The Upper West Side at night was almost quiet, which was the wrong kind of wrong.
Jude crouched on a rooftop, watching the streets below. Hat-wearers moved through the blocks in slow, silent circuits — armed, obedient, and completely useless as a defensive force if you knew how to read the numbers. He was running them now. The wind off the river smelled like rain and old concrete, and the neon from a bodega two blocks down threw just enough light to count silhouettes by.
Too few. Way too few.
Even accounting for the Mad Hatter's ability to turn civilians into tireless, painless, unbribable sentinels, the cordon was porous. Three blocks, maybe a hundred people. It should have been five times that. Batman had said it first — the hat factory's output didn't match the deployment. The missing five hundred weren't gone. They were waiting somewhere, tucked into buildings or staged around the theater's blind spots, and this sparse perimeter was the bait.
I know it's a trap. I still have to walk into it.
He let out a slow breath, watched one more circuit of the nearest patrol, and climbed down the outer wall to street level. He stripped off his black robe, folded it into his pack, and dug out the compound decoction. More than half a bottle left — he measured out roughly half of what remained and drank it without ceremony. Six hours of cover, give or take. It tasted like licorice and regret.
Thirty seconds later, a middle-aged man with a noticeable gut and a hat pulled low over his eyes stepped out onto the sidewalk. Expression blank. Eyes slightly unfocused. Gun in his right hand, hanging loose. He fell into step behind a cluster of hat-wearers moving toward the theater, and nobody on the street gave him a second look.
That was the beauty of the Mad Hatter's system and its central flaw. Under his control, people retained only the most basic pattern recognition — hat on head, gun in hand, moving in the right direction. The Joker himself could have shown up in a nurse's cap and scrubs and gotten a free pass. As long as the visual cues matched, the controlled civilians processed you as one of their own and moved on.
Jude kept his pace matched to the crowd's shuffle, not drawing on his stealth skill. The Riddler thought he was a cyclist who could shoot straight — that was the image he'd carefully maintained over months of undercover work. Stealth was a card you only played when no one was watching you play it. The master-level insight, hard-won through a hundred close calls and two very patient teachers, was that the best stealth was the kind that left no impression at all. Be boring. Be forgettable. Be the fat man in the hat who was clearly just one of the other fat men in hats.
Step. Step. Step.
The street was dense with footsteps and nothing else. No conversation, no coughing, no cigarettes. The controlled citizens didn't chat, didn't pause to check their phones, didn't complain about their feet. They moved because they'd been told to move, and they would keep moving until the Hatter told them to stop or until their bodies gave out — dehydration, muscle failure, whichever came first. Jude had been told this and had filed it under horrifying things about Gotham that I will think about later. Walking among them now, surrounded by a hundred people who were technically still alive and yet completely absent, he found that later had arrived.
"Hey — you there!"
Two men in black suits pushed through the crowd toward him, one with a fully automatic rifle already half-raised. Jude's instinct fired — turn, react, check what they're pointing at — and he killed it immediately, kept his eyes forward, kept his pace, kept his face slack and his steps plodding.
The pot-bellied man in the red hat drifted past them without acknowledgment, carried along with the flow of the crowd, and didn't look back.
Behind him, the two guards were already arguing.
"What did you see?"
"Fat guy in the crowd. Looked unfamiliar."
"There are hundreds of people on this street. New ones blend in every few minutes. You're going to remember all their faces?"
A pause. "Okay, fine, there was a woman in a red dress. Good figure. I wanted a better look."
"You're unbelievable. Those people fire on anything that disrupts their route. You want to test that theory with a full magazine?"
A beat of uncomfortable silence. Then: "Forget it. Not worth it."
Jude breathed out slowly through his nose. The composure had cost him — his pulse was still running fast — but it had worked. The natural response to being called out was to flinch, to look, to hesitate. He'd buried all three.
Direct combat here is the absolute worst option. Every civilian in a hat is an armed combatant.
He followed the procession to the edge of the theater's approach and stopped.
None of the hat-wearers were going through the gate. The Mad Hatter had delineated his zones precisely — the mind-controlled civilians patrolled the perimeter and nothing else. Blending further in with this crowd would only walk him in circles.
Disguise as a gang member? The door guards look sharp. That won't hold up.
He was still working through the problem when the night turned orange.
The explosion rolled in from several blocks away — a deep, heavy detonation, followed by a column of fire climbing the dark sky and a spreading billow of smoke. Solomon's block. Clayface had started.
Right on schedule. Poison Ivy had come through, which didn't surprise Jude — in any universe, her loyalty tracked to rare fertilizer and extinct flower seeds, and she'd given him the Riddler's full plan in exchange for exactly that. She was a reliable ally, as long as nobody touched her plants.
He and Batman had worked out tonight's specifics from there.
The Falcone soldiers on the surrounding blocks reacted the way soldiers always react to a massive unexpected explosion two streets over — they turned, stared, forgot temporarily that they were supposed to be watching anything else. Then the Batplane crossed the sky above the theater at low altitude, two enormous silhouettes visible in the retrieval net trailing from its fuselage, and even the door guards abandoned their post. They jogged out a few steps, craning their necks, trying to process what they were looking at.
A figure slipped out of the crowd from behind them, rounded the gap they'd left in the doorway, and stepped quietly into the theater.