Heads Up: Just two more chapters in this volume including this one.

I'm grateful that Tana isn't a talkative person, because the garbage chute climb is a pain, and if she responded to all my bored musings, we'd probably be found. But really, it's a wearisome task, and not too exciting. Luckily the chute is clean enough, but it's small and cramped, and my own gadgets aren't as good at sticking to slippery metal surfaces as Tana's.

"How did Maroni get the smarts and resources to get those made, anyway?" I grunt quietly, as my boot slips and I almost nail Tana in the head for the third time in as many minutes.

"Shut up, Grayson."

I bite my lip as I struggle to keep my position, but can't help myself from saying a minute later, "I hope he pisses himself when he sees that I'm still alive. Lost the election and all of his assassins, and jail's what's coming next."

"What part of 'shut up' do you not understand?"

A few levels later, I say, "You'd better go first and go fast, because if I slip again I'm going to say 'Aw, chute,' and then I won't be able to live with myself."

Having Tana go first is a bit of a help. I copy her movements, and since she doesn't feel the need to stop and quip ever so often, I'm preoccupied with keeping up. There's finally a point when I look up and realize that we've reached the last opening, and Tana quickly pulls the door open to stick her head out.

The only thing I can see above me is something that Tana probably does not want me to keep staring at. "See anything?"

I can hear her gloves humming with a scan. "There are pressure pads in the floor—everywhere in the floor, there's no way to get out and not set them off. We'll have to stick to the walls." She climbs out, and I follow tentatively. I've been to the lower floors of Cobblepot's campaign building. It's a fairly simple thing, with grey tile floors, and white walls. But Cobblepot' apartments are something else. A plush maroon carpet coats the floor, while the walls are painted a deep green, hung with paintings and festooned with drapes. Candles burn in sconces spaced every few yards. It has an old-timey feel, but I know that it's been backed up with some really high tech gear.

Tana is staring in disgust at the wall she's clinging to. "Who the hell puts curtains on a wall?"

"Cobblepots. Can't you disable the pads with your gloves?"

"And set off the silent alarm? You should have read the specs earlier, Robin."

But we haven't set off any alarms, and I'm feeling very proud until I hear rustling coming from an alcove ahead. Tana freezes and presses herself against the wall, eyes probing the darkness before us, until there's a muffled thump and we see a penguin waddle out of the shadows. Neither Tana nor I know what to make of this, until I realize that penguins don't move that mechanically, nor are they covered in synthetic fluff, nor do they possess glowing red eyes.

"What is that?" I hiss.

"A living penguin plushie with laser vision?"

At first I think it's only patrolling when I hear noises behind us and more penguins begin to converge out of the darkness, all staring at us. Their eyes begin to glow brighter, and hotter.

"He guessed we were coming," I realize. "I wouldn't worry about the pressure pads. Scram!"

We both drop off the walls as the penguins fire lasers, leaving scorch marks in the walls, and wind up back-to-back in the middle of the hall. An alarm starts to flash and wail, and the penguins flip out, cooing and cawing and charging at us in a fiery furry black mass. I dodge a laser blast from one and punch it, sending it flying into its fellows with a series of metallic crunches. A few kicks disable the next three, and I look back to see Tana swinging one like a mace. There's finally only one left, which hesitates, looking at both of us, before it sends out an earsplitting distress call and self-destructs.

Tana and I are both sent flying into an adjacent hall, and I cough out a "Well that didn't go as planned" when we're both picked up and thrown out of the way of a second exploding penguin that had awoken in its alcove next to us. Looking up, I realize that this hall is also littered with broken, sparking penguins and I look up a bit further to see Bruce.

"Cobblepot is still on the next floor," he growls, even though I'm distracted by the penguins moving out of the darkness behind him. "And the staircase is the only way up or down. Get on it. Knowing him, he's probably got an endless supply of these."

"On it, Batman," I say, springing to my feet as Bruce grabs a penguin that's about to explode and hurls it into a crowd of its approaching fellows. I see Tana shaking herself off as she gets up, and add, "Come on! He'll cover us."

We run past the hall of dead robots by the garbage chute, dodging over the hole in the floor where the one exploded. I can hear Bruce defending the way behind us, but footsteps shuffling in front of us as well. Tana does too, because she says, "If we're jumped, I'll go on defense. You get Cobblepot."

