"Commissioner Gordon. And... hm." Will looked at the man beside him. "Who's the other one again?"
The description matched — the stubble growing in without structure, like a badly grazed field, a filthy felt hat, a wide body wrapped in a rumpled caramel-brown coat with a coffee stain still visible at the collar. He was certain this man existed in every version of Gotham he'd ever encountered. He just couldn't place the name.
"Commissioner? COMMISSIONER?" The man pulled himself upright in the wastewater, outrage rising faster than the water level. "Why does James get Commissioner and I'm just 'the other one?'"
He reached for his coat pocket, found his cigars soaked through, and directed his fury at the nearest available target.
"I'm Detective Harvey Bullock, for the record."
"Good to know," Will said.
"It's you." Gordon had recovered faster than his partner. He looked at Will with the focused attention of a man running a mental file, then his gaze moved to Selina.
Black leather. Cat-eared mask. Young woman.
The match was close enough.
"Hands on your head. NOW."
He had the gun out before the sentence was finished, shifting into a half-crouch and advancing with the smooth, practiced movement of someone who'd done this several hundred times. Miranda came out in one unbroken recitation.
"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law—"
Selina let him get within range.
Her wrist turned. One hand caught his shoulder, one foot hooked behind his ankle, and Gordon was on his back in the water before he'd registered the contact. Bullock's revolver came up a second later, by which point the whip was already looped around Gordon's neck.
"Gentlemen." Selina's voice was pleasant. "You're very dedicated. There are actual monsters wandering these tunnels and you're going after a thief. I respect the work ethic."
"Thief?" Bullock kept his aim, jaw working. "You just assaulted a police officer. Blackgate's got a room ready."
"Does it? Funny — the Romans put a lot of officers in the hospital over the years and I've never seen a single one of them touch a Blackgate cell. So what is it — am I just an easier target, or is Falcone too heavy a bone to gnaw? Warehouse rat."
"What did you—"
Will stepped between them with both arms out.
"Everyone stop." He looked left and right. "We're all down here for the same reason. Deal with each other later. Right now we need to focus on getting out."
Bullock's gun stayed up for another three seconds. Then he holstered it and spat into the water.
"Fine. Not my idea."
"The warehouse rat has no objections," Selina said. "So neither do I."
She released Gordon, stepped back, and — with the efficient movements of someone who did this as a matter of professional habit — relieved him of his weapon and handcuffs as she helped him upright.
"I'll hold onto these," she said, before he could object. "You'll get them back when we're out. Assuming we get out."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Bullock's eye twitched. He was keeping count — two warehouse rat comments in under two minutes.
"The thing herding us," Selina said. "It's been pushing us downward the whole time. Level by level. Something's waiting for us lower down. I'd bet on it."
Bullock's hand moved toward his coat pocket before he remembered the cigars were ruined.
"Whatever it is, it's got nothing to do with us. Gordon, pull out the map and let's find a way topside."
Gordon said nothing.
Bullock turned.
Gordon was pressing the power button on his phone. The screen stayed dark. He looked at Bullock.
Bullock checked his own pockets. Then he looked at Selina.
"Did you—"
"I took the gun and the cuffs," she said. "I have no interest in your phone."
"My cigars are soaked. My phone is gone. My hat is wet. And I've been called a warehouse rat twice."
"Harvey." Gordon said it quietly.
Bullock stopped.
Will looked at the four of them — no map, no working devices, no clear direction — and worked backward from what he knew.
The sewer system fed outward. Water moved toward sea level. The main outfall for Gotham's old combined drainage network — the one the city had never bothered to retrofit with filter screens, which was why he and Selina had been able to fall cleanly through to this level — discharged somewhere on the coast.
He knew roughly where.
"The outfall," he said. "We follow the current. Let the water take us to the discharge point."
Gordon's expression lifted briefly, then tightened.
He knew where the main outfall was. Everyone who'd studied Gotham's infrastructure knew. The old discharge tunnels fed into the sea on the Coventry side of the island — the stretch of waterfront that ran below Arkham's cliff face. At high tide the rocks were underwater. At low tide they weren't.
He didn't know what the tide was doing tonight.
And the cliff itself was another problem. Thirty, forty meters of sheer rock face above the waterline. Even if they survived the drop, the swim back to shore in that current, in the dark, was its own problem.
But the alternative was waiting in the dark for something that was actively trying to drive them somewhere.
Gordon knew his department. He knew exactly who was working tonight, what shape they were in, and what the realistic chances were of a rescue operation organized without him present. He'd been a cop in Gotham for twenty-three years. He had a precise, unsentimental understanding of the word reliable as it applied to his colleagues, and the picture it produced was not encouraging.
He thought about Barbara.
"I'm in," he said.
Bullock watched his partner for a moment, then raised his hand.
He'd followed Gordon into worse situations than a sewer with bad odds at the end of it. That wasn't going to change tonight.
Will looked at Selina.
She puffed her cheeks out and exhaled slowly.
"Honestly? Tonight has been a disaster. No money, no exit, and now you're telling me the way out involves going off a cliff into the sea." She looked up at the ceiling, then back at him. "My instincts are telling me not to get in that water."
Will didn't argue. She wasn't wrong to trust her instincts.
"I'll stay and look for another way out." She straightened up, already scanning the walls for options. "I hope all three of you make it back to the surface."
"Same to you."
He unclipped his flashlight and held it out.
She took it. Their eyes met briefly.
"See you topside," Will said.
He turned toward the current and walked.