Chapter Text
JUSTICE LEAGUE AMERICA FILE A-76-06
DATE ACCESSED: JUN 29, 2225 9:02 PM
SUZANNE KING-JONES
CODE NAME: 5U
KNOWN ALIASES: SUZIE, ANNA
KNOWN ASSOCIATES: C4, 4N, K0
ABILITIES: MARTIAL ARTS SKILLS, HIGH PROFICIENCY WITH BOW AND ARROW, HIGH INTELLECT
WEAKNESSES: BASELINE HUMAN
STATUS: INACTIVE (DECEASED)
Cassie knew it wouldn’t change no matter how long she stared at it. Anna had been gone for five years now. Pulling up her profile in the League database just to stare at her face didn’t do her any good.
There was just something that didn’t sit right with her about it. She’d never seen the body. No one had. Anna had just… gone missing.
Whatever. She couldn’t wallow in her grief. It was unproductive. She had a big op tonight. She’d heard tell of something big in a DEO facility upstate. They called it “The Secret.” The secret to what, Cassie didn’t know. Kon said it was probably the solution to eternal life or something. Whatever it was, they needed it out of the government’s hands and into the League’s. Cassie, Kon, and a few others were responsible for that sort of stuff. They liked to think of it as liberating things that the government didn’t really need anyway. Anything the Justice League could use, they took. Anything they didn’t need, they released into Cassie’s possession for her to disassemble and resell. She’d made a small fortune doing it, and at only nineteen was able to rent herself a fairly spacious apartment downtown. Under the table, of course. Not many legitimate landlords were willing to accept payment partially in cash and partially in batteries.
She spun around in her rolling chair to face away from her monitor and asked “Computer, when’s my car gonna be here?”
A robotic voice answered “The hovercar that Diana sent for you is five point seven miles away. It should arrive outside your window no later than nine-seventeen PM.” She’d tried to program it to sound like her mom’s voice. It had only kind of worked. Hardware was her specialty, not software. Coding sucked.
Cassie sighed. That was too long. She wished she could just go now! If only her dumb car wasn’t in the shop. “Computer, call Kay-Zero.”
“Calling Kay-Zero.”
Kon picked up immediately, of course. “Cee-Four! You on the way to that DEO thing?”
“No, the car’s late, of course. I’ve been waiting since eight-thirty. If someone hadn’t nearly totaled mine last week, I’d be halfway there by now,” Cassie groaned
“I told you, it was After’s fault!” Kon protested. “I was trying to teach him to drive for real! You know Mercury makes him drive on the road like it’s the olden times.” Calling Bart “After” was sort of an inside joke between the three of them, because his code name was B4.
“You were in charge of the car, it’s your fault. We can’t have this argument again,” she chuckled. “How’s he holding up, anyway? Still on community service duty?”
“He’s normal-style picking up trash on the beach as we speak. Mercury’s trying and failing to turn it into some meditation exercise, from what I can hear.”
Damned super-hearing. Must come in handy. Cassie was working on a prototype of a device that’d enhance her hearing, but working with parts that tiny for too long at one time made her hands cramp, so it was slow going. She’d only just finished her telescopic vision goggles last month, and she was still working on the x-ray lenses.
Suddenly, she became aware of a whirring coming from outside her lab window. “Looks like the car’s here. I’ll call you back after I get in and put the directions in it, yeah?”
“Gotcha. Have fun with that old jalopy.”
Cassie snorted. “Oh, I will.”
Once she was on the road, so to speak (the more appropriate phrase would be “in the sky,” but she had a fondness for those antiquated sayings), she called Kon back, from her watch this time. It was sixty miles to the facility, so it’d take her about an hour. Those old hovercars the League used could only go sixty-five an hour because they were built with safety in mind instead of speed. The newer ones could go way faster. Then, she’d have to wait for the security guards’ shift change at eleven-thirty, and she could sneak in. She had a map marked with where they were keeping the Secret, whatever it was, and a description of what it should look like. By far not the hardest thing she’d ever have to do, but certainly not the easiest either.
They talked about anything and everything, like always. Mostly about what the Secret might be.
“I bet it’s some kind of experiment they’ve been doing to remove the metagene,” Cassie said. “Or, like, to take powers away from people who have them.”
“I maintain that I think it’s the answer to immortality,” Kon said. “Some sort of fountain of youth or something.”
“Nah, man, they made it sound like it’s dangerous. It’s gotta be something bad. Why else would the League know about it? It’s always bad stuff. Stuff we can’t trust the feds with. This probably isn’t any different.”
Cassie couldn’t see Kon, but she knew he was rolling his eyes. “Whatever you say, Cass. You getting close?”
“Yeah, only ten minutes away. Time to go quiet mode. See you on the other side.”
“Talk to you later.”
“Quiet mode” was what any normal person would probably call “stealth mode,” but being a vital part of a nationwide rebellion got really boring sometimes, and sometimes the only thing to do was make up different words for things that already existed. Cassie turned on the hovercar’s cloaking device, turned off all the tech that wasn’t absolutely necessary (Goodbye, radio! Goodbye, watch! Goodbye, phone!), and sat absolutely still. The government, especially the DEO, was getting better and better at detecting disturbances in the airspace, and any noise Cassie made could accidentally reveal herself.
Quiet mode was boring.
