The first thing Sarah noticed when she broke out of the trance was how quiet she was inside.
Not calm. Not peaceful. Just — emptied, the way a room looks after furniture has been taken out. The nightmare had been specific and surgical, the way the Joker's work apparently always was, and she wasn't going to think about it right now because there was a circus tent full of entranced civilians and a portal tearing itself open in the roof and Sam was already in the ring.
She moved.
Maya first. Sam had said Maya first, and Sam's operational instincts were the one thing Sarah trusted without qualification even when everything else about him was maddening.
Maya was three rows ahead, still seated, perfectly still, the tablet open in her lap and her eyes aimed at nothing. Jeremy sat beside her with the same vacant smile as everyone else in the tent, and Sarah filed him away as not-a-priority and stepped past him.
"Maya." She gripped her shoulder. Nothing. "Maya, listen to me."
From the ring, something exploded.
Sarah's head snapped up.
Sam had expected tricks.
He hadn't expected them to hurt this much.
The first one came fast — a fanned spread of playing cards, razor-edged, launched with the precision of thrown knives. Sam deflected two with the flat of the katana and took the third across the forearm, the armor absorbing most of it but not all. A thin line of pressure bloomed beneath the plating.
"Classic," Sam said, resetting his stance. "Weaponized card tricks. Very on-brand."
"You'd be surprised," the Joker said pleasantly, "how much damage a metaphor can do when taken literally."
He produced a handkerchief from his breast pocket — white silk, ordinary — and snapped it once.
The handkerchief became a whip.
Not a physical one. A construct — visible only in the way heat shimmer is visible, more a distortion than a thing. It cracked across the ring floor and where it struck, the ground fractured into a brief, yawning darkness before sealing again.
Sam moved sideways.
The whip followed.
Sam dove, rolled, came up inside the Joker's reach — too close for the whip to be effective — and drove the katana forward in a straight thrust.
The Joker sidestepped with the loose, jointless fluidity of something that had borrowed its body's movement patterns from a source other than human anatomy. The blade grazed his shoulder. The suit fabric parted. Whatever was underneath wasn't quite right.
"You're fast," the Joker observed, not sounding particularly concerned.
"You're slow," Sam replied. "Relatively."
"I'm patient," the Joker corrected. He gestured upward.
Sam looked.
The portal was larger.
It had been roughly a meter across when the fight started. Now it was closer to three, the rotation faster, the distortion around it deeper. The air near the ceiling had taken on a quality Sam recognized — that specific wrongness of a boundary being worn thin, like paper held too close to a flame.
And at the edges of the portal—
Fingers.
Long. Dark. Too many joints.
Something was pushing through from the other side.
"Every moment we spend on pleasantries," the Joker said, "is a moment they spend arriving."
Sam turned back to him.
"Then let's stop being pleasant."
He twisted the capsule on the hilt. The armor recalibrated with a sound like cooling metal — a subtle internal shift rather than a visible change, the system adjusting its output parameters. Sam felt it settle differently across his shoulders. More weight. More resistance. More cost.
He moved.
Not a charge — a sequence. A calculated series of angles designed to force the Joker to commit to a defensive pattern, to narrow his options until one of them ran out of room.
The Joker produced a coin from nowhere and flicked it.
It detonated.
The shockwave caught Sam mid-stride and threw him sideways into the ring barrier. He hit hard, bounced, landed in a crouch. The armor had taken the impact but the force had been real — he felt it in his back teeth.
"Interesting," the Joker said. He was already producing another coin. "The suit adapts. But it can't adapt faster than I can escalate."
He flicked three coins simultaneously.
Sam did the only thing that made sense.
He threw himself at the ground.
The three detonations went off above him in a cascade, the pressure waves overlapping, the combined force blowing out two rows of empty audience seating and sending a crack racing across the tent's central support beam.
Sam lay still for exactly half a second.
Then stood up.
