The rain came down in sheets over the abandoned Gotham Zoo, turning the cracked asphalt of the entrance plaza into a mirror of flickering streetlight and shadow. Bruce's cowl did little against the chill seeping through his armor, but he'd weathered worse. He always did.
The tip had come through one of Jason's less savory contacts—a two-bit thug who owed the Red Hood a favor. A little girl, no older than six, spotted wandering the old enclosures at night. Alone. Probably feral. Probably a ghost story told by a man who'd seen too many shadows move on their own.
Then again, Gotham didn't do coincidences.
The front gates hung loose, chains rusted through and swinging in the wind. Bruce slipped through the gap without a sound. Inside, the zoo was a graveyard of rusted cages and overgrown paths. The big cat enclosure sat empty, its concrete floor littered with graffiti and shattered glass. The primate house was worse. Some animal had gotten in and made a den of the old keeper's office.
He swept the main grounds first. Nothing. No heat signatures. No sign of movement beyond rats and stray cats. The security building at the back of the grounds was the last place to check—a squat, two-story concrete block that had once housed the zoo's offices and camera feeds. The door was unlocked.
That was the first wrong thing.
Bruce pushed it open slow, wrist-mounted flashlight cutting through the dark. The hallway inside was—wrong. The walls that should have been peeling institutional green were painted a cheery, faded pink. Crayon drawings taped up at toddler height. A child's raincoat hanging from a hook that had been lowered, the kind you'd find in any suburban home.
He moved down the hall, past a tiny pair of rain boots, past a small table with a half-eaten bowl of something crusted and old. The door at the end was open. The security room.
It had been repurposed.
The old bank of monitors was still there, dead and dark. But the rest—the rest was a bedroom. A toddler bed in the corner, the mattress stained with something that had long since dried brown. The sheets were threadbare, torn. The walls had more drawings—stick figures in green crayon, laughing, always laughing. A small dresser, one drawer hanging off its track, spilling out dresses in sizes ranging from newborn to maybe five or six. All pink. All worn thin.
In the corner, arranged like an altar, sat two dolls. A small clown with a painted grin, worn soft from being held. And a Batman doll—or what was left of one. Its head had been twisted off. Its limbs pulled apart. The pieces were arranged neatly in a circle around the clown.
Bruce's jaw tightened. He knew that pattern. He'd seen it before, in crime scene photos, in Jason's nightmares, in the Arkham files he'd spent years memorizing. The Joker didn't do altars. He did shrines.
He took a step toward the console, intent on pulling the hard drive and checking if any cameras still worked.
He didn't make it.
Something hit his leg.
Small. Light. A weight that barely registered through the armor. He looked down.
The girl was no older than six. She was rail thin, bones visible through the skin of her bare arms. Her hair was a tangled mess of jet black and dead, bleached green—the green patchy and fried, like it had been dyed over and over with cheap chemicals that had destroyed the follicles. Her face was pale, not the pale of a child who stayed indoors, but the white of bleached skin, painful and wrong. And her mouth—
Her mouth was split at the corners. Healed scars, years old, curving up in the unmistakable shape of a Glasgow smile. It wasn't a smile. It was a scar.
She wore a pink dress, too small, the hem frayed and the fabric so thin it was almost transparent. Her feet were bare. Dirt caked under her nails. Her eyes were wide, dark, and utterly silent as she stared up at him. She didn't cry. She didn't flinch. She just stood there, one tiny hand pressed flat against his armored shin, looking at him like she'd been waiting for someone to come through that door for a very, very long time.
Bruce didn't move. He couldn't. The pieces clicked together in his head with a horrible, mechanical finality. The green hair. The bleached skin. The smile. The shrine in the corner. He'd seen a baby version of this child before, once, in a framed photograph on the Joker's desk during a break-in at one of his hideouts. He'd assumed it was a victim. A future punchline.
It wasn't.
This was the Joker's daughter.
The girl's hand curled into a loose fist against his leg. She didn't say anything. She didn't make a sound. She just stood there, swaying slightly, and waited.
<Narrator> The rain outside picked up, hammering against the windows like the city itself was holding its breath.