VRRROOOM—
The engine turned over mid-sentence.
Bane had been building toward something — the kind of declaration that had been composing itself since the pit, the words that closed a years-long argument — and then the thing across from him simply left. No final exchange, no acknowledgment of the gravity of the moment, no last look back. The Bat-Wraith's chassis dropped low, the wheels bit asphalt, and it was thirty meters away before Bane had processed the fact of its departure.
He stood in the empty lot.
A foot, he thought. A human foot. That became a wheel.
He replayed the visual. Replayed it again. The information did not improve upon reconsideration.
Something about the Batman had been wrong all evening. Not wrong in the way of a tired man, or an injured one, or a man operating with reduced resources — wrong in the way of a category error, a fundamental mismatch between what Bane knew and what he was looking at.
He was going to need more data.
"Solomon Grundy. Killer Moth. Bird." He had the earpiece out and in before the vehicle had reached the next intersection.
"Here, Bane." Three voices, staggered.
"Change of plan. All of you, on me. We're pursuing."
A pause on the channel.
"Pursuing who," said Grundy, carefully.
"I'll explain when you catch up." He was already running — long strides, the Venom turning each push-off into something that covered ground the way nothing his size was supposed to cover ground. "Move."
The problem, Ethan had discovered, was that carrying four people while operating as a vehicle was not as clean a solution as it had seemed at the moment of execution.
Deadshot was on his left shoulder. Cheshire — still unconscious, head lolling — was on his right. Croc was tucked under one arm in the approximate configuration of a very large, very unhappy bag. Wesker was under the other, holding the Batman plush to his chest with the white-knuckled grip of a man taking comfort from whatever comfort was available.
He had also discovered that liquid nitrogen propulsion, while significantly faster than legs, had a handling quality that could charitably be described as committed. Once you started a corner, you were in the corner.
"Batman," Deadshot said, from the left shoulder, with the focused calm of a man who had decided that if he was going to die tonight, he was going to die having asked the relevant questions. "I need to say something."
"Say it while I'm running."
"Your feet."
"What about them."
"They just—" A rock the size of a microwave oven passed over his head with a sound like tearing air, thrown from forty meters back with the casual accuracy of someone who had spent years making heavy objects go where he wanted them. Deadshot's grip tightened. "They became wheels."
"Tuck your head in."
"Your feet became wheels."
"I'm aware of what my feet did."
"And you're a T-Rex right now—"
"Temporarily."
"WHY—"
"Heads down, I need to concentrate," Ethan said, and fired the nitrogen jets through the soles of his feet — both of them, maximum output — and the resulting lurch of acceleration pressed everyone aboard flat against their respective surfaces as Gotham's predawn streets blurred past on either side.
Alright, Floyd Lawton thought, face pressed against something that was functionally Batman's shoulder blade. This is my life now. I'm a passenger on Batman. Who is a dinosaur. Being chased by Bane.
This is fine.
Everything is fine.
"You could just go back and fight him," he said, when his face had returned to a position from which speech was possible.
"I can't engage Bane directly while I'm protecting all of you," Ethan said. "You're my priority."
From the right shoulder, Cheshire made a sound — still mostly unconscious, but something in the statement had apparently penetrated. Her hand found the edge of the shoulder it was resting on and held it.
Deadshot looked at her. Looked at the back of Ethan's (currently green, currently scaled) neck. Made a private assessment.
He's lying, Deadshot thought. He's protecting us because he can't take Bane alone. But the lie is the right lie — it's the lie that keeps Cheshire from feeling like collateral, and keeps Croc from doing something reckless, and keeps the unit functional. He filed this away, because understanding how your employer thinks is the most important survival skill in any engagement. He's not what he says he is, but he's better at it than anything else I've ever worked for.
"What," Croc announced, from under Ethan's left arm, in a tone of genuine scientific wonder, "is happening to your feet."
"Not now."
"You're changing color."
"I said not now."
"You've gotten bigger."
"CROC—"
"You have a tail."
The tail in question — which had arrived as part of the synchronization package and which Ethan was currently using as a counterbalance in corners — flicked, involuntarily, in the direction of Croc's commentary.
"I want everyone to stop looking at the tail," Ethan said.
"There's a road block," Deadshot said.
There was a road block.
Three buses, arranged in a staggered pattern across the intersection ahead, with the kind of professional placement that indicated someone who understood vehicle approach vectors. Three figures on top — Grundy, Moth, Bird, all three of them armed with the expression of people who had received a radio call that said intercept, don't ask questions and had decided this was sufficient instruction.
Ethan looked at the roadblock. Looked at the pursuing footsteps that were, somehow, still audible behind him. Looked at the sky — which was doing the first pale things that dawn does before dawn properly arrives.
He thought for approximately one second.
Bat-Rex, he thought. I am a six-meter Tyrannosaurus in a Batman cowl in Gotham at five in the morning. The only direction I have is forward. The only currency I have is spectacle.
Fine.
He opened his mouth — which was now considerably wider than it had been at the start of the evening — and roared.
Super Babes was a restaurant.
It had been open for three weeks, and its business model was straightforward: Gotham had a surplus of people with complicated feelings about superheroes, and a restaurant where the waitstaff dressed as local figures of interest had proved to be, against most reasonable predictions, moderately successful.
The waitress currently in the Harley Quinn costume had been on shift for four hours and was developing strong opinions about people who ordered off-menu.
