Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0151

The helicopter had no registration number.

Paula had noticed this back in Gotham, even before boarding. The machine had landed on the terrace of a disused parking lot with the lightness of an insect floating to rest on the water. The fuselage, a matte, almost velvety black, boasted hard, faceted lines, designed to swallow radar waves like a bottomless pit. Above it spun two sets of compound rotors, each blade as short as a razor blade, reducing the roar to a deep pulse that vibrated in her chest more than it could be heard in her ears. Paula recognized that family of aircraft: she had already jumped from older “sister” models decades ago, over jungles whose names never appeared in official reports. The American government spent fortunes pretending that model didn’t exist, and Amanda Waller treated it like a private taxi.

You haven’t changed at all.

Hours later, flying silently over the gray Alaskan sky, the aircraft had transformed into a somber animal gliding over a monochromatic world. Below, dense carpets of black conifers dotted endless fields of pristine snow, stretching as far as the curvature of the Earth allowed the eye to see. Frozen rivers snaked between the trees like silver scars. There was no road, no chimney emitting smoke. Paula kept her face pressed against the narrow window and did what she always did in hostile transport: meticulous accounting. Three hours and forty minutes had passed since refueling at a clandestine airstrip, calculated by the echo of the turbines. The sun rose sometimes to the left, sometimes behind, sometimes to the left again – deliberate course corrections to mislead attentive passengers. Even so, she noted every variation. Useless information doesn’t exist, only data awaiting context.

The six agents who occupied the cabin with her didn’t utter a single word. They wore plain black uniforms, rifles strapped to their chests like extensions of their bodies, and ballistic masks that left only two cold eyes exposed. They searched her before boarding with almost liturgical precision: millimeter-wave scanners that pierced fabrics, chemical detectors that wandered through pockets, gloves sliding along every seam of her clothing and every tube of her wheelchair, until they disassembled the left armrest in search of secrets. They found only a middle-aged, paraplegic, and unarmed woman. Exactly what Amanda Waller had ordered.

From time to time, she felt the weight of those gazes upon her: quick, furtive, like those of young soldiers who only know certain faces from stories. Paula pretended not to notice. The woman they spied on from the corner of her mask was forty-two years old according to her documents, but her face refused to confirm that figure: uniform caramel-colored skin, a legacy of the Saigon sun that no American winter had managed to fade; high cheekbones, firm lips, dark, slightly almond-shaped eyes that barely rested for more than two seconds on any point, and yet absorbed everything. Her black hair, cut short and practical, framed a neck erect with a discipline that no classroom could teach. There was a sharp, yet uninviting beauty there—the beauty of an impeccably honed blade.

The sound of the turbines changed. Descent.

Through the window, an austere mountain rose on the horizon: a dark granite ridge tearing through the white blanket of snow. The helicopter circled its base, and Paula spotted the helipad ahead: a heated concrete octagon, free of any trace of snowflakes, planted in the middle of absolute nowhere. She made the automatic calculation: the last inhabited place, a tiny village clinging to a river, was more than four hundred kilometers behind. No one arrived there by chance. No one left without permission.

Ten agents waited on the platform, distributed in overlapping firing sectors, with no blind spots, two always back to back. Someone had trained this competently. The propellers braked slowly, raising a crown of powder snow that the wind carried down the mountain, and the aircraft landed with a hydraulic sigh.

Two agents descended first, weapons raised, taking up positions as guardians of a secret. Then, a side platform unfolded from the fuselage with a precise hum, lowering Paula and her wheelchair onto the concrete like extremely valuable cargo.

“Follow us,” one of them ordered, his dry, uninflected voice leaking through the mask.

Paula remained silent. She pressed her hands against the rims of the chair and slid downstream, feeling the biting wind pierce every exposed inch of her face, while the tires scraped the heated pavement in a constant whisper, almost a secret shared between her and the mountain.

…

They guided her to the edge of the helipad, where the concrete octagon ended in a low parapet. From there, Paula glimpsed, through the thick clouds, what the mountain kept hidden from anyone looking from above: three hundred meters below, nestled in a fold of the terrain, stretched a slab of raw concrete, a square so perfect it looked more like a forgotten altar. The snow, a thin, pale layer, covered everything, accentuating the feeling of emptiness—no doors, no windows, no clue as to its purpose.

