Talon tossed it.
Not violently. Not even with particular emphasis. The way you tossed a coin across a table to make a point — casual, unhurried, the gesture of someone who had done this many times and found it unremarkable. Nathan Wolkowski's head rolled across the loading bay floor and came to rest two feet from Maxwell's knee.
Maxwell looked at it.
He didn't look away, didn't close his eyes, didn't give Talon the reaction the gesture was designed to produce. He looked at Nathan's face, memorized what was there, and filed it in the part of himself where he kept things that needed to stay.
"Your friend, I believe, Mr. Wick," Talon said. He had a voice like a building settling — deep, slow, carrying the accumulated weight of a man who had been delivering messages like this one since before anyone still alive could remember. He took a few steps forward, unhurried. "You've built quite an impressive resume these past months. The Court has been paying attention."
He raised one hand. A signal.
From the loading bay's shadows, from the dock entrance, from the spaces between machinery and stacked crates that Maxwell had been too occupied with the previous sixteen to fully map, figures emerged. They didn't rush. They arranged themselves with the patient precision of people who had time.
Twenty of them.
Maxwell was still on one knee. His left arm had stopped being reliable about twenty minutes ago. His ribs were counting themselves. The cut on his forearm had soaked through the suit's sleeve and was working on the outer jacket. Two of the H&Ks were somewhere on the floor behind him — he'd dropped the right one during the third wave when the arm gave out and the left had gone dry. He had the folding knife. He had whatever was around him. He had legs that still worked and a head that was still clear enough to be dangerous.
He pushed himself upright.
It took more than he'd have liked. His knee made a sound on the way up that he chose not to interpret. He straightened, found his balance, and looked at Talon across the length of the loading bay.
"I believe you want my head as well," he said.
His voice came out level. That was something, at least.
Talon tilted his head. The white mask caught the light from the loading bay's single functioning fixture and reflected it back blank and expressionless.
He gestured again.
The twenty moved.
— ✦ —
The adrenaline hit before the first one reached him.
Not the managed alertness he'd been running on for the past hour — something older and harder, the kind the body produced when it had calculated the situation and arrived at the conclusion that the situation required everything available. It didn't make him faster. It made the tiredness recede to a place he'd deal with later, if there was a later, and it brought the area awareness up to a clarity that cut through the accumulated damage like a light through fog.
Twenty. Spread formation, moving to close. Six seconds before the nearest reached him.
He moved first.
There was a short blade on the floor two feet to his left — one of the weapons from the second wave, dropped when its owner went down. He got to it in one step and came up with it already in his right hand, which put him moving when the formation arrived rather than standing still waiting for it. The nearest figure had to adjust. The adjustment cost them half a step. He used the half step.
The blade was shorter than he was used to but well-balanced, designed for close work, and he let it do what it was designed for while his body handled the movement that made close work possible. First attacker's weapon arm redirected, the short blade opening a cut across the inside of their elbow that changed how the arm worked. Second attacker coming from the right — he dropped below the swing, felt it pass over him, drove upward into their ribs with his shoulder and used the impact to push himself sideways into open space.
He needed to stop staying still.
Staying still with twenty opponents was how this ended badly. He moved through the formation instead of waiting for it, always toward the nearest opening, always changing direction before they could predict the next one. The area awareness tracked positions and flagged angles and he moved between them with the focused, burning urgency of a man who understood that he had one asset left in significant quantity and that asset was the specific capability the League had built into him over seven months of mornings that had started before dawn.
He used all of it.
A crate near the eastern wall — heavy, wooden, stacked three high. He drove the nearest attacker into the stack and the crates came down. Not on him. On two of the figures moving to flank from the right. The sound was enormous in the loading bay's concrete acoustics and for two seconds everything paused, the way sudden loud things made everything pause, and in those two seconds he crossed the loading bay to the wall where tools hung from a pegboard above a workbench.
A pry bar. Forty inches, steel, heavy enough to mean something.
He traded the short blade for it.
The pry bar changed the geometry entirely. Longer reach, blunt force rather than edge, the kind of weapon that didn't require precision to be effective, which suited his current arm situation considerably better than a blade did. He swung it once to feel the weight and then brought it across the first incoming figure in a horizontal sweep that connected with their forearm and produced a crack he felt through the bar. They dropped. The next one caught it on their shoulder. The one after that blocked it with both wrists and he was already reversing the swing before they could follow up, driving the blunt end back into someone else's sternum.
