CHAPTER 2

The chessboard looked like a grim battlefield for the owner of the black pieces. Dick sat hunched over, looking at where his king had ended up, stuck in a corner and surrounded by enemies. He scratched at his chin, and looked up at Bruce, who was smiling pleasantly even while he reviewed the latest news on his smartphone. Dick shook his head. The man had barely even acknowledged that a game was going on, and yet he was winning by a mile. Indeed, he had Dick’s pieces lined up in a perfect line on the other side.

Finally, Dick made his decision, and moved his king one space in a direction he was pretty sure kept him free from all attacks. He’d played this game with his dad many times before, and almost always won, but his adoptive billionaire had so far bested him in dozens of games over the last year, ever since he realized Dick had an interest in it. “Your move,” he said.

“Checkmate,” said Bruce.

Dick blanched. “What?”

“Checkmate.”

“Where? You’re not even looking.”

“Sure, I am.” Bruce lowered his phone and gestured at the board. “Now, I want you to look back and see where you went wrong.”

“But I’m not in checkmate.”

“Sure about that?”

Dick sighed, and looked back at the board. He perused the battlefield, and saw no way that Bruce could be construing a victory here. The two pawns near his king? No, one was pinned to Bruce’s king, and that one was blocking the other pawn. The queen, then? Nope, there was a bishop in her way, and she can’t leap over other pieces. The knight? Well, it could certainly take out Dick’s last pawn, which was the move he thought Bruce would be likely to go for next, but otherwise it couldn’t do any other damage to him. What about the…?

Then, Dick caught it. He sighed. “The rook,” he said, looking at the piece all the way across the board. “I forgot all about it. I mean, I saw it, but it was just…”

“Just so far away,” Bruce said, smiling and nodding. “Yeah, I know, that was always my problem, too. At least, when I was your age. But you’re a teenager, so it’s fine.”

Dick cocked his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He was constantly offended these days, and he was aware of it even if he didn’t know why. He’d become sensitive to criticism, which wasn’t like him, and once when Bruce had pointed this out to him six months ago, there had been their first and only argument.

“It means you lack the ability right now to take the long view of things,” Bruce said, finally switching off his phone and putting it into his pocket. “But that’s all right. It’ll pass. It did for me.”

“You play too fast,” Dick said, knowing that it sounded like the accusation of a whiny, pouting teenager even before he said it, but was somehow unable to stop himself from saying it.

“I play too fast?”

“Yeah,” he said, hating it more now that he had to justify what he’d said, and that he didn’t know how to take it back. “You don’t sit and think about your moves. My dad always wanted me to sit and think. He said it was good to cogitate.”

“Your dad was a smart man,” Bruce said, nodding appreciatively. “And that kind of thinking makes sense. When you’re first learning, that is. But, once you’ve played the game for a while, and you’ve got a feel for the different openings, tactics, and strategies, you need to start thinking faster, think on the move, adapt and change it up. And then, just sometimes, when you feel it in the moment, you just make something up. Jazz players do it all the time. Change directions on a dime, up the tempo or slow it down, and they’re never wrong. But, in the beginning, yes, they all played slowly and thought about the notes they played. The best of them think about the notes after they finished playing them. Cogitate, as your dad would say.”

Dick smirked. “Is that another lesson I’m hearing?” he said. “I should, what, meditate more on my mistakes, like you were saying about my PT?”

Bruce’s phone buzzed, and he took it out of his pocket to glance over it. He winced, reading a message, and texted someone back while talking to Dick. “You hardly need help with your physical training, Dick, you’re a PT machine. I’ve never seen anything like it in someone so young. I wasn’t even that dedicated until I was in my teens. But with your other training, the stuff with your chess club friends and the interest you’ve suddenly taken in martial arts and wilderness survival, to be really good at any of it, you have to be still sometimes, let the dust settle. A martial arts instructor of mine once said learning is like going swimming in waters of truth, but sometimes you have to step away, sit on the shore, and let the soot settle so the waters can become clear again.”

Dick shrugged. “So, basically the same meditation crap you’ve been pushing as before.”

To his great surprise, Bruce suddenly erupted in laughter. “Yeah, like all the other crap I spew. One of these days, you’ll learn to listen to me, and then you’ll learn not to listen to me.” Dick started to ask him what he meant by that, but Bruce suddenly stood up, looked at his phone, and said, “Sorry, Dick, I gotta take this call. I’ll probably be a little while in my study.”

