Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0149

Chapter 149

The glass was two meters high and almost four meters wide, and on Amanda Waller’s side it was just a window. On the other side, a mirror. She liked this asymmetry. There was something honest about it, an honesty the world rarely offered: those inside that room saw only their own reflection, their own ruin returned in polished silver, while those outside saw everything. To see everything. That was what she had been buying, trading, extorting, and burying people to get for over twenty years.

The young woman hanging in the center of the room couldn’t see her. But Amanda saw her with almost clinical clarity.

She crossed her arms and let the silence do its work. The silence was a long-time, reliable employee who never asked for a raise.

There were those who said, in the corridors of Washington, in the carpeted rooms where men in suits decided the fate of countries they couldn’t even point out on a map, that Amanda Waller had no soul. She had heard the phrase so many times that it no longer provoked anything, neither anger nor pride. It was inaccurate, that’s all. She had a soul. She knew exactly where her soul was because she felt the weight of each stain deposited upon her, layer after layer, year after year, like soot accumulated inside a chimney that never stopped burning. The difference between her and the men in suits was that they pretended the soot didn’t exist. She counted it. She took inventory. And, at the end of each fiscal exercise of her own conscience, she always arrived at the same result: it was worth the price.

Because the world she woke up to every day wasn’t the world her parents had raised her in. It was a world where gods walked. Creatures that traversed the sky faster than ballistic missiles, that bent steel with the nonchalance of someone folding paper, that decided, on their own and without anyone’s mandate, what justice was. Cape-clad aliens. Immortal Amazons. Billionaires dressed as bats who treated an entire city as their private property. The planet had become a chessboard where ordinary humanity, the one that bled, aged, and died, had been relegated to the status of a pawn. And nobody seemed to mind. Everyone applauded. Everyone knelt before their white-smiling saviors.

Amanda did not kneel.

If the gods walked, someone needed to carry the leveler. Someone needed to ensure that, on the day one of them woke up in a bad mood, there was an immediate response. It wasn’t patriotism, though she let her superiors believe it was, because patriotism was a currency that opened doors. It was something older, simpler. It was refusal. The absolute refusal to live on one’s knees in a world that insisted on standing only when the powerful allowed it. If the United States profited from her rise, great. Let them profit. The flag was a vehicle, and vehicles exist to take someone somewhere.

And the place she had arrived at was miles beneath the Alaskan ice.

…

The facility had no name. Names generate records, records generate trails, and trails generate questions in congressional committees from senators she herself had helped elect. In the few documents that needed to exist, and which later ceased to exist, the place appeared as an abandoned geological study. In Amanda’s mind, it had only one designation: the Vault.

It had taken six years to build it. Six years collecting favors she had been hoarding like a miser hoards coins, old debts from generals, agency directors, contractors who owed their freedom to a phone call from her. Not a single dollar had come from the official budget. No line of credit, no signature, no contract. The Vault had been paid for with the only currency that leaves no trace: accumulated fear. And it had been designed by three of the brightest minds ever to grace a clandestine payroll, engineers who worked separately, each designing a third of the structure without ever knowing of the existence of the other two. One of them had asked too many questions. Amanda had sent flowers to the funeral.

The result lay dormant beneath the tundra like a needle plunged into the planet’s flesh. A single entrance. A single exit. The same throat of concrete and steel descending vertically, underground within underground, to a depth where the surrounding rock maintained its own temperature and the world above became a mere rumor. Seventy floors stacked in a shielded shaft, each calculated to the millimeter, because buried space is expensive and waste was a sin Amanda wouldn’t commit even in hell.

She knew every floor like the back of her hand.

