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face. “That will be all,” he said, and the man looked startled. He turned to leave, approaching the door.
    Nigma shot him in the back. He collapsed without a sound.
    Two other nobodies rushed into the room, reaching for their guns. For a moment they looked stunned, then they reached down and grabbed the dead man by the arms. They dragged him out without uttering a word.

5
    Robin jogged along a long-abandoned tunnel once used as a turnaround for Gotham City subway cars, before the lines were moved and new facilities built on the far end of town. The overhead halogen lamps cast stark shadows. Peeling paint and mortar hung from the ceiling, and the trickle of an underground stream ran along an artificial channel sunk between the tracks.
    He came to a steel door, locked by a pair of heavy deadbolts and protected by an alarm that would sound if the door was tampered with from the other side. Robin leaned in so the retinal scanner on the alarm panel could identify him. Then he put his right thumb and then his left ring finger on a pad designed to read them. Those three identifying features, presented in the correct order, would disarm the alarm—and then only for fifteen seconds.
    The deadbolts shot back and Robin opened the door, easing it closed behind him. He waited and heard the deadbolts re-engage with a heavy
thunk
.
    On this side the door looked as ancient as its surroundings. The only light was cast by ancient incandescent bulbs left there by a maintenance crew, and the shadows blurred in the semidarkness. Graffiti was visible on the wall under each bulb, representing someone who had tagged his personal territory.
    Robin was in a maintenance tunnel paralleling the subway’s existing riverside line. He listened carefully, because here he might run into crews working on tunnel improvements or signal systems. All he heard was the fading rumble of a train that had just passed by, heading downtown. Nevertheless, he kept his bō staff at the ready.
    He moved quickly toward another tunnel junction where the main passage met a spur that led under the barrier between Arkham City and the rest of Gotham City. When Hugo Strange had overseen the construction of the walls around the complex, he had sealed the subway entrances, but not the tunnels. This made it easy for Robin to reach a station near the Flood Control Facility. There he would be able to climb up to the surface and get to the steel mill without being seen. Despite the violent chaos that had occurred, Arkham City wouldn’t be abandoned—not completely.
    Nothing in Gotham City stayed abandoned for long.
    Hopping over the turnstile, he climbed the stairs, reached the surface, and found that the doors to the subway station were still chained shut from the outside. All of the station’s windows were boarded up, as well. That presented him with two options. A dab of explosive gel would take the doors off their hinges, but he didn’t want to make that much noise. He could break a window without much effort, but then he would have to tear off the plywood that covered the window frame. That was also more noise than he could afford.
    Scanning the room, he looked up.
    The station had skylights, and they weren’t blocked.
    Slinging his bō, he pulled out a small grappling gun and shot a hook up to the beams that supported the roof. He rewound the line and was pulled smoothly up to the ceiling, where he scissored his legs around one of the beams. Holding himself steady he cranked the skylight open, grimacing as the ancient mechanism squeaked loudly.
    When it was opened enough to let him through, he paused to listen. No one seemed to have noticed his presence, so he stepped out onto the station roof.
    Arkham City lay before him in ruins. What destruction its inmates hadn’t committed during their imprisonment, TYGER forces and Protocol 10 had done during the final showdown that had culminated in the Joker’s death. Parts of the steel mill had collapsed, as had the courthouse