Overhead, the voice from the chopper’s megaphone called out to him. “Pull over,” it shouted. “Civilian, stand down. You will be arrested. Stop your vehicle!”
But Bruce had caught up to his target. Almost there. He tightened his grip on his steering wheel, hoping his calculations were correct. If he clipped him in the rear correctly, the Nightwalker car’s speed and friction would probably flip him. It ends here.
Alfred’s going to kill me.
Bruce patted the steering wheel once. His heart twisted for an instant at what he was about to do. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he murmured to the Aston Martin.
Then he sped up. The car tried to stop him this time, and he felt the resistance in the steering wheel against his move. “ALERT! Collision ahead!”
“Override,” Bruce shouted, then rammed his vehicle into the back of the Nightwalker’s car.
The crunch of metal slamming into metal.
Bruce felt a shock wave ripple through his body as his neck whipped sideways and he was hurled in an arc, his seat belt cutting into his chest from the force. The other car’s tires screamed against the pavement—or maybe that was Bruce, he wasn’t sure—and he saw the vehicle flip, momentarily airborne. The world streaked around him. For an instant, he caught a glimpse of the driver’s face—a man, eyes wide, his pale skin dotted with blood.
The white car crashed upside down. Glass exploded out in all directions as the metal frame crushed into a gnarled mass. Even though Bruce knew, as he shook his head groggily, that everything must have taken less than a second, he felt like he could see the metal twisting section by section, the million individual splinters of the windows cutting through the air.
Police swarmed the white car, their rifles pointed directly at the driver inside. He looked conscious, if barely.
“Don’t move, Nightwalker!” an officer yelled. “You’re under arrest!”
Bruce felt another wave of dizziness hit. As one of the officers approached him, shouting angrily now, Bruce heard his car issue a voice call alerting Alfred as well as sending his coordinates to him and the police.
Bruce’s guardian answered on the first ring, voice tense and frantic. “Master Wayne! Master Wayne?”
“Alfred,” Bruce heard himself say. “Could use a pickup.” He couldn’t understand what Alfred said in reply—he wasn’t even sure if he could hear Alfred’s words. All he remembered was slumping in his seat, and the world going dark.
Interfering with a crime scene. Disobeying a police officer’s orders. Obstruction of justice.
If Bruce had been hoping to avoid news coverage after the flurry on his eighteenth birthday, slamming his brand-new car into a criminal’s vehicle was probably not the best way to do it. Especially not so soon before graduation.
At least the headlines had veered away from talk of his parents and his money, focusing instead on questions about Bruce’s well-being and splashing photos of his ruined car on their front pages. Rumors of his possible death had swirled online almost instantly after the wreck, along with speculation about whether he was driving while intoxicated or escaping the police.
“An eventful couple of weeks?” said Lucius Fox from across the table.
They sat together in a waiting room at the courthouse, watching as the TV news repeated the footage of his Aston Martin crashing into the getaway car. Two weeks had passed since the crash, and Bruce still had a mild headache from the concussion he had suffered. He’d missed a full week of school because of it, and spent the second enduring questions from classmates and swarms of reporters hanging out at the manor’s gates. Still, he couldn’t help feeling a hint of satisfaction at the TV’s news coverage. It was clear to everyone who watched it—even Lucius—that the car would have escaped from the police had Bruce not intervened.
Not that it mattered to the court.
“Well, our car did everything it should have, right?” Bruce ventured. “How was that for a test of its safety features?”
Lucius raised an eyebrow at him, unable to hide a slight smile at his comment, then sighed and shook his head. At least he didn’t have the panicked look on his face today that he did when he first visited Bruce at the hospital and saw him strapped to an IV. “It’s my fault,” he replied. “I shouldn’t have asked you to take that car to the benefit in the first place.”
“Well, I ended up in the right place at the right time.”
“Or the wrong place at the wrong time, Bruce. Why did you do it? You suddenly felt a need to dole out justice?”
It was the question the police had asked him first, too, but Bruce still wasn’t sure how to answer. “Because I knew I could stop him, I guess,” he replied. “And the police couldn’t. Was I just supposed to stand by and watch?”
“You’re not in law enforcement, Bruce,” Lucius said. “You can’t just intervene like that.” The man’s eyes turned stern for a moment. “If you didn’t look the way you did, the police might have shot you dead for pulling a stunt like that.”
Guilt hit him, and Bruce couldn’t answer. If he could have intervened in that alley where his parents died so many years ago, his life might have turned out very differently. Lucius was right, of course, and it sent a thread of shame through him. His pale skin may have saved his life. “I won’t do it again,” he said instead, softly.
The video panned to police shouting at the other driver to come out, and the man being pulled out of the wreckage. “A low-ranking member of the Nightwalkers,” the reporter said. “Little is known about the group, although authorities have released their symbol, one that appears at the locations of each target.”
Nightwalkers. Bruce recalled the word being shouted by the police that night. He’d heard this group’s name mentioned on the news more frequently over the past year; in fact, the primary suspect in the murder of that businessman—Sir Robert Grant—was considered a Nightwalker, too. On the TV, an image appeared of a coin engulfed in flames, then of that symbol sprayed on the side of buildings at various crime scenes. There was something ominously personal about the symbol, the burning of wealth, like the Nightwalkers would gladly do it to Bruce himself if given the chance.
“Well, Bruce,” Lucius said as the footage began to repeat. He leaned back in his chair, running a hand absently over his closely cropped dark curls. The lights in the room cast a faint blue highlight against his brown skin. “I suppose our summer plans will have to change.”
Bruce turned to face his mentor. For being the new head of research and development at WayneTech, Lucius Fox was remarkably young. His smile was quick, his eyes bright and alert, and his step energetic in a way that made it seem like he was perpetually eager to change the world.