Chapter 328: I Want to Call the Police
"Janet, do you know what I find remarkable?"
The ground floor of Pym Technologies was quiet now. The atrium ceiling was open to the sky, broken glass covering the floor in a wide scatter pattern that crunched underfoot. Hank Pym sat in the middle of it, back against the spiral staircase, elbows on his knees.
"I was born in 1902. I have been alive for one hundred and four years. I have participated in S.H.I.E.L.D. operations that will never appear in any historical record. I have entered the Quantum Realm with you and fought things that don't have names in any human language."
He looked at the broken glass around him.
"In all of that time, I have never once doubted that sufficient knowledge and preparation could address any problem I encountered."
He paused.
"Tonight I want to call the police."
"Hank." Janet sat down beside him and drew his head gently onto her shoulder. "The NYPD cannot help with this. Whatever that creature was, it's outside their operational capacity."
"Then I'll contact S.H.I.E.L.D.," Pym said, with considerably more feeling than the words themselves contained.
"We will," Janet said. "But first — I think we should try Black Widow again. She may know more than she admitted."
"What could she possibly know about that thing?"
Janet hesitated for just a moment. "It might be a coincidence. But she did mention something earlier. Before all of this started."
"When? I didn't hear anything."
Pym straightened and looked at her.
"Hank Pym. Janet van Dyne."
The voice came from the ant farm, which still sat in the careful custody of its assigned ant on the seventh floor, now visible through the open ceiling structure above them. The voice carried down easily in the building's quiet.
"The two of you should be celebrating your affection for each other right now, not interrupting my sleep a second time."
Pym and Janet both looked up.
Janet focused on the ant farm with the expression of someone choosing her words deliberately.
"Natasha. Less than an hour ago, you told us you'd been with Batman. That he was human. Not some creature covered in — your words — tentacles."
"Did I?" Black Widow tilted whatever she was doing inside the small structure. "Possibly."
"We met him," Pym said flatly.
A pause.
"Met who?"
"The creature with the tentacles," Janet said, with matching flatness. "The one you described. He's Batman, isn't he?"
Black Widow had come to New York some weeks ago. She had worked briefly at Stark Industries — barely long enough to fill out the paperwork before she had been intercepted and placed in Pym's custody under the code designation D-2. She had not met Batman. She had never seen him. Everything she had said earlier about him had been improvised from fragments and assumptions, calibrated to sound credible while providing nothing useful.
But Pym and Janet were both looking at her with the specific expression of people who had experienced something genuinely unsettling and were trying to make sense of it. That was not a look she could dismiss.
She rearranged her expression into something appropriately grave.
"Yes. That's Batman."
"And the other one?" Janet asked.
Black Widow's composure held, but only by discipline. "There was another one?"
"Yes. He had a black cape. Wide. I only caught the edge of it before he was gone." Pym leaned forward slightly. "Who is he?"
Black Widow's internal monologue was not particularly charitable toward the situation she found herself in. But the question still needed an answer, and it needed to be one that sounded like knowledge.
"If Batman and someone else were operating together," she said carefully, "and the second figure was also connected to what you encountered — then the logical conclusion is that it was Garrett. They're both Hydra. Joint operations are standard."
Pym and Janet exchanged a look. Then Pym reached up and sealed the ant farm without another word, and the large ant settled back into position above it.
"She's still lying," Janet said quietly. "But I can't isolate which parts."
"I've been considering building a polygraph unit tonight," Pym said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Full fabrication, start to finish."
"I thought we might actually get something useful from her." Janet shook her head. "I'll reach out to Nick Fury. Have him send support personnel."
Pym nodded and turned toward the stairs.
"Hank."
He looked back.
Janet placed a sealed specimen bag on the table between them. Inside it, moving with slow, autonomous purpose, was a piece of black material roughly the size of a man's hand. It shifted against the plastic, contracted, extended — alive in some meaningful sense of the word, even separated from whatever it had originally belonged to.
"This came off the creature," Janet said. "When I stung its tendril."
Pym looked at it. The expression that replaced his earlier defeat was something different — the specific alertness of a scientist who has just been handed a problem worth solving.
"That fell off Batman?" he said.
"Off his companion. But yes."
Pym picked up the bag carefully, turned it over in both hands, and watched the material inside continue its slow, independent movement.
---
In the City Hall Batcave beneath Manhattan, Batman and Venom Robin stood facing each other across the work table. Both of them were empty-handed.
Any scanner, any sensor, any detection method Pym might have thought to use on them — none of it would register anything. They had left Pym Technologies clean.
"Robin," Batman said.
Venom Robin opened his mouth wide and pushed one arm inside it, past the elbow, reaching into the space his body made available. A moment later he withdrew a glass vial, transparent, containing a liquid that caught the cave's lighting with a faint iridescent quality — like mother-of-pearl suspended in water.
The transfer had happened in the dining room, in the seconds before Pym and Janet arrived. The moment Batman had identified the vials in the refrigerator, he had passed one immediately to Venom Robin, who had swallowed it. After that they had separated and exited independently. The symbiote's mass absorbed and shielded almost everything inside it — visible light, radio frequencies, most forms of electromagnetic detection. A glass vial of liquid inside a symbiote's body was, for practical purposes, invisible to any scanner Pym had available.
They had tested this beforehand. The method worked.
Batman took the vial and placed it in a silver insulated case roughly the size of a hardcover notebook, sealed it, and set it aside.
"During your engagement with the Wasp," he said, "I heard you cry out."
Venom Robin said nothing for a moment.
He knew what happened when Batman discovered that an operative had deviated from the plan. The three-year confinement threat was not rhetorical. Batman meant it, and Venom Robin had seen enough of how Batman operated to understand that meant it would happen.
"Her hand produced some kind of energy beam," he said. "It struck my tendril. The pain was — unexpected. I made a sound."
"That's all?"
"Yes."
"Nothing else occurred outside the plan?"
"No."
Batman held his gaze for a moment, then turned back to the workstation. His fingers moved across the keyboard and brought up a directory he had been building for some time — a file labeled "Symbiote Offspring Preparatory Analysis." He added a new entry dated to tonight's operation and typed several lines of notes.
The register was methodical. Almost everything that produced genuine pain in Venom Robin involved either concentrated acid or fire or sustained high-frequency sound. The Wasp's bioelectric sting fell outside those categories. Whatever the mechanism, it was worth documenting and accounting for before any future situation where the same energy type might appear.
That was the practical reason.
The other reason Batman had noted it, and said nothing further to Venom Robin, was that he had read the lie clearly. Not through microexpressions — those required a human face working in recognizable ways, and Venom Robin's face was not that. But there were tells in the way the symbiote arranged itself, hesitations in the rhythm of speech, small things that Batman had spent enough time observing to recognize.
Something had gone wrong tonight that Venom Robin wasn't prepared to admit.
Batman filed the observation, updated the contingency notes, and kept his own counsel.
***
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