Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0153

Chapter 153

One hour, four minutes, seventeen seconds.

Paula didn’t need a watch. Time flowed through her with an accuracy that still surprised her, marked by the rhythm of her own heart, by the cycles of breathing that she deliberately kept slow, by the almost inaudible hum of the ventilation that exchanged the air in the cubicle every ninety-two seconds. Before the IV drip, she estimated time as any veteran would, instinctively calibrated by decades of waiting. Now she counted it. The difference between the two was the difference between swimming and walking on water.

The room measured four steps by four. A narrow bed attached to the wall, a brushed steel sink, a chair bolted to the floor that no one would ever use. The wheelchair rested folded by the door, a piece of a costume she had worn for two days and which already weighed more than any bulletproof vest she had ever owned. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, hands flat on her thighs, shoulders slightly slumped at the exact angle of a defeated woman, Paula waited.

And beneath the wait, he worked.

Her mind retraced the path of descent once more. Seventy floors etched into the ice, and she had registered each one without moving her head: the rhythm of the elevators, the intervals between escort changes, the echo of corridors too wide for a prison and too narrow for a hangar, the doors that hissed and those that creaked, the cameras that rotated and those that pretended to be off. Routes were born and died behind her fixed eyes. Three of them survived the scrutiny. None of the three included her daughter alive at the end, not without help, and so her right hand rose once more to her face, elbow on her knee, fingers covering her mouth as if holding back a yawn.

‘Talk to me.’ The whisper died against the palm before reaching the wall.

The answer came from within the ear, clear, intimate, like a thought that had learned another voice. The implant was smaller than a grain of rice and had been sleeping next to the eardrum since the day before the trip; the surgery had taken eleven minutes and the healing, less than an hour. Not even the entrance scanners, fine-tuned to hunt for metal and circuitry, had sniffed out that tiny organic lie.

‘Still sweeping.’ Erick’s voice had the texture of someone speaking without taking their eyes off anything else. ‘Military traffic, ghost networks, backbones that officially don’t exist. Their host buried this base so deep that not even the government that funds it knows where it breathes.’

‘I already understood that when I went down the first floor.’

And she understood even more. What Amanda had built beneath the ice was neither a prison nor an agency with black money and stamped secrecy. She knew prisons inside and out, on four continents. This was another category of ambition, a vertical city designed never to be found, and Paula doubted that the seventy floors they let her see were all there was to it. Amanda never showed everything. Amanda showed exactly what served the purpose, and kept the rest like a gambler keeps the card that decides the night.

The minutes ticked by. Paula let them fall.

Then, without preamble, the voice returned.

‘We found it.’

A tiny smile hid beneath the fingers covering her mouth, so brief that not even the most paranoid cameras in the world could have captured it.

‘Your friend, if that’s the right word,’ Erick continued, ‘did meticulous work. This level of paranoia is what I’d expect from Batman. No physical cables come out of here, no antennas point anywhere. Everything goes up. I’ve located the satellite that manages the base’s information traffic. That’s how I get in.’

‘How long?’

‘It’s hard to say. From now on it becomes a battle. Its architecture isn’t a wall, it’s an organism. If I step wrong, the system senses the foreign object and the entire network closes in on us.’

Paula’s face contorted for a moment, the first real expression in hours, and she dismissed it before it was fully formed.

‘I know the clock is ticking against us,’ the voice continued, lower, ‘and I doubt he’ll give us the time his daughter needs. But this is the first door. We’re opening it now. Others will open before then.’

‘We have little time.’ Paula’s lips barely moved against her palm. ‘And there’s something that won’t close. Why haven’t they put me in front of it yet? They brought me all the way here to extract what torture couldn’t. The tool is ready, on the shelf. And nobody uses it.’

‘I found it strange too.’ A short pause, the kind Erick made when rearranging files. ‘You know her in a way no archive knows. Tell me. What’s going on in her head?’

