Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0150

Chapter 150

The first sound in the world was that of a drain.

A low, guttural drain vibrated through the liquid as if the water itself had a throat. Paula opened her eyes within the murky green and felt no panic, which intrigued her even before any other thought formed. She knew waking up in the wrong places. She knew what it tasted like, that acidic discharge at the back of her tongue, her heart racing before her mind could grasp the reason for the race. None of that came. Her consciousness returned in slow layers, the way the tide returns to the shore what it took away, one object at a time, without haste, and her body rested in that warm suspension as if she had traversed something exhausting from which no pain remained. Only the echo. The muscular memory of an effort that the flesh had made without asking permission from its owner.

The liquid level began to drop. She noticed it first by the light, which grew clearer as the green foil narrowed above her eyes, and then by gravity, reclaiming her inch by inch. Her shoulders met the padded surface. The nape of her neck. The curve of her back. The weight of her own body rearranged itself on the capsule’s upholstery with a strange, dense solidity, as if she weighed more than she remembered, or as if there were simply more of her to weigh it down.

A pneumatic sigh ran along the edges of the cocoon. The acrylic rose.

The laboratory air descended upon her damp skin, cold and sterile, with that metallic taste of overly filtered air. Paula blinked against the bright white light. She sat up slowly, her legs stretched out in front of her, moved by an automatism that consulted no intention whatsoever, and remained there, dripping, trying to piece together a map of where she was and how she had arrived. The answers existed. She felt them floating somewhere behind her forehead, blurry, waiting their turn to land.

It was then that he heard, to the left and to the right, the same pneumatic sigh in duet.

Two more cocoons opened.

From the first emerged a young man. And Paula, who had cataloged bodies her whole life with the detachment of someone evaluating weapons, who had learned to read in a torso the number of years of training and in a pair of shoulders the fighting style, found herself staring for a second longer than courtesy would allow. It wasn’t beauty, although beauty was there, and in almost offensive quantity. It was proportion. It was the design of something sculpted by a criterion that didn’t belong to academies or fortunate genetics, each muscle placed with the precision of a watchmaker’s piece, the whole thing radiating a resting power that made the surrounding air seem denser. She had faced gods before. Few could say the same, and even fewer had survived to use the comparison properly. That thing to her left reminded her of one of them on the day of creation.

The young man didn’t look at her. He stared at his own hand raised before his face, his fingers opening and closing slowly, and there was a deep, almost solemn reflection in his eyes, like someone inspecting the interior of a house after a renovation he himself designed.

From the other cocoon, a young woman rose through the vapor rising from the drained liquid.

And Paula’s world stopped.

She would recognize that silhouette in any darkness, under any disguise, in the middle of any crowd on the planet. She had embraced that silhouette when it fit on her forearm. But the daughter emerging from the tank wasn’t exactly the daughter who had gone in. Artemis had always been beautiful in a way that embarrassed photographers, athletic, sculpted, worthy of the covers she never wanted to grace. Now, however, something had passed through her and left its signature in every line. Her body had gained centimeters in height and a new definition, her hips wider, her bust fuller, her thighs and arms carrying a robustness that weighed her down, that only made her more inevitable. Her skin seemed to have been polished from within. And her golden, soaked hair fell down her back with a shine that no murky water should be able to produce.

Paula felt the smile welling up before she could even allow it.

She inherited her mother’s genes. The thought came with an old, almost forgotten vanity, lukewarm like a drink she hadn’t tasted in decades. The hair is from her father. The rest is mine.

Artemis was also studying her own hands. She flexed her fingers, clenched her fist, and Paula listened. She truly heard, across the two meters that separated them, the muffled snap of the phalanges closing, a compressed and dense sound, like that of a steel cable being stretched inside velvet. There was too much force contained in that small gesture. A force of a kind that made Paula’s instinct take a step back on its own, even with her sitting down, even with her being her daughter.

And then, as if a single invisible thread had pulled them, they both turned to her at the same time.

Beneath those two pairs of eyes, the fog that had clouded her mind finally dissipated. The last few hours landed all at once, in order, with surgical precision. Amanda’s voice on the phone, cutting through the night from the kitchen like a blade finding an old scar. Artemis kneeling before her on the cold apartment floor. The elevator plummeting into the ground. The green-skinned boy between three tanks, promising, with the nonchalance of someone noting an appointment, what twenty years of medicine had sworn was impossible.

