Late. Otisburg. A freight truck rumbled through streets that had given up on being busy hours ago.
Joel had run this route for years. He knew every shortcut, every pothole, every blind corner where people stepped off curbs without checking first. Drivers in Metropolis navigated with an eye on pedestrian safety. Joel had learned early that this city required a different operating philosophy.
Somehow, he'd survived without arrest. Good driving skills helped. Better speed helped more. A few reliable associates who specialized in the administrative side of unfortunate accidents rounded out the system.
In fairness, he rarely hit anyone. The fact that fewer people walked this route than they used to wasn't necessarily his fault.
Probably.
"Life finds a way," he muttered around a mouthful of burger, humming to himself.
No major incidents this year. By Gotham's metric, he was practically a model citizen.
Then he saw it.
A streak of light ahead, moving fast enough that his eyes couldn't resolve the shape. Colored light—multiple colors, cycling—moving down the center of the road at a speed that shouldn't have been possible for anything that size.
Joel leaned forward. The burger dropped somewhere into the passenger footwell.
Motorcycle with illegal modifications? Wrong silhouette.
Some kind of stripped-down go-kart? Closer, but still wrong.
One of Otisburg's mad scientists, testing something? Possible. Very possible.
It streaked past, close enough now for details, and Joel's brain spent a full two seconds refusing to process what his eyes were sending it.
"Is that..." He blinked. Rubbed his face. Looked again. "...a wheelchair?"
SYSTEM: Modified Electric Wheelchair (Active)
Current Speed: 75 mph / 120 km/h
Power: Maximum
Style: Blinding
Attention attracted: Excessive — though honestly, what did you expect?
Jude had both hands on the armrests and the wind trying its best to strip his face off, and he felt genuinely good about this investment.
Seventy-five miles per hour. In a vehicle that weighed maybe forty pounds. Every crack and ripple in the road transmitted directly up through the frame and into his skeleton, but the shock-absorbing seat kept him from being launched, and the intermediate wheelchair driving skill meant his hands knew what to do before his brain finished issuing instructions. The wheelchair moved like a thought—lean, and it leaned. Shift weight, and it shifted.
LED strips ran the full perimeter of the frame, pulsing through the rainbow at their own pace. He looked like a mobile nightclub. Like someone had given a rave its own transportation.
Like the most visible moving object in Gotham.
Worth every asset point, he thought, grinning into the wind.
Otisburg blurred past and fell away. The East End came up ahead, darker and more fractured, the grid of streets narrowing and bending in ways that had stopped making architectural sense decades ago.
A few people on corners watched him come screaming past. A couple reached for something at their hips, did quick mental math on the physics of hitting a target moving that fast, and let the impulse go. A few braver souls didn't do the math first. Shots cracked in the dark somewhere behind him, passed wide and left, disappeared.
Jude barely registered them. He was busy threading through a gap between a parked delivery van and a newspaper box, catching air over a pothole, and lining up the drift into the next corner. The navigation overlay from the system ran in the bottom edge of his vision—more reliable than commercial GPS, which in Gotham had a tendency to route people through active crime scenes or across bridges that existed only on optimistic city planning documents.
The East End's narrow streets opened to him. Any alley wide enough to fit became a route. He slalomed through trash, cleared a pothole at speed, drifted around a corner in a shower of sparks from one footrest scraping the asphalt.
A few people managed to take photos. Blurry images of rainbow light and one young Asian man moving through Gotham like he'd bet his life on it.
The good news, he thought, is that photographic evidence means I'm not an urban legend.
The bad news is exactly the same thing.
The alley mouth to Drake's building came up. He hit the brakes late. The wheelchair spun sideways, bled speed in a controlled drift, stopped precisely at the entrance.
10:12 PM.
He stood, hit the release, and the sides folded inward in a series of clean clicks. He hefted the whole assembly under one arm—it weighed about as much as a large backpack—and walked into the alley.
"Not bad," he said, to nobody in particular. "Tomorrow I can probably cut another minute off."
He carried it into the building, whistling.
On a rooftop several blocks away, Selina Kyle stood in the shadow of a water tower and watched the light disappear into the alley.
She'd been keeping loose track of him since his first night in Gotham. The outsider. The one who'd arrived with nothing and somehow kept not dying—no connections, no reputation, no skills she'd been able to identify when she'd checked his pockets at the train station. Just a face that looked like it had seen too much and a stubbornness she still hadn't found a satisfying explanation for.
She'd pulled the shooter off him on the bus. Curiosity, mostly. She wanted to see how long someone like that lasted.
Now she watched the folded wheelchair disappear through a door and tried to figure out what, exactly, she was looking at.
"I thought I'd seen everything," she said to the empty rooftop air.
She was wrong.
Joel was still driving, one hand on the wheel, working through his feelings about what he'd witnessed.
"Never seen anything like it. Absolutely outrageous." He shook his head. "Gotham gets stranger every single week. Scarecrow with his gas. The Penguin and his birds. That new Freeze character down in Otisburg." He spat out the window. "Freaks, the lot of them. And that stupid urban legend about the bat mon—"
A shadow passed over the truck.
Large. Fast. Silent.
The kind of shadow that doesn't belong to anything with good intentions.
It covered the entire truck and slid forward, moving toward the rooftops.
Joel almost didn't notice. Almost.
The windshield came in.
Not cracked—in. Glass sprayed across the cabin in a single sharp burst. Joel's arms came up on reflex, and when he got them back down there was something in the cab with him.
He couldn't have described it precisely afterward. He'd try, later, at length, to people who hadn't asked. The cape was what registered first—dark fabric that moved like something alive, that spread across the narrow width of the cabin and blocked the streetlights. Then the height. Then the shoulders, too wide for the seat, too wide for anything human-proportioned to need.
Then the eyes.
White. Lensed. No pupils. No depth. They caught the passing light from outside and gave nothing back. They looked at him the way a searchlight looks at a fugitive—not with interest, not with malice. Just with perfect, inhuman attention.
Joel had laughed at the stories. Had filed them under the comfortable category of things that happen to other people in other parts of the city. He'd been doing it for years without incident.
He understood now, with total clarity, that this had been an error in reasoning.