Eye of the Monster

The Chairman waved one hand dismissively. "There will be nothing to sweep. There will be a... disturbance. We will arrange an incident, and in it you will go missing. Presumed dead, your body lost among many others."

It almost impressed Havelock how willing the wealthy of the sixth world were to kill, in order to get what they thought they wanted. "Certainly you've never had a problem killing people before."

"Ah," Raphael said, at last showing the tiniest sliver of sympathy. "Your lovely Selena. Work with us, Elazar, and we can find who killed your beloved. Find them, and make them pay."

Havelock might also have been enticed by that if he could be reasonably certain Aztechnology were above suspicion, but they weren't. And anyway he had decided it didn't matter who was really to blame. It was probably inevitable. Just like what was to come was inevitable.

"Let's say I agree," Elazar said. "When should I expect this?"

Raphael and the elven man shared a look. "There is soon to be an execution," the Chairman said. "On that night there will be a riot among the inmates. A corrections officer in our employ will come for you."

Elazar almost wondered what they'd promised the prisoners who would instigate the riot. He almost wondered what it had taken to bribe the guard. But the only thing he cared about was getting out and resuming his work. He would rather die than work for a megacorp again and he had no qualms about lying to one in order to achieve his aims.

Elazar said, "I'm looking forward to a new career in Atzlan's employ." The Chairman smiled in a charmless self-indulgent way, and Havelock almost wondered if he could see anything past his own ego.

The elf didn't smile, and still said nothing. Probably he could tell that Havelock was lying... But Elazar didn't care. He'd had nothing to lose for a long, long time.

= = =

"Yea, verily! Behold that which darkness has spawned, but which has rejected darkness! We who wield the axe and club not in service to a dark master but for the glory of clan and kin!"

The other orks around the one holding the scroll clattered their makeshift weapons against their breastplates or against the concrete and repeated in unison a word he'd used. "Verily!"

He peered at the scroll again and squinted. He was probably the only one of them who could read which was the sole qualification that was necessary to be street leader now.

"And do we destroy without thought or concern that which could be shared beneath the sun with the children of light?"

The others around him shouted, "No!" faster than he'd expected and he had to scramble to find his place on the scroll again.

"Er, no! No, we say, for we are dark but we are proud! Too well were we crafted by the hands and tools of wickedness! Too form-idable were we made, so that..."

Candles chuckled in amusement. From the driver's side Dawson said, "Don't laugh at them. That's a much better use of their time than what they were doing before."

"They were a lot better at what they did before," he said. He pressed the button to lower the window and then stuck his head outside to speak.

"Hey! I think you're holding it upside down!"

The bloody tusk looked towards the Firebird and then at the scroll, genuinely baffled as he rotated it ninety degrees.

The light changed and Dawson put the car into drive. "If you want to get their attention," she said, "There's a better way."

She reached towards the stereo and turned the volume up.

"...everybody's workin' for the weekend! Everybody wants a new romance!"

The orks immediately scattered from the street corner, diving for cover in alleyways and gutters. Candles laughed heartily.

"So why exactly do you want to see this?" Dawson asked. "I'd think someone in your line of work would see enough death to satisfy any curiosity."

"Want to see what he drops," Candles said, not looking away from the window.

"What he drops? Are you implying a condemned inmate in Folsom state prison is carrying loot?"

"A guy that tough has got to drop something," Candles insisted.

Dawson pursed her lips. "And what's the actual reason?"

"Someone ought to see him die."

"There's going to be a dozen state officials in attendance, and at least as many corrections officers. Not including myself."

"Someone real," the ork added.

"How long have I been imaginary?"

"You're real," Candles admitted, "But you wish things could be better. I wish people would get what they deserve."

"Is that what you want, then? To see Ionfist 'get what he deserves' on the chair?"

"It'll be good for me," the ork said more carefully. "That could have been me in another life. I could have been a bloody tusk when I was young. I had the rage, and the talent."

"So why weren't you?"

"I had a sister to take care of. Wanted her to have a better future."

She didn't need to ask how that had gone. Instead she asked, "What do you remember most clearly about her?"

