Batman: Nightwalker

  Gone today was her playful nature, the teasing smirk she usually gave him, and in its place was someone cold. Bruce blinked, confused. He didn’t know why it bothered him that she seemed upset today. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Why did you wait until I came along before you started feeding information to the police? You clearly knew about that room—you knew about the brick wall. You’ve obviously been involved with the Nightwalkers this whole time. So, why now? What do you get out of this?”

  “Maybe I’ve decided to turn over a new leaf,” Madeleine replied, her voice dripping bitter sarcasm.

  The hall fell silent again. Bruce looked closer at her. When his gaze traveled to her arms, he noticed something new—a blue-black bruise on her upper arm. Four bruises, to be exact, as if left there by someone’s hand. He studied her other arm. Now he could see red scratch marks near her wrist, as if someone had tried to restrain her.

  Madeleine Wallace was a criminal, a notorious killer jailed for three brutal murders—but in this moment, Bruce forgot that. All he saw before him was a girl his age, curled into a tight, protective ball, her usual arrogance replaced with something vulnerable.

  Muffled thunder rumbled from outside. Madeleine spat out a curse. “I hate thunderstorms,” she said. “If the lightning causes power issues in here, the hall doors will seal us all in like rats.”

  Bruce looked toward the doors. “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” he said. Was he really trying to reassure her? “And even if it did, I’m sure they’d evacuate all of you.”

  Madeleine ignored him and continued looking down. “Just rats in cages,” she said, even quieter now. She shuddered and made herself smaller. She’s claustrophobic, Bruce thought.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “What happened to you?”

  She took another long moment to respond. “I refused to take my IV today,” she finally said. “We had a little fight in the clinic.”

  An IV. Draccon hadn’t mentioned that Madeleine was receiving medicine. “They hurt you?” he said.

  “Is it obvious?” Madeleine lifted her head up at that and gave him a wry look. Then she put her head down on the bed again and sighed. “Don’t tell Draccon you know,” she said. “I’d like her to keep thinking I’m difficult.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bruce said. And to his surprise, he actually was. Whoever had gripped her arm had done it roughly, hardly the work of trained professionals. A rush of anger welled up in his chest at that. He thought of the inmate James had shoved against the wall on Bruce’s first day. The inmate had attacked him, sure, but the warden also didn’t seem to have a problem with treating the prisoners roughly. Bruce hadn’t thought they’d do it to someone as young as Madeleine. Did Draccon not know about this?

  “It’s not your fault,” Madeleine muttered. She leaned over and dangled her legs over the side of the bed. Then she looked at him. “You asked me why I decided to tell you about the underground room.”

  Bruce nodded quietly, waiting for her to continue.

  “After your parents died, how did you cope?”

  A weight hit Bruce. Be careful. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  She brought her shoulders in until she looked even smaller. “People always expect you to move on so quickly after you experience loss, don’t they?” Madeleine looked away. “For the first few months, the sympathy pours on you. Then, gradually, it dwindles down, and one day you find yourself standing alone at the grave site, wondering why everyone else has moved on to caring about something else while you still stay right here, silently carrying the same hurt. People get bored with your grief. They want something new to talk about. So you stop bringing it up, because you don’t want to bore anyone.”

  Bruce felt himself nod. And then the words came. He heard himself recount the days before and the days after the theater. Every word infused with anger directed toward her, toward any criminal who killed the innocent and left others to pick up the pieces.

  When he finished, he half expected her to be smiling, taunting him again, gloating in getting this information out of him. But she had turned on the bed to face him directly, her dark eyes grave.

  Why had he said all that? Did he want her to understand the pain she’d inflicted on others? Or because he wanted to hear her pain, to try to understand her?

  “My mother was sent to prison for killing someone,” she replied after a while. “She did it out of love for my brother.”

  This was a surprise. Bruce hadn’t known why her mother was jailed, nor anything else about her family. “Your brother?” he asked.

