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Across the prison, inmates step into open corridors like dreamers waking in the wrong place. Some blink and freeze, others move instantly, purpose burning in their eyes. I recognize faces: Stitch, the laundry twins, even a few of the warped sub-block mutants — all calculating, all looking for the nearest threat or the nearest way out.

The sound builds slowly at first — distant shouts, boots slapping tile — then swells into a deafening roar. Fists hammer against steel, chains clatter, voices rise in a hundred languages at once. Somewhere, a real siren wails — not a drill, not a contained alert — and the echo bounces through the walls until the whole building feels alive with it.

On the monitors, chaos blooms. A guard in the main yard tries to stand his ground and is swallowed by the rush. Another drops his weapon and bolts. The camera feed shakes as someone slams into it.

Kang leans back, watching his work unfold with that same unblinking focus. “Should be enough,” he says. “We’ve got maybe ten minutes before containment. Maybe less.”

His tone is almost casual, but the way his hand hovers near his weapon says otherwise.

I keep my eyes on the monitors, but part of me is watching him — the man who can shoot, snap a neck, or open a thousand cells without a flinch. He kills like it costs him nothing. And somehow, instead of pulling away, I find myself moving closer.

I stood at the bank of monitors, hands braced against the edge of the console, watching the world collapse in a twelve-channel symphony of violence. Everywhere I looked, chaos metastasized: inmates swarming the halls, guards firing into crowds with less discipline and more desperation, bodies careening in and out of frame with every flicker of the surveillance feed. The air in the control room was thick with the armpit heat of machines run too hard for too long; every vented exhalation stank of recycled panic.

It was almost beautiful, in a way that made my skin crawl.

I could feel Kang behind me, one shoulder pressed to the wall, the other hand hovering at the small of his back like he was waiting for a sidearm that wasn’t there. He watched the screens, too, but not the way I did. His eyes darted from face to face, searching for pattern, for threat, for anything that looked like it could be predicted. I imagined he was already three moves ahead, mapping how long it would take the Authority to retake the blocks, how fast the mutiny would burn itself out.

He didn’t say a word.

I punched up the feed for the D block yard, tracking the surge of grey and blue as the cell doors released. The guards had dug in around the security checkpoint, stacked riot shields three high, and were lobbing gas canisters into the crowd with the ugly precision of men who’d done this before. The prisoners broke on the line, splintered, then regrouped, fanning out to flank the perimeter. It was as much a massacre as a mutiny.

My stomach pitched. My hands slipped from the console, suddenly damp, a thin sheen of sweat coating my palms. The electric heat of the machines felt too close, like the room was shrinking around me.

“This is what I agreed to?” My voice cracked. “You didn’t say it would be a slaughter.”

Kang didn’t even blink. “I didn’t say it would be clean either.”

The matter-of-fact tone made my stomach twist tighter. “I thought we were giving them a chance, not shoving them into open fire. Half of them don’t know how to fight, let alone take a rifle off a guard. You’ve just—” I swallowed hard. “We’ve just sent them into a meat grinder.”

His jaw tightened, the scar along his chin bleaching pale. “If Petrov kept them, most would be dead in a week. You know how the culling cycles work. This way, at least they die trying.”

“That’s not freedom,” I said, my voice low and raw. “It’s a death sentence dressed up as mercy.”

On the monitors, the prisoners made another run at the checkpoint. This time, they managed to rip a shield out of the line, turning the Authority’s own defense back on them. Two guards went down in a mess of boots and swinging fists, their rifles disappearing into the crush of bodies. The crowd pulled back, regrouped, then surged again. The corridor started to fill with smoke, bodies blurring in the haze, movement stuttering in slow motion under the strobe of the emergency lights.

My hands went cold, knuckles bone-white against the console.

“You think they’re going to last more than ten minutes out there?” I hissed.

Kang grunted, low. “Maybe not. Maybe that’s enough.”

The words caught in my throat. I slammed my fist onto the edge of the desk, the noise sharp and hollow. “You’re such a bastard,” I said. “You pretend not to care, but you’re just too fucking scared to try something that might actually work.”

He straightened, the Authority bearing snapping back into place. “You have a better idea?”

“I have lots of better ideas, all of which require you not playing stoic chess master while people get their skulls caved in for your amusement.”

He crossed his arms, eyes narrow. “Go on, then. Enlighten me.”

I scanned the console again, this time looking for anything that wasn’t a dead end. The control panel was Authority-standard, security protocol so old it was practically fossilized, but the OS underneath was something I’d seen before. Hybridized, modular, but with an ugly flaw in the patchwork code.

“Automated defense,” I muttered.

“What?”

I jabbed at the monitor. “The base is lined with automated turrets, right? Perimeter defense, corridor suppression, you name it. The guards use wristbands to ID as friendlies, but the system has to be able to tell uniforms from prisoners in real-time or it’s useless in a riot.”

Kang nodded. “So?”