He nodded, put his hands on his knees, and pushed himself to his feet. “I’m gonna do some training out in the gym.”

“Aren’t you hungry?” Bruce asked. “You haven’t eaten since before your tutor left. Alfred’s around someplace, I’m sure he’d be glad to fix you something to—”

“I’m good, Bruce,” he said. “Quick question before I leave, though. Did you ever get the autopsy reports on my parents I asked for?”

The billionaire winced, appearing physically pained. “Sorry, Dick. I had Alfred put in the request last week, and I’m assured that I’ll have it by next week.”

Dick nodded. “Thanks for the game.” He meant it, too. These days, he preferred any sort of activity, mental or physical, to keep his mind occupied. It kept him from thinking too long and hard on his parents, on their deaths…and on Anthony Zucco.

Meditation didn’t work well at all for Dick, despite Bruce’s endorsement for the whole practice. The more he just sat there and thought about things, the more the dark things crept in, found purchase, and took up permanent root. Even now, with the chess game behind him and a few minutes’ walk ahead of him to reach the gymnasium on the other side of Wayne Manor, Dick found himself thinking of that day already. But he’d gotten pretty good at suppressing that memory, of blacking it out like it had never happened.

He got to his room, which he left a mess almost every day, and almost every day the place was mysteriously cleaned, and made neat and orderly. This was the work of the butler, Alfred, who for the first six months Dick had thought of as a ghost that haunted Wayne Manor, for he seemed to materialize out of nowhere at times, like he had secret passages behind all the walls. However, in time, Dick had learned that the old fellow was really all right, even cool at times. Like a wise old grandfather, Al listened to Dick with a ubiquitous smile on his face, and though he only ever uttered a “mm-hm” or an “ah” here and there, it was obvious that he was listening because whenever he did make a reply, he could recount everything Dick had told him about his day of studies or his training.

In his year in the custody of Bruce Wayne, Dick hadn’t been able to go out very much. He was, after all, a party of interest to the state, to the Gotham City Police Department, and to the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Dick Grayson made the claim that Anthony Zucco had had his parents killed, and though there wasn’t any evidence, if it were ever found to be true, then Dick could be a key witness for the prosecution in the future, which could make him a target.

Nothing had been certain in those days after the Gotham City riots, after Edward Nashton and Oswald Cobblepot had created the first-of-its-kind hybrid between an organized crime syndicate and a well-oiled terrorist organization. The military had been called in to restore order, the GCPD was chasing down leads of other criminals that might’ve been involved with the “Riddler” and the “Penguin.” Dick’s safety had been a concern, although a relatively minor one, and Commissioner Gordon had called upon Bruce Wayne to take a young robin under his wing.

Presently, Dick walked over to his desk and sat at his computer, and immediately started surfing YouTube. He did this for a few minutes before he started feeling antsy. A doctor had once said he had restless leg syndrome, and both Dick and his parents had said that that was absolute nonsense, but these days he was beginning to believe it. He couldn’t sit still anymore, not even for a second, not even to enjoy a funny video from a YouTuber that had always entertained him.

He got his earphones and put on some music to listen to while he changed clothes and got his duffel bag full of training gear. He was ready to go over to the gym and just stepping out when he bumped into Alfred coming into his room. “Oh, hey!” Dick chuckled, removing the earphone from one ear. “S’up?”

“Have you eaten, young sir?” said the tall, almost imposing butler, speaking in the most refined accent that Dick had ever heard in his travels, and with Haley’s Circus he had certainly travelled.

“Nah. I’ll eat after I finish training.”

“You know, young man, it’s bad to push yourself too hard.”

“Not according to Bruce, it ain’t,” he said, sidestepping the old man.

“I often give him the same advice.”

“Uh-huh, and how well does he take it?”

“He doesn’t,” Alfred deadpanned, and the way he delivered it made Dick laugh.

“You’re a riot, Al,” he said.

“You’re the first to say so, sir.”

Dick shook his head, smiling. He hurried down the steps and made his way outside. Almost immediately he stopped dead in his tracks, hit by a wall of cold he hadn’t expected. He’d been inside with Molly, his tutor, all day long. He didn’t know they’d suddenly hit winter this hard. He thought about going and getting the keys to the go-cart, which Alfred and some of the other servants often used to buzz around the gigantic 4,878,000-square-foot area, but then he opted for a jog in the cold. It’s good to tough it out sometimes, he remembered Dad saying to him, even as Mom tried to throw more clothes on him in the cold season.

