The ceiling was wrong again.
Different wrong this time — not the water-stained wrong of a cheap Gotham apartment but the institutional wrong of a room designed to be functional and nothing else. White walls. Fluorescent light. The beeping of equipment somewhere to his left that explained the tubes in his arm before he even looked down at them.
He turned his head.
Medical bay. A uniformed officer sitting on a chair outside the door, back straight, doing the job. Through the window beside the door, a corridor that had the specific quality of a place where people were kept rather than treated.
He put it together without much effort.
Found at the docks. Unconscious, injured, surrounded by thirty-six bodies. Brought here, patched up, locked down. He ran a quick inventory — left arm wrapped and elevated, ribs taped, jaw tender in a way that suggested it was going to be tender for a while. The heal regeneration was doing its work in the background. Slow, given the extent of it, but working.
He was in Blackgate Penitentiary.
Could have been worse. Could have been Arkham.
The system chimed.
────────────────────────────────────────
✉ MESSAGE RECEIVED
Ho ho ho.
NOW that's the kind of entertainment
I'm talking about.
The shooting scene in the water?
That one blew my mind. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*.✧
Keep up the good work.
Make sure to entertain me in the
coming events. I have a feeling
things are about to get very
interesting.
Your one and only God ♥
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell read it.
Then he closed his eyes and went back to sleep, because he'd been shot, stabbed, thrown into a harbor, and was currently under arrest, and the god's approval rating was not a thing he had the energy to feel anything about right now.
The weeks moved.
They moved the way weeks moved in a place designed to make time feel like punishment — slowly, uniformly, each day identical enough to the last that the only way to track progress was by the healing, which at least gave him something to measure. The left arm came back first. Then the ribs, which took longer than he liked and reminded him daily of their timeline. The jaw sorted itself out by the end of the second week.
Task Force X did not appear.
He'd expected Vincent within a few days. A quiet conversation, paperwork, transfer to some federal holding facility that would vanish him from the system before anyone asked too many questions. The kind of arrangement that the Task Force's infrastructure was specifically built to facilitate. It didn't come. Day five, nothing. Day ten, nothing. By day fourteen he'd revised his assessment: either Vincent didn't know where he was, or Vincent had decided that a hitman currently in Blackgate under a cloud of thirty-six homicides was a liability the program didn't need, or the contract had genuinely lapsed and Maxwell was on his own.
All three possibilities were plausible. The third was the one that sat most comfortably, which was its own kind of answer.
He sat in his cell and thought and healed and watched the system.
The panel had been quiet since the god's message in the medical bay. No contracts, no shop notifications, no new contacts. Just one mission entry, sitting there when he checked, displaying a progress bar that moved in increments he couldn't feel happening.
────────────────────────────────────────
─ ACTIVE MISSION ──────────────────────
STAY AT BLACKGATE PENITENTIARY
Duration : 7 weeks
Progress : [====================] 99%
Reward : [CLASSIFIED]
Note : Patience.
────────────────────────────────────────
He stared at the note for a long time.
Patience.
He'd been in a mountain facility for seven months. He could do seven weeks.
He did the seven weeks the same way he did everything — methodically, without wasting the time. His body healed. He exercised within what the cell allowed, which wasn't much but was something. He ran scenarios in his head, planning the next phase, thinking about Constantine and the Justice League and the task Ra's al Ghul had set and how they all connected to a path home that was currently at twelve percent. He thought about the Nine Lives skill and the 2,400 SC it cost and how much work was on the other side of the prison walls waiting.
He thought about Nathan.
Not constantly. But it came back at certain hours, the way things came back when the day was quiet enough to let them. Nathan's face in Talon's hand. The open eyes. He filed it in the part of himself where he kept the things that needed to stay, and when it surfaced he looked at it and put it back.
The progress bar crept forward.
Ninety-seven percent. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine.
He was sitting on the cell bed staring at it when it clicked to one hundred.
For three seconds nothing happened.
Then the bang.