At the window table, two Gotham City Police Department officers — Sean and Boris, twelve and nine years on the job respectively — were eating breakfast with the dedicated professionalism of men who had learned to extract full value from every meal because you never knew when the radio was going to ruin your plans.
The radio crackled. Someone's bank was being robbed by the Joker.
Boris looked at Sean. Sean looked at Boris.
Boris turned the radio off.
"Batman'll get him," Boris said.
"Batman always gets him," Sean agreed. "And then we do the paperwork. The outcome is the same either way. The only variable is whether we finish breakfast."
They finished ordering.
"I've been in this city seventeen years," Boris said, cutting into something that had been described on the menu as a "Gotham Special Eggs Benedict" and appeared to be exactly that. "There is nothing left that can surprise me."
"Poison Ivy robbed the Chem Lab on Fifth last Tuesday," Sean said. "Gordon acted like it was a national emergency. By Wednesday morning it was just a Wednesday."
"That's Gotham. That's what Gotham is." Boris gestured with his fork. "I once saw a man eat a traffic cone on a dare for twenty dollars in the middle of a hostage situation. I wrote it up as 'civilian exercising judgment in stressful environment' and moved on."
The waitress — Harley Quinn costume, name tag reading CHELSEA — reappeared. "More coffee?"
"Please."
"You said nothing surprises you," Sean said. "I'll test that." He leaned forward. "If a T-Rex walked past that window right now—"
"Wearing a Batman costume?"
"Wearing a Batman costume—"
"I'd finish my eggs and then write it up," Boris said immediately. "That's Gotham. The sun comes up, Batman handles it, life continues. That's the whole contract."
Sean opened his mouth to respond.
Boris's eyes went to the window.
Outside, on Mercy Street, a six-meter Tyrannosaurus in a Batman cowl moved past the window at a pace that could conservatively be called purposeful. Its left arm held what appeared to be a large unconscious reptile-man. Its right arm held a small older gentleman in a brown jacket. On its shoulders were two more people, one of whom was actively firing a submachine gun over the dinosaur's tail.
Boris watched it pass.
He watched the tail disappear around the corner.
He put his fork down.
"Hm," he said.
The restaurant had gone completely silent. Every head was turned toward the window with the collective stillness of a group of people whose brains had finished processing something and were waiting for further instructions.
Then, from outside: the unmistakable flat percussion of a rocket detonating.
The T-Rex came back.
It had acquired two wheels — appearing to have grown them from the base of its feet — and was now running on those in addition to its legs, which produced a locomotion that was genuinely difficult to describe and would have kept a physicist busy for some time. Behind it: three individuals with rocket launchers, and one individual without a rocket launcher who was instead throwing parked cars from the side of the road with his bare hands.
"ROAR," said the T-Rex, which at this point seemed like the least notable thing that had happened in the last thirty seconds.
Chelsea the Harley Quinn waitress looked at her order pad.
"Do you want to add anything?" she asked the table.
Boris looked at Sean.
"I'll have another coffee," Sean said.
The T-Rex hit the roadblock — the three buses — at full speed and jumped them. Not over; through, technically, the buses going in different directions as the impact distributed itself across all three simultaneously. It landed badly, stumbled, used the tail to recover, and was gone down the next street before the sound of the crash had finished echoing.
The three men with rocket launchers ran past the window in pursuit.
Grundy paused outside the glass, looked in, looked at the humans inside looking at him, gave a brief nod of acknowledgment, and ran on.
The parked car currently airborne — a 2019 Honda Civic, light grey, owner's name on the parking permit was DEREK HANNAN — sailed through the intersection and came down on a fire hydrant.
The hydrant did not survive.
Boris and Sean, standing in the doorway of Super Babes, were drenched.
They stood in the water in their soaked uniforms and watched the dinosaur go over a rooftop — literally, all the way over, a jump that covered the full width of the building, four stories up, its shadow briefly eclipsing the dawn sky before it came down on the next roof in a crunch of tiles — with four people in pursuit close behind.
The street was quiet.
Water ran down the gutter.
Somewhere, a car alarm.
Boris wrung water from his sleeve.
"Right," he said.
"Right," said Sean.
A long pause.
"Was that Batman," Boris asked.
"That was Batman," Sean said.
"As a dinosaur."
"As a dinosaur."
Another pause.
"I maintain," Boris said, carefully, "that nothing surprises me. But I am open to the position that the category of 'nothing' has been revised this morning."
Sean nodded slowly. He looked at the debris. The overturned vehicles. The fire hydrant situation. The burning section of what had been, until very recently, a structurally sound city block.
"You know what I keep thinking," Sean said. "We're going to spend four hours on incident reports for whatever just happened. And by the time we finish, something else will have happened that needs four more hours of incident reports."
"So we could start now," Boris said, "and file reports until we retire. Or—"
"Or we could finish breakfast," Sean said.
They looked at each other.
They went back inside.
Chelsea handed them fresh coffees without being asked, because she had been in Gotham long enough to develop good situational awareness, and good situational awareness in Gotham meant reading when people needed something warm without having to be told.
Boris wrapped both hands around the mug.
"You know," he said, looking at the wreckage visible through the window, "sometimes I think if this city were a book, we'd be the characters without names. The ones who show up for two pages and then disappear."
"We have names," Sean pointed out.
"Only because we told each other."
Sean considered this.
"Boris," he said.
"Sean," Boris replied.
They drank their coffee.
Outside, somewhere several blocks north, something exploded.
"Back to work?" Sean said.
"Back to work," Boris agreed.
Neither of them moved.