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dim light illuminating Bruce alone in the midst of the cavern. “Indian Summer today, I believe they call it. The storm has cleared off to the east and we’re expecting slightly warmer temperatures under clearing skies. Breezy, cool, but pleasant.”
    â€œPleasant.” The word rolled off of his tongue like a foreign, unknown thing. A sunny day in Gotham. No, he thought, there was no such thing. Gotham was a never ending night. Gotham was a rain that never healed, never cleaned. Gotham was dirt and decay and rot that festered, a disease for which he alone was the cure; he alone stood between the great abyss and justice for those who called the darkness home.
    The darkness is Gotham. The darkness is my world.
    â€œWill there be anything else, sir?”
    Bruce looked up.
    The smell of leaves.
    The sound of laughter.
    â€œYou can call me Master Bruce, Alfred,” he said quietly. “It’s all right, if you like.”
    â€œThank you, Master Bruce.” Alfred smiled as he turned and continued up the stairs.
    Bruce Wayne continued to hold the card in his hand, but his eyes were fixed on the exit from the cave, the rushing sound of the falling waters … and the smell of a bright autumn day.

CHAPTER THREE
AMANDA
    B ruce Wayne, playboy of Gotham, with inexhaustible wealth, had become the Howard Hughes of the new century.
    For more than a decade, he had disappeared from public life. National news commentators collected their appearance fees by filling in the gaping blanks in the meaning of his absence by tracing his disappearance to September 11, 2001. Local newscasters, on the other hand, would annually and at regular intervals fill a little more airtime by pulling out the file footage on his parents’ violent deaths—lately with computer-generated reenactments of the murders—and trace the reclusive peculiarities to these understandable roots. Articles in the financial section of the Gotham Globe sold their papers with the claim that the Wayne heir’s mental aberrations were rooted in the mid-1990s and the rise of neoliberalism. Their competition, the Gotham Gazette , took a completely different point of view, insisting the underlying causes that had unhinged him were to be found in the economic explosiveness of a 1980s marketplace released from the restraints of ethics or social conscience. Several biographies—each unauthorized and always the subject of a perfunctory lawsuit—insisted it was a former lover, either female or male, who had jilted the unbalanced Wayne. Two of these had hit a little too close to the mark. Tarnished Princess: How Julie Madison Became Portia Storme Without Really Trying had been a bestseller exposé that centered as much on Bruce as it had on his former college girlfriend’s strange and meteoric life. The other one, the far more lurid Slain Manor: The Strange Case of Vesper Fairchild , had revived interest in the sensational murder of the popular television reporter and personality whom Bruce had dated briefly before trying to cool things off … only to be arrested when her body was discovered in his home. Those books were the exception; for the most part the players in these fantasies were shadows. The public, it seemed, was ravenous for any lurid ink regarding the Prince of Gotham and was willing to pay tabloid and paperback prices to read it. Each one promised to spotlight a new damsel in distress or hooker with a heart of gold. Their identities were always known only to the author, who was only willing to divulge the secret to anyone willing to purchase his book, pad his royalties, and wade through the shocking, fictional details.
    They knew absolutely nothing about Bruce, but that was not permissible for the media maw that had to be fed, and so they filled the silence with their own wild imaginings and sold all the more airtime, newspapers, books, and blogs in the process.
    They would have all been outraged, however, to know the