The ballroom looked like a war zone hit by a blizzard. Tyson appeared near the main entrance. The grand space was unrecognizable from the first time he'd arrived. Shattered skylights gaped overhead, letting in the cold Gotham night. Frost coated every surface, turning the marble floors into a skating rink and the ornate pillars into crystalline columns. Overturned tables, scattered centerpieces, and abandoned evening bags littered the ground where Gotham's wealthiest had fled in panic.
But the worst of it was the ice blocks, inside each, a person. Tyson counted eleven. Men and women in evening wear, frozen mid-scream or mid-stride, their skin already taking on the blue-white pallor of severe hypothermia. Some had their hands raised in front of their faces. One man in a tuxedo was frozen reaching for a woman beside him, their fingers inches apart, each sealed in their own separate prison.
GCPD officers swarmed the space. Someone had set up portable heaters, the industrial kind, aimed at the nearest blocks, but the ice was dense, and the melting was agonizingly slow. Water pooled across the floor in thin sheets. Paramedics stood by with thermal blankets and IV lines, waiting for patients they couldn't reach. A woman in a detective's coat was shouting into a radio about requesting blowtorches from the fire department.
Tyson walked toward the nearest block. A woman was inside, mid-forties, pearls frozen against her throat, her mouth open in a silent scream. The ice was so clear he could see the frost forming on her eyelashes.
He pressed his palm flat against the surface.
"Hey! You!" A uniformed officer broke from the perimeter, hand going to his belt. Stocky guy, mustache, sergeant's stripes. "Step away from there, this is a crime scene, you can't just—"
Tyson pulled on Coach Walt's gift. The fire came easily, rolling up from somewhere deep in his chest and channeling down through his arm into his palm. The ice hissed. Steam erupted from the point of contact in a thick white plume, and the block began to shrink. Not slowly, not the way the portable heaters were managing. Fast. The ice receded from his hand like it was afraid of him, melting inward from the surface in sheets of water that cascaded to the floor.
The sergeant stopped mid-sentence. His hand fell away from his belt.
Ten seconds. Fifteen. The block collapsed in on itself, ice crumbling and sluicing away, and the woman inside sagged forward. Tyson caught her before she hit the floor. She was cold. Dangerously cold. Her lips were blue, and her pulse was thready under his fingers, barely there.
He laid her down on the wet marble and held both hands over her chest. Golden light bloomed between his palms as Cyrus's healing ability flooding into her. Color returned to her skin, blue fading to white, fading to pink. Her breathing deepened. Her eyelids fluttered, and she coughed, a wet, ragged sound, and then she was gasping, alive, shivering violently but alive.
A paramedic rushed in with a thermal blanket. Tyson was already standing, already moving to the next block.
The sergeant caught up to him. "Who the hell are you?"
"Tuxedo Mask."
The sergeant looked at the woman on the floor, now being loaded onto a stretcher by paramedics. He looked at the ten remaining blocks of ice, each one holding a person who was running out of time. He looked back at Tyson.
"Listen up! Make a path! Move the heaters, move the equipment, give this man room to work!" The sergeant's voice had changed. The authority was still there, but the confrontation was gone. He turned to the other officers and raised his voice to a bark. "Batman said we've got minutes before we start losing people, so get out of his way and let him do his thing!"
Officers scrambled. The perimeter shifted, bodies moving aside, equipment dragged clear. Tyson reached the second block, a man in his sixties, and pressed his palm to the ice. Steam billowed. The fire ate through the frozen shell in seconds, and the man crumpled free, and the golden light did its work again.
Third block. Fourth. Tyson fell into a rhythm. Fire, melt, catch, heal. Each one took less than a minute. The paramedics figured out the pattern fast and stationed themselves at each block in advance, ready with blankets and stretchers the moment the ice gave way. The ballroom filled with steam and the sound of coughing and crying as, one by one, the frozen patrons came back to the world.
The fifth block held the couple, the man and woman reaching for each other. Tyson melted his first, healed him, then moved immediately to hers. When she came to, gasping and shaking, the man crawled across the wet floor to grab her hand. Their fingers finally closed around each other's.
Sixth. Seventh. Eighth. The sergeant walked alongside him, keeping the path clear, radioing updates. Tyson could hear the chatter on the frequency. Dispatch was losing its mind. Someone kept asking for confirmation that the victims were actually being revived.
Ninth. Tenth. The second-to-last block held a teenager who couldn't have been older than sixteen, in a dress that was probably her first formal gown. She came out of the ice crying, and Tyson held the healing light over her longer than the others, making sure. A woman who'd already been freed broke through the paramedic line, screaming the girl's name and wrapping herself around her daughter on the wet floor.
Eleventh. The last block. A heavyset man who'd taken the freeze blast directly to the chest. His vitals were the worst of them all, and Tyson held the golden light steady for a full thirty seconds before the man's color stabilized and his breathing evened out.
Tyson straightened up. The ballroom was a mess of water, steam, thermal blankets, and paramedics. Eleven people, all breathing. All alive.
The sergeant was staring at him. Half the GCPD officers in the room were staring at him.
Then the main doors banged open, and Batman came through.
He moved the way Tyson expected him to move, fast and purposeful, cape sweeping behind him, the cowl turning the upper half of his face into a shadow with white lenses. He had Freeze's cryo-gun in one hand, which meant Freeze himself was already secured somewhere outside, probably zip-tied to the roof of a squad car.
Batman stopped three steps into the ballroom and swept the room. The calculation was happening in real time. Melted ice, the puddles, the eleven stretchers, the paramedics working on patients who were very much not dead.
He'd come in expecting bodies. The set of his jaw said that much.
The sergeant approached him. "Batman. All eleven victims are accounted for and stable. Paramedics are transporting to Gotham General as a precaution, but vitals are strong across the board."
"How?"
"This man showed up. Called himself Tuxedo Mask."
The sergeant gestured toward the center of the ballroom, but Tyson had already sped out through the hole Freeze made coming in. Around the corner, out of sight, he listened.
"Melted the ice with some kind of fire ability, then healed each victim on the spot. Some kind of golden light, like nothing I've seen before. Went through all of them in minutes."
Batman said nothing for a long moment, taking in the ballroom again, slower this time, scanning.
"Where is he now?"
Tyson figured that would be enough for now.
He let the speed take over. The world blurred. Gotham's architecture streaked past in dark verticals, stone and glass and steel, his feet finding purchase on ledges and windowsills and the narrow lips of decorative molding as he descended.
The Royal Hotel was twelve blocks east. He ran up the facade of the building like it was flat ground. The penthouse balcony came up fast, and he vaulted the railing and slipped through the glass doors.
The suite was exactly as he'd left it. Warm light, dark wood, the Gotham skyline sprawling beyond floor-to-ceiling windows. The penthouse had been an indulgence, the kind of thing his black card made trivially easy. Billions of dollars sitting in an account that regenerated faster than he could spend it, and the Royal's presidential suite ran something like fifteen thousand a night. Which was comparably nothing. But the marble countertops, the private elevator, the baby grand piano nobody was going to play, all of it served a purpose.
It said I belong in rooms like this, and in Gotham, where money was its own kind of superpower, that mattered.
It had certainly mattered to Ivy.
She was on the sectional where he'd left her, legs tucked beneath her, one arm draped along the back of the couch. The bourbon bottle on the coffee table was noticeably lighter than when he'd stepped out. She'd poured herself a fresh glass and was holding it loosely, swirling the amber liquid with a lazy rotation of her wrist. Between his pheromones and the penthouse, she'd relaxed into something almost comfortable, the wariness from their first meeting dialed down to cautious interest.
He'd been gone less than fifteen minutes. Not bad.
"So," Tyson said, crossing the room and dropping into the chair across from her. "Are you in?"
Ivy looked at him over the rim of her glass. "Back already?"
"Thawed the people, healed them." He leaned back. "Batman knows it was me. I left before he could get a good look. I'm waiting to have the Joker in hand before I introduce myself. Peace offering."
She took a slow sip of bourbon. Set the glass down. "I'm not sure how you're doing whatever it is you're doing. You left here minutes ago. You come back saying you melted cryo-ice and resurrected people from the edge of hypothermic death. And now you want to gift-wrap the Joker for Batman."
"That's the plan."
"It's insane."
"So is everything in this city. Is that a no?"
Ivy picked up her glass again. She didn't drink from it, just held it, studying him the way a botanist might study an unfamiliar species blooming out of season.
"The Joker has poisoned three of Gotham's public parks in the last year alone," she said. "Exposed root systems, contaminated soil, killed trees that were older than this city. He did it for no reason. Not strategy, not leverage. He thought it was funny." Her voice went cold. Flat. "I've wanted him gone for a long time. But wanting and doing are different things in Gotham. Everyone who's tried to put him down permanently has failed."
