Free Batman Arkham Knight by Marv Wolfman Page A

city. I mean, he just said it again. He still feels as if any harm that comes to me does so because he didn’t do enough.”
    Batman looked away, and then glanced back at Barbara.
    “We’ll worry about him after we stop Scarecrow,” he said before turning again and leaving. The door slid shut behind him.
    * * *
    Barbara sat alone in the Clock Tower, replaying all the lies she’d had to tell her father since long before she became Oracle. He never learned that she had been Batgirl, who—more often than not—fought on the street alongside both Batman and his partner, Robin.
    Gordon never quite realized that by crippling her, the Joker wasn’t just sending a message to Gotham City’s police commissioner that nobody was safe. He was sending Batman the same message, too. To compound that message, he’d killed Jason Todd, the young man who had donned the Robin uniform after Dick Grayson put it aside to become Nightwing.
    Though she was paralyzed by the Joker’s bullet, Barbara’s need to seek out justice intensified rather than diminished. She created her Oracle guise as a way of protecting the city she still loved, and she wasn’t going to give it up now just because some Joker wannabe was out to make a name for himself. Surrender to one lunatic gave an unfettered license to them all.
    Yet while she had started down this path to promote justice and truth, instead she’d found herself lying to the one man she loved the most, and who unconditionally loved her in return. James Gordon was more than her father—he was unquestionably the best man she knew, and that included Bruce Wayne.
    James Gordon never hid behind a mask. Her father never shirked the public eye, and even his home address was listed in the city’s public records. He was too good a man to be treated like this, but Barbara knew no other way around it.
    She had long believed she needed to keep secrets from him, in order to protect him. But now, as the city was facing what might prove to be its gravest threat, she was beginning to wonder about the wisdom of her decision. If the worst-case scenario unfolded, if Scarecrow succeeded in creating an entire city paralyzed by fear, she didn’t want to die or see him die with any secrets remaining between them.
    But how to tell him the truth after so many years of lying?

10
    Back in the nineties and right through to the zeroes, Panessa Studios had been a thriving television and commercial advertising facility employing nearly 150 entertainment
professionals
.
    By 2004, local crime bosses began levying “protection taxes” on Panessa, and Gotham City’s general fortunes started their deep decline south. Studios moved their non-Los Angeles “inner-city” film shoots to New York, Toronto, Detroit, New Orleans, and Vancouver, leaving Panessa bankrupt and deserted.
    Wayne Enterprises, using the DBA “PanCo,” quietly purchased the studio and its nine acres of warehouses, soundstages, and back lots. PanCo made a small business out of renting it to the very occasional commercial unit that didn’t have the finances to go anywhere safer. Yet Wayne’s objective for the land wasn’t to restart it as a film studio, but to use it for far more private purposes.
    While some of the land and buildings still were open for use, the back two acres and former soundstages 35, 36, and 37 were officially closed. “Condemned” signs indicated mold and asbestos complications. Even the local gangbangers didn’t try to break in—not that they could have made it past Lucius Fox’s security system before the police showed up to arrest them.
    Theoretically, if they had tried and managed to get past the system, and if somehow they got to the soundstage, they still wouldn’t realize that the facility’s inside was significantly smaller than its exterior. Hidden behind false panels, Fox had constructed a series of soundproofed, self-sustaining holding cells that, when required, would be used to contain and interrogate the worst