Barbara ignored him and turned toward the security guard, her steps as firm as if she were heading to give a student council election speech, even though she had no intention of joining the student council in her entire life.
Chen Mo headed in the other direction, walked near the kitchen entrance, and leaned against the wall, making himself an utterly unremarkable piece of background scenery.
From that spot, he could see both the cart and Barbara's back, and he wasn't far from the cleaning cart, either.
Barbara walked up to the guard, stopped, and lifted her head. She wasn't tall, but there was nothing meek about the way she looked up at him to speak.
"Sir, I'd like to report a problem." Her voice was extremely polite, so polite that the guard instinctively nodded. "Go ahead."
Barbara began.
She said that during lunch distribution today, some existing students at the school had made discriminatory remarks about the newly arrived, extremely impoverished students while watching them. These remarks might violate Article Seven of the third revision of Gotham City's Educational Equity Ordinance concerning the campus verbal environment, and as someone in the student council...
She paused there. As "someone in the vicinity" of the student council, she felt it necessary to formally report this to the school, but didn't know what procedure to follow.
"Do you know which form I should fill out for this kind of complaint?" Barbara asked, her eyes so bright that the guard felt he was facing a fourteen-year-old lawyer.
A whole stream of gibberish he couldn't understand a word of, yet somehow she sounded entirely reasonable.
Just like a lawyer.
The guard opened his mouth, his brain frantically searching for "what the hell is a verbal environment ordinance?"
Of course he didn't know. He was a security guard, not an education policy researcher.
But he couldn't admit he didn't know, because adults shared one weakness: they couldn't look as though they didn't understand the rules in front of children.
"You'll have to ask the administration office about that," the guard said.
When in doubt...
Pass the buck first.
"But the administration office is on its lunch break right now," Barbara said. Chen Mo had told her that; he'd noticed the lunch-break light was on outside the office. "Could you help me write down what happened first? I'm afraid I'll forget by this afternoon."
The guard hesitated, then took out a crumpled notebook.
Barbara began describing it in great detail, down to the color of that middle-class boy's shoes, exactly which words he had said, whether his pitch had been high or low, and whether he had looked back when he left.
So detailed that anyone with experience could immediately tell this person was entirely fictional.
The guard lowered his head to write, occasionally looking up to confirm a detail.
This was the opening Chen Mo wanted.
Seven seconds after the guard's gaze left the insulated meal container, he moved.
No spider silk, no superpowers, just a pair of eyes and a pair of very light shoes.
Chen Mo walked past the cleaning cart, his heel brushing the rubber pad beneath its wheel with perfect naturalness.
The cleaning cart was already crooked. With that slight nudge, its wheel slid less than two centimeters to the side. Those two centimeters were enough.
The length of mop handle sticking out from the side of the cleaning cart slowly leaned toward the nearby tray return rack.
The plastic clip on the mop handle caught the plastic tray on the rack's top shelf. It didn't fall, merely pivoting partway around.
Chen Mo didn't stop. He continued to the kitchen entrance and leaned against the wall, his expression still that of a statue titled "I Have Nothing to Do with This."
Three seconds later, a sharp scraping noise rang through the cafeteria, like metal screaming, short and skin-crawling.
The tray on the top shelf finally slid off, taking three plates down with it in a succession of deafening crashes.
Everyone turned at once.
Gunshots couldn't make Gotham's students turn their heads.
But the sound of falling trays could.
Barbara turned too, her expression changing so fast it was like she had swapped faces. One second she was earnestly making a complaint; the next, she was an ordinary student startled by the crash.
Her hand even rose to her chest in accompaniment. Very convincing.
The guard jerked his head up and instinctively glanced toward the insulated meal container for a fraction of a second. In that fraction of a second, a cafeteria worker rushing to steady the tray rack knocked the container on the cart with an elbow, and it slowly, very innocently, slid forward.
The cart rolled two meters and struck the raised metal strip on the floor, making the entire container lurch violently.
The top lid sprang open, and three boxed meals fell out and hit the floor. Broth splashed out, and a piece of chicken rolled half a turn before stopping in a tile joint.
The cafeteria went silent in an instant, so silent you could hear that half a drumstick still steaming.
The worker went pale. Her first reaction wasn't to hand out meals, but to rush forward, pick up the boxes, and try to put the lids back on.
Barbara saw the three meal boxes smashed on the floor. The meat juices had already seeped into the tile joints, and the drumstick's crispy coating lay scattered everywhere. They were clearly no longer edible.
She turned toward Chen Mo, who was leaning against the wall by the entrance.
Chen Mo wasn't looking at her. His eyes were fixed on the brake latch beneath the cart.
The latch had been loose to begin with. No one had pushed it all the way down when parking the cart earlier, and the impact had sprung it open completely. The cart was still pressed against the metal strip, its wheels trembling slightly, ready to roll again at any moment.
Barbara raised her chin.
The worker had already fumbled the lid back into place and was pinning the cart down with her other hand, an "I'm screwed" expression on her face.
Barbara suddenly spoke. Her voice wasn't loud, but every word landed like a pebble hitting water. "The hot meals have already left the kitchen work area, and some of the food has fallen directly onto the floor and been ruined. Under food safety procedures, this container cannot be resealed for storage."
