The cavernous Batcave echoed with the sounds of Vicki's loud excmations as she continued her performance in front of the camera, her voice bubbling with excitement. She had already decided to make today her lucky number, given how much she'd managed to survive—escaping the grasp of Deathstroke and discovering a dark underbelly to the city she’d never even imagined. The news she had gathered today was enough to make up for a whole year’s worth of work. Her mood was soaring, and her resolve to pursue a career in journalism was stronger than ever.

  But on the other side of the room, Barbara was far from as thrilled.

  She had once thought that Batgirl was a symbol of hope for Gotham—a hero standing tall against the shadows of the city. But now, seeing Batgirl up close, the reality was far darker than she'd ever expected.

  Batgirl wasn’t just some city protector—she was a woman trapped in a cage of her own making, suspicious of everyone, driven by a twisted sense of control. Barbara could see it all now in the cold steel of the Batcave, and it was shattering her idealized image of the hero she once admired. The technological surveilnce, the way every citizen was watched, it felt like an invasion of privacy on an unfathomable scale. It left Barbara feeling hollow, as if the very idea of a hero had been torn to pieces.

  Vicki noticed Barbara’s distant gaze, the distraction clear as day. The team was still waiting for her to deliver results, so she waved her hand in front of Barbara’s face.

  “I swear, if you’re going to have a moment of teenage angst, can we at least do it ter?” Vicki teased. “Shouldn’t we be looking up that license pte? Gordon’s still waiting for backup.”

  “Huh? Oh—right.” Barbara snapped back to reality, fingers dancing over the keyboard as she keyed in the license pte etched on Gordon's gsses.

  Batgirl’s dark secrets were one thing, but right now, it was time to focus on the task at hand. She couldn’t let herself get lost in the fog of disappointment. She was too deep into this now.

  The system came to life almost instantly. It wasn’t just the Bat’s surveilnce tech that was impressive—this was top-tier stuff, and Barbara had to admit, it was terrifyingly effective.

  “Got it,” she murmured as the vehicle’s registration details flickered onto the screen.

  The name? Probably fake. But the vehicle’s movements today were what mattered. And there it was, marked clearly on the map.

  If they had nothing on the car from earlier today, the system would still dig up records. Where it had stopped, where it had refueled, the pces it frequently visited. Once it had those, the system could narrow it down to a manageable search radius. Mercenaries? They’d find the faintest trace.

  No one could escape the reach of so many hidden eyes. Every step left a footprint.

  Barbara’s eyes narrowed as she scrolled through footage, cross-checking everything. The screen split into dozens of smaller images, each one pying at a frenzied pace as the program sifted through data.

  The worst-case scenario that Su Ming had anticipated didn’t happen. In fact, the system quickly narrowed down the car’s movement, pinpointing its destination.

  “No, it can’t be there...” Su Ming muttered under his breath, shaking his head. Of all the pces in Gotham, why did it have to be there?

  “What’s wrong?” Barbara asked, confused. “What’s so bad about this pce?”

  She pulled up the details on the location. "Indian Hill. A junkyard located near the East River docks in Gotham."

  The name, Barbara noted, was a remnant from the city’s history—back when Gotham had been a different kind of pce, before the urban sprawl. It was once a Native American reserve, a fact that had been forgotten as the city expanded and eventually dispced the community. The hills, where ancestors had been buried, were sold off, the buyers vanished into the annals of history, and the nd became a junkyard.

  Back in the day, the site had been a pce where scrap metal piled up into mountains—broken vehicles crushed into cubes, ready for recycling. And now? Now, it was home to the homeless, to the forgotten. People who lived in the husks of old cars, scraping by in a wastend of discarded junk.

  No one cared about that pce. Even the criminal underworld had long since written it off—too poor, too desote. It was a pce where even the thieves didn’t bother to risk their time.

  But Su Ming’s reaction was far different. Barbara couldn't understand it. He’d been calm when talking about Arkham or Bckgate. But now, a junkyard? Something didn’t add up.

  “It’s just a junkyard,” Cindy added, voice heavy with confusion. “You’re acting like it’s a death trap.”

  Su Ming rubbed his fingers along the armored ptes of his elbow, his mind racing as he processed the data. He wasn’t from Gotham. He knew better than to dismiss Indian Hill as just a wastend.

  In the main DC universe, that pce was more than it seemed. It was a secret research facility, set up by the U.S. government after World War II. And the project? Bioweapons. Experiments gone wrong, abandoned, and buried in secrecy. But that was in his world.

  Here in Gotham, he suspected the same. With the Amazonian Council involved, who knew what twisted projects were lurking beneath the surface?

  Cyborgs, mutants, viruses, end-of-world weapons. There was no telling what horrors had been bred there.

  Gotham’s 8 million residents had no idea that they were living on the edge of a nightmare.

  Cindy’s face tightened as she realized the depth of the problem. “This isn’t good. Not good at all.”

  Su Ming sighed, trying to steer the conversation back to something manageable. “On the bright side, the facility’s been shut down since the '90s. If something escaped, Falcone’s the first one who’ll encounter it. And as of now, he’s still breathing.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s something.” Cindy took a swig from her bottle, her lips curling into a dry smile. “But things just got a whole lot more complicated.”

  Barbara couldn’t help but notice the grim weight that had fallen over them all. This wasn’t just another crime to solve. This was something much darker, something they’d have to face head-on. Gotham's darkest secrets were coming to the surface—and they weren’t ready for it.