She paused and thought about it. "But you're not from Gotham, are you? You don't play by the same rules. You don't even seem to know what the rules are." She tilted her head. "That's either going to get you killed, or it's going to work. And I admit, I'm curious which."
Tyson held out his hand. "Let's find out."
Ivy looked at the hand, then at him. She set the bourbon down, uncurled her legs from beneath her, and took it. He pulled her to her feet and didn't let go.
The penthouse vanished.
One heartbeat, they were standing on Italian marble under warm light, the next the world smeared sideways in a streak of color and motion, and then it resolved again into something entirely different.
Old Gotham. The industrial district. Sionis Steel Mill. The building was massive, a sprawling complex of interconnected structures that had once processed raw steel for half the city's construction projects. Smokestacks jutted against the overcast sky, cold and dead for years. The original signage was still bolted to the main facade, SIONIS STEEL in block letters across corrugated metal, but someone had spray-painted over it in dripping green and purple.
The Joker had made the place his own.
Every entrance Tyson could see had been modified. The main loading bay doors were welded shut and painted with playing card motifs, kings and jokers in garish colors that had run in the rain. Strings of carnival lights hung from the gutters and fire escapes, half of them dead. Someone had mounted a pair of enormous speaker horns above the main entrance, the kind you'd find at a county fair, and even from out here, Tyson could hear tinny calliope music drifting from somewhere inside the complex. Circus music. Playing on a loop.
The yard surrounding the mill was worse. Chain-link fencing topped with razor wire formed a perimeter, but it had been decorated. Stuffed animals hung from the wire by their necks, dozens of them, teddy bears and rabbits and things that had been rained on so many times they'd gone gray and shapeless. Hand-painted signs dotted the fence line.
WELCOME TO THE FUN HOUSE.
SMILE OR ELSE.
ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE (JUST KIDDING, THERE WAS NEVER ANY HOPE).
Each one in that same manic scrawl.
Ivy pulled her hand free from his grip. She was staring at the mill, and whatever softness the bourbon and the penthouse had coaxed out of her was gone.
Almost gone. The cold air helped, and the sight of the Joker's fortress helped more. Nothing killed a mood like a chain-link fence decorated with rotting stuffed animals. But when the wind shifted and carried his scent toward her, that sweet, heavy warmth that had no business existing on a man who moved like a bullet and hit like a truck, her pulse kicked up involuntarily.
She hated it. And right now she needed to be sure which feelings belonged to her and which ones had been planted.
"He's been here for three months," she said. "GCPD won't touch it. Batman raids it, clears it out, and the clown moves right back in within a week."
"Here's what I'm thinking," Tyson said. "I go in, round up the gang, you use your vines to tie them up as I bring them out."
Ivy stared at him. "That's it?"
"That's it."
"That's your plan?"
"Oh, one thing." He held up a finger. "No giant venus flytraps. Nobody gets eaten."
She was still staring at him. The look on her face was the look of someone who'd been promised a blueprint and handed a napkin sketch.
"There are going to be armed men in there," she said. "Joker's crew. Thugs, sure, but thugs with automatic weapons and nothing to lose. Plus whatever traps the clown has rigged up. He wires everything. Doors, floors, hallways. Last time Batman went in, he triggered three separate gas dispensers before he reached the main floor."
"Right. But they're just guys with guns, yeah? Nothing too special?"
"Just guys with guns," she repeated flatly.
"Great." Tyson rolled his shoulders. "I'm gonna go knock."
Ivy said nothing. She folded her arms across her chest and leaned her hip against a rusted section of fence, settling in with the air of someone who'd been handed free entertainment. If this strange, overpowered man wanted to throw himself against the walls of the Joker's makeshift fortress, she was content to watch.
Tyson walked across the yard.
He didn't run. Didn't blur. Just walked, shoes crunching on gravel and broken glass, past the hanging stuffed animals and the hand-painted signs, straight toward the main entrance. The calliope music got louder with every step, that warbling circus melody cycling through its loop, tinny and distorted through the mounted speakers.
He made it about forty feet before the first goon spotted him.
The man came around the corner of a shipping container, AR-15 already up, the stock braced against his shoulder. He was big, thick-necked, wearing a purple hoodie with a crude smiley face drawn on it in what looked like house paint. "Hey! The fuck are you? Stop right there or I'll—"
Tyson flicked his wrist.
The rifle ripped out of the man's hands. It didn't fall. It flew, yanked sideways by something invisible, spinning end over end and clattering across the gravel twenty feet away. The goon looked at his empty hands. Looked at the gun on the ground. Looked back at Tyson.
Tyson was already in front of him.
One punch. Short, compact, delivered to the hinge of the jaw. The goon's head snapped sideways, and his legs went out from under him. He hit the gravel in a loose heap, out cold before he finished falling.
Then Tyson was back at Ivy's side, standing next to her like he'd never left.
"One down."
Ivy looked at the unconscious man on the ground forty feet away, then at Tyson beside her. Forty feet there. Forty feet back. In no time at all.
"What are you?" The question came out before she seemed to decide whether she wanted to ask it.
"Complicated." He nodded toward the goon. "You mind?"
Ivy pushed off the fence. She walked a few steps forward and knelt, pressing her palm flat against the cracked asphalt. For a moment nothing happened. Then the ground split in hairline fractures around her fingers, and green pushed through.
Vines. Thin at first, pale and searching, threading up through the broken surface like something waking from a long sleep. They thickened fast, darkening to a rich green, leaves unfurling along their length as they snaked across the gravel toward the unconscious man. They reached him in seconds, coiling around his wrists, his ankles, his torso, cinching tight with a series of wet, fibrous creaks. In five seconds he was trussed up like cargo, pinned flat to the ground, wrapped in living rope that was already rooting itself into the soil beneath him.
Ivy stood and brushed the grit from her palm. "He'll keep."
Tyson grinned at her. "See? Great team."
She returned the grin. She caught it and pulled it back. He was standing close. Closer than the task required. His scent reached her again, faint under the chemical tang of Gotham's industrial air, and her pulse kicked up. She turned away to check the vine bindings on the nearest thug, and used the two seconds of broken eye contact to remind herself that whatever her body was doing in response to this man was not her decision.
Tyson turned and walked back toward the mill.
Again, he just walked. No burst of speed, no vanishing act, no whatever-it-was that let him cross forty feet in the space between blinks. He strolled across the open yard with his hands loose at his sides, gravel popping under his shoes, heading straight for the main loading bay doors with their painted kings and jokers.
He was daring them. Ivy could see it plainly. Walking slow and easy through open ground, making himself the most obvious target in the yard, practically begging someone to try something. She should have been annoyed. The showmanship of it, the deliberate swagger, the way he made it look like a stroll through a park. It was the kind of performative confidence she despised in men, the same preening arrogance she'd spent years exploiting and discarding. Except she wasn't responding to it with contempt.
From somewhere inside the mill, she heard shouting. Then the heavy metallic sound of a door being thrown open.
The side door burst open and three of them came out at once, fanning into a loose semicircle. Two had shotguns. The third carried a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, which said something about either his confidence or his intelligence.
Tyson didn't slow down.
The first shotgun blast went wide. The shooter had rushed it, jerking the trigger instead of squeezing, and the spread chewed into a shipping container six feet to Tyson's left. The second shooter was smarter, took an extra half-second to aim, but by the time his finger found the trigger Tyson wasn't where he'd been standing.
He was between them.
The shotgun barrels bent like taffy in his grip, metal shrieking as he folded them upward into useless L-shapes. Both shooters stumbled backward, still holding weapons that no longer qualified as weapons. Tyson put the first one down with a palm strike to the sternum that sat him on the ground wheezing. The second caught a shin kick that buckled his knee sideways, and he went down screaming.
The bat guy swung.
Tyson caught the bat mid-arc. He held it there, the goon straining against the sudden stop with both hands on the grip, and then Tyson pulled and the bat came free. The goon stumbled forward into a short right hook that put him on the asphalt face-first.
Three bodies. Maybe four seconds.
Tyson grabbed two of them by their collars, blurred, and Ivy had two unconscious men deposited at her feet before she'd finished watching the third one fall. The vines were already moving when he dropped the last one, coiling up through the cracked ground, binding wrists and ankles and pulling tight.
"Three more," Tyson said.
"I can count." Ivy knelt and pressed her palm down again, feeding the root network. The vines thickened.
Tyson turned back to the mill, and this time he didn't walk.
He hit the welded loading bay doors at speed. They didn't open so much as cease to exist as a barrier, the welds shearing, the metal panels blasting inward off their tracks and skidding across the concrete floor of what had once been the mill's primary processing area. The calliope music was deafening in here, echoing off steel walls and high ceilings, that same warbling circus loop bouncing around the cavernous space until it sounded like it was coming from everywhere at once.