From the first to the tenth floor, just below the access throat, lived its agents. Some found it ridiculous to house personnel at the shallowest point of the structure, closest to the surface, closest to anything that might try to enter. That was precisely the intention. Any invader would have to cut through the flesh before reaching the organs. Hundreds of highly trained operators occupied those ten floors in a rotation that never left a single post cold: four months underground, two on the surface, because even the best men began to rot after too long without sky. Amanda had learned that lesson from submarine crews and applied it without sentimentality. The dormitories were spartan but not cruel, eight bunks to a room, personal lockers, a mess hall that served four meals a day on a schedule dictated not by the sun, which no one down there had seen in months, but by ceiling panels that mimicked dawn and dusk with a fidelity that fooled the body if not the mind. There was a gymnasium that occupied half of the sixth floor, a firing range on the seventh calibrated for every weapon in the inventory, and a simulation deck where perimeter breach drills ran daily until the response ceased to be procedure and became reflex. What there wasn’t, anywhere on those ten floors, was a window, a bar, or an unmonitored corner. Recreation existed, screens, cards, a library of approved titles, because bored soldiers were dangerous soldiers, but it existed under the same cameras as everything else. And woven through it all, the teeth: embedded turrets behind retractable panels, corridors that sealed into watertight compartments at the touch of a console, choke points designed to transform each flight of stairs into a slaughterhouse. The men slept ten seconds from their combat posts. Most of them had stopped noticing. That, too, was the intention.

From the eleventh to the thirtieth, the collection began.

Amanda thought of these floors as an inverted museum: instead of preserving the best of humanity, she preserved the worst, duly cataloged and at the service of the nation. The logic of the wing was isolation raised to the level of theology. No two cells shared air, plumbing, or power; each drew from independent lines that could be severed from the control center without affecting its neighbors, because a containment failure that spread was not a failure, it was an extinction event. Prisoners never saw each other. Most never saw a human being at all: meals arrived through automated drawers, medical examinations were conducted through glass by doctors whose faces were digitally scrambled on the prisoner’s side of the screen, and the guards who patrolled the outer corridors did so along routes that never once crossed a sightline into a cell. A man cannot manipulate, seduce, or memorize what he never sees. Each chamber was custom-designed for its occupant, because treating extraordinary prisoners with ordinary solutions was the kind of economy that cost lives, and each had been built with its own execution protocol wired into the walls, a final argument that Amanda hoped never to use and maintained in perfect working order precisely for that reason. The most recent addition occupied a chamber where not a single milligram of organic matter grew: sterilized walls, air filtered seven times, light in a spectrum calculated to keep Pamela Isley alive and utterly powerless. Two cells further on, Harley Quinn’s quarters were empty, as was Deadshot’s, both on duty on the other side of the world, accompanied by an escort that needed no introduction. Amanda liked it when the cells were empty for work reasons. It meant the investment was paying off.

From the thirty-first to the fortieth floor, the architecture changed scale. There were the large cages, reinforced chambers for those who couldn’t fit in conventional containment: the pressurized pool where King Shark floated in carnivorous boredom, the electrified-walled pit that housed Killer Croc, the titanium sarcophagus reserved for Solomon Grundy, currently also empty, the undead creature borrowed for the same mission as Harley Quinn and Deadshot. On the same floors, by a compartmentalization logic that only she and two dead engineers fully understood, were the arsenal, the supply depots, and the reactors that kept that buried world breathing. The arsenal alone occupied two full levels, racks of conventional weaponry giving way, deeper in, to sealed vaults holding confiscated pieces that no manufacturer on Earth had produced. The depots held eighteen months of food and water for the entire complement, rotated with the discipline of a monastery. And the twin reactors hummed at the bottom of the wing behind three meters of shielding, redundant to the point of paranoia, because a fortress that went dark was just a very expensive grave. Food, ammunition, and energy, the trio that decides all the sieges in history, kept in the belly of the fortress.

From the forty-first to the fifty-fifth floor lay what Amanda considered the true heart of the Vault. Not the reactors. The servers.

Fifteen floors of uninterrupted processing, cooled by the permafrost itself, forming what she believed to be the largest computer in government hands on the planet. The server halls were kept at temperatures that required technicians to work in insulated suits, moving between the racks like divers on a wreck, and access to them was more restricted than access to the prisoners: a man who touched a cell touched one monster, a man who touched the servers touched all of Amanda’s. Intelligence was the cornerstone of her profession, it always had been, and in that respect she hadn’t spared a penny of the favors she charged. She had no illusions: she knew there were bigwigs, in Metropolis towers and Gotham caves, with superior gadgets. But she guaranteed, to herself and to anyone who needed to hear it, that what she possessed was not embarrassingly inferior. And no machine, however advanced, could replace what Amanda nurtured within it: three decades of secrets that no billionaire would dream of possessing.

From the fifty-sixth to the sixtieth, the laboratories.

