The downpour on Lake Street showed no sign of letting up.
The rusty iron door swung open, its creaking hinges painfully loud in the deathly still alley.
Yang Ming closed his black umbrella and casually hooked its handle onto the iron hook behind the door. Water dripped from its tip, forming a small puddle on the concrete floor.
"Put her up there. Be gentle."
Yang Ming stripped off his soaked trench coat and tossed it onto the swivel chair. He walked to the sink, turned on the faucet, and let the icy water wash over his hands.
Selene gritted her teeth, fighting the spasms that kept shooting through her left leg as she carefully lowered Maggie from her back onto the stainless-steel operating table.
The little girl was frighteningly light, like a skeleton wrapped in skin.
The effects of those two doses of potent spray were wearing off. Maggie's chest began retracting horribly again, and broken, bellows-like wheezes squeezed out of her throat.
Selene hurriedly wiped the rain from her face. She turned, about to beg Yang Ming to hurry, only for her gaze to freeze.
Click.
Yang Ming pressed the master switch on the wall.
The surgical light blazed a stark white. Then, deep inside the clinic, several hulking machines previously hidden in the darkness lit up one after another with ghostly blue standby indicators.
Selene's pupils contracted sharply.
Less than two meters to the left of the operating table stood an exceedingly strange silver-gray metal chamber.
Its body was streamlined, but scorched marks from brutal cutting covered the edges of its casing, and there were even several obvious bullet holes.
Yet behind its blast-resistant glass cover, extraordinarily intricate holographic readouts flickered.
Half of a scratched English stencil remained on the side of the chamber-"STARK."
Selene had once sneaked into the intensive care unit at Gotham General Hospital. Compared with the metal beast before her, radiating cold, futuristic menace, those cumbersome medical machines worth millions of dollars looked like scrap from the last century.
"Wh... what is this?" Selene swallowed, her voice unsteady. Secret military equipment from Wayne Enterprises? Some kind of human experimentation apparatus from beneath Blackgate Penitentiary?
"Shut up. Step back."
Yang Ming shook the water from his hands and pulled on pale blue sterile latex gloves. He had no time to explain discarded Stark Industries equipment from the Marvel Universe to a stray cat from Gotham's streets.
Hauling this portable battlefield hyperbaric chamber over from Hell's Kitchen had nearly crushed the discs in his lower back under gravitational acceleration.
He walked to the glass medicine cabinet and entered the code. Cold air rushed into his face.
He lifted a glass ampoule from its protective foam with two fingers. The liquid inside gave off an eerie pale green glow.
"Hold her shoulders down. Don't let her move."
Yang Ming approached the operating table and issued the order in a level voice. Snapping out of her daze, Selene hurried forward and pinned Maggie's frail shoulders firmly down.
He tightened a tourniquet around Maggie's upper arm. Yang Ming tapped the back of the girl's shriveled hand twice with his index and middle fingers. The faintest outline of a vein rose beneath her skin.
Needle in. Blood return.
The pale green targeted medication was slowly pushed into her vein.
"This targets the inflammatory cytokine cascade and blocks it. It'll hurt a little." Yang Ming withdrew the needle and casually tossed the empty ampoule into the yellow medical waste bin at his feet.
The instant the medication entered her bloodstream, Maggie's thin body went rigid. She thrashed violently like a fish struck by electricity.
"Maggie!" Selene's eyes reddened with panic, and she nearly lost her grip.
"Hold her down! Let go and her alveoli will rupture!" Yang Ming snapped.
Five seconds later, the struggling stopped. Tears seeped from Maggie's tightly closed eyes, but the spasms that seemed ready to tear her windpipe apart visibly subsided.
"Pick her up and put her in the chamber." Yang Ming pointed at the Stark Industries hyperbaric chamber.
Selene clumsily gathered her sister into her arms and placed her inside the softly lined metal compartment.
Yang Ming pulled down the blast-resistant glass cover with one hand, locked the latches, and rapidly swiped across the holographic panel beside it.
Hiss-
The pressure relief valve made an exceedingly faint sound. High-purity medical oxygen mixed with trace amounts of aerosolized tissue-repair medication instantly filled the chamber.
Yang Ming pulled over the swivel chair and sat down, watching the physiological readings on the panel.
Selene gripped the chamber's metal rim with both hands, her cheek pressed against the cold glass. She did not even dare blink as she stared at Maggie inside.
Thirty seconds.
The bluish-purple color began fading from Maggie's lips.
One minute.
The retractions above her breastbone and between her ribs disappeared completely.
Three minutes.
The oxygen saturation reading on the monitor climbed steadily from a dying red line at 78%, finally settling firmly in the safe green range at 96%.
Maggie's breathing became completely steady. No bellows-like wheezing. No agonizing spasms. A faint, healthy flush even returned to the little girl's cheeks for the first time in ages. She looked as though she were simply asleep, her chest rising and falling in a perfectly regular rhythm.
Selene stared blankly at the sight.
