Eye of the Monster

Dawson called out at him. "Talk, Megiddo. Before the smoke gets too thick for me to hear anything but you choking to death."

Candles didn't wait to throw another vial, this one landing on the small table and exploding with enough force to send the elf inside staggering backwards, tripping over his armchair and ending up flat on his back. This earned another sadistic laugh from the Shadowrunner.

"What possible reason could I have for wanting that savage at large again?" Julius called out.

"Can't hear you from up here," Dawson replied. "Must be the wind coming in through the broken glass."

The ork had removed from his jacket's interior a plastic canister small enough to fit in his palm. From the sock of his right foot he produced a nozzle which screwed into the top of that canister. Then he pulled out a simple disposable lighter from his back pants pocket, struck up a flame and held it in front of the nozzle before twisting a vale. A pressurized stream of blue flame spat out of the small tube and began to cascade across the interior of Megiddo's cell.

Dawson thought, Fucking hell.

Napalm sprayed across the wall as Megiddo dived for the floor behind his lavish bed, the imported feathers lighting up almost instantly.

"Call him off!" he shouted. "Call off your dog!"

Gaines' voice over the intercom, halfway to panicked. Dawson! That's a fucking order! Stop!

Candles was breathing laughter, but only now did she see the hot tears coursing down his cheeks. This elf in the cell had killed the one thing Candles had known to be good in the world. The thing that kept him righted, kept him honest. What was left but to watch the world burn? But to punish the one responsible?

A tongue of flame landed somewhere on Megiddo's back and he screamed. "Call him off!!"

"Stop!" Dawson reached out and grabbed Candles by the wrist, pushing down the arm holding the lighter and robbing the napalm of its pilot light.

The ork was breathing heavily, looking into the cell where most of the luxurious appliances were smoldering. Megiddo rose from his prone position behind his bed with a look of stressed indignation.

"He deserves to burn," Candles whispered.

"I know," Dawson whispered. "But right now, I need him."

Immediately he looked at her, his expression hardening. "If it takes his kind to save the world," he growled, "Better to let this world die."

Without waiting for Dawson's response he turned away and began walking down the corridor towards the stairway down.

Dawson watched him walk while speaking. "Talk. Talk, or I will call him back."

"What do you think I can tell you?" Julius said between gasps. "That I had advance warning of a riot? Fine, I did. I knew there would be trouble. Who didn't? Lone Star's ploy to inflate their stock price was just asking for something to go wrong."

"Spare me the trading tips," Dawson warned, her level gaze sliding to where the elf stood against the blackened wall of his cell.

"The riot was arranged for someone else. Ionfist just took advantage of it."

"Who helped him?" she demanded.

He shrugged mightily. "How should I know? Aztechnology gains nothing from letting loose a wild animal, detective. A lesson you could stand to learn."

"Then what was the riot for?"

Despite his state of extreme disarray, the elf smiled in an indulgent manner. The ash hadn't marred the white of his expensive dentistry. "Someone who will not be missed for some time. When you finish counting the bodies, look for the one you don't find and you will, I suspect, realize right away."

She hefted the shotgun again. "I'm not the Attorney General, Mister Megiddo, and this isn't the courtroom where your eloquence will get you a reduced sentence. Give me something useful."

"If I tell you now," Julius said chidingly, still haughty despite missing half an eyebrow, "Then the whole ruse is unraveled. You spring into action too soon and the company looks bad, you look bad, Lone Star looks worse and the prisoners who escaped stay escaped. But if you find out yourself, detective, if you have probable cause, ah--then we can negotiate. And I?" He spread his arms and looked around his half-incinerated jail cell. "I look like a man who has endured the flames of hell to protect corporate investments, revealing nothing under what was most certainly unlawful torture."

Dawson scoffed. "You can't convince me you were planning on my questioning."

"No, detective," Megiddo insisted, shaking his head as he picked his way around the charred debris in the cell. He stopped at the smoking stump that had once been his small table and from behind it fished up an ash-covered bottle of scotch. "But it is my nature to never let a good tragedy go to waste." He didn't look for the shot glass, instead just drinking from the bottle in one quick sip that seemed to go down less than smoothly.

