Jude walked without direction through streets that smelled like rain and old mistakes.
Twenty minutes. He'd been wandering for twenty minutes through the most crime-saturated city in America, and not a single person had tried to rob him. He'd passed two alleys where figures watched from the dark. He'd walked through a corner where three men were visibly dealing something under a broken streetlamp. He'd made eye contact with a man sitting on a fire hydrant who had the kind of face that usually preceded unpleasant conversations.
Every one of them had clocked him and looked away.
A man with his hands shoved in his pockets, jacket worn to the point of transparency, navigating Gotham at nine in the evening with the hollow expression of someone who had nothing to lose. Apparently that read very clearly.
Is there a nicer Gotham somewhere? he wondered. Gotham Springs? Gotham Heights? A Gotham where people do normal crimes, like tax evasion?
"Hey. Friend."
Jude stopped.
A man stood directly in his path, blocking the sidewalk. Sunglasses. At night. A black mask covering his nose and mouth, a grey hoodie with the hood cinched up, the kind of anonymous outfit that announced itself as a disguise the same way a sign reading "DISGUISE" would have. Every element of this person's presentation screamed: I am about to commit a crime.
Jude's first thought was not fear. It was, depressingly: finally.
His second thought was more practical. If he played this right—if he looked desperate enough, confused enough, unfortunate enough—maybe he could guilt the guy into sparing a few dollars. Begging wasn't technically illegal. Three dollars wouldn't last until morning.
The man reached into his pocket.
And produced a gun.
"Stop talking." His voice was high and tight, running on adrenaline. "Take out everything you have. Right now!"
The shout echoed off wet concrete. Several pedestrians turned, registered the gun, and made immediate improvements to their walking pace. One woman broke into a full jog without breaking stride. Nobody looked back.
Jude stared at the muzzle, and his charity-extraction plan dissolved.
He'd been thinking knives, at worst. Maybe aggressive body language and a demand for his shoes. But Gotham criminals apparently started at guns and escalated from there, which left him with no diplomatic entry point whatsoever. You couldn't reason your way around a barrel.
His eyes flicked to the system interface at the edge of his vision.
Safe Time Remaining: 9 minutes, 47 seconds.
The knowledge settled into his chest like ice water. He was protected. Technically. For the next ten minutes, nothing lethal would reach him.
The gun was still three feet from his face. Technical protection did very little for his blood pressure.
"I said—" The robber's voice cracked upward. "Take out everything you have!"
He shoved the pistol forward. The barrel came within inches of Jude's nose.
Jude stumbled back, hands up, and that was not entirely an act. Safe time or not, staring down a gun barrel triggered something older than reason, something that had been installed in human beings long before anyone invented systems and safe zones, and it said: you are about to die, start panicking.
"Okay!" His voice came out higher than intended. "Okay, I'm getting it, just—okay—"
His hands shook as he reached into his jacket pockets.
He pulled both pockets inside out.
Empty. Lint. The ghost of a receipt from somewhere that no longer existed.
The robber stared at the two white triangles of fabric flopped out from Jude's jacket like the ears of a very sad rabbit.
"Are you KIDDING me?"
Jude could feel the man's fury building from three feet away, pressure accumulating like something about to crack. Fear spiked through him despite the timer. Safe zone or not, an angry man with a gun was an unpredictable thing. People did catastrophically stupid things when their plans fell apart on them.
"Look," Jude said, voice shaking, "you can't be mad at me for being broke. You think I chose this?"
"Who the hell are you calling—"
The fury in those four words was personal. Raw. Like Jude had pressed a thumb into a bruise he didn't know was there.
Interesting, some detached corner of his brain noted, filing it away.
"I'm just saying." Jude moved his hands slowly toward his pants pockets. "Check for yourself. I've got nothing. See?"
The robber watched his hands. He reached up with his free hand, shoved his sunglasses up because of course he couldn't see properly in the dark, and leaned in.
"I'm watching you," he said. "Don't try anything."
Jude, who had never tried anything in his life that wasn't ultimately regrettable, pulled his pants pockets inside out.
Also empty.
The man made a sound that had no business coming out of someone holding a firearm. A small, wounded sound, like a complaint that had run out of words.
"You're hiding it!" Desperation crept into his voice now. Actual tears. "Take off your jacket. I need to search you!"
Jude didn't argue. He shrugged off the jacket and held his arms out.
Go ahead, he thought. You find a single dollar, I'll name my firstborn after you.
