Gordon's hand found an empty holster.
Right. The cat burglar. He'd already known that and still reached for it.
The fist came down from directly above. The smell hit first — blood and rot and something chemical — and then the wind off it, and Gordon's legs stopped working.
Bullock's shoulder connected with his ribs a fraction of a second before the blow landed. They went sideways together, the knuckles grazing Gordon's cheekbone as they passed, the coarse hairs on the creature's hand opening a line across his face.
A centimeter's difference.
He lay on the wet grate and processed that.
No time. Back up, rolling clear of a foot that came down where his chest had been, and then running — not toward anything, just away, the way humans run when the calculation has reduced to a single option.
Bullock had his revolver out. In good light, at a stationary target, he was the best shot in the precinct — had been for fifteen years. What he had now was a flashlight beam that kept catching water drops and losing focus, three creatures moving in multiple directions, and a sound environment that made locating anything by ear a complete guess.
He fired toward the nearest breathing.
The shots connected. Not kills — the augmented men were built too densely for a .357 round in the torso to do much — but the impacts staggered two of them, and the muzzle flash threw one second of sharp light across the shaft.
The creatures backed off.
They circled. Their low sounds moved around the perimeter of the grate in a pattern that felt deliberate.
A standoff. Sort of.
Will was very still in a corner of the shaft, and had been since they landed.
He'd seen it the moment they dropped in. The augmented men hadn't reacted to movement — they'd reacted to Gordon's shout and the flashlight beam. Creatures that had spent their entire existence in sealed nutrient tanks, and then a few weeks in a sewer, had almost certainly never experienced a light source they could navigate toward. Their visual systems had adapted accordingly. Right now, he and Gordon and Bullock were providing a lit dining table and a noise guide.
He'd tried to say so. There hadn't been a window.
He couldn't fix the situation from a corner. He needed to move.
Gordon still had Selina's handcuffs. Or rather — he had the handcuffs Selina had taken from Gordon. That distinction mattered because of what he could do with them, if he could get them, and if he could work quickly enough.
"Commissioner Gordon." He kept his voice as low as the ambient noise would allow. "The handcuffs."
"What?"
A little louder. "THE HANDCUFFS."
The scream cut through everything. He saw the arc of the throw in the flashlight beam.
He also heard, from somewhere to his left, the breathing change.
One of the augmented men had been retreating from Bullock's shots, nursing what sounded like an impact wound somewhere on its body. The shout had given it a new data point.
The flashlight swung away. Will heard the handcuffs land — a clean metallic sound, maybe three meters ahead of him, slightly right. He dropped to his hands and knees and started moving.
The grate vibrated.
Something was tracking him.
He stopped.
The vibration continued for another two steps, then stilled.
Whatever it was sat directly above him now. He couldn't see anything. He could feel the displacement of air — the mass of the thing, twelve feet of it, close enough that the heat off its skin reached the back of his neck. His neck was wet from the wastewater, and the heat felt obscene against it.
Then: a breath. Long and slow. Searching.
Will held his own breath and went completely motionless.
His heart was making sounds he was fairly certain were audible.
He counted internally. Reached for calm. Focused on the sound of the shaft water, the distant drip patterns, anything that wasn't the thing hovering two feet above his spine.
It moved. Not away — sideways, a half-step, reconfiguring. Looking for the source.
Will waited.
It moved again. Still circling, still searching.
You can't find me. You can't find me.
He repeated it the way a person says something they want to believe rather than something they know is true.
It worked. The breathing moved away.
Will exhaled through his nose, as slowly as he could, and started moving again.
His fingers found the handcuffs. Cold metal, sitting in a groove between two grate sections.
He touched them gently. They shifted. Settled back.
He adjusted his grip. Tried to close his fingers around the chain link.
Something hit the back of his hand.
He didn't understand it at first. Then it ran — warm, viscous, ropy — down his wrist.
He looked up.
Directly above him, the augmented man's face had turned back toward him. Its nasal cavity was working. One nostril, cartilage the size and color of a rotted strawberry, dilated and flexed and produced a long, slow strand of something that landed in Will's hair and continued its journey south.
He was going to throw up.
Not metaphorically. Not as a figure of speech. His digestive system sent a clear and unambiguous signal that it intended to evacuate, and the timing could not have been worse.
He bit the inside of his mouth until his eyes watered and held it down through sheer humiliation alone — because dying because he vomited on himself in a sewer in front of a monster was not acceptable.
The nausea passed.
The mucus did not. It had found the gap between his fingers and the handcuff chain and was applying itself with the thoroughness of an industrial lubricant.
He could feel the metal moving.
His grip was going.
He tried to compensate. His fingers were slippery, the angle was wrong, and the grate edge was cutting into his wrist. He could feel blood — warm, more distinctive than the wastewater — mixing with everything else.
The augmented man above him turned its head.
It could smell that.
Get the handcuffs back.
He reached. Felt metal. Tightened. It slipped. Reached again. Tightened. Slipped again.
One more time.
The chain caught briefly on a grate edge, gave him half a second of purchase.
He closed his fingers.
They opened.
The handcuffs fell through the grate.
Will knelt there for a moment.
Then:
"AAAAGHH — I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS—"
He couldn't stop it. Three months of Gotham, a casino massacre, Maroni's study, three augmented men, one near-asphyxiation by nasal discharge, and now this — the sound came out of him like something structural giving way.
The augmented man lurched back.
Its hand came down a second later and closed around Will's torso.
Bullock, hearing the scream, was already turning. He lost the position of the third creature for two seconds — which was enough. A long arm caught him across the side of the head with a sound like a plank on wet wood, and Harvey Bullock went down and didn't move.
The augmented man lifted Will toward its face.
Its mouth opened. Will had never thought much about teeth — about what they actually looked like on something this large, this old, this badly maintained. Every molar the size of a thumb. Yellow-brown, pocked, the gum line receded and dark. The breath that came with it was a closed room that had been sealed for months with something organic inside.
Gordon was still on his feet somewhere in the dark. It didn't matter.
The shaft went quiet except for water and breathing.
Then: light.
From the outfall apertures in the shaft wall — the inflow pipes, the ones that had been pouring in wastewater for the last hour — a beam stabbed out. Then another.
Two shots.
The first entered the open mouth of the creature holding Will, downward trajectory, exiting through the jaw. The augmented man dropped him and recoiled, clutching its face, slamming into the shaft wall.
The second shot went through the ear of the creature that had taken Bullock down, deep enough to reach something it couldn't recover from. The thing spasmed once, drove its skull into the shaft wall twice in blind pain, and then folded.
The third augmented man looked at its companions. Then it looked at the aperture the shots had come from.
It didn't advance.
A pause. Then a voice, echoing down through the shaft, light and completely unbothered:
"Gentlemen. Can't seem to manage anything without a woman in the room, can you?"