The Gotham sewers had a way of bringing back Gordon's worst memories.
Laszlo Valentine, for instance.
Valentine had been a fractured man in the clinical sense — severe dissociative identity disorder, the kind that left the dominant personality unaware of what the others had done. What they'd done was take children. He'd moved the bodies into the tunnels and tried to rearrange them into something new, driven by a surgical ambition that far exceeded his actual skills. What he'd produced was a horror with stitching, not a creation.
Gordon and Bullock had found him without much difficulty. Valentine was controllable once cornered, and the DID gave his defense team enough to work with. Arkham instead of Blackgate.
Gordon had visited a few months back. Valentine sat in his room most of the day now, quiet, wearing a cartoon pig mask, reading medical textbooks with the patience of a man who understood that he'd moved too fast the first time.
He hadn't abandoned the goal. He was just learning to be better at it.
Gordon found that version of Laszlo Valentine considerably more unsettling than the one who'd been screaming in a sewer.
"Thinking about Valentine?" Bullock said, without looking up from where he was sweeping his flashlight across the tunnel wall.
"You know me too well."
"Comes with the territory."
They moved through the wastewater in single file, flashlight beams cutting across the dark. The water came up to their thighs in the lower sections. It smelled the way it always smelled down here, which was to say badly.
Gotham's age showed nowhere more clearly than underground. The city's recorded history predated American independence — French engineers had laid the original drainage blueprint while revolution was still being fought in the countryside, and every subsequent decade had added new layers to the system without removing the old ones. The result was a genuine labyrinth: multiple levels, overlapping channels, dead ends that didn't appear on any current map because the maps themselves were unreliable.
Gordon had one anyway. He kept his eyes on it between sweeping the walls for evidence.
The augmented men had left plenty to find. Whatever Strange had built, it hadn't been built for subtlety. The claw marks ran along both walls in long, deep furrows — the kind of damage you got when something large and powerful moved through a tight space without caring about the infrastructure.
He tracked the pattern, plotted a route, called the turns.
Bullock marked their path with chalk at each junction.
They worked without needing to speak. Two decades as partners left most of the communication in shorthand.
Behind them in the dark, a small shadow emerged from an alcove and moved along the wall, erasing each chalk mark as it went.
Forty minutes in, Gordon stopped.
"We've been here."
"Can't have been. I marked everything."
Bullock held up the chalk. It was almost gone. He stared at the wall where the most recent mark should have been and found nothing.
"Map says left turn here. There's no left turn."
Gordon crouched and looked at the ground, playing his light across the water's surface. The beam caught something — a series of ripples moving outward from a point several meters ahead, slow and even.
He put his hand flat against the tunnel wall.
A faint vibration in the stone. Regular. Getting stronger.
"Earthquake?" Bullock said.
Gordon was already drawing his weapon.
"Stop pretending."
The ground shook again, harder, and the water came up in a half-meter wave that broke against their legs. From the far end of the tunnel came a sound that made the chalk marks irrelevant.
Breathing. Heavy and close and getting closer.
Gordon's Ruger GP100 felt inadequate in a way it rarely did. The .357 was reliable at a hundred meters against a human target. Whatever was at the end of this tunnel was not a human target.
They looked at each other.
The decision took no time at all.
They ran.
Gordon moved with a plan even at full sprint — he kept tracking the tunnel layout, counting junctions, trying to orient. But some part of him had already calculated the problem: whatever was behind them was larger, and in a straight corridor, larger things were faster things. If it wanted to run them down, it would.
It wasn't running them down.
He registered that slowly, between footfalls. The breathing stayed behind them. Not gaining. Not falling back. The ground kept trembling in irregular pulses, the sound rising and fading like something deliberately pacing itself.
Like it was driving them somewhere.
The thought arrived cold and clear and Gordon reached for Bullock's coat the moment it did.
"Stop—"
Too late. They hit a section where the floor dropped, the footing went wrong, and both of them went over together — down through an open drainage channel and into the level below.
One level deeper, Will stopped running.
He'd come to roughly the same analysis as Gordon, just faster, and taken it further.
The dragon in the garage.
Carl Sagan had laid it out plainly: suppose someone tells you there's a dragon living in their garage. Invisible dragon, floats off the ground, breathes heatless flame, impossible to detect by any instrument. How do you disprove it? You can't — the claim has been constructed to resist all verification. And an unverifiable claim, Sagan argued, is for all practical purposes no claim at all.
Will had not seen a single augmented man since entering the sewers. The ground shook. There was breathing in the dark. Both of those things could be faked, or misread, or generated by something else entirely. A large section of his fear right now was the product of his own imagination filling in what the dark didn't show.
He stopped.
Turned around.
Looked at the corner.
"Are you insane?" Selina was still moving, and when she realized he wasn't following she came back, reached for his arm. "If you can't run I'll carry you—"
"I have a theory." He pushed her hand away, keeping his eyes on the corner. "I might be wrong and we might die for it. So go. I'll catch up."
"I'm not leaving."
"Selina—"
"I said I'm not leaving." She took his hand instead. Her palm was cold and damp, tight against his. "So let's both be wrong together."
They walked toward the corner.
The distance was maybe thirty meters. Will counted every step. His heart was somewhere in his throat and didn't seem interested in returning to its proper location. Each footfall sent a small ripple through the standing water. The smell hit first — dense and nauseating, something between fermented fish and decay, so thick he was breathing it rather than just smelling it.
Real, he told himself. There's something real around that corner and it has a mouth.
He couldn't make himself take the last step.
Selina let go of his hand and looked around the corner.
"Nothing." She turned back to him. "You were right. There's nothing there."
Will let out a breath that had been forming for several minutes.
He realized, as the tension left him, that the smell had already gone. The nausea, the thick rot, the sense of something biological and wrong — all of it had faded the moment she said nothing.
He understood.
That smell had been his own fear. The creature had been his own fear. A dragon in a garage, very convincingly described in the dark.
He put a hand against the wall and stood there for a moment, letting his heart settle.
Then two heavy impacts from directly above, a crunch of old concrete, and two figures came through the ceiling.
They landed hard in the water, one after the other.
"AAHH—"