Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0154

Five minutes. Jade didn’t even need to look at the stopwatch: the tremor that rose from her shoulders to her jaw marked each second like a relentless metronome. It had been exactly five minutes since the metal door had slammed shut behind her mother’s wheelchair, and no sound had broken the silence except for the occasional creaking of the hinges—a silence that they both maintained as part of a carefully rehearsed performance.

The cold inside wasn’t the kind of cold you’d find in a hallway despised by the moon: it was a cold engineered in a laboratory, calibrated to the last tenth of a degree. Jade felt every icy atom entering through her bound wrists, trickling down her spine and settling on her knees like a guest who had already bought the property. The air seemed to vibrate with a low hum, as if an underground machine were saying: “Here, the body never lies.” Reacting would mean expending energy—and energy was the only currency left to the young woman trapped in that austere room, with white walls reflecting the cold light of the spotlights on the ceiling.

Paula sat in the chair exactly as a prisoner would: spine curved, hands crossed in her lap, weight pulled back as if every inch of muscle fiber were yielding to a silent capitulation.

Jade knew that posture by heart—she’d spent nights watching her from across the kitchen table, when her mother’s pain arrived before the coffee. The difference—almost imperceptible, unnoticed by the cameras that monitored everything—was that now Paula’s fingers didn’t tremble.

She never trembled when lying. But when the pain was real, her hands vibrated with their own rhythm, timed by her heart. That was the signal Jade had been taught to decipher even before learning her multiplication tables.

Five minutes ago, before the escort moved away and the silence became the deadliest weapon in the room, her mother had spoken without making a sound: one long blink, two short ones, the exact pause Jade had memorized before she memorized her own name. “We came to save you.” “I didn’t.” The choice of verb had cut Jade as deeply as the last failed mission. If she had said “we came,” there were accomplices in that plan—and it took Jade less than a second to identify the self-realization of the scheme.

In an organization built by Amanda Waller and the man who answered exclusively to her, placing bets was a matter of statistics. There was only one name that justified the risk: Erick. From the first job Jade had performed under his orders, he had exceeded all expectations, one by one, transforming doubts into undeniable facts. It wasn’t faith: faith is for those who lack numbers. Jade’s trust in Erick came from invisible spreadsheets, from each completed delivery without a sound.
She looked up at her mother’s face.
Paula returned the contact without looking away, and, for a moment, both were suspended in the air—two blades balanced end to end. There was a coldness in that gaze that didn’t come from the air conditioning, but from the steel forged by years of training: a calculating, experienced coldness that Jade recognized as if it were part of herself. It was she who taught her daughter to fall without making a sound, to fracture a wrist in total silence, to scan an entire room before deciding if it was worth entering.
Jade had grown up hearing stories about Paula’s missions before anyone could tell them—tales whispered by middle-aged mercenaries, full of reverence for the talent of those who had survived trials that should have killed them.
And there was that woman now, frail on metal wheels, each breath accompanied by a pitiful creak, as if the whole world rested on the back of her lungs.

Even Jade’s own body betrayed her suffering: the collar around her neck made an almost imperceptible click with each pulse of blood, tightening by another tenth of a millimeter whenever her heart raced beyond the limit that the technicians had decided, on their own, was “safe.” Her left foot—or what remained of it after two weeks in that icy cube—throbbed in an irregular rhythm, a discordant metronome that she pushed to the back of her consciousness with the same discipline reserved for any pain that didn’t serve an immediate purpose.

Jade’s eyes slid over her mother’s silhouette, first out of habit ingrained in decades of care, then with cold, calculating precision. The cold light of the fluorescent lamps reflected off the metal collar that sealed her abilities: Waller’s technicians had been meticulous, almost artistic, in how they had blocked every capability cataloged in the threat reports. Almost everything. Only a minimal perception remained, too small to merit a line in any dossier—and it was this spark of awareness that now revealed to her, clear as a pixel in high definition, a dark stain on the left sole of her mother’s shoe.

Earth.
Since she was seven, Jade had been that woman’s guardian. She had silently changed sheets at night, unjammed wheels stuck on uneven thresholds, learned to maneuver an entire chair without making the body hanging from it sway like ill-placed cargo. In twenty years, she had never seen dirt on that shoe. Dirt required soil. Soil required firm weight. Firm weight required legs capable of supporting a body—something her mother hadn’t shown she possessed long enough for Jade to have lost count of her birthdays.