At Gotham General Hospital, the senior doctors in their white coats had held a thick stack of test results and looked at her as though she were already dead. "Prepare for the funeral. Pulmonary fibrosis is irreversible."
And now, in less than ten minutes, one injection and a battered metal chamber had torn the only family she had in this rotten world straight out of death's grip.
Beep.
Yang Ming tapped the desk. "Bring her here for two hours every night. One week straight, and the damaged alveolar epithelial cells will recover to normal levels. After that, as long as she doesn't do drugs or breathe industrial fumes at a chemical plant, she'll live until you die of old age."
Selene turned around.
She looked at the man sitting in the swivel chair, drinking from a chipped mug printed with "I LOVE NY." His eyes, perpetually ringed with dark circles, held neither compassion nor the arrogance of a benefactor-only an impersonal, businesslike indifference.
The nerves she had kept stretched taut for more than a decade finally snapped.
Selene's legs gave way.
Without the slightest hesitation, she dropped heavily onto one knee on the rough concrete floor.
Her kneecap struck the ground with a dull thud. This stubborn girl, who had fought her way through Gotham's East End and would spit in someone's face even with a knife at her throat, bowed her proud head deeply.
Tears mingled with rainwater and dripped from her pointed chin onto the filthy floor.
"Thank you."
Her voice was hoarse beyond recognition, thick with tears.
"I, Selina Kyle, swear that from this day forward, my life belongs to you. If you want me to steal, I'll steal. If you want me to kill, I won't even ask for a name. Just say the word."
Yang Ming swallowed his mouthful of cheap instant coffee.
At the edge of his vision, ghostly blue characters flickered right on cue.
[Chain Quest: Redemption of the shadow of the night cat. Completed.] [Quest reward: 100-cubic-meter Subspace Storage Ring. Delivered.]
Yang Ming felt a faint chill at the base of his right index finger. An exceedingly plain, antique-looking dark silver ring, entirely devoid of patterns, silently appeared around it.
His heart gave two hard thumps.
One hundred cubic meters.
With this thing, he would never again have to shuttle between the two doors with a backpack like some laborer. He could move advanced technology and rare metals between the Marvel and DC worlds by the ton and resell them.
This deal paid off big.
Yang Ming suppressed his excitement, his gaze remaining cold. He set down his mug and looked at Selene kneeling on the floor.
"Get up. Mop up the water on the floor. This is a clinic, not a church. We don't do kneeling here."
Selene froze for a moment, wiped away her tears, and pushed herself up with a hand on her knee. Instead of fetching the mop, she clenched her fists tightly, a flash of profound worry and ferocity crossing her eyes.
"Dr. Yang." She changed how she addressed him, her tone turning deeply serious.
"This business with the Rat Gang won't end that easily."
Yang Ming leaned back in his chair, took a No. 11 scalpel from the drawer, and idly twirled it between his fingers. The blade flashed.
"Fiss is a vindictive animal," Selene said through gritted teeth. "He has more than thirty cutthroats working for him. You crippled three of his men at the Monastery today. He'll definitely track you here. And..."
She paused, seemingly afraid of something.
"Fiss dares to throw his weight around the East End because someone powerful is backing him. I heard that every month, he sends the homeless people and orphans he abducts into underground black markets controlled by other gangs to have their organs harvested and sold. You crossed him to save us. Trouble will keep coming to your door."
More than thirty cutthroats. Gangs. An organ black market.
Those words would have been enough to make ordinary Gotham citizens buy tickets and flee the city that very night.
But Yang Ming merely stopped twirling the scalpel.
"Finished?" Yang Ming raised his eyes.
Selene faltered. She could not find the slightest trace of fear on the man's face. He had not even frowned.
"Whether a giant like the Falcone Family would stick its neck out for a few sewer rats, I don't know." Yang Ming picked some dirt from beneath his nails with the tip of the blade, his voice as casual as if he were discussing dinner.
"But if that scumbag Fiss knows what's good for him, this ends here. He can keep being king of the sewer rats, and I'll keep running my underground clinic."
"And if he doesn't?" Selene could not help asking.
"If he doesn't?"
Yang Ming chuckled. He flicked his hand. With a thunk, the scalpel became a silver streak, slicing off a lock of Selene's hair with unerring precision.
"Then I'll erase the name Rat Gang from Gotham City's sewers for good."
Yang Ming stood and walked to the sink to wash his hands.
"People disappear in Gotham every day. Another thirty-odd bodies would make the piranhas in the waters off Blackgate Penitentiary very happy. Now go get the mop and clean up those muddy footprints you left. Spend tonight keeping your sister company."
Selene looked at the knife handle still quivering faintly in the wall.
A chill shot up her spine to the back of her head, but right behind it came a sense of safety unlike anything she had ever felt.
She said nothing more, turned toward the storage closet in the corner, and picked up the mop.
The Rat Gang?
Selene prayed those idiots would know better than to come to 22 Lake Street looking for death.