He was being hit. Regularly. He registered each impact and kept moving.
A blade caught him across the back — the suit's lining stopped the edge but not the force, and it drove him forward two steps. He turned the stumble into momentum, shoulder first into the nearest figure, both of them going into the workbench. The workbench went over. Tools scattered across the concrete. He came up from the wreckage with the pry bar still in his hand and a socket wrench in the other, which was not dignified but was functional.
The socket wrench found a jaw. The jaw's owner went down hard.
Fifteen remaining. He was starting to count less precisely. The adrenaline was doing the math he'd stopped having bandwidth for.
Near the loading bay's rear wall there was a chain hoist — the kind used to move heavy equipment, hanging from a ceiling track on a manual pull system. He reached it in four steps with two figures close behind him and grabbed the chain and swung himself up and over the nearest one's head, using the chain's length to get behind the formation's rear cluster before they'd finished adjusting to where he'd been.
He landed behind three of them who were still turning to find him.
What happened in the next thirty seconds was not elegant. It was the brutal, grinding close-quarters work of a man running on fumes and adrenaline and seven months of training that had been designed precisely for moments like this one. Every technique stripped of anything that wasn't essential. No combinations, no setups, just the fastest available path from threat to threat. Elbow to the base of the skull. Knee to the midsection, twice, because the first time didn't finish it. A throw that sent someone into the wall with enough force to decide the engagement on its own.
Twelve down from the new wave. Eight left standing.
He was breathing through his mouth. The ribs were no longer a complaint but an active problem — something on the right side that made deep breaths expensive. The left arm had gone from unreliable to not available for certain things. His knee had stopped complaining because it had moved past the complaining stage into the stage where it was simply doing the work and collecting the damage for later.
The eight spread out.
He set his feet and waited.
Three came first. He took them in sequence — not simultaneously, because he couldn't manage three simultaneously in his current state, but fast enough that the gaps between them didn't give the others time to arrive. He took another hit, this one to the temple, hard enough to make the world tilt for a full second. He planted and let it tilt and waited for it to stop.
It stopped.
He kept going.
Five remaining. Then four. Three. Two.
The last one looked at him across the loading bay floor, at the bodies of the sixteen from before and the twenty around them, and made a decision Maxwell respected.
They turned and ran.
He didn't chase.
He didn't have it in him to chase.
He stood in the center of the loading bay, surrounded by thirty-five people he'd put on the floor, and tried to remember how to breathe without it hurting. The adrenaline was already beginning its recession, which meant the full inventory of the evening's damage was about to arrive in a comprehensive report he wasn't looking forward to.
Slow footsteps from the far end of the bay.
Maxwell looked up.
Talon had not moved during any of it. He had watched the whole thing from where he'd stood when he made the gesture, as still and patient as the building itself, his white mask giving nothing. Now he stepped forward, moving between the bodies the way you moved through a space you considered yours, with the ease of someone who found the room's current state entirely unremarkable.
He stopped at the center of the floor. Ten feet away.
He removed the mask.
The face beneath it was not what Maxwell had expected. Old in the way that centuries made a face old — not weathered, not lined, but settled, the features carrying the specific quality of someone who had been here long enough that the concept of time had stopped being personal. His eyes were calm. Not cold. Just calm, the way deep water was calm, with everything underneath.
"You fight well," Talon said. "For someone who was nothing a year ago."
He raised his fists.
— ✦ —
Maxwell raised his too.
His left arm screamed at the elevation. He raised it anyway because dropping it would tell Talon exactly where to go, and Talon clearly already had opinions about where to go — he came in fast and low, lower than the twenty had come, a different speed entirely, the speed of someone whose capabilities existed in a different category from everyone Maxwell had faced tonight.
He blocked the first strike on his forearm and felt the impact run all the way up to his shoulder and beyond, the accumulated damage turning something that would have been manageable two hours ago into something that lit up his whole left side. He stepped back, bought a half-second, used it to recalibrate.
Talon was faster than the mask had suggested. Not Deathstroke fast — different. Deathstroke was power and economy. Talon was something older, the speed of a body that had been fighting since before modern training methodologies existed, refined not through curriculum but through centuries of actual use. There was nothing inefficient in him. Every movement carried exactly as much as it needed to and nothing more.
