Barbara was nervous.

  Ever since Batgirl left that day, Barbara had insisted on accompanying her father to work. Gordon didn’t like the idea at first, but eventually caved. Not because he thought it was safe—but because he understood there was no stopping her once she made up her mind.

  She wasn’t officially part of the GCPD—more like a volunteer in the communications room. No sary, no special treatment. Just helping out where she could.

  And honestly? If Gordon really wanted to, he could’ve handed her a badge and even fast-tracked her to the commissioner’s chair. No one would’ve objected. He had the reputation and the clout.

  But he never would. The police weren’t the Gordon family business—they were here to serve Gotham. And if he started handing out power like candy, how was he any different from the corrupt monsters he spent his life fighting?

  Barbara understood. She respected him all the more for it. That’s why, when she started coming in two weeks ago, she took the work seriously. Painstakingly so. She didn’t want a title. She wanted to help.

  And she could help. Barbara had a brain wired for tech—one of the sharpest in Gotham. The comms room was where she could shine.

  Soon, the others accepted her. Not because she was the commissioner’s daughter. Not because of what she’d been through. But because she was good—really good—and because she was kind.

  This version of Barbara had no idea that, in a hundred other universes, she was a full-blown superhero. That she’d once worn the cape as Batgirl. That, after the Joker shattered her spine, she had risen as Oracle, the heart of the Bat-family’s intelligence network.

  She’d created the Birds of Prey, been a key asset for the Suicide Squad, Supergirl’s best friend, a vital off-the-books member of the Justice League. She’d even been tech support for nearly every cape outside the speedsters’ nerd circle.

  Barbara Gordon: overworked and irrepceable.

  But on this Earth—Earth Minus-11—some cosmic will seemed to crush every heroic instinct that wasn’t from a certain purple-haired Amazon. Here, Barbara looked at bat ears and thought... kinda kinky.

  Right now though? She desperately wished she was a superhero. Anything but a hacker trapped in a wheelchair.

  It started about ten minutes ago. A squad of bck-cd mercs hit the precinct in a surprise assault. Barbara had spotted them early through the surveilnce cams and issued a warning, but the response was sluggish—worryingly so.

  The attackers were armed to the teeth. The first exchange ended in a bloodbath. The cameras went dark in seconds. From then on, all Barbara had were garbled radio reports from panicking officers.

  Her colleagues had locked her—and a handful of male staff—in the comms room. It was, along with the armory, one of the precinct’s most secure areas. They told her to try and contact the military or the Amazon Council. Someone. Anyone.

  But the enemy had come prepared. Every line to the outside world was severed. No network, no phone, no telegraph. If a carrier pigeon nded on her keyboard right now, she might just kiss it.

  As it stood, she was trapped. Deaf, dumb, and—goddammit—me.

  She kept trying. Over and over, searching for some hole in their signal jamming. But the silence outside, broken only by screams and gunfire, was starting to cw at her sanity.

  Then something changed.

  The yelling shifted from tactical shouts to pure shock.

  “Oh my god—she’s so fast!”

  “By Zeus himself—!”

  “Block him, block—!”

  “Help! It’s Dea—!”

  Then... silence.

  Total silence.

  Barbara froze. Her heart thumped against her ribs.

  What happened? Who’s still alive out there?

  Her mind raced for answers, but the tension was too thick. The sobbing from the other men in the room didn’t help. It was chaos in her brain, no focus, no crity.

  That’s when she heard it—whistling. A jaunty little tune paired with a low, deranged chuckle outside the door.

  Her blood ran cold.

  She’d heard that kind of ugh before. The Jester. That name alone made her skin crawl. Pain fred up her spine like a ghost of old trauma.

  She could still see it. Herself, lying there in agony, bleeding, helpless. The Joker’s voice echoing in her head.

  Then a second voice cut through. Calm, annoyed. Telling the whistler to tone down the explosives.

  The fog in Barbara’s mind cleared in an instant.

  She dove behind a desk, dragging her wheelchair with her, scanning the room for anything—anything—she could use as a weapon.

  Useless. Everyone here was deskbound: admin staff, a couple of forensic techs, one janitor. No one was armed. Closest thing to a weapon? A folding chair and her ptop.

  She clutched the computer to her chest.

  BOOM!

  The door exploded inward, smming into the wall with a metallic screech. The pressure wave bsted across the room.

  Barbara couldn’t hear a thing. Her ears rang like church bells. Her vision blurred. She y there dazed, blinking through the smoke, as two figures stepped into the haze.

