Chapter 25: This Thing a Quiet Madness Made

ARGUS director Iman Avesta knew there was but one rule in the insane world in which she lived.

If you don't have a body, then the body's not dead.

But Iman also knew that that rule was bogus. People fall into oceans and rivers all the time without their corpses being recovered, only for a huge shark or a catfish to be caught twenty years later with undigested femurs and wrist watches found in their digestive tracts. Getting a Disney death like falling into a body of water just meant that that body was subject to even more gruesome indignities after the fact.

She wondered whether or not anything short of some undiscovered leviathan from the ocean floor could even put a dent in the body of a half-human, half-Kryptonian like Conner Kent.

Superman was dead, and Iman Avesta had a splitting headache.

Iman was in the passenger's seat of a black Cadillac sedan, electric of course, at the tail end of her trip from Washington DC to Gotham City, with her assistant, a tall and handsome drink of water named Agent Dan Silvestri behind the wheel.

The trip had been silent. There was only one person on this earth that Iman was in the mood to talk to. And it was a bad mood, indeed.

The Cadillac went over a couple of bridges to get to the coordinates that Iman had been given: an old meat processing plant on Bleake Island.

Iman emerged from the Cadillac, breathed in the stale piss stench of Gotham City by twilight, and entered the old plant through the front door.

The main factory floor, bereft of its former machinery, was beneath a skylight, through which the red glow of twilight fell. Agent Silvestri scanned the area as Iman stood in the center. Iman had been expecting the smell of stale, rotten meat. She thanked Christ for small favors when all she got was mildew and dust.

"I'm not getting anyone in the area," Agent Silvestri said.

"And you wouldn't," said Iman, before she cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled:

"Get your ass out here, Cassandra!"

She felt a finger tap on her left shoulder. She turned, and there stood Black Bat.

Iman Avesta lost her hearing in the line as an agent, tortured by the Sunshine Patriot with sonic blasts. The hearing aids she had were scary strong… and they nonetheless did not detect Black Bat's movements.

"Jesus," said Agent Silvestri, who apparently didn't hear her coming either.

Iman glared at Black Bat and said "Take that fucking mask off."

Black Bat simply said "No." Iman could detect a thickness in her voice.

Iman glowered, rubbed her face, and folded her arms.

"Do you know how hard it is to scrub Youtube videos and Instagram posts of an event that took place in as big a city as Gotham?" she asked. "I have two STAR Labs workers in a tent on the outskirts of the city, and I'm waiting on presidential approval for the administration of amnestics. President Dibny's office itself needs to call me and tell me whether or not it's okay to wipe the memories of two working stiffs. So I have that to look forward to."

Iman huffed and put her hands in her pockets.

"Do you have… any fucking clue… how destabilizing it's going to be for America in general and the world at large to find out that Superman died? How big the power vacuum's gonna be? How emboldened enemies at home and abroad are gonna get? Yeah, sure, we have Superwoman, we have Power Girl, we have the Superkids, we still have Kong Kenan over in China, but it's Superman . He means something. And now he's gone."

She took a step toward Black Bat.

"And it happened in your town," Iman said. "On your watch. Amanda Waller had about three phone books worth of files on Bruce, you, and everyone else in this foul-smelling shitshow of a town that ever wore a mask and punched a bad guy, and she was champing at the bit to bring this whole thing down. Now Amanda Waller wasn't the best person on Earth, but even an evil, broken clock is still right twice a day."

Iman took a deep breath, and put her hands on her hips.

"My best agent, and the world's greatest symbol died, and you couldn't stop it. So tell me why I shouldn't blacksite your worthless ass."

Black Bat tilted her head. Her voice came out in a whisper.

"Your mouth is bigger than your stomach."

Iman chuckled. "What, you think I came alone? Knock out as many of my guys as you want. Uncle Sam will be more than happy to send more."

Black Bat said nothing to this.

Instead, she slowly reached into her utility belt, and pulled out a small black box, big enough for an engagement ring.

"What's that?" Iman asked.

"The Shadow Density Bullet," Black Bat whispered. "That's why… you… sent him here, wasn't it?"

Iman's insides started boiling. She had given thought to the prospect that, were it not for her orders, Conner Kent would not have been in Gotham City, and he would not have died… but she didn't want Cassandra Wayne thinking about that.

But she stuffed her indignation back down, and reached for the box…

...only for Black Bat to pull it away at the last second.

"What do you say?" Black Bat whispered.

"'Please.'"

"What else?"

