A Gotham-style education

"All right, here's to Bruce Wayne."

Chen Mo said this with the temporary student ID still pinched between his fingers.

The card was as thin as a bootleg membership card. Its laminated edges hadn't been sealed properly, and when one scraped across his fingertip, it actually hurt a little.

It could pierce Spider-Man's defenses.

Gotham's education system was formidable in unexpected ways.

He smoothed out the curled corner and read the words on it again.

Chen Mo.

East End No. 7 Public Middle School.

Temporary ID number: CM-0719.

The name was his, and so was the photo. Although it looked as if he'd just been bailed out of a police station, some official form now had a line that read "Chen Mo." When roll call came, someone would read it out.

That felt pretty novel.

Chen Mo clipped the student ID back onto his chest and stared at the school's name for three seconds.

East End, No. 7, public, middle school.

Every word sounded perfectly legitimate, but together they sounded like a prison block.

Especially the word "public." In America, hearing that made it hard to hold out much hope for the quality of education.

The school didn't disappoint him, either.

An old school bus temporarily borrowed by the registration center dropped them off at the school gate.

The vehicle probably knew it was playing the part of a school bus. Its body was painted very yellow, and when the door opened, its undercarriage coughed twice on the driver's behalf.

Chen Mo got off and looked up at a dingy gray classroom building.

The iron fence stood out more than the school gate. Several layers of graffiti covered the walls. Old gang markings had barely been covered with fresh spray paint before a few new knife marks appeared on top.

A banner hung beside the entrance.

[Welcome all children back to the classroom]

Beneath the banner, two security guards were dragging down a boy who'd been climbing the fence. His trouser leg had caught on an iron spike, leaving him dangling upside down, swearing with considerable cultural diversity.

The welcoming efforts were very hands-on.

The children slowly squeezed off the bus. Old backpacks bumped against plastic bags, and the group still carried the cigarette smell left by hungover adults. A little girl shielded the breakfast she'd received at the registration center with both hands. The bread bag was already flattened, but she still guarded it tightly.

Chen Mo had originally thought that perhaps today he could actually sit peacefully through an entire lesson.

In the dozen or so steps it took to enter the school, he'd already spotted three good places to hide a knife.

Guns weren't a consideration yet.

Probably nobody here could afford one.

A metal detector older than most of the students stood at the school entrance. The two handheld scanners beside it were nearly out of battery, only managing a feeble beep halfway through a scan.

A sheet of paper was also stuck to the table.

[Please do not bring firearms, drugs, or restricted knives onto school grounds]

Someone had crossed out "please do not" in black pen and changed it to "try not to."

A tall boy walked through the metal detector, and it immediately erupted in beeps.

A guard held out his hand.

The boy was practiced at this, too. He pulled a folding knife from his waistband and slapped it into a plastic basket.

"Do I get it back after school?"

"Depends how you behave today." The guard pushed the basket beside his foot. "Get inside, kid."

When Chen Mo's turn came, he raised his arms voluntarily and smiled with utmost cooperation.

The scanner swept from his shoulders to the soles of his shoes, losing power twice along the way. In the end, it never made a sound.

His suit, with its titanium alloy plates, lay at the very bottom of his secondhand backpack, and his web-shooters were still strapped to his wrists. For the first time, Chen Mo sincerely appreciated Gotham Public Schools' inadequate equipment maintenance budget.

The guard gave him another look.

"You're new, too?"

"Obviously, sir," Chen Mo said. "Otherwise, I'd already know which serving window has the free breakfast least likely to get stolen."

The guard went quiet for a moment, then actually pointed toward the cafeteria in earnest.

"Second one on the left."

Chen Mo was filled with respect.

What a good man.

Which was exactly why he absolutely wasn't going there.

After this long in Gotham, he'd at least learned that much.

The lockers inside the classroom building looked as though they'd just endured a round of debt collection. Some doors were dented, others gutted, with cigarette butts, crumpled paper, and a few assignments of indeterminate subject stuffed into their gaps.

A new notice from the Wayne Foundation was posted on the wall.

Free breakfast, lunch, basic medical screenings, and temporary mailing address services.

Someone had added a line in red beneath the notice.

[Wayne treats, the gangs pay.]

Chen Mo stopped.

Whoever had written it had pressed hard enough for the red pen to tear through the notice.

Chen Mo watched for a while without smiling.

The notice's lower right corner curled up and brushed the back of his hand.

Chen Mo raised his hand and pressed it flat.

He pressed it once, and the corner curled up again.

He pressed it down again, using a little webbing this time.

