Selah shuddered slightly as she transitioned into her mindscape, feeling her body exit reality. It wasn't a bad sensation, necessarily; the weight of her body lying on the cot faded away, and the sounds of the lab quieted until she couldn't hear them anymore. A buzzing, prickling feeling crept over her skin as her powers waned, making her mind feel emptier and more vulnerable. She instinctively became more alert, like her brain was trying to compensate for the absence of her telepathy. She opened her eyes, blinking them a few times.
The mindscape was as unchanging as ever- a white ceiling, white floor, and four white walls around her. She wished that Nia had been able to come in with her, but they had both agreed that it would be safer to have her stay back. Kara had reminded her (many times) that she would join her as soon as she could, but Selah had no idea how long it would take for her and Nia's psychic link to be stable enough to hold a third person.
"I guess it's just me and my thoughts for now," she muttered to herself. "And Beta. Wherever she is."
She walked to the far side of the small, empty room and sat cross-legged on the floor, resting her back against the cold white wall. For a while, all she could hear was her own heartbeat, echoing in her eardrums. She shut her eyes and let her mind wander, listening to the steady rhythm.
And then she began to hear something else.
It was very quiet at first, a soft, shimmering sound. It reminded her of wind chimes, except that this noise was harsher and more dissonant. As it got louder, she opened her eyes again, warily looking around the room. By now the sound was clearly audible, echoey and metallic, and her stomach tightened as she noticed that the air in front of her was beginning to bubble.
"I'm not making that," she muttered to herself, mostly to reassure her own thoughts. The bubbling grew larger and faster, the air swirling like the refracting heat waves that rose off of hot pavement in the summertime. Selah gingerly reached a hand out and touched the disturbance, and she was not at all comforted to feel a gentle warmth radiating out from it. Moving her fingers through the warmth, she recoiled as she felt them bump against the edge of something tangible, something real. She furrowed her brow, and grasped at the edge of that something, uneasily watching as her hand pulled a piece of rough parchment out of the air.
The disturbance immediately disappeared once the paper was in her grasp, and she frowned at the space where it used to be, trying to make sense of what had just happened before she turned her attention to what she was holding. It was thicker than normal paper and the edges were bumpy and deckled, as if it had been made by hand. Flipping it over, her suspicions were confirmed as she immediately recognized Beta's spiky handwriting.
"'Welcome back'," she read aloud. The room felt colder suddenly, and paranoia swept over her, giving her an eerie feeling like she was being watched. "What," she asked. "I don't get a fruit basket too?"
"Who are you talking to?" Selah whirled, her alarm fading as she saw that it was Kara who had spoken, and that the hero was standing a few feet away. But before she could relax, uncertainty crept into her mind.
"Um," she began cautiously, mechanically scrutinizing the woman, trying to find some kind of clue that could prove if this was actually Kara.
"Sorry I'm late," the woman continued. "The horticulturists were tougher than I was anticipating."
"What?" she asked numbly. The fog of skepticism faded a little bit as she tried to make sense out of Kara's words, and she blinked a few times. "Oh, right. About the..." she paused, trying to remember. "Cucumbers?"
The hero smiled, sitting on the floor next to where Selah was standing, and the girl slowly sat back down beside her.
"Sorry, I thought that a joke would maybe lighten the mood," she said. "How are you doing?"
"I'm okay," she replied. "I got this." She analyzed Kara's reaction as she showed her the letter from Beta, watching the woman's eyebrows crinkle together as she read it.
"Well that's ominous," she said, making a face. Selah didn't reply, still studying her face. Kara looked up and saw the girl's suspicious gaze. Her eyes softened gently, and she tipped her head to one side. "I'm real," she said reassuringly, her voice soft. "C'mon, Beta's jokes couldn't possibly be as good as mine."
"Your jokes aren't that good," the girl replied plainly, and Kara snorted out a laugh.
"That's so rude," she said. The corner of her mouth was pulling upwards just like it always did, and her thoughts were gentle and warm, filled with a quiet concern.
Selah knew that Beta was a lot of things, but an actress was not one of them. Whenever she had shapeshifted before, it was robotic and stiff. As much as she had tried to mimic Alex's facial expressions, or Aunt Lea's subtle accent, or Nia's witty banter, or the way that J'onn's thoughts flowed out as he spoke, none of it had ever felt real. It had felt like Beta was pulling her strings, and all of Selah's friends and family were her puppets, devoid of any life and emotion. The Kara that sat in front of her was alive and was bright and was Kara.