The worker turned to her. "You're just a student-"
"Gordon," Barbara said. "My last name is Gordon. My dad is a hero, and he's also Gotham's police commissioner, so if you want someone to sign off on this, I can ask him to come sign it for you. He happens to be free this afternoon."
She gave the word "hero" only the slightest emphasis, but placed before "police commissioner," it carried just the right weight.
"If there's a problem, maybe we could try calling the police?" Chen Mo still wore an innocent expression as he spoke.
The worker's mouth opened, then closed again. Gordon. The Gotham police commissioner's surname.
You could have no fear of students, but you had better fear a Gordon kid who could summon the police commissioner at any moment.
Calling the cops was useless? That was for the broke bastards in places like the East End, the docks, and the slums.
Try making that call from Wayne Manor and see whether it worked.
Why the fuck are you here instead of at a private school?
The worker looked at Barbara Gordon with resentment in her eyes.
The students nearby were still standing there. No one spoke.
The crash had made the guard break out in a sweat. Now all that sweat had gone cold. He instinctively glanced at Barbara, then at the ruined food on the floor. His mouth opened and closed, but in the end, he said nothing.
Barbara didn't say anything more, either.
She simply stood there, legs straight, chin slightly lifted, her red hair faintly gleaming beneath the fly zapper's ghastly white light.
Seeing her stance, Chen Mo silently stepped back to his previous spot, leaving the entire protagonist's halo to her.
Barbara didn't look at him, but she knew he had already stepped back.
She cursed inwardly. This guy really knows how to hide.
The worker was still struggling. Calling the police was out of the question, but...
"These meals were reserved for this afternoon's visitors. They really aren't-"
"Then write a report," Barbara interrupted, her tone no longer sounding much like a student's. "State clearly that a cart brake malfunction caused the hot meals to slide out of the kitchen work area, and that some of the food fell onto the floor and was ruined. The remaining thirty-six portions cannot be returned to storage under food safety procedures and must be distributed on an emergency basis to the students still waiting because they were missed at lunch today."
The worker's face went white.
It wasn't just Barbara she feared. It was the word "report." In Gotham's education system, the report was an apex predator. It didn't bite people, but it would crawl through emails onto their pay slips and settle down to breed there.
The guard tried to speak, and Barbara turned to look at him.
She didn't shout. She merely asked, very calmly, "Will you take responsibility for this container of food? Will you sign for it?" The guard's lips moved, but in the end, he said nothing.
The hot meals began to be handed out.
Barbara stood beside the serving window, personally handing each box to the students waiting in front of her.
Her movements were quick. There was neither pity nor pride on her face, only something unpracticed but unyielding. Like Chen Mo's earlier words, "This world needs reckless heroes," it belonged neither to logic nor calculation, only to someone willing to run over first and see how deep the pit was.
At some point, Chen Mo had returned to her side, holding a hot meal.
Barbara didn't know when that meal had been handed to him. She only saw him stuff the box into his backpack, then asked him why he wasn't eating it.
Chen Mo said there was a Bruce with a broken leg at home.
"Huh?"
Barbara, who had just swept all before her, slowly put a question mark over her head.
"Actually, you can't say he has a broken leg anymore. Strictly speaking, his leg healed a few days ago," Chen Mo explained with a perfectly serious face.
"My puppy."
"..."
"Then you should say 'it,' not 'he'!"
Barbara glared at Chen Mo, then fought to press down the corners of her mouth before they could curl upward.
"You know something?"
Barbara suddenly spoke, her eyes still on those students. "When I was little, I watched my dad work a case. Some guy had stolen a huge amount of money, but his books were so clean that no one could find any evidence. My dad didn't dig through his accounts. He went looking for the guy's tax returns. In the end, the guy went to prison because he'd left one source of income off his tax return."
"The Internal Revenue Service is fucking awesome."
Chen Mo pretended he hadn't understood.
"..."
"Let's stop being friends right now. I don't want to see you anymore."
"Hey, don't. Why are you getting mad after just a couple of words? You just mean that you Gordons don't like clashing head-on with your enemies. You prefer figuring out how the lock works, then making it spit out the key itself."
Considering that he would still need to use Gotham's police system in the future, Chen Mo immediately changed tack.
"But you didn't touch any of those locks today."
Barbara finally turned to look at him. Her eyes were like two screwdrivers freshly taken out of a drawer. They wouldn't stab you, but they could unscrew you to see how you worked inside.
"You didn't even go near the cart. You turned procedure into your tool."
Chen Mo was silent for a while, then said with great sincerity, "I'm just an innocent minor who happens to know how to check a brake latch."
Barbara glanced at him. The corner of her mouth moved ever so slightly before she forcibly turned it into a sneer.
She didn't press him on how he had learned to inspect brakes, find gaps in timing, or calculate a guard's attention. This was only their second day of knowing each other, and for now, she decided not to investigate whether this Asian boy belonged in the category of "trouble," "suspicious," or "dangerous."
But she was already certain of one thing: he reminded her of someone.
That person also liked taking roundabout routes, avoiding acting personally, and making enemies defeat themselves.
Recently, a comic featuring that person, drawn by some unknown artist, had taken the whole city by storm.
It was so good.
She just didn't know why the artist updated so slowly.
So slowly that Barbara had, for a time, thought Batman himself had assassinated the artist.
Before you continue