Purely because it was an eyesore.

The first lesson was in a mixed second-year class on the third floor.

When Chen Mo pushed open the door, two boys in the front row were pulling each other's hair over a seat. He stepped aside to dodge a flying wad of wastepaper, then spotted someone in the back passing a foil packet beneath a desk.

A girl by the window was asleep on her desk, her sleeve slipped up to her elbow, exposing a patch of needle marks.

A young female teacher stood at the front. The roll book in her hands had already been creased by her grip, but she was still trying to make her voice carry over the shouting and swearing in the classroom.

Today's topic was written on the blackboard.

[Civic responsibility and school rules]

Chen Mo looked at it for two seconds, then picked a seat by the window.

His back was against the wall, the window frame was within reach, and he could see the door by looking up. If a school shooting really happened, it would be easy to vault outside.

Guns were school supplies, as everyone knew.

He'd just placed the math workbook from the registration center on his desk when a dull thud came from the back row.

A chubby boy had been pinned to a desk, his face pressed against a textbook. Blood slowly ran from his nose, staining half the words "civic responsibility" red.

The one pinning him down was a tall boy in a black jacket, with a strip of dark green cloth wrapped around his wrist.

Chen Mo had seen that cloth during his night patrols.

The peripheral members of a small East End gang all wore it. It probably served much the same purpose as a company ID badge, except their team-building activities usually involved bloodshed.

"Stop!"

The teacher's voice was tight, but she still stepped out from behind her desk.

The tall boy let go and turned to smile at her.

"We're bonding, ma'am."

A burst of raucous laughter filled the classroom.

The chubby boy seized the chance to gather up his textbook and drag his chair one row forward. He didn't look up, just wiped haphazardly beneath his nose twice with the back of his hand, smearing more blood onto the pages.

The tall boy was already looking over today's new students.

He checked the temporary IDs on their chests first, then their shoes and backpacks. His gaze moved from one person to the next with a practiced ease that reminded Chen Mo of a street broker picking out merchandise.

When his turn came, Chen Mo looked up and smiled.

The tall boy stared at him for two seconds, then shifted his gaze away for the time being.

The classroom door opened again.

A red-haired girl walked in, carrying a clean, dark-colored backpack, her steps steady.

Upon entering, she first looked at the teacher at the front, then swept her gaze along the walls and over the exits at the front and back before finally looking for a seat.

Someone at home had taught her.

The red-haired girl sat in the empty seat in front of him. As she set down her backpack, her gaze passed over Chen Mo's hand resting at the edge of his desk, then glanced at the window beside him.

Chen Mo winked at her and whispered, "Morning, classmate. Will they be handing out ballistic plates in this class?"

The girl froze for a moment, then lowered her voice, too.

"No. But the desktops in the third row are thicker."

Chen Mo was filled with respect. Knowledge was power, in the physical sense.

She gave her name before turning back.

"Barbara Gordon."

"Chen Mo." Chen Mo tapped the card on his chest. "A temporary student freshly captured by the education system. My current long-term occupation is being poor."

Barbara turned back around.

At the front, the teacher finally got the noise under control and began taking attendance.

Someone answered for an empty seat, while another person laughed for ages after giving his own name. The teacher looked down and corrected her records twice, then continued reading.

"Chen Mo?"

Chen Mo raised his head.

This was the first time a teacher had called his name from an official class list.

The temporary student ID on his chest suddenly looked a little less like a bootleg membership card.

"Here."

He raised his hand, his voice perfectly clear.

Several people nearby turned to look at once. A whistle immediately came from the back row.

"The new kid's so well-behaved."

Chen Mo turned around, the smile on his face unchanged.

"Thank you. I've always worked hard to be polite. You could try it, too. With your foundation, you might have to start over from kindergarten."

The classroom went quiet for a moment, then several people burst out laughing.

The boy who'd whistled darkened and slipped his right hand into his desk.

A faint tingle ran across the back of Chen Mo's head.

It came from the back row.

He looked through the gap in the desk. The hand inside had already closed around a knife handle.

Barbara stopped writing in front of him. She used the reflection in the window to look toward the back row, while her other hand drew her backpack a little closer to her feet.

All right, she'd noticed, too.

If she really was from the Gordon family he knew, that parent was seriously unworried about sending his child here.

The teacher was still looking down as she called the roll, walking toward the back row one step at a time with the class list in hand.

Chen Mo touched the student ID on his chest.

Slamming a classmate into a wall on his first day would most likely bring this hard-won enrollment to a very definitive end.

