DC – I am Batman

Lucius Fox walked fast for a man who spent fourteen hours a day behind a desk. He was leading the tour through Wayne Enterprises' R&D floor with the brisk efficiency of someone who had things to build and was being polite about the interruption, and his shoes made a sharp sound on the polished concrete that echoed off ceiling-high glass partitions.

"Applied materials on the left, energy systems through the double doors, and the botanical research wing is at the end of the hall." He glanced back at Bruce. "Your father mentioned you'd been asking about the R&D budget."

"I'm curious how the money gets spent."

"Curiosity. From the heir." Lucius adjusted his glasses. "The applied materials team is working on a polymer composite that could replace Kevlar at a quarter of the weight. The energy team has a prototype fuel cell that runs on saltwater. And Dr. Isley's department has been producing results that I can't explain, which is unusual for me." He said the last part without turning around. "She's in Lab Seven."

He opened the door to the botanical wing and the air changed. Warmer, wetter. It smelled green in a way that had weight to it. Soil, chlorophyll, the sweet-rot of organic matter decomposing at the right speed. Grow lights hummed overhead in a frequency that sat at the edge of hearing, and plants grew in rows of clear-walled containers that ran the length of the room, each one labeled with handwritten tags in small, precise lettering.

The woman at the far bench had her back to the door.

Red hair. Past her shoulders, pulled into a knot that was losing the fight against gravity, held with a pencil. Lab coat that had been white at some point and was now marked with soil at the cuffs and something greenish at the hem. She was bent over a tray of seedlings, and the seedlings were wrong. They were too tall for their pots. Too green. The ones closest to her hands were visibly larger than the ones at the edges of the tray, like proximity to her was a growth condition.

"Dr. Isley." Lucius knocked on the doorframe. "I have someone for you to meet."

"I'm in the middle of a soil conductivity test." She didn't turn around. "If it's another compliance auditor, they can wait."

"It's Bruce Wayne."

She turned. Green eyes, sharp, already annoyed. She looked at him like he was a variable she hadn't planned for.

"Thomas Wayne's son."

"That's the one."

"We've met. You were fourteen. Your father brought you to a gala where I presented research on mycorrhizal root networks and nobody in the room understood a word of it." She turned back to her seedlings. "You ate three plates of shrimp."

He had. He remembered the gala and he remembered the shrimp and he didn't remember her, which meant she'd been paying more attention that night than he had.

Lucius looked between them. "I'll leave you to it. Bruce, Dr. Isley can explain her department's work better than I can. Dr. Isley, please try not to make him feel stupid."

"I don't try." She still hadn't looked up from the seedlings. "It happens naturally."

Lucius left. The door clicked shut and the hum of the grow lights filled the space. Bruce walked closer to the bench. The seedlings in the tray were growing in a pattern that radiated from where her hands had been resting, the tallest in the center and diminishing toward the edges, and the gradient was too clean to be accidental and too uniform to be environmental.

"Those are growing toward you," he said.

She looked up. The annoyance shifted. She was still sharp, still guarded, but now there was a flicker of surprise behind the green eyes. Most people didn't notice the pattern.

"Heliotropism. They grow toward light."

"The grow lights are overhead. They're growing toward where your hands were."

She held his gaze for a second. Two. Then she stood up straight, wiped her hands on her coat, and crossed her arms. The pencil in her hair was sliding and she didn't fix it.

"What do you actually want, Mr. Wayne? The tour? Because I have forty-seven active experiments, a grants review in three hours, and a set of soil samples from the Coventry industrial corridor that are going to tell me exactly how badly Gotham Chemical has been dumping hexavalent chromium into the water table, and none of those things improve by having a billionaire's son watching me work."

"I want to see the soil samples."

That stopped her. She looked at him and the annoyance was still there but it had company.

"Why?"

"Because Wayne Enterprises built three of the factories along that corridor and I want to know what they put in the ground."

She stared at him. Running calculations. Whether this was a real conversation or a rich kid performing concern.

"Come here," she said.

She led him to a workstation where soil samples sat in labeled jars, each one tagged with a GPS coordinate and a date. She picked up a jar and held it out. He took it and her fingers brushed his when the glass transferred.

Her skin was warm. Warmer than it should have been. His body clocked it before his brain did, the same training that had been running since Nanda Parbat. Warm from the inside, like a greenhouse, heat being generated rather than retained. She pulled her hand away and he was holding the jar and his thumb was where her fingers had been and the glass was still warm.

"Coventry soil," she said. "The sample on the left is from the public park three blocks from the Gotham Chemical plant. The one you're holding is from directly behind it."

He looked at the jar. The soil was darker than it should have been, with a faint iridescent sheen that caught the lab light. He'd seen that sheen in chemical contamination reports from the cave's database.

"This is dead."

"It's worse than dead. Dead soil still has microbial structure. This has been sterilized. The chromium concentration is nineteen times the EPA limit. Nothing can grow in it. Nothing can live in it. The root systems in a sixty-foot radius around the plant are black." She pulled up a photo on her workstation monitor. Root systems, photographed against white backgrounds. The healthy ones were pale and branching. The contaminated ones were dark, shrunken, curled in on themselves. "These root samples came from elms that were planted forty years ago. They survived the '87 drought, the industrial expansion, two construction projects that cut through their secondary roots. They survived everything Gotham threw at them for four decades. The chromium killed them in eighteen months."

