Chapter 57: blackgate
The first twenty-four hours in Blackgate were a masterclass in erosion.
It wasn’t the big dramatic horrors he’d imagined—no shankings in the shower on day one, no territorial lord summoning him for an audience. It was a slow, grinding dissolution of self, carried out by a thousand petty cruelties. The orange uniform chafed, smelling of industrial bleach and the sweat of a hundred desperate men before him. The eyes of the guards were flat, seeing only a number; the eyes of the other inmates were calculating, assessing him as either threat, resource, or prey.
His cell was a concrete sarcophagus. A bunk bolted to the wall, a stainless steel toilet with no seat, a small sink that coughed rusty water. The ceiling light hummed incessantly, a sound that drilled into the base of his skull. He could still feel the ghost of Roman’s hands on his hips, the luxurious ache of the penthouse floor, the taste of triumph. Here, the only taste was stale air and despair.
He moved through the routines like an automaton. Head down, eyes ahead, but not submissive. Just present. He catalogued the landscape. The Aryan Brotherhood types congregating near the weight pile, their tattoos a manifesto of hate. The Maroni remnants, who eyed him with a particular simmering resentment—the botched dock deal and the dead buyers were fresh news. Then there were the others, the ones who didn’t fit the gang archetypes. The quiet ones with strange scars, or eyes that glinted with a light that wasn’t quite sane. Blackgate, he remembered, housed the “manageable” metas. The ones without world-ending power, but enough to make them lethally unconventional.
He kept his wit sheathed, a hidden blade. During his first meal in the cavernous, echoing mess hall, a mountain of a man with a spiderweb tattoo on his elbow bumped his tray, sending a slop of lukewarm mashed potatoes onto the floor.
“Watch it, little girl,” the man rumbled, his breath smelling of processed meat.
A dozen eyes swung their way. A test. Simple, juvenile, but effective.
Reese looked slowly from the spilled food to the man’s face. He let the silence stretch, then shrugged, a small, painful gesture from his bruised ribs. “You gonna eat that off the floor or can I get back in line? They’re all out of seconds on dignity.”
A few snickers from nearby tables. The mountain man’s face darkened, but the moment’s tension had been punctured, not escalated. He grunted and turned away. A small victory, but it cost him. It painted a target. He wasn’t a cringer. He had spine. In here, spine was something people wanted to break.
The real trouble found him in the dank humidity of the laundry detail later that afternoon. Steam clung to everything, wrapping metal machines and concrete pillars in a sweating veil. He was feeding sheets into an industrial ironer, the mindless monotony almost a relief. The noise was deafening, a roar of machinery that masked softer sounds.
He felt the presence behind him a second too late.
A hand, shockingly strong, clamped over his mouth and nose, crushing his lips against his teeth. Another arm hooked around his throat in a brutal chokehold, dragging him backward into a narrow alley between two towering, vibrating dryers. The steam became a smothering blanket.
“Maroni sends his regards,” a voice hissed in his ear. It was laced with a strange, harmonic resonance, like two people speaking at once.
Reese drove an elbow back. It connected with a solid gut, but the grip didn’t loosen. He kicked, his heel connecting with a shin. Another man materialized from the steam in front of him—pale, hairless, his pupils wide and black as oil spills. He smiled, showing sharp, crystalline teeth.
“Hear you’re a talker,” the second man said, his voice a dry rustle. “Let’s see how you talk with no teeth.”
The one holding him wrenched his head to the side, exposing his throat. Reese bucked and thrashed, but the strength was immense, meta-human. The pale man drew a fist back. It wasn’t a normal fist. The skin seemed to harden, to glint like quartz in the sickly yellow light.
Reese did the only thing he could. He stopped resisting the pull on his head and instead threw his weight forward, then slammed it back with all his might. The back of his skull connected with the face behind him. There was a wet crunch. The arm around his throat spasmed. He tore free, gasping, spinning to face them.
He saw his assailants clearly now. Twins, maybe, but twisted by something chemical or supernatural. One clutched a bleeding, broken nose, his resonant voice now gurgling. The other’s crystalline fist finished its transformation, his entire hand becoming a jagged, foot-long shard of translucent rock.