Luckily, it was only ten minutes of driving in it. She could see the facility as she approached it. It was primarily underground, but a sleek, metal, one-story building peeking aboveground let her know it was there. The guards stood watch in their gray uniforms, fitted perfectly. The DEO had a big budget, being a part of the DOD, and it showed in every little thing.
The car, still invisible, parked itself about a half-mile away from the building. Cassie mentally reviewed her game plan. In that minute-long gap where there was no one guarding the door, Cassie would break it down, fly to the third-lowest level of the facility where they were keeping the Secret, grab it, and get the hell out of there before the graveyard shift guards were in position. Everyone had been hearing reports that Lexcorp had been working with the government to make devices that would enable people to fly, but even if they were, they certainly wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to catch Cassie. Not yet, anyway.
Cassie waited. Those telescopic goggles came in handy. The very second she saw the last afternoon shift guard move out of his place, she jumped out of the car and started speeding towards the facility. It used to take her a couple tries to knock down those heavy steel government building doors, but after years of strength training she could do it with no problem. She left a trail of bent metal doors in her wake, flying down eight flights of stairs, each separated by those same doors. They were no match for her. Finally, at the end of a long hallway on that third-lowest floor, she saw a door with “DO NOT ENTER WITH TECH — SECRET KEPT HERE” printed on it in large red letters. Do not enter with tech? Wonder what that meant…
She didn’t have time to think, and she sure didn’t have time to take off her watch. She busted down the door and there it was. A huge wooden box, covered in all manner of chains and locks, with “SECRET! SENSITIVE!” painted on every face of it. Yeesh. That was gonna be a bitch to fit in the car. Shouldn’t be too hard to open, though. She grabbed the box, followed the same route out that she’d taken in, stuffed the thing in the backseat, and floored it until she was able to get out of quiet mode. Perfect. Days since a mistake in an op: one-hundred and sixty-eight.
An hour and a phone call with Donna later, the hovercar was pulling up to the still-open window of Cassie’s place. The box was a little finicky to get out of the backseat, but not too bad. It was suspiciously light, even for someone with Cassie’s strength. Normally she’d bring the box right to League headquarters for Oracle or someone to supervise her opening it, but… well, she was just so curious. How bad could it be? She dragged it out of her living room and into her makeshift lab. Slowly, she pried the box apart, careful not to break the wood more than she had to. It was late at night, she didn’t want to make too much noise. Couldn’t risk getting on her landlady’s bad side.
A box. That was it. A small metal cube with a teal circle on the top of it. Barely the size of Cassie’s hand. She placed it on the floor. Maybe if she pressed the circle…
Woah.
So not what Cassie was expecting.
It was a hologram of a girl who looked about fourteen. Her head was bowed and her eyes were closed. It made the buzzing sound most holograms did, but this was… louder. Definitely louder.
How were you supposed to activate this thing? She waved her hands around, seeing if that’d do it. Lots of holos were motion-activated.
When that didn’t work, she said “Hello? Secret? Um, activate?”
Seemed like “activate” was the code word, because suddenly it came to life, eyes wide and panicked, holding its arms out in front of it. Sound came from the box, a voice yelling “No, no! Billy, stop! Stop it—” before it processed its surroundings and quickly calmed itself. “I hate that part,” it said. “I wish you guys would take that away like you did everything else.” It looked around, scanning the room before its eyes landed on Cassie. “You’re new. This room is new. Why did you move me? Are you doing different tests? Are you trusting me not to jump?” In the blink of an eye, its expression went from confused to… angry, almost. “Because you shouldn’t.”
And then it was gone. Or so Cassie thought, because its face showed up on the big monitor on her desk. Then it was on her T.V. screen, then her cell phone, which was still laying face-up on her workbench, then it was in her watch, then back in front of her as a hologram.
Holy fucking shitballs. This was way unlike anything Cassie knew how to handle. “What… what are you?”
It rolled its eyes. “Did they not tell you anything?”
Oh, right. It-or she?-thought it was still at the DEO. Cassie must just seem like a particularly incompetent employee.
“I’m not—not one of them. I, well, I stole you, kind of? I have no clue what you are. All I know is that you’re called the Secret. But, um, do you have a name? Are you… a person?”
The “are you a person” thing must have struck a nerve. “I was a person. Or so they tell me. But I don’t know anything about it.”
“About what?”
“Being a person. What my life was like. I don’t remember anything except for the last few seconds. That, I remember every time I wake up.”
Oh. “Nothing?”
“Nothing,” it said. She said.
For a while, it was just the sound of Cassie breathing and the buzzing of the machine. Cassie wasn’t sure why she said it. She was no detective. She felt obligated, she guessed. “I could help you. If you want. I could try and figure out who you are. Were. Are.”
The Secret’s expression was blank.
“Would you… want that?” Cassie asked.
“I’m not sure,” she finally answered. “I don’t… I’m not used to wanting things.”
God, what was Cassie thinking? This was a potentially dangerous entity which ostensibly had the power to control computers in some way, and she may be the victim of a murder case! She needed to turn it in to the League!
…But she looked so young. And she needed help. And God knows anyone in the League more suited for detective work was up to their nose in cases and didn’t need another one. “Well I want to. Should I—should I call you Secret? Do you want… a name?”
She laughed bitterly, the first time Cassie ever saw her smile. “Only if there’s one you’re not using.”
There was, actually. “How’s Suzie? It was… a friend’s. I think she’d want you to have it.”
This smile was real, lighting up her face. “I like Suzie.”