INTERLUDE: ORACLE

Barbara had seen this before.

The names changed. The faces changed. The city didn’t.

Gotham was a meat grinder. You stepped in thinking you could handle it, that you were the exception. Then it chewed you up, spat you out, and left you broken in a way you couldn’t come back from.

Some tried anyway. Some put themselves back together with whatever pieces they had left. Some didn’t.

And then there were the ones who thought they were fine right up until the moment they weren’t.

Taylor Hebert was running out of time.

Barbara’s fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up feeds from traffic cams, security footage, satellites—anything that might help her track the girl before she went too far. Before the city swallowed her whole.

She patched through to Nightwing’s comm. “You need to stop her.”

A pause. Then Dick’s voice, steady, but wary. “I take it things aren’t improving?”

She pulled up a grainy security feed—an alleyway in the Narrows. Two men sprawled on the ground. One clutched his leg at an angle that wasn’t natural. The other barely moved. Taylor was already gone, a shadow slipping into the night.

“No. They’re getting worse.”

Dick exhaled, barely audible over the line. “Spoiler’s been keeping an eye on her.”

“Yeah, and she’s in over her head.” Barbara adjusted her glasses, switching feeds. “You saw what happened last time we waited too long. We let him go too far, and we lost him.”

Silence.

She didn’t have to say the name. They both knew who she meant.

Jason.

“Batman won’t let it get that far,” Dick said finally, but there was an edge to his voice now, an unease he wasn’t bothering to hide.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Barbara muttered. “You know how this ends if she crosses the line.”

There were only ever two ways it went.

You made it out. Or Gotham made sure you didn’t.

She flicked through more footage, watching Taylor move through the city with a single-minded focus. Operation after operation dismantled, informants broken and bleeding, safehouses torched. She should have been facing more resistance by now.

But she wasn’t.

Barbara frowned, fingers drumming against the desk.

It was too easy.

Gotham never made things this simple. Someone should have stepped in by now—fought back, pushed back, done something. But no one had.

It felt less like Taylor was tearing through the underworld and more like the city was letting her.

And that was what worried her most.

“You’re the only one who might be able to reach her, Dick,” she continued. “But you don’t have much time.”

“…I know.”

Barbara watched the screen as Taylor disappeared from another camera feed. The city was closing in.

And if they didn’t stop her soon, Gotham would do what it always did.