Back on the lower level, Paige sat on the cot and shivered. She looked like a ghost, covered in fine white concrete dust that stuck to her as if glued, and she felt like a ghost, too, ephemeral and unreal. Where Bane was-and, more frighteningly, what she would do or say when he came back-she had no idea.
She couldn't stop replaying the moment in her mind: Bane, lifting the Batman over his head. The moment's pause. And then the swift arc down, performed with that casual grace. The terrible pain the Batman must have felt as he lay there. Then the knowledge, swift and cold as a knife blade between her ribs, that it was all her fault.
She had saved him, after all. Bane. She had helped him in that alleyway, instead of calling the cops and running away like any rational person would have done. If she had thought with her head, not her pity, then she might be safe at home in her own bed right now, and the Batman alive and brooding in whatever hideaway he lived and brooded in, and Bane locked up tight in Blackgate. Where they all belonged.
But instead, here she was surrounded by what she was coming more and more to believe was best described as an invading military force, the Batman was dead or dying, and Bane was who-knew-where, plotting who-knew-what, with a small army and a large armory at his beck and call. The red scarves-no street toughs now, dead or simply elsewhere, she didn't know-were busy removing all the crates and gear from the sewers and hauling them up into the warehouse above. Her alcove dissolved around her as she sat, men carrying boxes away, one untying the tarp and opening Paige up to spray from the waterfall. She wondered if they would just fold her up in the cot and take her above as well. Looking down at the waterfalls with bloodshot eyes, she thought it might be better, on the whole, if they simply chucked her into the churning stream below.
Her hearing was still recovering from the blast, so she didn't realize Barsad was nearby until he tapped her on the shoulder. She started, turned, and found he was holding out something made of dark cloth. She squinted to bring it into focus, and realized that it was her own wool coat.
"How-?" she broke off, taking the coat. She'd left this in her locker at work-how on earth had Barsad gotten a hold of it? She would have assumed the police would still be all over the GSE. She looked up at Barsad, bewildered. "Thank you?"
He waved a hand in an, "it's nothing" gesture, then said something else, the words almost inaudible.
Paige grimaced and pointed at her ear. "Can't hear," she said. "Explosion." Even her own voice sounded like something heard through water.
Barsad shot Arnaud a glance, in response to which the latter only shrugged. With a visible sigh, Barsad pulled a small notebook out of his pocket, flipped it open and scribbled a few moments, then handed it over to Paige.
"We're moving up," it read. "Can you stand?"
Paige nodded and did so, and Barsad led her down to one of the catwalks, Arnaud following behind. Harnesses dangled there at the end of various ropes that rose to crest the lip of the gaping hole above. Barsad fitted her into one with efficient movements, but gestured for her to hang on, as the buckles, even at their tightest, didn't fit snugly. Then, with a wave upwards and a call she couldn't hear, she was sailing up through the air. She looked down and watched the stormwaters rush away from her, as if they were sinking down into the earth, and she remained still. Her upward motion halted, and a couple pairs of hands grabbed her under the arms, lifted her, and rather unceremoniously dumped her by the side of the hole. The men then promptly ignored her, and she undid the buckles herself.
The space above was some kind of warehouse that stretched hundreds of feet in almost every direction she looked, interrupted at twenty-foot intervals by circular concrete supports. Though the ceiling was high, at least twenty or thirty feet, the sheer length of the thing made the room feel low and oppressive. One wall had rows upon rows of huge shelves projecting from it, full of large and anonymous crates. The rest of the space was scattered with crates, carts, and stands, some covered in plastic, others not. Several more of the camo tanks crouched around the room, dusted, like she was, from the explosion. Red scarves were already busy at these, and others were at work in the rest of the room. They opened up crates, emptied out stands, reorganized, and generally bustled about. She caught only glimpses of the various items: armor panels, some odd-looking guns that she thought probably weren't firearms, rolls of black and gray cloth, even bundles of arrows and darts. It was odd to watch all the hubbub, to see men talking or calling to one another, and be unable to hear anything but a vague rushing and a high pitch. She hoped her ears weren't permanently damaged.
Paige pushed herself to her feet and took a few tentative steps away from the hole. The soldiers glanced at her, but none of them appeared to be too bothered by her movement. Her eyes narrowed. She began looking around with renewed curiosity, and, keeping the men in her line of sight, took two more steps backwards as if unconscious of her own movement.
No glances at all.
Paige scanned the walls, and found exactly what she wanted. Directly behind her was a door, and the sign above it had written on it in large, friendly letters, one word: EXIT.
