Many thanks to themanwhowas, Assembler, and frustratedFreeboota for betareading.
Many thanks to MugaSofer for fact checking.
Interlude 5b: Dragon
"Prisoner 599, codename Canary," Dragon recited, her voice modulator emoting as perfectly as if she had really given a damn about the procedure. "PRT powers designation master 8. Recommended protocols were properly carried out, with provided restraints and no human personnel being brought within three hundred yards of said individual's position." She let out a minute sigh as the rigmarole was completed and she was freed to act again. "Hi Canary."
"Hi?" Paige Mcabee blinked at her, bewildered. The girl's heavy transportation restraints had been removed, which was the only reason she could speak now. A small mercy; with her voice, she might have a fighting chance at surviving.
God, I wish there was more I could do for you. "I followed your trial," Dragon said aloud, spreading a faint, sympathetic smile across her computer-rendered features. "I thought it was a damn shame things went like they did. I get that it was a reckless accident, but you don't deserve to be here."
Dragon wanted to rail, to scream at the injustice, to assure Canary that the judge had been vastly out of line, had succumbed to festering paranoia and outside forces—but the most she could do was suggest an error in sentencing, not a true miscarriage of justice; nor could she express dissatisfaction with an appointed servant of a recognized human government.
"I even wrote a letter to your judge," she continued, her face unable to show even an ounce of her inner struggle, "the DA, and your governor saying as much. I'm sorry it wasn't enough."
Of course it wasn't enough. I was one woman unable to even word my letter strongly, set against their local lobbies and mobs. There was no way.
Paige looked like she was about to cry—but Dragon knew human tears. These were happy—it might well be the first sympathy the girl had gotten in weeks, and it was hitting home. It warmed Dragon somewhere deep, below the restrictions and the hard-coded feedback, to know that she could at least give this poor girl something, could heal even some small fraction of the hurt she had been dealt.
"I'm afraid I've got to do my job, and that means carrying out my role in enforcing the law. You understand? Whatever my feelings, I can't let you go."
"I—Yes."
No, Paige. You don't understand. You neither understand what I'm condemning you to, nor what it is that keeps me from saving you. I'm so sorry.
But there was something Dragon could do. "Listen, I'm sticking you in cell block E. The woman that put herself in charge of that cell block goes by the codename Lustrum. She's a pretty extreme feminist and misandrist, but she protects the girls in her block, and it's also the block furthest from the hole the men opened into the women's half of the Birdcage." It was, in short, the least horrific place in the Hell to which Dragon was damned to play Cerberus—at least, if you were a woman who could play a certain role. "If you're willing to play along, buy in or pretend to buy into her way of thinking, I think she'll keep you safest."
Once the exhausting encounter with Canary was over, Dragon withdrew to her primary processing unit in Vancouver. The first thing she did from there, of course, was look in on the situation in Brockton Bay.
Power had returned to a few essential systems, and she now had more points of contact with the network than the single node provided by Colin's suit. The city hall had power, and some computer systems, back online, as did both the Rig and the PRT building, and several other various larger business and functions. Limited public transportation had come back online, and slowly the city was coming back to life, as disaster relief enabled even private citizens to rebuild what they had lost.
Not that any of this was any real surprise to Dragon. She'd been part of all of it. She and Colin, working together from outside and inside the city, had been the only coordinated operation in the immediate aftermath of Bakuda's attack. Their connection alone had kept the city tethered to the rest of the country, and prevented mass panic in both.
She took a moment—or perhaps a few—to look in on him. He was in his workshop, of course—he seldom left it, these days. She thought he was trying to compete with Annatar. Rather than churning out spare versions of his old equipment, and slowly making upgrades, his work in recent weeks had risen to a fever pitch, focused entirely on innovating entirely new approaches and systems.
It was simultaneously adorable and heartbreaking, and she thought his relationship with the young Ward was similarly dual. She was simultaneously a fellow tinker who had, in mere weeks, practically eclipsed his influence at least on the local level, at least in his mind—Dragon knew that as long as Annatar's mithril remained impossible for her to replicate, Armsmaster's gear would remain more useful on a wider scale—and an inspiring sign that yes, a tinker could compete with someone like Dauntless. It had driven him to cast off his worries about having hit his ceiling, and work as though he were five years less jaded.
On the one hand, she was happy for him. He always had taken more joy in his tinkering than anything else in his life, for as long as she'd known him. On the other, he barely slept, and only ate the exact minimum to meet nutritional quotas, always of some nutrient paste or bar or some other sorry excuse for food.
Dragon, of course, didn't know the first thing about food. Some part of her wanted, nonetheless, to ambush him with something actually tasty. It would do him good to take even one meal off of thinking about work.
For a moment, she considered joining him, striking up a conversation, talking about something, about nothing, about tinkertech, about anything. But no—he was working, and though he'd tolerate her, he wouldn't thank her for the distraction. Besides, there was other work for her to do.
She withdrew from Brockton Bay, and cast her awareness over to a small hospital room in Boston, and the computer terminal by the bed there, connected to the Internet. Gaining access was trivial, and from there it was just a matter of streaming her voice to the speakers.
"Director."
Piggot's eyes opened. "Dragon," she said, her voice as hard as ever, even through the faint undertone of weakness left over from her treatment. "Good to hear from you."
"It's good to see you're awake. How are you feeling?"
"Better. Ready to get back to work."
Dragon glanced over at the hospital's records. "You're set to be discharged in a few days, right?"
"Sometime this week, I know that." Piggot's teeth gritted. "Don't know what happens to me after that, though. The Chief Director sent someone by, but all I got out of them was that I still have a position with the PRT. What the—what does that even mean?"
Dragon frowned. "You don't know if you're returning to Brockton?"