Suddenly, without the sound of machinery or escaping steam, a section of the parapet receded, revealing a descent platform embedded in the concrete. The two agents climbed up first, motionless as stone statues, and waited. Paula rolled to the center of the metal plate. In an almost imperceptible glide, the platform began to descend the rock face, following a silent, cold, steel-like path.

During that descent—each second seeming to stretch out in slow motion—she scanned the contours of the two men: the exact distance between them, the way they held their weapons, the angles of their tense elbows. Old combat habits surfaced, her mind collecting data in a silent inventory: two taps for the first, three for the second, if she were standing. For it was only a matter of gathering information; judgment would come later. Not yet.

When the platform reached the slab, the agents descended with measured steps, and for a long moment, the only sound was the wind tearing through the low sky, the cold concrete beneath their feet. Then the ground moved.

Without squeaks, without the faces of workers, a square section of the slab simply rose, outlining in the void a cube almost six meters on each side. Its faces displayed a matte material, impossible to identify—it was neither steel nor concrete, but something in between. A bright vertical line tore through one of the faces, and the cube opened like a mechanical flower.

Inside, under a uniform, relentless white light, stood Amanda Waller. Time seemed to have been more generous to the cruelty of her expression than to her own body: she appeared fuller, comfortably seated in an impeccably tailored dark suit, strands of hair already turning gray at her temples, and a slight accumulation of skin outlining a discreet double chin. However, her eyes remained the same: small, sharp, timing every detail of the world.

Upon seeing Paula, Amanda smiled with the calculated calm of someone receiving a distinguished guest. She stepped to the edge of the cube like a hostess who knows all the secrets of the room.

“Paula. It’s good to see you,” he said in a deep, velvety voice, designed for whispers in sealed rooms. “I wish our meeting could take place under less… icy circumstances.”

Paula swiveled her chair a few degrees, positioned herself to face her, and allowed the silence to linger until it bordered on discomfort, before saying:

“Amanda. I see you’ve gained a few pounds.” His eyes lowered, slowly scanning the expensive suit, making a cold assessment. “I already warned you that this weight would cause problems.”

Amanda’s smile vanished in an instant, as if an icy breath had cut the air between them. Behind their satin masks, the two bodyguards’ eyes widened, and Paula noticed the sudden stiffening of the burly men’s massive shoulders, veins bulging beneath their taut skin. Men accustomed to bending generals to their will with orders had never seen anyone treat her with such fearlessness, and their rigid world needed a full second to realign itself.

“Always insolent.” Amanda’s tone was as hard as granite, and her face hardened, taking on a more austere, cold contour. “Remember who holds the cards, Paula.”

“I know who’s holding them, Amanda.” Paula’s voice came out low, flat, without a trace of urgency. But there was something there, a sharp glint that made one of the henchmen swallow hard, without understanding why. “Take me to my daughter.”

A flash of triumph lit up Amanda’s dark eyes, the heightened pleasure of someone who recognizes the exact place where each piece of the chessboard fit.

“Your daughter.” She lingered on the word, savoring each syllable. “Young. Beautiful. She inherited her mother from when you were still useful. If you knew what we tried to do to get information out of her… You’d be proud, Paula. You did a good job as a mother. She’s strong.” A surgical pause. “Like you used to be.”

“If you hurt her—”

“What are you going to do?” Amanda interrupted, contempt dripping from every syllable, heavy as lead. “You’re a cripple, Paula. A useless invalid who spent twenty years washing dishes. Shut up and obey. Maybe that way you’ll get out alive with your daughter.” The smile returned, narrow and cutting. “Maybe you’ll even learn to walk again.”

She lowered her gaze. Slowly, her massive shoulders yielded an inch, her chin touched her chest, and the tamed defeat—that perfect image Amanda had cultivated in her imagination for two decades—descended like a veil. Amanda drank in the scene like a rare wine, shrugged contentedly, and turned, confident, without fear of broken furniture. The brutes took their positions, the escort closed the rear, and everyone entered the cube that finally revealed its true face: a steel and glass elevator.