Five floors of research that no ethics committee had ever heard of and never would. The scientists who worked there arrived hooded, worked in compartmentalized teams that believed themselves to be in different facilities, and were paid through foundations that dissolved and reconstituted themselves like cells dividing. One wing dissected technology: every impossible device recovered from a crime scene, every alien fragment that fell into American hands before the Justice League could catalog it, ended up on those benches, reverse-engineered screw by screw. Another wing dissected biology, tissue samples from every metahuman who had ever passed through the floors above, an archive of the extraordinary kept at minus eighty degrees. It was there that the collar around the prisoner’s neck had been perfected, prototype after prototype, tested on subjects whose files ended in a single hyphenated line. There was a full surgical theater, an infirmary better equipped than most hospitals in Alaska, and, at the end of the last corridor, a small crematorium, because research produces waste and waste produces questions. Amanda visited the laboratories twice a year. She always left satisfied and always slept poorly afterward, and she considered both reactions to be evidence that the money was well spent.

From the sixty-first to the sixty-ninth, the head of the beast: the control center, where her technical team worked in shifts that knew no holidays, dispatching villains and agents across five continents like a casino deals cards, each operation a calculated move on behalf of a nation that would never know what was being done for it. Or to it. Amanda had long since stopped distinguishing between the two. The upper floors also held the quiet privileges of command: private quarters for senior staff, a briefing amphitheater, secure communication rooms sheathed in copper mesh, and Amanda’s own suite, which she used a few nights a month and which contained, as its sole luxury, a bed better than the one she kept in Washington. The people who worked those floors were the only ones in the Vault who knew the shape of the whole. There were eleven of them. Amanda had chosen each one the way she chose everything: slowly, and with a contingency plan.

And then there was the seventieth floor. Rock bottom. The floor she was on now.

It wasn’t listed on any blueprint, not even on blueprints that didn’t exist. It was an area reserved for a specific category of guest: individuals who possessed something Amanda needed and who, out of stubbornness, training, or stupidity, had decided not to hand it over.

The prisoner on the other side of the glass belonged to both the third and second categories at the same time. Amanda hadn’t yet decided to what extent.

…

Jade Nguyen was eighteen years old and had the file of someone three times that age.

Amanda had read it three times before descending to the seventieth floor, not because she needed to—her memory never betrayed her—but because rereading files was her form of prayer. A mercenary since before the age when normal girls get their driver’s licenses. Trained in the League of Shadows, which in itself was worth a chapter. Services rendered to Intergang. Contracts executed on four continents, some of them with a thorough cleaning that made experienced analysts suspect cataloging errors. A track record that, under different circumstances, would have made Amanda extend her hand instead of the pliers. She collected talents like that. She had collected her mother’s, years ago, when the world still revolved in a different direction.

But the circumstances were these: the prisoner had been captured inside a maximum-security vault, at the epicenter of the biggest theft of strategic material in the decade, and the material in question had evaporated in front of the cameras through a method that the best scientists at Amanda’s disposal described, in increasingly humiliated reports, as technically impossible .

Nth Metal. Precious pounds of it, vanishing from the center of a fortress like smoke sucked down a drain in the ceiling of the universe.

Someone, somewhere, possessed an ability that wasn’t listed in any database—not hers, not the Justice League’s, not Lex Luthor’s—and that someone was accumulating the only material on the planet that ignored magic. Amanda didn’t need imagination to complete the equation. She needed a name. And the only loose end the entire operation had left behind hung five meters from her, breathing slowly, on tiptoe.

Naked. Her wrists bound in surgical steel handcuffs, raised above her head and hooked onto a support that descended from the ceiling, high enough that her exhausted body was forced to stand on its toes. A banal position in the first few minutes. A cruel equation after hours: every muscle in her shoulder, back, and calf recruited relentlessly, the weight of her own body transformed into an instrument, gravity converted into a night-shift worker. She left no marks that a coroner could attribute to others. That was why Amanda appreciated her.

The other brands, those had signed authorship.

The girl’s body was a map of bruises in different stages of blooming, from deep purple to sickly yellow, scattered across her ribs, thighs, and abdomen, overlapping with the method of someone working in sections. Her nose, broken in the third hour, deviated at a discreet angle, and dried blood formed a dark crust from her lip to her chin. A tooth was missing, pulled out in the fifth hour. She was missing the toenail and the first phalanx of her left big toe, removed with pliers in the seventh, which made the act of standing on tiptoe a chapter in itself. Exposed wires had visited the most sensitive points of her body—her nipples, the inner thighs, the soles of her feet—in sessions timed by men who did it with the serenity of electricians inspecting an installation.

