The bus smelled like bleach and old cigarettes.
Leo opened his eyes and for a long moment he didn't know where he was. The ceiling above him was gray plastic with stains in shapes that didn't mean anything. There was a seatbelt digging into his hip. His mouth tasted like copper.
He sat up.
The bus was parked. The engine was off. Outside the window was a gas station with a busted neon sign that flickered in a rhythm his eyes followed without meaning to. G-T-A-M. The letters that still worked. His brain counted the flickers. Fourteen per minute. Uneven. A short in the transformer.
He didn't know why he noticed that.
He didn't know why he was on a bus.
He patted his pockets. Empty. No wallet. No phone. No keys. His jacket wasn't his jacket. A denim thing with a torn sleeve and a smell like someone else's sweat.
He sat there for a while. The bus was empty except for him. The driver's seat was empty too. Through the windshield he could see a man behind the counter of the gas station, watching him through glass that had bulletproof written all over it.
Leo tried to remember how he got here.
Nothing came.
He tried to remember the last thing he did remember.
Metropolis. His apartment. His desk. A textbook open to a chapter about signal processing. He'd been studying. It was late. He was tired.
That was it.
He stood up. His legs felt wrong. Not weak. Just... different. Like they'd been asleep for too long and were waking up slowly.
He walked to the front of the bus. The door was open. He stepped out.
The air was cold. Wet. There was garbage in the gutter and the street was cracked and the buildings on either side were low and old and had bars on the windows. This wasn't Metropolis. Metropolis had clean streets and glass towers and air that smelled like river water. This place smelled like exhaust and grease and something rotting.
He walked to the gas station. The door was locked. The man behind the counter shook his head through the glass and pointed to a sign that said RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY.
Leo pointed at himself. At his empty hands.
The man shrugged. Went back to reading a magazine.
Leo stood there for a minute. Then he walked back to the bus. There was a bench outside the station. He sat down.
He had no money. No phone. No idea what city this was. No memory of how he got here. No memory of the last three days, if he was counting right, which he wasn't sure he was.
His hands were shaking.
He told himself it was the cold.
---
A woman came out of the gas station about twenty minutes later. She was older, maybe sixty, with a cart full of groceries and a key fob in her hand. She looked at Leo sitting on the bench and her face did something complicated before settling on neutral.
"You okay, honey?"
Leo opened his mouth. Closed it. His voice came out rough. "Where is this?"
"Gotham. Clinton Street." She tilted her head. "You lost?"
Gotham.
He knew Gotham. Everyone knew Gotham. The news made it seem like a war zone. The movies made it seem like something out of a gothic novel. He'd never been here. He'd never wanted to be here.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm lost."
The woman looked at his jacket. His empty hands. The bus with no driver. She reached into her purse and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.
"Get something to eat," she said. "The shelter on Fulton takes people if you need a bed."
He took the money because he didn't know what else to do. His fingers were stiff.
"Thank you."
She nodded once. Got in her car. Drove away.
Leo sat on the bench with the twenty dollars in his hand and tried to think of what to do next.
---
He found the shelter before dark. It was a church with a basement that had been converted into a dormitory. Cots in rows. A sign-up sheet at the door. A man named Terrence with a clipboard who asked his name and didn't ask any other questions.
"You got ID?" Terrence said.
"No."
Terrence wrote something down anyway. "Dinner's at six. Lights out at ten. You cause trouble, you're out."
Leo nodded.
He got a cot near the back. A blanket that smelled like bleach. A pillow that was flat and had a stain on it that he tried not to look at.
He lay there and listened to the other men in the shelter. Snoring. Coughing. Someone talking to himself in a low voice. The heater clanking. The street outside.
His brain catalogued every sound. Every rhythm. Every pattern.
He didn't know why.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember. His apartment. His desk. The textbook. That was it. Nothing after. Three days gone. A bus. A different city. A jacket that wasn't his.
He slept.
---
He woke up at 3:17 AM.
He knew the time without looking at a clock. Something in his head was keeping track now. Counting seconds. He didn't know why that was happening either.
He lay still. The shelter was quiet. The man who'd been talking to himself had stopped. The heater was off.
And there was something else.
A sound. No. Not a sound. A vibration. Low. Deep. Coming from somewhere beneath the building. Like a bass note that was too low to hear but he could feel it in his chest. In his teeth.
