Chapter 29: You Just Pissed Away Elysium

THE THOMAS WAYNE MEMORIAL CLINIC

Whatever God he could thank for small favors, Bruce Wayne finally stopped leaking from the face before he got to the clinic.

He walked through the entrance to see Talia and David Hyde in the waiting area. His face was still bandaged, but he had at least graduated to the wheelchair stage of his convalescence.

Talia tilted her head, the malevolent poltergeist of a smile on her face.

"How many have my father and Astrid taken from you now, Bruce?" she asked. "I… seem to have lost count."

Bruce gave her a glare, before he walked into the private care ward.

Barbara was in bed in hospital scrubs, her face the shape, color, and texture of a blackberry. Her neck was in a brace, and both of her legs were in casts.

Black Canary was pacing back and forth in front of the bed. An unmasked Huntress was leaning against the far wall, staring off into space.

Cassandra was standing right next to Barbara's bed in a black leather jacket, a black turtleneck, and black slacks. And though the horrifying spectacle of what had been done to Barbara Gordon was right next to her, Bruce, for the life of him, could not take his eyes off of the expression on his daughter's face.

Because Cassandra Wayne was furious.

Not upset. Not scared. Not sad.

Furious.

So furious that she did not notice the intermittent dirty looks that Dinah Lance-Choi was sending her way.

As Cassandra Cain began her career as Orphan. Barbara Gordon set her up with a series of sparring bouts. One of which was against Black Canary.

Black Canary, the formidable martial artist enlightened in every discipline from Krav Maga to Mongrovian Karate, got destroyed in ten minutes while mustering next to no effective offense. But while others would take this sound and utter defeat personally, Dinah Lance extended a branch of friendship to the young Cassandra. Dinah took her abilities so seriously that every defeat offered her the opportunity to learn something.

These warm feelings that Dinah had for Cassandra, however, turned cold upon the defeat of Lady Shiva by Black Bat. For Dinah had been trained by Shiva, even though their attitudes toward taking lives differed, to put it mildly.

Black Canary's relationship with Lady Shiva was a fraught and complicated one, but Dinah was of the mind that Shiva deserved a more worthy defeat than the late Conner Kent going upside the back of her head at eighty miles an hour.

Dinah didn't understand. And Cassandra didn't understand why Dinah didn't understand. Thus, the friendship ended.

But what Cassandra had done for Bruce that morning was still on his mind. Beneath the canopy of concern for Barbara Gordon, he walked to his daughter, and hugged her as tightly as he dared.

"What's that for?" Cassandra asked, slightly marble-mouthed.

"I'll tell you later," Bruce said.

And then he broke the hug.

"Remember the Venom from the Great Gotham Team-Up?" Cassandra asked. "I read about it. Barrels of Venom under the city for God knows how many years."

"Yeah?"

"Well… Ra's has it now."

Bruce closed his eyes and sighed. It seemed that Barbara was right, and he was planning to use the chemical amplification reagent that the Arkham Knight boosted from the STAR Labs truck yesterday to combine with the twenty-year-old stale experimental Venom.

Which meant he must have had a way to disperse it.

But how?

"Then you're just going to have to stop him, now aren't you?"

He sensed, by how she was carrying herself, that at least a small portion of the weight had been lifted from her shoulders. This marked the first time in his fifty-one years of existence that the words of Bruce Wayne had ever successfully been used to aid in the emotional well-being of another human being.

For this, he was proud.

He patted her on the shoulder, walked to the wall, and his eyes caught Helena Bertinelli.

She had come from a mafia family. At the age of eight, everyone in the family save for herself, were murdered by a rival organization. She had been taken in by an uncle, Salvatore Bertinelli who lived in Sicily, and from the ages of eight to twenty-one she was trained in martial arts and marksmanship. She came back to Gotham City as The Huntress, and she cut a bloody swath through the Gotham mob until she was stopped by Batman. He saw potential in her to aid in his mission, but her continued reliance on lethal force (a reliance that took her years to break) earned her Black Sheep status.

