Batman (12 page)

“That’s possible, but I certainly hope not,”
Batman said.
“Bear in mind how the Riddler has arranged events so far. He’s keeping us working in tandem, but not together,”
he added.
“That’s becoming clearer all the time. He constructed this trap so I’d have to come here in order to release you. There must be a reason for him wanting me in Arkham City instead of working from the Batcave. I’m going to follow that angle.”

“Well, while you do that, I’m going to take the plunge again,” Robin said. “So to speak.”

“Good plan,”
Batman said. This time he didn’t add, “Be careful.”

Door number three opened easily. Robin felt a soft breeze hit his back as air from the room moved into the space on the other side of the door, and a draft around his feet as colder air from that dark space rolled into the room.

Terrific. I was just starting to remember what warm felt like.

He entered the space and saw that it was a cargo elevator, old and well used. There was only one button on its control panel. Robin pushed it and door number three closed. The rusty elevator doors slid shut, and the elevator dropped. Robin counted the seconds. Freight elevators rarely traveled at more than a hundred feet per minute.

He was between twenty-nine and thirty when the elevator car stopped and the doors opened again. That put Robin fifty feet or less below the floor level of the chessboard. Fifty feet was plenty of space for an elaborate trap, and it also put him somewhere near the depth of the subway tunnels that led under this part of the city. He stepped out into a large open space with a grime-covered concrete floor and rusted steel beams holding up the ceiling.

The first thing he noticed was the cold. He could see his breath against the semidarkness, and the air bit at the inside of his nose with every inhalation. It was going to be a theme, then. Pulling a halogen light out of a waterproof pocket on his belt, he shone it out into the space. There he saw several arrangements of spheres, seemingly suspended in midair. Each sphere was about the size of a beach ball. From where he stood, he couldn’t tell how many individual arrangements there were, though it might be three.

The rectangular room looked to be somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred feet long, and its width about half of that. The elevator was located in a corner, set into one of the shorter walls. Robin thought the long wall to his right—the closer one—must run parallel to the passage that led from the junction room to the holding tank. That would put the lower discharge tunnel under the floor.

He stepped carefully out of the car, not touching any of the spheres and stopping just a few feet from the elevator. This offered him a slightly different angle on the room, and he scanned for a door. After a moment he found it, all the way at the opposite corner. As his light fell on it, a bright green question mark lit up on the door.

Okay then
, he thought.
No question where I’m supposed to go. So what’s going to stop me from getting there?
He studied the floor underneath the nearest of the sphere arrangements, and didn’t see anything unusual. The hanging globes didn’t look different from one another.

Robin started to shiver again. His uniform had dried. Nevertheless, his nose and ears stung from the cold, and the cloth of his cloak crackled when he took a step. The flood puzzle had set the stage for this one, making him more vulnerable to the temperature.

Taking a chance and wanting to get this over with, he walked straight across the room on a diagonal, leaning out of the way of the hanging spheres and reaching the far door without incident. There was no knob or latch, no keypad or control panel on the wall near it. The question mark, a little less than a foot tall, glowed a steady green.

The solution is in these globes
, he decided.
And I’d better find it fast.
He could already feel the cold seeping into him. So he walked around the room, viewing the arrangements from different perspectives before he dared touch any of them. They hung at about waist height, and he could tell that they would look decidedly different if viewed from above or below them.

Pursuing that track, he lay on his back. Ignoring the shock of the cold concrete, he slid himself under one of the formations, scooting along the floor until he had moved along its entire length. Something about it tugged at his memory, but the cold was slowing his mind again. He wasn’t shivering anymore, and a distant alarm bell went off in his head.

Wasn’t that a bad thing?

He drifted a little, and nearly fell asleep—

No!

Robin jerked, like someone snapping out of a dream. Frost crackled on the parts of his cloak that were touching the frigid surface.

Hypothermia. That’s what it means when you stop shivering
, he recalled.
Your body is losing the ability to regulate its temperature.
He had to move, had to try to generate some heat somehow. He rolled over and got to his feet, shook his head, and out of the fog that had nearly put his mind into a lethal drift, a memory loomed.