Paige moved slowly and kept her movements small. Red scarves constantly bustled past her with boxes and bags, and she took advantage of this. She would step back with a demure bow of her head, skitter to the side as one passed close by, hop away if one came too close—but she always moved in one direction, back towards the exit door. She kept her eyes peeled for any pointing fingers, any faces suddenly turning her way, but there was nothing. Within moments she was only a handful of yards away, and hope had begun to creep back into her heart.
Then, his head already on a swivel, up from the hole came Arnaud. They locked eyes. His went wide. And as he lifted a finger to point at her, his mouth opening, she turned and dashed for the door.
Paige had the advantage of very long legs and comparatively little weight to move. She had abandoned her ruined heels below, so they, at least, did not slow her, but she had only just managed to grasp the metal handle of the door when strong arms wrapped around her from behind and began to lift and pull her away. Her grip broke at once. Again, while she weighed little, she was tall and therefore an unwieldy package. She struggled wildly, and the man's progress slowed. Remembering some video or other she had watched on self-defense, she lifted her legs as high as she could, then swung them quickly down. The man's grip slipped, his balance faltered, and they both stumbled to the side and knocked into an open crate. It tipped over, spilling dozens of little bat-shaped shards of metal. While the man was off-balance and bent over, Paige planted her feet and launched them to the side. They both went down in a clatter of metal bats.
The man cried out—she heard it faintly—and his arms loosened. She managed to kick herself free and rolled away towards the door. As she tried to stand, she realized why the man had screamed. The bats were sharp like knives, and several pricked her feet, but she kept moving. The door was only a few feet away, if she could only reach it—
Then two more men came in from either side, and that was the end of that.
Less than thirty seconds later, she was sitting, her back to one of the pillars, wrists locked around it by handcuffs, with a very peeved Arnaud staring down at her. The attempt had failed.
But secreted away in her coat pocket, unseen, were three little metal bats.
Moving up from the sewers took, by Paige's best estimation, the better part of a day. Her hearing returned slowly over the course of hours, but even when the last crates were brought up from below and stacked against one wall, and the men had all unfurled bedrolls and arranged themselves in rows beneath the fluorescent lights, she still couldn't hear as well as she had. The ringing never quite went away, and she wondered if it ever would.
Arnaud had remained by her side the entire day, and when time came to bunk down, he unfurled his sleeping bag just out of kicking range. "There are sentries outside the doors," he said as he unlaced his boots. "Try nothing."
Paige rattled her handcuffs, and winced at the sore, cramped feeling in her arms. "Wouldn't dream of it," she said.
Arnaud muttered something in French that probably wasn't complimentary, then climbed into his sleeping bag and appeared to be asleep in the space of three deep breaths. Soon the entire space was almost peaceful with the sound of even breathing and the occasional snore. Somehow, the heavy rifles lying ready beside the sleepers ruined the effect.
It was not so easy for Paige to sleep. She had always been something of an insomniac, and despite the dead tired feeling in her bones and the burning behind her eyes, her brain felt wide awake. And, in any case, falling asleep sitting on a concrete floor with your hands cuffed behind you wouldn't be easy for the best of sleepers.
She had no way to reach the bats in her pocket, and even if she could, there wasn't much to be done with them. She tried to pull at her handcuffs, but they were too tight to slip out of, even with her stick-like wrists. With no way to escape and nothing else to do to help her situation, she knew the best thing to do was sleep.
And yet she could not.
Her mind bounced between Bane, the Batman, the street toughs, the sewers, the warehouse, the stock exchange, and her own abduction as she tried and failed to put them all together into a cohesive picture. She tried to slot a dozen different motives into Bane's actions, but none of them unlocked the mystery. Whatever he had planned, it was most likely violent, or he wouldn't have felt the need to get the Batman out of the way and steal his armory. It was most likely far-reaching, judging by his large force, and the construction she had seen in so many parts of the tunnels—it wouldn't be something localized, like a bank robbery.
So what was he after? Money? She supposed one could get some money out of fraud during the stock exchange hit, but the accounts involved would be found out. If that were his goal, he would have absconded immediately to sell off any liquid investments and hunker down somewhere with no extradition laws, rather than retreat to the sewers to pour concrete. Perhaps he had wanted short term cash as funding for his true project? Surely there were easier ways to get it—weapons and training like these men obviously had would get them into any bank vault.
Was he like the Joker, just trying to send a message to the city, to spread chaos because it was fun? Unlikely. Bane certainly had a sadistic streak from what she had seen, but he was far too calculated, far too in-control for something like that.