Just looking at her, Bruce could tell that she hadn't changed much. Hadn't mellowed, despite her retirement. Still a bundle of nerves and anger.

And Bruce could not help but feel that this was his fault somehow.

With this in mind, he looked at Helena and said "I'm sorry."

Cassandra looked over at him with dull surprise. Helena and Dinah, however, looked at him with complete shock, as by his estimation, they had never heard those words come out of his mouth before.

And now that they were out, Bruce felt no different. Yesterday, those words would have had to have been viciously pried from him, but now? Today? After being saved from the Arkham Knight by the specter of justice he had created? Those words were simple. He found that provided one was genuinely apologetic, the words "I'm sorry" were a blessing, and not a curse.

"I was not the most decent person when I met you," Bruce said. "I was unmindful of what you needed as a person. I'm sorry."

Helena was visibly uncomfortable. "Well… Y'know… I learned a lot from you, so… It wasn't all bad."

Bruce shook his head. "Helena, you didn't need someone who could teach you to throw a better punch. You needed someone to be nice to you. Not kind, not charitable, nice. Someone should have been happy to see you. Someone should have valued you the way you should value yourself. The way you should value others. It could have been me. It should have been me. It wasn't me. And the day will never come when I'm not sorry about that."

He walked up to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She looked from his hand to his eyes with unalloyed bewilderment.

"My home is open to you," he said. "For whatever you need, for however long you require. And remember that if a life is measured by the impact it's had on others, then you will never need to ask how well you did."

Helena's expression of open-mouthed shock was now one of open-mouthed horror. There was a thin film of tears on each eyeball.

"Who the fuck are you and what the fuck have you done with Bruce Wayne?"

A new, female voice form the door. "Am I interrupting something?"

They all turned to see Doctor Patty Jenkins standing there in a white lab coat.

Bruce took his hand away from Helena's shoulder. "No, Doctor."

Doctor Jenkins walked in and stood next to Barbara's bed.

"The most serious matter first," she said. "Miss Gordon here broke her neck when she fell."

The room seemed to have gotten colder.

"However," Doctor Jenkins said, "saying that is a little misleading. None of the vertebrae simply broke in half. Rather a chip from her C4 vertebrae broke off and is just floating around in there."

"How big is this chip?" Dinah asked.

"Not big," said Doctor Jenkins. "Think of it as about a fifth of a Rice Krispie. Nevertheless, there's nothing weighing it down, and if it makes contact with her spinal cord, she's out from the neck down. I'm keeping her under medical sedation so she doesn't move around and make everything worse. Now, I know a spinal surgeon at Gotham Methodist who owes me a favor. He should be here in ninety minutes. As far as all things neck are concerned, Miss Gordon is going to be fine."

And just like that, the room got warmer.

"Moving a little further south," Doctor Jenkins said, "there is the matter of her shattered cheekbone. A chunk of bone about the size of my thumbnail just broke off. She's going to need surgery for that as well. But it's not life threatening, so it's not our immediate concern. Plus I know a guy who knows a guy, and he can take care of that too. Regrettably, she's going to need plastic surgery if she wants both sides of her face to match, so that's up to her."

Doctor Jenkins took a couple of steps down the bed.

"Which brings us to her legs," Doctor Jenkins said. "Both tibias snapped clean in half. If these injuries were only slightly worse, I'd strongly recommend amputation. But they're not worse, and I don't. She needs even more surgery to reset them. And this is where your commitment to all this cloak-and-dagger superhero bullshit really gets tested, because I don't know anyone who can come in and do that."

"I can," said Bruce. Because he could.

Dinah rolled her eyes. "Of course you can."

"But," Doctor Jenkins said, "she's gonna require the use of a wheelchair for the five months following the surgeries on her legs."

The relief in the room was practically palpable.

"Y'know," Doctor Jenkins said, "usually when I tell someone that their friend or relation is gonna need a wheelchair for a while, they aren't this chipper."

"Clearly you don't know the dickens Babs can get up to in a wheelchair," Dinah said.

