The corridor stank.
Not the vague, background unpleasantness of a neglected building. This was a physical assault—something that hit you at the threshold and kept hitting, the kind of smell that set up residence in your sinuses and made plans to stay. Rot. Sewage. Something organic and wrong underneath both of those that Jude's brain kept trying to categorize and kept failing.
Overhead, a single fluorescent tube flickered in a rhythm that felt almost intentional, throwing shadows that made the peeling wallpaper look like it was breathing. The light barely reached the floor, where puddles of something Jude had decided not to identify reflected the strobing bulb back in oily little mirrors.
Something rustled in the dark.
Jude stopped walking.
A rat—fat, grey, completely unbothered—scurried across the corridor ahead of them and vanished into a crack in the baseboard with the ease of long practice.
"I genuinely can't stand this." Jude picked his way around something on the floor that had either been a takeout container or a small dead animal at some point and currently could have been either. "I understand that slums are dirty. I accept that premise. But why does it smell like this? What is that smell?"
The robber, still wearing his mask, replied in a muffled voice. "Could be the body in one of the units. Sometimes they sit for a while."
"The—" Jude stopped. "Again?"
The man had two fingers pinching his nose shut.
Right. Jude reached up and did the same. His voice came out flat and compressed. "Why would someone leave a corpse in their own apartment?"
"Might not be hidden. Could've just died there." The man navigated around a puddle without breaking stride, the practiced ease of someone who'd made this walk a hundred times. "Addicts. Gangsters who made it home after the fact. Landlord says it happens. Sometimes nobody notices for weeks."
"And people still live here."
"You're welcome to book a suite at the Gotham Grand if you prefer. Or the underside of a bridge." The man glanced at him sideways. "Your choice."
Jude thought about his three dollars.
"Actually," he said, "this place has a certain charm."
They were both right, and he knew it. Three dollars didn't get you any roof in any legitimate establishment this city had to offer. And spending the night on a park bench or under a bridge in East End Gotham wasn't sleeping rough—it was a consent form for everything the city wanted to do to you. Best case, you got stripped of whatever you had left. Worst case, you ended up as the next thing nobody noticed for weeks.
The man stopped at a door halfway down the corridor. Reached for his keys.
Jude put a hand on his wrist.
"Wait. Who's inside?"
The man blinked. "My wife."
"Okay." Jude looked at him. "How are you planning to introduce me?"
"Tell her you're my new friend."
"And your new friend's name is?"
Silence.
The fluorescent light buzzed. Water dripped somewhere in the walls. The rat, or possibly a different rat, rustled in the dark.
Jude stared at him.
The man's face went red above his mask. "I was focused on the robbery—"
"You attempted to rob someone tonight and didn't think of asking their name beforehand. Not before, not during, not at any point until right now." Jude shook his head slowly. "With those instincts, a career in crime was always going to be a short one."
"Fine! What's your name?"
"Jude Sharp."
The man looked at him—properly looked, the way people do when a name doesn't match their expectations. "That's... not what I was expecting."
"No?"
"I mean." He gestured vaguely. "You're clearly Asian, but you don't read that way. You've got this Gotham thing going on. The way you stand. The way you talk. Like you've been here long enough that the city got into you."
Something settled quietly in Jude's chest. The system hadn't just assembled an identity—it had assembled a presence. The right accent, the right posture, the specific look that a city like this stamped on people after years of grinding them down. He had it already, fresh off the train, and apparently it was convincing enough to fool a man who'd spent a year learning to read Gotham.
Three dollars well spent.
"My name's Drake Ryan," the man said.
Jude nodded. "And what do you actually do, Drake? When you're not doing this?"
Drake's hand paused on the key. His jaw tightened.
"Let's go to the roof," he said quietly. "I'll tell you up there."
The stairwell had no lights at all. Just moonlight filtered through filthy windows at each landing, casting grey geometric shapes across walls that had been painted at some point in the last century and hadn't been touched since. Their footsteps went up and up in hollow echoes.
Neither of them spoke.