School.

Science class.

Circles and lines…

They were chemical models. He was looking at chemical compounds represented in three-dimensional space.

But what compounds?

Robin looked up and saw that the cables holding the spheres were hung from tracks built into the ceiling, along the girders. The girders looked dull and old, but the tracks were new and shiny in the flashlight’s beam. The nature of the puzzle became clear. He had to rearrange them somehow. Also, now that he was looking at the tracks, he could tell that there were two groups of spheres, and not three as he had first thought in the gloom.

But that realization didn’t bring him any closer to answering the questions he had. What were the compounds? Which one should he reconfigure first, and how? What would the consequences be if he did them in the wrong order?

It was time to bring Batman in. He activated the comm and, forming his words carefully because his face was so cold, he described the room.

“What do they look like when you lie underneath them?”
Batman asked immediately.

“I just did that,” Robin said, “and I almost didn’t get up.”

“I’m afraid you need to do it again,”
Batman said.
“Keep talking and keep moving. A quick look is all you should need.”

“If you say so.” Robin lay on his back and scooted under the formation closest to the door. “It’s… well, there are seven globes in this one. They are arranged in… wait a minute.” He stood up, noticing something he hadn’t seen before. “Some of the globes have the numeral ‘2’ on them.”

“Any other distinguishing marks? Numbers?”

Robin ran a light over all of the other globes and realized that several of them were marked ‘2,’ but that was the only thing to indicate any difference. They were the same size, the same color…

“Do you think all of the twos go together?”

“I doubt it,”
Batman said.
“That’s too straightforward for the Riddler.”

“Well, there are two distinct arrangements,” Robin said. “Each of them is some kind of chemical compound. That’s what it looks like they’re meant to be, anyway. The globes are hanging on tracks so I can move them, but I don’t want to just shove them around.”

“No, we need to know what we’re trying to do before we do something.”

What do you mean, “we”?
Robin thought abstractly. Batman said something else Robin didn’t hear. The globes shone softly in the beam of his flashlight, and he started to relax. It didn’t seem as cold as it had been a minute ago…

“Robin!”

He jerked again, catching himself as he was just about to sit down. That hypothermia-induced calm was dangerous. He started moving around, trying to stamp some feeling back into his feet.

“Sorry,” he said. “My mind wandered a little. It’s—” He tried not to let any of the fear he felt show through in the tone of his voice. “It’s really cold in here.”

“Stay focused,”
Batman said firmly.
“You know the cold is part of the puzzle. The Riddler got you soaked, almost killed you, and now he’s testing you again. Testing both of us.”

“Your part of the test seems a little easier than mine,” Robin commented.

“Tell that to Killer Croc,”
Batman said.
“And speaking of old friends, I think I know where I need to go next.”

“Go fast,” Robin said. “I’m not sure how long jumping jacks are going to keep me awake.”

Duane Trask, Gotham Globe Radio

Killer Croc’s tooth had led to Killer Croc. Now the combination of a chemical puzzle and the frigid trap suggested to Batman that the Riddler had involved Victor Fries, better known as Mr. Freeze. Further, he reasoned that since one of the murder victims had been involved with the Ace Chemical factory, that was likely where they’d find Mr. Freeze—and hopefully the clue that would help Robin.

He had to act quickly.

Batman scaled the smokestack that vented the Flood Control Facility’s generator. Ace Chemical was visible in the distance, at the edge of the former Restricted Area… which, now that there was no authority to enforce those restrictions, was just another abandoned block of streets and decaying buildings.

Originally built just before World War II, the factory had been well on its way to ruin even before the walling off of Arkham City, and it was a thorough wreck now. Batman swung and glided from rooftop to rooftop, passing the fire still burning in the Gotham Merchant’s Bank building. The streets around the bank were clogged with fire trucks, and a coroner’s van was on the scene. It looked like the firefighters were getting the blaze under control, though.