Wayne's Treat

At dusk, Chen Mo and Barbara came out through the school's back gate.

They hadn't used the main gate.

Reporters had blocked it.

One camera was filming a parent who was crying very hard. The child beside that parent looked numb, as though they didn't understand why they had suddenly become a victim of the education system.

Chen Mo took one look and decisively turned around.

"Back gate."

Barbara followed.

The two of them walked out along the perimeter wall.

There was fresh graffiti on it.

Someone had spray-painted a line in black:

Wayne, get out of our school.

Underneath, someone else had added a line in red:

Leave dinner behind first.

Chen Mo stared at those two lines for two seconds.

"Very democratic, but where's dinner? I haven't seen any."

Barbara looked at him.

Chen Mo offered a serious assessment:

"Still, a single wall has provided a platform for demands from multiple social strata. The first line represents anxiety over campus order, while the second represents basic survival needs. This shows considerable enthusiasm for grassroots political participation in Gotham."

Barbara hadn't wanted to laugh.

But the corner of her mouth twitched anyway.

Her persona was supposed to be that of a cold, heartless cool girl.

Lately, she'd been breaking character a little. It was all Chen Mo's fault.

"Do you think he'll see it?"

Chen Mo knew who she meant.

He hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder.

The fruit container inside dug into his back.

"If he doesn't, Batman might as well retire."

Barbara's steps faltered.

Chen Mo kept walking as though he hadn't noticed what he'd said.

"I mean, Bruce Wayne is so rich, he must have one of those teams dedicated to monitoring public opinion for him. Probably a huge screen, too, covered in densely packed data, like a villain's lair."

Barbara watched his back.

"Why do you think that sounds like a villain's lair?"

Chen Mo looked back, his tone sincere:

"Because good guys generally can't afford screens that big. Take me, for instance. I dropped my phone, and I can't even afford to fix it."

Barbara: "..."

For the third time that day, she decided not to speak to him.

Meanwhile.

On the top floor of Wayne Tower.

Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, Gotham's evening resembled a pane of smoke-stained glass.

The city lights came on one by one, offering no warmth, looking only like spots of pus seeping from a wound.

Bruce Wayne stood before an enormous wall of monitors.

He wore a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms and his tie loosened a little. The frivolous smile from the daytime news was absent from his face.

More than a dozen windows were open on the screens at once.

In the upper left was the cafeteria surveillance footage from East End No. 7 Public Middle School.

The image was paused at the instant the cart slid away.

A cleaning cart, a mop handle, a tray return rack, falling trays, and insulated meal containers knocked out of place.

Barbara stood beside the serving window, her red hair like a small flame beneath the stark white lights.

Chen Mo leaned against the wall, half his face hidden behind a pillar, his expression suspiciously innocent.

In the upper right was the lunch subsidy system's backend.

Rows of temporary student IDs displayed different statuses.

Registered.

Not synced.

Awaiting review.

Meal subsidy balance not activated.

Error; retrying.

In the middle were the cafeteria supplier's transport records.

The first truck had arrived twenty-seven minutes early.

The second truck had been delayed forty-three minutes.

The insulated meal container numbers were not consecutive.

Thirty-six meals reserved for the visiting group had been marked "non-student batch."

In the lower left were the student meal collection terminal logs.

Card scans had begun failing at 11:42 a.m.

Reason for failure: temporary ID unauthorized.

At the same time, the manual entry channel had closed.

Reason for closure: administrative lunch break.

In the lower right were live trending terms from social media.

Wayne social experiment.

Ordinary students' rights.

Wayne treats, students pay.

Street trash.

Free lunch scam.

Bruce Wayne, get out of the school.

At the center of the screen was the most widely shared composite image.

On one side, he was raising a glass and smiling at a charity gala.

On the other was a chicken drumstick smashed on the cafeteria floor.

Bruce looked at that image.

For a long time.

His expression did not change.

There was no anger.

No sense of grievance.

Not even the cold indifference of a rich man who had been offended.

He merely raised a hand, shrank the composite image, and dragged it aside.

Then he enlarged the surveillance footage from twenty seconds before the cafeteria cart slid away.

One frame.

Another frame.

Then another.

In the footage, Chen Mo walked past the cleaning cart.

His heel brushed the rubber mat.

The movement looked as natural as an ordinary student walking past.

Bruce pressed pause.

His gaze rested on that shoe.

The sole was very worn.

The outside edge of the right shoe showed obvious wear, indicating prolonged use of walls for leverage and a habitual shift in his center of gravity when landing.

The movement was so slight that an ordinary camera could barely capture it.

But the resulting chain was complete.

The cleaning cart shifted.

The mop handle touched the return rack.

Trays hit the floor, making noise.

The security guard looked away.

A staff member's elbow struck the cart.

The brake catch came loose.

The insulated meal containers left the preparation area.

Food safety procedures were triggered.

Bruce mapped the entire chain on the screen.

A line extended from Chen Mo's heel, slipped past the attention of everyone in the cafeteria, and finally ended at those thirty-six hot meals.

He pulled up another clip.

Barbara faced the staff.

As she spoke, her chin was slightly raised, her shoulders squared, and her right hand clenched into a fist before relaxing.

Nervous.

But she hadn't backed down.

She hadn't grabbed the food.

She had turned it into something that couldn't be returned to storage.

She hadn't threatened anyone.

She had made everyone realize that signing their names was more dangerous than handing out meals. Her methods bore quite a resemblance to Gordon's.