I nod, but return my focus to where I'm running, which is good since a penguin erupts out of the floor in front of me and singes off the front of my hair as I lean back to avoid its lasers. The swift kick I deliver to its head is enough to render it unoperational, but more are waddling around the corner, and others are popping out of the floor around us, blasting and tearing their way through the carpet like the living dead digging out of their graves. But though the penguins are an impedance, especially with the way they're setting everything on fire, I feel like we'll be able to take them and get to Cobblepot before he can escape.

And then the crows come.

The hallway is a big flaming mess, but I've almost reached the stairwell at the end, when a murder of robotic crows swoops out of the rafters above to swarm around my face. I can't see, and trying to beat off the metallic claws and feathers is less effective than trying to cut water. I finally slice my way through the swarm with my batarang, and find Tana doing the same with some of her old Omen weaponry. I don't notice there's a penguin creeping up behind me until she spears it with her hurled knife from a good twenty feet away. I notice that it's the same knife that she was going to try and kill me with.

In the confusion, though, I realize that I've moved. Tana is closer to the door now, and I'm farther away. We realize the switch, and Tana is running forward to switch back and defend my ass from the fresh penguin forces coming from behind, when one of the feebly sparking penguin bodies in the pile in the middle of the hall ignites.

The explosion is deafening, and by the time I look back, there's a twenty foot chasm in the middle of the hall, edged with fire and charred carpet. Tana looks down into it, then back up at me, and I wave her on.

"You take care of Cobblepot! I'll take these guys!"

She nods and bolts for the stairwell, and I'm left to take down a horde of demonic birds. At some point in the ensuing battle, I start hearing crashes in front of me, and Batman emerges from the smoke, destroying birds left and right. When the hall has been cleared, I realize that the alarms have stopped. Batman surveys the chasm. "Where's your grappling hook?"

"It was too bulky for the garbage chute."

He quickly takes out his own. "Hold on."

After we swing across, we make a dash for the stairs.

Tana peered into the top hall from the landing. There was only one other doorway, a towering pair of carved oaken slabs, at the very end of the hall. The walls were lined with portraits, each adorned with the name of their occupant, and depicting the Cobblepot succession since Gotham's founding. Tana quickly shut the stairwell door behind her, melting the doorknob shut. It wouldn't do for Cobblepot to escape now.

There were no other entrances to the hall, so she padded down the dark hall the way one hurries into the fog—with equal parts purpose and caution. At the hall's end, the wood was engraved with birds of all kinds, prominently penguins and owls. Finding the door unlocked, she pushed it open just an inch to survey the territory within. Seeing no movement, she slid it open farther and entered.

Cobblepot's quarters were breathtaking. Enormous floor-to-ceiling windows covered the entire back wall, making it look like the room was open to the moonlight and Gotham cityscape. The floors were plush, nearly an inch deep, and the walls covered in indigo velvet. There were carved wooden bookshelves, filled with old, musty volumes that looked like they'd been passed down for several generations, and other shelves filled with birds. Stuffed ones, live ones, carved ones—it didn't matter. A stiff vulture sat poised over the door in an eternal screech, while a jade hawk statue peered out at her from behind a potted mulberry bush. And on the claw-foot desk by the window, covered in crisp papers, fountain pens, crystal paperweights, and cigars, was a cage, whose occupant was a single white canary, which twittered softly behind the bars.

Tana suppressed a shiver; the room was cold, and the air reeked of cigar smoke, wine, old cheese, and ice. But there was no sign of Cobblepot. She closed the doors behind her and melted the handles again. She looked around for a good place to begin the search, but was unable to resist the urge to look out the window. The canary hopped and wheedled as she passed, but Tana hardly noticed, breath stolen by the view. Looking down, Tana saw that there were a hundred stories beneath her, ending in the concrete that was Gotham's financial district square.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

Turning, Tana was confronted by the ugliest man she'd ever seen. He was enormously fat, black tuxedo jacket straining at the buttons to contain his girth. His skin was a pale, pasty white, and he sported greasy black hair that fell in strands from under a velvet top hat. His long hooked nose would have been well suited to either end a fishing line or support a pair of glasses, but instead he wore a single monocle in his right eye, magnifying its shade of rather unattractive pucey-brown. Tana raised her right glove, charging up a stun blast, and pointed it at Cobblepot. "You're coming with me. You can either come with dignity, or I can drag you down the stairs."

