Part 3 — Escape
Chapter 6
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The Gordon living room was the kind of space that accumulated personality over time rather than being designed to have it.
Ben stood in the middle of it and looked around with the careful attention of someone trying to get their bearings in unfamiliar territory. A television mounted on the far wall. A pair of sofas arranged at a right angle to each other, the upholstery worn at the armrests in the way furniture gets when it's actually used. Family photographs on the side table — Barbara at various ages, a man with a steady face standing beside her in most of them, the two of them at what looked like a graduation, a fair, a ordinary Tuesday. A bookshelf against one wall with paperbacks mixed in among the hardcovers without any apparent system. A window looking out onto the street with the curtains half drawn against the Gotham evening.
It was a home. Ben hadn't spent much time in homes lately.
Barbara stood a few feet behind him, not quite sure where to position herself in her own living room. This was the first time she'd brought someone over who wasn't Pamela, and Pamela didn't count because Pamela had been coming over since they were twelve and had stopped requiring any social navigation years ago. This was different. This was a boy from her biology class standing in her living room looking at her family photographs, and her father was going to ask questions when he got home, and she was going to have to explain that it was for school, and she was already constructing the explanation in her head while simultaneously trying to appear like she wasn't.
The silence stretched past the point where it was comfortable.
Ben spoke first, because someone had to. "Nice house."
"Thanks. My dad and I did the decor."
A pause.
"Where are your parents?"
"My dad's at work right now."
"What about your mom?"
"She..." Barbara stopped, then continued evenly. "She passed away when I was little."
Ben looked at her. Then he looked down, the specific look of someone who has walked directly into something they didn't see coming and has no recovery available. "I'm sorry."
"Not your fault," she said. "You couldn't have known."
The conversation stopped there, both of them standing in the aftermath of it. Ben had walked into that question without thinking, which was what happened when you spent most of your time alone — you forgot to account for the things other people were carrying. He understood the shape of what she'd just said in a way he didn't particularly want to examine right now.
The silence became its own presence in the room.
"Want to see the materials?" Barbara said.
Ben felt something unclench in his chest. "Yeah. Let's do that."
"This way. I kept everything in my room so nothing would get damaged."
She led him toward the stairs, and he followed.
He found himself looking at her as she went up ahead of him, her red hair moving slightly with each step, the small frame of her back. She was pretty in a way that registered honestly before he could decide what to do with the information. He noted it, set it aside, and kept moving. Dating wasn't something that fit into the life he was running. He'd made that calculation a long time ago and it hadn't changed.
The second floor was quiet. Barbara pushed open the first door and stepped inside.
He'd had some version of an expectation and the room didn't match it. Not consciously formed, just a background assumption based on nothing in particular — something decorated, personalized in the way some girls personalized their spaces. What he found instead was functional and organized. A bed against the center wall, made neatly. A bookshelf filled with actual books, the spines varied enough that they were clearly read rather than displayed. A desk with a computer on it, notes stacked beside the keyboard, a pencil laid across the top page. A window that looked directly out over the Gotham skyline, the city's lights beginning to show as the last of the evening faded.
"Materials are over here," Barbara said, already moving toward the corner.
They pulled everything out together and laid it across the floor. The large glass jar with its rubber-sealed lid. The bag of potting soil cut with sand. The drainage layer, the filter material, the barrier, the small ferns and moss, the rocks and driftwood for landscaping. Everything accounted for, everything in better condition than he would have managed if he'd been the one sourcing it.
Ben reached for his wallet. "How much did all this cost? I'll cover it."
Barbara put her hand out to stop him. "Don't. I didn't buy most of it — I borrowed from a friend. Put it away."
He put the wallet back. "Do you know how to set this up?"
She smiled, brief and confident. "Yep."
"Then let's get started."
---
Several hours later the project had reached its fifth stage, the two of them cross-legged on the floor with the terrarium taking shape between them. Barbara was working a pair of long tweezers into the soil layer, positioning the root system of a small fern with the patience of someone who understood that this part required patience. Ben was placing the driftwood piece by piece, checking angles, adjusting.