And behind all of that, hanging somewhere she couldn’t name, was Jade.

Fear arrived without warning and without mercy.

Not the fear of pain, nor of death. She had tamed those while still young, taught them to eat out of her hand. It was an older, dirtier fear: the fear that none of it had worked. That she would open her mouth to ask and the answer would come wrapped in technical excuses, in percentages, in averted glances. That all of that—the sculpted young man, the transfigured daughter, the laboratory pulsating around them—was merely the setting of which she would be the only defective piece, returned to the world in the same way she had entered it.

Because, after all, how does a disabled woman save her own daughter?

The question hit her with Amanda’s voice, with Amanda’s exact timbre, and Paula hated herself for the precision of the imitation. She closed her hands on the upholstery of the capsule. She still hadn’t looked down. She realized this with a silent start: since waking up, her eyes had visited the ceiling, the tanks, the two young men, every corner of that room, except the lower half of her own body. Twenty years of teaching her gaze to skip that section. The habit had survived even a miracle, if there could be one.

Footsteps drew closer across the white floor.

Artemis stopped before her, with Erick half a step behind. Up close, the daughter’s transformation was even more disconcerting, but her eyes were the same, gray and direct, incapable of lying to her mother even when her whole life had depended on it. Artemis took Paula’s hand in his. Her palms were warm.

“Okay, Mom.”

Three words, spoken with the calmness of someone holding something about to break. Then Artemis turned her face over her shoulder, and the calm cracked enough to let out the urgency that lay beneath.

“Erick, is she okay? Did it work out?”

Erick lowered his gaze over Paula’s body. It wasn’t the look men gave to women, nor the look doctors gave to patients. It was the look of a craftsman inspecting his own work, attentive, meticulous, examining invisible points that only he knew where to look. When he finished, a satisfied look settled on his face.

“The surgery went perfectly. The IV injection was also administered.”

Paula heard the words and didn’t believe them.

Not out of distrust of the boy. Out of self-defense. Twenty years had instilled in her a rigid protocol against hope, and the protocol fired on its own, stamping each syllable with the same warning: it might be a dream . She had already had that dream. Dozens of times, in the early years, she would wake up with the physical certainty of having run, of having felt grass beneath her feet, and the morning would exact its toll on the deception with interest. She had learned to distrust any good news that arrived while she was lying down.

The capsule answered for her.

A low hum ran through the structure, and the walls of the cocoon began to descend, folding inward in articulated segments until they disappeared completely. What remained beneath Paula was a raised, flat stretcher, exposed to the air of the room. No more edges. No more protective shell. Just her, on a platform, before two witnesses.

Paula turned her torso.

The movement was simple, performed ten thousand times over two decades: rotate the hips with the arms, drag the dead weight, arrange the legs with the hands as if arranging firewood. His arms were already on their way to the task when his legs moved on their own.

They turned with her. They followed her hips, bent at the knees, slid down the side of the stretcher and stayed there, hanging, swaying gently.

Swinging.

Paula remained motionless, her breath trapped somewhere between her chest and throat. She felt it. She felt the edge of the stretcher pressing against the back of her thighs, the cold air running down her shins, the slight tingling of circulation in her toes. An entire continent of sensation, submerged for twenty years, emerged all at once from the ocean, and every inch of it screamed its existence simultaneously.

She took a deep breath. The fear remained there, stubbornly whispering that all it would take was trying to stand up for the dream to show its teeth. And perhaps she would have remained another long minute on that edge, negotiating with her own terror, if Jade’s face hadn’t crossed her mind uninvited.

Jade, in Amanda’s hands.

She knew what that woman was capable of. She knew with the intimacy of someone who had once been on the same side of the glass, reading the same reports, silently approving things that would later come back at night to demand accountability. Every minute that Paula spent there, sitting, measuring fears, was a minute that also ran on the other side of the world, inside a room that she couldn’t imagine without her stomach clenching.

Paula exhaled, and with that breath, surrendered.

He pushed the stretcher aside and stood up.

