Selina blew across the barrel and leaned against the shaft wall like someone who'd done this before.
Will was shaking. He was not going to cry in a sewer in front of Catwoman and two police officers, but it was a near thing.
She dropped from the aperture to the shaft floor in one clean motion, gun up, and walked the remaining two augmented men backward with the casual authority of someone managing livestock. The creatures retreated, still growling, still threatening — but the weapon was information their nervous systems hadn't forgotten, whatever else Strange had done to them.
"You alright?"
"Never better," Will said. "Very robust. Excellent structural integrity."
His ribs disagreed with all of this. The augmented man's grip had done something to at least three of them — he could feel it on every inhale, a precise, deep pain along his left side that hadn't been there before. He breathed shallowly and said nothing further.
Bullock was worse. Gordon had him upright but only just — his eyes were half-open, blood running freely from the corner of his mouth, and when he tried to speak it came out wet.
"You're alive," Will said. "That was for me. Thank you."
Bullock's eyes moved toward him with effort.
"Good kid," he managed.
"Harvey Bullock," Will said formally. "Same category as James Gordon. Good police."
Bullock's expression indicated that he found this assessment marginally acceptable despite the circumstances.
"Why did you come back?" Will asked Selina. "Did you find another exit?"
She shook her head.
After she'd left them, the logic of the situation had kept reassembling itself. Something had been driving them deeper — level by level, away from every exit, toward the shaft at the bottom. The outfall was at the lowest point. Strange had set this up deliberately. She'd thought about Gordon's empty holster, Bullock's methane symptoms, the state of all three of them, and turned around.
She'd been right. The shaft was the trap, and the augmented men were the mechanism.
As long as they were alive, Strange's location was unknown. Once they were dead, it stayed that way.
"The grate," Gordon said, looking at Will. "Why the handcuffs?"
"The mesh won't break under human weight. But the augmented men can generate enough force to shear the anchor points if something holds them to the grate. One cuff on the mesh frame, one on a limb, and let them pull their own way through." He paused. "In theory."
"In theory," Gordon repeated.
"There were some practical obstacles," Will admitted.
Selina turned the concept over. The specifics were bad — the augmented men were not going to stand still for restraint application, and the timing problem alone was nearly impossible. But borrowed force was a sound idea. Maybe a different mechanism.
She started to say so.
The lights came on.
They came on from the top of the shaft downward, one by one, a row of industrial work lamps embedded in the wall at each level clicking to life in sequence, filling the shaft with harsh white light.
After that much time in the dark, it was temporarily blinding. Will pressed his knuckles against his eyes and waited for his vision to adjust.
When it did, there was a figure on the third-level platform.
Short. Bald. A goatee trimmed with the precision of someone who considered their appearance a form of argument. White lab coat long enough to brush the floor. Hands in pockets, expression composed, looking down at all of them with the benign curiosity of a man observing an experiment that had proceeded more or less as expected.
Hugo Strange.
Will pressed two fingers to his forehead and exhaled.
He'd been in enough stories to recognize this part. The villain's platform. The speech that was coming. The careful exposition of motive that the hero would need to defeat him later. In every version of Gotham he'd ever encountered, Strange gave the speech whether or not his audience could use the information — because the speech was never really for the audience.
The difference was that Will wasn't Batman. He didn't need Strange's motive. He needed the money back, and Oswald out of Maroni's hands, and his own life not to end in a shaft in Gotham's sewer system.
Strange's feelings about humanity and improvement and the biological imperative were, with respect, not relevant to any of those goals.
Selina had a more direct reaction. The moment Strange appeared she raised the revolver.
Gordon's hand closed over hers. Ammunition.
The angle was bad anyway. Two levels of shaft height, Strange positioned at the back of the platform — the shots would deflect off the wall edge before reaching him.
"Welcome to my laboratory." Strange spread his arms. "Are my subjects everything you hoped?"
"Your subjects." Selina's other hand went to her hip. She was still holding the revolver one-handed, turning it slowly. "You mean the two that went quiet when they saw a gun? Those subjects?"
"Fear is a function of survival," Strange said, undisturbed. "Without the capacity for it, an organism moves toward self-destruction. Once death becomes dominant, reproduction loses its purpose."
Selina's expression indicated she was attempting to parse this.
"Your augmented men don't reproduce," Will said.
Strange's face did something brief and interesting. He controlled it quickly — brought the smile back — but not quite before Will caught it.
The recognition had been there. Involuntary, immediate, before the professional composure reasserted itself.
"You know me," Will said.
"I know that face." Strange's voice was even. "I've seen it more than once. I have been, in fact, looking for its owner for some time. I don't know your name — I make it my practice to know as little about my clients as they require. It's why they trust me with certain arrangements."
Clients.
The word landed in Will's chest and settled.
The body he was in had been to Strange. Had paid him for something, or been paid by him for something. Strange had been looking for him — which meant the original owner had either failed to deliver or disappeared before the arrangement concluded.
And if Strange wanted him — wanted this body — badly enough to have been searching, that was leverage. The first real leverage Will had in this room.
He opened his mouth.
Strange reached into his coat pocket.
"You were correct earlier," he said pleasantly. "The augmented men don't need to reproduce. And they don't need fear either." He held up the remote. "In approximately ten seconds, every emotional regulation pathway I left intact will be suspended. For the next ten minutes, they will respond only to stimulus. No threat assessment, no restraint protocols, no retained behavioral conditioning."
"Wait — you said you've been looking for me. If I'm dead—"
"What I need is the body. Whether the occupant is living at the time of retrieval is, medically speaking, a secondary consideration."
He pressed the button.
The two remaining augmented men responded immediately. Not with sound — that was what made it worse. Before, they'd snarled and postured and retreated from the gun. Now they simply oriented toward the group and started moving. Their mouths hung slightly open. Saliva fell in long strings from their lower lips and hit the grate without them registering it. The faces that had shown fear and confusion and animal anger a moment ago showed nothing at all.
Strange turned and walked into the dark of the platform corridor. He didn't look back.
One mercy: he'd left the lights on.
Selina didn't wait for discussion. She put two rounds into the nearest augmented man's face at close range. The eyeballs detonated. The creature didn't scream, didn't flinch, didn't slow. It registered the impact with a slight adjustment in direction — toward the sound of the shots — and kept coming.
Both of them dropped to all fours and covered the remaining distance in seconds.