Now he understood more: the way his mother’s fingers tightened around the arm of the chair, as if she still clung to the support by instinct, not necessity. The way her torso readjusted with each breath, a fine adjustment that true wheelchair users abandoned after the first year, as their bodies learned to trust the backrest and ceased to correct themselves. His mother, however, still didn’t trust it. She had learned to feign dependence—and she did it well, but not well enough to fool someone who had memorized every inch of that chair like someone keeping an escape map in their memory.

There was only one man in the world capable of making a promise of that magnitude. And he didn’t make pretty oaths: he made promises that were honored, sooner or later, with interest in favor of those who waited.
He succeeded. Faster than I expected, Jade thought, feeling her pulse vibrate in her neck.

Something shifted on Paula’s face, so subtle that any camera would register it as noise: a minimal relaxation at the right corner of her mouth, there and gone in less than a sigh. Jade felt her own face mimic the gesture, an involuntary echo that only happened because they were close enough to read the silent code flowing between them. It wasn’t a smile recognizable to any stranger, but rather a language honed over twenty years until it became a reflection—the only one those lenses couldn’t capture.

Amanda’s voice—the steely guardian behind the monitors—cut through the moment before it became dangerous.
“Paula.” The name came out slowly, without warmth, like an item read from a shopping list. “Don’t waste my time. I’d rather not have a plan B.”

Neither of them knew exactly what this Plan B would be. Paula had a theory, developed collaboratively with Erick in the weeks leading up to the mission, but a theory wasn’t certainty—and certainty was a luxury that room didn’t freely bestow. Jade’s reasoning, however, continued unabated: if she herself had managed to deduce so much in five minutes, trapped, frozen, without half her resources, Erick must have spent hours carving out breaches in Amanda’s network, layers of firewall giving way under the surgical patience Jade had seen in action before. His job wasn’t to break down doors: it was to convince the doors that they had always been open.

What was missing now was time — that unit that blinked red on the digital clock, marking every second of risk. Time for him to complete the intrusion from the other side of the network, or the other side of the world, or wherever he chose to operate when the target was an entire organization, not just an abandoned vault.

The mother’s voice broke the silence first, hoarse—calibrated to sound natural.
“Jade.” A pause that sounded like a blow. “Why? Why are you hiding who did this?”

Jade tilted her head exactly one centimeter, the exact amount a broken person would need to gather courage. It wasn’t amateurism—it was a profession. In the very world she had grown up in, lying well was more valuable than shooting well: a bullet could bring down a target, but a well-told lie could keep a dozen people alive at the same time.

“Mom.” The word came out with a calculated crack, almost a stifled sob. “I got a deal. For your cure. If I say who it is, I lose the deal, and you stay in that chair for the rest of your life.”

Paula recoiled as if slapped and lowered her head, hiding her eyes behind loose strands of hair. Jade knew, with the certainty of someone who grew up observing reactions, that this wasn’t pure talent. Her mother had always been the worst actress she knew, transparent as glass when trying to feign anything other than genuine pain or fury. Both daughters surpassed her in this regard before they turned eighteen. But what Paula lacked in technique, she made up for in instinct: she knew exactly when to lower her head, even without controlling the rest of her face.

“It’s over, Jade.” The voice rose a tone, almost a desperate plea. “They got me too. There’s nothing left to protect. Tell me who you are. Maybe we’ll still get out of this alive.”

“You don’t understand.” Jade let her own voice tremble—an expensive tactic she only used when the result was worth all the effort. “If I speak now, I’ll lose everything I’ve achieved. Months of work, Mom. Months.”

“And what’s worth more? Months of work or your life?”
The question sounded like a hammer blow against the cold wall of the room. The ceiling lamp cast a pale beam on Jade’s face, highlighting the weariness beneath her eyes.
“Yours.”
Jade’s words fell between them like a piece of raw iron—heavy, unyielding. For a second, Jade herself didn’t know if the harsh tone came from a rigid script or from a bloody conviction welling up inside her.

Suddenly, the speakers crackled, tearing through the silence that had settled. The air froze for a moment, thick with tension, before Amanda regained control of the scene.
“Touching.” Her voice was soft, but the delicate surface concealed a razor-sharp edge. “But time doesn’t stop to listen to declarations of love, girl. A name. That’s all I need.”

Jade felt a shiver run down her spine, a slight jolt in her shoulders—just the kind of imperceptible flaw any director would adore. Too much perfection betrays artifice; a subtle imperfection made her believable. She let her wrists slip in the cold stream, her head tilting forward, as if expecting the whole world to hold its breath.

