The bus rattled westward through Gotham's perpetual grey, weaving between fog and traffic. Water dripped through the empty window frames. The floor was sticky with something Jude had decided not to investigate.
"Thank god," Drake said, exhaling. "No second shootout."
Jude turned. "A second shootout is a possibility?"
"Depends on the day. When the bus gets overloaded coming through the East End, sometimes another group boards halfway through and things get creative about space." Drake shrugged. "Usually fine."
None of this is fine, Jude thought. Not one part of any of this.
"What happens to the bodies? The blood?"
"Professional cleanup. Gangs run their own crews. Fifteen minutes and it's gone." Drake said it the way you'd explain where mail goes after you drop it in a box. "And before you ask—drivers usually don't die. They're there to set the stage. Someone has to establish the situation. The problem is that not many people want to drive this route, so there's always a shortage of applicants. The fights are mostly theatrical."
Jude's eyes moved to Old Jack's broad, bearded back at the front of the bus, still apparently uninjured from the morning's events.
"How's the pay?" he heard himself ask. "For the driving job. Hypothetically."
Drake actually laughed. "Old Jack's gone through three drivers in the past year. One took shrapnel through the neck. The second got blinded by a ricochet. The third tried to mark up gun prices and had a very educational experience with one of his own customers." He tilted his head. "But the position is definitely open, if you're interested."
"Never mind."
"Smart."
"You said shrapnel. There are grenades on this bus?"
"Usually no. Way too expensive for a street fight. But this is the East End." Drake looked at the window frame. "More crazy people than the math supports."
He went quiet after that. Eyes on the street through the missing glass. Jude watched his face and left him to it. A year in the East End left things behind it that showed up at odd moments.
The bus lurched to a stop.
"Here." Drake grabbed his sleeve. "Donald's is a short walk from the station."
He checked his watch. "8:20. You're not going to be late."
"Excellent," Jude said, scrolling through the system shop on general principle. Everything cost more than he had. "I only almost got shot in the head. Great start."
"That's the spirit."
Otisburg looked different.
Not good, exactly. Gotham didn't have a good district, strictly speaking. But compared to the East End's open-air-chaos-experiment atmosphere, this was almost legible. Buildings stood without sagging. Corporate towers caught what grey light there was and reflected it back. Factories contributed smoke to the already compromised sky. The older residential streets looked worn but intact—messy, not decomposing.
Jude scanned the skyline. Stagg Industries. A chemical plant in the middle distance. A poker arena with a neon sign that worked. Various clubs whose names he didn't recognize.
Probably for the best.
Then he saw the Ferris wheel.
Rising over the rooflines, half-visible behind a cluster of older buildings. Still. Silent. The kind of structure that had absorbed the weather of years without being maintained or torn down, just standing there, waiting.
Oh. The recognition arrived with an unpleasant weight. That's where it happens.
"What?" Drake followed his gaze.
"Nothing. Abandoned amusement park?"
"The theater closed years back. Area went downhill after the Wayne murders—parents stopped bringing children to anything in this part of Gotham, everything nearby died with it." Drake's voice was flat. "Now it just sits."
Good, Jude thought. Stay sitting. When someone decides to do something with that property, a very bad night is going to follow.
He dragged his attention forward. Poor Gordon. The man would work himself to pieces for this city and what would Gotham give him back for it? The thought arrived and he put it away again, firmly. He was not in a position to do anything about anything on that scale. He could barely hold onto a Glock.
Drake had stopped walking.
He was staring at a building. Corporate, clean, tall—the kind of architecture that communicated legitimacy from a distance. Pharmaceutical company, judging by the signage Jude could half-read.
"What happened there?" Jude asked.
Drake's jaw tightened. "Used to be well-regarded. Had an accident. Now they're circling the drain." His tone carried something harder underneath the flat delivery. "Wonder how long before the vultures land."
"Wayne?"
"What? No." Drake looked at him oddly. "Bruce Wayne throws charity galas, he's not running pharmaceutical acquisitions. Trust fund playboy. Benign, as billionaires go." He turned back to the building. "This was the company that funded Victor's project. His wife's life support research."
Jude waited.
"They cut the funding mid-experiment. Just pulled it. Didn't care what happened to the work, or to him, or to her." Drake's voice was careful in the way that meant he'd made himself practice saying this until it stopped feeling like a body blow. "Victor kept working anyway after they cut him off. Without the safety protocols the funding had kept running. Without a buffer. And..." He made a short gesture. "You know how that ends."
"Yeah."
He did know—or thought he did, in the way you knew things from stories. The details in his memory were vague and possibly wrong. DC's continuity splintered and diverged constantly, rebooted itself every few years, contradicted itself between titles. He'd learned not to treat any specific detail as reliable.
What he was confident of: the man who emerged from that accident wasn't looking for anything as simple as revenge. He was looking for cold. Absolute zero and everything it preserved.
And you still can't do anything about any of this, he reminded himself. You can't shoot straight. You have seven hundred dollars in asset points and a job interview in four minutes.
The sky pressed low and grey. No sun, same as always. The air had that pre-rain density that never quite delivered.
Jude kept walking. Ace Chemicals in the distance, its smokestacks contributing to the general atmosphere. The poker arena's neon blinking even in daylight. The Ferris wheel still visible above the roofline, framed against clouds.
If he'd known the specific history of half the buildings he was passing, he would have turned around and gone back to the train station.
Drake stopped.
Jude pulled up short just before walking into him.
"We're here."