Gotham's Upper East End, a private villa owned by the Wayne Family.
The speakers beside the pool shook the water. Several people nearby were already drunk, swaying wildly to the music with glasses raised.
Bruce Wayne leaned against the open-air bar. He had held the same glass of whiskey for forty minutes and barely drunk any. The ice, however, had melted completely, leaving the liquor hopelessly watered down.
Someone beside him laughed shrilly. A third-rate actress was hanging on his arm.
She had certainly been generous with the perfume.
Tuberose, musk, and patchouli. The top notes had long since faded, leaving a cloyingly sweet scent that forced its way up his nose.
With nothing better to do, Bruce picked apart her perfume formula.
At least it gave him something else to focus on. He had really had enough of this chemical weapon.
The actress tilted her head up at him, and he smiled, lowering his head to hear her. With his glass held loosely in his hand, he looked every inch the rich playboy who had nothing to do all night and nothing going for him but his face.
That appearance put people at ease. Those around him made little effort to keep their conversations from him.
Across the pool, a rich young man took out a pocket watch set with blue diamonds and turned it around in front of another guest.
Bruce glanced at it and estimated its value. A little over a million.
The owner looked quite pleased with himself, saying he had won it at a Monaco casino last month. Its previous owner had been the son of a bankrupt Greek shipping magnate. He even paused deliberately on "won," waiting for someone to ask.
Unfortunately, the other man was busy talking about his yacht, where even the bathroom door handles were inlaid with slices of meteorite.
"You get to touch outer space while washing your hands."
Bruce raised his glass and clinked it against his.
Wonderful. Dockworkers were still worrying about their next meal, and this man already thought earthly door handles were beneath him.
He set his glass back on the bar and glanced toward the South End docks.
"Excuse me. I have a boring board meeting tomorrow. I'd better head home for my beauty sleep."
The actress tugged his arm and said, "You always do this." Bruce smiled and pulled free, making his way through the crowd with a drunken looseness even in his steps.
Only after the Lamborghini rounded the street corner did the last trace of his smile disappear.
Back at Wayne Manor, Bruce went straight down to the Batcave and took off his suit twice as fast as he had put it on.
The perfume still clung to his shirt collar. When he reached the last button, he simply pulled the shirt off and threw it into the laundry basket.
Four hours of smelling that. Enough.
Batman had not been active for very long at this point, and on the whole, he still seemed human. At least when a smell annoyed him, he would take a little of it out on his clothes.
Alfred stood beside the workbench, waiting until he had changed before bringing the files up on the screen.
"Master Bruce, the 'Pajama Freak' you requested. Also, you left forty minutes earlier tonight than your average departure time last month. Tomorrow's media may run with 'Wayne heir reportedly facing renal crisis.'"
Bruce sat at the computer and opened the surveillance footage directly.
Responding to that sort of dry joke could make it go on forever.
The first clip came from the South End docks, two weeks ago, at 2:14 a.m.
A thin red-and-blue figure vaulted down from a wall and crouched on the edge of a shipping container.
Bruce enlarged the image.
Old pajamas had been pieced together with a sweatshirt, the stitches unevenly spaced. Several seams across the chest had already split, revealing a gray undershirt washed almost white.
Calling it a suit was rather generous.
Below, a mugger with a knife had blocked a dockworker's path and was backing him into a corner.
Bruce waited for the red-and-blue figure to pounce.
Instead, he first raised both hands, jumped between the two men, and gestured at the mugger with his palms facing outward.
The footage had no sound, and the mask hid his mouth. Bruce watched those raised hands.
The posture looked more like someone trying to break up a fight.
The mugger slashed at him.
Bruce's gaze swept across the container's edge. In his place, he would have dodged to the side and used the container wall to create distance.
The boy in the footage merely turned slightly sideways.
The knife tip brushed past the loose threads on his chest. He caught the mugger's wrist, bent it outward, then pushed him away.
The knife hit the ground. Clutching his wrist, the mugger turned and ran.
Less than four seconds from start to finish.
The worker left too, but the red-and-blue figure remained, looking down at a bag of bread on the ground.
The mugger had dropped it as he fled. The sliced bread was a little squashed, but the packaging was still sealed.
He stood there for two minutes before finally bending down to pick it up and patting the dirt off the wrapper. Before leaving, he even looked both ways to make sure no one was around, then stuffed the bread under his clothes and slipped away along the wall.
Bruce rewound the footage.
The bag of bread was picked up again, brushed clean, and tucked against his chest.
He had not been that careful while saving someone.
"He took the bread."
Alfred set a tray on the workbench and glanced at the screen.
"A vigilante who takes carbohydrates from crime scenes. Considering Gotham's prices, that is quite economical."
Bruce paused the image, took another look at the drafty outfit, and opened the second clip.
At the mouth of an East End alley, a family sedan lay on its side in the road, fuel dripping down its body.
A homeless man's leg was trapped beneath it. He tried several times but could not pull it free. The onlookers stood well back. Someone held up a phone, filming with quite a steady hand.
The red-and-blue figure climbed down a wall and ran straight toward the car as soon as he landed.
He hooked both hands under the edge of the chassis, bent his knees, and lifted.
The stitching across the back of his clothes burst.
