On Monday mornings, the air in New York's Hell's Kitchen always reeked of stale beer and rotting garbage.
Yang Ming pressed down on the rusty door handle and stepped through the blue vortex. The slight shift in gravity briefly set his semicircular canals spinning.
He rubbed his temples out of habit, putting Gotham City's endless cold downpours firmly behind him.
Compared with the gothic madhouse that was the DC Universe, the slums of Marvel's New York actually felt a little more like a place where people lived, even if that life came laced with gunpowder smoke from gang shootouts.
Reaching the street entrance, Yang Ming gripped the bottom of the rolling shutter, which was plastered with little ads for drain cleaning and women offering big money to conceive a child, and heaved it upward.
With a piercing screech of metal, murky morning light slanted into the dim clinic.
Someone stood outside.
A tall, sturdy young woman in a battered black leather motorcycle jacket and faded jeans leaned against the peeling doorframe.
Her short, dark hair had seen little care, with untidy strands scattered over her shoulders.
There was no trace of makeup on her bare face, and two conspicuous dark circles hung beneath her eyes, the marks of too many late nights and far too little decent sleep.
The young woman held a sheet of paper. Yang Ming recognized it at a glance: the recruitment notice he had taped to a utility pole just before leaving yesterday.
Its edges had already wrinkled a little from the overnight dew.
There was none of the nervous hand-wringing of an ordinary job applicant, nor any professional, ingratiating smile meant to please an interviewer.
The young woman straightened, planted her leather boots on the concrete steps, and slapped the yellowed A4 sheet onto the iron table in front of Yang Ming that served as his triage desk.
"This says salary negotiable." Her voice had a slight rasp from prolonged smoking or drinking, and she spoke bluntly, without wasting a word. "Give me a number. How much a month?"
That feral street attitude certainly fit Hell's Kitchen. Yang Ming's gaze lingered for half a second on the frayed knees of her well-washed jeans before he stepped aside to let her through.
"Come in and we'll talk. Close the door behind you."
Without hesitation, the young woman strode into the underground clinic, which was filled with the pungent smell of disinfectant. She reached back and pulled down the rolling shutter, shutting out the noise outside.
Yang Ming went to the water dispenser in the corner, tore open two packets of cheap Nestlé instant coffee, and poured them into two paper cups bearing a fast-food restaurant's logo before adding hot water. He brought the cups back and slid one toward her.
"Thanks." She took the cup and, without even testing the temperature, tipped her head back and swallowed a large mouthful. The bitter, low-grade brown liquid went down her throat without so much as a furrow of her brow.
Between sips, her gaze swept over the rim of the paper cup and scanned the clinic like high-frequency radar.
A load-bearing pillar with peeling plaster, yellowed incandescent light tubes, a storage rack with a brick propping up its missing leg. The facilities here were worse than those of an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn.
But when her gaze reached the operating area, her pupils contracted slightly.
A nearly new surgical light imported from Germany hung from the ceiling; beside it stood a professional, multifunctional stainless-steel operating table; a portable defibrillator with ECG monitoring sat on a trolley; and a glass medicine cabinet held neat rows of high-purity anesthetics and antibiotics that were extremely difficult to obtain on the market.
Every one of these expensive pieces of medical equipment, so out of place amid the dilapidation, told her the same thing: this seemingly shabby back-alley clinic had exceptionally reliable supply channels and a level of expertise far beyond the average street quack.
Yang Ming pulled over the swivel chair with foam spilling from its seat and settled into it with his legs spread, his fingers interlaced over his abdomen. He had not missed the shrewd gleam in her eyes as she looked around.
"For someone who knows basic medicine and nursing, who can pass me instruments and prep wounds for suturing, the base salary is ten thousand dollars, plus a cut of the surgery fees." Yang Ming laid out the offer in an even voice.
At the words "ten thousand dollars," her tired eyes instantly lit up with startling brilliance. Her fingers tightened unconsciously around the paper cup, crushing its rim slightly out of shape.
Yang Ming took in her reaction, then shifted his tone and delivered the second half. "For someone who knows nothing, it'll just be physical work: cleaning, hauling medical waste, holding patients' arms and legs down. Base salary, five thousand."
The light in her eyes visibly dimmed. She unconsciously licked her dry lips, clearly under no illusions about the extent of her medical knowledge.
"Let me make the unpleasant part clear up front." Ignoring her disappointment, Yang Ming continued laying out the terms.
"I'm an unlicensed back-alley doctor. I deal with problems for people who can't afford to be seen. There's no health insurance, no weekends off, and no public holidays. And if you work here, you keep your mouth absolutely shut. Whoever comes in trailing their intestines, whatever gang secrets you hear, you take it all to your grave. If you can't control your tongue, the sewers of Hell's Kitchen always have room for another barrel of concrete."
The young woman listened quietly to the end, undeterred by the bloody warning. On the contrary, as she mulled over the figure of five thousand dollars again, her breathing grew noticeably heavier.
It was 2008. The dark clouds of the subprime mortgage crisis hung over the entire United States. Wall Street's elite were lining up to jump off buildings, and ordinary people had it even harder.
In a country with a high cost of living like the United States, the average monthly salary was only a little over three thousand dollars.
She had been bartending at the seedy bar on the corner, occasionally taking shifts as a dock laborer. Even after working herself to the bone for a month, she could not scrape together two thousand.
Her landlady pounded on her door every day, demanding the heating bills that were three months overdue. Worse still, she had to support her younger sister Trish at a performing arts school with outrageously high tuition.
Trish had called just last week to say she needed to enroll in a professional movement training course, asking for two thousand dollars straight out.
Five thousand. No qualifications needed, no selling my body. Just keep my mouth shut and do some physical work.
To her, that money was nothing short of an oasis appearing before someone dying of thirst in the desert.
The young woman looked at Yang Ming again. This time, most of the street punk's wariness and wildness had faded from her eyes.
In their place was the fervor of someone gazing upon the god of wealth. She stared straight at the young back-alley doctor in his swivel chair, her gaze so scorching it nearly burned two holes through Yang Ming's white coat.
The message in those eyes could not have been clearer: I'll stake my life on getting this job. Anyone who tries to take it from me gets their head twisted off and shoved down a toilet.
That blatant, aggressive stare sent a faint prickle up Yang Ming's back.
In his previous life, he had seen countless anxious looks from patients' families in the emergency department. But here in Hell's Kitchen, being pinned down by a cash-strapped local young woman's gaze as though she wanted to devour him alive still caused a flicker of physical discomfort.
He had to give a tactical cough and rap his knuckles against the iron tabletop, forcibly steering the interview back on track.