And around her neck, discreet as a piece of bad jewelry, the necklace.

Of all the toys that STAR Labs had ever developed under contracts that officially didn’t exist, this one was Amanda’s favorite. Years of research had mapped, synapse by synapse, the complete repertoire of commands that a human brain emits to operate its own body: moving, speaking, blinking, swallowing—the entire motor vocabulary of the species, cataloged like a dictionary. And they had also mapped what this dictionary didn’t contain. The neurological firing of a meta-human activating their abilities didn’t resemble anything in the common lexicon. It was its own dialect, an unmistakable electrical signature. The collar listened. Twenty-four hours a day, it listened, and the instant it recognized the signature, it responded with a voltage discharge calibrated to saturate the entire nervous system, numbing every nerve ending before thought could become power. The girl inside commanded winds capable of ripping the doors off safes. Inside that room, she couldn’t even control her own fingers.

Twelve hours. Twelve hours of persuasion applied by professionals Amanda had personally selected, men without sadism and without pity, because both contaminate results.

And the young woman hadn’t uttered a word. She hadn’t made a peep.

No name. No address. Not a single syllable that could be processed, cross-referenced, transformed into a clue. Screams, yes, the body has contracts with pain that no amount of training can completely rescind. But between one scream and another, when the men stepped back to assess the work and the room plunged into that damp silence of breath and metal, the girl raised her head, found her own reflection in the mirror, knowing perfectly well what was on the other side, and smiled.

He used to smile.

He had smiled with his broken nose, spitting red blood onto the sterilized floor. He had smiled with the pliers still in sight, his face white with shock and his dark eyes absolutely fixed. He had smiled after each discharge, his muscles still spasming, his cracked lips twitching in that insolent curve as if she were watching a mediocre play and applauding out of politeness. It wasn’t bravado. Amanda knew bravado, bravado that cracks at the fifth hour. This was something else. This was someone who had already been broken long before, in some basement of Nanda Parbat, by masters who broke children the way goldsmiths polish stone, and who had been reassembled in a way that left nothing loose for pain to enter and pull.

League of Shadows. Amanda recognized the finish as one recognizes a signature on a painting. Whatever Ra’s al Ghul did with his disciples in those monasteries worked, worked in a way that her own interrogation resistance programs, budgeted in millions, had never achieved. She found herself wishing, with a pragmatism that didn’t embarrass her in the slightest, to take a look at the Devil’s training manual. To incorporate a chapter or two into her agents’ training. She mentally noted the idea and filed it away on the shelf of long-term ambitions.

Because right now, at that moment, what she lacked was precisely what the League’s methods fed on: time.

The Nth Metal continued to disappear. More and more vanished each week, in other vaults, in other countries, always with the same impossibly thorough cleaning. Somewhere, a stockpile was growing, and along with it grew the only certainty that mattered: whoever was accumulating it was preparing for something. And Amanda Waller hadn’t buried seventy floors in Alaska to find out what that something was from the newspapers.

The anger rose slowly, disciplined like everything else within her, and settled behind her sternum.

It wasn’t the girl’s pain that bothered her. Pain was a tool, and tools don’t awaken feelings. What gnawed at her was the doubt: every hour of that smile was an hour in which her plan, her schedule, her will, were being disregarded by a creature hanging from a hook. Amanda had built her entire life on a simple principle: the world moves when she pushes. Governments, monsters, cloaked gods, all, sooner or later, yielded to the push, because she always found the exact point where to apply the weight. And that eighteen-year-old girl, without active powers, without allies in sight, without a single tooth of advantage, was winning. She was, in the most literal way possible, laughing at her.

Amanda uncrossed her arms and rested her palm on the glass. On the other side, the mirror would reflect back to the girl only her own ruined image. But for a second, a second she wouldn’t confess to under any torture, Amanda had the distinct impression that dark eyes met hers through the silver, at the exact same height as hers, as if the mirror were the window and the window were the mirror, and that the smile widened a millimeter.

She withdrew her hand.

