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Late night in Gotham.
The wind carried a persistent scent of rust and the musty stench of rising sewage.
The two smells blended together, mirroring the city itself: a core of corruption beneath a rusted skin.
Cole Vance crouched atop a rusted drainpipe.
The sandwich he had spent actual money on this morning had long since vanished, and it was currently engaged in a friendly, abrasive friction against his stomach lining.
Where did he get the money?
Is your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man not allowed to pick up a few stray bills while swinging around?
Do people realize how much loose change flutters away in the wind when bank robbers or armed convenience store thugs stuff their loot into those raggedy sacks?
Cole looked down and tried to fire a strand of webbing.
The shot emerged from his wrist with a half-hearted lack of conviction, drooping over the wall like an overcooked noodle.
Severe protein deficiency; even his superpowers were starting to cut corners.
*Cold-hearted programming,* he cursed inwardly.
*Even capitalism isn’t this realistic.*
*I hate Social Darwinism.*
A sound echoed from the depths of the alley.
It wasn’t a scream.
He was used to the screams of Gotham.
The screams of the robbed were short; the screams of brawlers were laced with profanity; the screams of those paying protection money sounded like resignation.
This sound was different.
It was a suppressed sound, muffled in the throat—the kind of noise a small animal makes when its neck is stepped on.
Cole’s ears twitched.
The sound made his skin crawl, like nails on a chalkboard or biting into a grain of sand.
He slipped silently off the drainpipe.
In the distance, a streetlamp was half-broken, sputtering sparks.
In the flickering light, a burly man in a grimy leather jacket had a small figure pinned against a brick wall.
It was a girl.
Twelve or thirteen years old, her mouth stuffed with a filthy rag.
Her eyes were wide, but there were no tears in them.
She looked as if she had accepted her fate.
The man’s hand gripped her waistband brutally, while the other pressed the back of her head, slamming her face hard against the cold red brick.
Cole didn’t waste words.
He lunged forward in a single bound, seizing the man’s nape with his right hand and twisting the other arm behind his back.
The sound of a joint dislocating was as clean as a dry twig snapping.
Driving his knee into the small of the man’s back and pressing down, he sent two hundred pounds of fat crashing into the muddy slush on the ground, splashing up a spray of oil-slicked filth.
The entire sequence took less than two seconds.
Perfect, stylish, and practiced.
The man’s face bubbled in the mud.
Cole was about to deliver a follow-up kick to ensure the guy’s lower half was permanently disabled when—
“Stop hitting him!”
A scream rang out.
Cole’s toe stopped mid-air.
The girl sat slumped in the corner of the wall, frantically pulling the rag from her mouth and gasping for air.
She didn’t run.
Instead, she scrambled toward him on all fours, but she wasn’t rushing toward Little Spidey, her savior.
The girl dove toward the man pinned in the mud.
Her thin, skeletal hand reached precisely into the man’s jacket pocket and fished out a crumpled roll of bills stained with unknown grime.
She gripped that money tightly, as if it were the only rope left in the entire universe to hold onto.
Only then did she retreat.
“He was giving me money,” her voice trembled like a sieve, but there was a desperate edge to her words, the sound of someone who had pushed all her chips onto the table.
“Don’t hit him.
We…
we had an agreement.
I need the money.”
Cole withdrew his foot.
He stood there, looking at the roll of bills in the girl’s hand—crumpled, the edges softened by sweat, stained with mud and something he didn’t want to identify.
Then he looked at the man grimacing on the ground.
He looked familiar; he seemed to have seen this guy selling enhancers nearby before.
Finally, his gaze landed on the vivid purple bruise on the corner of the girl’s mouth.
This wasn’t a robbery.
Nor was it a simple assault.
This was a transaction.
In Gotham, a perfectly normal transaction.
Cole hauled the man up from the mud, ripped off his leather belt, and skillfully bound the man’s fat hands behind his back with spider-silk.
He crouched before the girl, bringing his line of sight level with hers. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“Tell me exactly what’s going on.”
The girl’s knuckles were white, her nails digging into her palms.
Tears pooled in her eyes, but she refused to let them fall.
She began to speak, her voice flat, as if she were reciting a supermarket discount list.
Father.
The docks.
Cargo containers.
A broken leg.
The docks didn’t care, because a temp worker in Gotham was worth less than a blade of grass.
Insurance was for the white-collar workers in Wayne Tower; workers’ compensation was for those with contracts.
Temp workers had nothing; they weren’t even considered “people.”
Infected wound.
A fever that wouldn’t break.
The registration fee at a legitimate hospital was enough to feed the father and daughter for a month.
The ER nurses had taken one look at their clothes and told them to pay a deposit.
Five thousand dollars.
Neither of them had ever seen what five thousand dollars looked like in their entire lives.
Small clinics wouldn’t take them.
Unlicensed back-alley doctors were shrewder than anyone; they knew that treating a poor person with a severe infection was a losing game.
If the patient died on the table, the doctor would still have to pay for the shroud.
Black market antibiotics were more expensive than gold because the gangs controlled the entire supply.
The only thing they could afford were the cheapest painkillers.
Not to cure the illness, but to make her father scream less.
So they wouldn’t disturb the “neighbors.”
As the girl reached this point, she actually smiled.
On her swollen face, the curve of her lips was uglier than a sob, like a piece of crumpled paper trying to flatten itself.
The church.
The priest.
God loves all mankind.
But God doesn’t dispense amoxicillin.
The police.
When the police came to this district, they brought guns, not medicine.