That night, Bruce found himself lost in another nightmare. He was wandering the dark halls of his home again. The mansion seemed to stretch endlessly in all directions, halls turning into study rooms turning into balconies overlooking nothing but shadows. Alfred was nowhere to be seen. Bruce stopped in the dining room. Someone was lounging on the couch.

The storm raged—in Bruce’s dream, one of the large windows in the parlor shattered, scattering glass everywhere. A cold wind blew in, putting out the fire in a puff of smoke. Bruce cringed, throwing up an arm instinctively to shield his face—but when he looked again at the darkened parlor, the mysterious silhouette was no longer there. A hint of fear hummed underneath his skin, and he felt a sudden urge to run.

A hand touched his arm. He whirled around.

It was Madeleine.

She looked ghostly pale in the night, an apparition, beautiful. Her dark hair hung straight and shining over her shoulders, glinting blue underneath the slivers of light slicing the floors and walls. She smiled at him as if she had been expecting him, and Bruce felt himself smile back even as his skin prickled where her hand had rested. She wasn’t supposed to be here, was she? Had he forgotten something? She was a criminal, sitting behind a thick glass barrier at Arkham Asylum. So what was she doing here? It was difficult to understand things when he was around her, as if everything that would have seemed logical only a moment ago had now turned upside down, inside out.

“Don’t you remember?” she murmured, drawing close to him. “You got me out and brought me here.” Her voice was very quiet, raw with pain, and Bruce felt a tug on his heart at the sound. Her hands were small and cold against his chest.

Bruce leaned toward her until they were both against the wall. It took him a moment to realize that there was blood on her hands, and it left dark streaks on his skin.

“Do you think my brother deserved to suffer like he did?” she asked.

No. Of course not. Bruce winced as her words brought up the familiar feelings of his parents’ absence, and as he looked away, Madeleine’s arms came up to wrap around his neck. She touched his chin, gently guiding his face back toward her.

“Tell me the truth,” she murmured. Her eyes were so dark, the pupils black and indistinguishable from the irises. “You can’t stop thinking about me.”

I can’t.

She smiled. “And what exactly do you think of me, Bruce?”

Your lips. Your eyes. The twist of your smile. The blood on your hands. I want you. I’m afraid of you.

Bruce started to shake his head and step away—he knew she shouldn’t be here, that every fiber of his being told him that he was in grave danger—but she pulled him back toward her, tugging him down until his lips hovered over hers. Then he was kissing her, and her soft body was against his, and this—this—was everything he ever wanted. Why did he want to leave? She returned his kiss desperately. He felt light-headed—every muscle in his body had tensed in desire and in terror. He had never been with someone like her before, never been in the arms of a girl who genuinely scared him. It felt wrong, sickening…and yet, it was the greatest feeling in the world. He couldn’t pull away. He could only continue kissing her lips, then the line of her jaw, then her neck. He wanted to hear her sharp intake of breath, her whispering his name over and over. She wanted to be here, in his arms.

Run, Bruce. She is here to kill you.

Somewhere behind him came the unmistakable click of a gun barrel. Bruce flinched away from Madeleine and swung around. He was staring at a dark, blank wall. He whirled back—but Madeleine had vanished. The halls seemed to warp around him, closing in and then stretching out, and he shook his head, still dizzy from the heat of her lips on his. A sudden, bone-deep fear crept into his stomach. They were not alone here.

Nightwalkers. They’re going to seal me in. He had to get out of the house.

Bruce turned and ran. His steps seemed to drag through the air. He reached the front door and yanked it open, but instead of leading him outside, it only opened back into the same hall he’d just escaped from. Impossible. The broken window in the foyer was now intact. What little light there had been streaming through the windows now darkened, encasing Bruce in shadows. Somewhere in the darkness, he saw a silhouette run by. More footsteps. Whispers. The sound of a sharp object against metal.

“Madeleine!” he called out.

“I’m right here,” she replied behind him.

Bruce bolted out of his dream with a rasping gasp. A roll of thunder echoed from outside, and tree branches were slapping hard against the glass of his windowpane. He sat upright in bed for a few seconds, breathing heavily, his eyes still wide and darting around his room.

Had it really been a dream? Were the Nightwalkers here, in his home, sealing him in like Madeleine’s former victims, and hunting him down? He could still feel the burn of Madeleine’s lips, the warmth of her arms around his neck. His chest was slick with a sheen of cold sweat. Bruce stayed where he was until his breathing finally calmed down and the memory of his dream had started to fade, taking his terror with it. The storm continued to rage.

