When I woke up, I was in a hospital. There were people around and they made noises. It wasn't lonely anymore. A few bed bays down a screaming toddler was having a blood test. There was a kid in the next bay in traction with a shattered leg. He was playing a videogame.
I didn't see much else because I felt so exhausted my head dropped straight back onto the pillow. I closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep but the stupid toddler was screaming to loudly. It was only a pinprick for god's sake! Mind you, I'm one to talk. I screwed my knee just to avoid being stuck with an IV, which I ended up having later anyway. Lucky me.
I couldn't sleep. Since when did hospital beds become less comfy than the cardboard box I was used to? I tried to turnover, but then my chest reminded me movement was out of the question.
"Aaah!" I moaned and swore quietly under my breath.
The boy next door called the nurse. She came and checked on me and scolded me for moving. Then she asked me some questions.
"What's your name, little one?"
"Jade"
"Full name?" she asked, looking at the file on the end of my bed.
"Jade Anne Smith."
"Says Camden here." She said
"That's wrong." I whispered. I couldn't have anyone know my real name. She gave me a look like I didn't know anything.
"Are you sure?" She said
"Yes."
"How many fingers am I holding up?" she asked absent-mindedly while she checked my chest wasn't bleeding.
"Three."
"Good girl. Are you in pain?"
Nu-Duh! Lady!
"Yes."
"I'll up your morphine a little. See how you do."
She gave me a huge toothy smile. I guess it was meant to be encouraging. Oh well, she was trying to be nice. It was better than having some old hag look after me. She was friendlier than Batman anyway. At least on the outside.
I smiled back, but it probably looked more like a grimace. She made some notes on my chart and walked off.
I tried to go to sleep again but the toddler still hadn't stopped screaming.
It was going to be a long day.
About four hours of hell later I had visitors. Two policemen had come to see me. Great.
Charges dropped, my arse.
Actually, there wasn't even a mention of it, even when I tried to bring it up. I tried to bring up batman as well, but that was dismissed too.
These cops had one purpose. They were telling me I was going to a children's home until I was fully recovered, then I would be put up for adoption. First I had to get better though, they said. The reason they were there was to make sure I didn't try and run for my life.
Children's home. I wasn't stupid. This was Gotham. Children's homes suck.
It was two weeks later.
I had been out of hospital for six days. I was meant to have physiotherapy every day according to the woman who had looked after me in Batman's lair. I'd had physiotherapy in hospital and it hadn't been fun to say the least. My bed had been tilted so I was upside down and they rolled me onto my stomach. Then the physiotherapist had started smacking my back in a way that was probably meant to dislodge gunk from my lungs. It did. I choked twice in the first session and ended up vomiting. My back was sore from being pounded and I couldn't speak for hours afterwards without coughing. I hated it. But it was that or have my lungs scarred for life.
When I had come to the children's home my daily dosage of antibiotics mysteriously went down to half. I hoped it was because I was getting better. I was wrong. There was no physiotherapy and my lungs were seizing up. I woke up in the middle of the night panting because I couldn't breathe and I could hardly make it downstairs for meals.
I knew then that I wasn't getting better. The other kids hated me because I kept them awake with my coughing. I didn't mean to, I just couldn't help it.
I hated being sick and I hated medicine and I despised the physiotherapy I'd had in hospital, but I realized it was better than being sick forever. Being unable to do anything truly sucked.
I had to find out what had happened and why I wasn't getting better.
I asked the lady who runs the home when my doctor's checkup was. She looked at me as if I was an alien. I asked her about the physio and got the same response. She didn't even talk to me about, but sniffed and walked off for a smoke.
It was like when they cut off my hair.
When they picked me up from the hospital it was a matted mess and rather than shampoo it and sort it out they shaved my head. They weren't very gentle about it either. I had scratches all over my scalp and they'd yelled at me when I told them I just wanted to brush it. I felt like crying but I didn't. It was just hair, it wasn't alive or anything, right? It wasn't a part of me?