Dick figured he might catch a cold from this, but he hardly cared. He enjoyed jogging across the manor, which he still hadn’t seen all of yet. It had actually grown a little since he’d come here, because Bruce had purchased even more land behind his house from the National Forest Service last year, with the contractual agreement to preserve it. Bruce now owned something like 112 acres of land. That didn’t include land he apparently owned across the city, the property he owned around the country through Wayne Enterprises, and even some beachfront property as far away as Miami and the Bahamas.

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The area was covered in activities. It had a tennis court, racquetball court, weightlifting gym, gazebo, ballroom, a vita course that ran through the woods, a clubhouse, a duck pond with an adjoining picnic area, a garage filled with (at present) thirty-five different kinds of automobiles and motorcycles, and an indoor and outdoor swimming pool. All of Bruce’s money had afforded him to live in the lap of luxury, and Dick had started to feel guilty for enjoying it.

I’m forgetting my parents, he thought at times. It was true, but most of it wasn’t just the things he now had, it was also his willingness to put it all out of sight and out of mind. It’s not just the training, it’s the fact that I’m sitting here, doing nothing about it, and Mom and Dad are both dead. Dead! And I’m just…here.

On some level, Dick understood that his lack of remembrance, his inability to visit his parents’ graves more than once in a year, was all because that, even though he was physically very active, and active in his studies, he was emotionally languid. Thinking about the tightrope…how it snapped…how his parents looked in freefall—

Snap out of it, Grayson! he told himself. Don’t think about it. It’s not worth it.

But he knew it wouldn’t be that easy. He’d gotten good at dispelling the memories, but so far he hadn’t mastered the art of keeping them at bay. His parents still came to him in his dreams. He woke up smelling bacon that Alfred had quietly delivered to his room, and Dick woke up slowly, peeling off the sheets and, for just a moment, thought he’d find himself in his old room in their travel camper, back on tour with Haley’s Circus, his mother in the small kitchenette making the bacon for him, and the fresh biscuits and gravy—

I said, snap out of it, Dick!

He finished the jog over to the gym, and stepped inside just in time to see the cleaners leaving. They came by once a week to completely clean the entire gym, tennis court, racquetball court, and all other areas not attached directly to the mansion. He waved at them without taking his earphones out, and tried to focus on the lyrics, nothing else. His way of trying to empty his thoughts of the supreme guilt he felt often felt.

Dick had only recently become aware that some of what he was feeling was, in fact, guilt. Guilt because he had lived while his parents had died. Guilt because he hadn’t been there, because he’d been off retrieving the hand chalk like his mother had asked him, that he hadn’t been there to…to…to somehow save them.

But there was more to it than that. As Dick settled into the weightlifting bench, he tried to shake the feeling of guilt over something else that had been bugging him, and that was the guilt that neither he, nor Bruce, nor anyone else, had done much to find the truth of his parents’ deaths, despite Bruce’s promise to him a year ago that they would.

He lifted weights for forty-five minutes, then ran two miles on the treadmill before jumping rope. He did some basic fighting moves taught to him by a couple of Bruce’s own self-defense instructors. He kicked the bag with a rear round kick from muay thai, then practiced the basic jab, cross, and hook motions. Andy, one of Bruce’s oldest coaches, had taught Dick all about the importance of footwork and maneuverability, and had taught him the difference between a good push step and a bad one. Dick reviewed all of this for half an hour before he jumped into the hot tub to relax his muscles.

Dick never stopped training his mind, though. Andy had also taught him to practice emotional disengagement, psychokinetics, and controlled dissociation.

Restless leg syndrome, the doctor called it, he thought. Another doctor, this one from when he was just six or seven years old, had told his parents that he suffered from extreme attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This was way, way back when Dick had been falling terribly behind other kids his same age.

They’d tried giving Dick meds, but it only made things worse. It turned out that Dick Grayson just had a ton of energy he needed to get out, and a quick cure had been to allow him to start training with his mother and father, despite the fact that his mom had thought it was too dangerous for such a young boy.

