Chapter 1
She flipped the pages of names until she reached the one labeled one-o'clock. She scanned the signed list, looking for a familiar name - nothing. He wasn't here. She clenched her fists - he had promised - and checked the two o'clock. Only one name was listed, and it wasn't his. She practically threw the papers onto the long reception desk, and tried to pull herself together before the tour.
A journalist for Gotham Science was here to do an article on the lab work done at Wayne Enterprises. There had been a press leak a few days ago about the work for the police department and, indirectly and though no one would admit to it, for Batman. The important job was said to be to find a "cure" for the new terrorist calling himself the Bloodhound, though reporters had taken to calling him simply "Hound". The journalist was thrilled to be in the secretive Science building for the company, and was eager to interview his guide. She glanced at the clock. Twelve-twenty. She sighed as the man made his way through the glass double-doors to the lobby. He already had his notebook out.
"Dr. Erin Vin... Vines... Vinnest—"
"Vinestradt. Vine-stratt. But please, call me Erin." They shook hands.
"Of course. Erin. Now, I know I'm here a little early..." he laughed, and she resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "...But I'm here representing the scholarly journal Gotham Science, which comes out every month with all the latest news from the scientific world existing here in our city. I just wanted to ask you a few questions about what you do here." He stressed the "you", as though he came here to see her and nothing or no one else. "Do you mind?"
"Of course not."
He missed her sarcasm. "Wonderful!" His pencil was poised over the paper, and she imagined it was quivering with excitement. He was nice – if over-enthusiastic – so she tried to quell her cynical side for the next forty minutes as he barraged her with questions she couldn't give him real answers to. I've said "I'm sorry, that's confidential" at least fifty times, she thought at the end. The one o'clock tour began with the journalist looking very put-off with her unhelpful and vague input. But her orders came from the top - Mr. Lucius Fox himself had met all the public-relations scientists in a private meeting that explained exactly what information they were allowed to disclose.
Not that she'd volunteered for PR. That had also come from upstairs, from her boss and one of the leading research chemists in Gotham, Hayden Morris. He said she was good with kids. Because so many kids want to come to a lockdown nerd building rather than the zoo, she thought angrily.
The tour went smoothly for the next fifty-five minutes, at which point she was bored to tears and itching to get back in the lab. She was not at all sorry to see the ignorant CEOs leave, though she felt mild guilt at the frown on the journalist's face. Then she ran to the lounge for a snack and coffee.
When she got back, it was two-oh-two and her next tour was standing, hands in pockets, next to the reception desk. Morris is going to kill me for being late. She walked up the man, putting on a smile and quickly apologizing.
"Don't worry about it. I only just got here myself," he said, smiling in return.
"Good!" She looked at his nametag. Bruce Wayne. As in Wayne Enterprises.
Holy – Erin wanted to cuss. Bruce Wayne, suave multi-billionaire, the handsome Prince of Gotham, was standing before her, as her next tour.
"I'm Dr. Vinestradt. Would you like to begin, sir?" Erin asked, praying her voice wouldn't squeak. She nervously tucked her hair behind her ear.
"Sure, that would be fine."
She tried to imperceptibly clear her throat as he followed her down the hall. I'm being silly, she thought. I'm a professional, and he's my employer, for God's sake. Take some deep breaths. She looked over her shoulder at him, and he gave her another smile. He's just being polite, she reminded herself. And he's not that attractive. You're overreacting because you're fresh out of grad school. Get a grip!
"Here's our first stop." She pointed to a heavy steel door and turned to him. "Before we go in, I should probably warn you. You'll have to put on gloves and goggles in order to enter most of the labs. Some we don't go into for tours because they require a gas mask. However, if you want to see them, we have an extra for you."
"Well, I'd like to see as many rooms as possible. I'm very interested in the scientific work you do here. And masks aren't a problem."
Goosebumps raced over her shoulders, and she shivered. His voice was eerily deep. Focus. She wondered as to how much scientific knowledge he had already – probably not much, but would she have to stick to basics, like 'A proton has a positive charge' or 'Electricity only flows in a closed circuit', or worse, 'Don't touch the beakers with biohazard symbols on them!' That would be one hell of a tour. No, this definitely wasn't a place to take a school field trip, she thought, and grinned a little.
"Did I say something?" her charge asked her, with a bemused look in his eyes.
"No, just thinking. Take these," she said, pulling rubber gloves out of her lab coat pockets and slipping on her own. "The goggles are inside." She pulled open the door, and he stepped behind her and held it as she passed through. "Careful," she said. "It's heavy."
