Friday, December 5th, 2008, 22:45
New Jersey
Gotham City
East End Rooftops
Three weeks of Gotham Academy had given Malik a new appreciation for how exhausting normal teenage life could be. But when Selina woke him at half past ten on a Friday night, dressed in dark clothes that weren't quite her Catwoman costume but weren't civilian wear either, he realized his education was about to expand in directions the academy didn't cover.
"Time for a different kind of lesson," she said, tossing him a pair of black sweat pants and a dark hoodie. "Get dressed. Quietly."
Malik pulled on the clothes, his mind still fuzzy with sleep. "Where are we going?"
"Up." Selina moved to the window and opened it, letting in a rush of cold December air that made him fully awake in seconds. "Your balance is good, but you need to learn how to move without thinking about it. How to make your body do what your mind needs it to do."
The fire escape outside his bedroom window had become familiar over the past month, but tonight it felt different. Selina moved up the metal stairs with the fluid grace of someone who treated vertical surfaces like highways, and Malik found himself working harder than usual to keep up.
"The thing about this city," Selina said as they climbed toward the roof, "is that it's really three cities stacked on top of each other. There's street level, where most people live their lives. There's underground, where the real ugly business happens. And then there's up here."
They reached the roof, and Gotham spread out below them like a circuit board made of light and shadow. The view from Selina's apartment was impressive, but this was different. Up here, the city felt alive in a way that was impossible to sense from behind glass.
"Up here is where you can see the patterns," Selina continued, walking to the edge of the building with the casual confidence of someone who'd never met a height that frightened her. "Watch."
She pointed toward a cluster of expensive cars parked outside a warehouse six blocks away. "What do you see?"
Malik squinted into the distance, trying to make sense of what she was showing him. "Cars?"
"Look deeper. What kind of cars? Where are they parked? What does the body language of the people around them tell you?"
He focused harder, applying the people-reading skills his mother had taught him when she'd explained how audiences worked at the circus. The cars were expensive but not flashy, the kind of vehicles that suggested serious money without advertising it. The people moving around them kept checking their watches and looking over their shoulders.
"They're nervous," he said. "And they're waiting for something."
"Good. What else?"
"The cars are positioned for quick exits. And there's someone watching from the building across the street." Malik felt a flush of pride when Selina nodded approvingly.
"Very good. You're seeing the chess board, not just the pieces." She moved away from the edge, walking toward the next building. "Now let's see if you can move across it."
The gap between buildings was maybe six feet, easily jumpable for someone with Selina's athletic ability. For Malik, it looked like a very good way to end up as street pizza.
"I can't make that jump."
"Not yet. But you can learn." Selina demonstrated the movement slowly, showing him how she shifted her weight, how she used her whole body to generate momentum. "It's not about strength. It's about understanding physics and trusting yourself."
She made the jump look effortless, landing on the adjacent roof with barely a sound. Then she turned and looked at him expectantly.
"You're insane," Malik called across the gap.
"Probably. But I'm also alive, which is more than I can say for people who don't take risks." Selina's voice carried across the distance between them. "Your mother was an acrobat, right? That means you've got the genetics for this. You just need to believe it."
The mention of his mother hit something deep inside Malik's chest. Joan Anderson had walked tightropes and flipped through the air like gravity was just a suggestion, not a law. She'd told him stories about learning to trust his body, about how fear was just another obstacle to overcome.
Malik backed up to give himself a running start, his heart hammering against his ribs. The gap looked enormous, but Selina was right about one thing: his mother's blood ran in his veins. If she could dance through the air in a circus tent, maybe he could manage one stupid jump between buildings.
He ran forward and leaped, his body following instincts he didn't know he possessed. For a moment he was flying, suspended between buildings with nothing but cold air and city lights below him. Then his feet hit the adjacent roof and he stumbled forward, catching himself before he face-planted into the gravel.
"Not bad for a first try," Selina said, steadying him with a hand on his shoulder. "Your form needs work, but you've got natural timing. That's something you can't teach."
They spent the next two hours moving across the rooftops of the East End, Selina pointing out details that Malik had never noticed from street level. How to read the rhythm of foot traffic below. Which windows showed signs of recent forced entry. How to identify police surveillance patterns by watching where patrol cars didn't go.
"The city tells you everything you need to know if you learn how to listen," she said as they paused on a roof overlooking Crime Alley. "Most people only see what's directly in front of them. But up here, you can see the bigger picture."
"Is this what you do when you leave at night?" Malik asked.
Selina glanced at him, her expression unreadable in the dim light from the street below. "Among other things."
"Are you training me to do it too?"
"I'm training you to survive. How you use those skills is up to you." She started walking toward the fire escape that would take them back down to street level. "But Malik, there's something you should understand about the path I'm showing you."
"What?"
"Once you start seeing the city this way, you can't unsee it. Once you know how to move through shadows and read people's secrets, you'll always be aware of the darkness that exists just underneath the surface of normal life." Selina paused at the top of the fire escape, looking back at him. "That knowledge changes you. Makes it harder to be satisfied with ordinary things."
Malik thought about Brandon Thorne and his crew at Gotham Academy, how their problems seemed so small compared to the real dangers he'd witnessed on the streets. How sitting in calculus class felt like playacting when he knew there were people out there planning crimes and others planning to stop them.
"Maybe I'm already changed," he said. Thinking back to his parents being shot dead.
"Yeah, maybe you are." Selina smiled, but there was sadness in it. "Come on. Let's get you home. You've got school tomorrow, and maintaining your cover is just as important as learning these skills."
The climb down was easier than the trip up, muscle memory already adapting to the rhythm of fire escape navigation. By the time they reached Selina's apartment window, Malik felt energized rather than tired, his body humming with the satisfaction of successfully completing challenges he'd never imagined attempting.
"Get some sleep," Selina said as they climbed back through the window. "And think about what you saw tonight. Real observation isn't just about looking. It's about understanding what you're seeing and what it means."
Malik nodded and headed toward his room, but paused in the doorway. "Selina?"
"Yeah?"
"My mom used to say that performing was about reading the audience, understanding what they needed from her. Is this the same thing?"
"It's exactly the same thing. Except instead of entertaining people, you're surviving them." Selina settled into her chair with a cup of tea, looking suddenly older than her years. "Your mother sounds like she was a smart ass woman."
"She was." Malik hesitated, then asked the question that had been building in his mind all evening. "Are you going out again tonight?"
"Probably."
"The costume kind of going out?"
Selina's smile was sharp and knowing. "The kind of going out that pays for apartments in the Fashion District and Gotham Academy tuition."
She didn't say more, but Malik understood. The rooftop training, the observation lessons, the way she moved through the city like she owned it, it was all connected to whatever she did in the hours between midnight and dawn. And somehow, whether he'd meant to or not, he was becoming part of that world.
As he lay in bed listening to the sounds of Gotham settling into its nighttime rhythm, Malik thought about patterns and chess boards and the way the city looked from above. His mind automatically catalogued everything Selina had shown him, filing away details that might be important later.
He was getting good at seeing connections others missed, at understanding how seemingly unrelated pieces fit together into larger pictures. It was the same skill that helped him solve calculus problems quickly, the same instinct that let him read Brandon Thorne's insecurities and Becca's hidden strength.
His mother had called it intuition, but Malik was starting to understand it was something more than that. It was intelligence, but not the kind that came from textbooks. It was the ability to process multiple streams of information simultaneously and extract meaning from chaos.
And judging by the approving way Selina watched him work through problems, it was exactly the kind of intelligence she'd been looking for when she decided to take him in.