He raised his hands. "Why the hostility, Tana? I've done nothing to you, except helping to get you into Maroni's good books."

Her eyes flickered at the usage of her real name. Not even Maroni had known that. "Maybe you forgot that this entire plot was your idea? That you sent your people to kill Robin? And Dick Grayson?"

He sighed. "I really thought that that boy was Robin, but apparently I was wrong. And given what I saw from the security footage, he's still alive. A shame."

"You have three seconds to make your choice, Cobblepot."

"You misunderstand me. I've got all the time I want."

Tana could tell that something was wrong, but it didn't become apparent until her gloves failed to fire. Cobblepot chuckled. "You don't really think that Maroni knows who to go to to get gloves like those made. No, Tana, those gifts were from me. It's impolite to use them against me."

Tana looked down at the tools in her hands, that had given her the name of Omen, and everything she'd ever needed in her life. But they'd been gifts, hadn't they? And what could be given could be taken away. Or used against her. As she tried to rip them off, she felt them constrict, binding onto her forearms and starting to limit the bloodflow to her hands. "You—" her eyes made contact with Cobblepot's, and he smiled as he touched a control inside one of his cufflinks.

It was the first time in Tana's life that she'd screamed. With rage, perhaps, she had before. But as her gloves lit up with the blue light of a hundred volts being directly fed into her body, and she felt as though she were being submerged in white-hot needles, she knew the feeling of true pain.

And she screamed.

In a flash of red, the pain had ended, and Tana was kneeling on the floor, panting. She could smell something burning—probably the little hair that she had left. Cobblepot, had moved closer, was leering over her like an oversized crow. "I guess we can't do this the civilized way then, can we, Tana? You want the truth? I'll tell you the truth. I'm the reason that you exist."

Tana looked up and was on the verge of flinging herself at him when he raised his wrist to show her the cufflinks. "Ah-ah. You see, Tana, I had an idea. What if you could…make your own criminal? Without their realizing it? Mold them to your needs? Shape your own henchman. I'm the one who drained the funding of the orphanage, and made sure normal work was out of your reach." At her look of disbelieving rage, he chuckled again, and continued. "I also paid off a lot of your initial employers to give you a good thrashing. After all, I had to make sure you were what I wanted. A fighter, not a flyer. I had those gloves specially made for you, and had Maroni take you to work for him. Sure, I let you wander a bit, but what people don't realize is—I run this town. I own more criminals than I can count. And I own," he leaned down to exhale his sour breath into her face, "you."

Tana's hand slashed out to claw at Cobblepot's eyes, but in a moment she was back on the floor, reeling from the pain of second shock. "I've owned you for years. I am the reason that you are anyone, Tana. Now, I'm going to give you two choices. I threatened to kill Bruce Wayne's kid with my own assassin, but even the World's Greatest Detective didn't realize that that assassin is still you. You can come to terms with the fact that your life will always be mine to control, or I can remind you. With these." He flashed the cufflinks. "And you may or may not survive."

Breathing hard, Tana looked him square in the eyes. "Option two, please."

"Come on, Tana, is this really what I paid for? You're a survivor. Why would you throw your life away for this boy? Why did you, up in that tower? You choose to obey me, Tana, or you choose to die."

"Option two, I said."

Cobblepot looked disappointed as he moved his hand to his wrist. "If you insist."

Even though Tana was ready for the pain, it still poured over her and enveloped her like boiling oil. Yet she managed to force her head up, and through a crackling red haze, focus on Cobblepot's smirking form. And she started to crawl towards him. Before he could realize that she still had strength left, she'd staggered to her feet and taken him by the throat.

In an instant, the current shut off, and as she fell to her knees, she dragged Cobblepot with her. He looked at her, and realized that while she had strength left, she had very little. "Now what, little Tana? Are you going to knock me out and deliver me to your Bat?" Chest heaving, Tana raised a fist, but as she shifted, so did he, and with surprising strength for a man of his stature, he flung her across the room. Tana slammed into the window and slid down, leaving a trail of cracks, to come to a rest on the floor.

