Maxwell stood at the edge of the docks and stared at the water.
The sea was black at this hour, broken only by the lights of a freighter moving slow on the horizon. Cold enough that his breath showed. He hadn't come for the view. He'd come because the hotel room had started feeling like a box and he needed open space to think, and this was as open as Gotham got.
He thought about the year.
The Entertainment God. Luthor dropping him in a harbor. Ra's al Ghul fishing him out. Seven months of training on a mountain. The Task Force. Red Hood. The Court of Owls still unresolved somewhere in the background like a tab he'd forgotten to close.
Things were moving. He could feel it the way you could feel weather before it arrived — not dramatic, just present. A building pressure.
He needed a plan. A real one. Not the day-to-day operational grind of Task Force contracts but an actual sequence with an actual end. Because the end mattered. The whole reason he was still here, still doing this, still fighting through everything Gotham and the DC universe kept throwing at him, was one objective: get home. Out of this world, out of reach of the god, away from all of it.
The only being with that kind of authority was the One Above All.
And the only people who could point him toward something like that were Dr. Fate and John Constantine.
He'd already ruled out Fate. Finding the man was nearly impossible, and even if Maxwell tracked him down there was no guarantee he'd help. Fate operated on his own logic and his own timeline and Maxwell didn't have the leverage to move either.
Constantine was different. Difficult, yes. Unreliable, definitely. The kind of man who helped people only when the conditions were exactly right and sometimes not even then. But Constantine was findable, given enough patience and the right door. And the most reliable door was the Justice League. Constantine moved in those circles eventually. Maxwell just needed to be in those circles when it happened.
Which aligned neatly with what Ra's al Ghul had asked.
He almost laughed at that. Almost.
The freighter on the horizon crept south. Maxwell watched it until it passed the breakwater, then turned and walked back toward the city.
He had work to do.
— ✦ —
The following weeks moved fast.
Task Force jobs came through Vincent's channel on a rhythm Maxwell had started to recognize — every three or four days, briefing in the morning, execution by night, confirmation sent and payment deposited before the next morning's coffee. He worked through them with the focused automation of someone whose hands knew what to do while his mind was somewhere else. The jobs themselves blurred together. Names, locations, outcomes. He was good at it now in a way that had stopped requiring conscious effort, which meant he could be good at it and plan at the same time.
He was still thinking about Constantine when the sword hit the wall.
— ✦ —
He'd just finished a job in the warehouse district, three blocks from the docks, and was walking out through the loading bay when he heard the sound.
Not loud. A whisper of displaced air, then a hard thunk of steel meeting concrete. He turned.
A sword was embedded in the wall beside his head. Not a knife. A sword — short, curved, the kind carried by people who trained with blades the way other people trained with firearms. It had missed him by four inches.
Six figures stepped out of the dark.
White masks. Owl faces, blank and featureless. Dark suits tailored for movement. They stood in a loose semicircle and said nothing, which was more unsettling than any threat they could have spoken. Then, in unison, they moved.
Maxwell drew both H&Ks.
The nearest one was already inside his firing angle when he got the first shot off — the round caught them in the shoulder and spun them but didn't stop the forward momentum, and he took a forearm to the wrist that knocked his right hand wide. He kept the left up, fired twice more at center mass, stepped back and to the right to break the circle before it closed around him.
Two down. Four still moving.
They were fast. Not Deathstroke fast, but trained fast — the precise, economical speed of people who had been doing this since before they could vote. One came in with a short blade low, aiming at his thigh. He caught the wrist, redirected it, drove his elbow down onto the back of the arm at the joint. Something gave. The attacker dropped. He used the drop to put himself behind the falling body as cover while he re-acquired the remaining three.
One was already on him.
The blade raked across his left forearm — shallow but long, immediately hot. He absorbed the pain into the background where it belonged and drove the heel of his palm into the masked face with enough force to snap the head back. The mask cracked. The figure staggered. He put two rounds into the next one while the stagger was still happening, then turned to find the sixth.
The sixth had circled behind him.
He felt the impact before he heard it — a strike to the back of his right knee that dropped him to one leg. He went down controlled, turned the fall into a roll, came up with the left H&K and fired from the ground into the figure's center before it could follow up.
Six down.
He stayed crouched. Breathing. The loading bay was quiet except for the sound of him and the distant city outside. His forearm was bleeding steadily and his knee was unhappy but functional.
He counted to five.
Five more stepped out of the shadows.
— ✦ —
He was back on his feet before they reached him.
No time to reload. He holstered the left H&K and pulled the folding knife — the blade locking open with a sound that felt small against the scale of the situation — and met the first one before they could establish formation.
Closer quarters now. The League training understood close quarters in a way that the previous fights hadn't fully tested, and Maxwell let it run. He didn't think through the sequence. He moved through it the way he'd moved through it three hundred times on a stone courtyard floor, his body making decisions faster than consciousness could review them.
The first figure's blade came across in a horizontal sweep. He ducked under it, drove upward with his shoulder into the figure's ribs, felt the impact and used it to push through into the space behind them. Turned. The second figure was mid-lunge. He sidestepped, let the momentum carry them past, opened a cut across their knife arm with the folding blade. Not deep enough to stop them. Deep enough to change how they moved.
They changed how they moved. He used the change.
A strike caught him across the jaw — the third attacker had come in from his blind side and gotten there before the area awareness flagged it. His head snapped sideways, white for a moment. He planted, absorbed it, didn't go down. Grabbed the arm that had swung and broke the elbow over his own forearm in a motion that produced a sound he'd stopped wincing at.
Three figures left standing. He was bleeding from two places now and his jaw felt like it had opinions.
He pressed forward anyway. Forward was the only option that didn't end badly.