“Mary, he’s sharp. You know he is,” he recalled his father saying repeatedly. “He learns just fine, the same as any other kid, as long as you let activity be his reward. But…sweetie, I think he’s a prodigy. I know all parents think that, but he is! And prodigies don’t do well if they’re not challenged.” Eventually, John Grayson wore his wife down. Dick had been allowed to train, and fiercely, and they had watched a miracle happen. His test scores skyrocketed. He went from being in remedial classes to advanced classes like that.

Dick remembered those conversations between his parents. And he remembered all the good times they’d had. He remembered the Christmas in New York, when Haley’s Circus had performed for six weeks at Madison Square Garden. He remembered going to Tokyo for a small benefit for the victims of a terrible tsunami, performing for the sake of gathering donations.

And Dick remembered the sound the tightrope made when it snapped…the look on his father’s face when the world dropped out underneath him…his mother’s last scream…the look on her face a second after she realized the safety net wasn’t beneath them like it should be…and an instant before she hit the ground with a wet slap, and—

Stop it, Grayson! he admonished. Just stop it, you can’t do anything so just stop it!

But he could do something, and this was the other thing that Dick had been trying to keep himself from really thinking about, though his mind kept returning to it, the way the tongue will continue to play with the empty socket where a tooth had been pulled. I could go and find Zucco myself.

Now that was a dangerous thought, and he knew it. It was the same thought that had almost gotten him killed a year ago, when some part of him, insane with shock and grief, had taken him over and forced him to break into the Iceberg Lounge where he’d confronted and nearly killed Oswald Cobblepot, where he’d been shot at in less than a few hours after his own parents’ deaths. I almost joined them, thinking like that. He’d acted without thinking. He hadn’t taken the long view, as Bruce had said to him only a couple of hours ago.

The long view, he thought. Just take a step back from all the pieces, and take the long view. Relaxing in the hot tub, he opened his eyes. A thought had just occurred to him. It was along the lines of the previous thought, that of going and finding Tony Zucco himself, only now the idea was something else, more evolved.

I certainly have the resources, he thought, considering his new position in life. However, whatever it was that he’d been thinking quickly evaporated when he remembered just how closely watched he was at all times. After all, Bruce Wayne was a paranoid individual, and all of Wayne Manor was under surveillance, covered in cameras, both obvious and hidden, too numerous to count. I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to. I’m a possible witness for the prosecution in murder.

However, like any young man’s thoughts of rebellion, and like any teenager’s desire to get away, the dream never quite left him, not even when he hopped out of the tub, showered, and walked back to the castle that was now both his sanctuary and his prison.

* * *

THE CALL HAD been sent to Bruce’s phone through the very expensive rerouting service that he’d invested in six months ago, and which had been worth every cent he’d spent. Now, all his communications between Gordon, Essen, Alfred, and Lucius could be conducted through a single cell phone, and whenever he replied his messages were split up and sent throughout the world, in dozens of different directions, and reassembled at the other side at one of their cell phones or e-mail accounts without the source being traceable. He could now speak to Commissioner Gordon without having to relay messages through Alfred and the Batcomputer down in the cave.

This technology was just one piece that he’d gotten access to because of his relationship with Sarah Essen and her task force. Combined with his resources at WayneTech, there wasn’t any device on the planet that he couldn’t rig himself, and quickly, without having to go through as many potentially dangerous channels as he had just a year ago, when Lucius had been his sole accomplice in the tech end of Batman’s work.

Presently, he sat in his study looking at the photos of the crime scene Gordon had sent him. According to Gordon’s text, no one other than Breaking Point’s forensics teams had been allowed to view the scene for fear that a ton of critical information could be lost if the scene was contaminated. Bruce agreed with that decision, but disagreed with Jim that it looked like a mob killing, one that the commissioner felt was meant to send a message.

Bruce texted him back: This doesn’t fit the M.O. of any of the hitters I’m aware of.

He waited a couple minutes for the reply: You’re right, but someone went through a lot of trouble here & this equipment & these materials aren’t cheap.

He texted back: Any ID on these victims?

Gordon’s reply: Not yet.

Bruce considered this, then texted: Is it possible that I can survey the scene later tonight?

A few minutes, then: We’ll be waiting for you.

There was no doubt who the “we” he meant was. Gordon would be there with Special Agent Essen, who was incredibly busy these days conducting her task force and hadn’t made contact with the Dark Knight in months. She’d been leaving all of that up to Gordon.

