“I’ve Been Set Up Haven’t I?

She looked confused.

“The changes, to the library, whenever shit goes wrong, I’ll be blamed, won’t I?”

“Oh, that? No. You got all the proper sign-offs, so we’d get in trouble for authorizing it. We’ll find someone who wasn’t following procedure to blame. Or just call it supervillains being too strong for us. That’s what happened with Joker’s escape, or that business with Zsasz. This paralyzes the top, not everyone else.”

I blinked in confusion.

“It only blames a subordinate if they’ve actually fucked up, or not followed policy. If we did anything else, we’d be the ones who...well, that’s not true. I’m not dumb enough to blame my subordinates, but then they’re armed and I need them with me when shit goes wrong. The doctors are a different story, but you’ll probably be fine, even if there’s a problem. The inmates like it, so far…”

I nodded to her and walked away, angry with myself for failing to understand, only for her to pop her head out and order me to prepare for Jinx’s arrival, in front of the entire damn staff.

Payback.

Or an opportunity.

Or both.

Fuck it, either way, it was overtime, that I didn’t want to work, but I did it, which meant I had to warn the other men in my carpool I was stuck working overtime, which meant heading out, grabbing my phone and letting them know, then heading back in, going back through security. They were, mostly, fine with it, it happened to everyone. Honestly, I was regretting the damn carpool. It was limiting my movements, and not providing much in the way of actual success. The money it saved me was minimal and I’d only tagged one target, who was inside for months still.

I’d fucking tripped over more targets than that. So, I escalated the one complaint I’d gotten, until the guy snapped at me and I was justified in calling it off. There were a few text messages that evening, but just like that I freed up my schedule and gained back a bit of time. I’d never realized how much time was a currency like any other until I had cash and cunt, but no damn time…

I handled the security requirements for the transfer easily enough. Almost everything was standard, except the mystical collar, provided by Zatanna, which would allegedly prevent Jinx from using magic. That was new, as we had no other true magic users in Arkham. Personally, I wanted other backups, but for some reason Zatanna wasn’t sharing a bunch of ways to control/depower a magic user.

Or they didn’t exist.

Or she didn’t know them.

I didn’t need to be cynical about it, it wasn’t necessarily true that she’d prioritized keeping herself safe over keeping us safe from Jinx.

Target Acquired: Zatanna Zatara +1

Fuck. Well, I guess that answered that. Probably. I shouldn’t just trust the app, but it had never lied to me. That I knew of.

Punk.

Well, this was something I wanted everyone else’s input on...plus, if I didn’t tell them about Jinx, they’d kill me in my sleep. Okay, not really, obviously, but they’d be hurt and frankly, I wanted their advice.

As I finally headed out, I considered ordering Rapetoy not to mess with me like that again, but until I had more control, I didn’t want the attention. I already spent more time with her than most, but that could be covered by my seniority. If she started treating me better than the guys who’d been here for years, though admittedly there weren’t many of those, I’d make problems for myself with the other guards. Which wouldn’t be resolvable through the app as they skewed heavily male. She couldn’t keep secrets, or try to hurt me, that was enough..

Instead, I was finally able to take advantage of my own car and give Diamond and Asa a call, joining all three of us into a single call, glad for Skin’s upgraded security. “You saw?”

“Yes,” Asa said, “What happened?”

“I didn’t,” Diamond said. “What happened?”

“Fucking Jinx is headed to Arkham, Wednesday. For ‘evaluation.” I considered trying to hide my concern, but I didn’t bother. I trusted them. And frankly, I was still a bit freaked out. My trip through Jinx’s mind and powers had not been pleasant.

The next few minutes were in one sense no fun, in another, they were very satisfying. Venting to them both and them venting to me about the insanity of what was going on, even if they didn’t know how involved I’d been in Jinx’s capture, she obviously wasn’t crazy! As we argued at some length to one another.

Finally, Diamond raised a relevant point, “Is this to target you? Whatever deal you made, to trigger the rest of that?”

Fuck, I hadn’t even considered that.

“Maybe? Shouldn’t be, though. It’s not like I told her I was at Arkham.”

“So, maybe you just call in sick? How long can an evaluation take?” Diamond offered.

“I don’t know. Penelope wasn’t clear. I don’t have that much sick leave, I haven’t been there that long and the city fried my leave balance when they fired me last time.”

We argued about that a bit, with me focusing on the fact that she would hardly be going to the library and I didn’t feel great about leaving everyone else at her mercy. We were going around in circles, until Asa cut in.

“How did any of this drop Zatanna into the app?” Asa asked.

“WHAT?!?” Diamond’s surprise was almost as endearing as her concern. There was a quick sound as she pulled her phone away from her ear and pulled up the app. “How’d that happen?” she asked after a moment.

“That was my question,” Asa said with what I was sure was a smirk.

“Apparently Zatanna must have been in charge of the security precautions, which are basically just a magical collar that keeps her from using her powers. I thought that seemed a little limited, but that she probably didn’t want to share more means of preventing someone from using magic and was prioritizing her safety over ours and...poof, Zatanna in the app.”

“Eventually we’ve got to figure out why it’s sticking people in at various times, doesn’t seem consistent,” Diamond said.

“Sure, but right now...should I keep her in, or delete her?

What a good question.