“Okay,” Reese panted, dropping into a fighting stance, his body screaming in protest. “New plan. You keep the teeth, I keep my witty repartee. Everyone wins.”
The one with the shard-hand lunged. Reese sidestepped, the blade of rock whistling past his ribs and scoring a deep groove in the steel dryer. He jabbed twice at the man’s kidney, hard punches that felt like hitting a bag of gravel. The meta grunted, swung again. This time, Reese wasn’t fast enough. The shard didn’t stab; it swept sideways, a brutal club.
It connected with his left forearm.
The sound was a nauseating, wet snap, distinct even over the machinery. White-hot agony exploded, racing up his nerve endings to his brain. He stumbled back, his arm hanging at a useless, sickening angle. The bone wasn’t just broken; it was shattered, a compound fracture threatening to pierce the skin.
He didn’t scream. A choked gasp escaped him. He cradled the ruined arm against his stomach, vision swimming.
The meta with the broken nose recovered, his eyes blazing with pain and fury. “Hold him,” he snarled, his dual-voice ragged.
The shard-hand grabbed the front of Reese’s jumpsuit and slammed him against the hot metal of the dryer. The smell of scorched fabric filled his nostrils. The broken-nosed twin stepped close, his own hands now shimmering, the knuckles taking on the same sharp, rocky quality.
“This is for Donny,” he whispered.
The beating was systematic, professional, and utterly merciless. They avoided his head, aiming for the body. His ribs, already bruised, cracked under the onslaught. A crystalline fist drove into his solar plexus, emptying his lungs for a full minute, leaving him wheezing and purple-faced. A kick to the back of his knee folded his leg. He slid down the dryer, leaving a smudge of blood and sweat.
He couldn’t speak, couldn’t even muster a quip. Each breath was a knife-twist. He focused on the face of the one hitting him, memorizing the rage in those strange eyes. The world narrowed to the rhythm of pain.
Finally, a distant whistle echoed—the shift change. The metas stopped. The shard-hand reverted to a normal, bloodied fist. They looked down at him, a broken pile in the grime and steam.
“Welcome to Blackgate, girlie,” the broken-nosed one said, spitting a glob of blood onto the floor beside Reese’s head.
They melted back into the steam.
He lay there for what felt like hours, listening to the ironer roar. Every pulse was a hammer blow on his broken arm. He tried to push himself up with his good arm, failed, tried again. He managed to get to his knees, then, using the dryer for support, to his feet. He stood swaying, a puppet with cut strings. He looked at his left arm. The forearm was visibly deformed, swelling fast, the skin tight and purple.
He started walking, one shuffling step at a time, out of the laundry and into the brighter light of the corridor. Guards saw him. Their expressions didn’t change. One jerked his head. “Infirmary’s that way. Move.”
The walk was a marathon through a tunnel of pain. Inmates watched him pass, their faces blank or amused. No one offered help. He finally shouldered through a heavy door into a stark, antiseptic-smelling room with three cots.
The nurse, a tired-looking man with a permanent frown, glanced up from a clipboard. “Fight?”
“Disagreement over fabric softener,” Reese croaked, his voice barely audible. “I’m a snuggly sheets purist. They were bounce sheet guys. Things got heated.”
The nurse didn’t smile. He helped Reese onto a cot, cutting away the sleeve of the jumpsuit. His professional detachment faltered for a second at the sight of the arm. “Christ. Meta work?”
“Just a passionate debate.”
They gave him a shot for the pain, something that made the world soften at the edges but didn’t touch the deep, throbbing core of agony. They reset the bones, a process that made him black out for a few seconds, his body arching off the cot in a silent scream. They casted it, put stitches in a gash on his back from the shard, taped his ribs. He was a patchwork of injury.
He lay on the thin infirmary cot, staring at the water-stained ceiling tiles. The drug haze was there, but beneath it, a cold, clear thought emerged. He was weak here. Vulnerable. All the sharpness of his mind, all the loyalty he’d sold to Roman, meant nothing. He was meat in a cage. The fear was a quiet, chilling vibration in his chest, worse than any pain.
He closed his eyes. He thought of Roman’s hand on his stomach, the words my beautiful, vicious liar. A lie that couldn’t survive this place. The snark was a reflex, a shell. Inside, he was just scared. And he hated being scared almost as much as he hated being weak.