Inside, the doors slammed shut with a dull pneumatic click. Paula lifted her chin and scanned every inch: translucent walls on the inside, opaque on the outside, reinforced structural glass; an illuminated panel with buttons from the ground floor to the tenth floor, no more than that; no mechanical eye in sight, a sign of very well-hidden cameras; thin lines on the ceiling, gas ducts or motion sensors. She mapped every detail, heavy as if each piece of information were a step towards freedom.

Amanda noticed the lingering gaze and smiled without turning completely.
“You can stare all you want. It’s impossible to escape from here.” She pressed an illuminated button and the elevator shuddered in a sudden jolt. “We have countermeasures even against Superman.”

Superman doesn’t need to escape from anywhere, Paula thought, keeping her face unperturbed. Whoever builds a cage thinking of him forgets to think of me.

The cube fell.

The descent through the granite layers lasted the time it took to take three deep breaths. Sixty meters of rock passed like solid night through the translucent panels, until the stone opened in a burst of space. Before it, a vast subterranean hall rose, like a cataclysm of metal and pulsating lights: rows of consoles lighting up under dangling cables, generators rumbling to a heartbeat rhythm, dark corridors carved into the living rock. The smell of hot oil and ozone mingled with the faint echo of distant footsteps.

Paula was already familiar with the underground world — Intergang bunkers drenched in fear, laboratories in Star City caves, League of Shadows fortresses nestled in monasteries where the wind howled like a sentinel — but nothing, absolutely nothing, had prepared her for this.

The elevator now plunged through a ceiling of raw rock, artificially carved into a cavern that stretched beyond the reach of the light. A colossal hangar opened beneath its feet, and “hangar” seemed an understatement: concrete columns, as thick as redwood trunks, supported above them a vault of bare stone nearly thirty meters high. The air inside was thick, laden with hot oil and heated metal, vibrating with the faint hum of generators hidden deep within. Between the columns, the concrete floor lay seething in a choreography of slumbering war: rows of varnished armored vehicles lined up like chess pieces, low-profile troop transports camouflaged in olive tones, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft tucked under tactical tarpaulins, and autonomous forklifts glided silently through corridors marked with yellow stripes. Masked agents crisscrossed the floor in groups of four, rifles slung over their shoulders, thick-soled boots resounding in military rhythms. Technicians in gray overalls crouched over open engines, speaking in muffled whispers as they handled welding torches—each hidden behind a balaclava and mask, silent witnesses that there, no one had a face, no one truly existed.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” Amanda’s voice broke the silence inside the booth, thick with vanity. “It took me years to build all this. I broke a few eggs along the way, but it was worth it. Everything down here lives in my shadow. Every order that echoes in these corridors came from my mouth. Not even the president has a say here.” She placed her palm against the glass—the warmth of her hand seemed to etch into the surface. “This is mine.”

Paula kept her chin slightly lowered, the silent guard of someone accepting imprisonment, but her eyes didn’t stop for a second. She counted twelve vehicles ready to leave, mentally calibrated the distance between the columns, and estimated four hundred men on that level alone, judging by the formation and rotation of the patrols. She noticed the network of gutters tearing through the floor: too wide for simple water drainage, with the perfect fit for retractable barriers. And, despite everything, she couldn’t suppress an almost imperceptible smile that formed at the corner of her lips.

Each word from Amanda was a little gift of information. A base outside official records meant supply via clandestine routes—and their own routes meant bottlenecks untouched by official rescues. If even the president had no voice there, no one would come to that abyss to save them when the light went out. Paula kept everything in the same silent vault where she had gathered every fragment of knowledge she had absorbed in years of infiltration.

The elevator continued its descent, revealing one by one the floors designed by Amanda’s ambition. On the second and third levels, austere corridors stretched in straight lines, each door spaced with military precision. Through the openings here and there, Paula glimpsed spartan interiors: eight crude metal bunk beds in each room, narrow sheet metal lockers like cells, and not a single photograph pasted on any wall. The silence was broken only by the occasional creak of a locker latch.

