At dusk, Chen Mo and Barbara slipped out through the school's back gate.
They didn't use the main entrance.
The front gate was swarming with reporters.
A camera was currently rolling on a parent who was crying his heart out, while the child beside him stood expressionless, looking as if he didn't understand how he had suddenly become a victim of the education system.
Chen Mo took one look and turned around decisively.
"Let's go through the back."
Barbara followed.
The two walked along the perimeter wall.
There was fresh graffiti on it.
Someone had used black spray paint to write a line:
WAYNE, GET OUT OF OUR SCHOOL.
Below it, someone else had added a line with a red pen:
LEAVE DINNER BEHIND FIRST.
Chen Mo stared at the two lines of text for a couple of seconds.
"Pretty democratic. So where's the dinner? I didn't see it at all."
Barbara looked at him.
Chen Mo offered a serious critique:
"However, demands from multiple social classes have been successfully expressed on the exact same wall. The first sentence represents anxiety over campus order, while the second represents basic survival needs. From this, it's evident that grassroots political participation in Gotham is very enthusiastic."
Barbara didn't want to laugh.
But the corner of her mouth twitched anyway.
She was supposed to maintain the persona of a detached, cool girl.
Lately, her persona had been slipping a bit, and it was all Chen Mo's fault.
"Do you think he'll see it?"
Chen Mo knew exactly who she meant.
He hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder.
The fruit container inside poked against his back.
"If he doesn't see it, Batman can retire."
Barbara's footsteps faltered slightly.
As if oblivious to what he had just said, Chen Mo kept walking forward.
"I mean, Bruce Wayne is so rich, he definitely has a dedicated team monitoring public sentiment for him. There might even be a massive screen densely packed with data, looking just like a villain's lair."
Barbara stared at his back.
"Why do you think it looks like a villain's lair?"
Chen Mo looked back, his tone sincere:
"Because good guys generally can't afford a screen that big. Take me, for instance--my phone broke and I don't even have the money to fix it."
Barbara: "..."
She decided, for the third time today, to stop talking to him.
Meanwhile.
The top floor of Wayne Tower.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Gotham evening resembled a sheet of smoked glass.
The city lights flickered on one by one, glowing with no warmth, looking merely like pustules oozing from a wound.
Bruce Wayne stood before a massive monitoring wall.
He wore a dark dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his tie loosened slightly. The frivolous smile he displayed on the daytime news was absent from his face.
Over a dozen windows were open on the screen simultaneously.
The top-left corner showed the cafeteria surveillance from East End Seventh Public High School.
The footage was paused at the exact moment the cart slid out.
The cleaning cart, the mop handle, the tray return rack, the falling trays, the rammed-open hot meal boxes.
Barbara stood near the window, her red hair resembling a small flicker of flame under the bleak, pale lighting.
Chen Mo leaned against the wall, half his face hidden behind a pillar, his expression suspiciously innocent.
The top-right corner displayed the backend of the subsidized lunch system.
Behind rows of temporary student ID numbers, various statuses were displayed.
Registered.
Not Synchronized.
Pending Review.
Subsidized Meal Allowance Not Activated.
Anomaly Retry.
The center screen showed the cafeteria supplier's transit logs.
The first vehicle arrived twenty-seven minutes early.
The second vehicle was delayed by forty-three minutes.
The serial numbers on the hot meal boxes were non-consecutive.
Thirty-six meals reserved for the visitation were flagged as "Non-Student Batch."
The bottom-left corner showed the student distribution terminal logs.
Starting from 11:42 AM, card swipe failures began to appear.
Reason for failure: Temporary ID lacks authorization.
At the exact same time, the manual back-entry channel closed.
Reason for closure: Administrative lunch break.
The bottom-right corner displayed real-time trending keywords from social media.
The Wayne Social Experiment.
Rights of Ordinary Students.
Wayne's Treat, Students Foot the Bill.
Street Trash.
Free Lunch Scam.
Bruce Wayne, Get Out of Our School.
In the center of the screen was a composite image that had been retweeted the most.
On one side, he was smiling and raising a glass at a charity gala.
On the other side lay a shattered chicken leg on the cafeteria floor.
Bruce stared at that image.
He looked at it for a long time.
His expression didn't change.
There was no anger.
No sense of grievance.
Not even the typical coldness of a wealthy man being offended.
He simply raised his hand, minimized the composite image, and dragged it to the side.
Then, he magnified the surveillance footage from the twenty seconds prior to the cafeteria cart sliding.
Frame.
By frame.
By one more frame.
In the footage, Chen Mo walked past the cleaning cart.
His heel brushed against the rubber mat.
The movement was as natural as an ordinary student passing by.
Bruce pressed pause.
His gaze locked onto that shoe.
The sole was very worn.
The outer edge of the right foot showed significant wear, indicating a long-term habit of using walls to brace his momentum, causing his center of gravity to habitually shift upon landing.
The range of motion was so small that an ordinary camera could barely capture it.
Yet, the chain of consequences was perfectly complete.
The cleaning cart shifted.
The mop handle nudged the return rack.
The trays hit the floor, creating a racket.
The security guard's attention shifted.
A staff member's elbow struck the cart.
The brake latch slipped loose.
The hot meal boxes left the prep station.
The food safety protocol was triggered.
Bruce traced this entire chain of connections on the screen.
A line extended from Chen Mo's heel, bypassing the attention of everyone in the cafeteria, and finally landed on those thirty-six hot meals.
He pulled up another clip.
Barbara confronting the staff.
As she spoke, her chin was slightly raised, her shoulders tense, her right hand clenching into a fist and then relaxing.
Nervous.
But she didn't back down.
She hadn't stolen the food.
She had turned the food into something that couldn't be put back into storage.