  One of them scanned the room.

  “No Gordon,” she said smugly. “I win.”

  She slung her weapon from her back and moved toward the wall, eyes on the cowering men.

  Barbara shook her head, blinking stars out of her vision. She wasn’t about to give up. She was Jim Gordon’s daughter. She’d protect her people.

  “Don’t bully the guys!” she shouted hoarsely. “Come at me!”

  The woman stopped cold, like she’d just heard the most disgusting pickup line in history. She rubbed her arms as if trying to scrub off imaginary bugs.

  The men whimpered louder. One even fainted.

  Unlike Barbara, still reeling from the bst, they had seen her clearly. The bck-and-gold tactical armor. The custom gear. The chilling confidence.

  Deathstroke.

  A name whispered in every dark alley and backroom deal. The world’s most notorious mercenary. A living legend with a 100% kill rate.

  She didn’t frequent Gotham often—this city was just another Eastern seaboard cesspit, not a global hot zone—but when she did? Blood ran in the gutters.

  These admin cops had never been in the field. They only knew stories. But those stories said Deathstroke didn’t just kill the target—she wiped out the crew, the family, even the dog. No survivors. No mercy.

  If Cindy—this Earth’s Deathstroke—knew how Gotham whispered about her, she’d probably die ughing.

  Truth be told, she didn’t like killing extras. Too messy, too loud, too much cleanup. If she capped a mob boss, why off the underlings? One of them might step up and keep the business going. And if they did, guess who the client would hire to clean that up?

  Double payday.

  Call it harvesting. Reaping useful idiots like wheat. The more heirs, the more contracts.

  Cindy didn’t fear complications.

  Complications meant money.

  Cindy looked like she'd just stumbled across a gold mine. She gave Barbara a once-over, nodded in satisfaction, and smirked.

  "Looks like I won the bet. There's a 'Gordon' here after all."

  Su Ming was already annoyed by the pathetic sobbing of the men around him. He had never seen this many grown men bawling their eyes out in one pce, and frankly, it was revolting. His first instinct upon entering had been to knock them all out cold—maybe this time with enough force to keep them unconscious for a week or two.

  Then a woman’s voice stopped him cold: “Don’t bully the men. If you have a problem, take it out on me.”

  Every hair on his body stood on end.

  He turned his head slowly to find the source of that unsettling voice, and sure enough, it was a girl who had just spoken—probably the one those bck-suited thugs were after.

  Calling her a woman felt like a stretch. She looked about seventeen or eighteen—definitely younger than Cindy—and had this quiet, studious vibe to her. Thick-rimmed gsses perched on her nose, twin braids hung over her shoulders, and she wore a red sweater that was fraying at the cuffs over a painfully unfashionable pink-and-white pid shirt. The whole look screamed “socially oblivious bookworm.”

  Still, her skin was pale in a way that spoke of long hours indoors, and her features—underneath the ck of makeup and style—were actually quite pretty. She might’ve even turned heads if she put in a little effort.

  Then he noticed the wheelchair.

  Combine that with Cindy’s smug decration about winning the bet, and Su Ming immediately figured out who she was.

  “Barbara Gordon?”

  His tone was questioning, but the truth was he’d already confirmed it in his mind. It was hard not to recognize a character like Barbara, someone who popped up in nearly every Bat-reted dossier or intel file. She didn’t look exactly like her comic counterpart, but the vibe—the posture, the quiet fire—was unmistakable.

  “Who are you?” Barbara asked. There was the faintest hint of relief in her voice—Su Ming had, after all, stopped intimidating the sobbing cops—but her eyes still darted around nervously, like she wasn’t sure what came next.

  He gnced around. The room was still thick with smoke and debris from the earlier bst. This world’s Barbara seemed... a little more naive than he expected.

  “Well then,” he said dryly, “why don’t you clean your gsses and take a good look?”

  Barbara blinked, then reached up to wipe the soot off her lenses. She squinted at him.

  “!!!”

  Of course she recognized him.

  Being the daughter of Commissioner Gordon meant she’d heard plenty about Gotham’s most dangerous criminals. Some of them—Joker, Ra’s al Ghul, the Mad Hatter—were burned into her memory with enough fear to make her skin crawl. Her father had been very clear: if she ever saw any of them, she was to run, hide, and call the GCPD immediately.

  But topping that list, spoken in hushed, grim tones, was the name Deathstroke.

  Cindy had been making trips to Gotham for a while now. She always disappeared without a trace before the police could respond—leaving behind nothing but cooling corpses and crime scenes too contaminated with blood to recover any evidence. Batgirl had tried to stop her once and ended up knocked out cold. Total mismatch.