She thought again, as she had just after the Batman's defeat, about Bane's words in the stock exchange. About eradication.
Was that his plan, then? To purge the city somehow? But if that were his plan, why start with the stock exchange? And if he thought everyone there was a liar and a thief, why kill only Steven? Why spare any of them?
She let her head thump against the concrete pillar. None of it made any sense, and running herself in circles about it wouldn't help. She needed rest if she was going to find her way out of this.
She closed her eyes and began counting sheep, but even so, it was a long time before sleep finally took her.
Morning—or whatever time it was—began with Paige crashing face first into the concrete floor. She screamed, partly in surprise and partly in pain, and writhed uselessly for several moments until she managed a somewhat upright position. Her arms were immobile, numb and tingling.
Arnaud had the gall to stand beside the pillar and smirk. It was the first time he had ever worn an expression approaching a smile. Paige hadn't thought she could prefer his usual grim stoicism to anything, but he had proved her wrong.
"Up," Arnaud said. "Follow me."
He led her through the already-bustling room to a small but incongruously elegant bathroom, which she used eagerly. When they returned to their usual pillar, she had a clean face, hands, and feet, and her hair, though still in need of a wash, had at least been more carefully arranged. Arnaud didn't handcuff her to the pillar again, so she elected to stand with her shoulder against it, observing the busy room.
Time passed slowly as the warehouse gradually filled with boxes, crates, and bags. There was far more stashed away in the sewers than Paige would have guessed. All of it was arranged in careful, ordered stacks, directed by a few men with clipboards. The street toughs re-appeared, not dead after all, to help with the removal. Paige alternated between sitting, standing, and pacing slow circles as she watched. She wondered, again, what kind of operation required this amount of supplies.
A good number of hours must have passed, perhaps even most of the day, when she caught a change in the air. Tension and excitement ran over the men. They stopped what they were doing, stood up, turned. Paige sat up, craning her neck to see between men to whatever had caught their interest.
And there he came, striding in from an exit door, flanked by two men on each side. Bane. He was taking stock of the room as he walked, nodding to certain men, occasionally pausing to look through a particular crate or pile. Barsad jogged over to him from somewhere behind Paige, saluted, then fell into step beside him. Paige couldn't hear their voices from this far away over the sound of the other men.
There was no sign of the Batman.
Paige was torn between the desire to stay hidden on the floor and the desire to stand and see, or perhaps be seen. Setting her jaw, she stood, and stuffed her hands in her pockets so they wouldn't shake. She planted her feet and stared at Bane as he made his way across the vast warehouse floor. Each step made her muscles tense further, until she felt like a piano wire, ready to snap at the slightest pressure. Bane was only a handful of yards away now, his voice audible but not decipherable as he talked with Barsad. His eyes were constantly moving as he walked, flicking from man to man, and, at last, they landed on Paige.
And then moved right along to someone else.
Bane continued without stopping, heading for the hole into the sewers, and before long he had hooked into a harness and was gone from sight.
Paige deflated, the tension leaving her and an odd sense of disappointment taking its place. She realized she'd been clutching one of the metal bats in her pocket, and let go immediately. What had she hoped would happen? That Bane would come over to gloat over her specifically, as if she were the aim of this entire mad enterprise, whatever it was? That he would pause to listen politely to her complaints and demands for explanations? Perhaps return a witty retort or two and loom ominously like a cartoon villain? Whatever Bane was, he was certainly a man with more pressing matters at hand than banter. Paige leaned back against the pillar, more tired than ever, and rubbed her eyes.
A crinkling sound caught her attention, and she turned to see Arnaud taking two plastic-wrapped meals from another soldier hauling a canvas bag full of the things. Arnaud tossed her one, which she caught awkwardly, and settled back on the floor to eat. Her stomach was hollow, but she had no real appetite. Even so, she knew it would be important to keep her strength up for whatever might be coming. She ripped open the packaging and set in, hardly tasting anything.
Arnaud ate close by, standing, his gun dangling from its strap. She observed him out of the corner of her eye. She guessed he was a little older than her, closer to thirty. He had a few day's worth of scruff on his chin, close-cropped hair, dark eyes. She would have said he was fairly nice-looking under different circumstances, with a strong nose and high cheekbones. She wondered who he was, really; how he had come to work for Bane, who his parents were, where he was born. She assumed he was French from the accent. How did a Frenchman end up in a paramilitary group in Gotham? What roads had he walked down to lead him here?