"Your autonomy is secure," Iman said, grimacing. "If anyone from up top fucks with you, I wasn't behind it."

Black Bat brought the box back down, and Iman took it. She opened it up, and there was the bullet she'd sent Agent Kent here to find.

"Director Avesta?" Agent Silvestri said, his hand to his ear piece.

She looked at him. "What is it?"

"Word's come down from President Dibny," he said. "Your request for the administration of amnestics has been denied."

Iman looked down at her feet. "Fuck…"

She looked over at Black Bat…

...only to see that she had vanished. Her hearing aids didn't pick that up either.

"Wow," said Agent Silvestri.

Iman had to wonder if Alex Danvers over at the DEO had to put up with shit like this. Or Ava Sharpe at the Time Bureau. Did they have to deal with the Bats?

"I try not to call women bitches," Iman said. "Solidarity, and all… But God damn, y'know?"

WAYNE MANOR

Stephanie Brown, along with Harper Row, Aaliyah Ramsay, and Carrie Kelley, were standing at the main door in the foyer of Wayne Manor, looking out through the side windows.

At the open gates of the manor outside, two figures stood, silhouetted by the moon trying to bust through the clouds. One, small and female, looking up at the other, burly and male, with his head down.

As the Head Bat in Gotham, it was Cassandra Wayne's painful duty to inform Clark Kent that the man he had looked upon as a brother, Conner Kent, had died in her city.

"I wish we could hear what they were saying," Carrie said.

"No," said Stephanie. "You really don't."

"This old hat for you?" Aaliyah asked. "Telling superheroes their loved ones died?"

Stephanie shook her head.

"I haven't told any myself," said Harper, "but I've been to more than my fair share of funerals. You're looking at a veteran of the Battle of Founders Island. Steph, you remember when Wildcat broke down during Stargirl's eulogy?"

Stephanie did. "Jesus. That was painful."

"I don't think I could do it," Aaliyah said. "If staying out of a costume means not having to do what Cass is doing now, then that's fine."

"Not being in a costume doesn't protect you from it," Stephanie said. "You know that, right?"

"Yeah, but the odds go down," Aaliyah said. "I don't think I have it in me to break it to a universal icon that his brother just died. I'm just a simple girl from North Carolina."

"And Cass is just a simple girl from Arkansas. And he's just a simple boy from Kansas. Moral of the story here being, no one's just anything."

Stephanie looked back out the window in the brief lull of silence that followed. She realized she'd been making the mistake of placing the weight of the grief in this situation on Clark. It only now dawned on her that Cassandra was breaking the news that the only man she had ever loved had died on her watch, and she couldn't stop it, no matter how hard she had tried.

And that just made Stephanie feel worse.

Cassandra Cain had started in as deep a hole as Stephanie was able to conceive. And through work, determination, smarts, stubbornness, and even her fair share of ego, she had worked her way out.

Those slender shoulders of Cassandra's were strong. But something had to break them in the end. Stephanie hoped to God it wasn't this.

"Speak for yourself," Carrie said. "Cape life rules. I'm not giving it up for anything."

"You wanna be the next Black Bat?" Aaliyah asked.

"Hell no. I plan on being the first eighty-year-old Robin."

"Life has a habit of getting in the way," Harper said. "Marriage. Kids. So speak slowly."

Stephanie saw Carrie furrow her brow. "You were married, right?" Carrie asked.

"Once upon a time," said Harper.

"Is it true the wedding ring goes on the ring finger because the ring finger has a vein that goes directly to the heart?"

Aaliyah looked at Carrie as though she ducked her head beneath a salad bar sneeze guard to sneeze directly on the lettuce.

"They're veins, Carrie. They all go directly to the heart."

Carrie blinked a couple of times, and put a hand to her head. "Oh my God."

"What is it?" Stephanie asked.

"Naw," Carrie said. "It's just… you ever learn something so obvious, and you know it shouldn't affect you, but it kind of fucks with your day anyway?"

"No," Stephanie said. "I don't."

Carrie nodded, and said "Did you know the plural of 'beef' is 'beeves?'"

Stephanie did not, in fact, know that the plural of "Beef" was "Beeves." She had been saying "Beefs" all thirty-three years of her life, like some damnable shit-smeared peasant. It was obvious, she knew it shouldn't affect her, but it kind of fucked with her day anyway.

"I'm sorry," Carrie said. "We should, uh… We should be serious right now."