It was often the case, Dawson had found, that people longed to speak well of someone they missed deeply. Candles was no exception.

"She liked to laugh, you know. Knew a lot of really corny jokes. Like uh, 'What do you call a group of squid?'"

Dawson shrugged, and Candles answered the riddle.

"A squad."

She couldn't help but smirk.

"We talked every day. Well, she talked and I listened. Best not to talk about what I do. But she liked to talk so it worked out. I heard her voice about ninety-one minutes before she was killed, Dawson. Some nights when I'm drunk I play the recording and I wonder what I could have done differently. I wish I could trade places with her. I'd do it in a heartbeat."

"That's a good way to drive yourself mad," Dawson said softly.

"I'm already mad," Candles muttered. "I was born mad. Cleaned out the store and left the sane and sensible for her. Thinking of that bastard who did it rotting behind bars for the rest of his life is a cold, cold comfort."

It occurred to her that for an elf, a life sentence was not necessarily a guarantee that they would spend the rest of their life in prison, but in the moment that seemed a poor thing to dwell on.

"So yes," Candles went on, "I want to see someone get what they deserve. Not on the trideo, not on a matrix cast. I want to watch him burn and when his eyes go dead I want to know that the hell they send him to seems like heaven after what's been done to him."

"It's not nearly as dramatic as that," Dawson warned. "Most executions are over in seventeen seconds.

"I'll try to hold my excitement in for that long," Candles said, "But I can make no promises."

= = =

In the parking lot of Folsom, Dawson met Sokoth and Brandt. Beneath the overcast evening sky and sparse lights the lieutenant reacted to Candles' presence with visible distaste.

"What's this Dawson, he your plus one? You sure you shouldn't be on the inside of those bars and looking out, son?"

"They'd never put me in prison," Candles declared, "I don't fuck with the money."

Brandt shook his head in frustration. "It's a zoo in there. The San Francisco city council has tried to make this into a one-time holiday. Everyone in California is trying to watch this and the fights in Denver at the same time."

Dawson put her hands in her coat pockets and started walking towards the prison proper. "Well let's go whittle down their choices."

In the main lobby they met with the warden and her staff, a rotund minotaur who allegedly liked to think of Folsom as her labyrinth. The corrections officers were clearly nervous; the city's pleas for more manpower had been all but ignored in favor of diverting resources to protecting assets further east. Knight Errant was the same way--though he was good at concealing it, Dawson could tell that Gaines had been on edge at the last meeting at the Orchard. Too many top-secret projects going sideways, too many board members ending up in shallow graves. Everyone who cared, truly cared about the fate of Ion Ivanfist was in this building. The rest of the world was looking somewhere else.

From the main cell block Sokoth addressed the inmates, only audible over the din of a building cacophony because of the aid of a microphone and the loudspeakers in every corner.

"Shut up, you animals! This is your one and only warning! Anyone found on the outside of their bars tonight is going to get a face-full of lead. I don't give a shit what you're in for! I don't care if you were framed for jaywalking or you robbed a god damned soykaf machine! You are on thin ice and I am not in the fucking mood!"

He hefted his Enfield AS-7 in one hand, leaning the barrel against his shoulder to show off the twenty-four round drum magazine attached to the underside of the shotgun.

"You want to live to sue for police brutality? Want to make it to your parole dates and see your families again? Then stay. Put."

He hung up the microphone and gave Dawson a look. "Let's go get him."

The walk to the holding cell was tense for everyone except Ivan Ionfist, who seemed to be the only one in the entire world who was calm. He said nothing as the guards detached the chains from the floor of his cell and herded him at the points of several HK-227s. After coming out of death row the inmates exploded at the sight of the former warboss. Orks howled furiously, trolls beat their chests and even Humanis-tattooed thugs beat against their bars and cajoled, though whether in support for the mass murderer or in support of his imminent execution Dawson couldn't tell.

An ork she recognized as one from the raid reached out for Dawson as they passed his cell. She dodged his groping claw by half a foot and delivered one punch to his forearm that bent the limb at an odd angle and earned a strangled shriek from inside the cell. No one else troubled them as they walked.

