Batman (20 page)

It took some of them a while to recover from Batman’s fists and feet, but soon the casino floor was jingling and clanging again with the sound of slot machines. Through the entire fight, the scribe assigned to the man who had won the jackpot hadn’t moved. She still sat with her head tilted back and her eyes closed.

“Now that’s dedication,” the Hatter said, wheezing loudly. “That’s the dedication I feel for my Alice. Are you my Alice, darling?” he called out.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice barely carried over the thirty feet that separated them. “I’m your Alice. You’ve found me.”

“You’re not Alice!” he screamed in a sudden rage, his voice rising so high that it was almost a squeal. He strained against Batman’s grip as if to jump off the balcony after her. Still she didn’t move.

Batman pulled the Hatter back and bounced his head off the floor a few times to refocus him on the matter at hand.

“Mind control,” he prompted.

“Oh, yes, mind control. Off with their heads! Or more properly, putting what’s in my head in their heads, which amounts to the same things, wouldn’t you say?” He was still wheezing.

“The Riddler told me where you would be,” Batman said. “He sold you out, you and Mr. Freeze and Killer Croc. What’s he trying to hide?”

“Well, I did him a little favor involving Rā’s al Ghūl’s journals, but that hardly seems worth killing me for,” the Hatter responded. A jackpot bell rang on the casino floor. The Hatter jerked and started to yell out another call to murder. Batman punched him in the gut and he doubled over, spending the next minute or so gagging and hacking.

Looking out over the floor, Batman saw the slot pullers and scribes just standing around. They did nothing without the Mad Hatter’s instructions. This was good—it meant that he could keep them alive simply by keeping the Hatter quiet.

He squatted next to his opponent, who didn’t look as if he was quite ready to stand up yet. Batman didn’t care—he hauled the Hatter to his feet.

“Rā’s al Ghūl’s journals,” he growled. “Continue.”

“Well, I had to get the information from somewhere,” the Hatter said. “And I thought, who knew this kind of thing? Who had the secrets? Who had been the furthest down that particular… well, rabbit hole? (If you’ll forgive the expression, and I know you will.) Why, it would be Rā’s al Ghūl, with his marvelously named Lazarus Pits! All I had to do was track down the journals he left behind when you dismissed him from this mortal coil.”

The Hatter paused.

“Or… did you? Surely not. But you were present at the event, and certainly complicit.”

“Rā’s killed himself while he was trying to kill me,” Batman responded. “He died by the sword. I’m not sorry it happened, but I didn’t do it.”

“Distinction without a difference,” the Hatter said airily. “In any event, I needed those journals. Thus I sojourned into the ruins of Arkham City, daring the remnants of TYGER and other threats more dire. Then I found a certain other party who informed me that what I sought could be had”—he paused and his expression registered the memory of a painful experience—“for a price.”

“I’m not interested in the price,” Batman said.

“Oh, I think you are. I was the one who coughed up the filthy lucre to convince Killer Croc to go to the dentist. Credit where credit is due, I always say. And once I had made that happen, I found the journals squirreled away in a little box. Incredible man, Rā’s al Ghūl—if man he was.” Tetch stopped to catch his breath, then continued.

“The Riddler wanted me to teach him how to control machines with his mind, and Rā’s knew how to do it! I’m not even certain he knew what he had, but everything I needed was in his journals—brilliant techniques I could combine with my own. I built the Riddler his device, right in this very building. Components from computers, elements of high-res cameras, even spare parts from slot machines—a casino is a wonderland of surprises. When you put them together”—the Hatter’s face got dreamy again—“magic happens.”

Mind control over machines. Lucas Angelo, a software developer specializing in robotics and control systems. Rosalyn Mateosian, an electronics engineer. The pieces finally began to fall into place. The problem was, he didn’t know the
reason
. He was caught up to the present, but had no idea what Nigma intended the future to look like. What machines? And when he established his mastery—if, in fact, he could do so—what was he going to accomplish with them?

Batman stood, and hauled the Mad Hatter bodily to his feet. As Tetch sought to gather himself, he shot Batman a strange look.

“When I asked whether or not you had dismissed Rā’s from this mortal vale of tears,” he said, “I wasn’t questioning your motives, but the… shall we say,
finality
, of the act.” The statement sent a chill through Batman.

“What are you getting at?” he demanded. “Are you saying that he’s
alive
?”

“I am saying that in the end, a raven is like a writing desk. Nothing else matters.” With that he launched into a torrent of gibberish, and no matter how Batman tried, he couldn’t get anything more out of him.

Posted by JKB

Wednesday 2:38 p.m.

Robin was already moving when Harley Quinn’s hand dropped to her belt, and the shot shattered the family portrait on the far wall instead of punching a hole through his face. He cartwheeled to his right, coming up with the bō ready.

She threw the gun away and drew another one.

“Ready to play?”

“You keep changing the rules,” Robin said.

“That’s the game, silly!” she said. She leveled the new gun, then made a comical show of squeezing one eye shut and sighting down the barrel. The gun was tiny. In her small hands, it looked like a toy. Even so, Robin would bet his life that it would fire a real bullet.

