Everyone wins one night and then wakes up to the next morning. Gotham doesn't offer extensions.
The things that needed doing still needed doing, and the Mad Hatter was already at them — selecting his audience for the day's performance, running his cast through their marks, arranging his artificial wonderland with the particular obsessiveness of a man who had nowhere else to put it.
Jude stood to one side and watched.
The stage was less a theatrical set than a recreation — a full-scale diorama of the fairy tale's world, built with unsettling completeness. A giant rabbit hole, a table of bottled shrinking potions still bubbling, a Colonel Caterpillar perched on his mushroom, a grinning Cheshire Cat fixed to a tree branch in a permanent rictus. The Queen of Hearts stood at her station, ready to call for heads at appropriate moments. A small house with chimneys shaped like rabbit ears. And in one corner, a shallow pool built into the stage — representing, per the source material, Alice's pool of tears. The Mad Hatter had apparently felt strongly about including the pool of tears.
Only the ones who were never quite right to begin with, Jude thought again, looking at all of it.
"Alice! Come play with me!"
The Mad Hatter seized the hand of one of the blank-faced blonde girls on stage and led her down into the rabbit hole. He started dancing. The girl responded in a flat, puppeted voice: "Okay, Mad Hatter."
"No. You call me Tetch!"
So the girl called him Tetch, and they danced.
It did not go well. The height-enhancing shoes brought the Mad Hatter up to approximately the wrong height, and his Alice — deprived of genuine motor control by the chip in her wig — had the spatial awareness of a department store mannequin. Within thirty seconds she'd stepped on him twice and, on one memorable occasion, briefly lifted him off the floor by one hand.
The shouting that followed echoed off the theater walls.
"This isn't a perfect day! You're a fake too — die!"
The gunshot was flat and final. The girl dropped. A bloom of red spread across the chest of her costume, and when she hit the stage the blonde wig slid free, revealing dark red hair underneath.
Jude's hand found the pistol at his hip and stayed there, and in the same moment he understood two things simultaneously: why every girl on stage had uniformly long blonde hair, and why they were under the Mad Hatter's control despite wearing no visible hats.
Wigs. Wigs were a type of hat.
"No, no — my Alice is blonde, not red!" The Mad Hatter was already crouching over her, voice cracking, pressing the wig back onto her head with shaking hands. "I should have stapled it down like I always do, I know I should have — no, I can't do this, I can't do this to Alice — Thor! Thor!"
Jude walked over and said, in the flat mechanical voice of a controlled man: "Boss."
"Throw her out. I never want to see her again. Throw her anywhere." He waved a hand without looking up. "And you — clean the stage."
Jude lifted the girl from the floor. He'd already palmed a few fruit candies into his hand. The Mad Hatter had told him to put her anywhere, which gave him all the latitude he needed.
Call Batman tonight. Get her out.
When he returned, the stage had been cleaned. The Mad Hatter was already back up among his row of blank-faced Alices, reaching for the next one's hand.
Oswald or now called The Penguin walked in through the front doors before the dancing could restart.
"Don't get comfortable, Tetch. The Joker says Mr. Freeze has found something — new intelligence on the Riddler's force movements. He needs someone for a mission alongside Man-Bat."
The Mad Hatter's expression darkened in the specific way it did when the world interrupted him mid-performance. "Does he really have to take my new subordinate?"
"We don't have many people left. You know that." The Penguin's tone carried the practiced patience of a man who'd had this category of conversation many times. "This is the Joker's order."
Jervis let go of the girl's hand. He climbed down from the stage, found the broken teacup on the prop table — the one painted with the words Drink Me — and produced a tea bag from his breast pocket, labeled Soothing Tea, which he dropped into the cup and covered with hot water from a nearby flask. He didn't look at the Penguin.
"What are you waiting for? Just take him." He raised the cup. "You think I'm in a position to say no to the Joker?"
Jude caught the scent from across the stage the moment the tea hit the water. It wasn't tea. His nose catalogued the components with the clinical efficiency of someone who had spent too long around Scarecrow: belladonna, psilocybin, something that registered as lysergic acid diethylamide underneath the rest. The Mad Hatter's pockets were apparently a portable pharmacological arsenal — hallucinogens, stimulants, compounds that Jude had no precise name for but whose general category was extremely inadvisable. Whether the man had developed a taste for them after his original overdose, or whether he was engineering them deliberately as weapons, was unclear. The end result was the same: the Mad Hatter was operating at a level of chemical enhancement that most people would categorize as unhinged beyond clinical description.
"One more thing, Tetch." The Penguin set down his umbrella. "The Joker needs to be able to control him directly. You have to hand over the remote."
The Mad Hatter's smile was thin and cold. "Fine. Take everything I have." He dug into his coat and produced a small remote — buttons, a small antenna — and flipped it toward the Penguin. "You know how it works. Stop interrupting my rehearsals."
"Always a pleasure, Tetch."
The Penguin pressed the button. Jude fell dutifully into step behind him. Before they left the stage area, he administered the beret's effect one more time in the direction of the nearest Alice — a small, quiet extension of the I Didn't Kill Anyone field that would keep the next few hours from getting worse while he was gone.
Outside the theater, the Penguin walked him directly to a waiting car.
"Drive. We're going to the Joker."
The driver pulled out immediately, heading north toward the upper end of the Upper West Side — toward the second grand theater, the one the Joker had claimed for his own operations. The Mad Hatter chose theaters for the stages. The Joker chose them because he appreciated a good performance.
Why, Jude thought, riding in the back seat with his hands in his lap and his eyes appropriately vacant, do all of you people insist on meeting in theaters?
The car drove for several minutes, then slowed, then turned. Not north — down. The underground parking structure of an office building swallowed them, level by level, until they reached the lowest floor and stopped.
"Alright, Thor." The Penguin stepped out and beckoned. "With me."
Jude climbed out in his controlled shuffle. Two burly men in suits materialized from the shadows and took hold of his arms with the professional grip of people who'd done this before.
"Clean signal?"
"No tails. Jamming's clear."
The Penguin turned to face him and pressed a button on the remote. The chip's hold unwound from Jude's nervous system like a fist unclenching.
"Mr. Thor." The Penguin's tone shifted — businesslike, almost collegial. "Our arrangement isn't finished. You survived, which means we still have things to discuss." He tilted his head. "So. Let's talk."