It stung the inside of your nose before you had the words for it. Before you had a name. The nurses wore white and never smiled, and the fluorescent lights hummed a flat, dead note that never stopped, not even at night.

They called this place the St. Agnes Home for Children.

It sat on the forgotten edge of Gotham, wedged between a shuttered cannery and a laundromat that had been dark for a decade. Nobody visited. Nobody asked where the children went when their beds turned up empty.

They called you 056.

You learned early that the number was a name you did not get to choose, clipped to your wrist on a plastic band that never came off. The real names had been peeled away before you could hold onto them. Some of the others remembered theirs for a while. Then they didn't.

Tonight, the halls are quieter than usual.

Most of the doors in the east wing are open. Most of the beds are empty. The ones still occupied belong to children who no longer speak.

A door at the far end of the corridor is ajar, spilling a thin blade of light across the linoleum. Something metal rattles inside. Someone — an adult, from the weight of the footsteps — is moving between the cots.

Behind you, at the other end of the hall, a different sound. Footsteps. Older. Softer. Coming closer.

You have maybe ten seconds before both of them see you.