"How did you meet him?" she asked. The question slipped out without her meaning it to, but as Arnaud turned to look at her, she decided to commit to it. "Mr. Bane, I mean."
Arnaud finished chewing and swallowing before answering. "I know what you mean."
"So?"
He took another bite and chewed this as well before answering. "It doesn't matter."
Paige leaned forward. "If it doesn't matter, there's no reason not to tell me."
"And no reason to waste my breath."
Paige clenched her jaw for a moment. Then, she picked up a foil-wrapped rectangle from her meal tray. It was a paltry attempt at bargaining, but it was all the leverage she had. "I'll trade you my chocolate bar if you tell me."
Arnaud gave her a disdainful look, then bent down, plucked the bar out of her hands, tore it open with his teeth, and took a bite. He actually had the nerve to smile at her as he ate it.
Paige shook her head, turning away. "Psychopath," she muttered, and went back to her own meal.
To her surprise, he spoke again, in a lower voice. "Be careful who you call psychopath, fille," he said. "Some of these men would take it badly."
Paige eyed him. He was looking down at her quite seriously, not as if he were angry. "But not you?" she asked.
He shrugged, a twitch of the shoulders, but said nothing.
Paige searched her memory for a moment, then slowly pronounced, hoping she had her grammar in order, "Pourquoi me ditez ça?"
She actually managed to startle him a little, which made her feel irrationally proud. "You speak French?" he asked.
"Un peu." She held her fingers up, pinched close together. "I took a couple semesters. Language credit."
He recovered his equanimity quickly, studying her through his usual grim mask. "If you insult the wrong man, and he kills you for it," he said, "it will be on my head. I would rather it not be on my head."
Paige nodded. "That makes sense," she said. "Do you have anyone in mind I should specifically avoid insulting? To avoid bringing anything down on that head of yours?"
He gave her a flat look. "Avoid them all," he said. "Bane especially, but avoid them all." He turned back to his food.
Paige wasn't ready to let her only real conversation in what felt like days slip away from her. "Even Barsad?" she asked. "He seemed pretty easy-going." For a gun-toting henchman, she added silently.
Arnaud gave a hard chuckle. "Sniper's calm," he said. "I have seen Barsad shoot a man at seven hundred meters over a poker game. From a month before. Trust me, he is not 'easy-going.'"
Paige had taken a bite of biscuit, and it went down like a lump of drywall. "Oh," was all she managed to say.
Arnaud looked at her for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he squatted down beside her, bringing them to eye level. "Listen," he said, barely above a whisper. He kept his eyes steady on hers, hardly blinking. "You are a smart woman. Keep quiet, don't try to run again. You never met Bane before a few weeks ago, yes?"
"How did you—yes, that's true. The alleyway."
"Then he has nothing against you. He is… hard, you understand. He can be a cruel man. But he is not unreasonable. He never acts without purpose. I don't know why he has you here, but it is not to kill you. Don't give him or anyone else a reason to kill you, and you will do fine. Ça va?"
It mirrored what Barsad had told her—but then, Barsad was a cold-blooded killer. And so was this man, with his dark, steady eyes. She put on her best negotiator's face and nodded. "Ça va. Merci."
He said nothing, only stood and returned to his guard position, finishing up his food. Paige ate as best as she could, though it all tasted like cardboard. She had received two reassurances from two different men, and yet she felt just as vulnerable and anxious as ever. Perhaps more so.
Because if Bane didn't plan to hurt her, what on earth did he plan to do?
More hours passed. The activity around them slowed as time went by. Most of the supplies from the tunnels appeared to have been brought up, sorted, and stacked on flat, wheeled carts. Some of the guns-Ak-47s, she thought, and a lot of them-were packed into large, anonymous duffel bags. The various items that had already been in the warehouse had been packed away as well, leaving only the immense tanks. These had been thoroughly investigated, taken for test drives through the warehouse, and now sat idle and menacing near the large hangar doors at one end of the space. Most of the men now appeared to be engaged in personal maintenance: disassembling and cleaning their guns, checking their gear, and packing rucksacks. Paige wondered where they intended to use those guns, and when.
The most interesting thing that Paige realized as the activity in the room slowed, however, was that she wasn't the only prisoner. Several dozen yards away and handcuffed to a different pillar was a man. He was too far away for Paige to make out the details of his face, but from the iron gray of his hair, she guessed he was around fifty. He had already been looking in her direction when she spotted him, and now they stared at each other almost constantly, too far away to communicate, yet trapped in identical circumstances.