On the fourth floor, a mess hall the size of a gymnasium exuded the heavy aroma of rationed food—canned vegetables, weak coffee, and a hint of metallic smell that only enclosed mess halls know. Rows of masked men consumed their meals under ceiling panels that filtered a golden, oblique light, mimicking the sunset none of them had seen in months. Paula recognized the artifice: submarines used the same luminous deception to maintain the crew’s sanity.

Beyond the fifth floor, the sixth opened into a gymnasium that occupied half the slab. The acrid smell of sweat mingled with the gnawing rubber of the treadmills: men ran, lifted weights, wrestled on marked mats, all under a tense silence, broken only by measured breaths and the occasional clinking of metal against metal. On the seventh, before she could see it, Paula heard the muffled, rhythmic crackle of gunfire: a huge shooting range where dozens of agents unloaded ammunition as if performing automated tasks. The eighth was a simulation deck—replicas of corridors, doors, and staircases where teams repeatedly performed perimeter breaches, honing their instincts until every movement became reflexive.

And permeating all of this, visible only to those who had learned to see lines of defense, was Amanda’s true design: panels embedded in the walls, joined by joints too thin to be mere finishes—perfect fits for hidden turrets. Reinforced door frames every twenty meters, ready to lower hydropneumatic grates and seal entire episodes in watertight compartments. Staircases narrow enough to prevent mass advances, concrete funnels designed to transform each flight into deadly traps. Those first eight floors were not simple lodgings, but raw flesh positioned before a heart of steel: every invader would have to cross a legion of men sleeping ten seconds from their posts before even reaching what really mattered.

“You didn’t build a foundation ,” Paula thought, her jaw relaxed down, her eyelids heavy with contained tension. ” You built your own head. Paranoia for paranoia, floor for floor.”

And that was what she leaned on, as if on an invisible throne. She had known every recess of her own mind for thirty years.

…

On the tenth floor, the elevator sighed and stopped with a slight jolt. The brushed steel doors opened like silent lips, revealing a corridor that Paula, at first, thought was an illusion.

Nothing but a corridor. Polished concrete walls, gleaming softly, without cracks, rejecting any shadow. The ceiling housed rows of LED strips set in straight grooves, emitting a constant, whitish light, without flickering. To the right and left, identical doors: smooth sheets, without numbers, without visible handles, fitted into the wall with surgical precision. Between each door, an exact three-meter gap, measured by an indoor metronome. Every ten or fifteen meters, the corridor fragmented into two or three identical branches, disappearing into gentle curves that prevented any glimpse of the next intersection.

Amanda stepped out of the elevator with the ease of someone walking down their own balcony. The two giants in suits puffed out their chests, making way, while the escort pushed Paula’s wheelchair, its wheels scraping the smooth floor with a constant hum.

They walked for half an hour.

No apparent pattern guided the route. Amanda turned down a corridor by sheer intuition: left at one intersection, right at the next. She pushed open a door that swung open at the touch of an invisible sensor, revealing another identical tunnel; she crossed a transverse gallery illuminated by slits in the ceiling, returned, and continued on. Twice Paula was certain they were returning to the same point, and twice she discovered it wasn’t possible: a groove in the floor displaced three centimeters, the hum of a fan in a lower tone, the faint metallic echo of the colossal boots changing timbre as they passed over a supporting plate. The place had been designed to deceive the memory, not the body.

“Clever ,” she admitted. ” Kidnap the blueprint, torture the architect, it won’t do any good. The path only exists in the mind of the person who walks it every day.”

So Paula did what the Huntress had always done when faced with labyrinths: she succumbed to the strategy of mechanical recording.

Each wheel rotation became a measure of a stretch of road. Twenty-three rotations, left. Eleven rotations, right. Automatic door, seven rotations, inclined gallery to the right, forty-one rotations in a straight line. She anchored each fragment to an immutable sign: the odor of ozone, more concentrated near the main ducts, a lamp whose flicker marked a fraction of a second difference, the muffled echo of the two colossi changing texture where the concrete gave way to hollow panels. Paula’s mind triangulated each point, stitching together half an hour of walking into a string of beads that she could unravel in reverse, blindfolded, under a rain of shards.