He came again. Maxwell slipped the second strike and countered with a right-hand combination — the only hand currently worth committing to — and felt the first two land on Talon's guard and the third connect with the jaw. Solid. Talon moved with it rather than absorbing it, the head roll of someone who had taken hits for a very long time and knew how to shed the damage.
He didn't stagger. He didn't blink. He came back.
The exchange that followed had a different quality from everything that had come before it tonight. The twenty had been exhausting. This was something else — a genuine contest between two people who were each trying to find the thing that would end it, neither of them finding it, the pace rising and then settling and then rising again as each adjustment met a counter-adjustment.
Talon's hands were extraordinary. Not just fast — intelligent, in the way that hands got intelligent after centuries of application. He found angles Maxwell didn't know he was leaving open. He exploited the left arm systematically, targeting it every few exchanges, keeping it compromised. He used the ribs twice with short, driving strikes that arrived below Maxwell's guard and produced a quality of pain that made thinking briefly difficult.
Maxwell hit him back. Not as often. Not as cleanly. But he hit him.
He caught Talon with an elbow across the cheekbone that snapped the head sideways. Followed it with a knee that didn't land cleanly but landed. Got inside a combination and drove his forehead down into the bridge of Talon's nose, which produced a crack and — finally, for the first time — a visible reaction. Talon stepped back. Not far. Not for long. But he stepped back.
Maxwell pressed.
For twenty seconds he was the one moving forward and Talon was the one managing, and in those twenty seconds he put together the best sequence of the night — the League's training running clean and hard, the combinations building on each other, targeting Talon's guard systematically the way Talon had targeted his arm. He felt Talon's rhythm shifting, adjusting, looking for the reset point.
Then the ribs got hit again and the twenty seconds ended.
He went back to managing. Barely.
— ✦ —
He didn't know when it started raining.
At some point during the fight the loading bay's doors had been open and the night had come in with them, and the night had rain in it, and now the concrete floor was wet and the bodies on it were wet and the two men still standing were wet, their breath showing in the dock air, both of them needing a moment that neither was going to offer the other.
They stood across from each other in the rain.
Ten feet. Breathing hard. Maxwell's jacket was ruined beyond the question of salvage. Talon's face had blood on it from the forehead strike — not much, but present. A red line running from the bridge of his nose. It was the only damage Maxwell could see on him, which was not a fair accounting of the situation.
Talon looked at him with the calm, assessing patience of someone who was not in a hurry.
"You should have stayed small, Mr. Wick," he said. "Small people live longer in this city."
Maxwell said nothing. He was using the pause to take inventory. Left arm: available for blocking, not for much else. Ribs: serious. Knee: still holding, barely. Head: clear, which was the one thing still fully in his favor.
"The Court doesn't forgive interference," Talon continued. "You walked into our operation in Coventry. You left our people on the floor. And then you had the considerable audacity to keep working in this city as though that had no consequence." He tilted his head. "We wanted to know who you were first. We know now."
"So this is the consequence," Maxwell said.
"This is the message," Talon said. "The consequence comes after."
He came forward.
The second half of the fight was different from the first. The rain made the floor treacherous and they both knew it, both accounting for it in how they moved, the footwork adjusted for a surface that gave back less than concrete should. Talon adapted faster — another lifetime of refinement paying its dividend — but Maxwell had the area awareness reading the floor in real time, flagging the wet patches, the places where a planted foot would slip.
He used that.
He gave ground deliberately toward a section near the dock doors where a drainage channel had pooled the water into a slick three feet wide. Talon followed, advancing with the controlled pressure of someone who understood he was winning and saw no reason to change approaches. Maxwell waited until the lead foot was on the pooled water, felt the area awareness ping it, and threw himself forward instead of back.
Talon's foot slipped. Not far. Not enough to take him down. But the correction cost him his weight distribution for a full second.
Maxwell drove his right shoulder into Talon's chest.
They went into a stack of empty oil drums along the dock wall. The drums went everywhere, the crash enormous, both of them in the wreckage and scrambling upright through the rolling metal. Maxwell got up first — barely, by the margin of being the one who'd chosen the direction — and put two strikes into Talon while he was still finding his feet. They connected. Talon answered immediately, a single short punch that arrived before Maxwell's guard was back in position, landing flush on his jaw.
