"Idiots! What are you all doing?! I told you to kill her!"
The shout rang through the theater and accomplished nothing. The hat-wearers stood where they were. The Falcone gunmen stood where they were. Nobody moved.
"Stop struggling," Poison Ivy said. "You have no one right now."
"Impossible." The Mad Hatter pulled the remote from his pocket and began jabbing the red button with his thumb, once, twice, a dozen times. Nothing. "Impossible — the hat I made wouldn't betray me. They cannot betray me. They—"
A heavy thud from the far end of the theater interrupted him.
A Falcone gunman in a black suit had simply folded, toppling sideways to the floor, his body moving in slow, bewildered convulsions, his face wearing the expression of a man watching fireworks from somewhere very comfortable. He seemed genuinely pleased about whatever he was currently experiencing.
The first one going down was a signal. A second followed, then a third, then the whole theater began to come apart at the edges — actors, crew, hat-wearers, gunmen, all of them dropping in sequence like a slow domino chain, each one landing with the same soft, astonished expression.
"Why did you think I was talking to you for so long?" Poison Ivy said. "Did you imagine the Riddler would send me here alone, without a plan?"
The Mad Hatter threw the remote at the floor. It shattered. He reached into his hat and produced a miniature submachine gun — two of them, as it turned out, one from each side of the hat's interior architecture, which was impressive from an engineering standpoint.
"What did you do?!"
Poison Ivy laughed, and it was not a reassuring laugh.
"You couldn't have detected it. Look at what you put on every surface in here — cakes, candies, powdered sugar, sodas. You built yourself a room that smells like a confectionery. Your own stage killed your sense of smell." She ran two fingers lightly along the clusters of tiny flowers worked into her inner armor, the ones the Alice dress had been covering all evening. The fragrance they were producing was faint, almost imperceptible, the kind of scent that registered below conscious awareness.
"A special cultivar," she said. "My own development. The fragrance produces a hallucinogenic effect under sustained exposure. I was slightly concerned there might not be enough time." A brief pause. "Fortunately, your performance is extremely long."
The submachine guns opened up. Bullets shredded the air between them, and the vine wall absorbed every one, layer after fibrous layer, none of them getting through. The Mad Hatter kept firing and kept screaming, which was either impotent rage or a form of self-soothing — possibly both.
Poison Ivy waited for a pause in the salvo, then raised an eyebrow.
"I don't know what you ingested just now," she said, with the clinical interest of someone observing an unexpected experimental result, "but there shouldn't be an antidote for this compound yet. You've been in the fragrance environment long enough. Why are you still standing?"
She didn't know — couldn't know — the full scope of what the Mad Hatter had been doing to his own nervous system for the past several years. The tea bags in his pockets were a laboratory in miniature: compounds for calm, compounds for euphoria, compounds for focus, compounds for aggression, compounds for pain suppression. He had been methodically saturating his body chemistry for so long that the boundary between his bloodstream and a pharmacological experiment had effectively dissolved. His drug tolerance wasn't a quantity you could measure against a normal human baseline, because normal human baselines no longer applied to him.
It was, objectively, a miracle he was alive. It was, subjectively, the only way he knew how to function.
"Miss Pamela." His voice had gone to a strange, flat register under the fury, the way very deep water goes still. "A person who is already insane cannot become more insane."
The communicator on his chest crackled.
"Victor." Poison Ivy didn't turn around. "I didn't hear you come in."
"We're not unintelligent," Mr. Freeze said, through the device. "We couldn't leave the Mad Hatter managing a district without any kind of monitoring. His mental state has always been a variable we needed to account for."
"Oh? Aren't you a sane madman yourself?"
She raised one hand, and the vine wall began moving forward — a slow, solid press toward the Mad Hatter's position. The conversation had run its course. The fragrance hadn't taken him down, which meant finishing this quickly was now the priority.
"I may be, Miss Pamela. But I'm not stupid." A pause on the line — the brief, deliberate beat of a man with good timing. "I came here the moment I identified the anomaly. And now—"
The cold hit before he finished the sentence.
A wave of sub-zero air swept through the theater from the east wall, dropping the temperature by forty degrees in the span of two seconds. The wall's building materials — plaster, brick, steel studs — became glass-brittle in the cold, and then crack, a section of wall gave way entirely, opening a gap large enough to walk through.
Mr. Freeze stepped in through it, freeze gun raised, ice crystals still dissipating in the air around him.
"—I have arrived."
Several blocks away, Jude was pedaling his bicycle as hard as his legs would go.
Behind him, the remnants of the aerial engagement lit up the night in fragments — Man-Bat's shrieking, the Batplane's engine note, the distant arc of the flamethrower's light, the high-pressure water jets catching the glow of the street below. He wasn't looking at any of it. He was looking at the road ahead and the geometry of the turn coming up and how fast he could take it.
My gun cannot hit anything at that altitude. Therefore: bicycle. Therefore: now.
The communicator buzzed at his hip.
"Thor" Penguin's voice, clipped. He'd apparently tried the bat first and gotten nothing — unsurprising, given that Langstrom's communicator had been on fire for the last several minutes along with the rest of him. "How's your situation?"
Jude kept his voice flat and controlled. "I am withdrawing."
A pause. "Where's the bat?"
He glanced back. Man-Bat was currently throwing himself at the Batplane's hull with the full force of his serum-enhanced body, which was accomplishing nothing measurable against the aircraft's armored fuselage. Somewhere at the edge of the engagement radius, Firefly was calculating his own exit.
"Defeat is imminent," Jude said.
"And Firefly?"
"Running."
"Then what are you doing?"
"Withdrawing."
"I'm asking why you're withdrawing! And why is Firefly running? He was about to beat Man-Bat!"
"Firefly was not about to beat Man-Bat. Batman was about to beat Man-Bat. And Firefly cannot beat the Batplane."
A longer pause on the Penguin's end. "Ah. Right." In the background, the Joker sat in his chair with his characteristic expression of theatrical misery, mouth turned down in an elaborate frown that communicated I am experiencing tremendous suffering and also this is somehow amusing.
The Penguin turned away from him. "You still can't withdraw, Thor. Go back and support Man-Bat."
Jude pedaled harder.
"My last standing order was to follow Dr. Langstrom's operational direction. Dr. Langstrom is currently not issuing orders, having been set on fire. I am executing a tactical retrograde in the absence of updated instructions."
"That is not a retrograde. That is an escape."
"I prefer tactical retrograde."
"Thor—"
"This," Jude said, taking the corner at full speed, "is not an escape."