If Amanda was counting on a middle-aged invalid getting lost in that maze of corridors, she was making the most dangerous mistake in front of Paula Nguyen Crock.

He underestimated her.

The journey ended in a wider corridor, which closed off at a pair of elevator doors, also made of brushed steel, with no glass to reveal the interior. The flaps opened by themselves, revealing a hermetically sealed cabin, entirely lined in matte metal. On the interior panel, buttons numbered from ten to thirty.

“Segmented elevators ,” Paula noted as the chair rolled across the threshold. ” No cabin travels the entire shaft. Each section is an isolated fortress, and between them, a labyrinth. To go down, you need an escort. To go up…” She silenced the conclusion, letting the idea hang in the air.

The descent was quick and surprisingly smooth, as if the air pressure were compressed and released in perfect synchronicity before hitting her eardrums. Twenty floors dissolved without anyone noticing. Amanda didn’t celebrate victory; the silence carried a darker note than vanity. What existed between the eleventh and thirtieth floors, she wouldn’t share even if provoked.

On the thirtieth day, the doors opened to another labyrinth.

Brother of the previous one, but not a twin. The air there dropped two degrees, carrying clear traces of hospital disinfectant: chemical, subtle, persistent like a warning. The walls remained polished concrete, the same silent doors, but the silence had a different weight. On the tenth floor, it was simply the absence of humans. There, it was containment. Paula couldn’t explain how she knew, but she knew: behind some of those walls, something breathed, and the thickness of the concrete had been calculated to precisely contain that living thing.

They walked for another twenty minutes through cold tunnels, illuminated by strips of white LED lights that highlighted the suspended dust. The smooth floor sounded hollow with each step, echoing through the reinforced concrete arches. Paula mentally revisited each security protocol, recording everything again – rotation by rotation of the hydraulic cylinders, fold by fold of the metal locks – stacking one string of requirements upon another, like beads on an invisible rosary. Beneath the glacial fury she carried from Gotham, she couldn’t suppress a pang of professional admiration: the armor of that hole crushed everything she had ever invaded or defended. Amanda had always been famous for her paranoia. Down there, the paranoia had taken shape: stainless steel beams, protective concrete vaults, epic budgets bordering on sanctity.

The third elevator awaited them at the end of a long corridor, where the walls seemed to converge at a single vanishing point. A panel of buttons, arranged in millimeter-precise rows from 30 to 70, blinked under amber light. Amanda raised her finger without hesitation, slid it across the cold metal surface, and pressed the highest number with a sharp click.

Seventy, the steel button lit up.

“Hold on,” she murmured, with a biting humor that didn’t require a response.

The cabin began its descent as if sinking into thick water. Time stretched into overlapping seconds; the deep hum of the cables grew denser with each passing meter. Paula felt the depth on her skin: the surrounding metal plates became sometimes icy, sometimes warm, as if the pressure were compressing her in an underground shell. It was the weight of the planet closing an invisible hand on the ceiling. She tried to calculate how many kilometers of rock were accumulating above her head, but gave up – the number only increased her anguish.

Amanda broke the silence without turning around, keeping her gaze fixed on the dull reflection of the steel door:
“You know what I missed most in all these years?” Her voice was soft, almost gentle. “Working with people of your caliber. Those who came after were good, some excellent. But none of them could walk into a room and make everyone rethink every move. That was you.” A precise pause, and the sweet tone soured at the edges. “Then you threw it all away. For diapers.”

Paula kept her gaze fixed on the cold wall, her hands resting on the arms of the chair.
“I threw it away,” she said slowly, “what you never had.”

Amanda’s reflex didn’t move, but the fingers of her right hand clenched into a brief squeeze, revealing tension. Paula caught the gesture – a silent victory – and filed it all away in her memory. The rest of the descent passed in absolute silence.

The elevator announced its arrival with a banal, pastel-colored plim, the domestic note of a shopping mall sounding obscene at that depth, and the doors opened on the seventieth floor.

Before them stretched a colossal corridor: eight meters wide and with a ceiling height capable of swallowing a two-story house. The raw concrete walls were streaked with white light that prevented any shadow from appearing. Each step of the bodyguards reverberated like a contained thunderclap; the wheels of the chair grazed the polished floor, whispering metallic secrets. There were no side doors. No detours. That space had not been designed for circulation, but for arrival.