It was just a dream. And yet, somewhere in his subconscious, he could sense Madeleine there, was both terrified of her and filled with the desire for her in his arms.

Bruce glanced at the time on his phone. It was just past dawn, but the black clouds made it look like the dead of night outside. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he swung his legs over the side of the bed and rose. Weak light illuminated his naked chest and the pants that hung low on his hips. He walked barefoot out of his room and stared down the hall for a moment, watching where it disappeared into the shadows, imagining Madeleine materializing there, a ghostly figure in the dark. Only silence and storm greeted him. Alfred hadn’t even gotten up yet. Speckled light trembled in patches on the floor. After another long moment, he ventured out in the hall, his feet making no sound as he made his way to his study.

The air seemed stale in this room, and the rain lashing against the windows smeared the outside world into streaks. Bruce paused to stare at the old grandfather clock against one wall. The hands were stuck, and he had never bothered to force them to work again. He ran a hand through his hair in exhaustion, then made his way to his desk. There, he sat down and turned his computer on.

The machine—nothing but a thin, transparent glass panel as long as the desk itself, a piece of technology he had built himself—came to life, and cold, artificial light illuminated him. He stared at the icons that popped up, hovering seemingly in the middle of the air, and then leaned over to type in a new search.

Madeleine Wallace mother

Several familiar links showed up from his previous searches about Madeleine—her original arrest, the details about the murders she’d committed that had been released to the public. He scrolled through two pages of entries. Finally, at the top of the third page, he found a brief mention in an article about Madeleine.

It was an opinion piece, going into the murky details of Madeleine’s youth. A faded photo of the family. Madeleine Wallace. Cameron Wallace. Eliza Eto. Even though her brother was older than she was, he looked thinner and frailer, with hollow eyes and sloped shoulders, his hair buzzed short. Bruce’s attention went to Eliza Eto. There was no doubt that Madeleine had inherited her beauty from her mother; the two had the same long, straight blue-black hair, the same pale complexion and full lips. Bruce went back to reading the article, murmuring aloud as he went.

“ ‘The consequence of such negligent malpractice was tragic. One week after her son’s death, Dr. Eliza Eto broke into the office of Dr. Kincaid and lay in wait until Kincaid entered the room, then proceeded to stab Kincaid over a dozen times with a kitchen knife.’ ”

Bruce swallowed hard at the words. The story was similar to what Madeleine had told him—but it was not the same. In Madeleine’s version, her mother had hit the doctor once, accidentally, and too hard. In this version, Eliza had stabbed the doctor a dozen times with a kitchen knife, had committed a gruesome, premeditated murder, and had as a result been given the death penalty. She died in jail before the sentence was carried out.

Bruce leaned back in his chair with a frustrated sigh. Everything Madeleine said seemed to be a half truth. What about other things she had told him?

A chat bubble appeared in the corner of his screen. It was from Dianne. You’re up already? she said.

Crazy storm, Bruce typed back. Didn’t sleep much.

Same, she replied.

Are you ok? How are you feeling?

I’m fine, Bruce. Q is, are you fine?

Bruce sighed. Not really, he replied. But as much as he hated that Dianne was now somewhat involved in the case, too, he still felt relieved to have someone besides Draccon and Dr. James to talk to about everything. He cleared his search and tried another one. This time he looked up Cameron Wallace.

So—Madeleine told me some more about her past, Bruce typed back to Dianne. At least Draccon was right about her coming from a criminal family, although I still can’t tell how much of what Madeleine said is true.

Bruce. He thought he could almost hear Dianne’s sigh. You’re still on this case? The one that almost killed you?

Just listen. Please, Di.

Fine. Fine. What else?

Her mom was on death row for murder, too.

A pause. Damn.

I feel for her, though. She was ten at the time. And it was over her brother.

Oh, Bruce, I’m sorry. Also I didn’t know she had a brother?

Bruce stared at the screen’s search results. The top one was an obituary for Cameron Wallace, age twelve. Up popped a photo of the same weak, smiling boy.

Her brother died of some kind of bacterial infection. He sent Dianne the link.

How had that led Madeleine to the Nightwalkers?

Revenge. Bruce knew this instinctively, without a doubt—he could hear it in the way she talked about the death of her mother and the callous way the justice system had treated her, in the way she talked about her brother. Bruce might have even done the same, in her shoes. But his thoughts lingered on the doctor who had been murdered, and then on the three philanthropists killed in cold blood.