"If you're actually Beta, you owe me twenty bucks," she said flatly, refusing to say it outright.
"I will take that deal." Kara replied. "So what happens now? Do we just wait for her to show up?"
"I guess." The girl sat up a bit, uncrossing her legs. "Um. Do you want anything? I think that I can conjure food. It won't like, actually feed you, but it'll taste real."
"I'm fine, thanks," the hero replied. She leaned back against the wall, looking sideways at Selah. "What is conjuring, exactly? I've heard you mention it before."
"It's an empath power. Empaths can use their telepathy to alter someone's perception of reality, and make them see or feel things that aren't really there. I've never even tried it in the real world, because it feels really morally questionable. It's easier to do it in here though; since it's a more controlled environment."
"So you can conjure anything in here?" Kara asked earnestly, her eyes curious.
"Pretty much."
"Can I see?"
"Sure," Selah said. She cracked a few of the knuckles on her left hand before stretching it out flat. The air above her palm began bubbling as she focused her mind, and she watched in fascination as the bubbles began forming themselves into shapes, an outline of a grid, and then-
"Is that a Rubik's cube?" Delight was evident on Selah's face as she picked the cube up out of the air and grinned.
"Yeah," she said, beginning to twist the squares around, very clearly pleased with herself.
"Do you know how to solve it?"
"No. I always wanted one as a kid because my upstairs neighbor had one. She would let me play with it sometimes, but I never got one of my own."
"Maybe now's your chance to crack the code."
"Maybe," she replied, her smile dimming as the metallic shimmering sound began again. Kara didn't seem to hear anything, but before she could ask what was wrong, Selah squeezed her eyes shut and doubled over. Suddenly, there didn't seem to be enough air in the room, and her chest heaved forwards as her throat tightened and her hands clenched into fists, dropping the cube.
"Hey," Kara murmured. Her voice sounded muffled and distant to the girl, and she felt the woman's hand rest on her shoulder. "Breathe, please." She choked in a stuttering breath as the ground shuddered beneath them. "Don't push me out."
"I won't," she rasped. As she exhaled, the room changed, kind of like how it had when she was in the breach with her not-mother. They weren't in the white, empty room anymore, instead, they were now in a small, relatively untidy apartment.
"What's happening?" Nia's voice asked, echoing around them, and Selah took another breath. The air felt less thin now, and she cleared her throat.
"It's okay," she said aloud. "The mindscape is just shifting around. Is everything still okay on your end?"
"It's all good over here, your brain activity just spiked really high for a second," the woman paused, listening to something in the lab that the girl couldn't hear. "Alex says that it's coming back down again. Keep me updated if anything gets too weird."
"Okay."
"You're okay?" Kara asked. Selah nodded, still trying to focus on her breathing. "What does 'shifting' mean? Is this happening because you were conjuring things?"
"Not directly, no. My powers make the mindscape change on its own. It happened when I connected with my mother on the other earth, and again when Nia and I were testing things out."
"Can you control it?"
"Sometimes. I'm not sure if I'm the one doing this, or if..." she trailed off, looking around the room anxiously.
"Where are we?" Kara said.
The apartment was only a little bit larger than the white room that they had been in before, and it had faded floral wallpaper and beige carpeting. A cramped kitchen stood in one corner, and they were now sitting against the wall beside an overstuffed couch that looked to be from the 80s. The Rubik's cube was still next to Selah on the floor. There were two wooden end tables, and a larger kitchen table- all of which had reasonable amounts of clutter on them. Kara could only see two doors in the room, a smaller one next to the kitchen, and the heavy door with a deadbolt, which presumably led out of the apartment.
"I used to live here," the girl replied.
"Okay," the hero said, piecing things together in her mind. "This happened to me when I was in a coma and Brainy talked to me. This must be where your mind feels most comfortable. Maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something, I bet that there's a clue in here somewhere that will help us beat Beta." Selah looked unconvinced, so the hero stood, rifling through the books on the coffee table. "For me it was my cat. He reminded me that being attached to my humanity and my life on Earth was just as important as my life on Krypton, and that's what helped me to break out of the coma." Her voice sped up as she turned to one of the end tables, opening a drawer. "We just have to find the clue."
"I don't think that this is the same thing, Kara," the girl tried, but the hero was already getting excited, eagerly tossing her a notebook to read through.
"It has to be. Selah, this is how we beat her!"
"It's not," she insisted sharply, her voice louder than she meant for it to be. Kara faltered, shutting the drawer slowly. She took a deep breath, trying to keep her tone even as she continued. "Kara, this isn't like your loft. This place isn't a happy memory for me."
