The League had been keeping tabs on Poison Ivy, debating whether to recruit her. Nyssa wanted her for the Lazarus project.
Selina wanted Ivy to save her sister.
Worried whispers sounded down the hospital hall, and Selina slipped inside Maggie’s room, shutting the door. Her sister’s parents didn’t stir. Maggie remained unconscious, breathing labored.
Selina’s hands shook with every step closer to that bed, longing and terror knifelike in her chest.
Every question she had asked Ivy about ley lines…All of them were open gaps left by the scientists working on the Lazarus Pits, the ley lines on which the pools naturally occurred. Ivy had unknowingly filled them in. Just as she’d unknowingly helped steal those same chemicals the other night.
Some had been used to make explosives, yes. But neither Harley nor Ivy nor the GCPD had asked what happened to the semitruck containing the rest of the items Selina had demanded they take.
The chemicals inside, all needed to create a Pit from scratch. Right on that ley line outside the city.
She’d been so good to her source at the paper with her Catwoman tips and photos. They hadn’t voiced any questions when their anonymous benefactor asked that they indulge her request for an interest piece on ley lines in the paper. A conversation starter—a way to make sure Ivy didn’t question Selina’s sudden interest when she asked her about them that night on the roof.
She regretted none of it. Using Harley and Ivy. Lying to them every step of the way.
None of it.
Selina crept up to Maggie’s bedside. Her skin was sallow, her lips too pale beneath the breathing mask.
She carefully sent out a low electromagnetic pulse through her suit that rendered the machines and monitors silent and dead.
Gently, she slipped the IV from Maggie’s arm, the breathing apparatus from her slender face, and scooped her sister into her arms.
She was light. So thin.
Selina hefted her sister over a shoulder in a fireman’s carry, her free hand opening the door for them to slip out. Again, Maggie’s parents didn’t stir, and Selina didn’t look back as she shut the door behind her.
The hospital halls were deserted.
Save for a woman at the desk by the elevator.
Selina remembered her. The pinched, overworked, hateful face of the receptionist.
It was pale with fear and shock as she watched Selina stalk by, Maggie over her shoulder. “Y-you can’t—”
Selina’s steps didn’t falter as she passed. “I can.”
The woman got a good look at her face. Her face, and Maggie’s.
Recognition flared there.
The woman reached for the phone on her desk.
“Go ahead,” Selina said as she reached the stairwell doors. “Call them.”
She didn’t wait to see what the woman did as she kicked open the metal door.
The stairs were chaos. Doctors and nurses and patients and families rushed up and down, desperate to escape the bedlam in the streets.
The last piece of her plan: utter chaos in Gotham City to cover her tracks when she made her move. Courtesy of Arkham Asylum being sprung open by the League of Assassins.
Selina kept a hand free to hold any frantic people at bay as she hurried down the concrete stairwell to the ground level.
She had to move quickly.
Off the machines, Maggie’s lungs might not be able to last long. It was forty-five minutes to the old factory atop the ley line and the Pit she’d built beneath it.
“Hold on,” Selina breathed over the shouting in the stairwell. “Hold on.”
The seven Leopards there were wide-eyed as she came barreling out the back door into the alley. The street beyond was filled with smoke and darting figures. There was already blood dripping off the bat of one of the Leopards at the door—an unconscious man in Arkham white sprawled on the pavement a few feet away.
The Leopards sized up Selina, Maggie draped over her shoulder, and one of them pointed to the street in the opposite direction. “We kept it quiet that way for you.”
Gratitude crushing her chest, squeezing the breath from her, Selina could only manage a nod.
The Leopards would remain, guarding the hospital, until the GCPD had the city under control again. Mika had sworn it.
She didn’t have the words to voice her gratitude for that, either. For the remnant of home that had come when asked.
Selina started for the clear street beyond, keeping her jog as even as possible to avoid disturbing Maggie. She’d stashed her Mercedes a few blocks away days ago, waiting for this.