Across the river, in the gutted heart of Gotham, the news found Roman Sionis not as a shock, but as an insult.
It was delivered by a nervous underling in the echoing vastness of the clocktower’s main chamber. Roman stood before the frozen clock face, the perpetual 11:11 casting long, distorted shadows from the single work light he’d erected. Blueprints and surveillance photos were taped over the cracked numerals—plans for banks, for courthouses, for the very foundations of the city’s power structure.
“Sir,” the man said, his voice echoing. “The… the police blotter from last night. The Dixon Docks bust. They… they caught Reese.”
Roman went very still. He didn’t turn. “Caught.”
“Yes, sir. Processed and remanded to Blackgate this morning. High-risk holding, no bail.”
The silence that followed was immense, thick enough to choke on. Roman slowly turned. His face was a mask of composed marble, but his eyes were kilns, burning with a cold, refining fire.
“Blackgate,” he repeated. The word was a curse.
“The word inside is… he’s not talking,” the underling rushed to add. “He played dumb. Gave them nothing.”
“Of course he didn’t talk,” Roman said, his voice soft, almost conversational. “He’s mine.” He walked toward the man, his steps precise on the dusty floor. “But they took him. They put their hands on him. They caged him.” Each statement was a escalation of the blasphemy. “He was bruised when he left me. I allowed those bruises. They were marks of service. Of pleasure.” He was inches from the underling now, who trembled. “Now he is in a cage with animals who will leave different marks. Marks of contempt.”
He looked past the shaking man, out through the broken clock face at the spires of the city. His city.
“This is a message,” Roman said, the softness evaporating, replaced by a razor-edged fury. “From the Bat. From the gutless politicians hiding behind badges. They think they can take my tools. My possessions. They think a cage diminishes what belongs to me.” He spun back, his coat flaring. “It only proves they understand nothing.”
He stalked to the table where his plans lay. He swept them aside with a violent crash, sending paper fluttering like scared birds. He wanted clarity.
“Get me Warden Sharp’s schedule. His routines, his vices, his family addresses. Get me the schematics for Blackgate’s intake, its infirmary, its garbage disposal. Everything.”
The underling nodded frantically. “Yes, sir. Are we… are we extracting him?”
Roman’s smile was a thin, cruel slit. “Extracting him implies a retreat. A recognition of their authority over him.” He picked up a single blueprint—the clocktower’s own structural plans. “No. We are not extracting. We are repossessing.”
He leaned over the table, his fingers tracing the lines of the prison’s outer wall.
“And we are not just taking Reese back,” he whispered, the promise coiling in the air like smoke. “We are going to burn their cage down around their ears. We will show them what happens when you touch what’s mine. We will make Blackgate a monument to their failure.”
The ambition in his eyes had found a new, ferocious target. It wasn’t just about the city anymore. It was about a principle. It was about making an example so terrifying, so complete, that no one would ever dare lift a finger against his property again.
The ruin of the clocktower hummed around him, agreeing. The frozen hands on the clock seemed, for a moment, to tremble with the force of his will.
The frozen hands on the clock seemed, for a moment, to tremble with the force of his will.
Then he moved, a burst of controlled motion in the stagnant air. “Contact the chemist,” Roman said, his voice cutting through the dust motes dancing in the light. “The one who talks to plants. And the twins from the foundry district, the ones who melt steel.” He didn’t wait for acknowledgment, already visualizing the geometry of chaos. “This isn’t a snatch-and-grab. This is a systemic shock. We blow the exterior walls at the east cell block and the north yard simultaneously. Their response fragments.”
His underling, a wiry man named Jelks, swallowed. “The meta-wing is on the east side, sir. If those doors fail…”
“Precisely.” Roman’s smile was a cold slice. “We are not jailbreakers. We are gardeners. We are planting anarchy inside their own fences and watering it with panic. When the GCPD and the Bat are scrambling to herd powered inmates back into a compromised facility, our retrieval becomes a footnote.” He traced a line on a fresh schematic. “Our team is small. Five, including me. Precision at the perimeter to create the rupture, then a needle-thread to the infirmary. That’s where they’ll keep him.”