  Madeleine nodded. “I had an older brother. When he was young, a rare bacteria attacked his joints and made him violently sick. He suffered extraordinary pain as the infection ate away at him.” She paused, her brows furrowing deeply at the memory. Bruce had never seen her look like this—her face dark with an expression that reminded him of his first months as an orphan. “My mother poured all of her energy into trying to save him—taking him from one clinic to another, being turned down at all of them. She was a professor, but she wasn’t rich by any means. Our insurance was a joke. It didn’t even come close to covering it. My mother worked extra jobs.” She took a deep breath. Bruce felt a twinge of guilt at the reminder of his own fortune, and others’ lack of it. “Finally, she found a doctor willing to take my brother on. We were thrilled.”

  As she spoke, Bruce could picture the scenes playing out before him—a woman sitting by her son’s bedside, head in her hands. One run after another to various clinics, each time more desperate. “What happened?”

  “My brother died under that doctor’s watch. She claimed that there’d been nothing she could do, that it was his time and that he had finally succumbed to the disease. But my mother didn’t believe her. Something seemed wrong. So she broke into the office one evening, sifted through the papers, and found out that the doctor hadn’t been caring for my brother at all. She’d just been taking our money and feeding him placebos and sugar water.” Madeleine looked back up at Bruce. “The doctor walked in while my mother was still there. My mother didn’t even hit her hard—just hard enough to kill her. It was an accident.”

  Madeleine stopped, and the silence suddenly seemed overwhelming. “I’m sorry,” Bruce managed to say. What words could he offer other than those? What other words had anyone else offered him when his own parents had died?

  “She died in prison. No one can tell me exactly what happened to her, although I’ve seen how they treat their prisoners.” Madeleine shrugged as if she were wholly accustomed to living with this information. Bruce’s eyes went back to her own bruises. “During her time here, I watched the rich waltz out of jail. I hacked the prison system, and it turns out they always got released on house arrest. Meanwhile, I watched my mother rot away. We had no money. I was ten years old at the time.”

  Ten. The number hit Bruce hard, and suddenly he saw himself at that age, walking alone for the first time to school, facing every afternoon knowing that Alfred—not his mother or father—would pick him up from the academy. What had Madeleine looked like? A small, delicately framed child with long hair and grave eyes? Had she walked alone, too? Where did she go, with no guardian or money to protect her? How had she ended up here, another murderer, taking her mother’s crime to the next level?

  Did Draccon know all of this about Madeleine? Bruce doubted it—she was stern, but she wasn’t cruel.

  “You once asked me why I committed those murders,” she finished. “Tell me, Bruce Wayne, do you think of me as the same cold-blooded criminal who killed your parents? Do you think I deserve to rot in hell, to die with poison injected into my arm?” She sneered. “You’re a billionaire. What do you really know about me? Would someone like you ever understand desperation?”

  Trust nothing, suspect everything. His thoughts grew muddled, the images of his parents lying on wet pavement contrasted with the image of a lonely little girl, lost without her mother and brother. Bruce shook his head and f
rowned. “If Draccon knew this was happening to you, she wouldn’t approve of it. I don’t even think Dr. James would.”

  Madeleine made a disgusted sound in her throat. She rose from the bed and walked over to the window, until Bruce was separated from her by inches and a glass barrier. “Still so trusting. No one cares what happens to me,” she said. “They just want the information I can offer them. They’ll probably stop allowing you down here.” She hesitated, then continued, “I don’t want to see Gotham City burning. But I’d rather die before giving up what I know directly to them.”

  Madeleine’s eyes had turned soft now, and Bruce could see that they weren’t fully dark after all—now and then, when the light hit right, there were slashes of hazel and chestnut brown. If they weren’t separated by glass, if she weren’t being held in a facility like this, he would find their nearness awkward, even intimate.

  “And that’s why you’ve decided to talk to me?” Bruce said. “Because you feel like we have some sort of shared history?”

