Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
PROLOGUE. ALMOST DEATHS
HER NOSE WAS bleeding again. Her dad had used some of the money in the cash register to take her to the doctor just the other day. They'd ruled it normal, run of the mill coming-of-age behaviour that often afflicted the young. Nosepicker bleeds, the doctor had called it, laughing like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard.
It didn't matter now, anyway. She cupped a hand over her nose, a small and strong thing in the centre of a small and strong face, and kept walking, eyes bouncing between her feet on the ground and the figure in front of her. She'd been watching them for weeks, taking note of their movements, their weaknesses, their strengths. By now she knew them like the back of her hand, and one wrong scrape of the soles of her beat-up sneakers against the pavement would give her away. Just like that, weeks of work gone to waste.
So she kept silent, stuck close to the wall whenever she could. When the shadowy man slowed his walk, she slowed hers. When he turned around at a busy crosswalk, she ducked into the nearest alleyway. Quick on her feet, not from practise (she had never been very good at sustained effort) but from natural skill. She had nothing if it didn't come naturally to her.
The girl was a small thing, plump around the edges and rosy cheeked, olive skin and dark, tired eyes, messy hair bullied into being pinned above her head. Fifteen years old and she already knew things that other children die not knowing. Maybe it would kill her, one day, all this knowledge.
Maybe not. She stuffed her hands into the pocket of her hoodie, ducked her head low and sped up her pace a little. They were about to reach the dockyard. This was what she had prepared for.
Her father owned a hardware store not far from here, in Gotham's East End. A rough neighbourhood, sure, but he had good, regular customers and didn't ask a lot of questions about them. That was enough to keep them afloat, of course, until...well, until Gotham City reminded him where exactly he was.
The dockyard was on the far end of the place she called home. She knew what happened there, even though her source of intel was little more than whispers she heard across the schoolyard, gazes shifting as they murmured tall tales of afternoon cigarettes and kisses snuck there. It was so strange to her how easily kids went to hook up at the same spots where they knew murders happened, where organised crime syndicates ran wild. Human nature, she guessed—fear was the greatest aphrodisiac where hormones were involved.
