"You weren't born. The name Priscilla isn't yours. The childhood memories, everything before: it's fabricated. The Daemonites constructed it and loaded it into you."
She paused.
"Hey. Are you still with me?"
Voodoo's expression had gone completely blank. Not Priscilla. Then who? Where am I? What am I doing here? A cascade of philosophy that she wasn't prepared for.
Thea found a chair and sat down to wait.
Ten minutes. Then the woman's gaze sharpened again, slow and deliberate, like someone sorting through a box of evidence.
"Is the original Priscilla: does she exist?"
"She does. She had it rough. Abducted at four years old. Local police filed her as a missing person. She reappeared about five years ago: lizard physiology, claws, physically resembling your transformed state except she has wings and you don't. She managed to escape on her own, made it back to Earth, and was picked up by the FBI shortly after. She's still in custody."
Silence.
There's a particular kind of vertigo that comes from learning your entire identity is a manufactured object. Voodoo sat in it for a long time.
"Why are you telling me this?" she finally said. "What use am I to you now?"
Thea applauded once, quietly. "You're sharp. Sharper than the original, actually: she's been under the illusion that the FBI is going to help her return to normal. You don't have that problem."
"Hah." Voodoo rolled her shoulders, eyes moving around the room. "I'm still a prisoner. What's the difference between here and there?"
"We have a group of Daemonites in custody: probably the same ones you were planning to contact. Their ship requires Daemonite bloodline to activate. That's why I came to find you. Help me fly the ship. In exchange: full pardon, freedom, go back to your life, do whatever you want."
What surprised Thea was that Voodoo didn't want to go back to her life. She wanted to be a field agent.
Sure, Thea said. Done.
"You're not worried I'll turn on you?" Voodoo was being lowered from the suspension rig, her eyes still calculating.
"Can you?" Thea asked, genuinely curious.
Voodoo prepared to demonstrate exactly why that question was the wrong one to ask: and found that her body had simply stopped responding. Not impaired. Not struggling. Stopped.
"There it is," Thea said, perfectly matter-of-fact. "You can't move without my permission while you're near me. Telepathy is impressive in the right context, but it doesn't reach me. I can actually run your motor system if I need to."
She made Voodoo perform four specific movements in sequence, including a standing front flip, without any visible effort on her own part.
"I operate on a transaction basis. You fly the ship; you get your freedom. That's a fair deal."
Voodoo's response, once she recovered the ability to form words: Understood. You're in charge. I'm in.
Thea transferred them both directly to the dark side of the moon.
The Daemonite vessel had a kind of cold technological confidence to it: every surface functional, every line purposeful in the way that alien engineering sometimes was. Thea walked Voodoo through the control systems while the rest of the team assembled.
When word spread among Batman's associates that the Justice League was flying this thing to Jupiter, even the normally unflappable Tim Drake was visibly intrigued. Batman's answer to the question of whether they were coming was delivered via flat silence in the direction of his teammates.
The League arrived fast. Voodoo had only just worked out the basic control interface when Hal Jordan materialized with the three non-flyers in tow.
Seeing an actual alien spacecraft parked this close to Earth—real, substantial, here—produced a moment of collective disbelief even among people who had personally punched aliens.
The ship powered up cleanly.
Batman's team was sent back. Gotham needs coverage. Everyone present understood what this actually meant: he wasn't willing to put them in that particular kind of danger.
Jupiter.
Largest planet in the solar system by mass. Fastest rotation. Its volume exceeds Earth's by 1,316 times; its diameter runs approximately 142,000 kilometers (88,000 miles). The surface is a churning, hostile environment of ammonia clouds and superstorm systems, and it has no solid ground to stand on in any meaningful sense.
Finding a temple somewhere on that scale made "looking for a needle in a haystack" sound optimistic.
The League had brought J'onn J'onzz—the Martian Manhunter—and also Ray Palmer, the Atom, in from the reserve roster. Ray was doing his best to project calm energy; it wasn't entirely working.
The ship departed the moon, passed Mars, and locked onto Jupiter.
In the hold, visible through the interior viewport, were rows of Daemonite cloning tanks: dozens of near-identical forms in suspension. Voodoo looked at them for a long moment and then looked away and didn't look back. She input the coordinates mechanically and took up a position at the far end of the control room.
Batman, Ray, and the Flash had pulled up the ship's internal records and were running search algorithms, triangulating a probable location for the temple with what looked like genuine enthusiasm. They were—somewhat to Thea's amusement—fully committed to this.
Thea and Diana had retreated to a corner and resumed their interrupted conversation about Buddhist philosophy and its relationship to the Patron domain.
Four hours later, the ship broke atmosphere and set down on the Jovian surface.
Jupiter's distance from the sun meant temperatures that made their earlier mountain look hospitable. The low was around minus 168 degrees Celsius (minus 270°F): brutal even by standards the League had already encountered. Everyone had prepared. Those with technology adjusted their thermal regulators; those with powers adapted through them.
Aquaman—Arthur Curry, who preferred the term Aquaman and was currently swaddled in a coat made from something that was emphatically not any Earth-based animal—stared at the horizon with an expression suggesting he was reconsidering his life choices. He missed his ocean. He missed it very specifically and with considerable feeling.
The view made up for approximately five percent of the discomfort.
A moon—something the size of Earth's own—cleared the near horizon on a low orbital pass. The shadow swept across them, two full minutes of abrupt darkness, and then it was gone as fast as it had come. The Flash and Ray Palmer reacted with audible appreciation.
Then another moon came over.
And a third.
By the third pass, the awe had curdled into mild irritation.
Jupiter had sixty-nine known moons. Its rotational period was 9 hours and 50 minutes: compare Earth's 24-hour cycle. The moons moved at a corresponding pace. Occasionally, pieces of them did too: orbital collisions deposited debris fields without much notice or ceremony. It was a busy sky.
"We're off our landing coordinates," J'onn reported, turning his head toward a point in the middle distance. "Life signatures approximately twenty kilometers (12 miles) from our position."
A collective exhale. Nobody had wanted to spend more time out here than necessary.