The underside of the car rose off the ground. The homeless man seized the chance to pull his leg free and scrambled away. The boy kept holding it up until the man was clear, then released his grip and lowered the car.
With a bang, the car hit the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.
By the time the homeless man looked back, he had already climbed onto the wall.
Less than forty seconds from landing to departure. The cost was a set of pajamas that had never been particularly sturdy.
Bruce paused the footage and pulled up the vehicle's specifications. Its curb weight was 1.3 tons. A strength estimate was also displayed beside the image: four tons.
He marked the estimate as unverified, then opened the third surveillance clip.
At a West End convenience store, the boy intercepted a knife-wielding robber from the side. He opened his palm and shoved the man's chest, sending him tumbling into a pile of cardboard boxes three meters away.
Bruce replayed the shove, then switched back to the footage of him lifting the car.
"He's holding back."
"So I see, sir."
Bruce placed the two clips side by side and directed Alfred's attention to the open hand.
"He dares to reach under a car to save someone. But when he meets someone with a knife, he knows to hold back."
As he spoke, he brought up the footage of the bread being picked up again.
Alfred looked at the bag of sliced bread.
"This concerns you greatly."
"He can lift a car." Bruce paused. "Yet he waits until everyone leaves the alley so he can pick up a bag of bread."
He enlarged the boy's chest. Once the bread was stuffed inside, the already-broken seams gaped even wider.
"He hasn't even changed his clothes."
Alfred watched the screen without pressing him to continue.
Bruce brought up the past half month's records and began going through them from the first sighting.
The boy had always traveled by climbing walls and jumping. Only yesterday had a white strand shooting from his wrist appeared in surveillance footage from the south bank docks.
The strand stuck to a crane's crossbeam and carried him swinging across the entire alley.
Bruce enlarged the images frame by frame, stopping on the inside of the wrist.
There was no visible launcher.
"Possibly a biological secretion."
He set the before-and-after shots of the wrist side by side and added a marker at yesterday's point on the timeline.
"He may develop other abilities, too."
Alfred glanced at the strength estimate beside them.
"Quite enough cause for concern already."
Bruce saved the images, printed the screenshot of the bread being picked up, and walked toward the evidence board.
Much of the board was still empty. Only the South End docks, the East End alley, and the West End convenience store were connected to "Pajama Freak." They had not even found a place where he stayed.
He pinned the screenshot in the center.
The mask was an old T-shirt, and he sewed his own clothes. If he really had a partner or logistical support, someone should at least have helped him mend a few stitches.
At the very least, given him something to eat.
Bruce stepped back half a pace, looking at the bag of bread in the photo, and recalled a case in the West End from two weeks earlier.
A homeless man had entered a convenience store and taken a bag of bread off a shelf. The clerk had pulled a shotgun from beneath the counter and broken two of his ribs.
In this city, even filling your stomach could get you shot.
As for what people with a little strength did with it, Bruce had seen far more.
Last month, a dockworker had smashed his foreman's shoulder blade with an iron hook over being shorted twenty dollars in handling fees. Those three fourteen-year-olds in the East End had stabbed someone their own age seven times over a pair of sneakers.
He remembered all those cases.
Now someone was running through those same streets in torn pajamas, able to lift a car to save a life. Yesterday's surveillance footage had even caught him swinging across the docks on a strand.
Still hungry.
Bruce reached out and straightened the screenshot.
If this kid had robbed people at knifepoint, his work tonight would have been simpler.
"He could get food from any store he chose."
"And then?" Alfred asked.
Bruce turned to look at him.
"The clerk would call the police, and the next day, you would put the robbery on this board as well."
The old butler stepped closer and studied the torn clothes.
"So far, everything we have found shows him saving people."
Bruce returned to the computer and dragged the timeline back to the beginning.
He watched it again.
This time, he did not even skip the empty stretches before and after the rescue. The mugger ran away, the worker left, and only the boy remained in the alley, looking down at the bread.
He did not stop until the figure on the screen slipped away along the wall.
"Perhaps he truly is a good person, sir."
Bruce took his hands off the keyboard.
He had considered it too. That answer even spared him a great deal of trouble. Probably anyone who watched the footage would think so.
But it was a little too good.
He couldn't even feed himself, yet he still remembered to leave the mugger a way out after saving someone. If those abilities really had appeared suddenly, he might not even understand his own body, yet he dared to run outside in those rags.
Didn't he get tired? Had he never once thought about getting himself a proper meal first?
Bruce stared at the paused image, trying to find some other intention in the boy's movements.
After all that searching, there was still only the bag of bread.
What a headache.
Alfred watched him put his hands back on the keyboard and finally spoke.
"Sir, you have been watching for forty minutes. Would you like another viewing?"
Bruce shut off the screen and picked up his cowl.
"I'll go see him."
Alfred followed him to the car and waited for him to get in.
"What will you be looking for?"
Bruce gripped the steering wheel and started the engine.
"To see who he's fooling. Me, or himself."
The Batmobile drove out of the cave and slipped into the night through the concealed exit.
Could a hellhole like Gotham produce someone that purely good?
Bruce held the steering wheel, still feeling that something was wrong.
If this were some cult's initiation ritual, requiring him to save a certain number of people on an empty stomach first...
Even that would have made more sense to him.