  She furrowed her brows at him, her expression puzzled. “I’m telling you this because…it’s hard to figure you out. Maybe I’m telling you to be careful.” She said these last words with such finality that Bruce felt a deep chill in his chest. She’s giving me a warning. Her expression shifted again, and she turned her eyes down. She frowned, as if unsure of herself for the first time. “Or maybe I just like you,” she muttered.

  “They’re not going to let me talk to you again,” Bruce replied, resting his hand against the glass. “Draccon said this would be my last time down here.”

  She eyed him, untrusting. “They can’t stop you if they can’t see you.” She paused to nod up at the cams again. “If you want to come down here again, you’ll have to use the right scrambler at the right frequency.”

  She’s tricking you, Bruce told himself, torn between a tide of unease and a well of confusion. “Are you seriously telling me to mess with Arkham’s security system? Why would I do that?”

  “I’m not telling you to do anything,” she replied. “I’m just telling you what it would take for you to see me again. If you wanted to.” She hesitated. “If you needed to.”

  Tricks. Cons. Lies. But there was a strange, silent plea in her words, in the way she said that last phrase. If you needed to. Something in her tone sounded like a warning. Something urgent. There must be so much more that she wasn’t telling him.

  Then she shook her head, as if changing her own mind. “You don’t believe me,” she said. “Then just don’t come back. Tell Draccon what I said, if you feel like it. None of it will change what happens to me down here anyway.”

  Bruce opened his mouth to reply—but a deafening clap of thunder shook the hall. The lights along the corridor all went out in unison. His words froze unanswered on his tongue.

  At first, the darkness was all-consuming, so that he felt like he was adrift in a vacuum. Around him came shouts from the other inmates in the hall—some whooping, others howling for the guards to come fix the lights, still others tapping against the glass windows of their cells, pushing against their doors as if testing them. He couldn’t hear Madeleine’s voice in the mix anymore, couldn’t even see her face directly in front of him. But another sound made every hair on his neck rise.

  The creak of an opening cell door.

  A scarlet-red light came on, bathing the hall in blood. Through the light, Bruce saw two of the inmates stepping out of their cells while an urgent voice came on over the speaker system. An alarm began to scream.

  Jailbreak.

  The inmates who had just stepped out of their cells blinked in the blood-red light. One stared up at the nearest security cam in confusion. The other looked at Bruce in disbelief, as if still not quite sure he himself had escaped from his confinement. From somewhere above, Bruce could hear the alarms blaring on the higher floors and feel the tremble of footsteps thundering.

  “System lockdown!” a voice over the speakers shouted. “System lockdown!”

  Bruce glanced toward the exit door as a loud buzz echoed throughout the hall. The light over the exit door flashed green, indicating it was open. Run, he thought. Get out of here. His eyes darted to Madeleine’s cell for an instant. She hadn’t opened her door, but she was also nowhere in sight, out of her window’s view.

  The first freed inmate charged toward the exit. Before Bruce could stop himself, he ran to block the door.

  The man bared his teeth at Bruce and lunged, aiming to bite him. Bruce darted back, protecting his neck. He swung a fist at the man’s jaw, catching him in a clean blow. The man stumbled backward, shrieking a curse. Then he lunged toward Bruce again. There was a wildness in his eyes, a searing desperation, and his voice sent a shudder through Bruce.

  “Let me out,” he hissed. “Get out of my way—”

  Bruce winced as the man’s clawing fingers raked across his shoulder. He ducked, then threw his full weight at the inmate, sending him careening backward and off his feet. Bruce collapsed to the floor with him and grabbed for the mop handle lying nearby—his hands found it right as the inmate scrambled back to his feet. Bruce whipped the mop handle out, catching the man hard in the shins. He let out a yelp. Bruce leaped to his feet and hit the inmate again with the handle, this time jabbing him hard in the stomach. The man doubled over, his eyes bulging, and collapsed onto his side. The alarm continued to scream around them; everything had become a blur of scarlet.