His stiff frame radiated anger as he advanced on her. "Don't you ever try to take control of me, girl." The diamond ring on his right hand left a fracture in her cheekbone as he struck her, and as she blinked through the stars, Tana realized that the last shock had overloaded her eye. She could only see out of her left, and the right was likely sparking, losing its coloring. Cobblepot paused in surprise as she raised her bloody face and he caught sight of the machinery embedded in her socket. Unfortunately, he was a smart man.

"The right eye, eh? The one that Robin lost. Clever, Tana. Very clever. So my assumption was correct. Grayson should be getting a visit from me soon. Even if I can't be mayor or kill the Batman, I can have second best!" He cackled, a harsh, grating laugh like a crow's caw. "You should have killed the boy when you had the chance, Tana. You could have saved your life. And he'll die quite soon, anyway." As he wound back to punch again, Tana ducked, and his fist flew through the window in an array of broken glass. Reaching up, she grabbed his shirt collar and shoved him behind her, so that his torso shattered the rest of the window and his flying feet quickly scrambled to find the window ledge. When he finally came to a halt, his feet may have balanced on the metal strip, but the rest of him was dangling over thin air with only Tana's fist holding him up.

"You—" she snarled, panting, eyes swimming with stars. "You monster. Give me a reason why I shouldn't drop you, Cobblepot."

Cobblepot raised his eyebrows. "This, Tana? You expect me to be afraid of this? You won't drop me because you can't. You've never killed a soul before. You couldn't even kill Grayson, a boy you'd never even met!"

"He never caused me to suffer."

"I beg to differ. You lost your shot at a keeping your old life, and being safe from the criminals that you used to work for, by choosing to spare him. You saved his life, and it cost you an eye. And where is he now? I made you into something formidable, Tana, into the fighter that you are. I raised you from the bastard child you were into someone who will be remembered. If you couldn't kill that wretch of a boy, Tana, how are you going to kill me? Me?"

Tana looked into his eyes and remembered what had happened the night she'd tried to kill Dick. She'd been stopped by the idea of ending a life, of a person she barely knew. A person she didn't understand, whose history was a blank page to her. The idea of putting a flame out forever, and ending any chance of it growing or changing. She had no idea what made Cobblepot like this—what he endured as a child or suffered at the hands of others, to make him so bitter and so cruel, and deserving of death. Death—the final judgment, which Batman did not believe they had the right to give. And did they, really? Cobblepot had controlled her life to make her into what she was. So what had made him? And what could unmake him?

She looked at the Penguin's questioning face, cast into shadow by the street lights glowing down below, and she pulled him back inside.

The edges of his mouth curved up, showing just a hint of his unnaturally yellow, pointy teeth as he dusted off his suit. "Ah, you heroes. So noble. It will be the end of you eventually, but I can't deny you that."

Tana looked into his eyes and thought about everything he'd done. Smuggling. Bribing. Defaming. Controlling her, making her life a misery. Making her into a weapon. And yet, Bruce had been so clear. Death was not an option. Death was not her punishment to give. To hand him over to a judge would be the best thing to do. The right thing to do.

"I'm not a hero, Cobblepot." His building smile of amusement flickered at her next words. "Heroes don't kill people."

She wanted to say that she didn't enjoy his look of confusion in that moment, and then horror and surprise as she shoved him out the window. He reeled backwards, arms windmilling, feet scrabbling to stay perched on the building's ledge, but first one polished shoe and then the other slipped into space. Tana stayed and watched as he tumbled through the air, top hat catching a breeze and drifting away down the street while its owner dropped and spun like a flipped coin on the descent. She watched as he fell the entirety of the one hundred stories, and didn't look away as he disappeared forever into a red blotch on the pavement in the square below. And she'd be lying to say that she didn't smile.

Tana looked up a moment later to see Batman and Robin prising the doors apart, and freezing at the scene inside. She stood by the shattered window, a mild breeze ruffling what was left of her hair, and she looked back down to where flashing lights had already begun to gather.

"He fell."