CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR - SUPERMAN II

The door hissed shut behind him.

Silence hung, heavy and unbroken, as Superman stood outside Noelle’s chamber. Alexandria stepped beside him again but said nothing.

He glanced at her. “You knew I wouldn’t accept this.”

She met his gaze. “Yes.”

“Then why bring me here?”

“We were hoping you’d understand.” Her voice was soft. “We wanted you to see the cost.”

“The cost of what?” he asked. “Your plans? Your secrets? Your failures?”

A pause.

Then a quiet voice from above: “The cost of saving the world.”

The older woman again.

Superman turned, looking up toward the hidden speaker. “You’re not saving it. You’re using people. Breaking them. And when they’re no longer useful, you discard them.”

“We don’t pretend our actions are good,” the older woman said. “We don’t have that luxury. But they are necessary.”

A low tone sounded—barely audible, like the heartbeat of the facility itself. Lights flickered along the corridor, and with a soft shhhht, a hidden door slid open at the far end.

The woman in the fedora stood waiting.

“This way,” she said.

He didn’t move at first.

For a moment, he simply stood there—still as stone, jaw tight, eyes fixed on the far door where the woman in the fedora waited. Every instinct told him to leave. To tear the place down, to carry Noelle out and never look back. But he didn’t. Not yet.

Because some part of him—however small, however angry—knew that understanding mattered. That to fight this, he had to see it.

His fists unclenched.

He moved. 

. . . . .

The path changed again.

White became steel. Walls became glass. The air thickened, not from humidity, but from pressure—intentional gravitational manipulation, subtle and constant, making every step feel heavier. Something was buried here. Something the building itself didn’t want them near.

“We’re near Eden,” Alexandria said. “What remains of her.”

Superman’s eyes narrowed. He glanced at the woman in the fedora. “You keep her here?”

“We built around her,” she replied. “A precaution. A resource. A constant warning.”

They stopped before a reinforced viewing panel.

Inside was a chamber not meant for human eyes. 

Inside was a chamber not meant for human eyes. Wires and tendrils of flesh twisted into impossible configurations, while bones spiraled into looping, nonsensical growths, branching out like petrified roots. And veins pulsed with something too regular, too patterned—carrying not blood, but signal. And at the center: something vaguely humanoid. Sloughed, collapsed inward, rotting from within—but never truly decomposing. Not alive. But not dead.

Superman flinched. 

It wasn’t in disgust. It was recognition. Not of form—but of function.

Because he had sensed this kind of wrongness before—in red skies and ruptured timelines. In beings like Mxyzptlk or the Anti-Monitor. In places where reality itself bent under pressure.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Her corpse,” said the woman in the fedora. “But she still dreams.”

“That’s where powers like Noelle’s come from,” Alexandria added. “From her genetic material.”

Superman was silent.

Then, quietly, “You’ve been experimenting with the dead body of a god.”

The older woman’s voice returned. “Not a god. A jailer. We just picked the lock.”

“And broke the inmates.”

The woman in the fedora tilted her head. “If you break the lock, the door opens both ways.”

Superman’s hands clenched at his sides. “This… this is why your world is broken. You treat power like currency and pain like collateral.”

“And what would you do?” the older woman asked. “Destroy it all? Free the prisoners? Kill the sleeping jailer?”

“I would stop lying about it.” He didn’t shout, but his voice resonated. The air shivered. The walls trembled and a different pressure came upon the place.

The woman in the fedora watched him, her gaze unwavering and unnerving. 

“Your presence here,” she said, “was never accounted for.”

“I noticed,” Superman replied.

. . . . .

As they returned through the corridor, Superman stopped beside a narrow window overlooking a sterile hall lined with sealed doors.

“How many more like Noelle?” he asked.

“Too many,” Alexandria said. “And not enough time.”

He turned to her. “Then I’ll buy you time. But the cages end. Or I tear them down.”

“Do that,” she said, “and you may doom us all.”

“Then stop giving me reasons to.”

The Door opened beside them, its light spiling over his shoulders.

Superman stepped through without a second glance back.