He pressed his palm against the concrete floor.
The vibration was there. A pulse. Slow. Steady. Not mechanical. Something else. Something that felt almost like it was alive.
He lay there with his hand on the floor for a long time, feeling it.
He didn't sleep again that night.
---
The next day he found the library.
It was a few blocks from the shelter. Big building, old stone, pillars in front. The kind of library that had been there for a hundred years and would probably be there for a hundred more. The sign on the door said WELCOME in five languages.
He went inside.
The heat hit him first. Warm air that smelled like paper and floor wax. He stood in the entryway for a minute just letting it soak into him. His jacket wasn't warm enough for Gotham in November.
A librarian at the front desk looked at him. Middle-aged woman with glasses on a chain. She looked at his jacket, his unwashed hair, his hands. Then she smiled.
"Can I help you find something?"
"Just... somewhere to sit."
"Back corner. Near the windows. It's quiet there."
He nodded. Walked past the desks, the computers, the shelves of new releases. Found the back corner. A table by a window that looked out on a courtyard with dead plants.
He sat down.
There was a stack of newspapers on the table. Yesterday's. He pulled one toward him and read the front page without really seeing it. Something about a mayoral election. Something about a fire in the Narrows. Something about Batman.
He put the paper down.
His hands were still shaking.
He didn't know why he was here. In Gotham. In this library. He didn't know what he was supposed to do. He didn't know how to get back to Metropolis. He didn't have money for a bus ticket. He didn't have anyone to call. His parents were dead. His friends were people from school who'd probably forgotten his name by now.
He sat there and the morning turned into afternoon and the light through the window moved across the table and he didn't move.
Around two o'clock, he got up and found the engineering section.
He didn't mean to. His feet just took him there. Rows of books with titles like Advanced Circuit Design and Signal Processing Theory and Electromagnetic Field Dynamics. Books he'd read before. Books that had been his whole life, once.
He pulled one off the shelf. Sat down on the floor between the stacks. Opened it to a random page.
It was about wave interference patterns. He'd read this chapter before. He knew it. He'd aced the exam on it.
But when he looked at the diagrams now, something was different.
He saw them wrong.
No. Not wrong. Deeper.
The diagram showed two waves canceling each other out. Simple physics. Phase cancellation. He'd drawn this diagram a hundred times in his notes.
But now he looked at it and he saw the third wave. The one that wasn't in the diagram. The one that was implied by the empty space between the other two.
He stared at the page.
There was no third wave. He knew there was no third wave. The diagram was correct. The math was correct. He'd done the math himself a dozen times.
But his brain was telling him something else. His brain was showing him a pattern that wasn't there.
He closed the book.
His hands were shaking again.
He put the book back on the shelf and walked out of the library.
---
He didn't go back to the shelter that night.
He walked instead. Through streets he didn't know. Past bodegas and laundromats and churches and buildings with boards over the windows. The hum was there. Under everything. He'd felt it in the shelter. He'd felt it in the library. He felt it now, walking, a constant low pulse that seemed to come from the ground itself.
He walked until his legs hurt. Until his feet were blistered. Until the sky started to lighten in the east.
He ended up in a part of the city he didn't recognize. Narrow streets. Old buildings. A smell like the river was close.
He found a bench. Sat down. Watched the sun come up.
His brain was still running. Still counting. Still noticing. The pattern of cracks in the sidewalk. The frequency of the streetlights turning off. The way the wind moved through the buildings in waves that his mind was already modeling.
He was smarter.
The thought came to him and he didn't know if it was true or if he was losing his mind. But he'd been reading those textbooks for years. He'd been good at his work. Good enough to get the fellowship. Good enough to have a future.
He'd never been like this.
He'd never looked at a wave interference diagram and seen something that wasn't there. He'd never felt vibrations in the ground that felt like a heartbeat. He'd never been able to count seconds in his head with perfect accuracy.
Something had happened to him. On that bus. In those three days he couldn't remember.
He sat on the bench and watched the sun rise over Gotham and tried to figure out what to do next.
---
He found the scrapyard on his third day.
He'd been walking again. He did a lot of walking now. Walking was free. Walking kept him warm. Walking kept his brain occupied while it processed everything he was seeing.
The scrapyard was in the Bowery. A big lot surrounded by chain-link fence with razor wire on top. Inside were mountains of metal. Cars crushed into cubes. Industrial machinery rusting in the rain. Piles of wire and copper and steel that looked like they'd been there for years.