She hadn't issued threats.
She had made everyone realize that signing their names was far more dangerous than handing out food--a tactical style that heavily carried Gordon's flair.
And she was even bolder than Gordon.
Bruce stepped closer to the screen.
The cold glow of the monitor reflected in his eyes like two shards of ice submerged in deep water.
Outside, the entire city was cursing him.
The poor cursed him for not giving enough.
The middle class cursed him for giving to the wrong people.
The parents cursed him for disrupting order.
The media cursed him for experimenting on children.
Everyone had their reasons.
Every reason was valid.
Every reason felt like a small blade.
But Bruce didn't look at those blades.
His finger tapped the red error message in the lunch subsidy system's backend.
Temporary ID lacks authorization.
He tapped open the transit logs again.
The second vehicle was delayed by forty-three minutes.
Then he pulled up the supplier contract.
Outsourced company.
Secondary subcontractor.
Temporary batch.
Manual verification.
Finally, he lined up the four windows side by side.
The cafeteria.
The meal subsidies.
The transit.
The distribution.
Bruce hadn't just discovered this turmoil; nine minutes after the first campus video was uploaded, he had already opened every system.
Before the first parent was interviewed, he had already pulled all the cafeteria surveillance.
Before social media began screaming "Wayne's Treat, Students Foot the Bill," he already knew the problem wasn't the chicken leg, nor was it the students.
The problem lay in an entire chain where every single link appeared to have someone in charge, yet at every single link, someone could happen to say, "This isn't my problem."
Bruce looked at the screen. As Bruce Wayne, he always had to audit where his money went, didn't he?
After a long silence, he murmured:
"Treat."
When the word left his mouth, there was no irony, nor any hint of a smile.
It sounded like a nail being driven into wood--a coldness that didn't sound like it came from the mouth of Bruce Wayne, but rather from the mouth of Batman.
He dragged the composite image back over.
The Bruce Wayne at the charity gala held up a wine glass, smiling perfectly for the camera.
The chicken leg on the cafeteria floor was shattered to pieces, its juices seeping into the grout lines between the tiles.
The two images sat side by side.
Like the exact kind of joke Gotham excelled at manufacturing.
Bruce closed the half featuring his own photograph.
Nothing remained on the screen but the shattered chicken leg.
And in the corner, the word highlighted in red by the system:
Not Synchronized.
In Gotham, when a system displayed "Not Synchronized," it usually implied three possibilities.
First, the system was genuinely broken.
Second, someone wanted you to think the system was broken.
Third, whether the system was broken or not didn't matter at all, because everyone who was supposed to get paid had already been paid, and everyone who was supposed to starve was still starving.
Well, which option should Young Master Wayne choose to believe?
The lighting on the top floor of Wayne Tower was dimmed to its lowest setting, leaving the entire office illuminated only by the faint, eerie blue glow of the monitoring wall.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Gotham rain swept diagonally across the glass, as if someone were repeatedly scrubbing the city's face with a dirty brush.
It wouldn't come clean.
It never came clean.
Overcome by a wave of exhaustion, Bruce sat before the console, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his tie already ripped off and tossed aside.
That tie was worth four hundred dollars--hand-stitched, silk fabric, its low-key color matching what an heir would wear while pretending to care about profit margins during a board meeting.
Now it lay on the floor like a small snake strangled by high-society life.
Alfred walked in, carrying coffee.
He glanced at the wall full of windows, then looked down at the tie on the floor.
"Master Bruce, should I be grateful that you didn't consign your suit jacket to the paper shredder this time?"
Bruce didn't look back.
"I don't have time."
"Generally speaking, Master Bruce, even when one lacks time, one can still choose not to treat a four-hundred-dollar tie like evidence left behind at a crime scene."
Bruce remained silent.
Alfred placed the coffee by his hand.
The coffee had no sugar and no milk--black as Batman's sense of humor.
Bruce raised his hand, dragging four systems onto the screen.
The Wayne Foundation meal subsidy disbursement system, the catering company's delivery backend, the school cafeteria distribution terminal, and the Gotham Department of Education's pilot program oversight platform.
The four windows expanded side by side.
Like four men in clean shirts sitting in an interrogation room, each claiming they were just passing by.
Bruce first clicked open the Foundation's disbursement records.
East End Seventh Public High School.
Pilot Serial Number: WEF-EDU-EQ-07.
Project Name: Educational Equality Nutritional Support Initiative.
Project Objective: To ensure that every registered student receives basic hot meal coverage while at school.
Disbursement Status: Disbursed.
Supplier Status: Settled.
Meal Batches: 640 lunches, 640 dinners.
Sign-off Status: Complete.
Bruce stared at the word "Complete."
The font was very clean.
Black text on a white background.
No blood.
No grease stains.
None of the grating noise made when a student scrapes the last bit of mashed potatoes clean.
The system never displayed those things.
The system only displayed Complete.
Bruce switched to the catering company's backend.
The company was named "Gotham Nutritional Services Group."
It sounded highly reliable.
Generally speaking, when a company's name simultaneously featured "Nutritional," "Services," and "Group," at least two of those words were fake.
Bruce glanced over the corporate structure.
Parent company, primary contractor, secondary distribution, temporary vehicle dispatch, emergency outsourcing.
Standing behind him, Alfred raised an eyebrow slightly.
"A remarkably healthy corporate structure."
Bruce clicked to penetrate the equity ownership.
A tree instantly sprouted across the screen.
A very Gotham kind of tree.
The roots were in the Cayman Islands, the trunk was in the Gotham municipal bidding system, the branches reached into the Department of Education, transit companies, community kitchens, and cold-chain warehouses, and the leaves hung with a few shell companies whose names looked as clean as if they had just been pulled from a washing machine.