The Joker had redecorated.
The processing floor had been gutted and rebuilt into something between a carnival midway and a torture chamber. Oversized playing cards hung from the ceiling on fishing line, spinning slowly in the draft from the broken doors. The old conveyor systems had been painted in candy stripes, red and white, and repurposed as walkways connecting raised platforms throughout the space. Mannequins in clown makeup lined the walls, some posed in exaggerated laughter, others arranged in scenes of violence that Tyson didn't look at too closely. Neon signs buzzed overhead.
HA HA HA in green.
SMILE! in pink.
One just said WHY SO SERIOUS in letters that dripped red paint down the wall beneath it.
The floor was the problem.
Tyson stopped at the threshold and looked down. The concrete had been sectioned into panels, some original, some replaced with what looked like painted plywood. Pressure plates. He could see the seams where they'd been cut and reset, thin lines in the floor that didn't quite match. Beneath the plywood sections, he could hear the faint hum of something mechanical. Gas dispensers, probably. Or worse.
He didn't step on them.
Telekinesis gripped the nearest plywood panel and ripped it upward. Beneath it, a canister the size of a fire extinguisher sat in a shallow well, connected to a pressure switch by a simple mechanical linkage. Some kind of toxin. One step and the panel would have depressed, the switch would have triggered, and the canister would have vented its payload straight up into the face of whoever was standing on it.
Tyson pulled every panel in the room at once.
Twenty-six sections of plywood tore free from the floor simultaneously, spinning upward like a deck of cards thrown into the air. Beneath them, canisters and switches and wiring, a patchwork minefield laid out across the entire processing floor. He grabbed the canisters with his mind, all of them, and crushed them flat. Metal crumpled and compressed, the toxin inside contained by the force squeezing the containers into dense, harmless pucks. He stacked them in a neat pile by the ruined doors.
The calliope music kept playing.
He moved deeper into the mill. The next section was a corridor, one of the old maintenance hallways connecting the processing floor to the smelting rooms. It had been narrowed with sheets of corrugated metal bolted to the walls, creating a funhouse tunnel barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast. More carnival lights, these ones strobing in alternating purple and green. The strobing was meant to disorient. It didn't.
What it did was illuminate the trip wires.
Three of them, strung at ankle height across the corridor at irregular intervals, each one connected to something in the walls. Tyson followed the wires. The first two led to more gas canisters mounted behind the corrugated panels. The third led to a car battery wired to the metal walls themselves. Step on the wire, complete the circuit, and the entire corridor became a conductor.
He tore the walls out. Both sides, the full length of the corridor, corrugated panels ripping free from their bolts and folding flat against the original brick walls behind them. The trip wires snapped. The gas canisters clattered to the floor, and he crushed those too. The car battery he left. Someone from the bomb squad could deal with it.
A smelting room opened up beyond the corridor, and this was where they'd gathered.
Fourteen men. Some on the ground floor among the old furnaces and casting equipment, others on the catwalks and gantries above, all of them armed, all of them wearing variations of the same clown-themed uniform. Purple and green, smiley faces, playing card patches. A few had painted their faces white. They'd heard the loading bay doors go and they'd heard the walls come down, and they were ready, spread across multiple levels with overlapping sight lines and enough combined firepower to turn the doorway into a kill box.
Tyson stepped through the doorway, and everything happened at once.
He moved through the ground floor first. Shotguns and pistols yanked from grips by invisible hands, bodies lifted and shoved and dropped. He pulled his punches. Dislocated shoulders instead of shattered ones. Concussions instead of cracked skulls. Each man went down fast, folding over fists and knees and elbows that arrived from angles that didn't make sense, from a man who'd been ten feet away a fraction of a second ago. He wasn't fighting them. He was dismantling them, working through the room the way a mechanic works through an engine.
The catwalks were next.
A burst of automatic fire stitched across the concrete where he'd been standing. Tyson was already up on the gantry before the shooter could track, the rifle bent double in his hands. The man behind it caught a headbutt that dropped him boneless against the railing.
Two more on the same catwalk turned to fire and found their weapons pinned to their chests by something they couldn't see, triggers locked, barrels pointed at the ceiling. Tyson closed the distance on foot, two quick steps, and put them both down with short hooks that snapped their heads sideways in sequence, left-right, like he was working a heavy bag.
The last three on the upper level tried to run. One made it six steps down a service ladder before Tyson caught him by the back of his hoodie and set him on the ground with the kind of care you'd use placing a glass on a table. Then he hit him, and the care was over.
The other two reached a fire exit at the far end of the gantry, threw the door open, and found themselves face-to-face with nothing but a three-story drop to the yard below. They turned around. Tyson was already there.
Fourteen men. Maybe twenty seconds.
He gathered them in groups. Three at a time, gripped by collars and belts and whatever fabric held, blurring out through the ruined loading bay and across the yard to where Ivy waited. She'd expanded her root network while he'd been inside. The vines had spread outward from her position in a rough semicircle, thick ropy tendrils lying flat against the ground like a living net, ready to spring. Each time Tyson deposited a cluster of unconscious bodies, the vines surged upward and wrapped them tight, pulling them flat, binding limbs to torsos and rooting down through the gravel into the soil beneath.
By the fifth trip, she'd stopped watching him arrive and depart. She just kept her palm on the ground, feeding the network, her attention split between the growing collection of trussed-up thugs and whatever she was sensing through the root system itself.
"There's a sublevel," she said when he dropped the last three. "I can feel the foundations. The old smelting pits were dug deep. He's done something down there."
Tyson nodded and went back in.
Past the smelting room, deeper into the mill's guts. The architecture shifted from industrial to theatrical, the Joker's renovations getting more elaborate the further in he went. A hallway lined with funhouse mirrors, the kind that stretched and compressed reflections into grotesque shapes. Tyson caught distorted versions of himself in the glass as he passed, elongated and squat and twisted, and between the mirrors, mounted at head height, small speakers playing recorded laughter. Not the calliope music. Actual laughter, high and shrill, on a loop that reset every eight seconds. The same laugh. Over and over.
The mirrors were rigged. He could see the wiring running along the baseboard, thin cables connecting each frame to a junction box at the far end of the hall. Proximity sensors, probably. Get close enough to trigger one, and something would happen. Gas, electricity, or maybe the mirrors themselves would blow outward, turning into shrapnel. The Joker thought in punchlines. Every trap was a joke with a victim instead of an audience.
Tyson ripped the junction box off the wall from thirty feet away. It sparked once and went dead, trailing severed wires. The laughter kept playing from the speakers. He left it. The sound wasn't dangerous, just unpleasant.
Beyond the mirror hall, a stairwell leading down. The old service access to the smelting pits, a concrete shaft with metal stairs bolted to the walls in a square spiral. The lights down here were different. Someone had strung Christmas lights along the handrails, hundreds of them, all green, casting everything in a sickly underwater glow. The stairs themselves were clean. No trip wires, no pressure plates, no obvious modifications. That made whatever waited at the bottom more ominous.
The stairwell opened into a basement corridor, wide enough for equipment transport, the ceiling lined with old pipe runs and cable trays. More Christmas lights. More green.
The corridor branched. Left toward what a faded sign identified as MAINTENANCE AND STORAGE. Right toward SMELTING PIT ACCESS. From the right branch, Tyson could hear music. Not the calliope. Something else. Big band. Swing era, horns and piano, muffled by distance and concrete but unmistakable. Someone was playing Frank Sinatra down here.
He went right.
The corridor ended at a set of double doors, heavy steel, the industrial kind designed to contain heat and noise from the smelting operations. They'd been painted. A massive playing card, the Joker, grinning from the full height of both doors in purple and green and white, the paint thick and glossy, applied with actual skill, making it more unsettling than a crude scrawl would have been.
Tyson pushed the doors open.
The smelting pit had been converted into a throne room.
The pit itself was enormous, a sunken rectangular space sixty feet long and forty wide, the walls lined with old refractory brick that had been scrubbed and painted in alternating purple and green stripes. The original overhead crane still spanned the ceiling, its hook dangling on a heavy chain directly over the center of the room. Someone had hung a chandelier from it; crystal and brass, completely incongruous with the industrial space. The floor of the pit had been furnished. Rugs layered over the concrete, mismatched but expensive, Persian and Oriental patterns overlapping in a patchwork of stolen luxury. A long dining table ran down the center, set with fine china and silver candlesticks, eight place settings for a dinner party that would never happen. Couches and armchairs clustered at the far end, arranged around a massive flat-screen television mounted on a wheeled stand. The television was playing the source of the music. An old concert film, black and white, a big band on a stage somewhere.
