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.
It almost felt like a dream—she'd never managed to catch her father off-guard like this, and she guessed that Paloma wouldn't be expecting her either. It filled her with glee, effervescent bubbles of laughter eager to rush to the surface. They thought she was doing homework in the living room, and here she was, ready to bust their job wide open and stage an intervention.
Paloma and Luis Serrano had been, up until recently, little more than petty thieves. Luis had grown up jacking cars, and the apple didn't fall far from the tree (clearly, Val thought to herself) where Paloma was concerned — she fell in with him at around the same time he got her working at the store after school and on the weekends. They were thick as thieves—literally—and Valerie never got a piece of the action.
She watched from behind a red brick column as her dad watched the CCTV camera carefully, blue light blinking threateningly his way, almost catching his face. As it swung his way, the light flickered red, then blue again, and then red one more time. Finally, it blinked out entirely and the gate swung open.
Her father straightened his coat out, readjusted his tie, and then went in, gate shutting smoothly behind him.
She knew what to expect as she tiptoed across the road, silence muffling every footstep under the blanket of night. The electric hum grew louder as she drew closer, barbed wire much higher than it had looked from the other side of the crosswalk.
Val had practised this move a few times, but never with electricity. She'd tried the jump and touch method on the barbed wire out the back of her apartment block, to no avail, and that wasn't even electrified. The classic middle-aged burglar racing towards retirement technique would have to do.
The rubber blankets her dad sold were on back-order, so the next best thing she managed to snag was a car mat. It was much heavier, and took a long time to stuff into her backpack without bursting out every time she did up the zip, but it was still an alright size for her to hoist over the fence and pray that it didn't dislodge while she climbed.
Her toes fit neatly into the diamonds on the fence, and she stuck one in self-consciously before glancing over her shoulder to check for incoming cars.
Deep breath, Val, she told herself. You have three points of contact—one hand and two feet. Make it count.
The fence was six or so feet tall, excluding the barbed wire on top, and she inhaled, long and slow and deep, through puckered lips before hoisting herself up. It was a smooth motion, and it took her two attempts to really get a feel for it.
The car mat was small but thick, and even though the article she'd read on jumping an electric fence had warned that the rubber wouldn't insulate the voltage entirely, this seemed to do a great job.
She sat perched on top of the car mat for a moment, a little bird whose feathers ruffled and fluttered in the breeze. In part, she savoured the moment, a quiet kind of victory — how many of those stupid kids at school could say they'd scaled an electric fence before? The rest of her mind ran frantic with the gentle beginnings of full-fledged panic. This was quite a drop, and suddenly the feeling that she was on top of the world changed, undergoing rapid metamorphosis. She was too high up.
Valerie froze a moment, contemplating her options. Time was not on her side, and she needed to hurry in case she lost the trail or their plans changed or, worse still, somebody was patrolling the dockyard and spotted her on top of the fence. She was exposed, security cameras or not.
A hiss cut across the lot, bouncing off the skyscrapers of shipping containers and the sounds of Gotham City that felt like they were coming from far away, silenced by water.
"Val!" An urgent whisper.
She turned her head, frantically looking around for the source of the voice. There it was—Paloma Serrano, dressed in all-black, fuming with rage.
Paloma was the picture of beauty—she was soft around the edges, just like her sister, like a portrait from the Nineteenth Century, with striking features and eyes so dark and wide they melted even the coldest onlooker. Her hair, long and fine and normally worn cascading over her shoulder blades, had been hidden under a baseball cap.
She put one hand on her hip, raising her eyebrows at her little sister as if to ask, "Do you really want to do this right now?"
"Hi, Paloma," Val whispered back, a nervous greeting. "What're you doing here?"
Paloma scowled. "Cut the bullshit and get down from there, Nose-Picker. You're going to get us spotted, if you haven't already left a trail of DNA at a fucking crime scene." She looked puzzled, a moment. "And what's with the car mat? I switched the generator off when Pa told me you were behind him."
Val nodded. Sure, she was scared of landing wrong and hurting her leg, but fear of her big sister trumped everything—Paloma could be a real bully when she felt like it. She looked down, imagined herself landing on both feet, knees bent and hip-width apart. Then, she let herself slide from the fence.
Next thing she knew, Val lay in a heap on the ground, face up. The wind flew out of her, and suddenly everything was hot and cold and there was a blinding flash of light in her eyes as she gasped for air.
Paloma crouched over her sister, horrified. She held onto the shoulders of the small girl beneath her, shaking gently. "Oh my god, Val, are you okay?"
Silence permeated the dockyard, broken only by the groan of metal and cement. Nobody breathed—where the hell was Luis? The plan had been to meet at the security tower and go from there. The guard had been...subdued, and the shipment would arrive any moment, now. He needed that uniform.
Paloma had convinced herself that her little sister was dead. In her defence, so had her little sister. She squatted over the young, broken thing, tears rolling down her face.
A gasp of air shocked her, and there was Val, bright-eyed and blood-stained and breathless, lying on the ground. "I'm okay," She squeaked, raising her hands to fend off a smack from Paloma. "Just...bad landing."
This was the first of many Almost Deaths for Valerie Serrano, the first night of the rest of her life.
Paloma, now, was outraged. "What the fuck, Val?" She asked, emotion thickening her voice. "I thought you fucking...you...do you have a death wish or something? Is that what this is?"
Val laughed, then, a breathless chuckle, and pushed herself up with her right arm, using the left to wipe blood from her face. When her hand dropped, her sister saw, under the fluorescent floodlights that cast harsh, blue light over corners of the dockyard, that she was grinning, teeth white and crimson with more blood.
If she hadn't been little Valerie with the wide eyes and big smile she might have been very frightening. Unsettling in the half-dark, white and red and caramel stained grey. Paloma's heart ached a moment.
Val thought about her sister's question. She told her matter-of-factly, "Maybe I do."
author's note prologue?!??! this takes place a few years before the events of the story when val is a lil baby!! didn't want to give too much away because her character is best described as...shrouded in mystery lol
also this is not how val becomes a vigilante, there's more to her story/abilities!! wouldn't draw conclusions just yet....