Stephanie did not want to be serious. Stephanie wanted to be in a situation where they could dissect the ins and outs of the English language, free from the vast and all-consuming specter that was the death of Superman. As far as Stephanie Brown was concerned, Carrie Kelley could be a dumb-assed teenager all she wanted right now.

She didn't hear Violet Paige come up behind them, but there she was all the same. She tapped Harper on the shoulder of her blue t-shirt.

Harper looked at her. "Yeah, Violet?"

In a spectacle that Stephanie thought she would never see during her natural life, Violet looked down right sheepish. She was slightly shifting from one foot to the other, and twiddling her thumbs.

"Harper, I, uhh… I need your help with something."

Harper and Violet found Tim Drake in his old room in the East Wing, pulling a Jay Gatsby, looking out the window at nothing.

In his hand was a bottle of Bud Light.

What worried Harper was that, during the fifteen years she had known her ex-husband, he had never once touched a drop of alcohol.

But then again, it was Bud Light, which was basically a version of O'Doul's with a snotty attitude that consistently asked you if you knew who its father was.

"Hey," Harper said.

"Hey," said Tim, not even deigning to look at her. "I almost killed a guy today… So…"

"You, uhh… You wanna talk about that?"

Tim shook his head. "What is it Bruce always liked to say? None of us are perfect, but we're imperfect in different ways? Cass stopped me in the nick of time. I'm grateful. It won't happen again now that I know what it looks like, but…"

From the looks of things, Tim didn't even have a way to finish that sentence. He just shrugged.

"You're drinking," Harper said.

Only now did Tim avert his gaze from the window. He looked at the brown bottle of beer in his hand.

"I always told Conner the only time I'd ever crack one open was at his wedding," he said. "Looks like that's not happening now."

A moment of silence. "I called the rest of Young Justice," Tim said. "Anita took it well. Jinny and Bart didn't. And Cassie's not answering her phone."

"I'm sorry," Harper said. "He was my friend too, but I know you two were tighter. Hell, you were tighter with him sometimes that you were with me, and I'm your ex-wife."

"Some things you can only do with your friends," Tim said. "To quote the great Roy Harper."

"Tell her what you told me," Violet said. Harper looked at her.

"Tell me what?"

"Something stinks about this," Tim said, finally turning around to look his ex-wife in the face. "Something's off in a way I can't quite fathom. And it's driving me fucking nuts."

"We have a mole," Violet said.

Harper looked at her in terror. "What?"

"They came in through the Batcave," Violet said. "They had to have access codes for some unhackable entry ways to do it. Only way it could have happened is if someone in this house gave 'em to them."

"I'm past the mole," said Tim.

"How the fuck can you be past the mole?" Harper asked. "I just found out about it, like, right now."

"Why aren't any of the rest of us dead?" Tim asked. "Besides Conner, why are we still alive? We were all right here? It was a shooting gallery, but the Arkham Knight's men rolled in non-lethal and opted to knock us all out? Why?"

Harper had to think about it. "The mole could be anonymous. Going on a killing spree could get rid of the one source of info Ra's and the Arkham Knight have."

"Okay," said Tim, "but the mole could have just as easily arranged not to be here when the Knight's guys struck. Astrid popped you, Violet, to make a statement. They got Dick to demoralize us, and they got Conner to show us that even the strongest of us aren't safe. That kind of planning… I don't know."

Tim took another pull off of his bottle of weak, pissy beer. The very act, to Harper, seemed unnatural. Like a humming bird trying to saw off its own wings.

"And here's another thing," Tim said. "Why aren't the Supers tearing this town apart trying to find the Arkham Knight? She killed Conner. They have a vested interest, and they're not here."

"They're not like us," Violet said. "They don't do shit like that."

"You haven't been in contact with them a whole lot, have you?" Tim asked. "See, we call ourselves 'The Batfamily,' but we're not. It's a loaded term. None of us are related by blood, and only four among us have ever been related by marriage."

"Just two now," said Harper.

"Right," Tim said. "And just three of us by adoption. But the Supers? They actually are a family. They share blood, and they're not here."

"Cass is out front giving the bad news to Clark," Violet said. "Could be, she's asking him to keep the rest of the family out of Gotham."

"That'd work on Jon and Lara, him being their dad and all," Tim said. "Work on Kara, too. Karen Starr, though? No fucking way. Power Girl would zip from Wyoming to here, start leveling buildings, and she would not be shy about it."

Harper remembered Tim saying that apart from Conner, Karen "Power Girl" Starr was his favorite of the earthbound Kryptonians. To which Harper had replied that with the boom-booms Karen packed, she was her favorite too.