And there, in the largest armchair, legs crossed, one arm draped over the side with a playing card turning lazily between his fingers, sat the Joker.
He was thinner than Tyson expected. Gaunt, almost, the purple suit hanging loose on a frame that looked like it had forgotten to eat more often than not. The green hair was lank and unwashed, pushed back from a face that was all angles and that grin, that wide, red, permanent grin that split his white face from cheek to cheek.
Beside him, perched on the arm of the chair with her legs swinging, a woman in red and black. Blonde hair pulled into pigtails. Face painted white to match his, with a black domino mask and lips done in the same arterial red. She was blowing a bubble with pink gum, watching the television, one hand resting on the Joker's shoulder.
Harley Quinn popped her bubble and looked up at Tyson standing in the doorway.
"Puddin'," she said. "We got company."
The Joker didn't look up immediately. He kept his eyes on the playing card turning between his fingers, a king of spades, and let out a long, theatrical sigh.
"You know, I had a whole thing prepared," he said. The card stopped turning. He held it between two fingers like a cigarette, gesturing vaguely toward the chandelier, the table settings, the concert film still playing Sinatra on the flat-screen. "The table, the music, the ambiance. I even had Harley iron the good tablecloth. Well. I had Harley iron a tablecloth. The point is, I went to effort, Bats. Real, genuine, from-the-heart effort, because I thought tonight could be special. I thought tonight could be the night we finally sit down, you and me, and have an honest conversation about where this relationship is going, because frankly, I feel like you've been pulling away, and I think we both deserve—"
He looked up.
The speech died in his throat.
Tyson stood in the doorway in his black tuxedo, the white porcelain mask. He didn't move. He didn't speak. He just stood there and let the Joker look at him.
The Joker stared. The card slipped from his fingers and fluttered to the rug. Harley stopped chewing her gum.
"Who are you?" the Joker said. The theatrical cadence was gone. It was a flat question, stripped of performance.
"I'm Batman," Tyson said.
Silence. The Sinatra film played on. Horns and piano filled the converted smelting pit while the Joker sat perfectly still in his armchair, studying the man in the porcelain mask with an expression that couldn't decide what it wanted to be.
Then the grin came back. Slower this time, pulling wider by degrees.
"No," the Joker said. "No, you're not."
"You sure?" Tyson tilted his head. "I'm wearing black. I showed up uninvited. I broke your door. Seems like I check all the boxes."
"Batman doesn't make jokes."
"Maybe he got funnier."
The Joker uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in the armchair. Harley's hand slid off his shoulder. She was watching Tyson now with her head cocked sideways, the gum forgotten in her cheek.
"Batman doesn't wear a tuxedo," the Joker said, and underneath the amusement now, an edge. "Batman doesn't wear a pretty little mask. And Batman, my dear imposter, does not walk through my front door and introduce himself. Batman skulks. Batman broods. Batman makes a whole production out of appearing from the shadows." He picked up the fallen card from the rug and began turning it between his fingers again. "You're something new."
"Love what you've done with the place, by the way," Tyson said. "Very 'divorced dad tries too hard at Halloween.'"
The Joker's grin twitched.
"You're not him," he repeated. "The voice is wrong. The build is wrong. The whole vibe is wrong. You're too..." He waved the card in a small circle, searching. "Relaxed. Batman is never relaxed. Batman is a clenched fist in a cape. You're standing there like you're waiting for a table at a restaurant."
"Maybe I am." Tyson glanced at the dining table with its eight place settings, the silver candlesticks, and the fine china. "You did set all this up. Seems rude not to eat."
Harley snorted. She caught herself and pressed her lips together, but the sound was already out. The Joker didn't look at her. His attention hadn't left Tyson since the moment he'd registered the wrong silhouette in his doorway.
"Who sent you?" the Joker asked. The playfulness was thinning. Underneath it, the calculating mind that built pressure-plate minefields and wired corridors to car batteries was surfacing. "Because if this is someone's idea of a substitute, if Gordon thinks he can just send someone, to rotate in a replacement like I'm some kind of timeshare—"
"Nobody sent me."
"Then what are you doing in my house?"
"Your guys are tied up in the parking lot," Tyson said. "Your gas traps are crushed. Your mirror bomb is disconnected. Your electrified hallway is in pieces. And I walked through all of it in minutes." He paused. "I'm doing what Batman does. Just faster, and with better taste in formalwear."
The Joker stood up. It was sudden, uncoiling from the armchair in one motion, and Harley slid off the armrest to her feet beside him. Standing, he was tall. Taller than he'd looked sitting down, all vertical lines and sharp joints, the purple suit draping off him like a curtain on a coatrack.
"Say it," Tyson said.
The Joker blinked. "Say what?"
"Whatever's stuck in your teeth right now. The thing you've been chewing on since I walked in. The reason you keep saying I'm not him." Tyson took one step into the room. Just one. The chandelier light caught the porcelain mask and turned it bright. "Go ahead. You can say it."
The Joker's mouth opened. Closed. Confused.
"Batman isn't Black," Tyson said for him.
The silence that followed was different from the ones before. Sinatra's horns swelled and faded on the flat-screen. Harley's eyes bounced between them like she was watching a tennis match.
The Joker laughed.
Not the performance laugh, not the one he piped through speakers on a loop or broadcast over hijacked radio frequencies. This one was real, a short bark that punched out of him like he'd been hit in the stomach, and his whole body folded with it, one hand slapping against his thigh.
"Oh, that's rich," he said. "You think that's what I'm stuck on?" He wiped the corner of his eye with the back of his hand, still grinning, but the grin had changed. It was wider now and showed more teeth. "I've fought a man who dresses like a bat. You think I care what color the next one is?" He started walking. Not toward Tyson. Sideways, circling the dining table, one hand trailing along the backs of the chairs as he passed them. His fingers tapped each one in sequence. "No, no, no. What I'm stuck on, my mysterious friend, is that you're wrong. Wrong like a different language is wrong. Batman and I, we speak the same language. We've been speaking it for years. Every punch, every trap, every rooftop, every time he drags me back to Arkham, and every time I walk out again. It's a conversation. The longest, most intimate conversation of my life." The tapping stopped. He'd reached the head of the table and stood behind the chair there, both hands resting on its back. "And you walk in here speaking something I've never heard before. That's what's stuck in my teeth."
Harley had drifted to the couch, settling onto the armrest with her mallet across her knees. She was quiet, watching the Joker work through whatever this was, her head still tilted at that curious angle.
"So let me ask you again," the Joker said. He pulled the chair out from the table and sat down, crossing his legs, folding his hands in his lap. Composed. A host at his own dinner party. "Who are you? Not the costume. Not the bit. Who are you?"
"I told you," Tyson said.
"You told me a name. A brand. A franchise." The Joker picked up a fork from the place setting in front of him and examined it, turning it in the green-tinged light. "I'm asking what's underneath the pretty mask. Because something is. Something that let you walk through everything I built upstairs without breaking a sweat, and something that has you standing in my living room making jokes instead of hitting me." He set the fork down, perfectly aligned with the knife. "Batman would have hit me by now."
Tyson snapped his fingers twice. The sound was crisp and deliberate in the quiet between Sinatra tracks.
"I knew I was forgetting something," he said. He held up a hand and started ticking off fingers. "Appear out of nowhere, check. Aura farm, check. Hit the bad guy..." He paused, looking at his fingers, then back at the Joker. "Hit the bad guy comes next. Then it's quipping. I really like the quipping, so I did that first. My mistake. Let me fix the order."
The Joker opened his mouth to respond.
Tyson was already there.
Not walking. Not running. One frame he was in the doorway, thirty feet away, and the next he was standing over the Joker's chair with his fist already traveling. The air displacement hit a half-second later, ruffling the tablecloth and sending two of the silver candlesticks toppling sideways. The Joker didn't even have time to flinch. Tyson's knuckles connected with his jaw in a short, compact hook that lifted him out of the chair and sent him skidding across the table on his back, scattering china and silverware, his body plowing through place settings like a bowling ball through pins. He came to rest halfway down the table with a soup bowl on his chest and a bread plate spinning lazily beside his head.
Tyson straightened up and adjusted his cuffs.
"Better?"
The Joker lay on the table, staring at the chandelier. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth down his chin. For three full seconds, he didn't move. Then he started laughing. Quiet at first, building, his shoulders shaking against the tablecloth.
"Oh," he said between breaths. "Oh. You are new."
The mallet came from Tyson's left.
Harley had launched off the couch armrest the instant the Joker hit the table, crossing the distance in a dead sprint with her oversized hammer already swinging in a wide arc aimed at the side of Tyson's head. She was fast and moved like a gymnast, her whole body rotating into the swing with killing intent.
