Quentin didn't look up from the tablet right away.
His thumb hovered over one of the highlighted addresses, tracing the delivery route again as if repetition alone might reveal a lie hiding between the numbers. Then he spoke, voice even, almost casual.
"How do you know they didn't move the materials after delivery?"
Marcy didn't hesitate. She'd been waiting for the question.
"Because some of what they're bringing in can't be moved quietly," she said, already pulling up another set of files. "Industrial-grade refrigeration units. Shielded containment crates. One of the chemical mixers weighs over half a ton once assembled."
She flicked to traffic overlays and satellite stills.
"And since I started tracking the drops, no vehicle larger than a van has left any of the sites. No flatbeds. No cargo trucks. Nothing that could handle that weight without drawing attention."
Quentin leaned back slightly, considering.
Scarecrow wasn't careless—but he wasn't omnipotent either. Fear thrived in controlled spaces. Labs. Confined environments. Places where escape routes were limited and variables could be managed.
Four locations.
Too many to be coincidence.
Too few to be comfort.
Quentin exhaled slowly, then made his decision.
"Bring me the floor plans for each building," he said. "If you can find the originals, even better. Renovations lie. Old blueprints don't."
He slid the tablet back toward her.
"I want exterior photographs. Roof access. Alley approaches. Sewer tie-ins. And post teams on every building."
Marcy nodded. "Already done. Eyes on all four."
Quentin's gaze sharpened.
"Double them up," he said immediately. "I want coverage from every possible angle. Roofs, adjacent structures, line-of-sight positions. If someone so much as opens a window, I want to know who, when, and why."
Marcy's fingers were already moving again, relaying instructions.
Quentin stood, the faintest hint of anticipation settling into his posture.
"Scarecrow likes control," he murmured. "Which means sooner or later…"
His eyes flicked back to the map.
"…he's going to be exactly where he thinks he's safest."
***
Nolan sat alone in the quiet of the penthouse, the city spread out beneath the windows like a field of cold stars. Contracts and financial reports lay open across the table in front of him, pen moving steadily as he worked through the last of the paperwork. It was mundane work—necessary, grounding.
The soft chime of an incoming email broke the rhythm.
He glanced at the screen.
From: Marcy Liu
Nolan opened it, his expression sharpening as the contents loaded. Floor plans—four sets. Two tagged clearly as original blueprints, scanned from municipal archives that had no business still existing. The other two were newer, reconstructed from permits and partial filings. Attached beneath them were dozens of photographs: rooftops, alleys, fire escapes, sewer access points, loading bays. Every possible angle, every blind spot she could find.
Efficient. Thorough.
He didn't reply yet.
Instead, Nolan rose and crossed the room to the printer. Pages began to slide out in rapid succession, the quiet whir of the machine filling the penthouse. When it finished, he gathered the stack and moved to the far wall where a large board waited—clean, blank, expectant.
One by one, he pinned the blueprints up.
Four columns. Four locations.
Photos followed, arranged around each set of plans: wide shots first, then closer angles, then details—doors, vents, cracked masonry, warped grates. Nolan stepped back, took it all in, then reached for a marker.
As the first line went onto the paper, the room no longer felt empty.
Quentin appeared near the window, arms crossed, eyes already scanning the layouts like a general surveying a battlefield. Kieran lingered closer, posture relaxed but gaze intent, while Vey crouched near the board itself, eyes darting between the originals and the reconstructed plans.
Nolan began marking ingress points—service entrances, rooftops with weak sightlines, maintenance corridors that hadn't been updated in decades. Red for entry. Blue for exits. Arrows for movement. Circles for choke points.
"These two," Vey said suddenly, tapping the blueprints with the originals. "They don't match the newer scans. There's more space here."
Nolan paused, followed Vey's finger.
He saw it immediately.
Dead zones. Unaccounted voids between walls. Stairwells that ended too early. Rooms that existed on paper once and then… vanished.
"Yeah," Nolan murmured, marking the areas with a slow, deliberate X. "Hidden rooms aren't rare in Gotham."
He added notes beside them—false walls, legacy construction, off-book expansions. His pen moved faster now, confidence growing with each line.
Quentin leaned in. "If Scarecrow picked a place to settle into, he'd want isolation without feeling trapped. Control over access. Control over fear."
"And familiarity," Kieran added quietly. "Somewhere he can shape the environment."