"Structural damage," he said. "You're going to bring the tent down."
"Yes," the Joker agreed simply.
Sam stared at him.
"On the civilians."
"They'll still be breathing," the Joker said. "Probably. The portal needs living fear, not corpses. I'm not wasteful." A tilt of the head. "But a little physical crisis does wonders for sustaining the trance. Pain and fear are neighbors."
Sam's expression went very flat.
"Yeah," he said quietly.
He looked at the cracked support beam. Then at the portal. Then at the rows of motionless, smiling people.
"Okay," he said, mostly to himself. "Different approach."
In the nightmare, no one was listening.
That was the consistent feature of it — Maya could feel that even while she was inside it, some analytical part of her tagging the pattern the way she'd been trained to tag anomalies in data. Everyone was nodding. Everyone was smiling. Everyone was looking just past her shoulder at someone more important who hadn't arrived yet.
The room kept changing but the feeling didn't.
A briefing room. A lecture hall. A police precinct that looked like the one she'd worked at before Unit 7. She was talking and the words were technically landing — people were responding, occasionally — but no one was actually hearing her. The information she was carrying was critical and no one could see it and something terrible was going to happen because she couldn't make them understand and—
The construct whispered to her.
She didn't hear words exactly. More like a pressure behind the thought: you were never going to be enough.
Maya stopped.
Something in her went very still.
Not the stillness of despair. The stillness of a system encountering invalid input and flagging it for review.
You were never going to be enough.
She ran it again.
The structure of it was wrong. The logic didn't hold. "Never going to be" required a predictive certainty the premise couldn't support. It was a conclusion wearing the clothes of an axiom. It was, in the specific technical language of Maya's most practiced skill—
A false positive.
The nightmare pushed harder. The room filled with more people, more nodding faces, more of that particular social silence that meant we have already decided not to take you seriously.
Maya felt the pressure build.
And then—
Something happened that she wouldn't be able to explain clearly for several weeks afterward.
She didn't fight the construct.
She found its architecture.
Every system had one — a underlying logic, a set of rules it ran on, inputs and outputs and the assumptions connecting them. Even the supernatural, apparently, because this thing had been built to do a specific job and that meant it had been built, and anything built could be taken apart if you found the right seam.
The nightmare had a seam.
It ran along the moment the pressure became a voice. The shift from emotional weight to directed suggestion — that was the junction point, the place where it stopped being her memory and started being something else's instruction.
Maya found the seam.
And she pulled.
The construct didn't break dramatically. It came apart the way bad code unravels when you find the core dependency error — quietly, then all at once, the downstream effects cascading through every function that relied on the compromised foundation until the whole structure simply ceased to execute.
The nightmare stopped.
Maya opened her eyes.
She was in a circus tent. Her tablet was in her lap. Her hands were shaking faintly with the particular tremor of adrenaline finding nowhere to go.
Sarah was gripping her shoulder and saying her name.
"I'm here," Maya said.
Sarah exhaled — the controlled, minimal exhale of someone who had been managing worry with professional discipline. "Good. We don't have much—"
From the ring, a detonation. The tent fabric rippled.
Maya looked up at the portal.
At the fingers pushing through its edges.
"How many?" she asked.
"First one's already through," Sarah said. She was moving, pulling Maya upright. "Baru's down. Still in the trance. I need—"
"Go get him," Maya said. "I've got the portal."
Sarah looked at her.
"Maya—"
"I just took apart a supernatural construct from the inside," Maya said. She was already moving toward the ring, stepping over the divider. "I think I can manage a portal."
She said it with more certainty than she felt. But she'd learned something useful in the past thirty seconds: certainty was a tool, and you could pick it up and use it even when it wasn't entirely yours yet.
The first soldier was already in the tent.
It landed near the far edge of the ring — a dark, asymmetric shape that moved like a marionette learning to operate itself, all sharp angles and misplaced weight. It oriented toward Maya with the functional intelligence of something that had been sent rather than something that had decided.