Tyson leaned back two inches. The mallet head passed close enough to ruffle the edge of his mask. Harley didn't stop. She converted the missed swing into a spinning backhand, reversing the hammer's trajectory, then flowed into a low sweep aimed at his knees, then a rising diagonal that would have caught him under the chin. Each strike was vicious. She fought with all acrobatic aggression and zero hesitation.
Tyson stepped around each one. He moved the minimum distance required each time, a half-step here, a slight turn there, his hands at his sides, letting her exhaust the combination. She was good. She was also hitting nothing but air, and the frustration was building in her swings, each one wider and wilder than the last.
"Puddin'!" she shouted between strikes. "Little help!"
The gunshot was loud in the enclosed space.
Tyson heard the hammer cock before the trigger pulled. He was already moving when the first round left the barrel, the bullet passing through the space his torso had occupied and punching into the refractory brick behind him. The Joker had rolled off the table and produced a long-barreled revolver from inside his jacket, firing from a half-crouch with soup staining his lapel. He fired again. Again. Each shot tracked where Tyson had been a quarter-second earlier, the Joker adjusting his aim with each miss, trying to lead the target.
Tyson kept moving. The bullets kept missing. Harley kept swinging. She lunged forward with an overhead strike just as the Joker fired his fifth round, and Tyson simply wasn't there anymore, sidestepping clean, and the bullet that had been aimed at his center mass found Harley instead.
She made a small sound. Not a scream. A surprised exhale, like someone had splashed her with cold water. The mallet slipped from her fingers and hit the rug with a heavy thud. She looked down at her stomach where the red was already spreading through the black fabric of her costume, touched it with her fingertips, and sat down hard on the floor.
"Puddin'?" she said. Her voice was small.
The Joker looked at her from across the room, the revolver still raised, smoke curling from the barrel. Something crossed his face too fast to read. Then he shrugged.
"Walk it off, Harl." He was already turning back toward Tyson, adjusting his grip on the gun. "You've taken worse. Remember that time with the… Actually, never mind, you're being dramatic. You're always dramatic. It's your least attractive quality, and the list is long."
Harley's painted face crumpled. Not from the pain. From that.
Tyson hit the Joker so hard his feet left the ground.
It wasn't the controlled strike from before. This one had weight behind it, a straight right that turned off every light behind his eyes simultaneously. The revolver clattered away across the floor. The Joker's body went completely limp in the air, ragdoll physics taking over, and he landed in a heap against the base of his armchair with his head lolled sideways and his mouth hanging open. Out cold. The grin finally gone, replaced by the slack nothing of unconsciousness.
Tyson turned to Harley.
She was on her back now, both hands pressed against her stomach, blood seeping between her fingers and pooling on the Persian rug beneath her. Her breathing was fast and shallow, her painted face going gray underneath the white.
"Hey," she said, looking up at him. "That was... that was pretty good. The punch thing. Real crowd-pleaser."
Tyson knelt beside her and slid his arms underneath her body, one behind her shoulders, one under her knees. She weighed almost nothing. He lifted her off the ground and she hissed through her teeth, her hands still clamped over the wound.
"Hold on," he said.
Then they were outside.
The night air hit them both. One moment the green-lit basement, the chandelier, the unconscious Joker. The next, gravel under Tyson's shoes and open sky overhead and Ivy twenty feet away with her palm still flat on the ground, feeding her root network.
Ivy's head snapped up. She found Tyson first, then tracked down to what he was carrying, and every vine in the parking lot went rigid at once. The tendrils binding the unconscious thugs tightened. New shoots burst from the gravel in a ring around her position, thorned and thick, an involuntary defensive response that she caught and forced back down a second later.
"What happened?" She was on her feet and moving before the question finished leaving her mouth, closing the distance in three fast strides. "What did you—"
Her hands were already reaching for Harley. "Is that a gunshot? That's a gunshot. Harley. Harley, look at me."
"Hey, Red." Harley's voice was thready. She tried to smile and mostly managed it. "Mistah J says hi."
"I'm going to kill him," Ivy said. Her hands hovered over Harley's stomach, not touching, trembling with something that had nothing to do with the cold. She looked at Tyson. "Put her down. Put her down now."
Tyson lowered Harley onto the ground, keeping her head elevated on his knee. Ivy dropped beside them. She couldn't fix this. Plants didn't stitch bullet wounds.
Tyson placed both hands over the wound and golden light flared from his palms. Harley gasped. Her back arched off the ground and her free hand grabbed Tyson's wrist.
"What are you doing to her?" Ivy's voice was low and dangerous. The vines around them had crept closer without her conscious direction, thorned tendrils hovering inches from Tyson's arms.
"Saving her life," Tyson said.
The bullet spat from the wound. The muscle wall closed. The skin began to seal, new tissue growing over the wound.
Color crept back into Harley's face. Her breathing slowed from the rapid shallow panting to something deeper, steadier. Her grip on his wrist loosened.
"That's a neat trick," she whispered.
The golden light faded. Tyson lifted his hands and checked his work. The skin beneath the torn fabric was smooth, unbroken, pink with newness but whole. Harley lay still for a moment, staring up at the sky, breathing like she'd just remembered how.
"You good?" Tyson asked.
"Yeah." She touched her stomach through the rip in her costume, pressing experimentally. No pain registered on her face. "Yeah, I'm... that's wild. That's really wild." She sat up too fast and swayed, and Ivy caught her shoulder.
"Slow down," Ivy said.
"I'm fine, Red. I'm good. I'm great, actually. I just got shot, and now I'm great. That's new." She looked at Tyson. "You're like a walking emergency room."
Tyson stood and brushed gravel dust off his knees. "Stay here. I need to go back in."
Ivy's head turned. "For what?"
"For him."
"Leave him."
"Can't do that."
"He shot her," Ivy said it like she was explaining gravity to someone who'd just floated off the ground.
"He shot her and then told her to walk it off. But he's going to Arkham anyway, right?"
Ivy stared at him. "Fine. Go."
Tyson went.
The parking lot was quiet after he disappeared. Harley pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She was still looking at the spot where Tyson had vanished into the building.
"He's weird," she said.
Ivy sat down next to her on the gravel. Close. Their shoulders touched. "He's something."
"No, I mean... Mistah J shot me. And this guy, this guy I don't even know, he carried me out and fixed me up like it was nothing. Like that's just what you do." She picked at a loose thread on her torn costume. "That's weird, right? That's not normal."
Ivy didn't answer right away. She was watching Harley's hands, the way they fidgeted with the thread, pulling and twisting.
"Yeah, well." Harley laughed. It came out wrong, too high and too short. "Since when do we get normal?"
Ivy reached over and took Harley's hand. Just held it. Harley went still, the fidgeting stopping all at once, and she looked down at their fingers laced together on the gravel between them.
"He called me dramatic," Harley said. "Right after he shot me. He said it was my least attractive quality. I keep thinking if I just... if I'm enough, if I'm funny enough or pretty enough or tough enough, he'll..." She trailed off. The sentence didn't have an ending. It had never had an ending. That was the whole problem.
Ivy squeezed her hand. "Harley."
"I know. I know, okay? I know what you're gonna say."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were gonna say I deserve better."
"You do."
"See? You said it."
"Because it's true." Ivy turned to face her. Harley wouldn't look up. "He shot you. In the stomach. And his first response was to tell you to stop being dramatic."
"He didn't mean to shoot me. He was aiming at the new guy."
"And that makes it better?"
Harley didn't answer. She leaned sideways until her head rested on Ivy's shoulder. Ivy let her. The vines around them softened, thorns retracting, the tendrils settling flat against the gravel like sleeping snakes.
They sat like that until footsteps crunched on gravel and Tyson emerged from the loading dock with the Joker slung over one shoulder like a sack of laundry. He crossed the lot, set the Joker down against a concrete bollard next to his tied-up crew, and checked his pulse. Satisfied, he walked back to where Harley and Ivy were sitting.
"Okay," he said, rolling his shoulders. "Now. Ivy, would you mind if we returned those jewels? I'm not opposed to buying you the best we can find, but we're trying to stay low-key here."
Harley's head lifted off Ivy's shoulder. She looked at Tyson, then at the row of unconscious bodies vine-wrapped to the parking lot fixtures, then at the busted loading dock door hanging off its track, then back at Tyson.
"Knocking out Mistah J and his whole gang isn't exactly low-key," she said.
— Meteor Freak —
The Bat-Signal burned against the low cloud cover above Gotham, a pale disc of light that turned the underside of the overcast sky. It was cast from the roof of the GCPD building on Tricorner. On clear nights the signal could be seen from the Narrows. Tonight, with the clouds sitting low and heavy, it pooled directly overhead.