Nolan nodded, already circling likely lab spaces, tracing potential escape routes through sublevels and forgotten tunnels. He compared photos to plans, measuring shadows, angles, distances between buildings. Every mark on the board brought the picture into sharper focus.
Four locations.
Nolan finally took a step back, the marker hanging loose in his fingers as he examined the wall in front of him. The board was a mess of ink and paper now—arrows overlapping, notes crammed into margins, photographs half-obscured by red and blue lines tracing imagined movement. To anyone else it would have looked frantic.
To him, it was clarity.
He lifted the marker again and, without hesitation, drew a heavy X through the first location with original blueprints. Then another through the second. The sound of the marker against the board was sharp in the quiet room.
"We can almost certainly mark these out," Nolan said, voice steady, analytical. "Scarecrow—or whoever's backing him—wouldn't choose a site where the hidden spaces are already documented. Too many known variables."
Quentin's eyes narrowed slightly. "Unless they want us to think that."
Nolan nodded, already anticipating the objection. "Exactly. It could be a fake. A misdirection. So we still hit them—fast, clean, nothing loud. No assumptions."
He turned his attention to the remaining two locations, the ones with reconstructed plans and conspicuous gaps where originals should have been. Nolan didn't mark them out. Instead, he underlined them twice.
"These two are different," he continued. "The originals are gone. Not misplaced—gone. That usually means someone didn't want a permanent record."
Vey leaned closer, studying the negative spaces Nolan had circled earlier. "Which means the building doesn't end where the paper says it does."
"Exactly," Nolan replied. "There could be hidden rooms, sublevels, sealed corridors—spaces that don't exist unless you know they're there. And if I were Scarecrow, that's where I'd go."
Kieran exhaled slowly, eyes flicking between the photos and the plans. "Hidden rooms mean control. Control over entrances, over exits… over what people see."
Nolan capped the marker and crossed his arms, gaze fixed on the board. "And control is what this is really about. Fear needs a stage. These places give him one."
The room fell quiet again, the weight of the decision settling in.
Four locations would be hit.
But Nolan already knew which two mattered most.
***
The room was quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that came from abandonment or neglect, but the deliberate stillness of wealth—thick walls, soundproofing hidden behind tasteful paneling, floors that absorbed footsteps instead of echoing them. Soft lighting washed over polished wood and brushed steel, warm and controlled. If someone didn't know what they were looking at, they might mistake the space for a private research wing or a high-end medical suite.
Jonathan Crane preferred it this way.
The lab was immaculate. Glassware arranged with obsessive symmetry. Stainless tables wiped clean between every step. The ventilation system was invisible, perfectly integrated, humming so softly it barely registered. Even the smell—sharp and chemical—was muted, filtered until it lingered only as a suggestion.
Crane adjusted a valve and watched the numbers stabilize on the monitor. Satisfied, he nodded to himself.
"Good," he said quietly.
Along one wall, canisters sat in neat rows. Identical. Labeled. Finished. Not trial batches, not rushed compounds—this was refined fear gas, consistent and reliable. He lifted one, turning it in his hands like a wine connoisseur inspecting a bottle.
"They think they stopped me," he said, more amused than angry. "That I ran."
He set the canister down and moved to another table where a dispersal device lay assembled, its design elegant in a way only someone like Crane would appreciate. He checked the seals, pressed a switch, watched a small diagnostic light turn green.
"Adaptation isn't failure," he continued, almost conversationally. "It's intelligence."
His thoughts drifted, inevitably, to Nolan. To Kieran Everleigh. To the orphanage, the doors closing just in time, the city watching him play savior while chaos screamed outside.
Crane exhaled slowly.
"You're calm under pressure," he said aloud. "I'll give you that. You think that means you're immune."
A faint smile tugged at his lips.
"It just means I haven't applied enough."
He walked to the window at the far end of the room. Heavy curtains framed it, but beyond them Gotham's lights glimmered distantly, unaware. Crane rested a hand on the glass, relaxed, patient.
"I'm ready," he said simply.
Behind him, the lab remained pristine and silent, fear packaged and waiting—no longer an experiment, but a plan.
And this time, Jonathan Crane had all the time, money, and support he needed to finish what he started.
__
A/N: I was fully planning to do the raids in this chapter but I got too into planning the attacks. Lmao next chapter close to 3k words I promise!