Four flights. A rusted metal door at the top that Drake pushed open with his shoulder, the hinges grinding.
The rooftop opened up around them—cluttered with old equipment, water-pooled tar paper, the skeletal shapes of vents and pipes. But above it, Gotham's skyline cut against the clouds into towers of lit glass and stone. The wealth of the city concentrated up there, all that money and corruption stacked vertically away from the streets below. Down here, the slums spread out in the dark, broken only by streetlights and the occasional orange flicker of barrel fires.
A massive billboard stood at the roof's edge, its backlight buzzing steadily, bright enough to see by. Rain pattered across the tar paper in soft percussion.
Drake grabbed a rusty metal chair, wiped the seat with his sleeve, and sat down. The cold got into him immediately—Jude could see it in the set of his shoulders—but he didn't move.
"My wife," Drake said, without preamble.
Jude leaned against the billboard's support frame and waited.
"I was a programmer in Metropolis. Good job, decent salary. Probably was going to get laid off eventually—everyone does at thirty-three—but I hadn't really mapped out what came after that. Hadn't needed to." He hunched forward, elbows on his knees. "About six months before the layoff, my wife started coughing. Started losing hair. I told her to see a doctor. She said she was busy. You know how it goes."
He rubbed his face with both hands.
"She went eventually. We weren't worried—figured it was stress. A vitamin deficiency. Something that had a name and a fix." His voice tightened. "The specialist came back with test results. Rare disease. The kind that shows up in medical papers because there are only forty cases worldwide. Treatment cost..." He laughed, a short broken sound. "The medication alone would have cleaned out most people in a year. We didn't have a year."
Jude kept his mouth shut. This wasn't the kind of story that needed prompting.
"I burned through every cent we had. Sold everything worth selling. It wasn't close to enough." Drake's hands clenched on his knees. "She's been getting worse for six months. Hair almost completely gone. Started coughing blood two months ago. Can't sleep. Her organs are starting to fail."
He reached up and pulled at the hair at his temple—not a conscious gesture, just the habit of it, the same motion a hundred times until a few strands came loose in his fingers. He looked at them for a moment, then let them go.
"We were completely out of road. Then a specialist—I don't even remember which one, I was talking to everyone by then—mentioned a name. Said if anyone could do something for a case like this, it was him. A cryogenics researcher based out of Gotham. Apparently he'd done work on cellular preservation that nobody else had even theorized yet."
Drake looked up at Jude.
"Dr. Victor Fries."
The name hit Jude's ears and kept going, down through his throat and into his stomach, where it landed like a stone dropping into cold water.
He knew that name.
He knew it the way you knew the names of things that came with warning labels, the way you knew the names of diseases and disasters, the way every person who'd ever read a comic book or watched a news story about Gotham's particular flavor of catastrophe knew the names of the men who made it worse.
Dr. Victor Fries. Cryogenic researcher. Brilliant, tragic, dangerous. A man who had loved his wife enough to attempt the impossible, and who the impossible had broken in return. A man who had stopped being a man in any ordinary sense of the word and become something else entirely—something that walked around in a refrigeration suit and spoke in cold metaphors and left a trail of frozen crime scenes across Gotham's history.
Mr. Freeze.
One of the most dangerous supervillains this city had ever produced. And Drake Ryan, software engineer from Metropolis, had come to Gotham specifically to find him.
Had been waiting for him.
Had spent a year in this apartment building, sleeping in that smell, in those flickering lights, waiting for an audience with a man who robbed banks to fund his grief and froze anyone who got between him and his wife's cure.
Jude opened his mouth.
Closed it.
His brain ran through the relevant facts in a very fast, very unhelpful sequence.
He was new to Gotham. He had no money. He had nowhere to sleep. He had made a deal with this man: solve his problem, in exchange for shelter and help finding legal work.
The problem was Victor Fries.
Jude looked at Drake's bloodshot eyes, the trembling hands, the evidence of a year of this written into every line of his face.
All he could think, in perfect sardonic clarity, was:
I am so, so cold.