Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0147

Warm water trickled steadily over Paula’s hands, flooding each finger with its moist heat, carrying with it the pearly soap bubbles that clung to the edges of the dishes. The pale reflection of the fluorescent lights flickered on the surface in front of her, while small droplets bounced and burst silently against the stainless steel of the sink. The apartment had fallen into a deep silence, broken only by the intermittent dripping of the old plumbing and the distant hum of the refrigerator – an irregular purr she had learned to ignore, as if it were part of her own breathing.

Every piece of furniture, every shelf in that kitchen had been designed to accommodate her seated body: the sink embedded in a precise curve, the cabinets installed at the exact height, the stove and countertops sculpted to extend her arms. The carpeted surfaces, marked by creases and wrinkles, told stories of entire days preparing meals, of care administered with patience and precision. Paula knew every corner of that space with the intimacy of someone who had transformed limitation into shelter, routine into a silent fortress.

But that night, not even that meticulously planned routine was enough to calm her down.

There were times when a feeling of unease settled in her chest, like a twisted iron knot behind her sternum. It wasn’t the familiar discomfort of a sleepless night, nor the fleeting unease of an indigestible meal. It was a dull pressure, pulsing in irregular beats, as if a second wounded heart were beating there, announcing imminent danger. Paula had felt this premonition a few times in her life, and on each occasion the world had confirmed the omen with blood.

Something happened to one of my daughters.

She turned off the tap with a dry click and remained motionless, staring at her own hand resting on the edge of the sink, still splashed with water. Her skin was no longer the same as it had been twenty years ago: small, whitish scars marked her knuckles, reminders of blades, tight ropes, shards of glass on the rooftops of Saigon and Star City. These were hands that had strangled men twice her size, hands that now resigned themselves to washing dishes in an anonymous apartment, in a city where no one knew her real name.

Artemis visited her quite frequently: she would appear for a few moments, her steps quick and silent, look into her mother’s eyes just long enough to absorb the lines of worry, and then disappear again. Jade, however, hadn’t appeared for over a month. And the memory of their last encounter resurfaced now with cruel clarity, as if it were tightening around the corners of her chest.

Jade arrived unannounced, gliding through the door with that rehearsed step that no amount of training could erase. She sat in the armchair opposite, the light reflecting on her young face, and, without further ado, dropped the bombshell:

” I did it, Mom. I found a way to heal you.”

Paula remembered the shiver that ran down her spine when she heard those words. It wasn’t relief or hope, but a glacial emptiness, for she knew the underworld as well as the depths of her own shadow. She knew the price demanded for miracles. No one restored lost legs out of kindness, no one healed a fractured spinal cord without demanding something equivalent in return – and the currencies of this market were always the same: blood, servitude, or soul.

She pleaded. For the first time in years, Paula Crock truly pleaded, holding Jade’s hands tightly, her trembling fingers begging her daughter not to sell her essence for the sake of a crippled old woman. She insisted that she had already learned to live in that body, that she had accepted the wheelchair, the cramped apartment, the limited life. She declared that the only future that mattered was that of her daughters, that her own no longer belonged to her.

And Jade smiled.

It wasn’t the feline, calculated smile that hinted at hidden secrets. It was another smile: that gentle arc of lips that Paula had only seen when Jade was still a little girl with loose braids in the backyard, before her father poisoned all trust, before the blades, before the dreaded League. A pure and disarming smile, as if the weight of the world had been lifted from the shoulders of that grown-up child.

Everything’s fine, Mom. Now everything’s going to change.

Against all instincts, against decades of experience that taught her that promises in the underworld are debts with invisible interest, Paula believed. Because, that night, she saw something different in Jade: a lightness in her shoulders, once always armed, a peace in her eyes, once hunted. Whoever her daughter’s new protector was, had given her back something Paula thought was lost forever.

That’s when she let go. She released Jade’s hands, swallowed the fear that gripped her throat, and said, in the trembling voice of someone who trusts in a miracle: “I trust you.”

