---
Catwoman stared at the iron bars.
They had been wide enough for her to slip through easily. Now they were not. Jack Kadere had bent them back into place with his bare hands—not all the way, but enough. Just enough.
"Are you insane?" she asked flatly.
"Do you have medicine?"
"You shouldn't be locked in Blackgate." She stepped toward the bars, measuring the gap with her eyes. "You belong in Arkham."
"I'll visit if I get the chance."
She couldn't tell if he was joking. Worse, she suspected he wasn't.
Gotham, she thought bitterly. Full of lunatics who think they're comedians.
The gap between the bars was tight but manageable—barely. Catwoman turned sideways, placed one hand on the cold metal, and began to slide through. Her left leg went first, then her hip. She exhaled, pulling her stomach taut, and eased forward.
Halfway through, she stopped.
Her chest wouldn't fit.
She could have passed easily before. Before he decided to undo his own work.
Catwoman turned her head and found Jack Kadere watching her with undisguised interest, arms folded, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
She looked down at herself. At the exact point where her body had become stuck.
This bastard.
No wonder he'd studied her figure earlier. No wonder he'd bent the bars back. The whole thing had been deliberate—a juvenile, infuriating, deliberate provocation designed specifically for this moment.
Her jaw tightened. Without a word, she inhaled sharply and shoved herself through the gap.
Pain flared across her chest—a sharp, grinding ache that made her vision blur for an instant—but she forced her body forward until she stumbled free on the other side. Her shoulder throbbed where Jack had pinned her earlier. Her ribs ached where the bars had compressed them.
She refused to rub either spot. She refused to give him the satisfaction.
Behind her, Jack Kadere applauded softly.
"Well done," he said, sounding genuinely pleased. "You've proven beyond all doubt that everything is authentic."
Who said it wasn't? Who asked for proof?
Catwoman wanted nothing more than to squeeze back through the bars and beat him senseless—but movement at the end of the corridor caught her attention. Prison guards. Three of them, already reaching for the security door.
No time.
She sprinted toward them just as the door swung open. The guards met her with batons raised, forming a wall of uniformed bodies in the narrow corridor. Normally she would have danced through them without breaking stride. But her shoulder was still half-numb, her reflexes compromised. Every swing she dodged pulled at damaged muscle. Every counterstrike lacked its usual snap.
For the first time in weeks, she found herself genuinely struggling.
BOOM.
The explosion came from somewhere outside—a deep, concussive blast that rattled the walls and sent dust drifting from the ceiling. Shouts erupted. Alarms began to wail.
Before the guards could react, a wave of armed men poured through the far entrance.
They wore civilian clothes and carried military-grade weapons. Their faces were wild, ecstatic, drunk on something more intoxicating than alcohol. They moved through the corridor like a flood, overwhelming the remaining guards with sheer numbers before anyone could organize a defense.
"You are liberated!" one of them screamed, unlocking cell after cell. "You are free!"
"Gotham belongs to you now! Go take what's yours!"
"Find the rich! Find the people who put you here! Make them pay!"
Guns were pressed into eager hands. Cell doors swung wide. Inmates who had been rotting in concrete boxes for years suddenly found themselves armed and unchained, surrounded by others who shared their hatred for the system that had caged them.
The corridor became a stampede.
Catwoman found herself shoved aside, swept against the wall by a tide of bodies surging toward freedom. The guards she'd been fighting were already down—trampled, beaten, dragged away by inmates with old grudges. She tried to push forward, but the current was too strong, the crowd too dense.
Damn it.
Behind her, a tattooed man wrenched open Jack Kadere's cell and tossed a pistol through the bars.
"You're free, brother! Go wild!"
Jack caught the gun with casual ease. He turned it over in his hands, examining the weight, the balance, the mechanism. "Thanks."
He'd never actually fired one before. That was fine. He'd find someone who knew how to shoot and let them demonstrate on him later.
Catwoman was right. He really did belong in Arkham.
The corridor had become an impassable river of orange jumpsuits and stolen weapons. Jack slipped into the current and began to move. His body flowed through gaps that shouldn't have existed, anticipating collisions before they happened, adjusting his trajectory with an almost liquid grace. Where others shoved and stumbled, he simply glided.
As he passed Catwoman—still pinned against the wall by the crush of bodies—he offered her a pleasant smile.
"See you around," he said.
Then he was gone, carried away by the tide.
---
By the time Catwoman fought her way outside, Jack Kadere had vanished into the chaos.
And there was plenty of chaos to vanish into.
The streets of Old Town had become a warzone. Gunfire crackled from every direction—some distant, some terrifyingly close. Plumes of smoke rose from burning vehicles. Store windows lay shattered, their contents spilled across the sidewalk like entrails.
Former inmates roamed in packs, still wearing their prison uniforms, faces twisted with savage joy. They kicked in doors and dragged screaming residents into the street. They overturned cars and set fires for no reason beyond the pleasure of destruction.
But they weren't alone.
Gotham's ordinary citizens had joined the frenzy. Men in suits beat a banker with his own briefcase. Women in business attire smashed the windows of a jewelry store with crowbars. A group of teenagers spray-painted obscenities on the side of a church while their parents cheered them on.
And scattered among the mob, fighting back with everything they had, were the people of Gotham who refused to kneel.
Shopkeepers with shotguns. Homeowners with pistols. Old women with baseball bats. A hot dog vendor using his cart as a barricade while he fired a hunting rifle at anyone who came too close.
Welcome to Gotham, Jack thought, watching a stockbroker tackle an armed convict and bite his ear off. The one city where even the accountants shoot first and ask questions never.
He'd heard stories. When Darkseid's Parademons descended on Earth, most cities had evacuated or surrendered. Metropolis had waited for Superman. Central City had waited for the Flash.
Gotham had grabbed whatever weapons they could find and started shooting.
Because in Gotham, it didn't matter if you were human or monster, god or demon. If you threatened the wrong block, someone was going to put a bullet in you.
Jack respected that. He really did.
The sky overhead was thick with smoke and ash, turning the late afternoon into something closer to twilight. Gothic spires rose above the chaos like the bones of a cathedral, their ornate facades streaked with soot. The distant sound of chanting drifted from somewhere downtown—Bane's people, probably, whipping the mob into an even greater frenzy.
"The wind," Jack murmured, adjusting the collar of his stolen jacket, "is particularly lively today."
He made his way through the chaos with the unhurried pace of a man out for a stroll. Bullets whined past. Someone screamed for help. A car exploded two blocks away, sending a pillar of flame into the darkening sky.
Jack ignored all of it.
His destination was a modest apartment building at the edge of Old Town—five stories of crumbling brick and barred windows. The kind of place where the rent was cheap because the landlord stopped fixing things years ago.
The front door was locked.
Jack rang the doorbell. The chime was barely audible over the gunfire.
No response.
He rang again.
Still nothing.
"Fair enough," he said.
He stepped back, raised his foot, and kicked.
The door exploded inward, ripped clean off its hinges, and crashed against the far wall of the lobby with enough force to crack the plaster. Jack stepped through the opening, raised his stolen pistol, and announced in a pleasant voice:
"Attention, residents. This is a robbery. Please cooperate and no one will—"
BANG.
A bullet punched through the air where his head had been an instant before.
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