A sign on the gate said Darnell's Scrap & Salvage.
Leo stood outside the fence and looked in.
His brain lit up.
He saw the transformer half-buried under a collapsed shelf. He saw the copper wiring spilling out of a busted industrial fridge. He saw the circuit boards stacked in a bin near the back. He saw all of it and he saw what it could be. What he could make with it. If he had tools. If he had time. If he had a place to work.
He didn't have any of those things.
But he saw it anyway.
He stood there for an hour, just looking. Cataloguing. Planning. His brain building things he didn't have the resources to build.
An old man came out of a trailer near the gate. Black man, gray hair, a limp in his left leg. He looked at Leo standing at the fence and his eyes narrowed.
"You need something?"
Leo opened his mouth. Closed it. "I'm looking for work."
The old man—Darnell, probably—looked him up and down. "You look like you haven't eaten in a week."
"I haven't."
Darnell snorted. "Honest, at least." He jerked his thumb toward the yard. "I don't pay cash. I pay in scrap. You want to work, you work. End of the day, you take what you need."
Leo didn't hesitate. "Okay."
Darnell looked at him for a long moment. Then he shook his head and walked back into the trailer.
"Start with the copper," he said over his shoulder. "Strip it. Sort it. Don't cut yourself."
Leo climbed through a gap in the fence.
---
He worked until dark.
His hands were raw. His back ached. He'd stripped copper wire until his fingers were stained green and his nails were broken. But at the end of the day, Darnell came out and looked at the pile and grunted.
"You can take a few pounds. Not more."
Leo nodded. He picked through the pile. Took a length of copper wire. A busted multimeter that looked like it might still work. A soldering iron with a cracked handle.
Darnell watched him.
"You an engineer or something?"
Leo looked at his hands. The copper wire. The soldering iron. "Something like that."
Darnell didn't say anything else. He went back into the trailer and closed the door.
Leo walked back to the shelter with his wire and his tools and his brain still running, still planning, still showing him things he didn't understand.
The hum was louder tonight.
---
That was the pattern for the next three weeks.
Work at the scrapyard during the day. Strip wire. Sort metal. Break down old electronics. Take what Darnell let him have. Sleep at the shelter when he could get a cot. Walk the streets when he couldn't.
His brain got louder.
Every day, something new. Every day, another layer. He'd look at a circuit board and see not just the paths of the current but the inefficiencies, the shortcuts, the ways it could be better. He'd look at a building and see the wiring inside the walls, the load on the circuits, the places where the power was leaking into the ground.
And underneath it all, the hum.
Always the hum.
He started drawing in his notebook. The one the shelter volunteer gave him. At first just circuits. Designs for things he could build if he had more parts. Then symbols. Strange shapes that came to him when he was half-asleep. He drew them without thinking. Looked at them afterward and didn't know what they meant.
But they felt right.
They felt like they fit with the hum. Like they were the same language.
He told himself he was losing his mind.
He kept drawing anyway.
---
Then came the night at the scrapyard.
He'd stayed late. Darnell had let him work after closing because there was a shipment coming in the morning and the copper needed to be sorted. Leo didn't mind. The scrapyard was quiet at night. The hum was steady. He could think.
He was pulling a heat sink out of a busted server rack when he felt it.
A shift in the hum.
Not louder. Different. A change in frequency. A change in the pattern.
He looked up.
Across the yard, near the back wall, there was a storm drain. Old. Rusted. Half-covered by a collapsed billboard.
The grate was glowing.
Not bright. A faint silver-green light that pulsed in time with the hum. And rising from the grate, symbols. Burning into the air. Symbols like the ones in his notebook.
Leo's notebook was in his hand before he knew he'd reached for it. His pencil was moving. Copying. Tracing.
He didn't know what he was looking at. But his brain was telling him it was a cage. A lock. Something holding something else down. And it was breaking.
"The third node," he heard himself say. "It's fracturing."
A hand grabbed his shoulder.
He spun.
A man stood behind him. Tall. Broad. A coat that bulged in ways that suggested armor underneath. His face was hard. His eyes were flat. He looked like a man who had decided whether to kill you before he opened his mouth.
"What did you say?" the man said.
Leo's mouth was dry. "The containment. The third sigil. It's going to fail."
The man stared at him.