She considered asking Arnaud who he was, but decided against it. She would rather he didn't know she had realized the man was there; he might take extra steps to ensure they remained apart. Perhaps she could get close enough to exchange words with him on the way to the bathroom, or whenever they left the warehouse. Even being able to look him directly in the eyes would feel like a kind of victory.
The meal cart came by twice more, and a water cart once. Arnaud's supply of conversation had apparently been exhausted by their earlier exchange, and they ate in silence. Sometime after their third meal—dinner, Paige supposed—men began coming up from the tunnels in a steady stream. They brought with them the last of their gear, it looked like: power tools, computers, and a few large hard cases that she thought might hold very large guns. All things that would have been installed, the last to go.
And the last of all the men was Bane. He appeared to have eschewed a harness and the motorized pulley in favor of climbing the hundred odd feet hand over hand, yet he pulled himself out of the hole as if he had done nothing more strenuous than take a short walk. He had traded his dark jacket for the massive shearling coat that had been her blanket in the tunnels, the collar popped up around his neck against the sewer damp. Beneath that he wore a bulletproof vest and sturdy cargo pants with reinforced knees. Once he was standing on the edge of the pit, he turned in a slow circle to observe the entire space. His eyes missed nothing, including Paige, who stood stiffly beside her pillar. The background sound of the men talking amongst themselves slowly died as Bane's gaze swept through the room, until they all stood in the eerie, echoing silence of large spaces full of silent people. Barsad appeared by Bane's side out of the crowd. They exchanged a few words, Barsad nodded as if confirming an order, then headed for one of the exit doors.
Bane heaved himself up onto a nearby pile of crates. He had already towered over nearly everyone in the room, but now he was visible to all. Arnaud took what seemed to be an unconscious step forward, his eyes fixed on Bane. Paige scanned the room and saw the same look in every man's face: bright eyes, still bodies, straight backs. There was a quiet expectation in the air, a readiness. She almost wanted to call it a waiting obedience.
She could feel what drew them. She found herself also looking to Bane, also going still, also waiting to see what he would say. The man had a magnetism to him, she couldn't deny it. She'd seen shadows of it in bigwig executive types. They could charm a room, wow a crowd, make their employees share their vision—but even the best of them couldn't approach this. Bane had every person in this room, Paige included, hanging on his every breath, all without saying a thing.
"Brothers," he began at last, his voice echoing through the space, "we stand on the eve of Gotham's judgment. We have waited long, suffered much. All of you have done well."
Arnaud squared his shoulders, and a tiny smile, the first genuine one she had seen on him, touched his lips.
"Tomorrow morning will be the fruition of all our labor. Tonight, rest. There is much to be done in the days ahead. You will all need your strength."
He paused a moment, his eyes sweeping the crowd. "We have started the fire," he said.
And the men erupted.
Paige actually jumped and yelped, but the motion and sound were both lost in the cacophony. The men shouted and lifted their fists and their guns, roaring like a crowd at a home game—only with a fiercer, darker undertone. Words were mixed in with the shouts. "The fire rises," the men cheered. "The fire. The fire. Bane and the fire. The fire."
At some point in the din, Bane climbed down from his makeshift stage and began mingling with the men, clasping forearms and gripping shoulders. A glow seemed to suffuse the air through which he passed, made up of bright eyes and fierce grins. Every man he touched became his own flame, lit from the bonfire of Bane's presence. It was politicking, Paige realized—or maybe it was what politicking tried to imitate. Fostering real connection. Understanding who you led. Inspiring them.
Frightening, how easily he seemed to do it.
The sound died down over the course of several minutes, but the room buzzed with conversation. It sounded odd, and it took Paige a moment to realize why. In a normal space, the voices would be men and women speaking, but here it was almost all men. Paige had seen a bare handful of women dressed in fatigues, but that was all. As a result, the pitch of the sound was much lower, vibrating in her chest like a heavy bass line. It made her feel very desperately out of place.
Arnaud was silent, but he held himself straighter than he had before, and there was a different light in his eyes. Paige decided that she likely wouldn't see him in a better mood any time soon, and now would be the best time for questions.
"What does he mean by 'Gotham's judgment'?" she asked.
Arnaud continued gazing out over the crowd. This went on long enough that she thought he wouldn't respond, but at last, he said, "Tomorrow, we will bring this city to its knees. It will finally be held to account."
"How?" Paige pressed. "What do you mean? What's going to happen?"
He turned to her at last, that tiny smile still on his lips. "A reckoning," he said. "A cleansing fire."
"But what does that mean?" Paige pressed, exasperation mixing with fear in her voice. "What does that mean?"
