The Beam: Season Three (77 page)

Micah again took her, this time by the wrist. She shook him away then slapped the workman hard across the face.
 

“Natasha!”
 

Instead of turning to Micah, she hit the man again. And again. His hands came up. Off the man he was trying to pin. His weapon spun on its trigger guard, swinging on his index finger like a kid on a swing. Natasha hit him again and snatched the small gun. She had no idea what it did since her head had been turned when it had been fired the first time. But she knew the basic pieces, and that at point-blank, just about anything was deadly.
 

“Natasha, don’t — ”
Micah shouted, lunging, his legs tangling on Isaac’s body, his waving arms meeting the workmen’s rather than hers. He gave Natasha plenty of time to shove the tiny firearm into a soft spot under the armor across the chest of her husband’s murderer. And to pull the trigger.
 

The report was small — some sort of nano-weapon, probably, driven more by flying bots than powder. But the effect was big. Natasha felt her bare neck and shoulders splattered with something warm as she blinked against incoming gore. Then the big bag of meat sagged to the ground. She let it go, finding a large dent in a Plasteel-reinforced wall behind, its cavity painted red.
 

She dropped the weapon.
 

“We have to take him with us,” Natasha said, looking down.
 

“It’s done. Let’s go.”
 

“We have to take him!”
She pushed away from Micah and became a storm of fists and feet, punching and kicking her stupid brother-in-law everywhere she could reach. Her stupid brother-in-law who’d pulled Isaac into this, who’d dragged him where he was never supposed to be. This was an Enterprise event; this was an Enterprise man’s home; Isaac had wanted to leave; he’d wanted to flee with Natasha and never come here, never have had to save her for real, never have needed to prove, now that it was too late, that he’d always —
 

Natasha’s head rocked as Micah struck her, hard.
 

She was still dimly aware when she tipped against his shoulder then mostly blacked out by the time he lifted her feet from the floor.
 

And after that, for long enough, she was gone and knew nothing.

Chapter Twelve

The overhead lights seemed too bright, with torture inside him. The worst of the white-hot pain bled across his chest, but his arms were on fire, too.
 

Nicolai blinked from his position on the floor. There was something going on across the room. Instinct told him to keep his movements small, so he rolled his head only slightly — just enough to see the scuffed shoes of a man near the doorway, wearing blue jeans with something crusted in a streak down one leg — maybe dried blood, maybe dirt. Scrolling up, Nicolai could see his gray hair, in pigtails. He was wearing a rainbow-colored headband, of all things. Like an Organa. Then Nicolai remembered: that was the man who’d shot him.

He still was threatening two or three people — Kate and Kai, who’d backed into a corner, plus Sam Dial, a bit down the hallway — with what had to be a weapon. Nicolai couldn’t tell for sure; the man’s back was turned.
 

There was a girl in the corner whom the gunman almost didn’t seem to have noticed, in her late teens or early twenties. Unlike Kate, Kai, and Sam, the girl didn’t look afraid at all. As Nicolai watched her from his back, head tipped just enough to look around, the girl came slowly to her knees and crawled toward him like a child.
 

“So you’re him,” she said softly.

Nicolai tried to reply but couldn’t. He had to be dead. She had to be an angel because she’d crawled directly through a chair on her way to him. And he’d been shot full in the chest by two weapons that felt like they must have unloaded the force of a jackhammer. He could still see Sam, his hands raised in surrender. Sam certainly seemed to think the gray-haired man’s weapon was worth fearing.
 

“Can’t you talk?” the girl whispered.

Nicolai rolled his eyes toward the door. Maybe he
shouldn’t
talk even if he could. This looked like a standoff in progress — one he’d recently been part of. Although maybe it didn’t matter. Everyone at the door was shouting. They wouldn’t hear these whispers anyway.

Nicolai tried to move his mouth, but no words came. He had no breath. So he raised his neck and looked down at his chest, sure that he’d see a gaping hole. His chest didn’t disappoint. His jacket and dress shirt were both shredded enough that neither qualified as a garment. Beneath that was only blood, and what looked like scraps of skin.
 

“I guess it wasn’t done with you,” the girl whispered, following Nicolai’s eyes. Except that where Nicolai saw ruin, she seemed to see hope. As if his chest hadn’t been…
 

Well, it
hadn’t
been scooped out, which was where that thought had been going. It hurt like hell and was a mess of blood and flesh, but his chest still seemed to be there. No hole at all.
 

Nicolai touched his abdomen. Instead of encountering familiar skin, Nicolai’s fingers slid across something smooth and hard. Almost as if someone had installed a new enhancement without his knowledge. Or as if it had grown there.
 

“What wasn’t done with me?” he managed to ask.

The girl smiled. “The Beam.”
 

Nicolai’s fingers were still trailing over his chest. He wiped away the scraps of skin and clothing, starting to see the thing there for what it was: a thin, flexible, apparently impenetrable suit of armor. Only instead of wearing this body armor under his shirt, Nicolai had been wearing it under his skin.
 