The robber patted him down with escalating franticness. Jacket lining. Shirt. Belt. Pants legs. Shoes. Nothing. Not a wallet, not a phone, not a coin that had slipped through a torn seam. The man worked with the thoroughness of someone who could not accept the evidence in front of him and was determined to find a different answer.
He found none.
He stopped.
He stood there for a moment, looking at the empty jacket in his hands. Then he sat down on the wet pavement.
Set the gun on his knee. Put his face in his hands.
And started crying.
Not quiet tears. Actual sobbing—the kind that shook his shoulders and got caught in his throat and came out ugly, in broken pieces, through the mask he was still wearing. In Gotham, at nine in the evening, in the rain, a masked robber sat on the sidewalk and cried over a failed mugging while pedestrians crossed to the other side of the street without slowing down.
Jude looked at him for a moment.
Then he sat down next to him on the wet concrete.
"Hey," he said. "Everyone has a bad night sometimes."
The sobbing continued.
"If you really need to go home with something, you can have the jacket."
"Who the hell wants your jacket?" The gun swung up reflexively. The barrel caught Jude on the arm—solid impact, not hard enough to break anything, hard enough to remind him that safe time was specifically for lethal events and bruises were apparently still on the table. The man raised it again, pointing at Jude's face. "What do you know, you broke bastard? You won't last the night out here!"
Jude rubbed his arm. "I know this is your first time."
The gun wavered.
"Every other criminal I passed in the last half hour took one look at me and kept walking. They could read it. Empty pockets, nothing worth taking, not worth the energy. But you didn't see it." He kept his voice even, like he was thinking out loud rather than delivering a verdict. "You're wearing sunglasses. At night. No gloves, which means fingerprints. You made noise—the whole block heard you, I could've had three witnesses already. You kept putting the gun too close to my face, which loses you distance and control." He paused. "And when I reached for my pockets, you took your eyes off my hands. Anyone with real training could've taken that gun."
"Shut up—"
"You didn't pull me into the alley immediately. You sat down and started crying after the robbery failed instead of running, which means either you've never done this before or you've done it before and it always goes like this." He considered the gun. "And I'm still not entirely sure that thing is loaded."
The man swung the pistol. Jude ducked. The blow went wide.
They sat in the rain for a while, not speaking. Somewhere two blocks over, glass broke. A car alarm started and stopped.
"You're desperate," Jude said finally. "People don't do this without a reason. So, what's the problem?"
A long silence.
The robber reached up and pulled off the sunglasses. In the grey half-light of a broken streetlamp, Jude got his first real look at the man.
Late thirties, maybe. Thin in the way that came from stress rather than poverty—not the hollow thinness of someone who hadn't eaten, but the worn-down thinness of someone whose body had been consuming itself quietly for months. Dark circles deep enough to be structural features. Bloodshot eyes. A few tufts of hair visibly missing at the temple, like he'd been pulling at it without noticing.
A man running on fumes, propped up by desperation.
"There are already enough crazy people in Gotham," the man muttered, pulling the mask down around his chin.
He moved to stand.
"You're robbing people, which means you need money you can't get any other way," Jude said. "You're not very good at it, which means you haven't been doing it long. Educated, probably—I can hear it. The dark circles mean this isn't a new problem. Whatever you need the money for, it's a lot, and it's been going on a while."
The man stopped.
"You can't hit a bank. You'd die. And the street approach clearly isn't working out either. You got lucky I'm not a cop. Or worse." Jude stood and brushed the wet off his pants, which took a while because there was a lot of it. "Tell me what the problem is. Maybe I can actually help."
The robber turned slowly.
"Why would you help me?"
"Because I want something in return." Jude met his eyes directly. "I'm new to Gotham. I have no contacts, no shelter, no job. I need somewhere to sleep tonight and I need someone who knows how this city works to help me find legal work before I end up exactly where you are in six months."
He looked between them—the wet pavement, the failed robbery, the gun sitting loose in the man's hand.
"Here's the deal. If I can't help you, we will go our separate ways. You go home, I sleep on the street, we pretend this never happened. But if I can help—you let me crash at your place temporarily and help me find work. And I'll do whatever I can to solve your problem. Legal work only," he added. "I'm not killing anyone."
The robber stood there for a long time. Rain ran down his face. His jaw moved like he was testing the words, finding the weak points in them, looking for the angle.
He sat back down.
Looked up at the sky. Gotham's clouds, thick and low, let a thin veil of rain fall on both of them with complete indifference.
"You're not from Gotham," he said, after a while. His voice had gone quiet. Stripped of the performance of it. "I'll trust you. Just this once."
He laughed, and it wasn't a happy sound.
"Anyway," he said. "I don't have any other choice."