Catwoman: Soulstealer (DC Icons #3)(86)

Natural selection.

The words had sunk into Selina’s brain. Burned there.

Perhaps you should go back into training, if such sentiments are still a concern to you, Nyssa had mused.

Selina let her face become cold, heard herself speak the distant, formal words that convinced Nyssa such a thing was unnecessary, that she accepted Nyssa’s decision.

Then she had planned. With every hateful word out of Nyssa’s mouth, she’d planned.

She remembered that scientist’s password, his directions.

How to access the formula. How to steal it.

She had killed him. For this woman—this League.

And she would make up for it. To save Maggie and to honor the dying man’s wishes.

No, it would not fall into the wrong hands.

Selina slid back into the obedient, quiet role they expected of her. Went on enough successful missions that Nyssa seemed to forget about her request. And the night before she was to leave on another mission…

She slipped into that lab. And she stole every file and note. All of it, everything the scientist and his partners had discovered, downloaded onto her flash drive, then deleted from Nyssa’s own. Deleted from Talia’s files, the League backups.

A few more commands had her gaining entry to Nyssa’s bank accounts. Moving huge amounts of cash into a new Swiss account that she’d established on her last mission.

Money to start with. To get access to what she needed.

She left at dawn, right out the front door.

But not before she trashed the Pit. The scientist’s files had shown her how to do that, too.

Part of her wished she could see the look on Nyssa’s face when she entered that underground lab and found the pool to be dead. Forever.

Selina was long gone by the time Nyssa did. She knew, though, that they’d find her sooner or later. That Nyssa and Talia would use their usual methods to hunt her down.

So she’d come to Gotham City. Not because it had once been her home, but because it was the one place where a young, brilliant biochemist was an eco-vigilante by night.

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.