Okay, girl. Every fortress has an entrance. She knew that better than anyone; after all, she’d designed hers with only one. Yours has one too. And I know its name.

…

It had been an hour since she called Paula Crock. And so far, silence.

Amanda checked her watch, a gesture that was never anxiety for her, just accounting, and felt the strangeness settle in a corner of her mind like a grain of sand in her shoe. Curious. I thought you cared more about your little girls. After all, it was for them that Paula had vanished off the map. She had abandoned everything—contracts, contacts, reputation, a career worth empires—to raise two girls in a suburban Gotham townhouse, pretending that twenty years of blood could be washed away with dish soap. The desertion had enraged Amanda at the time more than she admitted to anyone alive. Not because of the operational loss, although the loss had been considerable. Because of the waste.

Because Paula Nguyen Crock had been the best.

Amanda could list, and had listed, for reports that no one above her was authorized to read, all the assassins and mercenaries who had ever served the interests of the United States outside of the books. There were metahumans on the list. There were products of enhancement programs, women with lab-bought reflexes and bones reinforced with experimental alloys. And at the top of the list, uncomfortably, unbeatably, for almost a decade, had been a Vietnamese immigrant without a single chromosome out of the ordinary. Completely human. Flesh, bone, and method.

That was what was frightening. Not the word the reports used—the reports preferred “remarkable” —but Amanda, in her inner self where she didn’t lie to herself, used the right word: frightening. The Huntress operated at a level of excellence that invited uncomfortable comparisons. Slade Wilson was the gold standard of the field, the laboratory miracle, the perfect soldier. Amanda knew, with the coldness of someone who had seen both of their tapes, that in a direct confrontation Paula wouldn’t beat Slade; biology is biology, and his had been rewritten. But it wasn’t direct confrontation that defined value in their profession. It was the success rate. And mission after mission, year after year, Paula’s numbers supported a truth that no general liked to hear aloud: the human mercenary delivered results on par with the super-soldier, without costing a cent of serum. How many impossible operations had succeeded solely because she was in command? Amanda knew the exact number. She kept it as one keeps a scar.

And along with the number, he harbored envy.

He could name her now, with the comfort of someone who had won. Back then, at the beginning of their own rise, when the two worked together and the world still treated them as disposable instruments of mediocre men, envy had been a living, nameless thing, lodged between their ribs. Paula would enter a room and the room would rearrange itself around her. Paula failed at nothing. Paula had what Amanda would spend her whole life buying with favors and blackmail: excellence that owes nothing to anyone.

Therefore, when the time came, Amanda personally took care of the details.

In the records, when records existed, there was a story about a shootout gone wrong. A damp warehouse, a poorly calculated ambush, a stray bullet lodging itself in the spine of the best mercenary in the hemisphere. Bad luck for the job. Everyone in the business nodded gravely and moved on, because that’s how the business is, everyone knows someone who’s been tricked by luck. Only two people on the planet knew precisely how much luck had been involved. One of them spent the following years in a wheelchair, nurturing a certainty she could never prove. The other was now in a corridor miles away under the ice, smiling to herself.

Amanda could never express enough gratitude for that bullet. And she didn’t need to: gratitude implies debt, and no one owes anything for a job well done.

The bullet had retired the only competitor she had ever respected. It had transformed the legend into a statistic, the Huntress into a crippled housewife, the unbearable excellence into a woman who depended on a ramp to enter her own bathroom. And the most delicious detail, the one Amanda had savored for years like a rare whiskey, was that Paula knew. She had always known, with that predatory instinct that not even the bullet had managed to extract. He knew and couldn’t do anything, because knowing without tasting is the most refined form of impotence. Between the two of them lay a postponed reckoning, a bill that both knew would one day be presented. Amanda was in no hurry. Patient creditors charge better interest.

And now, by a twist of fate that almost made her believe in providence, the debtor’s daughter was suspended in handcuffs in the next room.

The plan was so elegant it needed no embellishment. The girl wouldn’t speak in pain, that much was already proven. But no one emerges from the dungeons of Nanda Parbat unscathed; the League’s masters shield the flesh and fear, not love, because love they simply extirpate, and the girl’s entire dossier screamed that, at this specific point, the League’s surgery had failed. She had a mother. She had a sister. She had returned to them. So let the mother come. Let Paula enter that room with her wheels screeching and try to extract from her daughter what twelve hours of electricity hadn’t extracted. If she succeeded, Amanda would have her name. If she failed, Amanda would have her mother and daughter under the same roof, at the bottom of the same well, and in that scenario, the lines that still needed to be crossed were few and well-known. To take the mother hostage to open up the daughter. Or the daughter, to open up the mother. The order of the factors had never altered the product, in her experience.

