Her words brought some small measure of comfort. Bruce took a deep breath and tried to take them to heart. “Before I know it,” he echoed.
—
After all the jeers yesterday, the intensive-treatment basement of Arkham Asylum seemed eerily quiet by contrast when Bruce arrived after school.
The silence raised the hairs on the back of his neck. If he didn’t know better, he could swear that this was a hall straight out of a horror film—the pale green cast of light, the bare walls, the faint echo of his boots. If ghosts were real, they would live here, whispering in the air.
As he started down the hall, he listened for the voices of detectives coming from the last cell. Maybe they were interrogating the prisoner again today.
Bruce had just made his way toward the first cell window when a loud slam echoed from it. Instantly, he jumped back a step—and saw an inmate staring at him through the window. “Well, well, well,” the man said. “It’s the new boy. You look good enough to carve.”
He practically spat out the words, and as he did, he stirred the rest of the hall to life, until other shouts echoed along the corridor. Bruce looked away and concentrated on the floor before him instead.
“What’s the matter, boy?” the inmate said. “What got you into this slum in the first place, eh, cleaning up our sh—hey,hey!Where the hell you think you’re going?” He rapped madly on the glass when Bruce took a step away. “You know whatIdid to get into this place? I carve. I carvereal good.” He made a cutting gesture along his neck and down his arms.
Bruce sped up, trying to purge the haunting sound of the man’s voice from his mind.
The next cell was no better—it held an enormous man, who looked even bigger in his jumpsuit, with every inch of his exposed olive skin tattooed, including his face. He let out a laugh as Bruce went by, and didn’t break his stare until he was completely out of sight. Then he rammed his giant shoulder against the glass, making the entire pane shiver.
A third inmate was tall and eerily handsome, his veins visibly blue against his skin. Bruce recognized him from the news, a serial killer convicted of at least two dozen murders carried out in gruesome fashion. The fourth inmate was bald and thick-necked, with eyes as pale and clear as water, pacing from one end of his cell to the other, until his shoes bumped against the walls.
These were murderers who had terrorized Gotham City when they roamed free, who had dominated the news cycles. Now the only thing separating Bruce from each of them was a layer of metal and glass.
Finally, he reached the end of the hall. He slowed, then stepped closer to the last cell, where the officers had been interrogating the prisoner several days before, their voices raised and frustrated. His thoughts lingered on the inmates he had just passed, their twisted smiles and stares, their unspeakable crimes. If they were the sort who stayed down here, then what did it take to command the police’s undivided attention? Who sat in that last cell?
The window on the cell’s door stretched about half his body length, enough for him to see most of the inner room. It was plain,like the others, with nothing but a mattress and a toilet and sink. His eyes went to the lone figure sitting inside, pressed against one corner, legs stretched out, dressed in a long-sleeved white uniform.
It was the woman. No, that wasn’t right—thegirl.
She didn’t look a day older than Bruce himself, sitting languidly with her head leaning back against the wall, her expression empty like a doll’s, her eyes staring out at nothing in particular. They were very, very dark eyes. Her hair was long and straight and so black that its highlights appeared blue, and her skin was so pale under the light that it looked dusted with flour. Her mouth was small and rosy, her face heart-shaped, her neck arched and slender.
Bruce blinked.Thiswas the inmate the Gotham City police were interrogating? He didn’t know what he’d expected to see, but she didn’t look anything like what he’d imagined. She looked like she belonged in his class at the academy, a girl far too young to be in a place like Arkham. In this fortress of the violent and broken, she seemed calm as death and starkly out of place.
And yet. Therewassomething off about her gaze…something that sent a shiver down his spine.
The girl’s slender eyes shifted. She looked at him without moving her head.
Bruce startled, taking a step back from the window.Those eyes.They didn’t just appear dark—there was something more in those depths, something lurking and guarded, calculating. They were windows into an intelligent mind, and right now they were analyzing Bruce. He had the strange sensation that she was memorizing everything about him, that she could read his thoughts.
When he glanced down at her hands, he noticed that she had folded a napkin into the intricate shape of a flower…but whenever she twisted her wrists, the flower unfurled into the shape of a scorpion. Back and forth it transformed. Impossible, he wanted to think, to fold something that intricate with just a napkin. It reminded him of the precise way his mother used to fold letters before sending them, carefully sharpening the creases of the paper with her nail so that each segment of the paper lined up perfectly.
They stared at each other for a moment longer. Then Bruce stepped out of her line of sight and let out his breath. His mind spun.
Maybe the staff had moved the original inmate somewhere else and put this girl here instead. That would make more sense. Bruce frowned as he returned to work. What had she done to end up at the intensive-treatment section of Gotham City’s most notorious prison?
He thought of his system of categorizing people. Where did she fit?
When he couldn’t linger anymore, he packed up his supplies and turned to the exit. As he went, he got one more glimpse into the cell. He half expected the girl to still have her eyes turned to him, dark and depthless, searing straight through his bones.
But she had returned to staring off into space. She didn’t stir. The origami in her hands was back in the shape of a flower. Bruce thought about it for a moment, then shook his head as he stepped through the exit door. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed him at all, and he had imagined the whole thing.
Bruce was still thinking about the girl as the evening drew to a close and he headed out of Arkham’s doors to get into Alfred’s waiting car.
“How was it today?” Alfred asked.
Bruce cast his guardian a dry look through the rearview mirror. “Had the best time,” he replied. “I highly recommend it.”
Alfred frowned at him. “Where do you inherit all this sarcasm from, Master Wayne?”