"You will see," Arnaud said, and turned away, leaving her alone with the cold feeling in the pit of her stomach.
The next day, Paige was already awake when Arnaud undid her handcuffs, but, rather than escorting her to the bathroom like the day before, he instead brought her to a different set of doors that she hadn't seen before. And not just any doors: elevator doors. Paige felt some of her exhaustion lift as they stepped inside, and nervous energy pushed into its place. What would she be witness to next, she wondered.
She wasn't sure what she expected to lie at the top of their ascent, but it certainly wasn't a cushy executive office.
She blinked in the dimness of the office. One wall of the office had an enormous plate glass window, which showed the lights of Gotham twinkling beneath a predawn sky of gray. They were looking down from a considerable vantage point. Where on earth were they?
As Arnaud led her out of the elevator, a bookcase slid into place over the doors with the whirring of an engine, concealing them and casting the room into further dimness. Paige could only see the shadows of a desk and a few chairs, which she avoided. Arnaud prodded her forward towards the doorway of the office, and she stumbled as her bare feet hit soft carpet, then cold flooring once more. There was just enough light from the windows to see by; the hallway outside also seemed to be done mostly in white, which helped reflect and diffuse the meager illuminations. The only sounds were their own breathing and Arnaud's boots on the floor. Everything else seemed to be the echoing quiet of an empty building, long before anyone would arrive. Paige wondered what day it was. She had been taken on a Thursday, and she thought she'd been at least a night and a day down below, almost certainly more. Would anyone come into work today? Would they be discovered?
Arnaud walked beside her and to the side, whispering instructions as they went. Down a short hallway and then into a more broad central corridor, which led to a row of elevators. Paige pressed the button for the one on the far right. The car arrived quickly, and as the doors opened, the sudden golden light spilled out to greet them. They boarded, and Arnaud held the "close door" button until the light narrowed to nothingness on the floor behind them.
And, as her vision shifted to the doors themselves, she was given the answer to an earlier question.
Engraved letters slid together, and as the elevator car rose smoothly, she learned where she was: Wayne Enterprises.
She felt a quiet shock thud in her core. Vaguely, she noticed Arnaud pressing the button for the top floor. The Batman's armory was below Wayne Tower? And a construction project that big couldn't happen without their knowledge-they had to know it was down there.
Bruce Wayne's company had been funding the Batman all along?
She chewed on this as the car continued to rise-the WE tower was the tallest in Gotham, dominating the skyline-she couldn't make sense of it. Bruce Wayne was, by all accounts, an absolute airhead. A pretty nice airhead, apparently, giving lots to charity and being, according to multiple amicable ex-girlfriends, a "really great guy," but still, an airhead. The man posted pictures of pancakes on Instagram, for goodness's sakes. Why was he funding a violent, controversial figure like the Batman?
She supposed it could be some company figures behind it, not Wayne himself, but that made less sense. Idealists didn't climb that high in the corporate ladder, if you could even call supporting the Batman an "idealistic" move. It certainly couldn't be profit-motivated, unless the mob had been competing with WE somehow…
For a moment, her thoughts went into a dark spiral as she imagined what it might mean if the Batman's entire crusade against the mob, against the Joker, had all been nothing but a mask for corporate profit margins. A way for WE to take out its shady rivals without dirtying its own hands.
But then she thought about the fight in the sewer, and another fight in an alley, seven years ago, half-seen in the darkness and the rain and the fear, and she knew it couldn't be true. Whoever the Batman was, and whatever motives he had, he was more than a puppet on WE strings. Their reasons for bankrolling him were a mystery, but she couldn't believe he did everything he had done just for them.
The elevator reached the top floor, and the doors slid apart with a chime. Arnaud ushered her out with a poke from his rifle barrel, and she preceded him down a long corridor, floored in pale stone. There were still lights on here, just dim sconces, but enough to see by. Her feet made little sound, while his jackboots echoed down the hallway. There were several branching hallways, some dark and some lit, and Arnaud led her down one of the lit ones, and another, and another. The marble turned to gray, textured carpet, and eventually they reached an apparently disused back hallway, dead-ending in a metal door.
"Open it," Arnaud said.