“And in this game, I always win,” Quinn added.

She started to squeeze the trigger, when the back wall of the execution chamber caved in, and a huge humanoid figure burst through the rubble. A blinding flash lit the room, and Quinn was blasted off her feet by an energy bolt from a gun mounted on the robot’s shoulder. As she sat up and shook her head, the figure lumbered into the room and placed itself midway between her and Robin.

Its eyes glowed a baleful green.

She looked up at it.

“Wow,” she said, and she pointed comically. “Off with his head, too!” Then she dissolved into uncontrolled giggles. It was one of Wonder City’s famed mechanical guardians, built by Rā’s al Ghūl decades ago. Robin had seen them before, but never operational.

“I thought you wanted me to live long enough to see the Riddler’s big show,” he said to Quinn, his eyes still on the robotic newcomer.

“You dummy, that’s what I
wanted
you to think,” she answered with a laugh. “I don’t care what the Riddler wants—he never gave a damn about Mista J. You’ll see.” She scrambled to her feet, having recovered from the robot’s blast with surprising speed. “Time to go, I guess.” She skipped to the edge of the hole in the wall. “I hope the Riddler doesn’t kill you, sweetie,” she said over her shoulder. “That would be soooo disappointing.”

She blew him a kiss, and was gone.

The robot stayed where it was, frozen.

Was she on his side, or not?
Robin shook his head.
Every time we run into her, I end up with a headache. Too much bull—

“Ouch,” Vicki Vale said. He turned and saw her hiding behind the couch—
chaise longue
, he corrected himself—looking at the inside of her arm. A trickle of blood ran down her wrist to drop from her thumb. “That’s a sharp blade.”

She’d cut the zip ties with the axe blade.

“When did you do that?” Robin asked.

“While you were chatting about mento moris, or mementos mori… whatever,” she said. “All that.”

“Sorry,” Robin said. “If you’d waited a second…”

“I’m not big on waiting,” Vale said. “Especially not when someone’s just tried to cut my head off. Now I need to get out of here and file this story.” She stood up, bracing herself for a moment with her uninjured arm.

“I wouldn’t go just yet,” Robin said. He walked across the execution chamber and looked through the hole in the wall. A rough tunnel, almost looking like a natural cave, led away to what he thought was the north, sloping down into blackness.
A glimpse behind the Riddler’s curtain
, Robin thought.
He’s built in emergency measures to make sure nobody interferes with his game.
And he had control of at least one of the mechanical guardians.

“I didn’t think those things really existed,” Vale said. She walked up to the robot and looked it over. It was much taller than she was, taller in fact than any human.

“Well, they do,” Robin said. “This one’s been customized, I think. It doesn’t look like the other ones I’ve seen.” The mechanical guardians he’d encountered before were skeletal in design except for their torsos, which had to be larger to house their energy supplies. They reminded him of some robots he’d seen in an old
Superman
cartoon. Their heads were roughly the same shape as a human head.

Where human eyes would be, mechanical guardians had two glowing lenses. They had different built-in weapons, too, or at least this one did. Where the original guardians had been engraved with Victorian-style filigree, with a Jules Verne aesthetic, this one had question marks engraved on its armored exoskeleton.

“How many others have you seen?”

Robin shrugged. “A few, down in Wonder City.”

“You’ve been to Wonder City?”

He turned to look at her as he realized he was being interviewed.

“Miss Vale, this isn’t a good time…”

“Are you for real?
Every
time is a good time, when it comes to getting a story. That’s what I do, kid. But we can talk about Wonder City some other time—let’s get back to what you said about Batman losing someone he loves.”

Ouch.

“You heard that, huh?”

She smiled. “I sure did.”

“Well, you heard all you’re going to hear,” he said, making it sound final. “About that, anyway. You want to talk about the Riddler, we can do that—
if
we do it fast. I have to get out of here, and for all I know I just ate something really bad.”

“Do you think you’ve been poisoned?” There was something more than interest in Vicki’s voice.

Almost… glee
, Robin thought.
That’s sick.
Maybe it was the idea that she was onto a story of life and death, here in the ruins of Arkham City, that made her sound so hopeful.

“No, if the Riddler just wanted to kill me,” he replied, “he’s had more than his share of chances.”

“How many more chances are you going to give him?” Vale asked. “Shouldn’t you and Batman be taking a more active role here, instead of letting the Riddler lead you around by your noses?”

That stung.

“Look,” he said, his jaw tight, “not too long ago, Batman dug you out of a wrecked helicopter. Just now, I stopped Harley Quinn from giving the Riddler your head as a trophy. I think maybe you should allow us a little discretion.”

“Discretion isn’t something I do too well, doll,” Vale said. “But I do appreciate what you did.” She almost sounded as if she meant it.

“Appreciate it enough to not endanger more lives when you get out of here,” Robin said. “Okay?” He looked straight at her, hoping she got the message.

She held his gaze for a long time.

Then she nodded. “Okay.” She pulled her phone out of a pocket and snapped a few pictures, getting shots of the mechanical guardian and various angles around the two rooms, including the broken axe head buried in the wooden block. “So how are we getting out?”