“And after we have him?” Jelks asked, daring to hope for a clean exit.
Roman’s eyes held a distant, glorious ruin. “After, we watch the city burn a little. A gift, for their audacity.”
Back in the concrete bowel of Blackgate, survival became a calculus of pain management and strategic visibility. The infirmary released him after one night. The cast on his arm was a white flag he refused to wave. He moved through the yard the next day, a graveyard of concrete and slumped men under a forever-gray sky, trying to project a durability he no longer felt.
It didn’t work. The meta twins found him by the rusted basketball hoop. They didn’t speak this time. The one with the crystal fist had evolved; his entire forearm was a jagged, serrated blade. The other’s voice was a sonic weapon, a focused shriek that made the fillings in Reese’s teeth ache and his vision blur.
He tried to run. A sonic pulse hit the back of his knee like a baseball bat. He went down, the concrete scraping skin from his palms. The bladed meta swung low. The crack of his tibia was a dry, sickening report he felt more than heard. Agony, bright and absolute, swamped every other sense.
They moved in close for the rest. Quick, efficient stabs with a sharpened toothbrush handle, not meant to kill but to cripple, to degrade. One in the meat of his thigh, another glancing off his ribs, a third buried deep in the soft tissue of his side. The pain layered, each new injury a fresh chorus screaming over the last. He curled around his broken leg, a silent, shuddering oval.
Guards pulled them off eventually. Whistles, shouts. He was cargo again, dragged back to infirmary. More stitches. A heavier cast. A shot of something that made the world vague and cottony.
He woke to the relentless hum of the light. His body was a map of failure. The deep stab in his side throbbed with a heat that promised infection. His broken leg was a lead weight. Trying to seem like he wasn’t struggling was a joke now. He was the struggle, a collection of broken parts in a stolen orange skin.
They put him on a bottom bunk in a different cell block, one for “vulnerable” inmates. The air smelled of piss and weak disinfectant. He knew what that designation meant. It was a buffet notice for every predator on the block. He couldn’t fight. He could barely stand.
The mess hall the next day was his trial. The lineup was a gauntlet. Shoulders checked him. His tray was knocked from his trembling hands twice before he even got the slop. He stood on one foot, leaning against the wall, scanning the sea of hostile faces for any patch of neutral ground.
He saw it in the far corner, a space of eerie quiet. The table was occupied by a single man, or something that had once been a man. He was massive, his back broad and hunched under his uniform, skin thickened and textured with greenish, scaly patches. His hands were large enough to palm Reese’s head. Killer Croc. Waylon Jones. The inmates gave his table a wide berth, a moat of empty floor.
Reese made a decision. It wasn’t about courage. It was pure animal calculus. A bigger predator. He grabbed a new tray, ignored the cook’s scoff, and hobbled across the hall. The murmuring around him dipped, then surged with low, incredulous laughter. He felt every eye. Each hop sent jolts of fire up from his leg.
He reached the empty moat. Stopped. Croc didn’t look up. He was methodically eating something that looked like beef stew, bringing the tray to his mouth to shovel it in.
“Mind if I sit?” Reese’s voice was raspy from disuse and pain.
Croc’s chewing slowed. He lifted his head. His eyes were a disturbingly human yellow, peering from a heavy, ridged brow. They held a deep, weary intelligence that the cartoons and tabloids never mentioned. He looked Reese up and down: the casts, the bruises, the sheen of sweat from the effort of standing.
“You’re gonna fall over,” Croc said, his voice a low rumble like stones grinding in a deep cave.
“Probably,” Reese admitted, his balance wavering. “But I’d rather fall here than over there where they’ll steal my pudding cup.”
A snort, or maybe a growl, came from Croc. He gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod toward the bench opposite him.
Reese practically collapsed onto it, biting back a cry as he maneuvered his broken leg. He focused on eating, the food tasteless paste. The ambient noise of the hall resumed, but the curious, predatory stares from the other tables had shifted. They watched, but no one approached. The moat held.
This happened for three meals. Reese would hobble over, nod, sit, eat in silence. Croc would ignore him, mostly. On the fourth day, as Reese was struggling to cut a rubbery sausage with one hand, the rumbling voice crossed the table.
“Why here?”
