Chapter Text
The lighter didn't work.
She shook it. Held it sideways. Tried again. The wheel caught once, spat a pale spark against the rain, and gave up.
Okay, she said, to nobody. Okay, so.
She stood on the pavement outside the building on Kessler Street with a cigarette in her mouth and a duffel bag on her shoulder and a key in her pocket that allegedly opened apartment 4C, which was allegedly on the fourth floor, which assumed the elevator was working, which — looking at the building — was not a given.
Gotham smelled like wet concrete and old money and something underneath both of those things that she didn't have a word for yet. She'd have a word for it eventually. She had a word for everything eventually. It just took her a minute to find the right file.
Home smelled like red clay after rain and the specific sweetness of highway gasoline and her grandmother's porch, which smelled like cigarette smoke and Avon and a kind of patience she had not inherited.
Gotham did not smell like any of that.
She looked up at the building. Seven floors, pre-war brick, a fire escape with one missing bracket that would be somebody's problem eventually, and a pigeon on the second-floor ledge with the expression of a creature that had long since stopped being surprised by anything.
That's us, she told the pigeon.
The pigeon did not respond. Good instincts.
She tried the lighter one more time. Nothing. She put the cigarette behind her ear for later and went inside.
—
The elevator was not working.
She took the stairs.
4C was at the end of a hallway that smelled like carpet cleaner and something underneath the carpet cleaner that the carpet cleaner was working very hard to cover. The key fought the lock for a solid twenty seconds before she figured out it needed to be lifted slightly and turned in the same motion — the kind of thing a landlord should probably mention and didn't, because her landlord was a man who communicated primarily in monosyllables and had handed her the key with the energy of someone deeply relieved a particular transaction was almost over.
She pushed the door open.
Twelve hundred square feet of empty. The windows faced east, which she'd asked for specifically, which meant she'd gotten lucky, which wasn't a framework she was used to thinking in so she filed it and moved on. The floors were wood, real wood, worn the specific way floors got worn when people had actually lived on them for decades. She could see where the previous tenant had stood at the kitchen window — the boards darker there, rubbed smooth — and where they'd crossed the room to the door a thousand times.
She stood in the middle of the empty living room and put the duffel bag down.
Okay, she said, out loud. This is the thing.
The thing was: she'd driven fourteen hours from down South with everything she owned in the back of a rented Civic, which turned out to be everything she owned that fit in a Civic, which turned out to be one duffel bag, two boxes of books, a lamp her grandmother had given her that she'd wrapped in every piece of clothing she owned because she refused to lose it, and a folder on the passenger seat that she'd put her hand on at least thirty times during the drive to make sure it was still there.
The folder was still there.
The folder was the bank job.
She sat down on the floor — her floor, technically — and leaned her back against the wall beneath the east-facing windows and looked at the ceiling.
The ceiling had a crack running from the light fixture to the corner at a very specific diagonal. She looked at it for a while. Started reading it the way she read everything — not what it was, but what it meant. Old building, settling, the crack pre-existing rather than new. Structural but stable. The paint around the fixture was a different shade of white from the rest, which meant someone had patched something at some point, which meant the fixture had once been a problem and wasn't anymore, which meant —
She stopped herself.
You are reading the ceiling of your empty apartment in Gotham City, she said under her breath, at eleven-thirty at night, having driven fourteen hours on a Tuesday in October with your grandmother's lamp wrapped in cargo pants. The ceiling is not giving you notes. Go to sleep.
She didn't go to sleep.
She found the cigarette from behind her ear. Found the lighter in the outer pocket of the duffel bag — not the pocket she'd been checking, a different pocket — and finally, finally got it to work.
She smoked half of it against the wall and looked out the east-facing windows at the Gotham skyline doing what the Gotham skyline did, which was be enormous and grey and lit from underneath by the specific amber of a city that never switched off.
She'd looked at photographs. Neither photograph had been accurate, because photographs of city skylines were always taken from a distance, which flattened them. From here, from inside, from the fourth floor of a building on Kessler Street, the skyline wasn't a postcard. It was a fact. It pressed against the glass. It had weather systems. It was doing something and she couldn't yet tell what, which meant she was paying attention wrong, which meant she needed more data.
She needed to walk around in it.
She put the cigarette out on the windowsill and made a note to buy an ashtray first thing in the morning.
She opened the folder — the paper one, on the floor beside her — and looked at the letterhead again.
Gotham National Bank. Senior Analyst. Start date: Monday, October 4th. Report to: Thomas H. Henson, Branch Manager.
She'd looked up Thomas H. Henson. He had a LinkedIn untouched since 2019 and a face that suggested a man who had decided somewhere along the way that the most reasonable thing to do was accept whatever came next without making too much fuss about it.
She recognized that impulse. She respected it, or she respected the version of it that wasn't giving up, the version that was just — deciding to be present for whatever the next thing was, even when the next thing was unreasonable.
She had not told anyone back home where she was going. Her mother thought she was visiting a friend in another state. Her friend knew she was fine, which was true in the way that things were true when you'd decided they were going to be.
You are thirty-four years old, she told herself. You moved to Gotham City for a bank job. This is a perfectly normal thing that normal people do.
The skyline did not weigh in.
The necklace caught the amber light when she shifted — the thin chain, the small thing at the end of it she never explained and nobody had successfully gotten her to explain, not for want of trying. She put her hand over it once, briefly. The way she did when something was irreversible.
She took her hand away.
She'd figure out what the city smelled like. She'd learn the elevator's schedule, the landlord's monosyllables, the particular rhythm of Kessler Street at two in the morning. She'd find where they kept the good coffee and which streets to avoid and how the light worked in October versus November versus January, which was the worst month in any city that got real winter, which back home did not but Gotham apparently did, aggressively.
She'd figure it out. She was good at figuring things out. It was maybe the one thing she was reliably good at, and she was going to need it here, she could already tell — this city was a puzzle with too many pieces and half of them face-down, and something about that, something about the sheer density of what she didn't yet know, made her feel more awake than she had in a long time.
Okay, Luxi Ronsen said, to the empty apartment and the east-facing windows and the enormous, amber-lit, absolutely unreasonable city pressing against the glass.
Let's see what you've got.