At the end of the corridor, a four-meter-high armored door recognized them from a distance and slid into the wall with a deep rumble, echoing like thunder in an ancient cave.

On the other side, the absurdity was revealed. A meticulously ordinary waiting room: sofas upholstered in beige synthetic leather, cushions aligned with surgical precision; a water fountain bubbling in a rhythmic drip; a coffee maker exhaling clouds of roasted and bitter aroma; lush ferns hanging from suspended pots under calibrated spectrum lamps. It was a dental office reception area, buried under ancient rocks, just steps away from whatever secret Amanda kept down there.

Paula’s stomach clenched. She knew that trick well – she’d seen variations on three continents. Normality as an instrument of control. Contrast as a subtle blade. You sit on the sofa, inhale the smell of strong coffee, allow your body to relax for a fraction of a degree against your will – and it’s in that tenth of a second that they enter.

Two doors cut into opposite walls, each with its own secret. To the left, a huge, double opening, hermetically sealed, its metal plates embedded in the masonry with black screws. To the right, a smaller, unassuming door, made of simple wood, its gray paint already worn by years. Amanda crossed the waiting room without taking her eyes off the alarm switches near the ceiling, ignored the upholstered sofas—where the wooden tops creaked slightly under their own weight—and led the group to the small door. She turned the handle effortlessly and, with a click as soft as a mechanical whisper, allowed passage.

On the other side stretched the control room: a cavernous cube of gleaming white tiles beneath fluorescent lamps, whose low hum sounded like the din of electronic viscera. Half a dozen workstations lined up in rows, each dominated by monitors flashing columns of data: temperature curves rising and falling, lines tracing rapid heartbeats, oxygen saturation levels in irregular pulses. The air, cold and dry, smelled of industrial solvent. Two technicians, their faces hidden by sterile masks, rose just enough to reach silent keyboards; neither raised their head when the group entered, as if trapped in a silent choreography. On the back wall, a gigantic smoked glass panel occupied the entire space: a black, opaque rectangle, motionless like an epitaph.

Amanda strode to the central control panel, her footsteps echoing on the cold ceramic. Paula followed her every move, her gaze strained with anxiety. Through the darkened glass, she discerned vague silhouettes, outlines that almost dissolved into the twilight. A pale figure hovered in the center of an empty, ethereal space. Then, with a firm touch on a set of illuminated buttons, Amanda lowered the glass’s tint by two shades, and Paula, in a single glance, saw her daughter.

The world shrank to fit within that luminous rectangle.

Inside, Jade remained naked, propped against the immaculate wall like a sculpture of exhausted flesh. Her arms were outstretched above her head, her wrists intertwined in surgical steel handcuffs, attached to invisible rods that descended from the ceiling at the precise height to force each tense muscle to balance on tiptoe. The incandescent light outlined every curve of her body, the shadows accentuating the bony prominences and the exposed vulnerability. Paula immediately recognized the position: an old method, learned from Amanda herself decades ago, in basements dubbed “interview rooms” in official reports. There were no external bruises that a coroner could classify as the work of a third party: only the inexorable gravity, the dilated time, and the victim’s own weight becoming her executioner.

In a clinical flash, Paula assessed the rest: hematomas in various stages of blooming, coinciding on ribs, thighs, and abdomen, from deep purple to sickly yellow, deposited with machine precision. The nose, displaced at a slight angle, had not been reduced; a dark crust of dried blood stretched from the lower lip to the chin, like matte ink. The swollen left eye, almost stitched shut in a purple jealousy, barely opened a slit of pain. The left foot rested crookedly, save for the big toe protected by a minimal bandage—the exact mark of the pliers that had torn away the rest. With each of Jade’s sighs, a wisp of white vapor dispersed in the icy air, a sign that the cell was being cooled centimeter by centimeter. On the neck, resting on the thin veins, a dark metal collar gleamed with a point of amber light pulsing in slow rhythms, like a mechanical organ dodging death.

