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The air at the top of the skyscraper was thin and cold, as if frozen in the stratosphere. It burned his lungs with every breath, but Dick hardly felt it. One hundred and fifteen floors of emptiness beneath his feet, and he stood on the very edge, where the concrete parapet dropped away into nothingness. His fingers in thin gloves gripped the cold metal of the railing. Below, Dubai blazed with a fiery scattering of lights, stretching for miles along the coast. Car lights streamed along the highways like liquid gold, tower windows shone like cold diamonds, and somewhere in the distance, the Persian Gulf dissolved into an ink-dark void, dotted with the lights of ships. The entire city seemed alien, unnaturally clean and soulless, like a model displayed under the stars.
His suit—"Renegade"—was made of light-absorbing carbon fiber. It clung to his fifteen-year-old, not yet fully formed body, like a second skin, but a dead and alien one. Beneath it, the contours of muscles, tense from long immobility, were visible. The wind, whistling at such a height, sang a monotonous, sad tune in his ears. He wasn't afraid of heights. He was afraid of the silence within himself. The emptiness that had settled in his chest was thick and viscous, like expensive oil, spilling into every corner of his consciousness and drowning out all other feelings.
He looked at the lights and remembered another height. The bell tower of a cathedral in Gotham, steeped in smog and centuries of dust. The stones there were rough and alive under his fingers. And Bruce. Always Bruce behind him. His firm, confident hand on his shoulder, his voice, low and calm, cutting through the night: "Don't be afraid to look down, Dick. Be afraid of losing your morality. It is all that separates you from the fall."
Morality was lost. Hopelessly and irrevocably. It had crumbled like sand through his fingers the day he put on this black suit.
"Apprentice."
Slade's voice sliced through the memory like a blade through flesh. Even, deep, devoid of any trace of fatigue or emotion. In its falsely affectionate tone, there was always steel—cold, polished, and ruthless.
Dick turned. His movements were precise, honed to automatism by months of training. His muscles worked on their own, obeying commands drilled into his subconscious. He was a perfect marionette with cut strings, still moving by inertia.
Slade stood in the shadow of a massive antenna array, his armored suit blending with the darkness. Only the orange mask, stylized like a dead skull, reflected the distant city lights, like a glowing ember. He didn't gesture, didn't call. He simply looked with his single visible eye, and that was enough.
And Dick walked. His feet carried him across the rough concrete of the roof as if on a well-worn track. He deliberately scrolled through beautiful, but lifeless, pictures in his head. Not Gotham—those memories were too painful, they burned from within. Instead—postcard views: the neon rainbow of nighttime Tokyo reflected in wet asphalt after rain; the romantic lights of Paris, with the Eiffel Tower sprinkled with artificial stars; the snow-capped Alps in the sunset light. Abstract, detached beauty, unburdened by memory or feeling.
He thought that a stray bullet, coming from the darkness and neatly entering his temple, could be an elegant way out. Clean. Clinical. Almost painless. Just one click—and silence. Eternal silence that would finally shut off this incessant hum of anxiety in his head and lift the pressing weight from his chest, like a stone slab.
He tried with all his might not to think about the assignment. About what was going to happen in less than half an hour. The first time. A scar on his soul that would never heal, never be stitched up, would constantly remind him with a dull ache.
Slade, meanwhile, silently crouched down, his armor creaking softly. He unclasped a matte-black tactical case, resembling a small coffin. His fingers, thick, covered in a network of scars, and incredibly deft, began extracting parts of a sniper rifle. Bolt, stock, barrel, bipod. Each piece of cold, anodized metal clicked into place with a perfect, mechanical snap. The sound of this assembly was ritualistic, hypnotic. Click-scr-xxx… click. It was the sound of impending destruction of someone's fate, of inevitable doom.
Dick drifted off into himself again. His gaze fell on the famous fountain below, on the giant artificial waterfall cascading down from forty stories. Water. It sparkled and shimmered in the spotlight beams. He imagined this icy liquid flooding his lungs. How it would fill every alveolus, displacing the last bubbles of air, how he would cough trying to inhale, how his aquamarine eyes, covered with a film, would roll back. And it was cold, salty, like the tears he could no longer shed. He mechanically brought his gloved hand to his own throat, felt the rhythmic, living pulse of the carotid artery under the fabric. One sharp, precise thrust—and freedom. Escape. The end.
Slade's fingers, heavy and hard like vices, dug into his trapezius muscle. The pain was sharp, piercing, to the point of crunching bone. The world, woven from dreams and memories, shattered into thousands of sharp fragments, embedding themselves in his consciousness.
"Wake up," his voice held no impatience, only a cold statement of fact. He had finished the assembly. The rifle lay on the concrete between them—long, gray, a deadly toy, ready for use. "Target—in the building at 3 o'clock. Distance about a thousand feet. The window of the conference room on the sixtieth floor. Gray-haired man in a blue suit, Armani. The one gesturing by the flipchart."