Not close. Somewhere in the building's deep structure, a concussive thud that moved through the walls and the floor and arrived in his chest as a physical fact before he'd consciously processed it as a sound. Then another. Then the kind of noise that buildings made when something inside them had been fundamentally disrupted — alarms, shouting, the clatter of a response system activating all at once.
His cell door opened.
Not unlocked by a guard. The magnetic lock simply released, the door swinging free on its hinges with the passive indifference of a mechanism that had been overridden from somewhere else. Down the corridor, other doors were doing the same thing. He could hear it — the sequential clunk of locks disengaging, one after another, moving away from him in both directions.
He stepped out.
The corridor was already moving. Inmates from neighboring cells spilling out with the specific energy of people who had been waiting for an opportunity and were not going to examine it too closely before taking it. Some of them looked confused. Most of them didn't. The ones who didn't were already heading for the exits with the purposeful efficiency of men who had mapped this building in their heads since the day they arrived.
Maxwell joined the flow.
Not running — moving with it, staying in the middle of the group where individual movement was hardest to track, keeping his head down and his eyes up. The corridor opened into a larger passage and the larger passage had guards in it, three of them trying to establish a line against the tide of released inmates and not having a good time of it. The ratio was wrong. Blackgate had better physical security than most people credited, but physical security assumed functional locks, and the locks weren't functioning.
A guard stepped in front of him.
Young officer, probably hadn't been on the job long enough to have the specific Blackgate patience that the older ones developed. He had the expression of someone doing the right thing in a situation that was moving too fast for right things to matter much.
Maxwell feinted left and drove his knee into the man's thigh, hard enough to buckle the leg without doing lasting damage, and stepped past him before he'd finished going down. He heard the officer hit the wall behind him and kept moving.
The outer passage. A door that should have been sealed hanging open. Beyond it, another passage, and then the sound of open air and the cool evening wind and the prison yard spread out ahead of him under a sky that was the wrong color.
He stopped in the yard entrance and looked up.
The sky was the wrong color because something was burning.
Not one thing. Several things, in the direction of the city, the glow of them visible on the underside of the clouds in orange and red, the smoke columns rising and merging into a single dark mass that sat over Gotham like a weather system that had decided to be permanent. The city skyline was partially obscured by it. He could see the tops of the towers through the haze, the familiar jagged profile of the place he'd lived in for years, distorted now by what was happening at its base.
And above the prison yard, wheeling against the burning sky —
Parademons.
Six of them visible from where he stood, maybe more further out, the silhouettes unmistakable once you knew what you were looking for. Wings like angular membrane, bodies built for nothing except violence, the movement of creatures that didn't have the concept of hesitation. One of them was carrying something. He tracked it. A guard, struggling, the uniform visible before the altitude made the details impossible.
Another swooped low over the yard. Inmates who'd made it outside were scattering. Two of them didn't scatter fast enough.
Maxwell pressed back against the wall.
His brain was running the identification the way it ran identifications now — automatic, pulling from the comics knowledge he'd spent years accumulating and matching it against what his eyes were giving him. Parademons. Darkseid's forces. The invasion that preceded the formation of the Justice League, the event that forced earth's heroes to cooperate for the first time, the catalyst that turned a collection of individuals into an actual team.
He was standing in the prison yard at Blackgate Penitentiary in the middle of the Darkseid invasion.
In the distance, toward the city, something exploded. The sound reached him two seconds later, rolling across the open ground between Blackgate and Gotham like a wave.
The smoke was thicker now. Another column joining the ones already there.
He looked at the parademons in the yard. Looked at the gate at the far end, standing open in the same manner as the cell doors, the same override rippling through every lock in the facility. Looked at the sky beyond it and the burning city beyond that.
He said the only thing the situation deserved.
"Bloody hell."
He said it quietly, to himself, to nobody, to the sky and the smoke and the winged things turning above him and the city on fire in the distance. Just the two words, delivered with the flat, exhausted precision of a man who had survived a harbor and a mountain and a loading bay and seven weeks in a cell and was now standing in a Darkseid invasion with no weapons, no gear, no car, and the system's latest mission still sitting unclaimed in the corner of his vision.
He looked at the gate.
He looked at the sky.
He looked at the city.
Took in some breath.
He moved.