All that remained was the phone call, which never came.

Amanda looked back at the young woman through the glass. The trembling had begun half an hour earlier, subtle, involuntary, rising up her exhausted legs: the room temperature had been reduced degree by degree throughout the night, yet another discreet employee on the shift. Her bare skin shivered in waves, and her body, that stubborn body that refused to utter a single word, could no longer hide even that. Cold is honest. Cold doesn’t negotiate with training.

That’s when the phone vibrated.

Amanda slowly pulled it from the inside pocket of her blazer, read the number on the screen, and felt a surge of satisfaction. Finally. She answered without a word. On the other end, for a moment, there was only breathing, and then the voice came, and Amanda had to acknowledge, with the professional rigor she applied even to her own guts, that something in that voice had pierced her. It was a cold voice in a way she hadn’t heard in many years, flat, unhurried, fearless, the voice that used to make armed men take a step back without realizing they had. For a second, a single second, Amanda wasn’t in a hallway in Alaska. She was in a meeting room twenty years in the past, facing a woman the entire room feared, and the living thing between her ribs stirred in her sleep.

Then the second one passed. She remembered the wheelchair, and the world returned to its proper place.

“I accept.” Paula’s voice didn’t ask for confirmation that it was Amanda on the line. There was no greeting. “I’ll send you my coordinates. Send your dogs to pick me up.”

“It’s good that motherhood hasn’t softened her practical sense.”

“What if something happens to my daughter…”

“I already know.” Amanda let the mockery seep into her words, lukewarm, almost affectionate, the tone used with old acquaintances and old jokes. “You’re going to kill me. I wrote it down the first time, Paula. I’ll have it engraved on a plaque.” She turned to the glass, contemplating the trembling body hanging on the other side, and her smile deepened. “Don’t worry. When you get here, we’ll sort everything out. Like in the old days.”

She hung up without waiting for a response. Seconds later, the screen lit up again: coordinates. Gotham. Obviously. She forwarded the location to the control center with three taps and a two-line instruction, discreet extraction, full search protocol, and put the device away.

Something about that call lingered on the periphery of her attention, in the region where she maintained the instincts that had kept her alive. The voice. The complete absence of hesitation. Paula had taken an hour to answer, and desperate mothers don’t take an hour, desperate mothers answer on the first ring with their hearts in their mouths. An hour was the time of someone who had thought. Of someone who had decided something. Amanda held the thought up to the light, examined it from every angle, as she did with everything.

And he discarded it.

Paula Crock was a middle-aged invalid who had spent the last few years baking pies and watching her daughters through the window. Whatever she had decided in that hour, she had decided in a wheelchair, without resources, without a safety net, without options. Calculated desperation is still desperation. And all the mathematics of the Vault—the seventy floors, the single entrance, the hundreds of agents, the monsters in the cages—existed precisely to render irrelevant the decision of anyone on the outside.

…

She turned to the two men standing behind her, exactly three steps away, in the position they had been in for hours without a single joint cracking.

They were both tall, the kind of tallness that comes not from academia but from selection. Dark suits, black glasses even in that windowless corridor, the transparent radio cord hanging behind their ears. They didn’t speak unless asked, and even when asked, they spoke the bare minimum. Amanda had smuggled them out of the League of Shadows five years earlier, an operation she retrospectively considered one of the best acquisitions of her career. The two had participated in a conspiracy against Ra’s al Ghul, one of those palace rebellions that the Devil crushes every generation with the patience of someone pruning a tree. The conspirators died. All but two, who on the night scheduled for their executions discovered the cell doors unlocked, a clear path to the border, and, in the first town on the other side, a corpulent woman sitting in a café, with two passports on the table and a proposal without fine print.

Loyalty bought with money has an expiration date. Loyalty bought with life never expires. They both knew that the minute they stopped serving her, their whereabouts would reach Nanda Parbat through channels only she possessed. They were, therefore, the only men on the planet Amanda completely trusted, precisely because trust wasn’t a factor in the equation.