Executions in California were rare, but not so rare that there wasn't a designated viewing room adjacent to the chamber. While Sokoth and the guards strapped Ionfist in, Dawson and Candles took a seat in the rear next to Brandt. In front of them were a few officials from city hall and a few more from the corporate court, though one face Dawson had expected to see was absent.

She leaned towards Brandt and spoke. "Where's Reymont? I thought this was his reelection campaign in action."

"So did I," Brandt said suspiciously.

Dawson narrowed her eyes. "What's he know that we don't?"

"Does it feel," Brandt asked cryptically, "Like someone is staring at us?"

"The whole world should be watching a thing like this," she replied. "But it's not. I've got a bad feeling about this."

"Not as bad as that guy's about to have," Candles suggested, pointing at the display window. Ivan was clamped to the chair at the wrists and ankles. One of the guards left the room, presumably to attend to the switchboard. The electric chair was obsolete by every metric, barbaric and cruel in the extreme. And that was the point of using it.

Dawson's commpad chimed, but she chose to ignore it. A second later Brandt's own pad made a similar noise. He hesitated but then pulled it from his coat to check it. Inside the chamber Sokoth touched his pants pocket in a gesture that presumably silenced his device. A moment later he repeated the gesture. Then again. At last he made a fist and reached into his pants to retrieve the object, pulling it up next to his face and beginning to speak. He turned away from where Ionfist was sitting.

"Holy hell," Brandt whispered. Dawson was beginning to form a question when Candles tapped her shoulder and spoke.

"Hey, what's a guard got to whisper to a death row inmate about, Dawson?"

She looked back and sure enough the corrections officer in the chamber with Ionfist and Sokoth had bent down to whisper into Ivan's ear.

The warboss was grinning faintly.

Dawson stood up immediately. "Shit!" She reached for the Accelerator at her hip, and a moment later the ordinarily white lights of the viewing room flashed an angry red. An automated voice began to broadcast over the building speakers.

"Matrix security network accessed. Electronic locks... disabled."

She was pointing the Accelerator at the window, over the heads of the the attending VIPs, when the restraints holding Ionfist opened up. Sokoth, commpad still in hand, was spinning around just as the other ork was towering to his feet.

It took a moment for her left hand to find the dial on the side of the rail gun and turn it all the way up to maximum penetration. The delay cost her greatly; when she pulled the trigger Ionfist was already moving, and the red-hot steel rod passed effortlessly through the ballistic glass separating the two rooms to land squarely in the back of the chair where a moment before Ivan's head had been.

By then he was already swinging his remaining fist at Sokoth, who had dropped his commpad and tried to bring his Enfield to bear. But the call had been the perfect distraction, and the younger ork's balled hand connected with his jaw and sent him flying across the chamber to sprawl out on the floor.

More alarms began to blare. Prisoner escape. Exterior wall breach. Cascading system failure. Checkpoint non-response. Everything that could go wrong was going wrong.

Dawson fired a second shot at the viewing window but Ionfist had thrown himself towards cover. The guard who had let him loose had fled the room and no doubt Ivan was scrambling towards the open door. The dignitaries and officials were barely conscious of what was happening and she shoved them out of the way, seated or not, crossing the room to the door, distantly noting that Candles and Brandt were behind her.

Out in the hallway she caught sight of Ivan--an enormous darkened silhouette in the red warning lights of the cell block corridor--emerging from the chamber's reinforced portal, the way opened for him by some sabotage. Later there would be condemnations: everyone would point fingers and nod their heads at the notion that there should have been more security in place, but in this moment all Dawson cared about was who was at risk if this mass-murdering maniac should escape..

With that in mind she leveled the Accelerator at him and pulled the trigger. The steel rod flew down the corridor and grazed his neck on the left side. He slapped at the shallow wound with his singular hand, and then took off down the hallway. It was the last shot she'd get at him in Folsom. She swore, and then gave chase.

= = =

Dawson was halfway down the corridor pursuing the last glimpse of Ivan's jumpsuit when Candles and Brandt forced their way through the crowd of dignitaries in the viewing room. Through the open door she could hear panic mounting as a dozen people who had never done anything more dangerous than watch action trids or hear about crime reports on the news were suddenly much closer to the topic of law enforcement than they'd prefer. They'd come to attend an execution and now it must have seemed to each of them that it could be their own.

