Will had spent the last hour lying on his back staring at the ceiling.
The mold up there had spread into an irregular shape — blotchy, asymmetric, the kind of pattern that suggested different things depending on how long you looked at it. Right now it looked like his current situation, which was: three days, no leads, one unconscious crime boss in a hospital bed down the hall, and a laboratory he had to find before Maroni decided the three days were already up.
Strange wouldn't wait around. A man who'd just massacred a casino full of people and mailed the laundered proceeds back to his creditor wasn't going to sit in his laboratory and let the city find him. He'd already be gone. The question was where.
The Senate was quiet in a way it had never been before. The man across the hall who ran his radio until midnight every night without exception — gone. The couple two doors down who argued in rotating shifts — gone. The entire building was empty except for Will, and the faucet at the end of the corridor dripped into that emptiness with a slow, patient regularity that was somehow worse than all the noise had been.
Think. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. What would Batman do.
He lay there with that thought and felt it fold under its own weight.
Batman would have the tools. The network of informants spread through every alley and shelter in the city. The facility, the equipment, the money, the two decades of preparation. Bruce Wayne had built an entire architecture of capability before he'd ever put on the mask.
Will had a comic book that updated itself and a broken-jaw crime boss who was currently sedated four floors away.
He pulled the pillow over his face.
Something tapped the window.
He ignored it. Fifth floor — whatever it was, it would stop.
It tapped again. Then the pillow was yanked off his face.
"Miss me?"
Selina sat at the foot of the bed with one leg crossed over the other, looking at him the way a cat looks at something it's considering batting off a shelf. The mask was gone — she hadn't bothered with it. She'd pushed her silver-grey hair back behind her ears and her eyes in the lamplight were a very clear, very direct blue.
"How did you—"
"Fire escape. It goes higher than people think." She tilted her head. "You still owe me an answer."
Will sat up slowly.
He'd been turning this over since she'd left the alley. The timing of her appearance at the casino hadn't been random — Selina Kyle didn't end up in a mark's wardrobe by accident. There was a version of the story, one he half-remembered, where Catwoman's whole architecture of theft and controlled chaos traced back to a single origin point: Falcone. A daughter he'd abandoned. A mother left with nothing.
He decided to test it.
"You're doing this to hurt your father," Will said. "Falcone. Your mother's dead and you want to burn down everything he built."
Selina went completely still.
It lasted about two seconds. Then she pressed both hands over her face and breathed out, long and slow, like something had physically struck her.
"I haven't told Holly that," she said, mostly to herself. "I haven't told anyone that."
She sat with it for a moment, working through whatever it was doing to her internally. When she looked up, the calculation in her face had sharpened.
"Alright. What do you want?"
"The same thing you want." Will kept his voice even. "Falcone's operation comes down. We can help each other."
It was a lie, and not a small one. His actual priority was finding Hugo Strange's money, retrieving Oswald from Maroni's effective custody, and surviving the next seventy-two hours without being beaten with a decorative cane. Falcone was a problem for another chapter.
But Will had spent three months among people who lied for professional reasons, and he'd absorbed the craft of it. He said it with his shoulders relaxed and his eyes steady and his breathing exactly where it should be. Nothing in his body flagged it.
Selina studied him.
She'd arrived tonight with one objective — get her answer and leave. What she hadn't expected was for the man to know her origin before she'd told it to him, to have predicted the casino massacre, to apparently have been running intelligence on Falcone's personal connections. That kind of information infrastructure didn't come from nowhere.
She didn't fully trust him. She wasn't going to — not on one conversation.
But trust wasn't the same as utility.
She uncrossed her legs and placed both hands on the mattress, shifting forward in one slow, continuous motion the way certain animals move when they want to establish that they could close the distance before you'd processed the decision.
Will tracked the movement and did not move.
"What are you—"
She pushed him flat against the headboard. Close — close enough that he could see three or four faint freckles across her left cheekbone that the low light had hidden before.
His hands found the bed frame and held it.
"I want to work with you," she said. One fingertip traced a line from his forehead down to his throat, the leather of her glove catching slightly on his jaw. "But I don't work with people I don't know. So." The claw at the tip of the glove rested lightly at the hollow of his neck. "Honest answer. Or the other kind. Pick one."
Will had prepared for this.
Not because he'd expected the particular delivery — he hadn't — but because the moment her expression had shifted in the alley, when the seduction hadn't landed and she'd reached for her claws instead, he'd understood that the information imbalance was going to become a problem. He'd spent the intervening time building a story that would hold up to reasonable scrutiny.
The version he gave her: a merchant family, Gotham-born, dismantled by the families over a decade ago. He'd spent years working his way into low-level positions across different organizations — the Romans, a couple of smaller crews, a few contacts in the department — accumulating enough pieces to eventually move against the people responsible. Falcone's network was part of it. That was how he'd known Selina's face — he'd mapped Falcone's relationships, legitimate and otherwise, and she'd appeared in the edges of that research.
Selina listened without expression.
When he finished, she leaned back.
"That explains it," she said, after a moment. Something in her posture had released.
"So what's your answer? About working together."
She looked at him for a moment more.
Then she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his forehead — brief, light, deliberate — and was off the bed in one motion, back at the window before he'd fully processed what had happened.
The window pushed open. Night air moved into the room, carrying the city's particular mixture of river and exhaust and something faintly chemical. Her silver hair lifted in it.
"Goodbye, mysterious man. When you need me, I'll turn up."
"I need you right now."
She was halfway over the sill. Her foot slipped on the frame and she grabbed the window catch with both hands, five floors of open air directly below her.
"You—" She pulled herself back in, one knee on the sill, teeth set. "That was nearly a murder."
"I'll get you a beer," Will said. "Come to the roof."
They sat on the building's flat top with their legs hanging over the edge, the lower East Side laid out below them in its usual state of managed deterioration. Will had brought two bottles from Oswald's refrigerator — a liberty Oswald would either understand or wouldn't, depending on the jaw situation.
"You have an opener?" Selina looked at the bottle.
"Don't need one."
He put the cap to his back teeth and levered it off with a quick twist. The carbonation vented with a clean pop and the cap dropped away into the dark below. He handed her the bottle.
She took it with a look that was reassessing something.
The foam rose and settled. The smell of it — cold wheat and fermentation — moved between them in the night air.
Selina turned the bottle slowly in her hands, watching him from the corner of her eye. The features were good, she noted with the detached efficiency of someone who'd spent years using beauty as a tool and had developed exacting standards in the process. Strong nose, deep-set eyes, the kind of bone structure that would look better with a few more nights of sleep. He'd brought wine to a work conversation. Unintentional, probably. Still.
She drank and waited.
"Maroni's given me three days to recover the stolen money," Will said. "I need help finding where Strange moved the laboratory."
Just that. She felt a small, specific disappointment that she chose not to examine.
Then he mentioned the amount.
"Five million," she said.
"Give or take."
She held the bottle against her knee and looked out over the rooftops. "Where do you start?"
"The storm drains." He'd worked through it while she was climbing the fire escape, and the logic held: the bio-humans had come up through the sewer system, which meant they moved through it, which meant Strange had set up somewhere accessible from below. A man who kept three large, dangerous, lab-grown creatures needed them close. You don't relocate far from your own security.
"There's a real possibility we run into one of them down there," he added. "I want to be clear about that before you agree."
Selina tilted the bottle back and drank the rest of it in one long pull.
She set the empty down on the ledge.
"We're wasting time," she said, and stood.