Ultimately, it was Paula who shaped Jade’s every gesture. The girl was born into that world like a blade cutting through the air: terrifying even to her own mother. She absorbed technique like sand absorbs water, instinctively – and, at fifteen, she moved with the fluidity of a silent river, surpassing veterans with thirty years of experience on the mat. A talent of that caliber never went unnoticed. The mysterious League of Shadows, which observed everything from the shadows, extended its relentless hand, which no one dared refuse twice. Jade let herself be carried away, and Paula, trapped between impotence and the bars of her wheelchair, could do nothing to stop her. This opened a wound that never healed: the guilt of having watched her daughter leave to serve Ra’s al Ghul’s fanatics without being able to erect a single obstacle in her path.

And now, once again, he felt that tightness in his chest. As if an invisible fist – cold, metallic – were compressing his heart, leaving a taste of iron in his mouth.

Then the phone rang.

The shrill ring cut through the silence of the apartment like a blade, echoing off the bare walls. Paula shuddered: her heart raced before her mind could keep up. Impelled by a dry impulse, she turned the wheels of her chair, the screeching of the tires against the porcelain tiles echoing loudly in the deserted kitchen. She stopped before the table where the device vibrated, its small screen illuminated only by a sequence of digits that blinked like a cheerful riddle.

Unknown number.

Paula’s face contorted in a grimace of apprehension. Almost no one had that number – and the few who did had it saved on their cell phones. She let the phone ring again, listening to the hum of the refrigerator motor, the noise of the air conditioner, while old ritualistic memories awakened within her. Finally, she answered and, before she could say anything, whispered:

“Hello.”

“Good evening, Paula.”

The world seemed to shrink around her. A deep, measured female voice, imbued with a bureaucratic authority that didn’t need to shout – for that, there were armies. A voice Paula recognized from the cold interrogation rooms, from contracts signed under false names; a voice steeped in contempt and resentment.

Amanda Waller.

“If by chance you are in the United States at this moment,” he continued, with the same nonchalance as someone giving a weather forecast, “I would like to inform you that I have just captured one of your descendants.”

The iron hand tightened even more around her chest. The pain was so sharp that Paula held her breath, her ribs throbbing as if every bone wanted to break. The dishes in the sink, the clinking of a glass, all vanished in a blur. All that remained was Amanda’s voice in her ear and the blood pulsing in her temples.

Exit.

There was no need to confirm. The premonition, the month-long disappearance, the nature of her daughter’s work – the pieces of this macabre puzzle fell into place on their own, each one triggering a new pang of guilt.

Amanda spoke again, impassive in the face of the silence on the other end of the line:

“She proved to be truly resilient. We tried to extract information in every way possible, as you can imagine.”

“In every sense.” In Paula’s mind, that expression took on monstrous dimensions: sleep deprivation, dark rooms, electric shocks, insidious chemical substances, with the surgical precision of torturers who treated human pain as an experiment. Images flashed before her eyes – Jade’s face distorted by anguish, her eyes filled with tears, her lips trembling with terror. Each scene was a direct stab to Paula’s heart.

Sitting on the edge of the worn wooden table, under the dim light streaming through the window, Paula held the phone to her ear. The distant clinking of still-damp dishes echoed in the silent kitchen, a subtle reminder of the daily tasks that now awaited her. On the other end of the line, Amanda’s voice cut through the air.

“But I must admit,” she hissed, and there was a wicked glint in her tone, “she took after her mother. Not a single meow, her kitten died silently.”

“If you do anything to her…” The words escaped through Paula’s clenched teeth, low and sharp, released from an inner vault she had kept locked away for years.

“What would you do?” Amanda interrupted, with a sharp, abrupt cut, like the snap of a blade. Then came the laughter: short, without any trace of humor, like the harsh sound of someone shooing away a fly.

“You’re in a wheelchair, Paula. You’re disabled.”

A chilling shiver ran down Paula’s neck, trickling down to the base of her spine like melting water. It wasn’t the insult itself that hurt her—she’d been collecting insults since before she learned to walk, and she’d been reliving them since the fall. The coldness came from the harsh truth shrouded in that cruelty: without legs, what could she really do? Would anyone push a wheelchair through the corridors of a secret military base? Would anyone strangle sentries with hands accustomed to sponges and detergent?

