The morgue was colder than the night outside.
Jonathan stood beside the slab where the bodies from the Silent Trial had been laid out. Their faces were pale, waxen masks men who had once been alive, now reduced to evidence. And yet the Gotham Police had declared them "lost vagrants, unidentified." Case closed.
But Doc Wilburn Tate didn't close cases. He opened them like puzzles.
The morgue doctor limped into the room, dragging his bad leg across the tiles with a faint scrape. His coat was stained with ink, his spectacles thick with grime. He carried a lantern in one hand and a notebook in the other.
"You're not supposed to be here, Wayne," Tate muttered, setting the lantern down beside the corpses. "The chief wants this matter buried."
Jonathan folded his arms. "Then bury me beside them, because I'm not leaving without answers."
Tate studied him through the foggy lenses. For a long moment, silence hung. Then, with a crooked grin, he tugged the sheet back from one of the corpses.
"Good. I was hoping you'd say that."
The dead man's chest was carved with markings lines and curves etched into the skin, not random, not ritualistic in the usual way. Jonathan frowned. "What am I looking at?"
Tate tapped the wound with his pen. "Not letters. Not language. A map."
Jonathan blinked. "A map?"
The doctor nodded. "When you overlap each carving, each victim, the lines connect. They form a web. And when I traced it… guess where it pointed?"
He limped to his desk, tore a sheet from his notebook, and slid it toward Jonathan. A rough sketch of Gotham spread across the page. Through the streets and alleys, the lines converged on a single mark: a circle beneath the East End.
Jonathan felt a chill crawl up his spine. "The tunnels."
Tate leaned closer. "Deeper than tunnels. Foundations. Places no city should have been built over. I've seen records of caverns down there, older than Gotham itself."
Jonathan recalled Isadora's words, his father's journal, the blood in his visions. Everything pointed beneath the city, like roots to a poisoned tree.
"What's down there?" he asked quietly.
Tate's grin faded. He scribbled something quickly on a scrap of paper, then folded it into Jonathan's palm. "Riddles don't reveal themselves all at once, Wayne. But I'll give you this: the dead don't lie, and neither do stones. Follow them."
Jonathan opened the note as Tate limped away. Scrawled in sharp letters was a phrase:
"Where the first fire burned, the Owe was born."
Jonathan's grip tightened. The founding flames. The riddle of Tate was not just a puzzle it was a warning.
He slipped the note into his coat and looked back at the bodies. Their silence was heavy, but now their message was clear.
The Owe wasn't just haunting Gotham. It was rooted in it.