"Fair enough," Doctor Jenkins said. "As far as these injuries are concerned, give it a year after the surgeries, and she'll be up and around on rooftops like tonight never happened. Provided she wants to, of course."

Helena caught that last part. "Is there a reason she wouldn't?"

Doctor Jenkins opened her mouth, and then closed it again. If Bruce didn't know any better, it looked like Doctor Jenkins had said too much.

"Just so we're clear," Doctor Jenkins said. "In a superhero context, doctor-patient confidentiality doesn't mean dick, does it?"

"No," Dinah said. "No, it doesn't."

Doctor Jenkins sighed. "I ran her blood. Just to be on the safe side. And… Well…"

She pointed at Barbara Gordon and said:

"Your friend here is pregnant."

...before she left the way she came in, leaving them all to deal with the hand grenade from which she had just pulled the pin.

Long seconds of silence passed that seemed like minutes, all of them staring at the medically sedated Barbara with their mouths open.

It fell to Helena to sunder the quiet.

"Okay," she said. "Not gonna lie. My first instinct was to get down on my knees and start praying."

Everyone closed their mouths and looked at her.

"I was under the impression that no one's been pulling Barbara's hair and making her scream for the last six years," Helena said. "So if she's pregnant… then that means Jesus is coming back!"

"Do you think she knew?" Dinah asked.

"Do you think she'd have been out there tonight had she known?" Bruce asked. To which Dinah nodded.

"Why didn't she tell us she was seeing anyone?" Helena asked.

Cassandra decided to reply with "Because the two of you are nasty."

"I feel like I should argue with that," Helena said. "But… y'know… I can't, so…"

"Who's telling Jim?" Bruce asked.

Barbara's father, the former Gotham City mayor and police commissioner James Gordon, was spending the rest of the month down on the Florida coast, fishing for marlin.

"I think Barbara should tell him herself," Dinah said. "Once she's stable, I mean. I don't think she'd forgive any of us for doing that without her, now that we know she's gonna be okay."

Dinah walked up to Bruce and put her hand on his shoulder.

"We're staying in town," she said. "Because you best believe we want in on the ground floor of taking chunks out of Ra's al Ghul's ass. Any plan you have, we're down for."

"I appreciate that," said Bruce. "But… I'm not the person you should be saying that to."

And he looked over Dinah's shoulder, at Cassandra.

Dinah's gaze followed his, and her whole body stiffened when she made eye contact with Bruce Wayne's adopted daughter.

But that stiffness finally subsided.

"Any plan you have, we're down for," Dinah said to her.

Cassandra nodded, and said "Thank you," in a voice most frosty.

And she was the first to walk out of the ward. Bruce, Dinah, and Helena all looked at each other with concern, before they followed her out.

Once they got to the hallway, however, they stopped. Cassandra was standing in front of a familiar face.

It was Simon Baz.

The Green Lantern was in civilian attire, consisting of a brown leather jacket, a white t-shirt beneath, and a pair of jeans.

And he seemed to be blushing.

"I, uh… I heard Bab- Barbara got hurt," he said. "I was in town, and, uh…"

He just trailed off.

Bruce, Dinah, Helena, and Cassandra all looked at each other… and immediately got it.

"Nice," Dinah said.

"Yeah," said Helena, eyeing Simon as though she were an assembly line worker at an auto plant looking for loose rivets. "Nice."

Dinah patted Simon on the shoulder before she left.

Helena did the same.

Cassandra looked at him a while, squinting as though he were one of those Magic Eye pictures from the nineties that hid the image of a sailboat.

"Is that Talia al Ghul back there?" Simon asked her.

"Yes," said Cassandra, before just walking off.

Bruce sized him up, nodded, and made his own exit without saying a word.

GOTHAM HILTON

Stephanie had ordered room service. The Fettuccine Alfredo. It was… okay. For Stephanie Brown was worldly enough to have actually had pasta in Italy, therefore ruining any and all American attempts at that particular culinary venture

Post-dinner and post-shower, she had taken to pacing back and forth in front of her hotel room window as the television played, wearing pajama bottoms and a black tank top, unable to sleep.

