Liada stood as well. "Now this I gotta see," she said. Kellan glanced at Max, but the dwarf just shook his head.

"Not me," he said, "these legs weren't built for dancin'. I'm just fine where I am." He punctuated the gesture by plucking his new mug of ale off the tray the waitress brought over. "I'll stay and guard the drinks."

"Ha!" G-Dogg snorted. "We expect them to still be here when we get back, halfer."

"Then you better not be gone too long, goblin boy," Max retorted, a smile splitting his bearded face.

Kellan laughed and decided to follow G-Dogg's lead. She put her concerns away, took the ork's hand and headed out onto the dance floor. He was right. Why worry? Now was the time to have some fun.

The celebration lasted well into the night. Kellan didn't remember how she got back to the coffin hotel, though she vaguely recalled something about refusing a ride from G-Dogg or Max to make her own way there. In hindsight, it was a marvel she hadn't been jumped between the street corner and the sealed and locked coffin module. Probably, it was late enough (or early enough) that the nocturnal urban predators were holing up for the coming of dawn. Kellan made no effort to get undressed before collapsing onto the temperform padding and falling deeply asleep.

In her dreams, she relived parts of their run, disjointed images passing through her mind: Orion's catlike moves and the flash of his blade in the darkness, Jackie Ozone's voice speaking in her ear, like the omniscient voice of a spirit guide, the thunder and crackling lightning of the storm spirit. She saw the shocked look on the face of the Ares shaman over and over again as she shot her in slow motion, seeing the shaman lying facedown on the deck of the truck, blood seeping out from underneath her as it hadn't in reality, until Kellan was standing in a puddle of crimson.

She relived their escape and arrival at the abandoned garage, then peeking into the crates to discover they contained only cheap electronics.

"What the frag do you think you're doing?" Orion said from the back of the truck.

Kellan turned to face the angry elf ganger just as someone shot Orion in the back: Blam! Blam! Blam! Three quick shots. Orion jerked forward, exit wounds blossoming crimson on the front of his T-shirt, a look of complete shock on his face that transformed his arrogant sneer into almost childlike surprise as he tried to comprehend what had happened. He pitched forward and Kellan ran to the edge of the truck bed to see what was happening.

Mr. Johnson stood there in his nondescript black clothes, dark shades covering his eyes, smoking pistol in his hand. He turned calmly to where Lothan stood nearby and put three shots into the troll mage, who pitched forward like a felled tree. A pool of dark blood spread out on the concrete floor around him. Turning to his left, Mr. Johnson just as calmly shot the Street Deacon before he could draw his guns. The Deacon's dark shades and hat were knocked off as he fell, and he looked surprisingly old and ordinary to Kellan without them, his artificial eyes staring blindly upward in death.

It was like everything was moving in slow motion. The dark-clad man picked off the shadowrunners one by one, leaving them lying dead on the cold concrete floor of the abandoned garage: G-Dogg, Liada and Silver Max, until only Kellan was left. She should have reached for her own gun, or her stun baton, or tried to run and hide, but she couldn't move, couldn't even cry out. She just watched, paralyzed with fear like she'd never known, as Mr. Johnson walked toward her. She heard the electronic whisper of Jackie Ozone in her ear.

"I could have told you this would happen," she said sadly. Then Mr. Johnson raised his gun toward Kellan.

"Nice and tidy," he said, and pulled the trigger.

The bang and flash of the muzzle was the last thing Kellan saw as she jerked awake.

"NO!" she yelled, followed by "Ow!" as her head connected with the low ceiling of the coffin module. She flopped back down, rubbing her head and trying to slow her rapid breathing. Someone in the next module yelled, "Shaddup!" and pounded on the side.

A dream, she thought, breathing deeply, hungrily inhaling the stale, rank air inside the coffin. Just a dream.

Or was it? she asked herself, shifting to a sitting position-tough to manage in the confined space. After all, Kellan thought, she was supposed to be a magician. Could magicians see the future in their dreams? Liada and G-Dogg had acted like the mage's reading fortunes for people with tarot cards was some kind of scam, but maybe some magicians really could foresee things. And Liada had said that her dreams might have meaning now that her Talent was awakened.

Her fingers rubbed the cool jade of the amulet. What about her artifact? Even Lothan didn't know exactly what the amulet was except for the fact that it was magical in some way. Maybe it had influenced her dreams.

Or maybe it was just a fraggin' dream, Kellan thought with a sigh. A dream brought on by worrying too much and celebrating with a few too many drinks. It could be as simple as that-nothing more than her subconscious working overtime after her first shadowrun with new partners in a new city. Maybe it was nothing more than that.

"But I can't take that chance," Kellan muttered quietly. If there was even a possibility that there was something important surfacing in her dream, she had to check it out. Despite G-Dogg's advice to just forget about it, she couldn't put her questions aside so easily. She realized now that she had never even considered that the runs in KC might have been more complex than what she'd seen on the surface. She'd been naive; or maybe her team never graduated from the small stuff.

She settled back onto the padding with a sigh. I've got to get the frag out of this place. But her first priority was going to be a little digging about the man Orion called Brickman. She wanted to find out why he was willing to pay to have something hijacked that he didn't want. And she wanted to know why the elf ganger had been along for the ride.

So resolved, Kellan managed to fall back to sleep. Her dreams, if any, troubled her no more that night.

After getting a steaming soykaf latte and a doughnut from the Stuffer Shack on the corner, Kellan settled herself in her sleep coffin, sitting cross-legged on the temperfoam padding, her hair brushing against the ceiling. She took her well-used Fuchi dataBook out of her bag. The computer had outlasted the company that made it by a few years, and though it was nowhere close to top-of-the-line, it would do until Kellan had a chance to get something better. She'd cut her teeth on the dataBook and the shape of its keyboard was familiar to her fingers. She plugged the small computer into the power and data ports in the coffin, slotting her credstick to start the flow of energy and information. The flatscreen on the wall showed the credit slowly ticking off. Rolling out the dataBook's flatscreen, she booted the computer and settled down to surf the Matrix. The trouble with having access to a tremendous amount information was that there was a tremendous amount of information, most of it completely useless. The Matrix was like an ocean of data, wider and deeper than any physical sea. It took a measure of skill, time and patience to sift through the waves of data to find exactly what you were looking for.

Like every other kid who went to school, Kellan had learned about the Internet, the precursor to the Matrix. It had consisted of a mismatched network of slow computers linked by antiquated voice communication systems. The computers required special adaptors just to send data over copper wiring never intended for such use. It was crude, slow and, from the sound of things, not all that useful.