She addressed the taller of the two, a black man with gray temples whose real name she no longer even used.

“Doctor Edgar Cizko.” The name came out of her mouth without inflection, the way one reads an item on a shopping list. “Bring him here.”

Behind the dark glasses, no reaction. But Amanda had worked with those two long enough to read the microsecond of stillness that preceded the nod, and she understood what it meant, because anyone informed would have the same stillness. Cizko wasn’t a resource you brought in. He was a resource you unearthed. A tiny man with immense talent and a history that made Harley Quinn’s files look like children’s literature, currently held in a facility where the word containment was taken more seriously than anywhere else in the hemisphere, because walls couldn’t contain what Cizko did. Cizko entered. Into memories, into desires, into everything people believed to be the last locked room they possessed. Where the pliers found a smile, Cizko would find the shelf where the smile was manufactured.

Amanda preferred not to use it. Not out of scruples—scruples she filed away with the soot—but because of pricing: everything Cizko touched came out of the process with factory defects, and damaged assets lost resale value. The mercenary would be more profitable whole.

But she hadn’t gotten where she was by betting on just one card.

“If the mother can’t get the information out of you,” he said, more to the runner than to the agent, “it’s always good to have a plan B.”

The man nodded again and left, his steps too silent for his size, and disappeared towards the elevator. Amanda did the calculation in her head: Paula’s extraction in Gotham, the transfer, the screening protocols, and on the other side the bloody bureaucracy of removing Cizko from the facility where he was rotting. A few hours, in both cases. The pieces would arrive on the board almost simultaneously.

She cast one last glance at the glass.

The young woman had closed her eyes. She wasn’t sleeping; nobody slept in that position, in that cold, on a mutilated foot. She was somewhere else, some inner room built in Nanda Parbat, brick by brick, precisely for nights like this. Amanda watched her chest rise and fall at a pace too slow to be involuntary, the trembling tamed by some breathing technique, her ruined face in absolute repose, and felt, for the first time in twelve hours, something akin to respect.

Enjoy the room, girl. I’m going to send your mother in there. And then a little man who’s going to take down the wall.

Meanwhile, she could rest a little. The thought came with the tranquil taste of things deserved. Sleep was a luxury, and luxuries, in the world she managed, were distributed by merit and position: neither the prisoner on the seventieth floor, nor the woman who at that moment awaited her dogs in Gotham would be entitled to it tonight. Amanda would. The hierarchy of rest, she reflected as she turned her back to the glass, was the most honest of all hierarchies. Tell me who sleeps, and I’ll tell you who’s in charge.

The corridor to the elevator was long, bare concrete, lit by recessed LED strips that cast no shadows, because shadows were hiding places, and hiding places were design flaws. Her footsteps echoed alone. The second agent remained behind, standing guard before the door to the observation room, motionless as a piece of furniture.

Amanda walked slowly, savoring the rhythm of the day.

The outcome was good. Better than good. For weeks, the Nth Metal case had been waking her up at four in the morning with a taste of defeat in her mouth, that intolerable feeling of watching the game from the stands while someone, somewhere, moved pieces she couldn’t even see. Now she had a lead. She didn’t have the name yet, it’s true. She didn’t have the method, nor the stockpile, nor the head of whoever was emptying impossible vaults around the world. But she had his operative hanging on a hook seventy stories deep, she had the best possible interrogator on her way, compelled by love to do the job for free, and behind those two leads, she had a third that never failed.

And there was something else. Something that wasn’t mentioned in any report and that she savored in silence, while the elevator doors opened with a pneumatic sigh.

She had Paula Crock’s daughter broken and naked in her cell, and she had Paula Crock rolling back into her jurisdiction of her own accord, twenty years later, still disabled, still without evidence, still in debt. The old bill, finally, would be presented, with all the interest, on a plot of land that Amanda had chosen, designed, and buried under miles of rock. A lifelong rival, reduced to an instrument of torture against her own daughter, under her own roof.

There were nights when it was worth having your soul stained.

The doors closed, and the elevator began its ascent through the silent body of the fortress, floor after floor of sleeping monsters, sleepless servants, and agents on standby, all revolving around the will of a single woman. Amanda Waller closed her eyes and rested her head against the steel wall.

The parts would arrive in a few hours.

She could hardly wait.