It was like she was under house arrest. Past this room lie Ra's al Ghul and the Arkham Knight, and all the forces they had martialed. Combined with the fact that she had neither the resources nor the inclination to combat these foes in the way in which they needed to be combatted.

Stephanie wondered what it would take to get her into a costume again, provided of course that there were not only any Spoiler costumes left out in the Gotham wilderness, but that they still fit her after fourteen years.

She rolled this in her mind as a knock came upon the hotel room door. Stephanie looked at the holographic TV set, which was playing an old Peter Fonda movie whose title she could not identify. It was playing at a reasonable volume, thus ruling out an angry visit from hotel management.

Stephanie opened the door.

It was Cassandra.

Neither woman said anything.

Stephanie's impromptu surface analysis of Cassandra Wayne, standing there all in black, led her to believe that she had, in fact, taken her order to go home and sleep. Her eyes weren't quite so sunken in as they had been when she saved Black Bat from the Arkham Knight that morning.

But there seemed to be a weight upon her. Standing perfectly motionless, she seemed to be giving off the same energy as a fly trapped between two panes of glass.

Is this her apology face? Stephanie thought. Is this what Cass looks like when she was wrong, knew she was wrong, and is now forced by her own conscience to bend the knee and eat some shit?

Stephanie knew herself well enough to keep her mental receipts open and handy. She knew herself well enough to know that even in an atmosphere of peace, she would press an advantage, and create an atmosphere of hostility.

She held her breath.

Cassandra finally looked from the floor, to her.

"Ra's got Babs," she said.

Stephanie's breath finally left her body as cold terror started skiing down her spine.

"She's still alive," Cassandra said, "but… it's bad."

Cassandra seemed to wither right in front of her. She slumped and sagged as the air left her.

So Stephanie took all of that resentment that had been building about how even at this late age no one seemed to have any faith in her…

...and put it under lock and key in the back of her mind because Cass needed her help.

She walked into the hallway, but her arm around the shoulders of Cassandra's leather jacket, and ushered her into the hotel room.

By the time Stephanie was done locking the door behind her, Cassandra had already shed her leather jacket onto the hotel room carpet, and had taken up Stephanie's task of pacing back and forth in front of the window.

Stephanie watched how she moved. Observed how Cassandra's musculature shifted beneath her black turtleneck.

That morning, she had told Cassandra that she was cracking. It was still true. But seeing her pacing, Stephanie had to guess that this was more… immediate? Was that the word?

"She didn't have faith in me," Cassandra said in a watery voice.

Stephanie said nothing.

Cassandra stopped and looked at Stephanie with wet eyes.

"She fought so hard for me," Cassandra said. "Taught me almost everything I know, and she still didn't think I could do this job. She took the Birds, tried to get a stockpile of Venom in the sewer away from Ra's al Ghul, and she didn't tell anyone."

"I'm on your side," Stephanie said softly. "But Babs has seniority, here. She's a vet. You can't expect her to clear anything with anyone."

Cassandra narrowed her eyes. "If Bruce were still in charge, do you think she'd have gone down there on her own?"

Well, Stephanie thought, you got me there.

"You're absolutely right," Stephanie said.

Cassandra looked down, a curtain of her black hair hiding her face. Stephanie could see the beige carpet at Cassandra's feet darken with tears.

Rubbing the eyes beneath that curtain of hair with the edges of her palms, Cassandra said "I… am trying… so hard."

Stephanie walked to her and wrapped her arms around Cassandra, bringing her to the couch so they could both sit down.

With Cassandra's head resting on her chest, Stephanie ran her fingers through her black hair.

Cassandra sighed, warming the fabric of Stephanie's black tank top… and Stephanie became all too aware of the fact that, at present, she was not wearing a bra.

Stephanie inhaled the scent of Cassandra's hair, and caught in a soft reverie in whose grip she had not been held since her teenage years, Stephanie Brown started softly singing.