"Am I to understand," Dawson said skeptically, "That you're plotting against your employer?"

At this Julius adopted a slight sneer. "I am not some common street scoundrel cutting the throats of my peers and colleagues simply to raise my station by a measure of altitude proportional to their corpse. I am concerned with just one individual whom I am of the opinion has lost their touch. Let us say I have an aversion to throwing good money after bad."

For a long moment Dawson stared at him through the bars. Though it had taken Candles burning him half to death and destroying tens of thousands of nuyen in luxury goods, Megiddo had coughed up something. This wasn't just one prison break, it was two.

"And what are you after?" she pressed. "You think your corporate backstabbing will get you out of this cell early?"

The elf shrugged dismissively. "Hardly. From inside prison I look helpless, removed from events. In truth it is the perfect position from which to make bets. And I rather enjoy displaying my wealth to the lower classes. Their squalor and ignorance inspire me to appreciate my refinement and my accomplishments."

"You mean your crimes," Dawson corrected. "You, Mister Megiddo, are truly disgusting."

"The word you are looking for, detective, is opulent. And I apologize for nothing."

= = =

They'd given Havelock a fine white lab coat that had a faint gray shimmer to it around the neck and shoulders that somehow matched his hair. The Chairman may have been an avatar of all the sixth world's corruption and disease but he knew his corporate aesthetics. Underneath the coat was a pair of subdued blue slacks and a plain black shirt which felt like a mixture of silk and velvet. Certainly the most expensive clothes he'd worn in over a decade.

Without an orange suit on, guards barely gave Elazar a second glance. The Aztlan man who had come to his cell led him through a throng of corrections officers whose nervousness was palpable. Sure enough as they were walking through the lobby towards the exit to the courtyard, display screens began to flicker off and doors to security checkpoints began to slide open. He was hurried out of the main entrance as the hardwired alarms began to blare.

The Aztechnology plant informed the gate watchmen that things were going to shit inside and his VIP needed to be evacuated. Soon they were in a government-issue tan car, Havelock in the rear seat and the guard driving them somewhere. Based on the signs they passed by on the road, it was to an airport.

Havelock began taking off the lab coat as if it caused him discomfort. His driver looked up briefly into the rear view mirror but then returned his eyes to the road.

Elazar asked, "How long have you worked for Aztechnology?"

He responded in his thick south American accent. "All of my life."

"Oh," Havelock said. "That's a relief. I don't feel as bad, then."

The man didn't look up from the road. "Bad for--"

The twisted-up lab coat went over his head and around his throat like a noose and Elazar pulled back as hard as he could.

For around five seconds the car continued straight forward, then swerved suddenly to the left and careened off the side of an overpass. It spun once in the air and landed upside down, teetering slightly in the silent nighttime air. It just so happened that it was situated right in front of the spot where several weeks before Impulse Dawson had been gazed by a bullet that sprayed some of her blood across the concrete, luring to it a creature Elazar Havelock had summoned into the world.

After about a minute, the aged scientist pushed open the rear passenger door and crawled out. He still had the lab coat clutched in one hand, and as he stood up, stretched and put it back on he was a little dismayed to see there was a bright red stain on the left shoulder.

Well, Elazar thought, so much for good clothing.

He was dusting himself off when he realized that there were two elves beneath the underpass, one male with a mohawk and one female with an entirely shaved head, sitting beside a flickering display screen that showed a fuzzy, silent image of a news report about a prison riot. They had abandoned watching it in favor of looking at him.

"Hey," the male elf said, "You alright man?"

Havelock worked his mouth for a moment and nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks."

The female elf didn't get up from her seat on an ancient television. "You uh... You need to go a DocWagon or somethin'?" The stylized A symbols on their jackets gleamed in the low light cast by the street lamps on the overpass above.

"No," Havelock said. "Just need to get back to work. Excuse me."

He put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat and began strolling down the canal in the same direction as the creature which now called itself Instinct had, shortly after being born.

The male elf called out after him, "Hey chummer, what about your wheels?"

Havelock called back over his shoulder. "It's not mine." After a moment he added, "You can have it."

The two elves looked at each other, then scrambled up to go loot the vehicle.

= = =

Brandt asked, "What did you learn from that elf?"