Brandt cried out her name from the top of the corridor. She half-turned and shouted back at him, "Get Max!" Without another word he darted into the execution chamber to check on the lieutenant. Candles began pulling objects out of his pockets as he jogged after her; he was probably carrying the parts to a Streetline Special modified to hold polymer rounds. It was the sort of thing a Shadowrunner would carry through a metal detector.

The various alarms going off recalled to mind for Dawson of the one previous prison riot she'd been present for. Her second year of consulting she'd been pursuing a pair of burglars, a querx and a night one, as they knocked over alchemical storehouses to fuel their talismongering. As with most things there was a larger scheme behind the simple robberies and that time it had been an employer who was using them to commit, among other things, insurance fraud.

She had correctly predicted the pattern of their heists and together with Sokoth, still a sergeant at the time, they'd ambushed the pair and apprehended them without having to fire a shot. But the regional manager at the time had insisted that Dawson--being a woman--be the one to deliver the burglars to the Institution for Women in Riverside and that the entire thing be televised... and of course one of the media crew was a saboteur and crashed the control matrix for the doors in two cell blocks.

But that had been like a cruise down Sunset Boulevard compared to this. It sounded as if Folsom's entire electronic network had been taken offline. Bars in the maximum security wing that were normally electrified were most likely being pried open or contorted through by the metahumans they normally kept contained. Sentry guns trained on the isolation cells of convicted terrorists were going silent, indicating that this was no test or ploy. And of course there was the understaffing to make everything worse...

She put it all out of her mind as she rounded the corner after Ionfist. The culpability could be quantified when it was over. The hallway led past a checkpoint where a guard with a Yamaha Pulsar should have been waiting to incapacitate anyone running by in convicted colors. As she barreled past it she heard rattling coming from the door of a cabinet behind the desk, along with muffled shouting. Ionfist wouldn't have done that, and wouldn't have had time even if he'd wanted to.

Someone had cleared the way for him. He had help... a lot.

Again she shouted over her shoulder. "Get that cabinet open!" She imagined Candles hesitating for a moment as he loaded the barrels of his streetline, but she couldn't afford to slow down and do it herself.

A security door beyond the checkpoint was partly open; only a metahuman of immense strength could have forced it and only if it the steel rods from the door frame had been retracted before he'd gotten to it. There was a time lock mechanism of five minutes to move out of the death row block and he had gone right through without waiting... More evidence of help.

Beyond the door was the general population block, the central structure of Folsom and also the largest. Its state was nothing short of bedlam, filled with the screaming of hardwired alarms as old as the prison itself and lit only by the strobing red of modern emergency lights. Beneath the claxons was the all-too-familiar din of a desperate brawl. Men and women shouted and howled, both the prisoners let loose from their cells and the guards struggling to contain them and punctuated by the occasional gunshot.

The inmates were a disorganized mob pushing towards the main lobby, but it was easily the most heavily fortified position in the whole prison. A phalanx of corrections officers in riot gear had already formed up at the door to the corridor, armed with barriers and parashield dart pistols. Any inmate who managed to squeeze past the press in the walkways around the central block--which was five stories high--and close to the exit was given two or three syringes of a sedative strong enough to put an ork like Ionfist on his ass in under ten seconds.

So Dawson wasn't surprised when she spotted the enormous warboss shoving and roaring his way through the crowd in another direction, towards the eastern block known unofficially as the palaces. It was the collection of cells for the more affluent variety of inmates: convicts who had connections and cut deals during trials that included not being stuck with the general population.

As she started after him Dawson worked her mind to figure out why he would go there and not towards the lobby. Clearly he meant to escape but the individual cell blocks had no outside exits and the exterior walls were five-meter thick concrete. But the Palaces had windows on its uppermost floor, windows without bars or ballistic glass so the privileged prisoners could look out over the countryside surrounding Folsom when they grew bored of their trideo entertainment. Ionfist could break through one, but a fall of five stories onto the concrete below would kill even him.