The silence stretched in the heavy air until Jade found the exact moment to open her mouth. Then, she whispered:
“Lex.” Her voice came out low, almost broken. Each syllable seemed ripped from her body.
“Lex Luthor.”

On the other side of the glass, there was a muted echo of surprise—too long to simply digest information. Then, Amanda’s voice gasped from behind the microphone.
“A name alone doesn’t buy any trust. Where. When. Give me something I can check before believing a single word that comes out of your mouth.”

Jade looked up, tracking the exact spot on the ceiling where the lamp flickered. Each programmed word weighed like counted coins. “A warehouse in Metropolis. Port area, near dock fourteen. He never shows up in person. He always sends an intermediary—a guy with a tattoo on his left wrist: an L inside a diamond. That’s how we found out it was him, and not one of his usual henchmen.”

The detail came out smoothly, full of minutiae—the dust jumping off the wooden crates, the creaking of the dock every time a container was pulled, the metallic smell of old oil. The same method Erick had taught him: a well-forged lie never entangles the truth, it merely accompanies it, painting it in vivid colors.

Another pause. Amanda pretended to be busy: keyboards, clicks, muffled voices indicating a check in progress—or perhaps it was her illusion. For Jade, it didn’t matter, as long as she gained seconds.

The white walls of the room absorbed the ticking of her breath. Jade felt the sharp pain of the chains digging into her wrists, running down her spine, lodging themselves in her knees like an intruder refusing to leave. Without looking away, she counted: a metal gate through which they had entered, a thick panel that hid Amanda, a ventilation grate high above, creaking occasionally in the cold blasts of the air conditioner. Three possible escape routes—none viable without her hands free.

In the corner, Paula remained motionless, her hands resting in her lap. Her eyes, dark and serene, were more eloquent than any whisper: a woman untouched by pain, accustomed to waiting centuries for worse torments. Jade wondered, for the hundredth time that night, how much of that patience was inherited and how much was born with her, forged before any training.

Between the tenth and fifteenth minute, a flash of memory invaded Jade: a sunny kitchen, with white tiles speckled with coffee, the carefree laughter of a mother climbing stairs without fearing the emptiness. Her heart tightened in a way that no current could explain to those watching from the other side of the glass. She closed her eyes for two seconds, held back the pain, retained the memory. When he tore her eyelids open again, the mask of control was already in place.

Then, without warning, they both raised their heads at the same instant. Paula’s gaze trembled for a millisecond—a subtle, rhythmic blink that Jade deciphered before the last syllable died. Two words echoed in her head: I trust you. It wasn’t about the plan, nor about Erick, nor about information networks: it was about an old debt, about years of guilt never confessed to anyone. Jade responded with a short, laconic blink: received.

Then they turned back to face different points on the white wall, as if nothing had happened. Because there, under the eyes of all the cameras, nothing more could happen beyond the script they had already written.

Twenty minutes dragged on in icy silence. Then thirty. Then, like an electric whisper, the speakers crackled and came alive again.

“Good.” Amanda’s voice echoed through the white room, relentless as a thermometer checking a fever. Without haste, without anger, her tone was that of someone wearily leafing through a report at the end of the workday. “It didn’t hurt that much, did it?”

The silence responded with waves of tension.

“You could have given me this name yesterday, girl, and saved yourself hours of cold. But you chose the hard way, and information has an expiration date: the more I delay, the more expensive it becomes for the person who should have spoken sooner.” Amanda paused. The silence served as an unstable comma in the air. “Anyway, thank you. Not for the name itself, but for the certainty it just gave me.”

Amanda’s phrase crystallized into a point of ice in Jade’s mind. Certainty. It was too big a word for something unconfirmed—reserved for solid truths, not for clues yet to be checked. Something in the thirty minutes she had been submerged between the cold and the monitors had changed without warning, a deviation that wasn’t part of any plan agreed upon with Erick. Before Jade could formulate the question, a metallic snap sounded from the other side of the chamber: locks turning, a heavy, rhythmic sequence, like the vertebrae of an ancient monster slowly coming loose.

The double doors slid open on creaking tracks. The air that entered was a blow against the sterile odor of the cubicle—a mixture of dried sweat, mold ingrained in the corners, and the faint trace of rust, the smell of an abandoned cell.

In the hallway, a man barely over five feet tall blocked the cold light of the corridor. He wore an orange prison uniform that was far too large, like a rickety cocoon around a thin body. His hair, once combed, now grew in irregular tufts, stiff against a forehead marked by throbbing veins. His stubble hid half a cruel smile, his teeth yellowed and missing here and there, and his eyes—red at the edges, deep with weariness accumulated over centuries of insomnia—landed on Jade before they even reached Amanda.