Maya stopped walking.
The soldier moved toward her.
Maya held up her hand.
She didn't know why she did it. It wasn't a decision exactly — more like the same instinct that had found the construct's seam, the same not-quite-conscious analytical reach toward the underlying architecture of a thing.
The soldier's movement stuttered.
Like a skipped frame.
Maya's eyes widened.
She pushed — not physically, not with any vocabulary she had for what she was doing — and the soldier's movement stuttered again, more severely, its form flickering at the edges as whatever pattern held it together encountered interference it couldn't process.
"Oh," Maya said softly.
A second soldier dropped from the portal.
A third.
Sarah had reached Baru and was working on pulling him out of the trance — her hand on his face, her voice low and direct, the same approach she'd used with Sam. Baru was harder. He'd been under longer, and whatever nightmare the Joker had built for him was holding more stubbornly.
Maya turned to face all three soldiers.
She had exactly no idea what she was doing.
She also had, apparently, enough raw instinct for it to matter.
She pushed outward with both hands — a gesture, a focus, a way of directing something that didn't have a name yet — and the three constructs simultaneously seized, their movements locking mid-stride, their forms destabilizing at the edges like corrupted files losing coherence.
One collapsed.
The other two fought it, their patterns restructuring in real time, trying to find a configuration she couldn't disrupt.
Maya watched them adapt.
Interesting, some part of her noted. They learn.
Then she started finding the new seams.
Sam saw it from across the ring.
The soldiers seizing. The collapse. Maya standing at the portal's edge with her hands extended and her expression carrying the specific focused intensity of someone who had just discovered a capability they didn't have a name for yet.
He had half a second to feel something that might have been relief before the Joker stepped into his sightline.
"Complications," the Joker said. He sounded less pleasant now.
"She does that," Sam said.
The Joker produced his handkerchief again.
Sam was already moving.
He crossed the ring in four strides, closing the distance before the construct could fully form, and drove his shoulder into the Joker's chest with every gram of momentum the suit could amplify. They crashed into the ring barrier together — Sam felt the impact through the armor, significant and rattling — and he pressed the advantage before the Joker could reset, the katana coming up in a controlled arc aimed at the construct anchoring the portal.
The Joker caught his wrist.
The grip was wrong. Too strong. Too cold.
"You can't cut the anchor from this side," the Joker said. His voice had lost its theatrical lilt. What was underneath it was flat and very old. "The portal has to be collapsed from within."
"I know," Sam said.
He headbutted him.
The Joker reeled — a full step back, his grip breaking — and in the space that created, Sam reversed his grip on the katana and drove it into the ground at the center of the ring. Not an attack. A focus point. The blade hummed against the energy radiating from the portal above, conducting it, redirecting it.
The tent shook.
From behind him: a massive impact, followed by the particular sound of Baru's voice saying something quiet to his family. He was out.
Sam looked up at the portal.
At the soldiers Maya was systematically dismantling at its edges, one seam at a time, her movements becoming faster and more confident with every construct she took apart.
He looked at the Joker.
The Joker was watching Maya.
His expression had changed.
Not afraid — something didn't have enough investment in its own continuity to be afraid. But recalculating. Reassessing.
"New variable," the Joker said quietly.
"She's good at that," Sam said.
He pulled the katana from the ground.
The Joker turned back to him, and the theatrical pleasantness was fully gone now, and what replaced it was something considerably more honest about what it actually was.
"This changes nothing," it said. "The portal is already—"
"Sarah," Sam said.
From the edge of the ring, without looking up from the portal analysis she was already running on her tablet, Maya said: "Two minutes. Maybe less."
Sam nodded.
He looked at the Joker.
"Two minutes," he said.
The Joker spread its hands.
"Then make them count."
Sam exhaled slowly.
Rolled his shoulders.
And moved.