Jude did not resist.
To be precise, he no longer had the will to.
The moment the guard mentioned the black robe and mask in the restroom, something came down over his head from behind — soft, wool, fitted. A hat. The chip in the seam activated before he could process what was happening. His muscles unlocked all at once, the tension draining out of them like air from a punctured tire. His eyes went flat. He stood exactly where he was and waited for instructions.
"Mr. Saul, you were a little careless tonight."
The two Falcone gunmen holstered their weapons with the practiced calm of men who'd been expecting this outcome. The walkie-talkie on the nearer one's chest crackled.
"Was Mr. Rabbit caught? The one who jumped into the hole?"
The Mad Hatter's voice — that same high, uneven pitch from the loudspeaker, childlike and completely unhinged.
"Bring him onto the stage."
Jude's body moved. His legs carried him forward through the doors into the theater's main stage area, following the two gunmen without hesitation, without choice, without anything that could reasonably be called a self. He was a marionette and someone else held the strings.
One flicker of something passed through the fog — the guards were holding his black robe and mask. The sight of them stirred something under the surface. Those feel familiar. Are those mine? Who—
The chip pulsed. The thought dissolved.
The stage was fully dressed. Actors in heavy makeup and elaborate costumes stood in their marks, most of them wearing hats, performing scenes from Alice in Wonderland on an endless loop — the same lines, the same blocking, the same movements, over and over with the tireless precision of machines. The Dodo. The Cheshire Cat. The White Rabbit. The Queen of Hearts, the Jack of Hearts, and a row of Alices who, alone on the stage, wore no hats at all.
At the center stood the Mad Hatter.
Or rather — a puppet. A figure on strings, costumed and positioned at center stage, head tilted at the angle a real person's head would tilt if they were watching the performance with satisfaction.
The Mad Hatter was not in the theater.
"Boss, we're at the stage."
"Wonderful. I'll be right there. Wait for me."
The walkie-talkie clicked off. The group waited. On stage, the controlled performers continued their scene without pause, indifferent to the new arrival standing at the edge of the lights.
High above the city, the Gotham night sky was clear enough to see the river, and in it flew two shapes — one black, one green — dragging something enormous between them on a net.
The clover's wind assist had been the difference. Without it, Clayface and Grundy would have come down somewhere over a residential block. With it, they'd made the industrial district with the kite backpack's frame still intact, barely.
"Liquid nitrogen plant's right below us," Kite Man reported, looking down. In the net, Clayface's clay tentacles were still coiled around Grundy's cervical spine. Grundy's hands were still tearing methodically at Clayface's torso. Neither of them had stopped.
"They're really going at it. Committed, I'll give them that."
"It won't last." Clayface's primary directive was Batman, not Grundy — given enough time to think clearly, he'd reassess and redirect. The fighting was rage talking. Rage had a shelf life.
"So what's the plan? We drop them into the factory and then go in with liquid nitrogen?"
"That won't be necessary." Batman was already reading the Batcomputer overlay projected across his lenses — the factory's internal layout, pipe routing, liquid nitrogen storage locations rendered in clean blue wireframe. He took in the diagram for two seconds and had already finished thinking.
"Kite Man. Let go."
"Finally — where do you want them?"
"Just let go. I'll adjust."
Kite Man released the net without argument. His arm had been on the edge of giving out for the last three minutes and the relief was immediate and total. The weight transferred to Batman, who spread his cape as wide as it would go and caught the air, redirecting the net's trajectory by a few critical degrees — not much, but the Batcomputer wasn't asking for much.
Two seconds of freefall. The liquid nitrogen storage tanks came into view below — several large cylinders standing in a row, their surfaces glittering with condensation in the moonlight.
Batman held on for three more seconds past his original release point. When the net's projected path intersected with the target corridor on his display, he let go.
The net went in.
His original plan had been to put them directly into a storage tank — the resulting explosion would have been significant, but the factory was empty, and neither Clayface nor Grundy had the kind of vitality that liquid nitrogen and a pressure rupture could permanently end. They'd be neutralized, not destroyed. Acceptable. Now, with a cleaner angle, there was a better option. As he released the net, his other hand was already pulling the second ice-blue mushroom from his belt.
In the net, hurtling downward at full speed, Clayface felt the freefall cut through the combat rage like cold water. His higher functions came back online in a rush — fall, Batman, trap — and he made the call instantly. He converted to his softest form and poured himself through the gaps in the net, out of Solomon's grip, sliding free of the plummet —
The mushroom hit.
That sound. That feeling.
Batman's second iceshroom caught him mid-escape, locking him solid for the statutory four seconds. Long enough. He and Grundy dropped together through the factory roof, through two interior walls, through a secondary partition — and then through the liquid nitrogen delivery pipeline, severing it cleanly.
The pipe ruptured. Nitrogen at -190°C flooded the chamber, billowing over Grundy's unconscious form and over Clayface's sluggish, semi-frozen mass as he fought to regain his shape. Cold at that temperature doesn't burn. It simply stops everything — movement, thought, the slow chemical processes that constitute being alive or, in Clayface's case, being Clayface.
He struggled. The mud had gone hard and dense, his usual fluid motion locked down, every attempt to deform or flow resisted by the cold working through him.
Grundy, for his part, had already stopped moving entirely. He lay where he'd landed, large and grey and perfectly still, with an expression on his reconstructed face that suggested, on some dim level, that being born on a Monday had been the beginning of a long run of bad luck.
Batman came in through a broken skylight sixty seconds later, carrying a bucket of water. He poured it on Clayface. It froze on contact.
That concluded the evening's engagement.
If Jude had been there to see it, he probably would have watched Clayface and Grundy lying motionless under a coating of ice and nitrogen frost, thought about it for a moment, and said:
It's good to be young. You fall asleep the second your head hits the pillow.