She did so, revealing metal stairs heading up, a single bare bulb protruding out of the concrete walls. She took the steps gingerly, the cold metal biting into her feet. There was only about a flight and a half of them, with another metal door at the top. This she opened as well, and blinked in unexpected November air, frosty. It slapped her in the face with a joyous abandon and the smell of the bay. She emerged, blinking, onto the roof, pulling her coat tight around her in the chill. Rubber mulch felt strange and unsteady under her feet. She turned in a circle, looking hungrily at the city, with its myriad towers, labyrinthe of streets, millions of people, and far out, gleaming with a sliver of rising red sun, the sea. Her chest expanded with an enormous breath that seemed to clear the last of the dust and sewer damp from her lungs. Free air surrounded her, unbelievably free, and no walls penned her in. After so long underground, it felt like being born.
Arnaud closed the door behind them, and stood in front of it, rifle across his chest. He looked even more grim in the faint light of the dawn, if that were possible. His eyes were shadowed and unreadable.
"What are we doing up here?" Paige asked.
"Waiting."
She tried to stifle her impatience. "For?"
A small, ugly smile flashed in the shadows. "For the show to begin."
A chill, divorced from the cold, shivered up her back. Pressing her lips together, she turned away and looked out over the city.
Gotham never truly went to sleep, but morning still gave it a kind of awakening. As the sun rose higher over the bay, slipping rays between the high rises, car traffic increased, small as matchboxes bellow her, and the tiny pinpricks of traffic lights changed more rapidly as the sun continued to climb. The redness gave way to ordinary, pale autumn sunlight. Pedestrians, barely visible from this height, became more numerous. Paige looked down at them with an ache in her stomach. If she shouted, could anyone possibly hear her? As powerful as Bane and his men seemed, she was sure, somehow, that if she could only get down there, down in the streets, with normal people doing normal things, then all their power would break like an icicle. Like waking up breaks a bad dream.
But there was no way to get down. There weren't any fire escapes this high up, so unless someone had left a parachute on top of Wayne Tower, she was stuck here.
The cold lessened only slightly as dawn broke fully, and Paige began to bitterly regret her choice of footwear on the day of her abduction. Her boots would have held up just fine over the last several days-why hadn't she worn her boots? Even a pair of flats would have been better. After perhaps an hour or two, she discovered some kind of heating tower or exhaust vent protruding in a box from the roof, and against this she huddled, pressing her feet to the metal.
Time passed. She thought of her mother, down in Florida and afraid. She thought of the Batman-was he alive? Was he a prisoner, like her? Or had that blow to his back been the end of him? It was impossible to say. She thought of the other prisoner she had briefly seen, the man with iron-gray hair. Why was he being kept? Had he also shown a poorly-timed kindness to Bane? Or was it something else, something unknown? She thought of the people down below, going out for coffee, breakfast, brunch. Shopping on their day off, walking the dog, going to see friends. She thought of her church-not far from here, perhaps even visible from the right angle-the opening prayer, the Scripture reading, the singing. She remembered, with a pang, that she was supposed to conduct the psalm that morning. She wondered who was filling in.
And she thought about the three, sharp little bats in her pocket, and she thought about Arnaud's gun, and she wondered.
Her stomach began to grumble as the sun neared its zenith up above. Arnaud remained almost perfectly still the entire time, hardly even shifting from foot to foot. She wondered how he did it. He had to be cold, and if her sluggish metabolism was running low, he had to be starving. And yet he stood still as stone. Such was his devotion.
It was not until the sun was a quarter of the way down from its zenith to the earth that he, at last, spoke.
"Get up," he said. "You must see it happen."
It. It was finally happening.
A rush of nerves buzzed in her stomach and filled her up to her throat. Swallowing, she lurched to her feet, and stumbled over on legs numb with cold and inactivity. "What's happening?" she asked.
Arnaud's face was filled with tension and some strange emotion she could not identify. He pointed out over the city, towards the Gotham Stadium in Uptown. "Watch."
She turned, and watched.
Three minutes later, the world rocked back on its feet, and everything changed.
It began as a low rumbling beneath her bare feet, increasing until the rubber mulch bounced around them in waves. Then, shooting out from beneath the foundations of Wayne Tower came lines of force and power. Paige watched, transfixed, as the ground beneath them shook as if from an earthquake. Plumes of smoke and dust rocketed up one after another in every direction in straight lines from the base of the tower. Paige gaped and twisted as she tried to keep track of them all. Traffic jams instantly clogged up the streets before they were swallowed completely by dust, and crowds of frightened pedestrians milled in every direction. Explosions, dozens, hundreds, finally reached her ears as the plumes continued to rise.
With a great and terrible grinding rumble, a building three blocks to the north began to collapse in on itself.