She couldn't sing for shit. Hitting them bars was a pastime strictly reserved for the shower… or when she was feeling a certain way, which did not come often.

Stephanie didn't know why this particular song hit her at this particular moment. She'd been working in France some five years back, and there was this whole retro film noir thing that a certain subset of French youth had clung to at the time, and this one particular song had been a favorite of theirs, played so ceaselessly in her hotel that she'd memorized the words against her will.

Nevertheless, the lyrics came.

"It begins to tell 'round midnight… Midnight… I do pretty well, till after sundown… Supper time I'm feelin sad… But it really gets bad… 'Round M-"

Stephanie stopped singing when Cassandra lifted her head from her chest and looked at her.

The look in her eyes was one of absolute terror… and Stephanie, for the life of her, couldn't imagine why.

But Cassandra's eyes closed. Her posture slackened. Her head moved closer.

The kiss that followed was both leisurely and chaste. It was not designed to fuel passion or sway minds. It was a way to connect, as bald as it was desperate.

Yet Stephanie Brown fell in all the same.

She still had her eyes closed when the kiss broke. When Cassandra started hugging her close. When she whispered in Stephanie's ear.

"What's done, cannot be undone..."

Stephanie opened her eyes.

What she saw was a Cassandra Wayne whose lower lip quivered. Whose shoulders shook ever so slightly. Who was trying to maintain whatever small shred of dignity she had left.

The woman who was cracking that morning? She was back now.

"Stay here," Cassandra said. "Till this is done… It's safer that way."

And with that, Cassandra got up. She picked up her leather jacket from the floor. She left the hotel room, closing the door behind her.

Leaving Stephanie weirdly amused in spite of herself.

Cassandra Wayne had come here for a sympathetic ear pertaining to how Babs didn't have enough faith in her to do the job… only to turn around and do the exact same thing to her.

Stephanie reckoned that for someone with as staunch a no-kill rule as Black Bat had, she sure did just slit irony's throat just now.

WAYNE MANOR

Bruce had parked the Benz in the garage, walked up the main foyer, and entered the East Wing, headed for the master bedroom.

He was cut off, however, by the sudden appearance of Selina coming out of the rec room.

She had cut her hair in the style of her old pixie cut, and her gray streaks were gone.

Bruce just stopped dead in his tracks, beholding her. Bare feet, pair of jeans, and a gray and white buttoned short-sleeved shirt.

It was… It was the woman he married. The woman who had ruined their honeymoon plans by asking him "Truth or Dare?" and sending them on an adventurous cross-country odyssey for the next month or so until she finally lost the game. He knew Selina liked to say that she hadn't aged a day in the past fifteen years, but the evidence was right here in front of him. He had to squint to see the lines on her face that the prior decade-and-a-half had given her. In fact, the black stitches on her hairline were the only immediate proof that the last day or the last fifteen years had even happened at all.

"Well?" Selina asked.

It took Bruce a second to figure out what she was referring to. Then he got it.

"It's bad now," Bruce said. "But it'll get better later."

Selina nodded. "Poor Babs."

Bruce sighed, and said "She's pregnant."

This widened Selina's eyes. She didn't speak right away. She only did so when her eyelids came back down.

"So," Selina said, "our legally adopted daughter can look at a pregnant woman to whom none of us share blood, and say 'I'm going to have a little brother or sister or whatever.' Has anyone ever told you that this little family unit we have going on is fucking weird?"

"I've caught the gist," Bruce said.

"Who's the donor?" asked Selina.

"I don't think she wants anyone saying until she can say it herself."

Selina gave him a look.

And if he could trust anyone on this Earth, it was his wife.

"Simon Baz," he said.

Selina looked off into the middle distance before a smirk appeared, and she said "Nice."

Cue the awkward silence.

"Your hair is beautiful," Bruce said.

"Thanks," Selina said, running a hand through it. "I've always gone for the pixie cut since I was a teenager. I was broke, and provided you know your way around some clippers, you can do it yourself in the privacy of your own bathroom. Which I did."