"It's no problem."
They moved inside and the door clanged shut. The air buzzed with electricity, this being the lab of some of the circuitry and computer scientists working in the building. Both grabbed goggles. "Here we design some of the most cutting-edge circuitry used in electronic devices today. We're currently working on a method using sapphire and carbon nanotubes. This will be make electronic usage more accurate than today's silicon circuits, with the added bonus of the circuits being at least half their current size."
He looked thoughtful for a moment, and Erin wondered if he had actually taken any of that in. Then he nodded and said, "Because the nanotubes would automatically align if grown on the sapphire, due to the hydrogen, right?"
She stared at him, and he stared back through the thick goggles. "Right." She nodded, feeling self-conscious and stupid for underestimating his intelligence. "That's... You're exactly right." She turned away to hide her blush. "If you would like, you can get a closer look at what Dr. Hane is doing," she said, pointing at an elderly physicist bent over his work at a desk. "He's probably calculating resistance of the nano-..."
But Wayne had already left her side to speak quietly with Dr. Hane. She hovered near the door, feeling slightly out-of-place, as astrophysics was more her cup of tea. Though recently she had been roped into the chemistry department, and was doing pretty well, her boss said.
Just like PR, she thought. Keep up the good work, Erin. You're doing fine. Right, yada yada. Then they send in the sexy, smart CEO who also happens to be the town's bachelor and billionaire, you lose your cool, you're falling for another pretty face. Shake it off, girl. Focus. He's your employer, not your friend.
Wayne walked back over to her, nodding. "This is excellent. Shall we move on?" he asked. Erin took a breath.
"This way."
They went up the elevator to the fifth floor and walked about the extensive library of periodicals and journals – Erin spotted the section devoted to Gotham Science – and Wayne spoke alone with one of the librarians. Then he led her to a section on general medicinal practice and pulled a 1989 journal off the shelf. On the front was –
"It's my dad. He used to let me take out his stethoscope, when I was very young. I'd heard he was on the cover of MedSci years ago, but I couldn't find a copy."
Erin didn't know what to say. Why was he telling her this?
He smiled a little and put the magazine back on the shelf.
He looked at her. "Where next?"
Next was the seventh floor, nuclear physics, then the eighth, ninth, and tenth, dedicated solely to medical and pharmaceutical research, though the hospital was four blocks away.
He seemed to be looking for a particular experiment throughout the medical area, walking around to each setup in each room she led him to. She wanted to ask him about it, but hesitated. What if it was an experiment they weren't doing? That would expose her boss in a bad way, and she'd definitely be fired. And she really didn't want to lose her job.
Otherwise she was having a great time with Wayne. He had very few gray areas on the topics she covered, and was actually better informed than she on many of the more physical and mechanical topics, such as electricity and robotics. She found she was going off and telling him things about the projects she usually left out of the tour lectures. He took it in stride and kept up with her banter, impressing her beyond belief. They actually argued on the elevator on the way to the twelfth floor about the best way to treat autism.
"Let me show you the work we've done on mirror neurons. We've managed to isolate two areas of the brain where they're located. This room," she said as they walked down the corridor.
"Do you do work on this sort of thing?" he asked as they entered the anteroom.
"Well, I was in the nuclear and astrophysics department, up on the twentieth floor, but I've been moved down to this level, for biochemistry, and my current specialty is the brain's reactions to steroids."
"What exactly do you do?"
Erin missed his sudden intense stare. She wondered whether she should tell him – the work came from the police, not Dr. Fox, and definitely not from him. She looked at him before they entered the neuroscience lab. He was watching her as though waiting for something. "Uh, I… I'm currently working on an antitoxin." That should be safe.
"Would this have anything to do with that Hound person in the Narrows?"
I should have known he'd figure it out. I won't underestimate him again. But what do I do? Erin thought frantically as she stared at the whitecoats milling about in the lab beyond the glass doors before her. He's found out – crap – why did I ever agree to do this sort of thing?
"Doctor?" He looked concerned; the expression on her face must be one of horror, or nausea, as she was feeling both. She relaxed her frown.
"Yes. That's what it's for." Well, it's all over now –
"Good."
What?
"You authorized that?" she asked incredulously.
He gave her a strange look. "Of course I did. Nothing goes on in this building without my authorization." His eyes bored into hers, concern etched on his brow. "Are you all right? You look a little pale."