Gordon wasn't at the signal. That was wrong.
Batman came in from the east, dropping from a glide path that had started three blocks away on the roof of the Gotham Gazette building. The cape caught air and slowed his descent, and he landed on the GCPD roof in a crouch that absorbed the impact through his knees and the balls of his feet. The gravel shifted under his boots. He stayed low for two seconds, scanning. The signal was running but unmanned, its beam pointed straight up, the generator humming. No Gordon. No uniforms on the stairwell. The maintenance door was propped open with a brick, which Gordon never did.
Someone else had turned on the light.
Batman moved along the roof's edge, keeping to the shadow thrown by the water tower. His lenses cycled through thermal, picking up residual heat signatures on the access stairs. Two sets of footprints going up. One set coming back down. The second person was still on the roof.
He found them on the far side of the signal platform.
The Joker was tied to the base of the signal light with thick green vines that wound around his torso, arms, and legs in overlapping coils. His head hung forward, chin on his chest, unconscious. A bruise the color of an eggplant covered the entire left side of his jaw and wrapped around to his ear. Behind him, arranged in a neat row along the roof's edge like luggage on a carousel, his crew sat bound in the same organic restraints, slumped against each other in various states of unconsciousness. One of them was snoring.
The man in the tuxedo stood beside the signal light with his hands in his pockets.
The white porcelain mask was still on. The tuxedo was immaculate. No tears, no bloodstains, no sign that he'd been in a fight at all. His posture was loose.
Batman stepped out of the shadows.
The Tuxedo Mask turned to him. Not startled. Not surprised. He'd known Batman was there. He'd been waiting.
"Sorry about the mess at the Ball," he said. His voice was calm, conversational. He pulled one hand from his pocket and held something out. The Heart sat in his palm. "Ivy wanted to return this."
Batman looked at the diamonds. Then at the Joker. Then at the row of bound men. Then back at the man holding the diamond.
He took them.
"I'll make sure it's returned to the Wayne Foundation," Batman said.
"Right." The Tuxedo Mask held the pause a beat too long. Then he stepped closer. Not aggressively. Just enough to close the distance to something conversational, something private, away from the unconscious bodies and the humming signal light. Quieter now.
"Wouldn't it be more effective to hire more cops?" he said. "Instead of trying to take down the criminals yourself. Even mercenaries. Personal security forces. Something scalable."
Batman studied him. The mask gave nothing back. No micro-expressions to read, no eye movement to track. Just smooth white porcelain and a voice that asked the question like it was genuinely curious.
"Cops can be bought," Batman said. "Mercenaries follow contracts, not principles. Private security answers to whoever signs the check. I've seen what happens when you put Gotham's safety in the hands of people who do it for a paycheck. Half of them end up working for the people they're supposed to stop. The other half looks the other way."
The Tuxedo Mask tilted his head.
"Gotham doesn't need more uniforms," Batman said. "It needs something the uniforms can't be. Something that can't be bought, threatened, or reassigned. Something that's there at two in the morning on a rooftop because it has to be, not because someone's paying overtime."
He looked at the Joker. The bruise on his jaw. The vines holding him upright.
"You did this tonight," Batman said. "Took down his operation. Returned what was stolen. Brought him here. What happens the next night? And the night after that? Can you hire someone to care about that?"
Tyson let out a short breath through his nose. "Way to put me on the spot."
He shifted his weight, glancing at the unconscious Joker, then back at the dark figure standing between him and the signal light.
"Uh. In my case, I think security forces are actually the way to go. Hired, vetted, accountable. The whole nine." He paused. "I wasn't planning on staying in Gotham. At least, not right now. This is a one-shot for me. I've got my own mission, my own problems. I'm just a Gotham honeymooner."
"A honeymooner," Batman said. "Staying at the Royal. In the penthouse."
Tyson went still.
"And a mission," Batman continued, "that has to do with the stone in your pocket."
Tyson stared at the dark figure for a long moment, then shook his head and let out a low laugh.
"I shouldn't be surprised." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I really shouldn't be surprised. Right on both accounts." He dropped his hand. "I'm guessing you had trackers installed on the diamonds. Or the Stone itself. Should've expected that. It's my first night out in costume, so, you know. Learning curve."
Batman said nothing.
Tyson straightened. He pulled both Stones of Power from his inner jacket pocket and held them up between two fingers. He didn't offer them. He held them where Batman could see, then returned them to his pocket.
"I returned the Heart," Tyson said. "Brought in the Joker and his whole crew as a gesture of goodwill. I'm not here to cause problems for Gotham. But I need the Stone." He searched for the right words and didn't entirely find them. "It's hard to explain. As you can see, it's part of a set. A collection of artifacts that are connected to each other in ways that go beyond what they look like sitting in a museum case. I'm trying to keep them out of the hands of people who would misuse them. And the people who are after this particular set..." He trailed off, then committed to it. "They're powerful. More powerful than what you deal with here. Trust me when I say I'm doing Gotham a favor by getting these things out of the city."
Batman watched him through the entire explanation. No interruption. No shift in posture. When Tyson finished, the silence stretched. Three seconds. Five. Long enough that the snoring thug at the end of the row shifted in his vine restraints and mumbled something about overtime pay.
"You broke into a charity gala," Batman said. "Caused a panic that sent three hundred people running for the exits. Two sprained ankles. One broken wrist. A woman in her seventies went into cardiac distress in the stairwell. She's stable. You didn't know that."
Tyson's jaw tightened behind the mask. He hadn't known that.
"You partnered with Poison Ivy, a known eco-terrorist with outstanding warrants in three states, to steal two items. You returned one. You're keeping the other. And your explanation is that you need it. That it's part of a set. That someone dangerous wants it."
"That's the truth."
"Everyone who takes something from Gotham has a reason. The Joker had a reason tonight. Ivy had a reason. The difference between them and you is that you brought him in and gave back the diamond, which tells me you have a conscience. But a conscience and a justification aren't the same thing."
Tyson opened his mouth. Batman kept talking.
"I don't know you. I don't know your mission. I don't know what that stone does or who's coming for it. What I know is what I can verify. You checked into the Royal under a first name only, using funds that couldn't be traced, and I have access to every database. You moved through the Joker's crew like they were standing still, which puts you in a category of physical ability that has a very short list. And you healed a gunshot wound with your hands."
He let that sit.
"So either you're telling the truth, and something is coming to Gotham that I need to know about. Or you're lying, and you're the most polite thief I've met this year. Either way, the stone doesn't leave this city until I understand what it is."
Tyson looked at the cowl, and made a decision.
"Right. This is a Stone of Power. It's an alien artifact. Not as in immigrant. As in extraterrestrial."
He pulled the two stones from his jacket pocket again and held them in his open palm. Under the glow of the Bat-Signal they looked like nothing special. Polished rock. Museum pieces. The kind of thing you'd walk past in a display case without slowing down.
"There are three of them. I have two. The third is in Metropolis." He closed his hand around them and put them back. "When they're put together..." He stopped. "I don't know exactly what they do. I don't have the full picture. What I do know is that a centuries-old dead witch has possessed my girlfriend, trying to collect them, and I'm trying to beat her to the set. Free my girlfriend. And two of my other friends who've been possessed by the rest of her coven."
He was laying it out, piece by piece, because saying it all at once would make it sound insane, but maybe if there was anyone who could help him, it was Batman.
Batman's posture didn't change. But his attention sharpened. Extraterrestrial artifacts. Possession. A dead witch's coven operating through living hosts. Any one of those claims would have been enough to flag the conversation as delusional in most contexts. But Batman's threshold for "impossible" was high.
"How do you intend to free her?" Batman said.
"Two options," Tyson said. "One. Offer them other bodies and give them the stones. Let the witches walk away in new hosts, willingly. A trade. My people for theirs, the stones as payment for cooperation." He paused. Trading bodies. Offering up someone else's life to get back the ones he loved. He didn't flinch from it, but he didn't pretend it was clean, either. "Option two. Find a way to break the possession spell directly. Force them out without their cooperation. I have the witch's spellbook. It's written in Latin and French, and I don't understand either, so. It's a long shot."
Batman had been processing as Tyson spoke. The gala. The partnership with Ivy. The return of the Heart. The deliberate, almost theatrical delivery of the Joker to the GCPD roof. None of it was random. None of it was the behavior of a thief. It was the behavior of someone building alliances and burning through favors on a timetable.
"You're partnering with Harley and Ivy," Batman said, "because you might need to exchange them."
Tyson went quiet. Batman had just said the worst part of his plan aloud, and hearing it from someone else made it real in a way it hadn't been when it was just a contingency rattling around inside his own head.