The ground received her. Firm, solid, real, rising up the soles of her feet like a low-voltage electric current, and she stood there, vertical, the whole world positioned at the wrong height, too high, the perspective of everything shifted half a meter upwards from the angle at which she had observed it for twenty years. A brief dizziness. Then, balance. Her body knew. Her body had never forgotten.

Only then did she look down.

Two legs. Long, intact, covered in sculpted musculature that descended from her hips to her ankles without a single patch of flabby flesh, without the atrophy that should have been there, that had been there just yesterday, transforming her limbs into thin, pale reminders of what they once were. They were the legs of her prime. No, she corrected, examining the muscle definition with professional coldness returning to command: they were better. The legs from when she was among the best mercenaries on the planet, rebuilt to a more demanding standard than the original.

She raised her arms in front of her face. The same story. Years without any training, and her forearms displayed the hard definition of an athlete in season, her shoulders full, her bare stomach marked by a six-pack that hadn’t been so defined even at twenty-five. Time hadn’t been erased. It had been rewritten, as if retirement, the wheelchair, the disability, the two whole decades of decline were a discarded draft, and that body, the version that should always have existed.

She looked up at the two young people.

Erick had changed little, at least in her eyes, and something told her that the changes within him lay in depths beyond the reach of any eye. Artemis, however, was different. Artemis had been remade inside and out, taller, stronger, sculpted. And the young man smiled at Paula, a smile without arrogance, almost childlike in its satisfaction.

“Didn’t I tell you? You were going to come back stronger.”

Paula opened her mouth to reply.

And the world opened up along with it.

There was no bang, no pain, no warning. There was only information. A deluge of it, arriving through all the doors at once, and the strange thing, what made Paula frown in astonishment, was the order in which everything landed. Each piece of data entered, found its place, was filed. As if something beneath her skull were working at the reception desk, an invisible employee organizing the chaos at the door before it turned into an avalanche. She didn’t understand how it was being managed. She only knew that it was, and that without this silent curation she would probably be on her knees.

His eyes were the first to change.

Artemis moved her hand, a banal gesture, brushing a wet strand of hair from her forehead, and Paula saw the movement in its entirety. Not the blur that normal speed offers, but the complete trajectory, frame by frame, the wrist rotating, the fingers opening, each strand of golden hair yielding to the passage in sequence, drops of water detaching from the tips and crossing the air in arcs that she could lazily intercept. Erick shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and she read the complete transfer, ankle, knee, hip, a mechanical phrase spelled out slowly. The world hadn’t slowed down. It was she who had begun to read it at a different speed.

Then came the ears.

Beneath the hum of the equipment, beneath the residual dripping of the drained tanks, two muffled drums revealed themselves in the silence. In rhythm. Slightly out of sync with each other. It took Paula a full second to accept what they were: hearts. Artemis’s, a little faster. Erick’s, absurdly slow, a processional drum beating against a chest two meters away from her. Two meters. No human ear on the planet could hear another person’s heartbeat through two meters of open air, and she heard both with the clarity of someone pressing their ear to a chest.

And then her sense of smell finally woke up, and that almost took her apart.

Because the scent that prevailed over the antiseptic, over the sweet residue of the green liquid, over the thin ozone that lingered around Erick, was that of Artemis. And beneath everything that the transformation had added to that scent, intact at its core like a footnote that no chemical had managed to edit, was the same warm trail that Paula had known since motherhood, the scent she sought on the top of her daughter’s head when she rocked her in the early morning. It was all there. She could even smell her own scent, new and old at the same time, and she had to plant her heels firmly on the ground because the whole thing, the fragmented vision, the twin drums, the air transformed into an open archive, swirled gently around her.

It wavered. One degree, maybe two.

Erick noticed. Of course he noticed.

“It’s disorienting when your senses are amplified with that force.” His voice also came in layers—the timbre, the vibration in the air, the minimal echo off the metal walls—and Paula had to choose which layer to listen to. “I went through this the first time I turned into an animal. And it was truly disorienting. Difficult to get used to at first.”

There was genuine memory in the phrase, a residue of self-directed humor, and Paula filed the detail along with all the others: he talks about turning into an animal like he talks about riding a bicycle. Just another piece in that young man’s impossible inventory. She would study him later. There was time to understand her son-in-law. There wasn’t time for the rest.

