“I don’t know.” Bruce leaned forward and hung an arm over the side of Alfred’s seat. “Maybe it’s from you.”
“Me? Sarcastic?” Alfred sniffed, the barest hint of a smile appearing on his lips. “It’s as if you think I’m British.”
Despite the long day, Bruce couldn’t help but grin at the retort. He watched the dead limbs of trees blur past the window. The girl’s face lingered in his thoughts, and when he let himself dwell too long, he could see her eyes flashing by in rhythmic intervals between the trunks, darker than night.
A few minutes later, they pulled up to the training gym where Bruce spent many of his evenings. Bruce took a deep breath as he got out of the car, pulled open the gym door, and stepped inside. He needed a good, clean workout to clear his head, to shake the girl from his thoughts.
The gym was an exclusive club where the coach—Edward Chang, an Olympic gold medalist in boxing and wrestling—only accepted students to train on a case-by-case basis. Bruce’s gaze swept across the massive unbroken space, ending at the ceiling, which yawned a good two stories over his head. Blue mats were set up in various configurations all around the floor, and an octagon ring lay in the center, where official spars happened between Bruce’s coach and his students. There were dozens of stations with weights and jump ropes, punching bags and padded gear, multiple rock-climbing walls. At one far corner, there was even a swimming pool with eight lanes.
He went to the locker room and changed quickly, wrapping each of his hands in white gauze and dusting them with powder, and then took a pair of slim aviator goggles from his locker and pulled them on.
The facilities were impressive, but what made the gym so expensive was the technology behind these goggles. With them over his eyes, Bruce could now see labels—MATSandRINGandPOOL—hovering over each area of the room. A central panel showed him a carousel of rotating landscapes he could set himself in while he trained.
Bruce scrolled through them until he found his preferred setting. He reached out in midair to tap the option, and the world around him darkened into blackness.
In a flash, it reset—and he found himself standing on the edge of a tower that disappeared into a bank of sunset clouds, staring out at a sea of glittering skyscrapers all connected to each other with cables in such a way that he could do a run between them. Stairwells curved around the outside of each building in spirals. Overhead hung a virtual night sky. When he looked down, the height seemed so realistic that he felt his head spin.
The skyscrapers and obstacles all matched up with the layout of the gym itself, the mat formations and the octagon fighting ring and so on, the virtual stairwells syncing up with real, physical steplike mats laid out in circles. Bruce could select a mode on this landscape, too; if he wanted to run between the skyscrapers and up and down the stairwells, then the cables and stairwells would be highlighted, turning bright white to make it easy for him to see. If he wanted to scale the sides of the buildings, then footholds along the sides of the buildings would be highlighted instead, all matching up with the rock-climbing walls.
Bruce chose the option to highlight the cables and stairwells. They lit up in white, startling against the sunset scene. He stretched in relief, ready to shed the image of Arkham’s dark halls from his mind and let himself stare down the dizzying side of the skyscraper. Then he jumped.
He landed on a cable that ran between him and the nearest skyscraper. Instantly, he began to run it, his balance unwavering, footing accurate from years of practice. When he reached the end, he took a flying leap to grab onto the bars of the building’s outer stairwell. In real life, he hooked onto the metal monkey bars hanging over a series of blue mats, and his wrapped hands sent up a cloud of white dust. Bruce pulled himself up in a single motion, his arm and back muscles wound tight, then rolled onto the stairwell and continued running. Up a stairwell, then a flying leap, then another cable line. Sweat beaded his brow. With each passing minute, the warm-up exercise calmed him, and he could concentrate on nothing other than the steady pounding of his heart.
“Bruce!”
Bruce paused the simulation, then pulled his goggles up to see Coach Chang emerge from his office down the back hall to wave at him.
Bruce smiled. “Coach.”
The man nodded at the greeting. His hair was shaved short on the sides, tapering into a fauxhawk on top, and when he folded his arms, his muscles bulged. His ears were scarred, hinting at his wrestling past. “Nice work on those runs.”
Bruce was about to respond, when a second figure followed Coach out onto the gym floor. Richard.
Richard forced a smile. “Hey, Bruce,” he said, flexing his wrists once.
“Richard told me he’ll be out of town the night he usually trains,” Coach said. “I hope you don’t mind that I have him here tonight. The pair of you can partner up like you used to.”
Like you used to.It’d been years since he and Richard had wrestled together as friends.So much for a relaxing workout session,Bruce thought.
Richard nodded. “Like old times.” Bruce heard the note of exaggeration in his voice, the sarcasm.
Their coach seemed oblivious to the tension between them as he dropped a bunch of equipment on the floor. Then he glanced down at his phone. “Warm up a little, loosen yourselves up. We’ll get started on a routine in a bit.” He held his phone up to his ear and stepped away, leaving them alone in the room.
They moved to a sparring mat, where Richard started circling Bruce.
“Heard you left the benefit early,” Richard said. “Did I really bother you that much?”
“I just needed to clear my head.” Bruce searched for an opening, his eyes fixed on the other boy.
Richard let out a humorless chuckle. “Please. You think I don’t know you well enough to tell when you’re lying?”
Bruce flexed his hands open and closed. He remembered circling Richard around this same space when they were young, the way they’d laugh and throw challenges at each other. How different it’d felt back then. “If you’d said that years ago, I’d have believed you,” he replied.
“Not my fault we stopped hanging out.”
“Then why?” Bruce scowled. “Was it something I did?”
At that, Richard’s expression darkened. “Maybe someone’s head got too big for his brain.”
