"Nocturnal creatures can't outsmart cats," Catwoman had told Batman. "And clearing traps from outside a building is always cleaner than from inside."
The height was something else, though. The fall from up here would be decisive in ways she preferred not to think about. She pushed the thought aside and resumed climbing, eyes on the wall, not the ground.
She was used to the low-grade vertigo of working at altitude — a creature who spent her nights moving up and down the face of Gotham's skyline developed a relationship with falling that was less fear and more negotiation. The question was never whether you might fall. It was how badly. Right now the answer was probably very, so she kept her grip tight and her attention on the next hold.
The seventy-third floor came up quickly. She found a seam in the glass curtain wall, held herself steady, and looked in.
The Joker was there, exactly as Batman had predicted.
He sat at a desk in the corner office, in profile, utterly still. No manic energy, no pacing, none of the theatrical chaos she associated with him. Just a man in a suit with a downturned mouth, sitting in the quiet like he was waiting for something he'd already decided wouldn't arrive.
That's unsettling, she thought. The Joker at rest was like a grenade with no visible pin.
"I've got eyes on him," she murmured into her comm. "Seventy-third floor office, you were right about everything. He's just... sitting. Calm. Which is somehow worse."
She was still working out what that calm meant when the Joker turned around.
The revolver came off the desk in one fluid motion — no hesitation, no warning, just a practiced draw that told her he'd known she was there for at least thirty seconds. The muzzle swung toward the glass.
Catwoman moved on instinct, twisting right.
The shots punched through the curtain wall in a bright, catastrophic line. The section she'd been gripping disintegrated. The glass she'd been standing on — that thin, chipped fragment of a shattered pane — couldn't hold her weight for more than a second. She felt it give, heard a short involuntary sound from her own throat, and then she was falling.
Batman's voice crackled through her earpiece, urgent and sharp.
"Don't yell — give me a moment!" she snapped back, more irritated than afraid.
Two hundred meters of Gotham air rushed past her. She was already moving, already calculating — body rotating to face the building, eyes scanning the facade for anything. A windowsill, maybe twelve floors down. A drainage pipe. She hit the sill with both hands and hooked her heels into the pipe simultaneously, the impact wrenching her arms so hard she saw white. The deceleration was brutal but real. She held for exactly one second, then let go and dropped into a controlled roll — she'd already mapped a rooftop below, flat enough to land on, impact survivable if she distributed it right.
Losing face in front of Batman is deeply annoying, she thought, watching the rooftop rush up at her.
"Kite Man — now!"
The wind shifted. She looked up and saw the enormous green kite banking toward her at speed, Chuck Brown leaning hard into the turn with jets of air shrieking off the frame. He threw a line without being asked. She caught it and let the kite brake her descent until she touched down on the rooftop at something approaching a graceful landing. Approaching.
She straightened up and smoothed her suit.
"If you had Kite Man on standby," she said, "why not just send him to scout in the first place?"
"His kite isn't exactly discreet," Batman replied. "And the Joker may have a sniper up there. You know how to stay hidden."
She glanced at the glass debris raining down from seventy-three floors above. "I clearly hid it very well."
At street level, the Riddler watched Catwoman's landing with mild professional interest.
"Bad news — Kite Man and Catwoman are coordinating." He turned back to his assembled force. "Or possibly he simply saw a woman falling and acted on reflex. But I'm inclined to assume the more complicated answer: someone has put together a third team, and even though Batman hasn't shown his face yet, we should treat this building as actively contested." He raised an eyebrow at his people. "So. How do we get in?"
"Here's the good news," he added, and allowed himself a slight smile. "The Joker just demonstrated, with a single bullet, that the exterior glass facade is completely trap-free."
Jude swallowed. "So we have to climb."
"Fly, you idiot. Fly." The Riddler's composure cracked for just a moment, his voice pitching upward with genuine exasperation. "Get out there, find Firefly, and get his spare flight equipment. Quickly. And tell the others to stay on the ground — there's nothing for them up there anyway."
Twenty minutes later, the Joker had run out of patience.
"When are these morons going to move?" He slammed the revolver back onto the desk hard enough to rattle the lamp. "Can we just finish this? Is that allowed?"
The glass curtain wall behind him exploded inward.
Wind and shattered glass tore through the office, sending papers into a cyclone, knocking him sideways a step. He caught himself on the desk's edge and turned.
Five figures stood in the gaping hole where the window had been: the Riddler, Poison Ivy, Zsasz, Firefly, and the figure in the black robe. They were spread in a loose line, and they filled the room with a very specific quality of silence.
Across from them: the Joker. Alone.
He glanced at the revolver on the desk — three steps, maybe less. The Riddler's eyes tracked the same path and arrived there first.
"Not going to happen," Nygma said pleasantly.
The Joker snorted. His mouth stayed in its familiar downward pull. "Aren't you going to say something clever? Aren't these the lines where you gloat?"
"Now that you mention it." The Riddler stepped forward, letting the smile reach his eyes. "Did you hear the one about the clown who lost a war?"
The Joker's fist connected with his jaw.
Fast — genuinely fast, the kind of speed that came from years of brawling in places where hesitation was fatal. But the Riddler had already been moving, and what the Joker's right hook found was a wrist grab rather than a clean hit. Nygma's fingers closed and twisted, and a line of white-hot pain ran from the Joker's elbow to his shoulder.
"I may have told that badly," the Riddler said, tightening his grip. "Delivery isn't really my strength. Perhaps a riddle instead?"
He hit the Joker across the face with his free hand, and the clown went down.
"I want to guess!" Jude said immediately, raising a hand.
"I considered it," the Riddler said, without looking at him. "And I decided against it."
He hit the Joker again. And once more. Each impact was precise and deliberate — not rage, something colder.
"It's over," Nygma said. "You lost."
The Joker spit blood and smiled for the first time all night. It wasn't a happy smile.
"Yeah?" He turned his head toward the window. "Why don't you take a look outside first?"
All five of them turned.
Three figures came through the broken glass in the same instant, riding the updraft from the building's face: a bat, a cat, and a man on an enormous green kite, all of them entering the room at once.
The third side had arrived.
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