Paula looked away from the two of them and gazed at the open space in the room.

And he took the first step.

It was unstable. Her body had strength to spare; she felt the force overflowing from every fiber like pressure on a dam, but strength and confidence are different things, and the latter was rusty. Her foot landed too hard, her knee locked half a second too late, and Paula had to open her arms a hand’s breadth to regain her balance. A child taking her first step in the body of a predator.

The second step was better. The third, even better.

With each step, something ancient awakened and took its abandoned place. The fourth step no longer required the arms. On the sixth, the hips remembered how to distribute weight in movement. On the eighth, the feet stopped landing and began to roll across the ground, heel, sole, toes, that silent step that instructors had hammered into her in another life and that now returned uninvited, too deeply ingrained for twenty years to uproot.

By the tenth step, Paula Crock crossed the room as if the wheelchair had never existed. As if the two decades had been what the first years of insomnia swore they were: a long, detailed nightmare from which all she had to do was walk out.

And that’s when euphoria won.

She wanted to test it. She needed to test it, with the sudden and irrational hunger of someone who receives back their mother tongue and wants to shout in it. She bent her knees and jumped.

The ground disappeared.

The ceiling came crashing down on her with murderous haste, and luckily, by sheer architectural luck, the ceiling height of that hall was generous, because Paula climbed five meters in a straight line and saw the lighting panels pass within a hand’s breadth of her face. A hand’s breadth. She had calculated the momentum of a regular jump, the jump of a woman in shape, and her body had delivered the momentum of a catapult. One more sliver of force in her legs and she would have cracked her skull against the structure.

The descent was long enough for her to rearrange everything.

And her body, once again, knew. She landed on the balls of her feet, her knees absorbing the impact in a fluid flexion, and the astonishing thing wasn’t the cushioned five-meter fall. It was her silence. No jolts in her joints, no weight exacting a toll on her ankles. It was as if the ground had cradled her in its lap.

Paula stood still for a moment, breathing.

Then he recalibrated. And he allowed himself, for the last time that night, a luxury.

She took two steps and launched her body into a somersault, the ceiling spinning above her in a clean arc. She landed already in transition, her torso plummeting to the floor, and planted a single hand on the ground, her whole body rising inverted onto that single arm, motionless for a second of absolute balance. The arm flexed, compressed, and hurled her upwards like a steel spring. She spun in the air, one, two turns, the world slicing into sharp frames before her new eyes, and when the ground approached again, she received it in a perfect roll that returned her to her feet and still slid into two consecutive somersaults before the inertia ended, her heels landing on the white floor with the smoothness of a well-placed period.

Silence.

Paula looked at her own hands, her chest rising and falling slowly.

She hadn’t just executed that sequence. She had inhabited every fraction of it. Every rotation with the exact margin, every landing on the chosen millimeter, a precision she had never achieved, not even in her early twenties, nor at the absolute peak of her career, when her name crossed borders in sealed folders. What she had just done wasn’t the recovery of an old level. It was the arrival at one that had never existed for her.

And it was precisely at that point, at the peak of the euphoria, that the euphoria died.

Because a thought awaited her up there, patient as a creditor.

While you’re jumping, she’s hanging off somewhere.

Paula felt the joy stream down her face like water still trickling from her hair. What remained underneath was something old and smooth, without warmth, that she hadn’t worn in twenty years and that fit her shoulders instantly, perfectly tailored, like everything else on that new body.

What came out of the tank was something else entirely.

She turned to the two young men who were watching her. And she smiled. The smile carried no warmth, and the voice that crossed the room carried even less, each word honed in a coldness that made the air seem thinner.

“We’re going to rescue my daughter.”

The two approached, and the three faced each other in the center of the hall, between the empty tanks, a single objective occupying three minds in distinct ways. In Paula, the fury of a mother, old as the species, newly armed with a body befitting her own size. In Artemis, the strength of a sister, her fists clenching again with that crack of steel under velvet. And in Erick, something he himself couldn’t define, something nameless, dense, refusing to fit into the words he knew. He gave up trying to name it. He kept only the part that was already decided, the only part that mattered.

The person in charge was going to pay.