“Paula, we’ve known each other for a long time,” Amanda continued, now with the ruthless pragmatism of someone who works with spreadsheets. “We’ve worked together before. You know I don’t answer calls without a purpose. I’m calling to, once again, hire your services. And, if you cooperate, maybe we can even help you.”

There was a calculated pause. The line vibrated, heavy with expectation — but Paula didn’t take the bait.

“Tell me your location. Come over to us. Help me get your daughter to sing.” Another brief silence, and then Amanda continued, with a false cordiality that barely disguised the coldness underneath. “Because otherwise… well. I’m out of patience, and your daughter is being, frankly, a real nuisance.”

A flame of fury exploded in Paula’s chest, burning away the cold that enveloped her. She let the heat spread through her veins, but stifled the roar in her throat. Years of training don’t undo easily, and she knew that every syllable of that phone call had been recorded, analyzed, triangulated.

They tried to track her down. Thanks to her past life, Paula had mastered the art of fragmenting telephone signals: the device passed through three layers of redirection that only she knew how to configure. It was the habit of a professional who never believed in retirement. Amanda would never discover her whereabouts. Of all the assassins Paula had known on three continents, none disappeared with the discretion and mastery she possessed. Disappearing had always been her supreme art, preceding and superior to the blade and poison. And that was the first lesson she passed on to her daughters: first you learn to disappear, then to kill.

“Okay,” Amanda concluded, with the dry sound of a stamp tapping on paper, “think about it and call me back. You have until the end of the day to give me an answer.”

Click.

The conversation was interrupted and silence returned, as dense as pitch black.

Paula remained motionless, the phone still pressed against her ear, absorbing nothing. Finally, she slid her arm in a slow, restrained movement and placed the device on the table with the delicacy of someone disarming a bomb about to explode.

The world began to materialize again in fragmented sounds. The low, constant hum of the refrigerator motor, a sound she normally didn’t even notice. The methodical dripping of the sink faucet, each drop echoing in the silence like a small torment. And inside her, an old, familiar feeling returned, heavy and oppressive like a wet blanket – helplessness. It was the same weight that had overwhelmed her in that hospital room years ago, when her fingers traced her own thigh in search of a sensation that would never return.

Lawrence. The name of her ex-husband surged in her mind like a bitter taste. Somewhere in a remote corner of the planet, he must be neck-deep in his apocalyptic cults and faceless corporations, playing God with technologies that tore apart the fabric of reality. The man was pure ambition, an insatiable appetite that knew no bounds. She had managed to escape, at least. She had erased his tracks with the precision of someone who knows how to die, buried the Huntress in a grave so deep that not even she herself could dig it, and upon the rubble she had built this minimalist existence, this life of white walls and calculated silence.

And for what purpose? So that her daughter would end up in Amanda Waller’s hands.

It could only be Jade. Artemis was safe, her new home protected by that “green seal” her boyfriend applied to everything like an impenetrable bubble – a safeguard against a world Paula didn’t even try to understand. No one approached the youngest. But Jade… Jade had chosen to live on the edge of danger. Jade, who a month ago had been there, in that same kitchen, her eyes shining with a new plan, promising that everything would be different, with a conviction that now broke Paula’s heart.

Everything changed, my daughter. And it changed for the worse.

Paula leaned forward, her elbows meeting her inert knees beneath the fabric of her trousers. A fine dust danced in a ray of light streaming through the kitchen window. She brought her hands to her face, her rough palms against her closed eyelids. Her breath caught in her throat, a muffled sob trembling in her chest, once, then again. She closed her eyes tighter, her fingers pressing until she saw flashes of colored light in the darkness, fighting back tears with the same tactical coldness with which she had once neutralized threats.

What could she do?

Paula let the question hang in the air, unanswered. Her eyes fixed on the window, on the gray rectangle of sky she could see from there, and Amanda’s voice returned with the naturalness of a knife finding an old scar: *You’re a cripple.* She knew that apartment like the back of her hand—every inch of the hallway calculated for the wheels, every doorknob installed too low for any visitor who could stand upright. Built for a diminished woman. And that was exactly what Amanda knew, and used to her advantage.

That’s when she heard the door.