Whatever the reason, Bruce replied, she didn’t do it alone. A ten-year-old girl simply didn’t become an assassin in eight years without someone else’s help.

Bruce frowned, then leaned forward in his chair and reached for Madeleine’s profile that he’d taken from Draccon’s office. I’ll put it back the next time I’m there, he told himself. His finger scanned her profile, her crime reports. He stopped near the bottom, where a link was printed alongside a username and password. It was to her interrogation video.

He hesitated briefly. Then he typed it into his browser. The page promptly asked for the username and password, and Bruce entered them.

GCPD Guest

GreenLightning

The prompt flashed once, and the screen refreshed. He was in the GCPD video directory.

The familiar reports on each of Madeleine’s crimes popped up, followed by a series of videos and interrogations. Bruce paused at one video, where Draccon and several other officers had surrounded Madeleine in her cell. She stayed on her bed, her head turned away nonchalantly, as they asked her a slew of increasingly frustrated questions. The sight brought a cynical smile to Bruce’s lips as he remembered how he’d felt whenever Madeleine ignored him in the same way.

“You’re not doing a very good job of lying, Miss Wallace,” Draccon was saying, the bite in her voice the same as when she’d first met Bruce. “We are well aware that you were not alone in the Grant home. In fact, we suspect that you had at least three, perhaps even four, others working with you on this murder. Who were your accomplices?”

Madeleine, as expected, stayed quiet, her gaze so calm and distant that it was as if she thought she were alone in her cell. The only thing Bruce caught was the slight movement of her hands—and when he looked closer, he realized that she was folding and refolding one of her paper creations in her lap, making the same three or four creases over and over again.

Draccon stepped forward and shook her head. “We’re going to get them, whether you tell us or not,” she said. “But your confession will mean the difference between a life sentence for you or the death penalty. Your choice.”

Madeleine didn’t deign to respond.

Bruce looked on as the interview continued, fruitless, just like every other interview conducted on Madeleine before he came along. Her crew. He sat in the silence of his room, listening to the storm pound away outside and the muffled sound of the ongoing interrogation, wondering about the other people Madeleine worked with. She had hacked into the prison system when she was only ten years old—sure, she was smart, but she likely had help, too. Then he thought about the murders themselves, the grisly nature of each of them—throats slashed, blood everywhere, the signs of struggle rampant throughout each house.

A ten-year-old girl simply didn’t become an expert murderer in eight years without someone else’s help. And with as many as four accomplices with her…

The video ended. Bruce hit replay, letting it cycle again.

What if Madeleine had been there, but not been the actual murderer? Who else was with her?

The video had reached the point again where Madeleine was folding the paper shape in her lap. Bruce narrowed his eyes….Something, something about her movements made him pause the video. He replayed the segment. Sure enough, she would fold the same creases over and over, three or four times, undoing and redoing it before moving on.

Bruce had seen her do this before, of course, but never from the point of view of the security cams. From this angle, a new thought occurred to him.

He and the officers had always thought her origami was just the idle habit of a bored, intelligent mind. But what if it wasn’t trivial at all? What if it was her way of communicating with the outside world? What if she was using it to send signals to whoever was on the other end of the cams?

Bruce sat back in his chair as a wave of nausea hit him. She was perceptive, but sometimes it did seem like she knew more about what went on beyond the walls of her cell than she should. There were others out there who had worked with Madeleine…who might still be working with her.

Hey. Hey. It was Dianne, pinging their chat box. Hey hey hey is Bruce Wayne still awake? Hello?? What the hell is going on outside?

With his new theory about Madeleine still swirling in his mind, it took him a while to realize what she was talking about. Out in the storm, muffled behind the roar of rain and thunder, he heard the faint sound of sirens. A lot of sirens.

The sirens? he typed.

Dianne sent him a video from her phone. The wails and flashing lights were coming from somewhere down her street, close enough to Dianne’s home that they were deafening.

Yeah. Looks like a New Year’s parade.

He rose from his chair and went to his window, then peered through to see if he could catch anything. There, on the curve of the street below his hilltop, was the glow of a mass of police lights.

Something big had happened.

He hurried back to his desk, then picked up the remote for the room’s TV and turned it on. He flipped through several channels before he landed on a morning newsfeed, and there, he stopped. A giant headline was emblazoned over a frantically talking reporter, displaying the newest Nightwalker victim.

TERROR REIGN

Mayor Price Found Dead in Home