"That's the fallback option," Tyson said. "Yeah."
"You befriended two women so you could offer their bodies to a dead coven if you can't find another way."
"That's not..." Tyson started, then stopped. He took a breath. "Yes. If I can't crack the spellbook, if I can't find a way to break the possession directly, then I need hosts. And I need the witches to agree to the trade. Which means I need people who are..." He searched for the word.
"Expendable," Batman said.
"If it comes to that option, I have a way of defeating the head witch; it'll break her possession. It's a sure thing, but the other two, the others, I don't know if it'll free them."
"And you think Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy would volunteer for that."
"I think they're two of the most dangerous women in this city." He paused. "And no. I haven't asked them. I haven't even brought it up. It's a contingency. A last resort. I'm hoping I never have to use it."
"You have a spellbook you can't read," Batman said. "Artifacts you don't understand. And a plan that requires either a breakthrough in translation or the sacrifice of two, maybe three people." He let the summary stand on its own. "You came to Gotham with nothing but money and hope."
"And a tuxedo and mask," Tyson said.
Batman didn't laugh. But the pause before his next words wasn't quite disapproval.
"The spellbook," Batman said. "Where is it now?"
Tyson reached into his jacket. Not the outer pocket where he'd kept the stones, but the inner breast pocket, the one that sat flush against his chest. He pulled out a leather-bound book. He opened it and flipped through pages of dense, handwritten text, columns of Latin and French crowding the margins, until he found what he was looking for.
He held the book open and turned it so Batman could see.
The symbol took up most of the page.
"This is what's on her back," Tyson said. "On Lana's back. It appeared before the possession. We went to a plastic surgeon. It's not a tattoo, it's not scarring. It's just there, like it grew under the skin."
Batman looked at the page. He didn't touch the book.
"I showed this to someone who knows magic," Tyson said. "Someone I trust knew what they were talking about. He said it's European. Fifteenth, sixteenth century. Hermetic tradition, but modified. Someone took a binding seal and reworked it for transference." He pointed to the gap. "This is the mechanism. The witch comes in through the gap, like a one-way valve."
He let that sit for a second, then kept going.
"He said whoever designed this knew exactly what they were doing. Either wrote this themself or studied under someone who did. And because the symbol manifests physically on the host, the spell is anchored to the body, not just the soul. You can't exorcise it. You have to break the seal itself."
"How," Batman said. Not a question. A demand.
"The counter-ritual. Every binding has one. It's somewhere in this book." He held up the journal. "Written in fifteenth-century Latin and French, neither of which I can read. So I've got the answer in my hands, and I can't get to it. The alternative is to overpower the rune, which I can do, but no guarantee it'll free the others."
Batman took the book.
He didn't ask. He reached out and took it from Tyson's hand. Tyson let him. There wasn't much choice in it.
Batman held the book open under the glow of the signal light and studied the page. His eyes moved behind the lenses, tracking the text, the symbol, the marginalia. He turned the page. Then another. Then back to the symbol.
"The script around the outer edge isn't Latin," Batman said. "It's a cipher. Substitution, based on Latin characters, but the letter frequency is wrong. Someone encrypted the key components."
Tyson blinked behind his mask. "You can read this?"
Batman didn't answer that directly. He was already turning pages, scanning the handwritten text. He stopped on a page near the middle of the book where a second symbol had been drawn, smaller, with notations in the margin.
"This is the counter-seal," Batman said.
"You're sure?"
"The geometric inversion matches. The gap is closed in this version, and the spiral text runs counterclockwise instead of clockwise. It's a mirror ritual." He looked up from the book. "The instructions around it are in the cipher. I can break it, but not here. I need to photograph every page and run the substitution pattern through analysis."
"How long would that take?"
"Hours." Batman closed the book and held it at his side. "I'll return it."
"Not sure you want to take that book," Tyson said.
Batman paused. Not at the words. At the tone. Flat and tired, the delivery of someone issuing a warning they expected to be ignored.
"If the Joker gives you a challenge," Tyson continued, "this witch, let alone her coven, are far, far worse to fight. The Joker's dangerous because he's unpredictable. These women are dangerous because they have magic. They possess people, Batman. They take your body and wear it like a suit, and there's nothing you can do about it from the inside. Lana's in there somewhere, watching herself do things she'd never do, and she can't stop it. Can't scream. Can't blink wrong." He gestured at the book in Batman's hand. "That's not evidence. That's a target. Whoever holds that book is someone the coven needs to deal with."
Batman looked at the journal. Then at the man standing across from him on the roof, calm and telling him, with complete sincerity, that the book he was holding was more dangerous than the clown tied up six feet away.
"Then you're coming with me," Batman said.
Tyson stared at him.
"You need the cipher broken. I need to understand the threat. You work with me tonight, and by morning you'll have your counter-ritual translated, and I'll have a complete picture of what's operating in my city." Batman tucked the book into a compartment on his belt. "The alternative is I keep the book, run the analysis alone, and you wait."
"That's not really an alternative."
"No."
"Where?" Tyson said.
Batman turned and walked to the edge of the roof. He didn't look back. He stepped off.
Tyson watched him drop. The cape spread, caught air, and the dark shape glided out over the gap between the GCPD building and the parking structure across the street. He landed on the far roof without sound and kept moving.
Tyson looked down. Twelve stories. No cape. No grapple line.
He jumped.
The fall lasted two seconds. He hit the parking structure roof at speed, absorbed the impact through his legs, and rolled once before coming up in a sprint. Batman was already at the far edge, firing a grapple line at the next building. The cable caught, went taut, and he swung out into the dark.
Tyson followed. He couldn't match the grapple, but he could match the speed. He vaulted the gap between the parking structure and the adjacent office building, caught the fire escape railing three stories down, swung himself up and over, and landed on the roof in time to see Batman's cape disappear over the next ledge.
They moved through Gotham like that. Batman swinging and gliding, Tyson jumping, running, and climbing, both of them covering ground at a pace that would have killed a normal person.
They dropped into a narrow alley between two industrial buildings in the Burnley district. Batman landed first. Tyson landed three seconds later, harder, cracking the asphalt under his shoes. He straightened and brushed concrete dust off his jacket.
Batman walked to what looked like a solid brick wall. He pressed something Tyson couldn't see. A section of the wall shifted inward with a hydraulic hiss, revealing a passage barely wide enough for one person. Dim blue light spilled out from somewhere below.
"After you," Tyson said.
Batman went first. Tyson followed.
The passage led to a staircase, then to a freight elevator that looked like it hadn't been serviced since the building was constructed. Batman hit a button that wasn't on the panel. The elevator dropped. Not to a basement. Deeper. The descent took long enough that Tyson felt the pressure change in his ears.
The doors opened onto a cave.
Not a room. Not a bunker. A cave. Natural rock formations rose from the floor and descended from the ceiling, stalactites and stalagmites framing a space that had been converted into something between a command center and an armory. Computer terminals lined one wall. A workbench held disassembled equipment. A glass case displayed suits, older models, each one slightly different from the current version. Somewhere in the dark beyond the lit area, water dripped in a steady rhythm.
Tyson stopped at the threshold and took it in.
"This is where you work," he said.
Batman was already at the main terminal. He pulled the journal from his belt, opened it to the first page, and placed it on a flatbed scanner built into the desk surface. A mechanical arm adjusted, and a high-resolution camera began photographing each page as Batman turned them.
"The scanning will take twenty minutes," Batman said. "The cipher analysis will run simultaneously. If the substitution pattern is consistent, I'll have a key within the hour. If it shifts per section, longer."
Tyson walked further into the cave. He stopped at the glass case with the suits and looked at them for a long moment, then turned back to Batman.
"You brought me to the Batcave," he said.
Batman didn't look up from the scanner. "You told me a dead witch's coven is possessing people in my city using fifteenth-century hermetic magic. You showed me the binding seal. You admitted you're planning to either crack a counter-ritual or trade human hosts to break the possession." He turned another page. The camera clicked. "I don't have time to vet you through normal channels. So I'm doing it this way. You're here because I can watch you, and because you need what I can provide. That's the arrangement."
Batman glanced at him. Just once. Then back to the book.
"You jumped off a twelve-story building and landed on concrete without injury," Batman said. "You healed a gunshot wound with your hands. You took down the Joker's entire crew in under ten minutes." He turned another page. "If you're lying, I'll find out. And I'll have a plan for that too."
Tyson let out a laugh. "Fair enough."
He pulled a chair from somewhere, a rolling office chair that looked absurdly normal in the middle of a cave, and sat down near the terminal. He stretched his legs out, crossed his ankles, and settled in.
