Little arms, little legs, little heads, crudely, mockingly stitched together.
He'd come straight from the kindergarten, followed a trail of innocent blood back to Arkham Asylum. Tracker switched off. Cowl communications disabled. He was a ghost. Batman wouldn't find him until it was done.
Weeping parents, fighting over patchwork corpses.
The sanatorium had been derelict for years. A burnt-out patch of dead earth on top, a forgotten warren of cells below. Good, Jason thought, he's already in the dirt. There was a moral line that Bruce had sworn never to cross. Jason would cross it for him.
Jason had been watching a grief-stricken mother piece her son together when the kindergarten speaker system came to life.
No, Robin, he thought. Push it down. Jason pulled back to the heavy iron doors that would have once led into a laundry chute, and dropped into the dark.
"Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall," Joker sang.
It was a net, half-way down, that caught him. It broke with his weight, sending him tumbling out of the end of chute onto the granite floor. Jason gritted his teeth breathed through the pa-
The first swing of the crowbar took out two teeth. The second broke his ankle.
"All the king's horses, and all the king's men, couldn't put Humpty together again," Joker was singing.
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