"And the hair dye?"

"Wasn't feeling the streaks," Selina said. "I don't think I will be for the foreseeable future."

"It looks great on you."

"I know."

Bruce tried to walk around Selina to get to the bedroom…

...only for Selina to get in his way.

"Sorry," Bruce said, and stepped to his left to get around her…

...and she got in his way again.

He looked at her.

She was grinning, eyebrows raised as though she were expecting a tip just for existing.

And Bruce Wayne… had his instructions.

He brought his hands to her face, and his lips locked with hers. Her hands drug themselves down his back. His hands moved from her face, and drug themselves down her front.

Bruce wrapped his forearms around Selina's thighs and picked her up. Her legs wrapped around his waist. And he carried her into the rec room.

The hardwood floor still had the long scuff marks on it from the day before, when Violet Paige had thrown it at some unlucky Squires. But she'd put it back during the post-rumble clean-up. Which was a good thing, too. Perish the thought of Bruce having to move a few extra feet to get to one of the three other pool tables!

He set Selina down next to the pool table closest to him. He tore off his gray blazer and sent the buttons of his shirt flying as he tore it open, before flinging both across the room as though they had offended him somehow.

Clad above the waist in only a white tank top undershirt, his scarred, brawny arms wrapped around Selina, Their lips met. Their front teeth softly bounced off one another. Their tongues entered into aggressive negotiation with one another.

Bruce looked down and saw that the buttons on Selina's shirt were the cheap metal snaps. With one savage yank, it was open.

She was not wearing a bra beneath.

She had been planning this since he left the house.

He moved Selina's open shirt down her supple tan shoulders, and haphazardly wrapped it around her wrists behind her, forcing her to stick her bare chest out like the carved wooden mast of a singularly gaudy pirate ship.

Bruce leaned in, dragging his lips and teeth across the collarbone of his frantically panting wife. His hands moved down her cleavage, down her taut and flat stomach, the soft warmth of her breasts seeping into his undershirt all the while. His fingers found the waistline of her jeans, and he deftly maneuvered them open.

She was wearing a pair of red silk underwear.

He thought back to that afternoon, when they had been cleaning blood and red brick off one another in the shower. This pair of underwear was not in the clothes that Cullen had left for them outside the bathroom.

So… she really had been planning this since he left the house.

Bruce slid his fingers beneath Selina's underwear, and…

She moaned. It was a high, tremulous sound. Like the damsel in distress of an old melodrama seeing the moustache-twirling villain for the first time.

He looked at Selina's face.

Sex was the only time Selina Wayne allowed herself to look needy, so he stopped and enjoyed such a sight whenever he could.

The upturned eyebrows. The half-closed green eyes. The flaring nostrils. The full lower lip softly held between her two rows of white teeth. The…

...pores…

...of…

...her…

...skin.

Bruce Wayne stopped moving.

Selina's eyes fluttered open. "What is it?"

The events of the past few days, both major and minor, locked into place.

He pulled his hands from beneath Selina's underwear, an action that caused her to involuntarily shudder and gasp.

Bruce stalked out of the rec room to the study, which would take him down to the Batcave.

With, of course, a brief detour to wash his hands.

ARKHAM ASYLUM

Ra's al Ghul handed one of Astrid's Squires the clothes that were stained with Barbara Gordon's blood, and said "Burn them."

The Squire took the clothes, bowed low, and departed to fulfill the task asked of him.

Ra's walked down the halls of the maintenance wing in Arkham Asylum in a jade green suit and white shirt with no tie, his expensive black Italian shoes clacking on the ceramic white tile of the floor.

And as he walked, his mind turned over a new nugget of information.

Barbara Gordon had accused him of stealing Dick Grayson's body from the Gotham City morgue.

But Ra's al Ghul had done no such thing.

He had given Astrid carte blanche to spread terror among Gotham City's superhero set. No doubt she was the one who absconded from the morgue with Grayson's body for one of her acts of gruesome theater.