The cave was quiet in a way that the rest of the night hadn't been. No orchestra. No screaming. No calliope music on a loop or gunshots or the wet, fibrous sound of giant plants eating men in hockey masks. Just the click of the scanner, the hum of the terminal, the distant drip of water somewhere in the dark. He watched Batman photograph the spellbook page by page. Watched the analysis software chew through the cipher. Pattern after pattern failed, was discarded, replaced.
His body wanted to move. But he stayed in the absurd office chair. Partly because Batman had brought him here to be watched, and moving around the Batcave uninvited seemed like the kind of thing that got a man a batarang between the shoulder blades. Partly because the stillness was settling him. Forcing the night into sequence. The gala. The dance. Clark through the ceiling. Isobel's face when she realized the stones were gone. Ivy's plant eating people. The Joker on a table with soup on his lapel. Harley bleeding out on gravel. All of it had happened in the space of a few hours, and he hadn't stopped moving long enough to feel any of it.
He was feeling it now. Not physically. His body was fine. The shoulder was mostly fine after he'd popped it back in, and the bruising from Clark's glancing hit had faded before he'd left the ballroom. But the other kind of tired, the kind that was settling in now, filling the gaps the adrenaline had left behind.
He let his head tip back against the chair. The cave ceiling was lost in the dark above the reach of the monitor light, and he stared up into it and thought about the spellbook under the scanner. Every page Batman turned was a page closer to the answer. The counter-seal. The way out. If the cipher broke clean, if the instructions were complete, if the formula worked, then the nightmare ended, and the girls came home. Lana. Chloe. Kyla.
If it didn't work, he had option one. And option one had a cost he didn't want to think about.
So he thought about Lana.
Not the way he'd been thinking about her all night, as a problem to solve, a hostage to recover. He thought about her the way you think about someone at three in the morning. He thought about the sound of her real laugh, not the one Isobel performed, but the one that scrunched her nose. Right now, somewhere in the dark between Gotham and Metropolis, Lana was trapped inside her own skull. Watching. Feeling her mouth form words she hadn't chosen, her hands reach for things she hadn't wanted, her face arrange itself into expressions that belonged to a dead woman who'd decided Lana's life was hers to use. And every hour it continued, the glass got thicker. The voice on the inside got quieter. Not because Lana was giving up; she wouldn't, he knew that much. She was too stubborn to surrender to anything, but because even stubbornness wore thin when you screamed long enough and nobody heard you.
— Meteor Freak —
Batman turned from the terminal, two small glass vials in his hand. Each one held a liquid that looked like diluted ink, dark but translucent, swirling faintly even though neither vial was moving.
"The counter-seal requires a physical medium," Batman said. "The binding anchors to the host's body through the rune. To break it, the host has to ingest a compound that disrupts the seal's connection to their biology. The cipher specified the components. Most of them are chemical, not mystical. Sulfur compounds, trace minerals, a specific alkaloid ratio." He set the vials on the desk between them. "I synthesized it from the instructions in the book."
Tyson leaned forward in the office chair and picked up one of the vials. He held it up to the blue light of the monitors. The liquid shifted inside like it had weight to it, settling slower than water should.
"So all I need to do is have them drink these," Tyson said, "and it'll free the girls from the possession?"
"Not your girlfriend," Batman said. "The others. The two secondary hosts. The counter-seal in the book corresponds to the lesser bindings. The coven leader's seal is different. More complex. The gap mechanism I identified on the primary rune has additional layering that these won't address."
Tyson set the vial back down. He'd expected that. Hoped otherwise, but expected it.
"Right," he said. He picked up both vials and tucked them carefully into his jacket's inner pocket, one on each side. "Well. Thanks for the potions."
"They're not potions."
"You made them from a spellbook."
Batman turned back to the terminal. His fingers moved across the keyboard. He didn't respond for long enough that Tyson thought he'd simply decided the conversation was over, which, from what Tyson had gathered in the last few hours, was how about sixty percent of Batman's conversations ended.
Then Batman said, without turning around, "The spellbook provided a formula. I identified the chemical compounds the formula described, sourced equivalent modern materials, and synthesized them in a controlled environment using laboratory equipment." He pulled up a molecular diagram on one of the screens. "The process is chemistry. The fact that a sixteenth-century occultist wrote the recipe in cipher Latin doesn't make the output a potion."
"So it's a chemistry potion."
Batman's typing paused.
"It's a solution."
"A magical solution."
"A chemical solution to a metaphysical problem."
"Right," Tyson said. He patted the vials through his jacket. "Potions."
Batman pulled the journal from the scanner and held it out without looking. Tyson took it and slipped it back into his breast pocket.
He stood from the chair and stretched, the rolling casters squeaking against the cave floor. He checked the vials one more time through the fabric, then looked around the cave, at the terminals still running analysis, at the glass cases, at the dark water somewhere beyond the light.
"I can't tell you how much you've helped me," Tyson said. "Seriously. I came to Gotham hoping to find a lead, and you cracked the whole thing in one night." He paused. "Is there anything I can do before I head out? You want me to swing by the Iceberg Lounge and drag Penguin back here by his collar? I can have him gift-wrapped in twenty minutes."
Batman didn't respond to the offer. He was standing at the terminal, pulling up a file. Medical records. Tyson could see the header from where he stood, though the name was redacted behind a black bar.
"Your healing ability," Batman said. "How far does it extend?"
Tyson tilted his head. "How do you mean?"
"You healed a gunshot wound. Closed tissue, stopped bleeding, repaired what looked like muscular damage in seconds. You healed hypothermia." Batman turned from the screen. "Is it limited to trauma? Cuts, fractures, acute injury? Or can you affect systemic conditions?"
Tyson thought about it. Not because he didn't know the answer, but because the question was more specific than anyone had asked him before, and he wanted to be accurate.
"I've healed concussions," he said, counting on his fingers. "Heart disease. A man in his fifties, arterial blockage, early-stage heart failure. The cardiologist thought the original scans had been wrong." He paused. "And I fixed my friend's mom's infertility. That one was an accident, actually. She found out she was pregnant two months later. Her doctors had told her it was impossible."
Batman turned back to the terminal and typed something. A new file opened. This one had images. Tyson could see what looked like cellular microscopy, tissue samples, and a photograph of a woman lying in what appeared to be a cryogenic pod.
"I contacted Bruce Wayne," Batman said. "Given that his foundation funded the gala you robbed, he has standing to press charges. The stone you took, the disruption you caused. Wayne has every reason to pursue this."
"However," Batman continued, "given the circumstances, and the nature of the threat you're addressing, Wayne is willing to overlook your transgressions. On a condition."
"Name it."
"Wayne has an acquaintance. A man suffering from a rare degenerative condition called MacGregor's Syndrome. Stage one. The disease attacks the immune system at the cellular level, breaking down the body's ability to regulate temperature and fight infection simultaneously. There is no cure. Current treatment is palliative. Without intervention, the prognosis is terminal. Wayne has been funding research into MacGregor's Syndrome for years. Privately. The public efforts through his foundation are a fraction of what he's invested. He has personal reasons for wanting this disease cured." He closed the file and turned to face Tyson fully. "If you can heal this man, Wayne considers the debt settled."
"Done," Tyson said. "Tell me where he is, and I'll do it tonight."
"There's a second part."
Tyson waited.
Batman pulled up another set of files. These weren't medical records from a hospital. They were from Arkham. Inmate profiles, incident reports, and more cryogenic imagery. The photograph showed a man in a mechanized suit, bald, his skin carrying a blue-gray pallor, and beside that file, another photograph of the woman in the cryo-chamber.
"Victor Fries," Batman said. "You encountered him at the ball as Mr. Freeze."
Tyson recognized the name.
"Fries was a cryogenics researcher. Brilliant. His wife, Nora, contracted MacGregor's Syndrome. The same disease. He placed her in cryogenic suspension to halt the progression while he searched for a cure." Batman's voice didn't change, but the pacing slowed. More deliberate. "The accident that transformed him happened during that research. His physiology was altered at the molecular level. He can't survive outside of sub-zero temperatures. His suit maintains his environment. Without it, he dies."
"And he turned to crime to fund the research," Tyson said.
"To fund the research. To acquire equipment. To access facilities no legitimate institution would grant a fugitive." Batman closed the files. "Every robbery, every confrontation, every life he's endangered or taken has been in pursuit of one goal. Curing his wife."
"You want me to heal Nora Fries," Tyson said.
"I want you to cure MacGregor's Syndrome in both patients. Wayne's acquaintance first. That proves the ability works on this specific condition and settles your debt. Then Nora Fries." He paused. "If Nora is cured, Victor Fries has no reason to continue his campaign. Every crime he's committed has been driven by desperation. Remove the desperation, and you remove the villain."
"And Gotham has one less problem."
"Gotham has one less tragedy," Batman corrected.