  Brie—this world’s Batgirl—had tried to pn a proper ambush the next time Cindy showed up. But Cindy’s tactics had changed again, and once more, she got away clean. No leads. No answers. Just frustration.

  And hovering over it all like a phantom… Deathstroke.

  If not for the Joker haunting her nightmares, Deathstroke would’ve had that spot locked down.

  Unbeatable. Untraceable. Fear incarnate. To Batgirl, Deathstroke wasn’t a person. She was a monster in the dark.

  Gordon had once expined it like this:

  “Deathstroke is a kind of crazy, too. Just a... calm kind. She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with killing. To her, people die—that’s just life. She just speeds things up. Thinks of herself as nature’s delivery system.”

  It was meant as a warning.

  But right now, remembering those words only made things worse.

  One Deathstroke was a nightmare.

  There were two.

  TWO.

  Barbara took off her gsses again, spped herself lightly on the cheek, wondering if she had a concussion. Maybe she was seeing double?

  But no matter how many times she blinked, both figures stayed put. Both cd in that same infamous armor. Both terrifyingly real.

  Her mind raced. Was this the truth? Was Deathstroke not a solo assassin but a pair? Or even a whole organization? One stayed behind to toy with the Bat-family while the other slipped away to finish the job?

  The pieces clicked together, and with them came a wave of pure dread. She’d discovered a truth she wasn’t supposed to know. Which meant…

  They were going to kill her.

  I haven’t even met my birth mother yet… I still have things I want to do…

  While Barbara spiraled into panic, Su Ming calmly pulled out a stun baton and silenced the room by knocking out the wailing cops one by one. Finally, some peace and quiet.

  "Which one of you is Deathstroke?" Barbara blurted out, clutching her ptop like it could somehow protect her. The two killers didn’t attack. They just… looked at her. Curious. Amused.

  She gnced toward the other officers, all slumped against the wall. No blood. Good sign. Still breathing.

  “I am. He’s not,” Cindy stepped forward quickly, ciming the title and casually sliding into Su Ming’s previous spot.

  Su Ming just shrugged. Her world, her rules. He was Deathstroke, but hey—if she wanted to take credit, let her. The truth didn’t need her permission.

  Barbara squared her shoulders, her face tight with resolve. “Why are you here? This is a police station. You don’t belong here.”

  Cindy raised an eyebrow, surprised. Gordon’s daughter’s got guts, she thought. No wonder she’d survived encounters with the Joker.

  “We were actually here to see your father,” Cindy said, tone almost conversational. “We need his help. But it looks like he’s not around?”

  “You’ll never get to him. Just kill me now,” Barbara snapped.

  Cindy rolled her eyes. “Rex. If I was going to kill you, you’d be dead already.”

  She wasn’t lying. As Gordon’s daughter, Barbara might be useful. But more importantly, Cindy had a new mission now—preventing the world from ending. Killing her wasn’t on the list.

  Su Ming stepped in, switching tactics. “You saw the ones in the hallway? Bck suits, earpieces? They’re not random thugs. They belong to a tight-knit syndicate. And they’re after you—and your dad.”

  Barbara’s brows drew together in arm.

  “We’re trying to stop them,” he continued. “They’ve got jammers on the cars outside, cutting off all signals. I’m going out to disable them. See if you can get in touch with your dad.”

  If the call went through, they could lie in wait. No way Gordon would abandon his daughter. And if the call didn’t go through—then maybe he was already captured. Either way, they’d have their answer.

  Simple. Effective.

  Barbara didn’t respond, just stared at him warily.

  Su Ming started toward the door, but Cindy stopped him.

  “I’ll go,” she said, casually cracking her knuckles. “You stay and keep our guest company. You’ve got that charming male communication style this world seems to respond to.”

  Su Ming sighed and watched her go.

  Now it was just him and the girl in the wheelchair. The silence stretched awkwardly. He didn’t really know what to say. He was a vilin, after all. And this was the police commissioner’s daughter. She probably hated his guts.

  Time ticked by.

  Then Cindy returned, humming a little tune, dripping water from her armor.

  “I blew up their jammer,” she said cheerfully. “Also fixed the building’s network on the way back. Fun fact—there’s a mole in your department, Babs. The signal was cut from inside the station.”

  She looked from Barbara to Su Ming.

  “So? Come to any agreements while I was gone?”

  What agreement? They’d basically just… sat in silence.

  Would that count as progress?