SILHOUETTES ─ jason todd

PROLOGUE: Overture

PROLOGUE

—

ONE YEAR AGO

When Prisoner #387 looks into the barrier meant to protect visitors from volatile inmates like herself, it's difficult to see past her reflection, a pale ghost in the plexiglass. Visitation privileges had been granted six months into her incarceration, but the prisoner sees no point in it. She has no family, and her only friend had been savaged to death years ago.

But life was determined to prove her wrong.

"They say you did something bad." The visitor swallows, frowning. "They wouldn't tell me what, but..."

Leant back in her seat with her cuffed hands splayed out on the edge of the metal table, Prisoner #387 shrugs, the small, harmless action tracked by the guards flanking her, hands poised over their stun guns strapped to their waists. Not a threat, but a precaution. Always at attention, always at the ready to drop her if she so much as moved an inch in the wrong direction. Even with the power suppressor clamped around her neck, she was still regarded as deadly.

All this—the guards, the glass barrier, the shackles, the surveillance cameras trained on the prisoner's every move—just to keep a small woman in line seemed a little drastic at first. Until the visitor watched the woman lunge out of her seat and almost shatter one of the guards' kneecaps with a savage brutality when he'd only clamped a hand over her shoulder to push her into her seat when she'd initially refused to. She might have taken away his ability to walk had the second guard not reacted quickly enough. The visitor finally understood why they watched her so intensely. Why, out of all the other guards escorting the other prisoners back and forth between their cells with eyes glazed over and dulled with boredom, more irritable than on guard, these two were keen as vultures.

Stun guns weren't just a precaution against Prisoner #387.

Granted, all the details surrounding the prisoner's crime were classified. Nobody had to know anything beyond the business of her bloodied hands, what the black-out rage of a girl could do. Even then, the council had done a water-tight job of keeping the case contained from the population.

"Will you tell me?" The visitor asks, knee bouncing agitatedly, lacing and unlacing and lacing her fingers, the slow poison of frustration working its way through her nerves. "Look, I came all the way here just for you.  You could at least give me the time of day. You could at least tell me why."

"No," says Prisoner #387. The girl— no, not a girl, but a killer, a monster— smiles, white teeth flashing in the fluorescent light, vacant and venomous. "You came here of your own volition. I'd respect you more if you'd come right out and admit that you're here to gloat, but, I've run out of patience for people, and you've just proven to me that this is a complete waste of time. I don't owe you anything."

It's difficult to reconcile the face on the other side of the glass with a girl who had merely been dealt life with an unlucky hand. That's how it began. Bad luck was what landed her in the midst of war-torn Gotham, where she'd spent the formative years of her life fighting to see one day after the next. Bad luck was what landed her behind bars, sequestrated from the rest of society, because they don't look at her and see a lost, frightened metahuman girl. They see a menace, not a lost child weaned on violence. They see a monster, not a survivor. But bad luck does not make monsters, and both Prisoner #387 and her only visitor know better than to chalk it down to coincidence.

This is the face of a woman who, when they found her kneeling in a river of blood at the altar of bodies lying limp and lifeless at her knees, mutilated beyond recognition as though she didn't stop slashing at them even when they'd stopped breathing, laughed. The stuff was everywhere. On her hands, coating her chest, dripping down her chin. In her mouth, her teeth gleaming like rubies in the starlight, drenching her hair. So much of it, plastering the shredded tatters of her clothes—what little that survived the ordeal, barely clinging to her frame—to her skin, it'd been almost impossible to remove without taking some of her flesh off.