Batman (27 page)

“Don’t
what
?” Gordon asked. “Don’t save my city? That’s my job! Isn’t it what you’re supposed to be doing, too, Batman? Or has this gotten a little too personal for you?”

The armored figure had paused nearby on the highway, most likely because the Riddler was listening to their exchange. Batman suspected Robin could hear him, as well, but at the moment he was more interested in playing to the Riddler’s sense of drama and superiority.

“I put Robin in this position, Gordon,” he said. “I sent him down below Arkham City to investigate what the Riddler was planning. That was what the Riddler wanted all along. He set us up, and I didn’t realize it until it was too late. Now Robin is trapped in that suit, and I put him there.

“If you destroy it, the Riddler wins.”

“Wins?” Gordon replied. “Nobody wins this. It’s not a game! We’re talking about Gotham City on fire, Batman, or hadn’t you noticed that?”

“Of course I have, but I’m close to solving the last riddle. Do you want the Riddler to walk away from this knowing he got exactly what he wanted? He’ll start his next scheme the minute Robin dies, and we’ll be right back at square one. For now, though, we have a chance of stopping him.”

“Oh, we do?” Gordon countered. “If that’s the case, then where is he right now?”

“Not far,” Batman said. “After putting in so much time and effort, he’ll want to see the grand finale.”

“Well, you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t want to participate in a dog-and-pony show for a homicidal nut,” Gordon said. “With the Joker gone, the Riddler’s about the worst we’ve got, and he’s proved it today. Yet you want me to play into his hands.”

“Exactly. He’s staking a claim,” Batman said. “It all adds up. Everything he’s done so far has been a message to me. He intends to replace the Joker. It’s got to be me who stops him.”

“Listen to yourself—you’re not thinking clearly,” Gordon replied, his voice almost a shout now. “You’re too close to it—you’ve got to see the bigger picture. I care about Robin, too, but his is just one life. One. A precious life, a life that deserves to continue—yet how many people are going to die if that suit spends an hour shooting its way through Midtown? How many of those lives will you trade, just to keep Robin alive?”

“Only mine,” Batman said.

“That’s not an option.”

“Yes it is. You hear the sirens. Oracle has begun the evacuation, and with the help of your men, we can clear the area. Buy me some time to solve the riddle.” He paused to let it sink in. “Nigma always outsmarts himself in the end, Commissioner. In this case, he probably already has—I’m just not seeing it yet.”

There
, he thought.
I’ve thrown down the gauntlet.

The guardian armor started to move again.

“Copters waiting for your order, Commissioner,” an officer said. He was standing in the open door of Gordon’s car, holding a dashboard handset. Static crackled faintly from the speaker.

Batman didn’t say anything else. Gordon would have to make the decision. Five seconds passed.

Ten.

“If that suit gets within a hundred yards of any of those helicopters, they fire,” the commissioner said finally. “You better know what you’re doing.”

With a nod, Batman spun and touched a button on his gauntlet that would bring the Batmobile under his control. Its engine roared to life and he locked his eyes on the guardian armor. It was moving toward Henry Avenue, which cut across central Gotham City from east to west.

Sensors in his cowl tracked the focal point of his vision and relayed it to the Batmobile’s autopilot. The car surged forward and skidded into a drift, slamming into the guardian armor and knocking it half a block south. It slid on the pavement, then tumbled, snapping off a streetlight pole and coming to rest flat on its back in front of a taxi garage.

Batman keyed in another command and the Batmobile roared again, driving up and slowing as it approached the armor. Robin raised one arm, but too late. The vehicle struck it a glancing blow, knocking it aside and down before the Batmobile rolled over the armored suit, pinning it in place.

It was too bulky to move, and found no leverage.

He sprinted to catch up to the car and get a look at the suit. There had to be a clue on it somewhere—a hint he hadn’t yet seen. “PUPA” had revealed the overarching theme… but the imago solution wasn’t yet within his grasp.

As Batman approached, Robin jammed the suit’s free arm under the Batmobile’s left-front wheel well. A blast of energy threw the vehicle over onto its side. Batman dodged out of its way, skirting the rear to get closer. Robin stood up and kicked the Batmobile, which rocked the rest of the way onto its roof, engine still running. Batman seized the opportunity to jump onto the suit’s back. Judging from what he’d seen of its movements thus far, he didn’t think it had the agility to throw him off, or the flexibility to reach back and get a grip on him.

Instead, the moment he put his full weight on the suit’s back, it toppled backward.

The impact drove the breath from Batman’s lungs. Black spots swam in his vision and he lost his grip as the suit got back to its feet and kept going. But as it did, he saw something in the design on the back of its torso armor: a clock face, surrounded by three concentric circles. Spaced around the outer circle were letters. He was still getting the air back in his lungs and clearing his eyesight, so he didn’t immediately catch all the details, but he was certain this was the key for which he’d been searching.

“You saw that, right?”
Oracle said.

“I did,” Batman said. “Now I need to get a closer look.”

This was the metapuzzle.

Robin’s voice blared from the suit’s loudspeaker as it stomped away from the waterfront and turned down Henry Avenue.

“You’re facing two doors. Behind one is misery, behind the other is happiness. Twin brothers stand in front of the doors. One always lies and one always tells the truth. You may ask one question to learn which door leads to happiness.

“What is it?”
he concluded.

Batman sprinted after the suit and shot out a zip line, wrapping it around the base of the suit’s helmet and drawing himself close enough to get a look at the puzzle again. The suit was so strong that it hardly shifted as he pulled himself nearer.