Everything went white.
He didn't go down. He was moving before the white fully cleared, moving because stopping was the one thing that would finish this, and his body had enough autonomous training in it to keep going while his head caught up. Talon was right there, inside his guard, and he grabbed and clinched rather than tried to strike, buying himself two seconds in the hold while his vision resolved.
Talon broke the clinch. He was stronger than he looked.
They separated. Three feet.
Maxwell's jaw was going to be a problem tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow. His vision had resolved but the white flash had left a ringing that sat behind his ears and refused to leave. He blinked it back and found his stance and looked at Talon and understood, with the honest clarity of someone who had done this calculation before and knew what the numbers meant, that he was running out.
Not out yet. But close.
They exchanged again. A full minute, neither stopping, neither finding the finish, Talon's superior conditioning showing in the precision that stayed with him while Maxwell's began to fray at the edges. The left arm was covering more than it could really afford to cover. The ribs were making every full breath a decision. He was fighting on the credit of the training rather than the capacity of the body, and training was a finite resource against something that had been doing this since the city was young.
Talon hit him and he went back three steps.
Hit him again and he went back two more.
His heel found the edge of something — a body, a dropped weapon, the edge of the drainage channel — and he lost the back step entirely, going sideways instead, catching himself on one hand on the wet concrete.
He looked up from the floor.
His H&K was three feet away. The left one, from early in the evening, skidded there in the chaos of the second wave and never retrieved. He'd been too occupied to reach it, and then the third wave had come and Talon had come and reaching for a weapon on the floor had not been among the available options.
It was an option now.
He moved for it.
— ✦ —
He got his hand on it.
His fingers closed around the grip and the weight of it was the best thing he'd felt in the last hour — familiar, functional, the tool he'd been without for too long. He was already bringing it up when Talon reached him.
Not a strike. Talon didn't try to stop the gun. He grabbed Maxwell's jacket collar with both hands and the momentum of the grab didn't stop, it converted, Talon's weight and direction and the full force of a man who had been waiting for exactly this kind of committed movement all carrying them both sideways through the open dock doors and into the air above the black water.
Maxwell had approximately half a second of dark sky and rain and the lights of the freighter on the horizon before the water hit.
Cold.
Absolute cold, the kind that hit every nerve ending simultaneously and produced a total, involuntary body response that had nothing to do with choice. He went under. The dock's depth was real — not shallow, not forgiving, the black water closing over him with the complete, indifferent thoroughness of something that didn't care what it was asked to do.
He still had the gun.
He found Talon in the water by the grip on his jacket, which had not released. They were both under, both moving, the fight not stopping because the environment had changed but transforming into something even more primal — the close, terrible work of two people in cold water in the dark, the techniques that applied on dry ground stripped away by current and weight and the burning need for air.
Maxwell fired.
Once. Twice. Three times. The muzzle flash lit the water around them in brief, strobing bursts of orange, the reports muffled into deep concussive thuds by the water, the rounds going somewhere he couldn't track. He felt Talon's grip on his collar change — not releasing, but changing, the quality of it different, the force behind it less organized.
He fired twice more.
The grip released.
Maxwell kicked. Up, because up was where air was, and air was the only thing that mattered now, and his body understood this with a simplicity that cut through everything else. He broke the surface gasping, the cold rain hitting his face, the dock lights above him painting the water in amber and shadow.
He grabbed the dock's edge with both hands. His left arm tried to quit. He held anyway, the fingers finding the timber and locking, and he pulled himself up over the edge with the last organized effort his body had available, rolling onto the dock planks and lying there face up in the rain.
His chest heaved. The ribs said things he declined to process. The rain came down steady and cold and entirely indifferent, drumming against the wood around him and against his jacket and against his face.
He looked up at the Gotham sky. Orange-grey, the clouds lit from beneath by the city, rain falling out of them without urgency.
Somewhere below the water's surface, something was still or wasn't.
He couldn't look. He didn't have the angle and he didn't have the reserves to get to one.
He lay on his back on the dock in the rain and listened to himself breathe.
The gun was still in his right hand. He'd held it through all of it, through the water and the surface and the climb, the grip automatic and total in the way of something the training had made structural. He loosened his fingers. The gun stayed where it was, resting on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing.