainforest charity gala dissolving into screaming chaos around her. Her vines had already done their work, scattering Gotham's elite like roaches. Mr. Freeze's unexpected entrance through the skylights had been a bonus she hadn't planned for, the perfect cover. The Heart of Isis was hers.
Then the world lurched sideways, and she was somewhere else entirely.
Wind hit her first; cold and sharp. Pamela stood on a wide balcony, the railing ahead of her overlooking a drop that made her stomach tighten despite herself. Forty-eight floors of nothing between her and the street.
The Royal Hotel. The building's silhouette was unmistakable from the outside. The tallest luxury high-rise in New Gotham. All of Gotham was visible from this height. The city was two places pretending to be one. To the south, New Gotham, where she stood now, all glass towers and renovated waterfronts and money laundered so clean it squeaked. GCPD headquarters sat squat and ugly near the waterfront.
To the north, across the Gotham Pioneer Bridge with its Gothic stone arches and rusted suspension cables, lay Old Gotham. The original city. Darker, denser, a maze of industrial decay and crumbling architecture where the money had dried up decades ago, and nobody had bothered to pretend otherwise. Arkham Asylum sat on its own island just off the northern coast, visible even from here as a cluster of pale buildings behind high walls. Old Gotham was where things went to rot, and where the people who liked rot tended to gather.
Pamela turned from the view.
He was standing ten feet away, near the balcony doors. Tall, lean, light-skinned black man in a tuxedo. She'd seen him in the ballroom before everything went sideways. Hard not to. The white porcelain mask covered his upper face, contrasting with his brown skin and dark hair.
The Heart of Isis was still around her neck. Whatever had just happened, he hadn't taken it from her.
"Who are you?" she said. "Where am I?"
"You can call me Tuxedo Mask."
Pamela stared at him. "A little on the nose, isn't it?"
"Says Poison Ivy."
She smiled. "Fine. Where am I, Tuxedo Mask?"
"Penthouse suite of the Royal Hotel. Top floor."
Pamela glanced back over the railing. She'd been right. The balcony alone was larger than most Gotham apartments, and through the glass doors behind him she could see the suite itself, all dark wood and ambient lighting and the kind of furniture that cost more than cars.
It suited her, actually. She hated that it suited her.
"And why," she said, turning back to him, "did you bring me here?"
"Seemed like a better place to talk than a ballroom under siege."
"Talk about what?"
He didn't answer immediately. Just stood there, hands in his pockets, mask giving away nothing. Pamela catalogued what she could. Posture relaxed. Not armed, or at least nothing visible. He'd somehow transported her across Gotham in the space of a blink, which meant metahuman, or tech she hadn't seen before, or magic. None of those options made her comfortable.
"You went through a lot of trouble for that necklace," he said.
Pamela's hand drifted to the Heart of Isis. "A girl likes accessories."
"Must be some accessory, to crash a charity ball with a small jungle."
"I'm passionate about the rainforest." She took a step toward him, letting her hips shift, letting her hair catch the wind. "You still haven't told me what you want."
"Information. Conversation. A drink, maybe."
"And you thought kidnapping was the best opener?"
"I thought getting you out before Batman turned his attention to you was a favor."
He wasn't wrong. Once he was done handling Freeze's little entrance, the bat would have been drawn to her.
Pamela closed the distance between them slowly, deliberately. She knew what she looked like. She knew what she could do. The pheromone compounds were something no human man could resist. A dusting of powder from her fingertips, a breath of toxin-laced air, and he'd be hers. Compliant. Adoring. Useful.
She reached up as if to adjust his mask, her fingers trailing close to his jaw, and released the powder. A fine, almost invisible cloud of green-gold particles drifted between them. But his breathing didn't change. His posture didn't shift. He didn't lean into her touch or go glassy-eyed or start telling her she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. He just stood there, looking down at her through that white mask.
"That usually does something," Pamela said.
"I'm sure it does."
Then he moved. Not away from her. Toward her. One step, and his hand was at her waist. Face to face. He breathed, and she caught a scent. Something sweet and thick. It hit her bloodstream like warm honey poured directly into her veins.
Pamela's knees softened. Her pulse jumped. A flush crawled up her neck and into her cheeks, and she felt genuine want. Not the performative seduction she used as a weapon. Actual desire, hot and disorienting, centered entirely on the man in front of her.
He was close enough to kiss her. His mask was inches from her face. A distant, furious part of her brain recognized what was happening. He was doing to her exactly what she did to everyone else. But she didn't care. She wanted him to kiss her.
But he didn't. He held the moment for one long second, then stepped back. The chemical fog didn't clear immediately. It lingered, warm and pulling, and Pamela had to grip the balcony railing to keep her composure.
"What the hell was that?" she said.
"Call it professional courtesy. Now you know we're on even footing." He turned toward the balcony doors and pushed them open. "Come inside. I'll make you a drink, and we can have that conversation."
The penthouse interior was everything the balcony had promised. Pamela settled into a chair that probably cost five figures and accepted a glass of something amber and expensive. The pull was fading, but slowly, and she kept tracking him behind the bar with more attention than she wanted to give.
"So," Tyson said, pouring his own drink. "Mr. Freeze. That wasn't your doing at the ball."
"Freeze has his own agenda. Something about his wife." Pamela sipped her drink. Bourbon. Good bourbon. "He's sloppy, though. Dramatic. Batman's probably already scooping him off the pavement."