Paula’s hands slid to the side handles of the chair, where the cold of the tubular steel invaded her skin. For an instant, everything ceased except the throbbing pulse in her ears. Then, without thinking, her fingers clenched with terrible force. The metal yielded with a muffled groan and bent, molding itself to Paula’s fury like wax to heat. She felt the steel soften beneath her palms, the discreet squeak of the enamel chipping in micro-fissures. In an effort that hurt her more than any torture inflicted on that defenseless little girl, Paula opened her hands, let them fall onto her thighs, and, with a painful movement, covered the damage to the handle with the thin blanket that wrapped her legs, as if she could hide, beneath the fabric, the stifled cry of her powerlessness.

Not yet. Not yet.

“See how well we take care of your little girl.” Amanda’s voice echoed through the room, warm and sticky like honey left in the sun, permeating every corner of that impersonal space—impeccably white walls, gleaming floor, air too cold to be comfortable. “Our guest of honor, so to speak.” She turned to Paula with a crooked smile, like a hostess displaying a rare wine. “Why don’t we say hello?”

With a soft click, the insulating glass separating the two of them from Jade transformed from a reflective mirror to total transparency. The panel beside the wheelchair shimmered, and Amanda leaned over a thin-stemmed microphone, the cold metal contrasting with the cruel heat in her voice.

“Hello, kitten.” The words invaded the cell through the speaker, sweet as spoiled syrup running down a throat. “How’s the stay going? I hope my boys haven’t bored you.”

On the other side, Jade raised her head in a slow, calculated movement—each millimeter of her neck costing enough energy to reveal the pain behind that gesture. Her face, disfigured by torture, turned toward the glass, and her dark eyes pierced the exact spot from which the voice came, without hesitation, without surprise, as if they already knew where to find it. There was no fear, no hatred, but an ancient and patient coldness in them, the coldness of the dungeons of Nanda Parbat. Amanda clicked her tongue, almost in admiration.

“That reaction…” She shook her head, leaning a little closer to Paula. “You really raised wonderful daughters.”

It was then that Jade’s eyes, moving from the glass to what was behind it, met the figure seated next to Amanda Waller. Her mother. In the chair. There.

The ancient cold shattered into a thousand pieces. Paula saw, in slow motion within her own mind, the exact instant the armor forged by the League of Shadows crumbled: Jade’s shoulders sinking in a jolt, her chest collapsing in a desperate gasp, her body arching an inch toward the shackles, the veins pulsing in her neck. Her parched lips parted, a whisper of her name rising from her throat…

Immediately, the amber necklace around Jade’s neck shimmered suddenly, its warm hue turning a fierce red. Then, every muscle in her body stiffened at once, as if an invisible sledgehammer had struck them in unison. Her torso arched from heels to nape, her feet lost their grip, and all her weight fell onto her already bruised wrists as an electric current ripped through every fiber. It lasted two seconds, but it felt like years.

“I didn’t give you permission to speak.” Amanda raised a finger on the control panel, casual, cold as an executioner. The voice that echoed was that of someone reprimanding a domesticated animal. “You speak when I want you to. Only when I want you to.”

The convulsion ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Jade hung there, her fingers searching for the floor, her breath escaping in white sparks, while raising her gaze required a titanic effort. She found her mother through the glass: in Paula’s eyes, a deep well of despair.

Something inside Paula finally broke.

Without thinking, when she realized it, she had already moved away from the wall—four measured steps, two seconds timed by her own adrenaline. Each step made her heart pound against her ribs, every fiber of her body vibrated, ready to explode. She climbed onto the elevated platform, her skirt swirling around her legs like a flag of fury, and knelt before Amanda Waller, her face pressed against the cold panel.

“Calm down.” Her voice came out low, but laden with an unthinking authority, as if it came from an ancient warrior at the height of battle.

The voice was born inside her ear like the sound of a metronome in a dark room—no visible origin, no body, just a pulse.

“Jade can handle it. She’s holding on. Look at her.” A short pause, calculated to fit between two of Paula’s heartbeats. “We don’t know what that necklace can do. If you react now, all of this will have been in vain, and she’ll pay the price. Breathe, Paula.”