"You said that you lived here before the Agenda" she stated. "Isn't this your aunt's old apartment?"
"No." The girl stood up and dropped the notebook onto the couch, walking to the middle of the room and running a hand over her eyes. "I lived here after they got me."
"I thought that you lived in their facility." Kara watched as she sat down wearily at the kitchen table, pushing aside a notebook and some stray papers that were strewn across it. After a moment, she followed, sitting next to Selah. A simple lamp hung from the ceiling above the table, washing them both in a gentle, warm light.
"Not at first."
"Oh." There was a window behind the table that Selah looked through, but she wasn't really paying attention to the street outside. It was either just after sunset or just before sunrise, but either way the lighting was dim and muted.
"My mother pulled me out of school one day, I was in my third period History class and then I got called to the office. She said that there was this great opportunity for me, and that she had found some people who wanted to sponsor me. She said that they were scientists who would mentor me and help me, and that I could help them with their research, as a part of some scholarship thing. We packed up a bag, and I went to meet with them. They picked me up in a really nice car, and then they brought me here."
Kara looked at the apartment with fresh eyes, trying to imagine Selah living here on her own. "It wasn't bad at first," she continued, pulling the hero out of her thoughts. "I never really had much growing up, and they gave me lots of things. There was good food, new clothes, and plenty of books to read. I thought that things were good, and I felt so lucky to have been given this opportunity."
"When did they start doing the experiments?" she asked.
"Pretty early on. At first it was only ever blood samples, they took them every couple of days. I let them do their tests because they were doing so much for me, and I wanted to help them in return. It was close enough to winter break that I just stopped going to school, and I felt like I had all of this new freedom," she chuckled sadly, still looking out the window.
"When did things change?"
"It didn't happen suddenly," she replied, glancing quickly over at Kara before focusing her gaze down onto her hands. "It's not like one day it was good and then it wasn't. It was slow; everything built on itself, so that every time they pushed farther it only felt like a little bit more than before. One day, they wanted more DNA samples, so they asked me for cheek swabs and skin and hair samples. Then the next week they needed scans, so I spent hours in the lab doing x-rays and CTs and MRIs. And then they wanted to do surgery on me."
"Did you say no?" Selah twisted the corner of her mouth up, shaking her head slowly.
"I tried to. They said that they had to do it, they needed to get a better picture of my internal anatomy, and it was so important for the research. I didn't want to do it, but they told me that they really needed it. And then they reminded me of how much they'd done for me, and how they gave me all the gifts, and this apartment, and so I let them."
Kara didn't know what to say. She didn't want to interrupt the girl, as this was the most she had ever shared about the Agenda. And so she stayed quiet, watching Selah's face as the memories ebbed out of her mind.
"After that, they stopped asking me for things," the girl said, proceeding with her story. "If they wanted my blood, they'd just take it. If they wanted my hair, they'd come in and they'd cut it. If they wanted me, they'd..." she paused, tracing her thumb on the edge of the table. There was a long, thin scratch in the wood, and she dragged her nail along it lightly.
"Use me," she finished finally. She dropped her hand back down into her lap, but kept her eyes firmly set on the table. "And then I said that I wanted to leave, and I wanted to go back home. It was the end of February, and I still wasn't in school, even though they had promised me that I would be taking all of these prestigious, advanced classes. I was lonely, I missed my aunt, I missed my friends, I missed my life. Before then, I didn't know that they legally owned me, and that they had custodial rights over me. I still thought that I was volunteering for them, and I was doing them a favor by helping. Then they started telling me that I wasn't allowed to leave until I paid off all of my debts, and that I owed this to them. They moved me out of this apartment and took me to their facility."
"To where Alex found you?" Selah nodded.
"Yeah. They had me in a lab at first, it was like a hospital room, but I kept trying to escape so they had to move me. Then they put me into a cell, like the one we were in. And whenever they moved locations, I'd go with them, but I always stayed in the same kind of places. From there it was bad all the time. It didn't get worse, exactly it was just always really, really bad. Especially once the fertility projects fell through, because then I didn't have a purpose for them anymore. They didn't have a goal for their research, or a reason to keep me. That's when they started doing whatever they wanted to, and trying out different experiments. I think that they just wanted to see what would happen, and how much I could take before they broke me." She finally met Kara's gaze again, her grey eyes sad but calm.
"I'm sorry," the woman said. "I didn't know."
"Yeah, well it's not exactly a fun story."
"How long did you live here?"