Reese didn’t look up. “Your table’s cleaner. Better view of the door. Superior company.”
Croc was silent for a long time. “They sent you to get something from me? A story? A scaly freak show for some gutter press on the outside?”
Finally, Reese met those yellow eyes. There was no pity in his own gaze, just a frank, exhausted assessment. “No. They sent me in here to die slow and pathetic in a corner. I’m not a fan of the plan.” He gestured vaguely with his plastic spork between the two of them. “I figure it’s like crocodiles.”
Croc’s heavy brow furrowed. “What’s that?”
“You see a bunch of crocs basking on a bank, right?” Reese said, pushing his tray aside. “You don’t see them fighting each other for the sunny spots. Not unless they’re starving or stupid. They just… exist. Share the space. Conserve energy. They understand the real enemy isn’t the other croc. It’s the drought. The poachers. The things bigger than the river.”
He let that hang in the greasy air. “I’m not asking for protection. I’ve got nothing to trade for it. I’m just trying to conserve energy. This spot seems efficient.”
Waylon Jones stared at him, his massive, scarred hands resting on the table. The analogy was ridiculous, yet it wasn’t. It acknowledged a shared, fundamental truth of captivity. It wasn’t flattery. It was recognition.
“Hn,” Croc grunted. He went back to his food. “Your leg’s infected. Smells like it.”
Reese nodded, a spike of cold fear cutting through the constant pain. He’d known. “Yeah. Probably.”
“They won’t give you the good antibiotics unless you’re septic. Rules.” Croc said it without malice, just a statement of fact, like the weather.
“Rules,” Reese echoed, the word tasting bitter.
They lapsed back into silence. But it was different now. It wasn’t empty. It was, however tenuously, shared. For the remainder of the meal, no one came near. No one threw a piece of bread or a muttered threat. It was a temporary, fragile ceasefire, bounded by the invisible lines of the moat.
It wasn’t protection. In the showers later, two members of the Brotherhood caught him, holding him up under the scalding water while a third drove a fist into his gut, over and over, until he vomited bile and water. His side wound tore open, staining the water pink before it swirled down the drain. They didn’t break anything new. They didn’t have to. They were just reminding him of the hierarchy, of his place at the bottom of it, a place not even proximity to a monster could change.
He dragged himself back to his bunk, shivering, his body a symphony of wrong notes. But he knew, come next meal, the quiet corner would be there. It was a small, specific peace. A place to eat uninterrupted, to gather the strength to endure the next beating. It was the only plan he had left.
Meanwhile, in a soundproofed warehouse near the Gotham docks, Roman’s plan solidified into something beautiful and terrible. He stood before a large, makeshift tactical board. Photos of the five-person team were pinned: the plant-chemist, a nervous-looking woman with dirt under her nails; the foundry twins, hulking and silent; Jelks; Roman himself. Overlaid on a detailed blueprint of Blackgate were two bright red X’s.
“The charges here, and here,” Roman said, tapping the east wall and the northern perimeter. “The twins will handle placement. Their thermal coating will bypass standard scans.” He turned to the chemist. “Your role is suppression. When the alarms sound, the guard towers will focus here. You seed the air with your pollen cloud. I want them weeping, blinded, useless.”
He finally pointed to a smaller room deep inside, marked ‘Infirmary B’. “This is the objective. Jelks and I go in during the initial chaos. The meta-wing breach will be the main event. By the time they realize a secondary, surgical objective was ever a possibility, we will be gone.”
“Extraction route?” Jelks asked, studying the lines.
“We egress the same way we ingress. Through the hole we make. The city will be on fire by then, metaphorically and otherwise.” Roman’s gaze was fever-bright. “We are not asking for our property back. We are demonstrating that their locks are made of paper, and that their order is a thin veneer over the chaos I allow them to pretend to control.”
He looked at each of them. “We move in seventy-two hours. The moon will be new. The dark will be absolute.”
Outside, the Gotham night pressed against the warehouse walls, heavy and waiting. Inside, the blueprint of a prison break looked less like a theft and more like a declaration of war. Across the river, in his sterile bunk, Reese drifted into a feverish sleep, the heat in his side burning brighter, the fragile meal-time peace his only tether to a world that hadn’t yet completely finished with him.