The Ducati eased under the Chinatown gate and stopped.
Will climbed off and rubbed his face.
There had been one helmet. He had been on the back. For six blocks of Gotham at night, Selina's blonde wig — the civilian one, not the combat one — had been expressing itself freely in the headwind directly against his face. It didn't hurt, exactly. But it wasn't comfortable, and it was relentless, and he'd spent the last four minutes accepting whatever was happening to his nose with the resignation of a man who had used up his allotted outrage for the week.
Selina pulled her helmet off and watched him with a half-composed expression.
"I could get a second helmet."
"Unnecessary," Will said. "I won't be riding often."
She accepted this with the slight smile of someone who had registered the deflection and was choosing to let it stand.
They walked into Chinatown.
The street opened up around them — lantern-style lights strung between buildings, the smell of something frying somewhere above them, characters on every sign overlapping with their English translations like a conversation happening in two languages at once. Will's pace changed. He hadn't registered it himself until Selina did.
Selina moved toward the nearest restaurant with a red sign and a lit menu board.
He caught up and redirected without touching her.
"Not that one."
"It smells fine."
"All Blessings Restaurant," Will read. "'Butter noodles' on the board." He looked at her. "Which Chinese grandmother taught a restaurant to make butter noodles? That name, this menu — this is American-Chinese. ABC-run at best, Southeast Asian at worst, designed specifically for people who have never eaten the real thing."
Selina turned to look at him with the expression of someone cataloguing new data.
"So you know Chinese food."
"I know Chinese food."
"How do you know which places are real?"
"By who's eating."
He found what he was looking for two blocks in — a narrow storefront, hand-lettered sign above the door reading CHUNFANG DUMPLING HOUSE in both characters and English, the English portion added as an apparent afterthought. Inside: twelve tables, most of them full, the walls pale yellow with a calendar from two years ago still hanging near the kitchen, a small shrine in the back corner with a stick of incense that had burned down to a stub.
Every face in the room was East Asian. Workers in site clothing ate next to men in loosened office shirts. A table of four women were splitting something from a shared plate and talking over each other.
Will held the door.
Selina walked in, registered the room, and felt the temperature change — not hostile, but cool, the specific quality of a community that had learned to maintain a perimeter.
They sat.
The owner came out of the kitchen: mid-fifties, hair pulled back, apron dark at the hem. She looked at them both with the assessment of someone deciding whether this was going to require effort, and addressed Selina first in clipped English.
"What can I help you."
Will answered.
He answered in Mandarin, with the particular tonal coloring of someone who'd grown up speaking a northern regional variety and never fully flattened it out of the standard, asking for two large portions of pork and scallion.
The woman's face changed.
Not dramatically — a loosening, more than anything. The math being revised.
"Goodness," she said, in Mandarin now. "Where'd you learn it? That's pretty clean."
"Twenty-some years," Will said. "It better be."
The table nearest them had looked up. Two others had followed. The coolness in the room didn't disappear exactly, but it stepped back, replaced by something more interested.
Selina leaned toward him across the table as the owner retreated to the kitchen.
"What just happened? Two minutes ago I felt like they wanted us to leave."
"Cultural recognition," Will said. "Speaking someone's language is one way of saying you've taken it seriously. This is a people that's been open to the world for most of its history, but the world has not always been kind in return. The markers are still there. Once you demonstrate you're not treating it as a backdrop — that shifts."
Selina considered this.
"That's very specific," she said.
"History leaves specific marks."
She looked at him the way she'd been looking at him, on and off, since the sewer — the cataloguing look, the one that meant she was still working on the classification.
The dumplings arrived in two wide bowls, water-boiled, in their own steam, nine to a portion. Will poured a small amount of black vinegar into the dipping dish, peeled two cloves of garlic from the dish on the table, and ate them.
"Garlic," Selina observed.
"Advanced method. Do you want—"
She shook her head with a clarity that suggested this would not be a recurring conversation.
Will picked up the first dumpling, dipped it, and put it in his mouth.
The garlic had already cleared his palate. Then: the skin — thin, the right side of translucent, properly boiled so it had give without going to paste — and then the filling, pork and scallion in the ratio that someone who'd grown up eating these had calibrated over decades, the fat rendering slightly in the hot liquid, the scallion doing what scallion does when it's been enclosed in heat.
He stopped chewing for a moment.
He chewed again, slowly.
His eyes closed most of the way.
Three months of Gotham food — adequate, edible, completely without this. He hadn't known how much he'd been missing it until it was there.
Selina watched him from across the table, spoon halfway to her mouth, arrested by the expression on his face. He looked like someone who had remembered something he'd forgotten he was allowed to want.
She ate her first dumpling.
She chewed. Set the spoon down. Looked at the bowl.
Ate another.
"Alright," she said. "You weren't exaggerating."
Will's eyes had opened, narrowed to the comfortable expression of someone processing something excellent.
"This is the taste," he said, to no one in particular.
The shrine in the corner put a soft light against the wall. Will was framed by it from Selina's angle — backlit, completely unbothered, eating dumplings with garlic and vinegar in a Chinatown restaurant at nine in the evening as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
She laughed, sudden and genuine.
"What?" Will said.
"Nothing. You're just — nothing."
They came out into the warm evening full.
The owner called after them from the doorway — "Come back sometime, young man" — and Will waved back.
Selina watched him.
She'd been thinking about it through dinner: the way he moved through spaces. The sewer, Maroni's casino, Falcone's table — he'd been reading every room, managing every variable, making the right call under pressure with consistent accuracy. And then he'd walked into a Chinatown dumpling restaurant and spent twenty minutes visibly ascending.
It wasn't a contradiction. It was the same person, fully present in completely different registers.
"Come up for coffee," she said. "Or something."
Will opened his mouth.
The reasoning assembled itself neatly: Falcone was her biological father. Will's goal required eventually moving against Falcone. Whatever Selina's stated intentions were, blood ran complicated when the moment of actual decision arrived. He was a small player with no margin for misplaced trust. He should decline.
"Sure," he said.
He stood there for a moment.
That had not been what he'd intended to say.
He looked at his hand, as if it had done something independently. It hadn't. He'd said yes with his mouth, without any clear decision to do so, the way you sometimes realize you've already stood up before consciously deciding to stand.
He sat on the bike.
He considered this.
At the casino, the night of the massacre, something had redirected him to Oswald's table. He'd thought about it since — the specific quality of that compulsion, like a nudge from inside rather than a decision. He'd filed it under stress response and moved on.
He reached into his jacket now, inner pocket, where the ruined comic had been before the sewer water took it.
His fingers found something.
He drew it out.
A comic book, moderately worn, spine creased from a previous reading, the cover soft from humidity. A coffee stain along the bottom edge, like it had been sitting on a desk somewhere.
New. Or rather: refreshed.
He turned it over in his hands.
The sewer had destroyed the last one. He had not replaced it. There was nothing in any of his pockets that could have become this.
He understood the mechanic now, or at least part of it: the comic reloaded when a new node was incoming. The narrative had a shape, and at certain junctures it provided the next installment of the script.
Whatever Selina's apartment held — whatever was waiting on the other side of his inexplicable sure — it was on the page somewhere.
He tucked the comic back into the inner pocket.
"Ready?" Selina asked, helmet already on.
Will looked at the gate of Chinatown, at the lantern light on the wet street, at the city extending beyond it in every direction with all of its weight and history and unremediated problems.
"Ready," he said.
The engine turned over.