"Nothing yet," Dawson said. Best to play this one close to the chest. It wasn't that she didn't trust Brandt. The person she didn't trust was the one they now had to report to.

Sokoth's office was normally a pretty lived-in place. Since his long overdue promotion to Lieutenant and his move from the cramped office on the first floor of the precinct building, he had adopted a more personalized approach to his interior decorating. Professional photographs--not just display screens set to a particular still image but actual photographs printed on real paper--decorated the wall, showing important moments of the last several years of his career.

One showed Sokoth, Brandt and Dawson standing in front of a pile of tempo bags that came up to their waists. Another showed an empty shipping container with Dawson standing before it looking in, the image having been taken when she wasn't looking. A more recent one captured the three of them at the oceanography research center where a storm had been held captive, destined to be used as a superweapon. Sokoth was supporting her on his shoulder, but she was smiling. It was the only one where she was smiling. She didn't need to wonder what had changed.

Also decorating his office were trophies, the latest addition being Ivan Ionfist's namesake cybernetic hand, contained in a simple glass box and set into an alcove on the wall where the previous Lieutenant had kept a display screen displaying stock prices for Lone Star. Hands in her coat pockets she truly looked at it for what was basically the first time and confirmed her initial assessment: it was not a sophisticated piece of technology save for its ability to emit power through the rods in the knuckles. A stun gun really, but super-charged with a miniaturized nuclear reactor kept in the palm. The radioactive material had been removed before it was encased, so it could serve only as a reminder that law and order prevailed.

Staring at it, Dawson couldn't help but feel the weight of their collective failure.

Dawson asked, "Where is she at?"

"City council meeting," Brandt replied. "Emergency session. Want to guess who called it?"

"Don't need to guess," she muttered. Instead she changed the subject.

"How's Jill?"

"She's wonderful," Brandt said, smiling broadly at the mention of her. "The sweetest person I've ever met. And she's an animal."

"Dogs do tend to be the best people," Dawson observed.

"It's more than that," he insisted. "She's the best... the best mind I've ever known. She's so sensitive, to everything. And so smart. So intelligent. She should be leading research somewhere, solving problems. Anything less is a waste of her brilliance. It stuns me that she only wants to chase storms. Most people that bright, they tend to have larger ambitions. But her... She just wants to listen to the rain. To really listen to it."

"So you're getting on well then," Dawson guessed.

Brandt breathed a bit of laughter. "It stuns me that she even talks to me. I'm not a fifth as imaginative as she is, or a tenth as patient. You know, shapeshifters don't tend to live all that long. A few years beyond whatever animal type they're born to. There's a certainty that I'm going to outlive her. And it won't be by a small margin. I almost cry when I think about it. How someone so pure and kind gets less time than some... some bitter fuck in a corporate tower somewhere, soaking in chemicals trying to preserve themselves like a pharoah in a tomb."

"You've got to appreciate the time you get," Dawson said softly. Brandt nodded, exhaling heavily from the sudden outpouring of emotion.

The double doors opened to the office and the regional manager strode in. Dawson had never liked Agatha Culdite, a short human woman who did not wear her weight well. She had the sort of eyes that seemed to see dollar signs in everything and her face, already host to a perpetual scowl that seemed almost painted on, was further marred by the presence of several gaudy implants on the left side of her head which were poorly hidden beneath her neck-length orange hair.

"Detectives," Agatha said with the kind of unconcealed distaste that could only be summoned by someone whose degree was not in criminology or justice but rather in finance. "So glad you could make it." Dawson elected not to point out that they'd been waiting on her. Brandt did the same, dispersing his good mood from talking about Jill so they could attend to the matter at hand.

The manager continued speaking as she walked around the room to Max's desk, helping herself to his seat as if in truth it were hers and she merely allowed him to use it. "How's Lieutenant Sokoth?"

"His jaw is broken," Brandt said, " And he hit his head on the wall as he fell. Mild concussion. He's going to be out of commission for at least a few weeks."

"If Ionfist hadn't been in such a hurry to get out," Dawson observed, "He'd have done far worse."

"He's out there doing far worse right now," Culdite seethed, looking from one detective to the other. "Well? Either of you geniuses want to explain just how exactly you managed to fuck this up?"

