“Do cats eat bats?” Selina murmured under her breath as she strolled aimlessly down the sidewalk. “Do cats…eat bats? Hmm. Do bats—do cats eat—bats.” She stopped in her tracks. “Do bats eat cats?”

It had been years since she had read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It had been on her bookshelf when she was a little girl, but she hadn’t been much interested in reading it. She had been too active to care about stories. But she remembered the Cheshire Cat, teasing silly little Alice, her mother’s voice in the dark between awake and asleep, stretching the words out with supreme felinity. She remembered Alice and Dinah. And she remembered the Mad Hatter.

Yes, the Mad Hatter. She remembered the picture of a funny-looking little man in a top hat.

And she remembered that same picture from the paper. It hadn’t really clicked with her at first, the connection between that sad-looking WayneTech employee and the silly man in the story that had made her giggle when she was just a little girl.

But now…now she remembered. And she knew exactly where to find him, too.

Tenniel Gardens, the Powers-That-Be's latest attempt at making Gotham City into a Nice Place to Live, was all the way on the other side of town, not far from Arkham Asylum. Selina had never been there, but she had heard it was a nice little place, crammed with statues and hedge sculptures of all the characters from Wonderland. If it had been around ten years ago, she would have begged her mother to take her there. She had never gotten around to teaching her sister to climb a tree; Maggie was the one who would always rather be sitting at home with a book. Maybe in Wonderland, they would have finally found their common ground.

On the tram, hurtling along at blistering speeds among the highest rooftops of Gotham City, Selina stared at the empty seats and saw the ghosts of her childhood, a pretty, dark-eyed woman, a sweet-faced child with a smile that showed the purple bands on her braces, a coltish girl only just willing to sit still because of the box of kittens on her lap. She blinked and they were gone.

But the dilapidated cardboard box was still there. Meowing.

Selina got up to investigate. She had this car all to herself; no one took the tram anymore. What had once been a symbol of Gotham’s progress, charging toward the future full speed ahead, had devolved into just another place for an old man to be mugged, a woman to be raped, or a teenager to be shot in self-defense for pulling out a switchblade comb or a can of spray paint. The respectable types had fled the skies, back to the grimy streets below. Soon the predators had followed. And the ultramodern Gotham Tramway had become a relic of the past, utilized only by the brave, the foolish, the curious, and those with a powerful sense of nostalgia.

It wasn’t a place Selina would have chosen to leave a box of homeless kittens, but obviously, someone else had. A child, by the looks of the handwriting on the note: “Please take care of my kittys.”

Well, who was she to reject an offer like that? She reached down to pick up one of the kittens. Two of them shied away from her hand. The third sniffed her curiously.

“Oh, I like you, Sniffles.” She let him latch on to her wrist, jangling her silver bracelets. His brothers got over their shyness and sniffed at her. She scratched behind their ears.

She really shouldn’t be taking home any more cats. She knew that. This wasn’t like when she was seven years old and could always count on Mama to take care of the babies that followed her home. But she couldn’t just leave them on the train. She’d have to find them a place before she went and tracked down Sheba.

She really did want to keep them. They were just too sweet, and she didn’t know what kind of home they would find if she just left them with the vet.

And the note had asked her to take care of them, not just abandon them somewhere else.

Oh, who was she kidding? She couldn’t take in three more cats.

“You wouldn’t want to come home with me anyway, would you?”

They all expressed their disagreement by attacking her hand in a cuddly kitten swarm.

“Oh, stop that. How am I supposed to let you go if you make me love you?”

The tram came to a stop, and someone actually got on. Selina looked at the group of school kids with some suspicion. She couldn’t leave her kitties with them.

Well, this was her stop, anyway. She picked up the box and left, ignoring the catcalls from the overeager fourteen-year-olds.

Down on street level, she took a moment to orient herself. This wasn’t her part of town. Her stalking grounds were north of Park Row, far enough from Arkham and the State Pen that not too many escaped cons came her way, and not too many curious cops came after. And she worked south of the Finger River, where the money was, like any sane person would do. It felt strange looking to the north and seeing Arkham’s highest tower rising ominously above the city.

She turned her back on it. The Gardens made for a better view.

And just there, on a bench by the garden gate, were a man in a truly awful striped tie and a little blond girl in a Hello Kitty t-shirt. The little girl was crying, to her father’s obvious distress.

“Kitten, sweetheart, it’s not going to be so bad. It’s just Mommy’s house.”

“But I want to be with you,” the kid pouted.

Ah, separation anxiety. The parents were getting divorced, most likely, and Daddy’s Little Girl wasn’t ready for it. Selina had never had much sympathy for children of divorce, boo hoo hoo, how tragically difficult their childhoods must be. As far as she was concerned, half those kids were using the disruption in their lives as an excuse to act like even bigger brats than they already were. Still, she hated to see a Hello Kitty fangirl cry, so she gave one of the kittens a little nudge. He put his paws on the edge of the box, looked out, and meowed.

The little girl looked up, suddenly all smiles.

“Daddy, she has kitties! Can I have a kitty, Daddy?”

Daddy looked like a deer in headlights. Selina smirked to herself. Obviously, he wasn’t used to the word “no.”

“Mommy would just love that, wouldn’t she?” he muttered. The little girl pouted up at him. Selina smiled. He grinned back suddenly. “I don’t suppose you’re looking for a good home for those kittycats?”

It wasn’t very nice of her--not nice for Mommy, anyway--but Selina never looked back.