It was a circular construction, in four concentric layers. Around the outside layer were letters, fourteen of them. The next two layers were blank. The inside circle was a clock face, with numbers, indicating ten minutes after five. The mounting shaft holding the hands of the clock was hollow, and the hole in the center of it was grooved. It didn’t appear to be quite circular.

The suit tried to shake him off, but he held on. There were fourteen letters. AAAAPPIMULRVGO. They were raised, and looked as if they could be moved. Each “A” was bordered with a different shape—one each of a triangle, hexagon, octagon, and diamond. Each “P” was inside a square, and the rest of the letters—which didn’t repeat, were circled. LARVA PUPA IMAGO, that was easy enough to figure out… but how was he supposed to arrange them? It was like the chemical puzzle Robin had faced below the Sionis mill.

In fact, Batman realized, it was
exactly
like that. He thought back to that puzzle, and mentally listed the active compounds in each battery type.

Lithium cobalt oxide. Four atoms.

Sulfuric acid. Seven atoms.

Lead oxide. Three atoms.

Fourteen atoms, fourteen letters. But how did they go together?

The guardian stopped trying to shake him off and instead worked its fingers into the zip line coiled around the base of its helmet. The cord was rated for a thousand pounds, but it snapped like cheap string when the gauntleted hands grasped it and pulled. One half of the line dangled from its right hand. Batman was holding the other half, and so was the guardian.

He flung out his left arm as if he was throwing a frisbee, and Batman was jerked off the suit back. He hit a plate-glass window which shattered on contact, and then he smashed down onto a desk, scattering papers and office supplies as he tumbled onto the floor. A framed picture of a young mother flanked by two children clattered down in front of him.

Through the broken window he heard the guardian armor moving deeper into Gotham City. It fired again, and the sound of the explosions rolled down the street.

Batman jumped back through the window and resumed his pursuit. The sound of helicopter rotors filled the silence left in the aftermath of the explosions. Ahead of him and to his right, a delivery truck burned. On the other side of the street smoke poured from the destroyed facade of a clothing store. He spotted the helicopter swiveling into view several blocks ahead. It was still more than a hundred yards away—probably closer to three hundred—but Gordon was sending Batman a message.

He wasn’t going to wait forever.

He activated his comm link.

“Commissioner,” he said, “there’s a puzzle built into the guardian armor. I can solve it, but I’m going to need some time.”

“Time’s in short supply, Batman,”
Gordon answered.
“I can’t just stand here while that thing sets my city on fire.”

“It’s my city, too, Commissioner.” He broke the connection and went after the armor again.

Two revelations hit him at once.

Two doors, two brothers, one question. So the puzzle forced one of the brothers to eliminate both uncertainties at once.

He had it.

The other revelation had to do with the word puzzle. He’d been thinking about it the wrong way, trying to make the letters correspond to atoms—but they didn’t. The puzzle had another step. It wasn’t the letters that counted, but the symbols. There were eight oxygen atoms in the three compounds, therefore eight circles. There were two hydrogen atoms, and two letters inside a square. Then there were the four “A”s inside of their different shapes, each representing an atom that only appeared in the compounds once.

He had to get closer to the suit again.

The buildings were becoming taller, with fewer spaces between them. The streets still seemed to be deserted, which meant Oracle and the police had done their jobs. Yet the guardian was moving into more densely populated areas, and before long someone was going to get hurt.

There had to be a reason for the Riddler to be using Robin as a mouthpiece for seemingly random riddles. As he got close to the suit, it raised its palm weapons, and he tested his theory.

“Which door will your brother tell me leads to happiness?” he asked. The suit froze, and he leapt onto its back again. He held its collar ring with one hand and leaned slightly away, to give himself room to manipulate the elements of the puzzle. Three concentric rings, three chemical compounds. All of the letters were on the outside ring, so he would have to create the corresponding patterns by subtracting letters from the outside.

He had a feeling he’d only have one chance.

Batman slid the letters into different rings. Because sulfuric acid had the largest number of atoms, he left it on the outside, sliding four of the circled letters into the second ring, then three of the “A”s. He left both “P”s, which because of their matching shapes he figured corresponded to the two hydrogen atoms.

So the outside ring had PP A IMUL.

In this puzzle’s structure, H
₂
SO
₄
.

The second ring now had seven letters: AAARVGO.

The next largest compound was lithium cobalt oxide. That would need two of the “A”s, for the individual lithium and cobalt atoms, and then two of the circled letters to represent the oxygen atoms. So he had to move one “A” and two circled letters to the inner ring.

That done, he looked at each of the three rings.

PP A IMUL

A A RV

A GO

A click sounded from within the puzzle. Testing the result, Batman again tried to move the letters. They wouldn’t budge—they were now fixed in place. So he’d gotten that part right. And for the moment the figure remained still.

Maybe the Riddler wants to see if I can do it.

Next the clock face. He studied it more closely, searching for a clue about the position of the hands—but his grace period was up. The guardian armor unleashed a fresh barrage, destroying a row of cars in a corner parking lot and the entrance to a subway station on that same corner. Then it started walking toward the flames. Four of the cars were piled together by the force of the blast. Batman could feel the heat from across the street.

The guardian walked closer to them, and then stopped close enough to the fire that Batman couldn’t breathe without searing his lungs. He held on as long as he could, then sprang off the suit into a backward somersault, landing out in the street far enough away that he wasn’t being roasted alive.

With its assailant off its back, the suit lurched into motion again. It turned and fired at Batman. He dodged the beam, which plowed up a deep gouge in the street. A shattered water pipe shot a fountain into the air, the roar and patter of the water merging with the sound of the fires and the thudding of helicopter rotors in a complete soundscape of disaster.

Gordon was right. They couldn’t wait forever to stop the armor, no matter what the cost. But he had to keep trying.