  Bruce lifted his head to see the second inmate. It was the man who’d threatened to cut Bruce. The inmate wasn’t focused on the exit. Instead, he had wandered to Madeleine’s cell and put his hand on the door. Fear shuddered through Bruce.

  As the man pulled Madeleine’s door open, Bruce shoved him away. But the prisoner towered over Bruce by at least an extra foot. A dark grin appeared on his face. I’m going to die here. The sudden thought sent adrenaline surging through Bruce’s veins. The man swung. Bruce ducked to the ground, narrowly avoiding the blow, then darted away and toward Madeleine’s door.

  The inmate turned on him and prepared to strike.

  Guards burst through the hall door, shields up, guns drawn, helmets on—blurs of black as they shouted at the inmates to get down on the ground. The enormous man facing Bruce looked away as the guards surrounded him. He opened his mouth in a snarl, then shuddered as one of the guards fired a Taser at him, forcing him to collapse. Bruce looked on as the guards dragged the inmate, still struggling and shouting, back to his cell. The alarm blaring overhead finally quieted. The doors on each cell locked once more.

  James appeared. Her eyes settled on Bruce, and for the first time since he’d known her, she looked shocked. Maybe even guilty. “You okay?” she asked as he picked himself up. Strands of her hair had loosened from her braid, and she was breathing heavily. “Damn storm. You shouldn’t have stayed down here. I—” She sighed, shaking her head as she put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. Let’s get you out.”

  Bruce turned to look into Madeleine’s cell as he went. She was back on her bed now, leaning forward on her knees, her hair a river over her right shoulder. She looked like she was trembling slightly. As he left, she lifted her head to look at him. A brief smile appeared on her lips, one that flickered in and out like a candle, so brief that no one else must have seen it.

  Bruce found himself thinking about Madeleine’s words again. Just rats in cages, she had said. And he had leaped to protect her.

  Bruce’s hands were still shaking as he turned away and followed James out of the hall, the shouts of the other inmates still echoing behind him.

  —

  Bruce didn’t return to the asylum until the following week, needing some time off after the brief jailbreak was mentioned in the news and reporters swarmed the front gates.

  James seemed subdued when she saw him again, and her usual sarcasm was replaced with concern. She even informed him that she would put in a word with Draccon and the court to shorten his remaining hours, due to what had happened. His duties c
leaning the intensive-treatment level were done away with altogether.

  Except Bruce didn’t want to shorten his time at Arkham, or stop visiting the lowest floor. He had too many questions, too much about Madeleine still to figure out. He went to go find Draccon at the precinct and see what she could tell him.

  “I’m glad you were unharmed,” Draccon said to Bruce as she flipped through folders of court documents in her office. Bruce watched her work from his chair across her desk. “I’ll put in a word with the court. I’ve never heard of a malfunction before at Arkham Asylum, but the storm had apparently initiated a perfect chain reaction of faults in the security system. It shouldn’t happen again.”

  “Madeleine never even tried to escape, you know,” Bruce replied, frowning. “Why would she just stay put like that, when she had a chance to run for it?”

  “I have no idea. Did she say anything about the underground discovery?”

  Maybe I’m telling you to be careful. Or maybe I just like you.

  Bruce pushed her words out of his head. “She didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t seem surprised when I told her about it, either,” he said. “Anything else useful that she might have said, I’ve already mentioned to you.” Bruce studied the detective. Madeleine had asked him not to, but he wondered if he should bring up the issue of the bruises he’d seen on her, to ask about her medications. But if he sounded like he was criticizing the police’s handling of her, it might also start to sound like he felt pity for her, even affection.

  The thought of not talking to Madeleine again brought up a strange, unpleasant feeling in his chest. Why had he protected her?

  Don’t tell Draccon, Madeleine had whispered.

  Maybe it would be better, Bruce thought, if he went off on his own again. There had to be something out there about Madeleine’s mother and her time in prison. He would figure it out himself. His eyes settled on the neat stack of folders sitting on the edge of Draccon’s desk, all of Madeleine’s documentation to date.