Brandt began saying something civil. "As far as we can tell--"

Dawson cut him off. "We fucked this up? Sokoth warned you, and the warden, and the city council that Folsom was understaffed for the kind of agitation it was experiencing. There would have been an incident even if there hadn't been every form of possible sabotage."

"Resources are stretched thin right now," Agatha defended. "You know what's happened in Denver, don't you?"

Working her mouth, Dawson elected not to editorialize. "Yeah," she said. "Caught the report just after we left Folsom. Damien Knight reported as dead, Arthur Voegel reappeared and claimed control of Ares. Forgive me if I'm more concerned about the mass murderer who just got back onto the streets of San Francisco."

"I don't have to forgive you," the manager said reproachfully. "I only have to hold people to account. This is your fault."

Dawson's eyebrows went up in disbelief. "Mine? Are you saying I should have been in the room with Sokoth? If I had known that--"

This time it was Agatha who cut her off. "Not even. You should have killed that ork go-ganger on the street. You or Sokoth." She gestured to the cybernetic weapon encased in the alcove. "You shot that off, didn't you? It should have been his head."

Without thinking about what she was saying, Dawson spoke with more than a measure of what she thought of as righteous fury. "I didn't get certified to execute people in the street! There's a process to this, and principles, or otherwise Lone Star is just another corporate security death squad pushing around anyone too poor to pay them off!"

Agatha's response was as quick as it was smug. "You mean like the one you worked for? From what I understand, detective, you had no difficulty executing people in the streets of San Francisco for about seven years."

Once again her past behavior had been weaponized, and not even in a particularly useful manner. With great effort Dawson contained her irritation by gritting her teeth.

"I don't kill people anymore," she stated.

"You were entirely prepared to let the state kill Ivan Ionfist. You knew full well what was waiting for him after that raid, if he lived. You are complicit, no matter what you think."

"That's different!" Dawson shouted. "What the system decides isn't up to me! I'm trying to make things safe out here! And they would be if you'd listened to us! If you'd carried out the sentence in a timely manner there'd have been no time to arrange the riot or the escape! Instead you wanted to make it a fucking festival!"

"If you had carried out the sentence when you had the power," Culdite hissed, "We wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be at home in Pacific Heights sleeping and not here at three in the morning arguing with a pair of borderline obsolete and undeniably incompetent cops."

Dawson turned away from the desk and wiped her face. She wish she had her hat to contain her hair, but they hadn't found it in the debris and chaos yet. "This isn't the time for a conversation like this," she sighed. "We need to hit the street. Start putting the screws to bloody tusks, try to figure out where Ionfist would go to ground." To say nothing of the other prisoner Megiddo had alluded to.

"Not you," Agatha said with obvious enjoyment. Dawson spun around and fixed her with a stare.

She and Brandt spoke at the same time. "What's that supposed to mean?"

The manager spoke her next few sentences with extreme relish. "Did you know you're eighteen months overdue for a psychiatric evaluation? The corporate office's statistical analytics algorithm has determined that you, detective Dawson, are a suicide risk."

Dawson's mouth twitched slightly but she said nothing. Brandt spoke in her place.

"What the fuck are you talking about? Dawson's record is incredible! She's the best detective, hell the best cop San Francisco has ever had!"

Agatha spoke as if she were reading directly from a report, accessed through her matrix-enabled implants. "A SIN-less background, suggesting impoverished origins. Triple-digit kill count during the occupation, yet not one on-record kill during her entire period as a consultant. Famous with the city's underclass for organizing second-chance deals for SIN-less offenders, and a noted aversion to associating with higher authority figures. The assessment: has something she is trying to make up for. Likely only sought police work in the hopes that it would get her killed. A textbook martyr complex. Eighty-eight person chance of suicidal tendencies. Unfit. For. Duty."

"You can't be serious," Brandt said, becoming heated. "We need her now more than ever! And more than that, she's one of us!"

"She's one of you," Agatha corrected. "My job isn't to have solidarity, my job is to increase stock value and inspire shareholder confidence. Suicidal employees do not inspire shareholder confidence." Brandt was about to say something else when Culdite lifted one finger on one hand. "And algorithms do not make mistakes!"