Ra's went past the empty stock rooms to the loading bay.

Something was waiting for him.

In the middle of the loading bay's concrete floor was a high-tech crate roughly seven feet long and three feet wide. It was white, made of fiberglass, and had a combination lock.

Said combination Ra's had committed to memory.

This was the fruit of the League of Assassins operation in Brazil.

With a smile, Ra's al Ghul walked to the lock, and punched in the combination on a metal keypad.

The crate slid open by itself. And inside…

...was the medically sedated body of a woman.

BATCAVE SOUTH

Bruce sat down at the Batcomputer and immediately started bringing up files.

A minute or so later, he heard footsteps behind him, and he swiveled in his chair to look.

It was Selina. She looked… out of sorts. So out of sorts that her white and gray shirt had been unevenly rebuttoned.

With a cold fury, Selina said:

"This… had better… be good."

"Did you hear about the fires in the Amazon?" Bruce asked as he turned around.

"Yeah," Selina said, some of the anger ebbing from her voice. "I don't know much, what with all that's been going on, but I know there've been fires in Brazil."

"Ra's and the League were behind them," Bruce said. "And this is how I know."

With that, he brought up a chemistry formula.

"What am I looking at?" Selina asked.

"This," Bruce said, "is the chemical combination of the chemical amplification reagent that was stolen yesterday, and the Venom that was stolen tonight. Barbara came to me with a theory that Ra's and the Arkham Knight were going after the Venom from the Great Gotham Team-Up, combining it with the reagent from the STAR Labs truck, and using the resulting Venom compound to dose the city, and using the unmanned monorail tests tomorrow night to get as many people as possible. I shot the theory down, because the Venom compound would be too thick, and no technology exists presently to disperse it in a way that would dose a big enough number of people. Turns out we were both right… and both wrong."

"So the tech to disperse the Venom does exist?" Selina asked.

"No," said Bruce. "But the means of dispersal isn't technological. It's biological. Each individual dispersal vector would have to be the size of a human pore, minus fifty percent elasticity. The only way a human pore could lose that level of elasticity would be if it had spent years- decades, even-pumping out chemicals beyond the usual sweat and pheromones."

Bruce brought up his Rogue's Gallery files.

"Eight billion people on planet Earth," Bruce said. "You know how many fit that description?"

"How many?" Selina asked.

"Just one," said Bruce. "And her last known whereabouts… were in Brazil."

Bruce brought up the file he was looking for so Selina could see it.

He turned around just in time to see his wife lose all the color in her face.

ARKHAM ASYLUM

Ra's al Ghul had set out with a simple goal: destroy ninety percent of the human race to save the human race.

Even he knew it was easier said than done.

But the human race, stubborn and disappointing entity that it was, had insisted upon saving itself. Pollution had gone down. Carbon emissions dwindled. Even the damned ice caps were coming back.

Ra's had run the projections. As loathe as he was to admit it, everything was going to be fine.

Which meant that Ra's al Ghul had nothing left to do with his immortality except settle old scores and seek revenge, the pettiness of which he would not admit even to himself.

Gotham City had been the bulwark against which he had dashed himself time and time again. This city meant failure.

And Ra's al Ghul could not brook failure, least of all from himself.

But this was where the woman in the box came in. And looking upon her, he smiled to himself.

She had skin the color of mint ice cream, and in her age, her fiery red hair had streaks of brown running through it where others would have streaks of gray.

Her modesty was protected by a bodice of brown, dying leaves.

Ra's al Ghul would secure the line of The Demon with Cassandra Wayne. He would see to the death of the pretender Aaliyah Ramsey.

And he would destroy Gotham City.

He would disperse the Venom compound, using tomorrow night's unmanned monorail test to dose as many people as possible.

The citizenry would be given strength beyond their imagining, and homicidal insanity beyond their reckoning.

Gotham's people would tear each other to shreds. Rivers of blood would flow in the streets. A city of eight million people would become a ghost town overnight.

And Ra's al Ghul would use the body of Poison Ivy to do it.