Paula let her eyes linger on the bare wall and, behind the wall, on the past. The twenty-something she once was, crossing operating rooms alongside a ruthless analyst who, though not yet in command, already saw everything, who treated loyalty as a variable and each human being as a safe with its own password. Paula remembered a night in Tripoli, an extraction collapsing live on the radio, seven lives hanging by a thread, and Amanda delaying the rescue order for forty minutes, motionless, just to confirm which of the seven was leaking information. She confirmed it. She saved six. She never lost a night’s sleep over the seventh. The decades had fattened that woman’s power without touching her essence.

‘Amanda is paranoid to the point of making it an illness,’ he finally said. ‘She won’t play a card until she knows all the others. She’ll wait until the whole table is visible before lifting a finger.’

‘Do you think she knows about me?’

‘The puppet master behind the robberies? She knows.’ Paula didn’t soften her tone. ‘Not you. Not a name, not a face. But she knows there’s someone after Jade, someone disproportionately large compared to Jade’s apparent stature. That’s what she wants from this whole operation. Not my daughter. What’s after my daughter.’

‘And that’s why the tool remains on the shelf.’

‘That’s why.’ Paula’s fingers closed slowly on her knee. ‘If she hasn’t put me in that cell yet, there’s only one interpretation. She wants extra security in the room. Someone to verify, in real time, if what comes out of Jade’s mouth is true. And if what comes out of mine is.’

The pause on the other end lasted half a second longer than the previous ones.

‘Um telepathic.’

‘A telepath.’ Paula almost laughed, a dry breath against her own hand. ‘And to think that, a few decades ago, this was a wartime rarity, a corridor legend. Today this woman has a database full of them, cataloged by power, like ammunition.’

‘This ties into a file Morgana brought up. A small, unpleasant name.’ Erick didn’t pronounce it, and Paula thanked him silently; names attract attention even when no one is listening. ‘If it’s who I think it is, he turns other people’s minds into instruments. And he doesn’t work for free, which explains the delay.’

‘So the delay is our window.’

‘Yes. And I’ll use it until the very last second.’ The tone shifted, losing the speculation and gaining sharpness. ‘I’ll work as fast as the net allows. Be ready at any moment, asleep or awake. My priority is controlling the leashes. When I give the signal in your ear, they die. All of them. At that instant, use everything you have, and I mean everything, and get both of you out of there. While you climb up, I’ll descend to the base. From that moment on, her net is mine. Understand?’

Paula closed her eyes just once, slowly, and then opened them again.

Understood.

The voice fell silent, and she knew that, thousands of meters away, suspended in a point in the sky that no radar could detect, he had already dived back into his work. Paula returned her hand to her knee, her shoulders to the angle of defeat, and resumed waiting as one resumes a guard post.

…

Thirty-one minutes later, boots.

Four pairs, escort cadence, still two corridors away. Paula cataloged the weight of each step before the door even thought of opening, and when the pneumatic seal sighed and the corridor light entered, cutting the cubicle in half, she had long since become the woman they expected to find: hunched over, pale, her eyes rising too slowly, as if each movement were exacting interest.

Armed men filled the gap. Rifles held low, fingers extended along the trigger, the bored discipline of someone performing the thousandth repetition of a protocol that has never failed.

‘You’re coming with us. Now.’

No title, no varnish. Paula noted that too. On the way down, two days earlier, they still treated her with the icy courtesy reserved for valuable items. The varnish had worn off. Some cog, on some floor, had turned.

One of them opened the wheelchair with a sharp flick of his fist and positioned it next to the bed. Paula performed the choreography of weakness: the trembling support on the armrest, the slow transfer of her own weight, the short sigh of effort at the end, and felt the man behind her take the handlebars without ceremony. The wheels turned. The cubicle was left behind.

She knew the route. It was the same as the day before, curve by curve, joint by joint of the pavement passing under the wheels at intervals her memory checked like an accountant checks banknotes. The giant corridor with its throat-thumping echo, the freight elevator descending without indicating floors, the gallery of identical doors where only the number of steps distinguished one destination from another. She let her head tilt a degree to the left and used the distorted reflection of a panel to count the escort again. Four. No technical uniforms among them, no lab coats. Wherever they were taking her, it wasn’t for a chat.

