Three men now. No Selina.
Bullock had been without nicotine for several hours and it was showing. He moved hunched and loose-headed, listing from side to side with each step, like a man who'd decided thinking was optional.
"How long before we're out?"
"Best case, dawn." Gordon checked the water level against the tunnel wall. "It's probably around three in the morning. I don't know if Barbara's still up."
He said it quietly, the way you mention something you've been carrying the entire time.
Will didn't say anything. He was the one who'd designed this plan. That made the weight his.
He'd wondered about Gotham once, watching the films from the other side of a screen. The city's sickness was structural — economic stagnation, an impossible wealth gap, parasitic aristocracy feeding off the working poor in plain sight. One masked vigilante couldn't fix that. The math didn't work. You could spend a decade breaking up criminal organizations and the conditions that created them would simply generate new ones. More jobs would do more good than any number of broken bones.
But then he'd learned that Gotham's rot went back a century, and the oligarch families who'd been running it that long weren't vulnerable to money. Bruce Wayne could spend his entire fortune on infrastructure and civic programs and the people who actually controlled the city would treat it as an externality. You couldn't buy your way out of a system that had already bought everything.
Is this what happened? he thought. One stray thought on my part — and now this world has no Batman?
The worse he felt, the more his mind spiraled, and the more it spiraled the worse he felt. A Möbius loop. He was the ant walking it.
Three more levels down.
Gordon remembered the rough layout from old briefings — four tiers total, increasing in volume and flow. They were on the bottom level now. If the outfall shaft was anywhere, it was here.
The water was at their waists and moving faster. Good: the current would do the work. Bad: Bullock's face had taken on the specific pallor of methane exposure.
"Partner." His voice came out thin. "I'm cold. Head's spinning." He showed a tired smile. "I'm not going to die in a sewer, am I?"
Gordon said nothing. He put both hands on Bullock's back and kept him moving.
Will had never missed Bruce Wayne before — not Bruce Wayne specifically, not the man underneath the cape. He'd thought about Batman as a symbol, a function, a narrative device. But right now, watching Gordon hold his poisoned partner upright in the dark at three in the morning, he understood something the comics had always gestured at without quite landing.
Divinity.
Every other hero had a version of it. Superman spreading his arms against the sun, cape catching the light. The Flash burning through his last molecules to reverse time itself. The audience looked at those images and felt something that had a name.
Nobody used that word for Bruce Wayne.
Even in Nolan's version — the Dark Knight absorbing all of Harvey Dent's crimes, sacrificing his reputation to preserve a lie that might save a city — divine was not the word that came to mind.
But standing in a Gotham sewer at three in the morning, Will felt it. The specific weight of a world that needed saving and no powers to save it with. Just a man. Just will.
Understand me. Become me. Surpass me. Go save Gotham. Go save the people.
The words moved through him like a current. Not his words, not his memory — something that belonged to the body he was wearing, half-formed, like a voice heard through water. Whoever had been in that tank. Whoever had sent him here.
He filed it away. The sewer wasn't the place.
"THE OUTFALL — IT'S AHEAD!"
Gordon's voice bounced off the tunnel walls and Will came back to himself. The sound of water had changed — from the steady echo of a closed channel to something open and enormous, the roar of volume falling through space.
The tunnel ended at a ledge.
Beyond it: a shaft the size of a football field, dropping nearly a hundred feet to the bottom, its curved walls punctuated with hundreds of outflow apertures still pouring in wastewater from every direction. Somewhere below, the shaft met the sea.
And at the very bottom, a grate of heavy steel mesh over the shaft's final drain.
The mesh was fine — maybe apple-sized openings at best. To get through it they'd need to move it or break it.
That was the bad news.
The worse news was the three augmented men eating off it.
Eating was approximately accurate. They were crouched on the grate, picking up whatever the flow had deposited and consuming it without apparent discrimination — rotting meat, vegetable matter, a plastic bottle that crunched and disappeared. Their digestive systems, apparently, were built to different specifications than anything biological Will had encountered.
They hadn't noticed the three men on the ledge above. The shaft was loud. It would have stayed that way.
Then Gordon, managing Bullock's weight, called out for his partner to hold on.
The sound carried.
All three augmented men turned their heads upward at the same moment.
They were bigger than anything the crime scene photographs had suggested. Twelve feet from heel to crown. Grey-green muscle stacked in configurations that looked borrowed from a diagram of industrial machinery rather than an organism. Black coarse hair across the shoulders and arms, like boar bristle scaled up.
The space between their legs was — Will caught it in peripheral vision and immediately redirected his eyes.
The comic had given them tattered shorts for the benefit of its readership. Reality had no such consideration.
He was going to need time he didn't have to process that image, and this was not the moment.
The augmented men turned their bodies in one synchronized motion, dropped their knuckles to the grate, and compressed — the posture of a silverback preparing to close distance.
"What are they doing?" Bullock had snapped back to full alertness, eyes sharp, every trace of the methane fog gone.
"I don't know. But we should—"
Will already had Gordon's collar.
"Jump."
He went first.
"What — are you—"
Gordon couldn't finish the question. The augmented men left the grate.
The distance had been fifteen meters. It stopped being fifteen meters very quickly.
In the last available instant, Gordon grabbed Bullock and went over the edge.
The shaft wall was angled at roughly sixty degrees. They hit it and slid rather than fell — ugly, loud, half-controlled — and landed on the grate five or six meters below the ledge with enough force to knock the wind out of everyone but not enough to break anything important.
Will's reasoning had been sound. Running back up the tunnel against the current, against things built to outrun cars — that was worse odds. The shaft was the only play.
Landing on the grate bought them perhaps thirty seconds.
The augmented men had jumped back up the moment they missed. Now they dropped again, all three, and hit the grate together.
The metal screamed. The mesh deformed visibly, pressing downward in a wide bowl shape.
It held.
Will stared at it.
His plan, in its entirety, had been: let three twelve-foot augmented monsters land on the drain screen at terminal velocity, and rely on Gotham's notoriously corrupt infrastructure spending to have produced something structurally inadequate.
The screen had not gotten the message.
"I thought Gotham had a corruption problem," he said, to no one in particular. "How is the sewer rated for this?"
Nobody answered. There was nothing to say.