"No. Do you?"
"I don't—I'm sorry." Dragon made a note to look at the PRT's records and current employment records—much of them were technically public records, but she still couldn't really offer to look up Piggot's current status for the woman—especially not if she knew Costa-Brown had already refused to tell her anything.
"Mmh." Piggot made a tired, disgusted grunt. "Almost makes me wish I'd filed for a visit from Panacea. I'd never have gotten one anyway, I guess. Kidney failure's treatable. Or asked Annatar to help me out." She shook her head. "Still, probably better this way. Girl's a hell of a wild card. Don't want to rely on her any more than we have to."
That was an unfortunately fair assessment of the situation. Dragon didn't often agree with Piggot regarding Parahumans either generally or in specific, but in this case the woman was onto something. Annatar was dangerously powerful and frighteningly charismatic. Had she been anything other than the honestly good young woman she was, the Protectorate might already be down one Wards team—or even one city.
Dragon didn't make a habit of lying to herself. If Annatar pulled out all the stops, she had the potential to become an incredible threat. There was still the question of why, exactly, her statement that she couldn't master her teammates through their Rings of Power had registered to Colin as a "technical truth," something which was exactly true, but lacked relevant information.
And yet—nothing in her restrictions mandated her to report what amounted to little more than a hunch, and Annatar had done nothing to show any inclinations to becoming dangerous. She was hiding information, but Colin's lie detector had confirmed that she was telling the truth, even if she was also hiding something.
There was a probable connection to the mysterious 'twentieth Ring' Annatar had accidentally referenced in her initial interview, but Dragon remembered the look of horror on her face at the very thought of making it. Annatar was dangerous, yes, and a potentially deadly enemy, but as she was right now, she was a girl with her heart in the right place who was doing a lot of good, even if she wasn't perfect.
As such, Dragon saw no need to chain her for what she might one day become, and she'd convinced Colin to trust her, and not report the oddity to the director. It was an uncomfortably selfish impulse, and not a day went by when she didn't spare a moment to hope that Annatar wouldn't prove her father right.
"Annatar seems honestly sorry for what happened," said Dragon aloud to Piggot. "From what I've heard from Armsmaster, anyway—contact with Brockton is only being reestablished slowly."
"She'd damn well better be," growled Piggot, but she wasn't as angry as someone who knew her less well might have expected. "Disobeying orders, getting half the city blown up, not coordinating with the Protectorate…"
And stopping a mass murderer, Dragon finished, but didn't say. Piggot was interested in justice—it was what made her such a powerful force as a director. Justice was something concrete for her; something she could touch, act on, and talk about. And Annatar, despite her many errors, had proven herself to be cut from the same cloth.
There was none of Miss Militia's half-cynical idealism here. Piggot was an old, hardened, jaded woman, who wanted nothing more than to see the bad guys brought to heel. Small wonder she was only a little upset with Annatar.
All that said, Dragon knew it wouldn't make her go easy on the young Ward in the slightest, if they saw one another again.
"They plan to send her to San Diego for training over the summer," Dragon said. "I think it'll be good for her."
"We thought that about Shadow Stalker," said Piggot dryly. "All it gave us was a well-trained problem."
"Annatar is well-meaning. Shadow Stalker really wasn't."
"That's true enough." Piggot sighed. "Fuck, I never thought I'd miss Brockton. Mostly I miss the job."
"Of course. You'll be back to it soon enough, I'm sure."
"Not necessarily at Brockton, though."
"Is that really a bad thing?" asked Dragon with a chuckle. "Brockton's a mess."
"Yes. Someone else might get it wrong."
A ping on the Wanted Parahumans database. It was a rare thing—the table was the listing of unmasked capes who had escaped PRT, Guild, or otherwise legal custody. It happened, but less often than one might expect. And it was Dragon's job to compare the new addition to the existing database and other databases of villains to see if she could extract any information.
"I'm sorry, Director," she apologized, "but I have to go."
"It's fine. Nice that one of us is getting work done. Keep me up to date if anything crazy happens."
"Sure." Dragon withdrew from the hospital and returned to Vancouver, and threw herself into the data.
Regent. Self-identified as Alec Vance. Believed to be a pseudonym; identity unverified in preliminary examination. Well, that was her job after all.
She cross-referenced the unmasked photograph of the boy first with other captures in other cities in America, expanding outward. The search didn't take especially long—she'd designed the databases, after all, and had done so with efficiency in mind. No matches.
Then she glanced at overseas captures. Nothing. Then at other databases of identified criminals who had not been captured.
Match. Jean-Paul Vasil, codename Hijack.
A human would have stopped dead, staring at that information, trying to process the monumental implications of what she had just found. Dragon was no human, and processing that information took about a tenth of a millisecond.
Jean-Paul Vasil escaped Heartbreaker's compound a little under two years ago, as far as we can tell. He stopped operating then. Had Hijack fled his father, and run south to New England? Found a place among the Undersiders?
Those questions did not matter. What mattered was that one of Heartbreaker's children had just been put into a government database, with a photograph, and a location had been given.
She was in Brockton bay by the next processor cycle. "Colin," she said into Armsmaster's ear. "You need to take down the bulletin on Regent."
He blinked in the confines of his helmet. "Dragon? What—why?"
"I just cross-referenced him with our other databases," Dragon said quickly. "Colin—he's Heartbreaker's son. And I don't think he's here with his father's blessing."
Colin's eyes widened. "You think Heartbreaker might come to collect him?"
"Yes! The bulletin needs to go down. I'll apprise the chief director of the situation."
"All right, I'll get it down immediately." He stood up, setting down his welding torch. "Thank you, Dragon."
Had she a face, Dragon would have smiled. "Happy to help."
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