The sound was almost imperceptible: the dry click of a spinning cylinder. But Paula was already different even before she could process what it was—straight back, jaw clenched, fingers guided by muscle memory toward the third drawer. Knife. Four clicks of the wheel. Three seconds.

Reason arrived like the ebbing tide, slowly. Two people in the world had that key and knew that address. Three, counting the youngest daughter’s boyfriend.

The door opened and Artemis entered.

Paula could read her daughter from the doorway to the center of the room in a single glance. Her blonde ponytail was loose to the side, not straight forward—she must have run, not just walked quickly. The zipper on her jacket was stuck in the middle, as always happened, and Artemis had never had it fixed. And her face: her daughter was clutching something tightly between her teeth, her strength waning.

She knows.

Artemis locked the door without taking her eyes off her mother and crossed the space between them with steps that wanted to be controlled, but weren’t. When she was close enough, she lowered her body slowly, her knees touching the cold floor, until their eyes were at the same height. Paula recognized the gesture—her daughter had invented it on her own, at eight years old, one afternoon when Paula had arrived home from the hospital and Artemis had simply crouched down without anyone asking. They had never spoken about it.

It was at that moment that Artemis saw the red on the edges of her mother’s eyelids.

The question came out of her as if she were afraid of the answer.

“All very well?”

“Exit.”

One word. All Paula needed to murmur, and it fell upon them like a leaden weight.

Artemis’s eyes widened, dilated by the imminence of a new panic.

“Do you already know?”

Paula nodded her head in a slow, almost ceremonial gesture.

“They called me.”

The air around them froze.

“Rescue?”

The word escaped Artemis, laden with a distorted hope, like someone clinging to any thread of salvation. Paula closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. Artemis felt the flame of her breath die out.

“They want me to make the bird open its beak.”

For a second, Artemis looked at her mother, trying to decipher if it was true. Then the realization hit her like a block of ice breaking: it wasn’t money they demanded, but secrets. To obtain them, they used Paula herself as a bargaining chip, transforming her into an instrument of psychological torture more refined than any blade. They displayed maternal suffering to extract words from their daughter.

A burning flame coursed through Artemis’s chest, quickening her blood. Her fists clenched so tightly that her knuckles creaked beneath her nails. How dare they use a woman in a wheelchair as a human shield? How could they place a mother, who had already lived so long, in the middle of that hell?

“I may be disabled, but I’m not useless, Artemis.”

Paula’s voice cut through her daughter’s whirlwind of fury with the ruthless precision of a scalpel. Artemis blinked, disarmed. Her mother stared at her with dark eyes that had always read hearts like open books, and in them shone an ancient, hardened pride that refused to bleed in public.

“I don’t want your pity. Remember who I used to be.”

Artemis let her head fall, feeling shame and longing mingle with the weight of the scene. The woman before her had once been a feared legend in the underworld, whose codename—Huntress—still made veterans tremble at the mere whisper of her name. Legends tolerate no pity, not even when cloaked in filial love.

A dense silence settled between the two, filled with everything that dared not be said.

In the midst of that suffocating silence, Artemis remembered the real reason she was there. Her mind raced, consumed by worry for Jade. She knew that turbulent thoughts were distracting, that hesitations at crucial moments cost lives. She couldn’t afford that luxury.

She raised her face, firm.

“Mom, is there anyone who can help us?”

Paula frowned, and skepticism etched deep wrinkles onto her brow. The phrase sounded like a premonition of unpayable debts, of blood and disappointment.

“Who will it be?”

Artemis held her gaze, swallowing hard.

“The same man who got Jade into this mess. And the same one who can get her out of it.”

Paula’s eyebrows arched in a slow, precise movement, like flexible metal rods bending under a hidden force. A suspicion crept into her gaze, forming in the depths of her eyes, dark contours she had pretended to ignore for months, deluded by the radiant happiness of her youngest daughter.

“Are you trying to tell me that…”

“Yes.” Artemis interrupted her firmly, like someone throwing a stone into the bottom of a calm lake: a single bubbling sound was heard, then silence. The word sounded definitive, at once a confession and a sentence. “Erick is responsible for this.”