He didn’t walk. He slid into the cubicle, his feet dragging on the cold floor. The pace should have sounded pathetic, but instead it conveyed the calculated coldness of someone who had decided long ago that he no longer needed to use force to instill fear.

Behind him, two guards maintained their implacable posture: rifles aligned, shoulders rigid, gazes fixed on nothing. But Jade noticed the subtle misalignment of their feet, angled toward the exit—muscle and instinct ready to flee. Every fiber of those men was subconsciously assessing the shortest escape route.

Recognition throbbed in Jade like a cold punch. That face, an echo of warnings exchanged in mercenary taverns, was no legend: it was the personification of nervous stories told in whispers. The man who had subdued an international heroine without touching her, who turned armies against their own generals, who extracted state secrets with questions whispered like confidences. He didn’t need handcuffs—the real ones were lodged in the minds of those who dared to confront him, invisible prey without a lock on the outside.

The perfectly rehearsed ruse on Lex Luthor shrank in an instant, reduced to the size of a business card thrown into a brazier.

Beside Jade, for the first time that night, her mother showed no fear—she showed something even more chilling: the cold recognition of someone watching their opponent’s last card being turned over. Paula knew that name. Of course she knew it. In the midst of them, each escape route and each mental file piled up like gunpowder, waiting for the snap that should never come.

The interrogation chamber was a sterile cube bathed in a sharp, white light, whose glare revealed even the tiniest grain of dust floating in the air. The low ceiling and concrete walls reflected every whisper, and there was a metallic taste of tension hanging between the steel chairs and the central table. In the center of this icy stage, the man stopped. He gave a slight tilt of his head, as if adjusting the framing of a crooked painting: his red eyes, with bulging veins, slid from Jade’s pale face to her wrists still marked by the ropes, then traveled over the cold frame of the wheelchair until they landed on Paula’s restrained expression. Every feature, every exposed nerve seemed to register in his perverse mind—there was nothing clinical about that voracious attention.

“So, Amanda.” The voice came out strangely loud for that restrained body, interrupted by a short giggle that rose and fell without warning, echoing the lack of empathy of someone who gave up on themselves long ago. “These two are mine to play with however I want?”

Amanda raised her chin, without altering the transactional tone she had maintained from the beginning: dry, neutral, impersonal like a contract signed by lawyers. “First the information. Then, do whatever you want with what’s left.”

He took a step forward, and the crunch of his soles on the cold floor made Jade clench her bleeding hands a little tighter. The guards, in their dark uniforms, retreated two paces—not out of fear, but out of habit—certain that, inside, no weapon offered them any real advantage. The man curled his lip into a crooked smile and ran his tongue over his yellowed teeth; the small, moist sound traveled through the space to reach Jade’s ears, making her swallow hard.

“Information.” He repeated, savoring the word with his tongue, as if it were an exotic dish. “I don’t need to ask anything to get information, Amanda. Just a minute alone with either of them, and you’ll have more truth than you know what to do with it.”

Amanda made an almost imperceptible, but firm gesture. “One minute, then. Then I’ll decide the rest.”

For the first time since he had entered, he turned his face toward Paula. He observed her from head to toe: from her polished feet, covered by the dark fabric, to the chain that held the wheel of the chair, noting the slight tremor that betrayed her control of each muscle. His curiosity was almost—but only almost—disconcerting. “And this one here.” His voice now low, confidential. “They say she was one of the best, before her legs stopped working. I’m very curious about what’s left inside, after so long sitting in a chair, fantasizing about her own funeral.”

That night, it was the only time Jade saw a slip on Paula’s face. A twitch in her jaw, tiny and too quick for the cameras to capture, but visible to an attentive daughter: it was a mother’s instinct calculating how many seconds it would take to break someone’s neck if only her hands were free. Paula restrained the impulse, took a deep breath, and the silence that followed was colder and more menacing than any scream could have been.

The man’s gaze swept over Jade one last time—from her shoes to the top of her head—and stretched his smile to the darkest corners of his mouth, displaying each rotten tooth under the relentless beam of the lamp.

“Deal, Amanda.” The laughter came out again, muffled, moist, almost affectionate, as if they were good friends sealing a long-standing agreement. “Deal.”

Behind him, the enormous metal door began to slide along the track, seal after seal snapping into place with a dry click. The last sound Jade registered before the locks finally closed was her own heart—hammering so loudly that, in that frigid room, it seemed to have beaten for all the humanity contained within her chest.