And she was bolder than Gordon.

Bruce moved closer to the screen.

Its cold light reflected in his eyes like two pieces of ice submerged in deep water.

Outside, the entire city was cursing him.

The poor cursed him for not giving enough.

The middle class cursed him for giving to the wrong people.

Parents cursed him for disrupting order.

The media cursed him for experimenting on children.

Everyone had their own reasons.

Every reason was valid.

Every reason was like a small knife.

But Bruce wasn't looking at those knives.

His finger touched the red error message in the lunch subsidy system's backend.

Temporary ID unauthorized.

He opened the transport records again.

The second truck had been delayed forty-three minutes.

Then he opened the supplier contract.

An outsourcing company.

A second-tier subcontract.

A temporary batch.

Manual confirmation.

Finally, he arranged four windows side by side.

Cafeteria.

Meal subsidies.

Transport.

Collection.

Bruce hadn't only just discovered this uproar. Nine minutes after the first video from inside the school was uploaded, he had already opened every system.

Before the first parent was interviewed, he had already pulled up all the cafeteria surveillance footage.

Before social media began shouting "Wayne treats, students pay," he had already known the problem wasn't the drumsticks or the students.

The problem lay in an entire chain where every link appeared to have someone responsible, yet every link could, in practice, say, "This isn't my problem."

Bruce watched the screens. As Bruce Wayne, he did always have to check where his money had gone, didn't he?

After a long time, he said quietly:

"Treating."

When the word left his mouth, there was neither sarcasm nor amusement.

Like a nail being pressed into wood, it was so cold that it seemed to have come not from Bruce Wayne's mouth, but from Batman's.

He dragged the composite image back.

At the charity gala, Bruce Wayne held up a wineglass and smiled flawlessly for the cameras.

The chicken drumstick on the cafeteria floor had shattered, its juices seeping into the gaps between the tiles.

The two images sat side by side.

Like the kind of joke Gotham excelled at making.

Bruce closed his half of the photograph.

Only the smashed drumstick remained on the screen.

And, in the corner, the words the system had highlighted in red:

Not synced.

In Gotham, when a system displayed "not synced," it usually meant one of three things.

First, the system really was broken.

Second, someone wanted you to think the system was broken.

Third, whether the system was broken didn't matter, because everyone who was supposed to get paid had already been paid, and everyone who was supposed to go hungry was still going hungry.

Well, then, which option should Master Wayne choose to believe?

The lights on the top floor of Wayne Tower had been dimmed to their lowest setting, leaving the entire office lit only by the faint blue glow of the monitor wall.

Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, Gotham's rain swept slantwise across the glass, as though someone were scrubbing the city's face over and over with a filthy brush.

It wouldn't come clean.

It never came clean.

Feeling a wave of exhaustion, Bruce sat at the console, his sleeves rolled to his forearms, his tie already pulled off and tossed aside.

That tie cost four hundred dollars, hand-stitched silk in an understated color suited to an heir pretending to care about profit margins at a board meeting.

Now it lay on the floor like a little snake strangled by life among the wealthy.

Alfred came in carrying coffee.

He glanced at the wall full of windows, then at the tie on the floor.

"Master Bruce, should I be grateful you haven't thrown your suit jacket into the shredder as well this time?"

Bruce didn't turn around.

"I don't have time."

"Generally speaking, sir, even when one has no time, one can still choose not to treat a four-hundred-dollar tie as evidence left at a crime scene."

Bruce still didn't answer.

Alfred set the coffee beside his hand.

There was no sugar or milk in the coffee. It was as black as Batman's sense of humor.

Bruce raised a hand and dragged four systems onto the screen.

The Wayne Foundation's meal subsidy disbursement system, the meal supplier's delivery backend, the school cafeteria's meal collection terminal, and the Gotham Education Department's pilot program oversight platform.

Four windows opened side by side.

Like four men in clean shirts sitting in an interrogation room, each claiming he had only been passing by.

Bruce opened the foundation's disbursement records first.

East End No. 7 Public Middle School.

Pilot program ID: WEF-EDU-EQ-07.

Project name: Education Equality Nutrition Support Program.

Project objective: Ensure every registered student received a basic hot meal guarantee while at school.

Disbursement status: Disbursed.

Supplier status: Paid in full.

Meal batch: 640 lunches, 640 dinners.

Receipt status: Complete.

Bruce stared at the word "complete."

The typeface was very clean.

Black letters on a white background.

No blood.

No grease stains.

None of that grating sound students made as they scraped up the last bit of mashed potato.

The system never displayed those things.

The system only displayed "complete."

Bruce switched to the meal supplier's backend.

The company was called "Gotham Nutrition Services Group."

It sounded very reliable.

Generally speaking, when a company's name contained "nutrition," "services," and "group" all at once, at least two of those words were lies.

Bruce glanced over the corporate structure.

Parent company, primary contractor, secondary delivery, temporary vehicle dispatch, emergency outsourcing.

Standing behind him, Alfred raised an eyebrow slightly.

"A very healthy corporate structure."

Bruce opened the ownership tracing view.

A tree immediately grew across the screen.

A very Gotham sort of tree.

Its roots were in the Cayman Islands, its trunk in Gotham City's municipal bidding system, its branches reaching into the education department, transport companies, community kitchens, and cold-chain warehouses, with a few shell companies hanging from its leaves, their names as clean as though they had just come out of a washing machine.