"When I became a PI," Tim said, "I thought I could just rely on the facts and evidence that presented themselves. Only for me to find out that most of this work is gut feelings. I hate those. I need everything measurable. It's a flaw of mine. I try not to say cliched detective shit, I really do, but…"

The private investigator stood in the bedroom of the billionaire's country mansion, which was full of suspects in a murder investigation, and said:

"I suspect… even fouler play."

The conversation between Cassandra and Clark out at the front of Wayne Manor seemed to be winding down.

And Stephanie Brown still would have given everything she owned to be able to hear it, while still fearing it at the same time.

She could see the burly silhouette of Clark Kent turn away from Cassandra. Stephanie could see him put his hand to his face and bend over, placing his other hand on his knee.

The symbol of kindness and decency the world over was partaking in a display of raw grief.

The words just oozed out of Stephanie's mouth. "Oh my Gawwwwwwwwd."

"I know," Carrie said. "This, uh… This really hurts to watch."

But Clark eventually took his hand away from his face, stood up straight, and flew off. Leaving Cassandra to walk up the gravel driveway to Wayne Manor's main entrance in what must have been the loneliest trek of her young life.

"Okay," Stephanie said to Aaliyah and Carrie. "Back up and look natural. Don't crowd her. Don't even look at her."

Carrie and Aaliyah did what they were told. They sat on a bench in the corner of the foyer and started watching something on Carrie's phone as Cassandra opened the front door.

She stood seemingly shrunken before Stephanie, and Cassandra was already small to begin with. Her cheeks were puffy and slick. Her eyes were red.

Stephanie just looked at her for a moment before she asked "Do you need to talk right now?"

Cassandra looked back at Stephanie and said, in a watery voice, "No."

Then she walked past Stephanie to the interior of the mansion. Stephanie followed.

"Where are you going?"

"Patrolling."

"Do you really think you should be alone right now?"

"Yes."

"Can't you just talk to me?"

"No."

Stephanie stopped, and let Cassandra go to the study to go down into the Batcave. Clearly she wasn't going to get anywhere like this.

An entirely new tack was required.

Stephanie found Selina Wayne sitting cross-legged on a couch in one of the corner living rooms, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a gray t-shirt, playing the positively ancient video game Doom on a holographic television set.

She knew that this was the only acceptable way anything was getting shot in this house. Provided, of course, that one was not the butler.

And from the look in Selina's eyes, it was apparent that she had some aggression of her own to work off. Hence the exploding demons.

"I need a favor," Stephanie said.

"Is this favor Cassandra-related?"

"Yes."

Selina hit pause on her game. "Then favor granted."

Stephanie felt Selina's green eyes bore into her.

"Be there for her," Selina said. "She's the Bat in Gotham. Not being able to stop Superman getting killed isn't a good look, and she knows it. Be there for her in any way you can."

Stephanie knew where this was going. "Cass and I… mutually… decided we should just be friends."

Selina raised her fool-spotting eyebrow. "Mutually?"

Stephanie nodded.

Selina facepalmed. "For fuck's sake, Steph…"

Bruce was at the Batcomputer down in the cave when Cassandra came down in the elevator. He swiveled the chair around to see her, and saw the state she was in.

"Would you like to talk?" Bruce asked.

"No," she said, and immediately went to the lockers in another room within the cave.

Bruce had been here before. Having something or someone taken from him, and from the bottom of that dark well, seeing the only remedy for his ails as righteous violence in costume.

He wanted to be the one who broke the news about Conner to Clark, but Cassandra had insisted. She was the Bat in Gotham, so it was on her. And in the midst of the darkness, suspicion, and grief on multiple fronts, Bruce was amazed that he could still find the time to have an unalloyed pride in his daughter.

Black Bat came back out of the locker room, and went to the Batmobile.

"Do I need to tell you that using your fists to work through inner pain is unhealthy, and I've been in therapy for fifteen years now to get rid of the damage that it's done?" Bruce asked.

"You just did," Black Bat said. "I'm late for work."

Into the Batmobile she went, and off she drove into the night.

Bruce sighed. It was one thing to tell her, but some things she just may have to learn on her own.

He went back to his work at the computer, investigating the different uses for the chemical amplification reagent that the Squires had stolen from the STAR Labs truck.

The telltale metal shudder of the elevator going back up to the study, and coming back down. The tentative padding of sneakers on concrete.