"Only for a few months. It wasn't a super long time." She flipped open the notebook in front of her, thumbing through the pages idly. Wedged in between a rough pencil sketch of the street outside the window, and what looked like notes from a Spanish class, she found an ID card. She picked it up and showed it to Kara. "They made me this right after they explained the 'scholarship program' to me," she said. "I remember that it made me feel so official and professional to have my own ID." Underneath the title: Selah Lerrol, 2014 Research Intern, 037, was a picture of the girl. Her hair was tied back in a tight ponytail that draped over her shoulder, and she was beaming, her cheeks pink and round. She looked like she was scarcely twelve, even though Kara knew that she was older.
"Damn," she muttered. Selah flipped the card over, and scoffed, reading the back of it.
"It says I'm only five foot two, this must have been before my growth spurt," she said dryly, but Kara didn't know how to respond. She turned to look at the apartment again, paying closer attention to the clutter that laid around her.
There was a discarded orange backpack in the corner, with loose papers spilling out of it, and an MP3 player with tangled headphones sat on one of the end tables. A few plates and a cup were in a dish rack by the sink, still waiting to be put away, and a textbook titled Pre-Calculus: Concepts and Skills, was on the kitchen counter. The papers and notes on the table were written in brightly colored ink, and they had doodles and stickers on all of the margins. A jean jacket hung on the back of the door, adorned with embroidered flowers and colorful pins. The stacks of books were juvenile fiction and young adult novels, and the fridge had an assortment of neon magnets; plastic smiley faces and peace signs.
She wasn't sure how she had ever thought that this could be Selah's aunt's apartment; this wasn't a home where an adult lived. This was the house of a child. Everything in it was bursting with the light and innocence of a round-faced, bright-eyed kid who wasn't finished growing yet, a girl who had barely turned fourteen, who was filled to the brim with optimism and youth, and who smiled from ear to ear for a photo that was taken by her abusers.
Kara felt nauseous.
"Are you okay?" Selah asked, and the hero looked at her blankly.
"Yeah," she said distantly.
"I'll get you some water." The girl stood, walking to the kitchen to fill up a glass at the tap. She brought it back to the table, and Kara stared at it for a second.
"Is this...?" she began.
"Oh yeah, no. It's not real," she clarified. "I just thought that it might help."
She took a sip, a little surprised by how normal it felt to drink mindscape water. The scene shifted around them, changing back to the white room, and they were sitting on the floor once again. A few remnants of the apartment were left behind- The water glass remained in Kara's hand, and the Rubik's cube and a few notebooks were still scattered nearby.
"Is it going to keep changing?" she asked, setting the glass down on the ground. She wasn't sure if she could handle another casually traumatic scene from Selah's past.
"I'm not sure." The girl opened one of the notebooks, and winced. "You're not allowed to read this one, it's full of really cringey poetry."
"How cringey?"
"I'm sure that I thought I was being eloquent. Turns out it's just..." she shut the book again, dropping it and shaking her head. "Bad." She leaned against the wall, resting her head on Kara's shoulder. "This isn't really what I expected."
"The mindscape?"
"Yeah. I thought that Beta would be here, and that things were going to start happening."
"I would argue that many things have happened today," the hero said tiredly.
"You know what I mean. I was hoping that this would all go quickly, but I'm not so sure that it will."
"I'll be here for it," Kara reminded.
"I know."
.
When Kara returned a little while later, Selah was in the apartment again. It was sunny outside, and the room didn't seem quite as sad when there were patches of sun shining onto the floor. She didn't find herself to be as overwhelmed by it, at least.
"Hey," she said. The girl was lying on the couch upside down, her head dangling off the seat and her legs sticking up over the back. She glanced at the hero. "All's well on the home front."
"Is it still the same day?" she asked.
"Yeah, it's around six thirty. Everyone says hi, they're still hanging out in the lab. Alex ordered takeout, I think that they're all going to try to stay through the whole night. Lena made a schedule for them to start sleeping in shifts so that if I need a break, then someone else can pop in and keep you company." Selah nodded.
"Tell them that I say hi back."
"I will." Kara sat on the arm of the couch, but the girl didn't move. She kept staring solidly at the wall in front of her, her face unreadable. "Anything new from Beta?"
"I still haven't seen her. I think that I heard her voice a few times, but I couldn't make out what she was saying."
"I see that we're back in your old apartment."
"It's changed a few times, I was at the DEO briefly, and then I kept ending up in Noonan's." Glancing around the room, Kara noticed that the Rubik's cube was sitting on the floor a few feet away.
