“I’m sorry I didn’t take you seriously—”

Gordon cut him some slack. Foley was a good cop. He had just taken for granted that the bad days were gone. Gordon had known better.

“Don’t apologize for believing the world is in better shape than it is,” the commissioner told him. “Just fight to make it true.”

Foley nodded, seeming to understand at last. He left to carry out Gordon’s orders. Blake moved to follow him, but Gordon called him back.

“Not you,” the commissioner said. “You’re telling me the Batman’s gone. So you chase up the Daggett leads, any way you can.”

They needed to do more than just find Bane. They had to find out what he was up to, before it was too late. Daggett’s name had been all over the excavations in the tunnels, and now he was dead. There had to be a connection. And somebody had to find it.

If not Batman, then maybe Blake.

Water dripped onto Bruce’s dry, cracked lips. An old man with shaggy white hair leaned over him, squeezing the liquid from a dirty rag. One cell over, separated from them by sturdy iron bars, a blind Middle Eastern man squatted against a rough stone wall. He appeared to be in his seventies. Milky cataracts clouded his eyes.

He muttered something in a tongue Bruce couldn’t place. An obscure dialect of Persian, perhaps, or Arabic.

“He asks if you would pay us to let you die,” White Hair translated. An Eastern European accent suggested that he had been born somewhere far beyond this hellish pit. A ragged wool vest hung over his scrawny frame. He was dressed like a peasant, but had an air of ravaged gentility. “I told him you have nothing.”

Bruce grimaced. He lay miserably atop the cot, from which he hadn’t stirred for who knew how long. Feverish and weak, he’d lost all track of time, drifting in and out of awareness. His head pounded, and the searing pain in his back was a constant companion, even in his sleep. Existence had become an endless ordeal he could never escape. He could not even clean himself.

“Do it for the pleasure,” he said bitterly. But the nameless European placed a stale piece of bread to Bruce’s lip. He shrugged apologetically.

“They pay me more than that to keep you alive.”

Chanting, coming from outside the cell, caught Bruce’s attention. Slowly, painfully, he rolled his head to see what was going on. Daylight, its presence just as tantalizing as Bane had promised, provided barely enough light to see.

A crowd of prisoners had gathered around a stocky, well-built inmate who could have had a career as a carnival strong man. He stood on one of the upper levels, just below the mammoth shaft that led to the surface.

Another prisoner, whose face was liberally covered in tattoos, handed the strong man a rope, which he tied around his brawny chest. More prisoners crowded the various terraces and stairways. They joined in the chanting, which sounded more dirge-like than encouraging.