She smiled. "I'm fine." Her hands were cold and sweating, she realized, and stuck them in her lab coat pockets to dry them without him seeing.
"Shall we proceed?" She stepped into the next room, and the scream of a monkey reached her ears. "Oh, about the noise…"
Wayne appeared to be thrilled as they walked towards her lab. He peppered her with questions about her experiments on the steroid Hound was taking. She had told him that they didn't know exactly what he was taking, and that they assumed he had it specially made for his body.
"In order to create the antitoxin we estimated the chemical formula of the toxin. When we discovered what it was, we were very surprised. It's a combination of lethal toxin and powerful steroid, which means that if an average man, even if he had an identical body to Hound's, took that stuff, it would overload his nervous system in about five minutes."
Wayne's expression darkened. "That means he's been making it and testing it for a long time."
She nodded. "To build up immunity to the toxin."
"But why would he use the toxin at all?" he seemed to ask himself.
"I've wondered the same thing," she began helpfully, "and I've made a few guesses: One, no one can copy his method any time soon, because they would also have to build up immunity – so no threats equal to his enhanced strength, and there's probably some pride involved. Wants to be the only one who could do it. Two, though this isn't proven as I don't have any volunteers to test it on, I think it messes with his head. Makes him angry, or frightened, and gets his adrenaline pumping."
"I think we can safely assume he's insane," Wayne said, shaking his head. They stepped into her lab.
"Jerry!" she called to the technician at the back of the room. "We've got a visitor."
A man with dark graying hair and thick glasses came forward. He looked to be about six feet tall, and wore casual work clothes and a white lab coat like Erin's. He and Wayne shook hands. "How d'you do, sir." Jerry said in a deep-voiced Southern drawl. "We don't get many visitors here, Mr. Wayne. I was just eating lunch. I hope you won't mind me gettin' back to it."
"Not at all, not at all."
"Yeah, Jerry, I was just gonna show him around." Erin said, and she noticed for the first time that her voice returned to its Carolina roots when she spoke with her colleague and friend. She wondered if Wayne had noticed. She tried to keep her voice in its normal, professional tone as she talked about her search for the antitoxin/anti-steroid combination that would work against Hound.
"I finally realized that a previously created antitoxin wouldn't work in combination, so I had to go looking for the toxin that would."
"The toxin?"
"Yes. You know, like poisonous snakebites are treated with an antitoxin made from the poison itself. Same idea."
"So you created a new antitoxin." Does he sound impressed?
"Well, almost. I'm not done yet – I still can't get it to work quite right with the anti-steroid. Though now it's just a matter of finding the right formula, the right chemical balance."
Wayne wandered over to her desk, where she had stacked papers and news clippings of Bane, and three spiral notebooks. He opened the one on top. The date read January 3, two weeks ago.
"That's my first notebook," Erin said from behind him. "The one I'm using now is over here," she said, walking to the lab counter and picking it up. She showed him yesterday's work – a list of twelve of the toxins she'd tried, and at the bottom, the last one was circled.
"But this isn't the only thing I do, you understand," she said carefully as he scanned the page. "I still work with the astronomers upstairs, and I do tours…"
"I think," he said, "that this needs to be priority. Don't you agree?"
She nodded.
"Hound is killing more people every night. The sooner we can stop him, the better." He looked at her intently. "How much work have you done on this? Is anyone else working with you?"
She shook her head. "It's just me and Jerry. My boss didn't think it would be a good idea for us to openly announce that we're working for the Batman, so the less people who know about it…"
A grim smile appeared on Wayne's face. "Would you mind working on this full time? I'll talk to your boss."
"Not at all. It should take only two more days to complete if I'm working only on it. Maybe less, if I get lucky." Erin calculated in her head, thinking, I'll finish it tonight, probably, unless I'm going completely in the wrong direction…
"Perfect." He glanced at his watch. "Three-fifty. I've got to run, meeting at four."
She told herself that she wasn't disappointed to see him go. "Okay. Glad you… glad I could show you around."
He said, "Aren't there about… let's see… eight more floors to inspect?"
She smiled. "Something like that."
"Raincheck?"
"Anytime."
He practically ran down the hall to the elevator, and she watched him from the doorway. I will not sigh, she told herself. He's not that hot. After the elevator doors closed, she turned around and went back inside the lab.
"Alright, Erin, let's finish this thing." Jerry said. "Young lady, you look like you been sunburned. You feelin' okay?"
"I'm fine, Jerry," she said shortly, ignoring his low chuckle. "Hand me two grad cylinders, would you?"