"You solved it!" she exclaimed, picking it up and looking at the completed puzzle.
"Theoretically," Selah replied glumly. The hero sat on the couch next to her, looking down at the girl's gloomy expression.
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know if that actually is what a Rubik's cube looks like. It's based on a memory from when I was like, eight. So, I solved the theoretical cube, but it's not real. For all I know, it doesn't function in the way an actual one would in the real world."
"I mean, you still solved it."
"All I did was solve my fake brain cube," the girl grumbled, rolling herself upright on the couch again and slumping against the cushions with her arms crossed.
"Why so glum, chum," Kara asked, bumping her knee against Selah's.
"I'm sick of waiting for things to happen," she replied crossly. "I want all of this to be done. I want to go home."
"Hey," Kara said. "This will have an end."
"Well, what if this wasn't the right idea? Beta's a pathological liar, for all we know she was just messing with me when she said that I had to go in here to push her out. Maybe she has some other nefarious scheme that she's working on right now, because she knows that we're all too distracted to notice."
The doorknob to the bedroom began to turn, and Selah looked up at it, bolting upright on the sofa. Her body was tense and alert.
"So little faith in me," Beta commented smugly, standing in the now-open doorway.
"What's wrong?" Kara demanded, looking concernedly at where the girl was staring.
"You can't see her?" she asked.
"See who?"
"Unfortunately, she cannot see me," the woman confirmed. "After all, it's not her mind that I am inside of." She waltzed into the apartment, scraping a finger along the wallpaper. "I forgot how quaint this place was. You definitely were not destined to be an interior designer."
"Selah?" Kara pushed, and the girl glanced at her with a loaded expression. The director opened the fridge, wrinkling her nose at the contents.
"Did you seriously drink cow's milk?" she asked. "That explains-"
"Look Beta," Kara interrupted. She was scowling at the empty doorway, clearly under the impression that the woman was still over there. "I don't know what you think you're planning, but it's not going to work. Selah is stronger than..." the girl elbowed her and she trailed off.
"She's over there now," she muttered, pointing to the kitchen. Kara adjusted her position and continued.
"Selah is stronger than you anticipate, and you're going to learn very quickly that-"
"Is she trying to lecture me?" Beta inquired, speaking over the hero's monologue. She peered up over the refrigerator door, obviously amused. "She believes that she will talk some good sense into me and then we will all prance off into the sunset as great, respectable pals?"
"Kar, I appreciate this speech, but it's not landing well," the girl murmured, ignoring the director's chuckling. The hero nodded, clearing her throat.
"So you'd better just... watch out," she ended lamely, exchanging a glance with Selah who flashed her an awkward thumbs up.
"That was a very moving speech. Inspirational even," Beta sniped, walking back over to the couch and standing in front of the girl.
"Look, are we finally going to fight, or whatever?" she asked, wishing that she felt more tough.
"Do you think that you are ready for that?" she asked, smirking. "I would be lying if I said that I am not impressed by your initiative. However," she pursed her lips, holding up a finger. "You are not playing by the rules."
"What rules?"
"I believe that I told you that we had to face each other one-on-one. This-" she wagged her finger at Kara and Selah, sitting beside each other- "Does not look like one."
"Okay, well, that's a stupid rule. Why do you get to decide on all of the rules? This is my brain, after all."
"Well, yes. For now, at least," she said. "Very well, if you get an ally in this fight then so do I. It will be my choice, and I can choose whomever, or whatever I like." She began pacing, pretending to consider the idea. "I think that a Sun-eater might be fun, me and a Sun-eater against the two of you. Have you ever fought a Sun-eater, 037?"
"I think it is very obvious that I have not."
"Hmm, well that is too bad," she paused her steps to impart a bit of wisdom onto Selah, adding: "The tentacles, now they are what you really have to watch out for."
"This doesn't feel like a productive conversation," the girl stated, fed up with the woman's snarky commentary.
"No, no, if we are revising the rules here, then those are my new rules!" Beta exclaimed. "We should change a few more while we are at it, yes? What if you get to decide where we will fight, and then I will get to decide whether or not I want to pass your dying words on to your friends after I defeat you, hmm?"
"Okay! You've made your point," Selah snapped, glancing at Kara, who was still trying to figure out where Beta was in the room, so that she could properly glare at the woman. "It'll be just us."
"Well then, I look forward to it," she said haughtily. "I will be seeing you soon." She shot one last icy smirk at the girl, and she then disappeared back into the nothingness.
.
.
.