Two more steps, and she would be standing beside that desk.

Chinese kung fu?

Forget it.

He was in a decent mood today. For now, there was no need for that kind of education geared toward emotional release.

Chen Mo lowered his head and picked up a pencil from the registration pack.

There were two in total.

This one was very short, its wood split and its lead crooked.

It was also one of his pitifully few legal possessions at present.

Chen Mo gave his wrist a gentle flick.

The pencil flew between two rows of seats and struck the edge of the desk with a crack.

The impact jolted the knife halfway out.

The boy hurriedly tried to push it back in.

Too late.

The teacher spotted the knife handle and snapped the roll book shut.

"Take your hand out!"

She stepped forward to block him while calling into the hallway for security. The guard who'd just confiscated the folding knife poked his head in, and his face immediately darkened. He came inside, pressed down on the boy's shoulder, and escorted him out of the classroom.

As the boy passed Chen Mo, he glared fiercely at him.

Chen Mo blinked, his face all innocence.

"Maybe he just wanted to sharpen a pencil," Chen Mo said earnestly. "Although personally, I'd suggest he get a pencil first."

Barbara lowered her head, and the open textbook in her hands shook slightly.

After she finished laughing, she first glanced at the knife marks inside the desk in the back row, then at Chen Mo's desktop.

Only one pencil remained there.

Chen Mo didn't keep wisecracking.

When the knife handle had slid out just now, it had also brought out the corner of a folded note.

An alphabet letter and two digits were written on the note.

M-17.

He had never seen this number before, but the way the note was folded looked familiar. Street runners often folded notes like this when passing goods: from the outside, it looked like a ball of scrap paper, but inside it could hold a location, a number, and a name. If anything went wrong, they could just shove it into their mouths.

Just after the security guard took the boy away, the girl who had been sleeping by the window opened her eyes.

Her fingers tapped three short beats and one long one beneath the desk. The foil packet had already been passed to her feet. She pinned it under one foot without picking it up.

Outside in the hallway, a boy in a gray cap ambled past. Ten seconds later, he drifted back past the doorway.

The tall boy in the black jacket did not look at the boy being taken away. His gaze followed the teacher to the door, then paused on the wall clock for a second.

He was noting how quickly the school reacted.

Chen Mo lowered his head and glanced at his temporary student ID.

The Wayne Foundation had just put a group of children without adequate guardianship or fixed places to live into the same building. The teachers were still learning their names, while the people outside had already started choosing who could run errands and who would be easiest to get a grip on.

The gangs had started taking roll before the teachers.

Gotham really had brought career planning into compulsory education.

The third morning class ended, and the lunch bell had barely rung when the first large-scale brawl erupted in the hallway.

The cause was pathetically trivial.

The tall boy in the black jacket squeezed past a boy carrying a lunch tray. One bump of his shoulder sent half a tray of mashed potatoes straight onto someone else's chest.

A curse had barely left someone's mouth before the boy in the gray cap straightened up from the wall.

Thirty seconds.

Seven people got dragged in, and two knives came out. Someone slammed into the lockers, sending their doors banging one after another.

The boy in the black jacket blocked the direction the teacher was coming from. Gray Cap did not throw any punches. He only edged forward along the locker doors, his eyes fixed on the center of the chaos.

As though he were waiting for something.

The next moment, someone's back slammed hard into a locker.

The latch snapped open.

A small-caliber handgun fell out of the locker and slid half a meter across the floor.

The muzzle brushed past two pairs of shoes before finally stopping in the middle of the hallway.

Every sound cut off.

Even a younger boy who had been crying shut his mouth, still clutching his trampled breakfast bag in a death grip.

Every eye in the hallway landed on the gun.

The people closest to it first looked at one another, then gauged the distance. Someone drew back a fist and quietly inched one foot half a step forward.

Chen Mo's mind buzzed.

Holy shit.

Someone could actually afford a gun?!

Apparently, he had seriously overestimated how hard it was to buy a gun in Gotham.

The tingling at the back of his head suddenly exploded.

Someone on the left bent down, while a hand on the right also dropped. The female teacher shoved the last two students into the classroom, then turned and squeezed back past Chen Mo, still shouting for everyone to get back.

The tall boy in the black jacket stepped sideways, blocking her hand as she reached for the gun.

Diagonally behind Chen Mo, Barbara grabbed the child clutching the breakfast bag and pulled him behind her, shifting her footing at the same time.

Her eyes were fixed on the gun on the floor.

Her right hand had already slipped into her backpack's side pocket.