The grate glowed brighter.
"How do you know that?"
Leo looked at his notebook. At the symbols he'd just drawn. At his own hands, shaking.
"I don't know," he said. "I just know."
The man grabbed his arm. Pulled him toward the fence.
"We need to go. Now."
He threw Leo over the fence like he weighed nothing. Leo hit the ground hard. The man came over after him, landed on his feet, hauled Leo up by the collar.
"Forget what you saw," the man said. His voice was low. Hard. "Forget you were here. Or the next time I see you, I won't pull you out."
He walked away.
Leo lay on the ground, the notebook pressed against his chest, his heart pounding, the hum still vibrating through the earth beneath him.
He didn't sleep that night either.
---
He sat in his apartment the next day. The one he'd rented with the money from selling his first real project—a power regulator he'd built from scrap and sold to a guy on Craigslist who didn't ask questions. A hundred and fifty dollars a month for a room with mold and a radiator that screamed and a window that faced a brick wall.
He'd been here three weeks now. He had a bed. A table. A laptop from a pawn shop.
And a notebook full of symbols he didn't understand.
He opened it now. Looked at the pages. The diagrams. The shapes. The things he'd drawn at the scrapyard, the things he'd drawn in his sleep, the things that came to him when he was walking and his mind went somewhere else.
He didn't know what they meant.
But he knew they were real.
He looked at the pile of parts in the corner. The ferrite core. The copper wire. The soldering iron.
He looked at his hands. Still shaking. They were always shaking now.
He looked at the floor. The hum was there. Constant. Waiting.
He opened his laptop. The battery was at forty-seven percent. He pulled up the browser. His fingers moved before he could stop them.
He typed: Gotham City underground symbols
The results were nothing. Conspiracy sites. Old forum posts. People talking about things they didn't understand.
He typed: containment ritual sigils
More nothing.
He typed: man in coat Gotham scrapyard
A news article from three years ago. A shooting in the Bowery. No names. No descriptions that matched.
He closed the laptop.
He sat in the quiet. The radiator hissed. The mold on the wall was spreading. Somewhere in the building, someone was cooking something that smelled like onions and cumin.
His phone buzzed.
He didn't have a phone. He'd never bought a phone.
He looked at the table.
There was a phone there.
A cheap burner phone. The kind you bought at a bodega with cash.
He picked it up. The screen was lit. One message.
You saw something you shouldn't have. If you want to understand it, be at the corner of Clinton and Fulton at 8 PM. Come alone.
He stared at the message.
The phone buzzed again.
We know about the bus. We know what happened to you.
His hands were shaking.
He put the phone down. Picked it up again. Read the message twice more.
The hum in the floor seemed to pulse in time with his heartbeat.
He looked at the window. It was dark outside. The brick wall was dark. The room was dark.
He put the phone in his pocket.
He stood up.
He walked to the door.
He stopped with his hand on the knob.
He thought about the man at the scrapyard. The way he'd thrown Leo over the fence. The way he'd said forget what you saw.
He thought about the symbols. The way they'd burned in the air. The way his hand had moved to draw them without his permission.
He thought about the bus. The three days he couldn't remember. The jacket that wasn't his.
He opened the door.
He walked out.
---
The corner of Clinton and Fulton was empty.
Streetlights out. Storefronts shuttered. The buildings on either side were old tenements with windows that had been boarded up for years. The sidewalk was cracked. The gutters were full of garbage.
Leo stood under the awning of a closed laundromat and waited.
The hum was loud here. Louder than anywhere else. It came up through the soles of his shoes, through his bones, through his teeth. He could feel it in his skull.
He waited.
Ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty.
He was about to leave when a door opened across the street.
A building he hadn't noticed before. Or maybe he'd noticed it and his brain had filed it as empty. But the door was open now. A rectangle of darkness in a wall that should have been solid.
A figure stood in the doorway. Tall. Thin. A coat that hung loose on a frame that was too angular to be normal.
"You're Leo," the figure said. It was a woman's voice. Low. Calm.
"Yeah."
"Come inside."
He didn't move. "Who are you?"
"Someone who can tell you what happened on that bus."
The hum pulsed. Once. Twice. Three times.
Leo crossed the street.
The door closed behind him. The darkness swallowed him. The hum got louder.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice that sounded like his own whispered: This is where it starts.
He didn't know if it was a warning or a promise.
He kept walking.