Bruce had a talent for telling the people in his life merely by the sounds their shoes made on the Batcave floor.

"What can I do for you, Barbara?" he asked without turning around.

"The stuff they stole from that truck," Barbara said. "What does it do?"

"It bonds with existing chemicals to create a bigger yield," Bruce said. "It's still in the test phases, but it'll work wonders for pesticides, flame retardants, you name it."

"Venom," Barbara said. "What about Venom?"

Bruce swiveled yet again in the chair to look at her. She had her arms crossed, staring at the screen of the Batcomputer intently.

The Great Gotham Team-Up twenty-one years ago had been the last great hurrah of Barbara Gordon's Batgirl. And in the twenty-one years since that night, the experimental venom that Bane had brought into the country (that Catwoman subsequently stole, and then lost) hadn't been recovered.

Though Barbara had risen to stellar heights (and from a point of severe physical disadvantage, no less) that she could not have even conceived of as Batgirl, he could tell in the intervening years that losing the Venom, and losing the fight with Catwoman in the sewers, still stuck in her craw.

He decided to humor her.

Bruce turned back around, and ran the chemical amplification agent against the formula for the experimental venom that had been puttering around in the banks of the Batcomputer for over two decades now.

"It'll bond," Bruce said. "But we have problems."

"Name them."

"The first is that because of the organic material found in Venom, it's the only chemical steroid I know of that can go bad and spoil," Bruce said. "It was volatile to begin with, but now? It'll cause homicidal insanity. Which rules the Arkham Knight and Ra's al Ghul using it on their men right out. They'll tear each other apart."

"What if they don't want to use it on their Squires?" Barbara asked. "What if they want to use it on the city?"

"Then we have a couple of problems with dispersal," Bruce said. "The first is that there isn't a way to dose great whacks of the city at the same time."

"Yes there is," Barbara said. "The monorail test run the day after tomorrow. It runs around the entire city. Great time to use it."

"Which brings us to our second problem," Bruce said. "There's a problem with viscosity. Once the Venom bonds with the chemical amplification reagent, it'll turn into a gel. It'll be too thick to spread. Each dispersal vector would have to be roughly the size of a human pore, but with three quarters the elasticity."

"What can do that?"

"Nothing," Bruce said. "Not even WayneTech is that good, and WayneTech is great. No such technology to disperse the Venom and reagent compound exists. Nor will it exist for another twenty years."

The cave lapsed into silence, until finally Barbara said:

"We have a mole."

Bruce closed his eyes. "The thought had occurred to me."

"I have suspects."

"Name them."

"Stephanie," Barbara said.

Bruce opened his eyes and shook his head. "She's been back after fourteen years, but she has no motive and no means."

"You think with all the galavanting across the planet she's done for the past decade and a half, she wouldn't have run across the League?"

"Doubtful," Bruce said. "The League's been keeping a low profile, playing the long game for just this occasion. Plus, she'd have needed access to the Batcave's entrances. She's out."

"Okay," Barbara said. "How about Cullen?"

Bruce turned to her. "Seriously?"

"He had access," Barbara said.

"But no motive."

"Working for a billionaire is motive in and of itself."

"If he wanted us dead, he would have poisoned us," Bruce said. "There are easier ways for a butler to commit mass murder than working with a centuries-old guild of assassins."

Barbara looked down at the floor when she said "Jason."

Bruce's mind had been leaning that way for hours now. There was a motive, sure. Jason Todd hated Bruce Wayne, and it was not beyond him to wish to destroy everything he had ever touched.

He had taken a vow never to raise a hand in anger or duty, and contacting Ra's al Ghul to do the dirty work for him would be a great way to bypass it.

During that heated monologue he had delivered in Bruce's bedroom yesterday, he had said that he had snuck past Wayne Manor's perimeter defences to sneak into the mausoleum on the rear grounds. If he could do that, he could find a way around the Batcave's passcodes, right?

And yet...

During that profane soliloquy, he said that Ra's and the Arkham Knight would not think of sparing him, passive observer or no. And the one thing Bruce could remember thinking while Jason was yelling at him was that Jason wasn't lying.

"No," Bruce said. "It's not him."

"How can you be sure?"

"He doesn't fit."

Barbara turned almost as red as her hair. She brushed a bit of it from between her glasses and her eye when she asked "Okay, who do you think it is?"

Bruce's mind danced about motive and fact, theory and evidence, before he gave voice to the only possible conclusion.

"No one."

Barbara's green eyes flared. "What?"