Her body trembled. Her hands, once again clenched against the warped steel of the handles, beneath the blanket—her fingers curled against the already deformed metal, the marks of her own fingernails still fresh on her palms.

“Breathe.”

Paula breathed. She pulled air through her nose in four counts, the way she’d learned before that boy was born—taught by a woman with a dry voice who said the body is an animal and that animals are domesticated through repetition. She held it. She released it, her warm breath dissolving into the artificial cold of the room without leaving a trace. The engine beneath her skin didn’t shut down—it never completely shut down—but it sank, receded below what Amanda’s eyes could measure, to a place only Paula had access to. The distance between the chair and the nape of Amanda’s neck became just distance again, four bent steps, tucked away like a knife in a boot, and the fury, instead of escaping, descended and settled deep in her chest, dense and usable, a fuel stored for the right moment—cold now, and therefore more dangerous.

Amanda, oblivious, observed the biometric monitors with the interest of a collector, her small eyes moving from line to line with the patience of someone reading a language only she understands.

“Really, I brought the right person.” She turned to Paula, and there was a glint of confirmed experimentation in her small eyes—not the glint of someone who feels, but of someone who takes notes. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a reaction from her. Twelve hours, and nothing. You walk into the room, and look at that.” The smile opened slowly, the corners of her mouth rising without her eyes following. “Maternal instinct. Underestimated as a tool.”

Then she consulted the clock on the wall, and pleasure gave way to accounting—the expression closing like a drawer, the next item already on the tip of her tongue.

“It’s not time for the interrogation yet.” She turned to her rival with the cordiality of someone concluding a productive meeting, her voice carrying the exact weight of nothing. “We have a few hours before the process begins. Rest. You’ll need it.” A curt nod to the escort agents, the brief, eye-free gesture of someone dispatching mail. “Take her to a room.”

Gloved hands gripped the back of the chair—long fingers closing over the metal with a familiarity Paula registered and stored away in a separate compartment—and the chair swiveled, its wheels gliding silently across the shimmering floor, and they began to push her toward the door. Paula needed all the willpower that forty-two years had bestowed upon her to let them take her, to keep her hands flat and lifeless on her thighs, her shoulders docile, her theater upright—her neck obeying muscle by muscle, her breath escaping in intervals she fabricated one by one as if building a wall brick by brick. The voice in her ear murmured, *that’s it, calm down, we’re with you*, and yet it was hard. It was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she had already crossed a minefield carrying a dead man, her feet learning the ground blindly while his blood slowly cooled against the side of her neck.

His eyes, however, obeyed no pretense. They remained on his daughter until the end—on the thin vapor that escaped between her parted lips, on the amber point of light pulsing in the necklace like a heart that belonged to no one.

And Jade’s eyes remained on her.

—

It was at the last instant, with the door already opening behind her, that Paula blinked. Not the involuntary blink of someone whose eyes are burning. A sequence. Short, precise, rhythmic, long, short, pauses measured in fractions that seemed only the tired trembling of a defeated woman, and which twenty years ago, in afternoons of training disguised as play, she had instilled in her daughters as one instills a language before speech: her code, distilled from Morse code and rewritten to fit into a glance.

Three words.

We came to save you.

Jade’s eyes widened. Not like before, not the widening of shock that the necklace had punished. Something deeper and quieter, an understanding igniting behind her ruined face, and Paula still managed to reach the first millimeter of that light before the escort turned her around completely and the door swallowed the control room, the glass, her daughter.

The giant corridor greeted her back with its throat-thumping echo.

On the other side of the closing door, Amanda Waller approached the glass and gazed at the prisoner with the serenity of someone checking the oven.

“Calm down, calm down.” Her voice came through the speaker, soft. “You’ll have plenty of time to talk. Why don’t you rest a little?”

She touched the panel. The glass darkened shade by shade until it became a black tombstone again, returning to the cell only its own reflection: a naked young woman, hanging, broken on the outside, alone miles from any sky.

And in the white silence of the cell, on tiptoe on the cold floor, Jade Nguyen looked at her own image in the dark mirror and smiled.

Amanda had seen that smile dozens of times in the last twelve hours and had learned to read a challenge in it.

This time, I would have read something else.