She was talking faster. Her hands were moving, pulling up data, pointing at graphs. The pencil fell out of her hair and she didn't notice. Her hair fell across her face, red against the pale skin, and she pushed it back without stopping.

"Nobody cares," she said. "I've sent this data to the EPA, to the Gotham City environmental office, to the Gazette. The EPA opened a file. The city referred me to their legal department. The Gazette asked if I had photos of dead birds because dead trees don't sell papers." She turned to him. "Your company built three of those factories."

"I know."

"Is that why you're here? Damage control?"

"I'm here because I asked Lucius what department was producing results he couldn't explain and he said yours."

She was quiet for a few seconds. Her arms uncrossed.

"I want to show you the park," she said. "Robinson Park. I can show you what the contamination looks like when it reaches mature trees."

"Let's go."

Robinson Park was forty minutes from Wayne Tower by the route she chose, which cut through the Coventry industrial corridor because she wanted him to see the factories before he saw the trees. She drove a ten-year-old Volvo with soil samples in the passenger footwell and a fern in the backseat that was outgrowing its pot. She drove aggressively and she talked about chromium valence states the entire trip.

He watched the factories pass through the window. Three of them had Wayne Enterprises logos. Two of those had been built before Thomas took over the company. One was built after. He made a note.

The park was big. Old trees lined the paths, oaks and elms and a few beeches that had been there since before Gotham was a city. It was early afternoon and the park was mostly empty. A woman was jogging on the east path. Two kids were throwing bread at ducks near the pond, and the ducks were losing interest because the bread was whole wheat.

Pamela walked straight past the healthy trees toward the south end where the canopy thinned. The difference was visible from fifty feet. Green gave way to yellow, yellow to brown, and the trees at the edge were bare or close to it, their branches holding leaves that curled at the edges.

She stopped at a large elm and put her hand flat against the bark. Closed her eyes.

He watched her. The hand pressed against the tree, the fingers splayed, the wrist relaxed. Her breathing slowed. She stood like that for ten seconds, twenty, and the quiet stretched until the park sounds filled it. Birds. A car horn from the road. Wind through the branches that still had leaves.

"They're in pain," she said. Eyes closed. "Nobody hears it but me."

He could have dismissed that. Most people would. A botanist anthropomorphizing her research subjects, projecting emotion onto organisms that operated on chemistry and light. He'd heard worse claims from people with less evidence.

But her skin ran warmer than any normal person's. Her plants grew toward her hands. The seedlings in her lab bloomed in a gradient that tracked her proximity. And she was standing in a park with her palm against a dying tree and her breathing had synced with the wind and her face had gone still and open.

"I believe you," he said.

She opened her eyes. Looked at him. The green was bright in the afternoon light and she was looking at him with her hand still against the bark and her mouth slightly open and she didn't say anything for a long time.

"You shouldn't," she said. "I can't prove it."

"You don't need to."

She took her hand off the tree and looked at it. Turned it over. The fingertips were stained brown from the bark, and she rubbed them together and the soil fell away and her hand was pale and warm.

"Dr. Woodrue thinks the connection is quantifiable," she said. "He's been designing an experiment. A way to measure the biochemical interface between a human body and plant chemical signaling." She said it carefully, the words chosen. "He thinks I might be producing compounds that aren't... typical."

Woodrue. Jason Woodrue. The Floronic Man. The man who was going to pump Pamela Isley full of toxins and burn away everything human about her because he wanted to see what was underneath.

"What kind of experiment?" he asked. His voice was level.

"Controlled exposure to plant hormones. Auxin analogs, custom-synthesized. He wants to see if my body metabolizes them differently than a standard subject." She looked at the tree. "It's a good experiment. The methodology is sound."

"Do you trust him?"

She frowned. "He's my academic mentor. He's publishing my research."

"That's not what I asked."

The frown deepened. Her mouth opened, closed. She looked away.

"He's brilliant," she said. "He understands the interface between plant and animal biology better than anyone alive."

"And do you trust him?"

She didn't answer. The wind moved through the park and the bare branches above them rattled. A leaf fell and landed on her shoulder, dry and brown, and she picked it off and held it in her palm and looked at it.

"I should get back to the lab," she said. "The grants review."

"I'll have a car sent."

"I have my car."

"Then I'll walk."

She looked at him. He was standing in a park full of dying trees with a woman whose skin ran warm and whose plants grew toward her hands and whose mentor was going to destroy her.

"Thank you," she said. "For looking at the data. Most people don't."

"I'll look at all of it. Send me the full chromium report."

"I will." She paused. Looked at the dead elm. "These trees are going to die. All of them. The contamination is in the aquifer now. Even if Gotham Chemical stopped dumping tomorrow, the damage is done. The roots are saturated."

"Can anything save them?"

She put her hand on the bark one more time. Closed her eyes. When she opened them she looked tired.

"Me. Maybe. I don't know yet."

She walked back to her car. He watched her go. Red hair against the brown park, lab coat over her shoulders, her stride fast and focused and slightly uneven because the ground was soft. The fern in her backseat was visible through the rear window. It was the greenest thing in the park.

He walked back to the city. The factories were visible on the skyline and the Wayne logos were visible on the factories and the dead trees were behind him and Pamela Isley's warm handprint was fading on the soil jar in his jacket pocket that he'd put there without thinking about it.

Tomorrow he'd pull the Woodrue file from the cave and find out how much time he had.

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