A knock at the door.
It opened before either of them responded, and Jim Gordon stepped into the room.
He was a broad-shouldered man in his late forties, carrying the particular tiredness of someone at the end of a long shift rather than the end of a long life. His hair was dark going gray at the temples, his mustache the same. He wore his work clothes still — slacks, a dress shirt with the collar button open, his jacket over one arm. His eyes were sharp behind his glasses with the instinctive assessment of a man who had spent his career reading rooms and people simultaneously.
"Babs, I'm home —"
He stopped.
Ben had already straightened up from the floor, his jacket set aside, fully absorbed in the project a moment ago and now standing with the slight awkwardness of someone caught doing something entirely ordinary but in an unexpected location.
"Hello, sir."
Jim looked at him for a moment with the measured quality of a detective processing new information. "What's your name, son?"
"Ben. Ben Tennyson."
Something shifted in Jim's expression — a small recalibration, the name landing somewhere recognizable. "Are you related to Frank Tennyson? The attorney?"
"He's my uncle."
Jim nodded slowly, the kind of nod that means several things are being weighed at once. "Jim," he said. He looked at Barbara. "Can I see you outside for a minute?"
He stepped back into the hallway. Barbara followed, pulling the door most of the way closed behind her.
Ben returned to the driftwood. He could hear the low murmur of conversation through the door without being able to make out words, which was fine. He positioned a piece of pale wood against the back of the jar and checked whether it sat level.
The door opened again and Barbara came back in, her expression carrying the slight residual tension of a conversation that had gone reasonably well rather than perfectly.
Ben looked up. "Your dad looks familiar somehow. I can't place it."
"Probably from the Carmine Falcone arrest. It was everywhere for a while." She settled back into her spot on the floor. "He became head of the GCPD after that."
"Right." Ben looked at her. "I remember now."
He turned back to the unfinished terrarium, the glass jar sitting between them with its layers visible through the clear walls.
"Ready to keep going?" he asked.
"Actually — " She paused. "My dad wants to know if you're staying for dinner."
Ben thought about it. The mansion was twenty minutes away. Aunt Natalie would have something on the stove. Kevin would eat two servings of whatever it was and claim he'd barely eaten.
"Sure," he said. "That sounds good."
---
The warehouse was dark and still.
Batman moved through it without a light, which wasn't necessary. The cowl' s lenses handled the dark. He walked the perimeter of the space first, then the interior, reading what the room had to tell him.
The hole in the wall was the most obvious thing and therefore the last thing he looked at. He started with the floor — the marks left by rapid lateral movement, the weight distribution suggesting something heavier than a person, the drag patterns near the large crates that indicated something had been lifted and set back down. He looked at the entry point, the window latch, the way the dust had been disturbed by someone coming through it from outside rather than from within.
Then the hole.
The edges of it were consistent with an impact from inside the building traveling outward. The force required to produce that exit point was not within human range. Something on the wall near the impact zone showed residue that the spectrometer attachment would need to analyze — possibly an energy discharge of some kind, the surface slightly scorched in a pattern that didn't match any conventional weapon he had on file.
He stood in the middle of the warehouse floor for a moment, assembling what he had.
The energy signatures he'd been tracking always originated from locations like this one — abandoned warehouses, cleared industrial spaces, places with enough room and enough isolation to make them useful. He'd been arriving after the fact every time, the trail already cold, the sources gone before he could get a position. He'd started checking every abandoned structure in the affected radius systematically, and the pattern was consistent: evidence of activity, evidence of significant physical force, no occupants.
They were using these spaces and moving on before he could arrive.
He looked at the hole in the wall again, at the scorch pattern on the surface beside it.
He needed to be here before they were, not after.
He turned and walked back toward the window he'd come through, already running the calculation of which warehouses in the grid he hadn't checked yet.