The next one came with a combination — high, mid, low, cycling fast, the pattern of someone who had drilled it until it was automatic. He read the cycle after the first two strikes and timed his entry for the mid beat, getting inside the low before it arrived and making sure the low never did. Short, controlled elbow to the temple. The mask crunched. The figure dropped.
The fourth caught him with a blade strike across his upper left arm. His jacket tore. Muscle beneath it tore too, not deep but real, and his left arm told him about it in language that was hard to ignore. He ignored it. Turned the motion from the impact into a pivot that put him behind the attacker, locked the knife arm, applied pressure until the blade hit the floor.
The fifth backed up a step. Reassessing.
Maxwell looked at them across the loading bay. Both breathing hard. His left arm was soaking through the jacket sleeve. The cut on his forearm from the first wave hadn't stopped. He felt it all in the diffuse, itemized way the body presented damage during a fight — present, logged, not yet processed.
The fifth attacker made their decision and came forward.
He met them.
It was uglier than the others. His arm was compromised and they knew it, targeting it repeatedly, trying to compound the damage. He let them come for it twice and blocked with the other arm to sell the pattern, and on the third attempt he let it through, took the impact on the damaged arm with a sound that he felt more than heard, and in the moment they were committed to the follow-up he drove his forehead into the bridge of the owl mask with everything he had left.
The mask shattered. The figure collapsed.
Five down.
Maxwell stood in the loading bay surrounded by bodies and breathed. He was starting to feel the accumulation. The left arm was bad. His jaw ached from the hit he'd taken in the second wave. His knee from earlier had upgraded its complaint from unhappy to significant.
He counted to three this time.
Five more.
— ✦ —
He almost laughed.
Almost.
The third wave was different. They spread wider, taking angles he hadn't had to manage in the previous two engagements, and they were more patient — not rushing in but probing, testing, looking for the arm, looking for the knee, looking for what the first ten had cost him. They knew how to read a fight that had already happened.
He was in trouble and he knew it.
The area awareness was working but it was competing with pain now, and pain had a way of narrowing the world down to the immediate. He kept moving. Moving was the only thing that kept the angles from becoming fatal — a still target in the middle of a spread formation was a dead target, so he moved, using the loading bay's geography the way he'd used the warehouse floor against Red Hood, making them chase him rather than surround him.
The first one caught him crossing an open section — a throw that he couldn't fully counter with the arm, landing hard on his right side on concrete. He rolled, got up, felt something in his ribs register a new complaint. Kept moving.
The second came in while he was still recovering from the landing. He caught the blade on his forearm guard — the suit's construction doing its job, the reinforced sleeve taking the edge rather than his skin — and headbutted the attacker for the second time tonight, which was two more headbutts than he'd ever planned to use in a single evening. Stars. He pushed through the stars.
The third, fourth, and fifth came together.
This was the moment. He felt it the way he'd felt the tell in Deathstroke and the recalibration beat in Red Hood — not a thought but a read, the body's understanding of a situation arriving before the mind had words for it. Three at once, from three angles, with no room to manage one before the others arrived.
He didn't try to manage them.
He picked the closest one and went through it.
Not around, not away. Through. Driving into the nearest attacker with total commitment, using their body as a shield against the angle behind them, accepting the impact from the third angle on his back because his back was in better shape than his left side and the suit would catch what it could. He drove the nearest attacker backward, off balance, and in the four seconds that the collision created he worked through them with everything the League had built into his hands and his feet and the part of his brain that had stopped needing to consciously decide.
When it was over he was on one knee in the center of the loading bay.
Sixteen bodies. His left arm was barely functional. His ribs had something to say. His knee had revised its complaint upward again. The cut on his forearm from the first wave had gone from bleeding to bleeding significantly.
He stayed on one knee and breathed.
The loading bay was quiet.
Then footsteps. One set. Slow, deliberate, the walk of someone who had been waiting for this moment and had all the time available.
— ✦ —
He came out of the dark at the far end of the loading bay.
Talon.
Not one of the Court's operatives. The Court's operative — the one they sent when they wanted something communicated rather than simply accomplished. He wore the same white mask, but the way he wore it was different from the sixteen on the floor. Unhurried. Certain. The walk of someone who had been doing this since the city was built and expected to keep doing it long after the city was gone.
He was carrying something.
Maxwell's eyes went to it before he'd consciously decided to look. The shape of it. The way Talon held it — not like a weapon, like an object. A thing brought to be shown.
His stomach went cold before his mind caught up.
Talon stopped ten feet away. He raised his hand.
"No one," he said, his voice flat and even, carrying no particular emotion, "messes with the Court and goes free."
He held it up so Maxwell could see clearly.
Maxwell looked.
Nathan Wolkowski's face looked back at him. Eyes open. Expression frozen at the moment of surprise, the way expressions froze when there was no time to change them. The head rested in Talon's grip with the specific, terrible matter-of-factness of a message that had been delivered many times before and would be delivered many times again.
Maxwell didn't move.
Nathan. Who had recommended him for the job with the sludge villain two years ago.
Who had introduced him to the Penguin's network. Who had stood beside him in a Coventry corridor when the owl masks came out of the alcove and had fired the shot that ended the engagement. Who had, in the way of Gotham connections, been something closer to an ally than Maxwell had many of.
He was on one knee, injured in six different places, facing Talon with sixteen of the Court's operatives on the floor behind him, and somewhere in the city the Penguin was either already aware of this or was about to become aware of it, and the Court of Owls had just made it personal.
He looked at Nathan's face for one more second.
Then he looked at Talon.
Neither of them spoke.
The loading bay held the silence the way Gotham always held silence — temporarily, restlessly, already filling with the next thing.