Turn 5 of 10

Head straight to the Morley Building and check on the apartment

The elevator drops you eighteen floors in a stomach-lurching rush that has nothing to do with your new powers and everything to do with deferred maintenance. By the time you hit street level, you've shoved the envelope into your jacket and you're walking with the particular stride of someone trying to look like they belong in a costume they haven't seen yet.

The Morley Building rises from the industrial flats like a promise someone forgot to keep—twelve stories of converted warehouse with windows that don't match and a lobby that smells like radiator steam and distant cooking. Unit 412 means the fourth floor, which in this building means a staircase with iron railings worn smooth by decades of hands, and an elevator that rattles ominously behind its cage door.

You take the stairs. Your thighs remind you that heroism involves more cardiovascular commitment than the comics suggest.

The hallway on four stretches in both directions, lit by fixtures that buzz at frequencies designed to discourage loitering. Apartment 412 sits at the end, its door painted a blue that's peeling to reveal older blues beneath, like geological strata of tenant turnover. The key fits smoothly, too smoothly—someone's been oiling the lock.

The door opens on a space that breathes with someone else's interrupted life. A couch with a blanket still rumpled from last use. Dishes in the sink that have dried to archaeology. And on the windowsill, a cat the color of storm clouds watching you with the calm assessment of a creature who has seen this before.

Commissioner Gordon blinks, slow and deliberate, and you understand that you are being auditioned.

"You're not Sera," a voice says from the kitchen doorway. The young man there—twenty, maybe, with her eyes and his own fear—holds a phone like a weapon.

"She said if someone else ever used that key, I should run."