Then another, south. A second. A third. More. Then the lines of smoke, becoming blurry with distance, reached the perimeter of the island, and ignited the bridges. One by one they fell, tumbling into the water like matchsticks and sending up rolling waves out into the bay. Paige turned and saw the same in every direction-Uptown's bridges fell, then Downtown's, even South Hinkley's. Flames gouted out and black smoke rose from the splintered edges.
Dust rose into the air like the mist from a waterfall, cutting off Paige's view, and as she stood atop an island in the midst of the cloud, Paige had an earlier question answered.
Yes, you could hear screaming between the top of Wayne Tower and the ground beneath. But only if enough people were screaming together.
Arnaud was pressing something into her hands. It took her several seconds to process the fact that something was touching her, and then to grab it automatically, and finally to realize that she was holding a smartphone with a cracked screen. It took several seconds more for her brain to begin to comprehend what she was looking at.
A news channel, live. Of Bane.
He was standing in the endzone of the Gotham U football field, his men arrayed around him, and behind him loomed a strange, futuristic black sphere. The audio was not very good, between Bane's mask and the shoddy speakers on the phone, but at last her frazzled mind comprehended what was being said.
A bomb.
Bane had an armed nuclear bomb in the middle of Gotham city.
Paige watched, her horror rising beyond anything she had ever thought to feel, as another question was answered: Dr. Pavel was the name of the other captive. And he was not being held for showing kindness to Bane, but because he alone knew how to arm and disarm the bomb looming behind them.
And then Bane laid hands on the doctor, and he was not being held anymore.
Paige missed what Bane said next, as she was stumbling away, searching for something, though she didn't know what, and then was violently sick. Once, twice, thrice.
She was on her hands and knees, though she didn't remember falling to them, staring down at the mulch and her own mess and her hands, which wavered in her vision as if in a heat wave. She heard, with odd clarity, Arnaud's approaching boots. She turned her head to stare up at him. He was, after all, human—he had to be human. She was in the midst of a terrible, monstrous nightmare, and she had to be anchored to something real and breathing and human.
Arnaud looked down at her, and if he had any expression on his face at all, it was one of satisfaction, of triumph.
"Come," he said, grabbing one arm and lifting her. "Time to go below."
Paige could not afterwards recall the descent to the ground floor of Wayne Tower. Her memories began again when she found herself deposited in a large chair in what appeared to be some kind of waiting room or visitor's lounge, a large space with expensive furniture and dark hardwoods. There was a large TV mounted in the corner, showing an out of state newsroom reviewing footage of the explosions, commentating with solemn expressions.
Her hands gripped the overstuffed leather of the chair, cool and soft beneath her fingertips. She dug her toes into the rug, and stared at the screen, willing herself to comprehend. Her sensations seemed utterly divorced from her own mind, alien and unattached. There was the Paige that had just watched a man die, and had seen a city fall into dust around her feet; and then there was the Paige sitting in a cool chair in an air conditioned room, listening to an incoherent babble of newscasters. Neither of them felt real.
Arnaud was standing beside and a little behind her. Gradually, she realized that more of Bane's men were around them, coming and going. She was near the front entrance of the building, behind the empty reception desk, with rapidly fading sunlight shining in through the large windows above and behind her. Bane's men were in constant flow in and out of the building, some carrying supplies, some not. Some distant corner of her mind told her she needed to figure out what they were doing because someone would need to know it, someone would have to understand what was happening, but she simply couldn't keep the thoughts in her head. Men flowed in and out, and Paige just sat and watched.
The sunlight was completely gone by the time she was able to string words together.
"I don't understand," she rasped. Her throat was unexpectedly rough. She did not look at Arnaud. Men flowed in and out, more than before.
"Bane is giving the city back to the people," Arnaud said. A knowing smugness lay under his words. "He is letting the many rule the few, instead of the other way around."
"He's got a bomb," she rasped.
"To ensure no one from outside interferes." She could hear a smile in his voice. "You will see more tomorrow. There are many changes coming. Perhaps you will like them."
"The buildings. They fell."
Arnaud said nothing. She turned her head to look up at him, and saw his face was only slightly curious. "Yes?" He said after another moment.
"Apartment buildings. One of them. At least. An apartment building."
He did not have the moment of dawning comprehension that she so desperately needed to see. She kept pushing.
"Those explosions. Bane's. They brought down an apartment building."
Nothing.
"People," she hissed. "People live there. People live there and it's Sunday. They were in there and he brought it down."
"Revolution," Arnaud said, as if that were an answer in and of itself. He shrugged his shoulders microscopically. "It never comes without a price."
This time, Paige managed to reach a nearby trashcan before she began heaving.