"No one under this roof betrayed me," Bruce said. "Either Ra's wants us to think there's a mole, or there's some mitigating factor we haven't found out yet. Either way, I don't believe we have a mole problem."

Barbara just… blinked. She was caught in a rictus of her own apoplexy.

"You… don't… believe…?"

Then she threw up her hands and exploded.

"What the fuck happened to you?" she seethed with all of the apparent poison in her body. "What happened to the guy who thought no one was above reproach or suspicion? What happened to the guy who yelled at me, and Dick, and Jason and called us all failures every time we screwed up the tiniest thing? And now you don't believe? WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO BATMAN?"

Bruce had always had a frosty relationship with Barbara even at the best of times. This was decidedly not such an instance. And he was fairly sure she'd been saving this one up for decades now.

"I'm not Batman anymore," Bruce said. "It's not my job."

"And if it were your job, we wouldn't be in this situation to begin with."

Bruce knew where this was going. And he was sincerely shocked to hear it coming from, of all people, Barbara Gordon.

"We lost Dick Grayson six years before he left this earth because we had faith in Cassandra," Bruce said. "You and I both."

"And we were wrong," Barbara said. This seemed to still her. Seemed to ebb away her anger. But it was only replaced with shame.

"Cass is every last bit a daughter to me as she is to you," Barbara said. "It kills me to say it, but it needs to be said. She can't do it. She can't be the Bat in Gotham. We lost Nightwing and Superman in this city, on our watch, and if you were still wearing that costume, we wouldn't have. There's no coming back from this."

Barbara took a step forward. "Suit up, Bruce. Be Batman again. Your city needs you."

Bruce slowly swiveled to look at his old costume in the display case among the old Robin and Batgirl outfits.

In the name of that cape, of that cowl, of that symbol, he chose the path of never-ceasing torment and never-ending misery for the sake of protecting his home. And in so doing, through his vigilance and paranoia he had, at one time or another, alienated every last person who had ever been in a position to care about him. In some cases even irreparably, as he had evidently done with Barbara, if the current outburst was any indicator.

For the past six years, he had thought of not being Batman as though he had willingly sacrificed a limb. Every cell in his body had screamed to put the armor back on and continue his crusade, even if it meant the cycle of sadness and alienation would continue.

And now, when no one would judge him for suiting up and lending a hand, even in a supporting capacity… he just couldn't do it.

He looked back at Barbara, and said "No."

The entirety of Barbara Gordon's body seemed to sour with contempt, before she turned and walked away.

"I'm going back to the Clock Tower," she said, frost in her voice. "It's not safe here. And it's not smart, either."

She got to the elevator, stopped, and turned around. Now she just looked sad.

"If Dick were Batman, he'd still be alive," she said. "You know I'm right."

ARKHAM ASYLUM

Astrid Arkham knew energy drinks were deeply unhealthy.

But she killed Superman today.

She could have a treat.

Astrid decided to have her can of Monster beneath the faucet of the open tile shower in the same wing as the morgue in which she slept. Being the leader had its perks, and she claimed this entire wing for her own.

She took a swig as the hot water cascaded down her scarred flesh. She stared into the steam at nothing in particular.

Astrid had studied all her life at the feet of The Demon, and while the great Ra's al Ghul praised her mind, he had also said that her biggest problem was impulsiveness.

And she could see where the man was coming from.

She jumped into the Gotham City operation with both feet, planting missile installations across the city just on the off-chance that one of them might take out Mother Panic on her glider. That had panned out, much to her surprise, but it was only with the intervention of her Mystery Caller that a deeper plan began to take shape. One of demoralization and fear.

Astrid wished to meet this Mystery Caller of hers. Hear their story. Share in their hatred.

However the Mystery Caller hadn't made contact since before the death of Conner Kent. So she was left to her own devices yet again.

But what devices they were. One in particular stuck out to Astrid.

The Squires had intercepted an inter-office City Hall email stating that Selina Wayne would be on her way to the building tomorrow morning to answer some of Mayor Alysia Yeoh's questions.

No doubt her husband would accompany her, for moral support if for nothing else.

And Astrid did put a tracker on that shitty pick-up truck of Bruce's before she left Wayne Manor today.

In the best of all possible scenarios, Astrid would save her mother's murderer for last. To flay the flesh from his bones in front of his ruined city, the heads of his pitiful makeshift family on pikes with their eyes gouged out.

Then again…

Astrid Arkham took another swig of amped up, sugary garbage beneath the hot water of the asylum shower.

She was feeling impulsive.