"Which means Arkham?"
"Which means Arkham." He framed it like a question, so she'd fill him in. "They'll throw him in a custom cell with a refrigeration unit and call it humane." She crossed her legs. "Why do you care about Freeze?"
"I don't. I care about the landscape. Who's operating in Gotham right now, and where?"
Pamela studied him over the rim of her glass. The pheromone trick had rattled her more than she wanted to admit, but it had also told her something. He was powerful. Powerful enough to be worth talking to, and dangerous enough to be worth keeping close rather than making an enemy of.
"You want a tour guide," she said.
"I want context."
"Fine." She set her glass down. "Penguin runs the Iceberg Lounge in Old Gotham. Cobblepot's been entrenched there for years, arms dealing, smuggling, the usual. He's got muscle and money, and he thinks that makes him untouchable. The Bat disagrees periodically, but Cobblepot always slithers back."
She ticked off fingers. "Two-Face controls territory in the Bowery. Harvey Dent, former district attorney, coin-flipping psychopath. He and Riddler had some kind of arrangement for a while. Nygma's quieter these days, running things from the shadows, but he's still out there. Still obsessed with proving he's the smartest person around."
"And the Joker?"
"Joker escaped Arkham three months ago. He's set up in the Sionis Steel Mill in the industrial district on the north island. He's got a gang, guns, explosives, the whole circus... And he's got a sidekick."
"Who?"
"Harley Quinn." Pamela's lip curled. "Her real name is Harleen Quinzel. She was a psychiatrist at Arkham. Was assigned to the Joker's case, and he got inside her head. Twisted her up, broke her down, rebuilt her into whatever she is now. He treats her like trash, but for reasons beyond my understanding, she's completely devoted to him."
She'd said the last part with a particular bitterness. Interesting. Tyson leaned against the bar. "Catwoman?"
"Nothing but rumors." Pamela picked up her glass again. "People say she's active, hitting high-end targets in New Gotham, but nobody's pinned her down. Not even the Bat, as far as I know."
Tyson set his glass down on the bar with a quiet click. "I'm going to hit the Joker. Tonight."
Pamela went still. She'd been mid-sip, and the bourbon hung against her lower lip for a beat before she swallowed. "Tonight. You've been in Gotham for, what, five minutes? And why?" She set her own glass down, matching his energy. "The Joker isn't a side project. He's a catastrophe. People who go after him end up in the ground or in Arkham themselves."
"I need to not be a blip on Batman's radar. Right now, I'm an unknown. A new mask in his city. That makes me a problem he'll want to solve, and I don't need him interfering with what I'm doing here." He straightened from the bar. "I deliver the Joker, heal the people Freeze put on ice at the gala, and it clears the path. Buys me goodwill. Buys me time."
Pamela turned the logic over. It was clean. Ruthlessly clean, actually. Most people in Gotham's underworld operated on ego or obsession. Cobblepot hoarded power because he craved respect. Nygma played games because he couldn't stop himself. The Joker burned things down because burning things was his point. But this man was talking about the Clown Prince of Gotham the way a contractor talked about demolishing a condemned building. Like it was a task, another step in the sequence of his plans.
She found that more unsettling than any amount of theatrics.
"You can heal them?" she asked. "Freeze's victims?"
"Yes."
No elaboration. No explanation of how. Just the flat certainty of someone who'd already moved past the question.
He came around the bar toward her. Pamela tracked him, her body tensing on instinct, but she didn't stand. He stopped close. Too close. Close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to keep his mask in view, and she caught that scent again, sweet and heavy, rolling off him like heat from sun-warmed soil.
She thought he was going to kiss her. She wanted him to kiss her, and the wanting itself was infuriating because she couldn't tell if it was her own desire.
He didn't kiss her. Again.
"Stay here," he said. "Think about what I've said. Think about whether you want to work with me. Whether you want to help take down the Joker. I'll be back shortly."
Pamela blinked, and the balcony doors were open, wind curling through the penthouse, and he was gone. No sound. No flash of light. Just an absence and a gust of wind where a man had been standing.
She sat in the five-figure chair in the penthouse of the Royal Hotel with good bourbon in her glass and the Heart of Isis against her throat, and she tried to think clearly.
It was harder than it should have been. He'd done it on purpose. Twice now. Not to control her, not the way she controlled people, but to demonstrate. To show her what it felt like on the other side. The arrogance of that should have made her furious.
It did. It also made her curious, which was worse. She stood and walked to the balcony. Gotham spread below her, split in two by black water. Somewhere on the north island, in the industrial rot of the Sionis Steel Mill, the Joker was laughing at something. He was always laughing at something.
And Harley was with him.
Pamela pressed her lips together. She hadn't said more than she needed to about Harleen. Hadn't mentioned the phone calls that stopped coming, or the bruises she'd seen the last time they'd crossed paths, purple and yellow beneath the white greasepaint. Hadn't mentioned that she'd thought about going after the Joker herself, more than once, and talked herself out of it every time. He was too entrenched.
But this man. This strange, masked, impossibly confident man who shrugged off her pheromones and hit back with his own. Who talked about dismantling the Joker like it was an errand he'd run before dinner.
If he could actually do it. If he could free Harley...
Pamela picked up her bourbon and drained it.
She'd think about working with him. She was already thinking about it.