The Joker leaned back in his chair and delivered the punchline.
"A man walks into a toy store. Says he wants to buy a new boomerang." He paused. "Then he asks the clerk — how do I get rid of my old one?"
The Penguin let the silence run for exactly one beat. "Honestly? It's not a great joke on its own." He adjusted his monocle. "But given everything that happened last night, I find it very difficult to say it isn't funny."
"That's the thing about bad jokes." The Joker stared at the ceiling. "Drop them in the right situation, and they stop being bad. Context does the work." He paused. "Still not laughing, though."
The Penguin understood completely. The night had been a disaster by any reasonable accounting — Mad Hatter, Mr. Freeze, and Man-Bat, all three of their heavy hitters, taken by Batman in a single operation. The Joker's fighting force had gone from thin to skeletal. And without the Hatter, his army of remotely controlled civilians evaporated with him. For the first time in this war, the Joker was genuinely, functionally alone.
"It's alright," the Penguin offered. "The Riddler probably can't laugh right now either."
As it happened, the Riddler absolutely could not laugh right now.
Three blocks away, in the restored theater that served as his base of operations, Jude finished the punchline.
"— and then he asks the clerk: how do I get rid of my old boomerang?"
Victor Zsasz stared at him. Zsasz's face did not possess a full range of expressions at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. He looked at Jude the way a man looks at a stain he can't identify.
Poison Ivy, however, was grinning so wide it reached her ears. She covered her mouth with one hand and glanced sideways at the Riddler, who was sitting in his chair at the center of the hall, having heard every word.
His face was worse than Zsasz's.
His lips had pulled down into a deep, involuntary frown — the exact shape of a clown's painted-on sorrow, which made the whole thing considerably funnier to everyone except him. In some ineffable way, the two men had arrived at a perfect mutual understanding.
"Enough." The Riddler's voice cut across the room. "Stop."
Jude stopped.
The problem — and the Riddler was aware of the problem even as it was happening — was the way the joke landed. It wasn't just a bad joke. It was a joke about someone who couldn't let go of something that had already served its purpose, delivered by the one person in Gotham who had made the Riddler feel like the man in the toy store. The Bike Stripper. His boomerang. The humiliation arrived gift-wrapped in cheerful ignorance, which made it worse.
He straightened in his chair and cleared his throat.
"Last night's defeat will be the weight that breaks the Joker's back." His gaze moved across the room — Firefly, Zsasz, Poison Ivy, all that remained of his operational force. "And that means it's time to stop thinking about the war and start thinking about the peace. It's time to collect what we've won."
He adjusted his top hat and allowed himself a thin, deliberate smile.
"Once we deal with the Joker, we open Arkham. We bring everyone home. And then — Gotham is ours."
The final battle arrived faster than Batman had expected. That wasn't a comfortable thing to admit.
He crouched at the edge of a rooftop, the wind pulling at his cape, and looked down at the street below. Catwoman perched beside him with the casual ease of someone sitting on a park bench.
"The Penguin is gone," Batman said. "He didn't betray the Joker — his men were captured first. The Riddler had them tortured until they gave up the Joker's last holdout."
Catwoman glanced at him sideways. "And you know about this because...?"
"The assault column isn't subtle."
She looked down.
He wasn't wrong. Moving up the block below them was a procession that would have stopped traffic on any street in any city on Earth: Firefly cutting a contrail of black smoke through the air above, steel armor gleaming in the gray morning light; the Riddler in full green, golden cane in hand, unhurried; Zsasz walking bare-chested among the armed thugs, his scarred skin a catalog of violence; and beside them, Poison Ivy in her vines and the figure in the black robe, hood up, moving with a slight but recognizable limp.
"Alright," Catwoman said. "They're not subtle. So what's the problem? Just let Batman be Batman."
"The building." He kept his eyes on the facade. "The Joker has had this one prepared for a while. Floor seventy-three is clean. Everything else — the roof, the elevators, the stairwells — is trapped. Going up from the ground floor or down from the roof means working through layers of rigged passageways. It would take time we don't have, and it would hurt."
Catwoman raised an eyebrow. "And you need me because...?"
"You're the most agile. You can read a room before you move through it. I need someone who can reach seventy-three quickly and without triggering everything on the way."
She reached over and scratched lightly under his chin, the way she did when she was deciding whether to be amused or irritated.
"You're assigning the dangerous mission to me." She pulled her hand back. "You don't have anyone else who can go in from the inside?"
"He's not inside. And he's not one of my people."
"That would be useful right now."
"No one does this the way you do."
"Oh." She leaned back. "You've been practicing compliments. I'm genuinely touched. Do you think that's enough?"
Batman said nothing.
Outside the building's glass curtain wall, the Riddler stopped and looked up.
"There is a bomb on the ground floor," he said, in the tone of a man sharing an interesting observation. "Two inches from the bomb is a computer. Three inches away, a can of gasoline. Four inches, a barrel of nitroglycerin." He tilted his head. "If the bomb goes off — what's the first thing to be destroyed?"
"The bomb itself," said the voice behind him.
A beat.
"Boss, you are so smart." Jude's delivery was entirely earnest. "Honestly, one day I'm going to publish a collection. The Riddler's Greatest Brain Teasers. I'll put every riddle you've told me in there."
The words landed like a bucket of cold water poured directly into the ear.
The Riddler went very still.
That was the thing about it — and he knew, even as the humiliation crawled up the back of his neck, that he understood exactly why this was worse than being mocked. If someone intelligent had offered that compliment, it would be sarcasm. Simple, readable, deflectable. But the Bicyclist was not intelligent. The Bike Stripper would not offer sarcasm. The Bike Stripper had genuinely, sincerely meant it — and that meant he had just been placed, in the mind of a fool, on the same shelf as a toy store boomerang riddle.
He would rather have Batman break his ribs. He would rather be shot in the stomach by the Joker again. He made a private, immediate resolution: no more riddles that a fool could solve. Ever.
"Wait." Firefly's voice crackled from above. "Is something climbing the outside of the building?"
The Riddler looked up. Against the glass curtain wall, perhaps fifteen stories up, a dark shape moved with impossible ease — fingers and toes finding purchase on nothing, moving upward at a pace that made it look effortless.
"Catwoman." He studied her for a moment, then turned back to the entrance. "A new ally of Batman's, or an opportunist who sees which way the wind is blowing. Either way, she's not going to change what happens today." He straightened his tie. "Leave her. We go up."
Two hundred and ten meters above the street, Catwoman paused on the glass and let herself look down.
The people below were ant-sized. The city stretched out in every direction — streets and rooftops and the cold Gotham sky, no wind today, which was the one small mercy.
She found the edge of the seventy-third floor with her fingertips and kept climbing.