The elevator descended further than the day before. Paula measured the fall by the pressure in her eardrums and the cable time, and arrived at a number that rewrote part of her mental map: three more levels below than anything they had shown her. He silently corrected the three escape routes, lengthened distances, added unknowns. The base continued to grow beneath her, and each new meter was a meter that Amanda had considered unnecessary to hide. This, more than the rifles, said something about what was to come.

It was in the anteroom that the world changed.

The same anteroom as before, the same aseptic vestibule between the corridor and the control room, and Paula felt, in the first third of a breath, what two whole days had not offered: a smell.

The detail struck her even before the smell itself. Ever since the hangar doors had closed behind her, up there, the air in that entire base had been an absence. Filtered, washed, neutralized layer by layer until it carried no information whatsoever, and she only understood the magnitude of this asepsis now, in the instant that something finally pierced through her. Seventy floors of nothing, and then this.

Old sweat. Ancient grime. Not the grime of a bad day, but the kind that accumulates when time ceases to be measured in days, the kind that seeps into the skin and becomes part of it, sour and mineral at the same time, unmistakable to anyone who has ever opened the door to a prison. Paula knew that signature intimately. She had worn it before. She knew how much darkness was needed to create it, and the answer was never a small amount.

It came from the direction of the control room. From the room where Amanda had received her the day before, behind the glass, with the serenity of someone checking the oven.

The wheels kept turning without hesitation, and Paula didn’t move a muscle in her face, but inside, the information fell onto the board and stayed there, throbbing. Someone had passed through that room in the last few hours. Someone who had rotted for too long in a cell, and not in a cell here, because the cells here don’t leave a mark of abandonment, they’re clean like everything else. A new piece on the table. She filed away the entire fact—smell, direction, intensity—and stored it along with the three escape routes, in the same safe.

The escort did not take her to the control room.

They walked straight past the door that had opened yesterday to the dark glass and Amanda’s soft voice, and continued to the back of the vestibule, where a larger door awaited. Larger and different: bare steel, without a decorative panel, with the double frame of a chamber designed to withstand pressure, temperature, or worse. Before it, the man behind Paula stopped his chair and took a step back, and she realized that none of the four intended to cross that threshold.

The door slammed shut with a deep crack as latches snapped shut in succession.

The first breath escaped through the cracks before the leaves had finished opening, and the icy air hit Paula’s face like a memory of another continent. The leaves slid. On the other side, a low, white light, without shadows, and a cold that wasn’t the cold of a poorly dressed night, it was a cold by design, manufactured, maintained, measured in degrees chosen by someone on a panel.

The handlebars pushed her inside with a single thrust, almost like a discard.

Behind her, the door sealed shut, lock by lock, and the sound of each latch grew fainter until only the compressed silence of the chamber remained. The cold surged through Paula’s body in concentric waves, piercing the thin fabric of her prisoner’s jumpsuit, biting first her ears and fingers, then settling deep into her bones with the patience of someone with all the time in the world.

And in the center of the cell, her daughter stared at her.

Jade hung from her wrists, completely naked, the tips of her toes touching the pale floor just enough to deny her shoulders rest. Her entire body was a map of bruises in different stages of blooming, from deep purple to sickly yellow, and a continuous tremor ran through her from her jaw to her knees, thin, incessant, the engine of her organism burning its last reserves to avoid shutting down. The vapor of her breath escaped in short wisps and disappeared. On her neck, the amber point of the collar pulsed its slow rhythm, indifferent to everything.

On one of the walls, a wide, dark panel reflected back into the cell only its own reflection, a black mirror from floor to ceiling. Paula needed no more than a glance to know what was on the other side, and who was there. The game, finally, was beginning, and the owner of the chessboard insisted on watching from the front row.

Neither of them made a sound.

Paula held her daughter’s gaze through the white cell, and Jade held hers, and in that instant, in the space of a single meeting of eyes, everything that needed to be said had already been said three words ago. The rest was waiting. And waiting, they both knew how to wait better than any soul buried in that ice.