I coughed for hours because I couldn't cry. Every sob was a cough.
That night I decided to see what my record was.
Every child in the home had an electronic record. It contained their background information, medical file and a character assessment for anyone looking to adopt. It also contained instructions on the child's individual needs and schooling.
I needed to find mine and have a look at the instructions. I didn't trust these people. I had a feeling mine had been tampered with.
Batman sat in his cave. He was almost bored. The Joker had been returned to Arkham Asylum when Batman had caught him robbing a bank. He'd seemed subdued. He guessed it was because his joker gas was now useless and now he didn't have the money to develop a new one.
Batman sighed. He'd tucked Dick into bed after hard days training. He didn't even have any paperwork to do as Bruce Wayne. How could the CEO of a city's main company run out of paperwork? How could a vigilante of Gotham run out of crime?
It had never happened before.
He contented himself with updating his files on his computer before patrol. That actually didn't take him very long. He could move all the stuff back into the med bay, but he had a feeling Alfred may already have done.
He checked anyway. He could save the old man some heavy lifting.
Everything had been put back and the beds lay sheetless and sterile. Something niggled at his mind. He tried not to think about the fact that he'd almost killed a young girl. She'd collapsed in his arms and he'd thought she'd been playing dead until she started turning blue. But she was all right. Perfectly safe and sound. Safe anyway. Probably. Maybe. In a children's home with other kids her own age. She was probably fine. Maybe.
Then it hit him. He'd meant to check up on her. He could do that before patrol.
He typed Jade Camdem into his computer program and began looking through public records and health records, even the police records. Nothing came up but an old police file from Australia detailing the disappearance of people close to the Camdem family. Eventually the father, Ben, was found to be a serial killer. Batman frowned at this. Not a happy situation. This couldn't be her family could it?
He managed to call up a picture of the family from a local newspaper. It was very bad quality. There was a mother and father and two children. One was a little boy who looked about seven. The kid hadn't been able to keep still so there was a motion blur all around him as he rushed to hug the smaller child. Bruce was reminded strongly of Dick.
The smaller child was a two-year-old girl with red hair. She was clinging to the leg of her father's pants and looking at the camera with blind terror on her face. Or at least, she might have been. It was hard to tell. The parents were smiling but it looked very forced, even with the bad photo quality. There was something about the mothers forced smile that was disturbing. Like she was trying to hide her eyes behind her cheeks. The photograph was very bad quality and there wasn't very much he could do to improve it. That's all he could surmise from it.
It didn't look like the girl but he couldn't really tell. Besides, she had red hair and red hair didn't change color as the owner grew up so she couldn't be the blonde girl he'd had in the cave. Then he noticed something. The mother had brown hair but the father had black. Wasn't red hair a dominant gene? How could you have red hair if only one of your parents had it? The boy had red hair too. How was that possible? Had the mother fooled around? Were the children adopted?
They were all viable theories but the family still looked related. The kids and father were definitely family. The shapes of the faces were too similar. The father and son were instantly recognisable as related.
It occurred to him that this was an investigation for another time.
He needed to find out where the girl had gotten to. He found her police records, the ones he gave Gordon but after that everything trace seemed to vanish.
An idea occurred to him. He limited his search to records that had been edited in the last month and in Gotham. He changed the name to Jade Smith.
He got two hits; a hospital record and a child welfare services record.
She'd changed her name again. He wondered why. Why was she hiding?
He looked at the records.
Something wasn't right he could feel it. This kid was trouble; he'd known it since he'd laid eyes on her. Something was wrong.
Then he realized. The CWS record said absolutely nothing about her hospital record, yet she'd been picked up from the hospital by the children's home.
How could they miss something like that? She'd had a life threatening illness that might well affect her for the rest of her life and it was skipped over. In fact, other than her name, age and appearance it said nothing about her. Her medical record was completely missing from CWS. They didn't even list her allergy to penicillin.
Batman smelt a rat. He'd go visit this Children's Home tonight.