Dick nodded, his gaze sliding over Slade's figure, not seeing it, fixed on some point in the void behind his back.
"For your practice, I chose a very interesting contract," Slade spoke methodically, hammering each word in like a nail. "This politician didn't just cheat and set up my client for billions, though that's certainly part of it. He ruined a lot of lives. Gave the order for a 'cleanup' of a favela in Rio to make way for his next glass dump. There were children, Grayson. Children who played ball on his future parking lot. The horizon must be clear for his hotels. Aesthetics, you see."
The words reached Dick distorted, as if through the thickness of water in which he had just been mentally drowning. "Lives… children… favela…" They bounced off his consciousness, not sticking. He thought about the wind. How it would howl in his ears if he stepped over this narrow concrete ledge. How many seconds would the fall last? Five? Six? Seven? He mentally calculated the trajectory, like he used to calculate the flight path on the trapeze. The city lights would turn into a dazzling spiral, a fiery river rushing towards him. And in that last, stretched moment of weightlessness, he would be flying again. Not falling. Flying. Like back then, under the circus big top, towards the applause and the happy faces of his parents.
"Get down. Take the rifle." An order. Simple. Indisputable. Requiring no thought.
Dick knelt on one knee, then the other. The cold of the concrete instantly seeped through the suit's fabric, reaching his skin. He felt the roughness of the surface even through the gloves as he lay down, pressing his eye to the scope. The cold metal eyepiece became his only connection to reality. The whole world narrowed to the crosshairs and the brightly lit rectangle of the window. He saw the man. Graying temples, energetic hand movements, a smile directed at the audience.
"Found," his voice was flat, devoid of any overtones, like an old synthesizer.
"Waiting for an invitation to dance?" A dangerous steel finally rang in Slade's voice, foretelling a storm. "Shoot."
His index finger rested on the trigger. The whole world, the entire universe, froze in that microscopic, smooth movement of the trigger. And inside him, everything exploded in a deafening, soundless shriek. The memories he had so carefully suppressed burst forth in an unstoppable wave, sweeping everything away. The first night in the Robin mantle, when he felt like a hero from the comics. Bruce's face, illuminated by the pale light of the Gotham moon, and his words, etched in memory: "We don't kill, Dick. That's what separates us from them. Always." And right after—the fragrant smell of sawdust and cotton candy in the circus arena. Loud, joyful laughter. His father's strong, confident hand, firmly holding him by the waist before the most difficult throw. He clung to these fragments, to the last crumbs of who he once was, trying to find in them the support, the strength to say "no."
"Grayson." His surname, uttered by Slade a second time, sounded like a final verdict. Patience had snapped. The game was over.
Dick shuddered all over, as if from an electric shock. The muscles in his back and shoulders tightened into one hard, painful knot.
"Roger that," he exhaled, and his finger, living its own, separate life, contracted reflexively, without the slightest participation of his mind, squeezing the trigger all the way.
A dull, muffled thump. A brief, sharp recoil, absorbed by the muscles of his shoulder.
In the window opposite, the gray-haired man's head jerked, as if from a push, and sharply disappeared from view. The glass, perfectly transparent just a second ago, was now covered with a bizarre web of cracks radiating from a single point. In the center of this web, right at the level where the head had been a second ago, a small, almost beautiful crimson stain was spreading.
He slowly, like a sleepwalker, rose from the cold concrete. The rifle was still in his hands, unbearably heavy, alien, sticky. His fingers didn't want to unclench. And the hands themselves—these treacherous limbs—suddenly began to tremble with a fine, uncontrollable shudder.
Slade's palm landed on his shoulder again. This time, not just heavily, but crushingly firm, squeezing the muscle and collarbone, staking a claim. In that single touch was everything: the cold satisfaction of a trainer seeing the result, the undisguised contempt for a broken, obedient thing, and a strange, perverse, almost paternal approval.
They stood in tomb-like silence, broken only by the distant wail of sirens rising from the streets and the eternal hum of the city.
Dick couldn't tear his eyes away from that window. He saw the blizzard of panic in the lit hall, the dark figures rushing behind the now-murky glass, and the motionless body splayed on the table. He had found his demise. Not in an elegant bullet or a dizzying fall from a height, not in the salt waterdomineeringly filling every particle of his own lungs. He had found it here, on this cold roof, in this quiet, insignificant click of the trigger that had forever separated him from that naive boy in the red and green suit. And with terrifying clarity, he understood that from this moment on, he would return to this instant again and again. In every nightmare that would tear him from sleep. In every random silence that would fall during the day. In every shadow of his own face reflected in a shop window. This would become his personal Golgotha, the point of reference from which his entire future, infinitely long life would be measured.
And this shot would ring in his ears until the very end.