"Selina! Selina Kyle!"
Those syllables ricocheted through the empty Underground Clinic, struck the yellowing support columns, and bounced back against Yang Ming's eardrums.
The metal tips of the surgical scissors stopped above the collar of her leather jacket. Less than two millimeters of downward pressure would have sliced through the cheap leather.
Yang Ming's fingers applied no further pressure to the scissors.
Selina Kyle.
The archive of memories deep in his hippocampus was forced open, and labels relating to the DC Universe were pulled out one after another.
Gotham's future master thief, the Catwoman who prowled the boundaries between good, evil, and everything in between, and Bruce Wayne's inextricable, fated entanglement.
He had only just recruited Jessica Jones as grunt labor for his clinic over in Marvel's Hell's Kitchen. Then he had turned around, returned to Gotham, and pinned the future Batman's little girlfriend to an operating table, ready to dissect her alive.
There really was something uncanny about the feng shui of this shabby clinic, which measured less than sixty square meters. No matter how he looked at it, his recruitment plan of betting on both sides had the absurd air of an attempt to scoop up every superhero in one net.
Yang Ming loosened his thumb and forefinger.
Clang.
He casually tossed the surgical scissors into the stainless steel tray beside him, producing a sharp, piercing clatter. He stepped back half a pace, untied the medical tourniquet wrapped around Selina's wrists, then pulled over the swivel chair with its exposed foam stuffing and sat back down, legs spread.
The restraint was gone.
Selina reacted instantly. She pushed both legs against the edge of the bed and sprang upright. Quickly, she retreated to the far side of the multifunction operating table, pressing her back against the cold wall as she alternated between rubbing the red marks on her wrists.
Those eyes, so piercing in the darkness, stayed fixed on Yang Ming as he sat in the shadows. She looked exactly like a stray cat whose tail had been stepped on, ready to lash out with her claws at any moment.
"Where's the money?" Selina asked, her voice a little dry from their fight. "Benjamin's wallet had more than ten thousand dollars in cash."
"Once it entered my pocket, it became my legitimate income." Yang Ming leaned against the backrest and crossed his legs, his gaze sweeping over Selina's badly worn leather jacket.
"Enough people starve to death on the streets of Gotham's East End every day to fill two garbage trucks. With your skills, you could work as a low-level hitwoman for the Maloney Family or the Penguin and earn enough in a month to rent a luxury apartment with heating uptown. Instead, you came to steal a black-market dealer's wallet and got beaten to it by me. What for?"
Selina gritted her teeth without answering. The sole of her combat boot scraped irritably against the stainless steel bed leg twice.
Yang Ming leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his nostrils twitching slightly.
"Salbutamol," he said, naming a medication.
An almost imperceptible stiffness entered Selina's guarded posture.
"There's a faint trace of Salbutamol on the left side of your jacket collar and around your cuffs. It's a short-acting beta-2 agonist, specifically used to relieve bronchial spasms."
Yang Ming's gaze cut through Selina's facade with the precision of a scalpel.
"The edges of your fingernails have sulfide deposits left by prolonged exposure to burning low-grade coal. But your own breathing is exceptionally steady, and that flowing sequence of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu chokeholds just now proved your lung capacity is far above average. You don't have asthma."
Yang Ming paused for half a second before delivering his conclusion.
"Someone at home is sick. Very sick, right?"
Selina's pupils contracted sharply in the halo at the edge of the surgical light.
She had met the detectives of the Gotham Police Department who fancied themselves clever, as well as the crafty old foxes in the gangs, but she had never seen anyone strip her secrets bare with nothing more than a few lingering traces of scent in the air and the dirt beneath her fingernails.
This Asian man with his heavy dark circles wasn't just a monster in a fight. His powers of observation were keen enough to make her scalp prickle.
Now that her defenses had been torn open, there was no point in keeping up the act.
"My sister, Maggie." Selina gave up the pointless concealment. Her voice dropped, taking on the helpless, rough edge peculiar to Gotham's underclass.
"Congenital asthma. Add the rotten conditions at the Monastery in the East End, where a living person could freeze into a popsicle, and she developed a severe lung infection last week. Now even breathing feels like swallowing knives."
She raised her head and met Yang Ming's emotionless gaze.
"The emergency department at Gotham's public hospital won't even let you through the doors without a thousand-dollar deposit. Those smuggling bastards have driven the prices of Amoxicillin and cephalosporins on the black market through the roof. A secondhand portable oxygen concentrator costs ten thousand dollars. If I don't steal, Maggie won't even make it through this weekend."
After hearing her out, Yang Ming's face remained cold and businesslike. As an attending physician who had seen countless partings in life and death in the emergency department in his previous life, he knew all too well how high the mortality rate for a severe lung infection could be without medical intervention.
Especially in a city like Gotham, where sunlight was scarce year-round and the air was thick with industrial emissions and mold, extensive consolidation had most likely already developed in Maggie's lungs.
"So you set your sights on Benjamin." Yang Ming picked up the ballpoint pen on the desk and spun it once between his fingers.
"That fat bastard deserved it! Bloated scum like Benjamin make their living sucking people dry through smuggling and loan-sharking! Their money was dirty to begin with!" At the mention of Benjamin, disgust surged back into Selina's eyes.
"He repackages nearly expired antibiotics from uptown and sells them at inflated prices to the poor in the East End, who can only wait to die when they get sick. Taking his money was just collecting a little interest on their behalf."
Selina straightened her back and lifted her chin slightly.
"Listen, back-alley doctor. I, Selina Kyle, am a thief, but I have my rules. I don't touch women's wallets, because their lives in Gotham are harder than a dog's. I don't pick old people's pockets, because that might be their coffin money. And I never steal a child's meal money. I only steal from fat, bloated bastards who profit from other people's misery. That ten thousand dollars from Benjamin could have saved my sister's life!"
Her words rang with conviction, echoing through the cramped Underground Clinic.
Yang Ming looked at the girl before him, only twenty-two years old. She wore the cheapest clothes and did the shadiest work, yet in Gotham, that rotten mire that devoured people whole, she clung fiercely to a line that was both laughable and worthy of respect.
Never steal from the weak.
It was easy to say, but holding that line when hunger had stomach acid churning in your gut and a loved one was dying took tremendous willpower.
By comparison, Gotham's rich and powerful in their immaculate suits had standards lower than the rats in the sewers.
"Good rules," Yang Ming remarked evenly.
"But medically speaking, even if you got that ten thousand dollars in cash, the substandard antibiotics you bought on the black market wouldn't save your sister. Respiratory failure caused by a severe lung infection requires precise drug dosages and intervention with professional medical equipment. Taking those drugs home would only hasten her death."
Yang Ming looked at Selina, who was still waiting for him to pronounce her fate. She was only twenty-two now. She hadn't yet put on that iconic cat-eared mask, nor did she have the long whip that could lash people until their skin split open. She was merely an older sister struggling to survive in the mire for her little sister's sake.
Neither wholly good nor wholly evil.
Her boundaries were flexible, but she did have them, and deep down, Selina was a kindhearted girl. Just as she hadn't gone all out to hurt him, she had always held to her principles when stealing money.