Bruce flipped through the twenty or so pictures that the commissioner had snapped with his phone. His face never changed. He looked over the bodies, strung up like lambs for a slaughter. No, he thought. Even lambs at slaughter are not mutilated like this. The bodies had been frozen, but obviously shattered piece by piece. Bruce already believed that these people had been alive when this had been done to them, and that they had been made to suffer. Freeze-burn blisters around the breaks indicated this. Not only that, but the heads that were still recognizable as heads had mouths permanently frozen in masks of horror…or excruciating pain.

Bruce’s own face was as unchanged as those frozen on his smartphone’s screen. He’d seen a lot and even worse in his time. But then, he came to the final picture, that of the frozen infant. It was a girl, probably no older than four months, placed inside a tub of liquid nitrogen and left there. It was now like a large, white stone. An ice sculpture in the shape of a perfect little angel, sleeping and thinking of no ugliness, no cruelties, having died before it lived to see the atrocities. The only thing the angel was missing was its wings.

Bruce had seen dead children before—like any crime fighter, it was an inevitability of the job—but something about this picture sparked something. It had been a long, long time since he’d truly felt anger well up inside of him. It was a moment before he realized he was squeezing the side of his phone. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and relaxed.

“Master Bruce?” said Alfred. The butler had entered the study using the only other key besides Bruce’s. Together, these two men had taken every precaution to keep Batman’s secret a permanent one, but now, with the boy living with them, they had even ceased to talk to one another openly about anything in the house. Now the only time Bruce and Alfred were frank with each other was when they were safely ensconced in the cave below.

Bruce turned his chair around, and looked up at his oldest friend. “Yeah, what’s up, Alfred?”

“I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I’ve just spoken with Dick and…” Alfred looked at Bruce, and gave pause. “Is something wrong, sir?”

Bruce stood up. “Wrong?”

“Yes, sir. You look…upset about something.”

He shrugged. “A pretty hideous scene down on Alexis Street. I’ll run it all by you later. What were you saying about Dick?”

“Hm? Oh, yes, well, he’s just come to me to get something to eat, finally, and while I was preparing his soup he said that he wanted me to relay a message to you.”

“What’s that?”

“He said he wants to up his training with Andy and your other instructors, if it’s not too much money, sir.” Alfred smiled.

“You look pleased with yourself, old man. What’s that smile all about?”

“If you’ll recall, sir, when you first brought him here, I told you that he was going to be an active one, and an inquisitive one. He’s asking me all the time, ‘What’s Bruce doing in that study all by himself?’ And of course, ‘Why does Bruce come home so early in the morning? Does he party at all hours of the night, like they say?’ ”

Bruce smiled. “And you, of course, answer…”

“I tell him that you’re an adult and can do as you please, sir,” Alfred said. “And I tell him that he shouldn’t be so nosy.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

“It isn’t. But, he listens well enough.”

Bruce nodded. “Tell Dick that I’ll arrange it so that every day that I train with Andy, I’ll pay them triple to do an extra long lesson with him right afterwards. That, combined with his normal martial arts training, ought to be enough. Tell him that the stipulation is that as long as his grades do not suffer even a smidgen, then he can continue to train like this. Deal?”

“I’m not his mother, sir. You don’t have to ask me.”

Bruce then laughed. It was first time in a long time he could remember genuinely laughing.

“What’s so funny, sir?” Alfred asked.

He shook his head ruefully. “If you don’t get it by now, I don’t know how to tell you,” he said. “Alfred, you are that kid’s mother. At least, you’re the stand-in for her. Me? I’m the stern but elusive father, the man that he looks up to because he can’t quite get enough face time with me.”

“Funny,” Alfred said. “I thought of myself as more of the father figure, perhaps a nanny, and whenever I see you two together, I see brothers, not father and son.”

“Yeah, well, this weird little family of ours is still working out the kinks,” Bruce said, walking over to the bookshelves and lifting the head on the statue of Theodore Roosevelt. “Just make sure that the boy doesn’t find out what secret Mommy and Daddy have in the closet.” He pointed to the door of the study. “Is that door locked?”

“Of course, sir, I locked it when I came in.”

Bruce nodded, and tapped the switch hidden beneath Roosevelt’s head, and the bookshelf slid to one side. He got a grip of the fireman’s pole and said, “Don’t wait up.”

“Wouldn’t think of it, sir.”