Seventy-three floors above Gotham, the Riddler looked at his army and found it wasn't one anymore.
Solomon Grundy, Mr. Freeze, Killer Croc, Two-Face, Deadshot, Deathstroke, Man-Bat, Poison Ivy, Thor — every last one of them standing still, occupying the room like furniture. Only Firefly and Zsasz had moved when he'd given the order. Everyone else hadn't even shifted their weight.
"I said kill them," the Riddler repeated, very quietly. "Are any of you hard of hearing?"
"You know me, boss." Jude gave an apologetic shrug. "I'm an insurance policy, not a fighter. Keeping you from getting completely wiped out — that's my function. I don't have much in the way of combat power."
"Nygma." Two-Face produced the coin — black on one side, white on the other — and sent it spinning. Caught it. Looked at it without particular expression. "You've always known how I operate. The coin has spoken. I stay put."
"Riddler." Poison Ivy sighed, the way a person sighs about something they'd already made peace with. "I helped you to stop the scorched-earth strategy. Now that the Joker isn't a threat to anyone, I've run out of reasons to keep spending energy on this."
"Friend." Deathstroke was doing something idle with his blades, rotating one around his fingers. "Our contract ended the moment my mission failed. I'm present as a courtesy — consider it after-sales support."
"Don't look at me." Man-Bat's voice was its usual ruined rasp. "I never wanted to be here. I don't like killing people. I was making up numbers."
Grundy stared at the ceiling for a moment, then scratched the back of his enormous head, apparently still working out what was happening.
With each voice, the Riddler's expression had been traveling somewhere very dark. He looked at the room — his room, his people, his final card — and felt the architecture of the last several months develop a crack that ran from floor to ceiling.
"You betrayed me."
"That's a strong word for it." Deadshot had already moved, pistol swung toward Zsasz, posture easy. "I'm a contractor. I do the work I'm paid for. Unfortunately, someone's deposit cleared later than yours." He paused. "I'll refund your advance. Full amount."
"Very good." The Riddler's laugh had no humor in it. "Extraordinary, all of you."
"Don't take it personally." Mr. Freeze had raised his weapon too, the barrel aimed at Firefly. "His offer was better than yours."
"Better than Gotham City? Better than a billion dollars?"
Killer Croc took two slow steps forward, claws visible. "Some things," he said, "cost more than a billion dollars."
The Riddler stopped looking at the rest of them. He turned to Jude.
"Mr. Thor." His voice had gone very controlled, the way things go quiet before they break. "Tell me who you're working for. No point pretending anymore, is there?"
"Boss, I am deeply loyal—"
"Stop." The word came out flat. "You've been leaking my intelligence from the beginning. I know it. Don't embarrass yourself."
He let a short silence land, then continued, almost conversationally: "I spotted you early. A nobody — incompetent enough to need a supervillain's protection, greedy enough to sell information to whoever was buying. My first instinct was to use you as a disinformation channel. Feed you false intelligence, let you pass it along, muddy Batman's picture." A thin pause. "Then I realized you were more useful than that. Your connection to Batman was genuine, and that connection served me — it helped me rotate the Joker's own people against him. So I sent you to work inside the Joker's camp." He tilted his head. "And for a while, that worked exactly as intended."
"But on the night I deployed Firefly and Poison Ivy, Batman still arrived in time." His eyes moved to Ivy. "I had three operatives left. I hadn't accounted for a traitor among three people. I certainly hadn't accounted for it being her."
Ivy looked back at him and said nothing.
"So." He returned to Jude. "The others may stay quiet out of professional discretion. But a man like you — someone who would sell his own shadow for the right price — would tell me. Bruce Wayne's half-billion is no good to me anymore. Consider it a severance package." He straightened his jacket. "Give me the name."
Chuck, from the side of the room, was shaking his head slowly. He'd spent enough time with Jude to know what kind of person he was — careful, principled in his own oblique way, not the simple mercenary the Riddler had him pegged as. Five hundred million dollars was not going to open that mouth. The Riddler had him completely wrong.
"It was the Bike Stripper!" Jude announced. "Boss, it was the Bike Stripper the whole time. I bribed everyone."
Chuck closed his eyes briefly.
Jude, for his part, was doing rapid mental arithmetic. He'd known this assignment might pay well. He hadn't quite projected this well. The number was still settling.
The Riddler went still.
Then he looked around the room — at Deathstroke, at Croc, at Freeze, at Two-Face — and watched them give him nothing. No denial. No correction. A silence that confirmed exactly what Jude had just said.
The man who had orchestrated the entire war — who had read the Joker, read Batman, read Gordon, read the federal intervention, read every variable on the board — had been outmaneuvered. By him. By The Bike Stripper, the accidental informant, the throwaway piece he'd sent to the Joker's side as an expendable.
The Riddler had used Jude as a tool. Jude had used the Riddler as a paycheck and apparently converted every supervillain in the room on the side.
Something behind the Riddler's eyes went a very specific kind of wrong. He clenched his fists. His jaw worked. He held very still for a moment, keeping the murderous impulse below the surface through what appeared to be considerable effort.
"Impressive," he said, at last. The word tasted like glass. "I know you spoke with Two-Face. Killer Croc. Deathstroke. I can reconstruct most of it." He exhaled through his nose. "But Ivy."
He stopped.
His gaze moved slowly across the room — past the desk, past the far wall — and landed on the window box above the radiator. A tangle of green stems and small white flowers that had been sitting there for weeks. Unremarkable. Part of the building. He had never once looked at it.
The Riddler was not a man who overlooked things. He had catalogued every person in this room, every alliance, every motivation. He had accounted for money and loyalty and pride and fear. He had mapped every channel of communication he could detect.
That was, he now understood, the problem.
He turned to Ivy. She was already watching him — had been watching him since he'd stopped speaking — and when their eyes met, she smiled. Small and private and entirely her own. The smile of someone who had been waiting for a man to look at the right window box for a very long time.
The Riddler looked back at the plants. At the window boxes. At the flowering stems threading through the cracks in the plaster along the east wall. At the vines curling along the exterior cornice, visible through the glass. He had lived in this building for three months. He had never counted the greenery.
His jaw worked.
"The first one turned," he said softly, "was her."
Not a question. The conclusion arrived the way conclusions did for him — whole, instantaneous, terrible. The seed. Chuck's lighter. Weeks before the war had even reached its final shape. And then two people exchanging intelligence through a channel built from stems and roots and window-box soil, in a language that left no record anyone human could read, in front of him, for months, while he watched every other variable on the board.
Ivy said nothing. She didn't need to.
"And Deathstroke. Deadshot." His voice had taken on the quality of a man reviewing a document he can't believe exists. "Even Freeze." He looked at Jude directly. "This isn't about money. It's not about ideology. So who are you, actually?"
Jude considered this question with apparent sincerity.
"Boss," he said, "I think it's better for everyone — honestly, better for you — if you don't know the answer to that one." He paused. "Some information just makes people unhappy."
The Riddler looked at him for a long moment. The room was quiet. Somewhere far below, the city went about its business, indifferent to the fact that the most meticulous criminal mind in Gotham had just been handed a riddle he hadn't written and couldn't solve.
The man who kept every answer was staring at the one question he didn't have.
His hand moved to his jacket.
"No," he said. "I don't accept that."