“Hurts.”
 

The girl nodded. But as the seconds ticked by, it seemed to be hurting less. If he wiped away the blood, he could see the armor’s strange gray color replaced by a blushing peach. It must be nanobots at work — far better and faster ones than Nicolai ever remembered having injected.
 

“I don’t remember much,” the girl said, still kneeling over him. “But I know it plays favorites.”

“What?”
 

This time she rolled her eyes a little and repeated, “The Beam.”
 

Nicolai tried to slow his breathing. Tried to slow his pounding heart — which, thanks to the strange new armor, was quite unharmed. He thought of the slowly diminishing pain. He thought of how he should try to help the others, if he could figure out how to move again. He thought for some reason of Europe, of his trip through the Chunnel, of the way his scrubbers had somehow come back to life after they should have been long dead. How his Doodad had never run dry despite its ancient battery. How the Doodad, according to Micah Ryan, had called satellites and left a footprint for others to follow. How that old gyro car had somehow started outside Amsterdam when it had no business doing so. How time after time, despite impossible odds, Nicolai had always miraculously managed to stay alive, as if he’d had a guardian angel. Or maybe a trillion of them.
 

He came to his elbows. In the doorway, Sam Dial was shouting at the gray-haired man, pointing past Nicolai’s position and toward Craig Braemon’s desk. Sam sounded panicked — but not, interestingly, panicked by the weapon that Nicolai had to assume was leveled at his chest. And it wasn’t usual Sam panic, either. He sounded scared but coherent. Not Beamsick at all.
 

In the corner, Kai had turned to look at Nicolai. Her eyes were wide. She flicked them away, but Kate had already seen. Kate’s disbelieving expression was less discreet.
 

As Nicolai sat up farther, his torso ran into the girl’s swinging blonde hair and went right through it. He had to move quickly. Right now, the assailant was focusing on Sam. He was alone; the other people who’d stormed the party must have fled, possibly back through their entry hole. Nicolai was behind the gunman — and based on Kate’s expression, he was probably supposed to be dead.
 

He could do this. He could do
something
.
 

“You have to stop the upload!”
Sam was shouting, still pointing. “Shoot me; I don’t give a shit! Just stop it first!”
 

The man wasn’t listening. He took a step, saying nothing.
 

“One of you,
do something!”
 

But Kate was still looking directly at Nicolai, who’d made it to his knees then into a hesitant squat. His skin must be knitting; most of the pain had gone, leaving only his concussive shortness of breath. Sam saw Kate’s gaze and looked right at Nicolai. And the gray-braided man —

Oh, shit; the man was turning his head.
 

There was nothing to use against him. The weapon Kate had snatched from the wall was nowhere to be seen; it must have turned out as useless as Nicolai figured. Craig Braemon had an otherwise weapon-free office. Nicolai couldn’t even hit him with anything. He didn’t trust his muscles much yet and saw nothing heavy. Nothing he could grab in the two seconds it took for the man to turn around.
 

Sam tried for the man’s back, but the minute he touched the assassin’s skin, he jerked as if electrocuted, then leaped back. The man had come prepared. There simply wasn’t time, without armament, to riddle around his defenses.
 

He was holding two weapons. Both came up — not to Nicolai’s chest this time, but to his head. Nicolai wondered if he’d grown a second skull, too. Not that it mattered. Once the man fired, he’d no longer have a face.
 

“York,” he said.
 

“My name is Nicolai Costa.” He raised his hands, palms forward, at his shoulders.

But the man wasn’t interested in talking, or in giving anyone time for improv or debate. Both index fingers depressed triggers.

But this time, nothing happened.

The assassin looked at the weapons. He shook them then tried again. Again, both failed to fire. Finally, he tossed them aside and came forward with his hands up, fingers curled, some sort of enhancement whirring beneath his skin.
 

From Nicolai’s side, Kai gasped. At almost the same time, he heard a sharp metallic sound, like that of a sword being rapidly drawn from a scabbard.
 

Nicolai pulled his attention from the advancing man for long enough to turn his head. The old man did the same. And they both found themselves staring as a floating metal ball — one that had just now grown spikes — moved closer.
 

“What the fuck is that thing, Nicolai?” Kate said, her voice shaky.
 

Nicolai knew. It was a piece of his father’s technology that he’d last seen during the Fall, when he’d loosed his old home’s security system against the Rake Squad. An oldie but a goodie — antiquated, but plenty effective. And this time, he hadn’t even needed to summon it.
 

Although based on what the girl had said, Nicolai sort of suspected he had.
 

The old man, however, didn’t seem to know what the spiky ball was.
 

Then he found out.

Chapter Thirteen

“Leo.”
 

Leo blinked. He could feel his heart becoming sluggish. He could feel the blood leaking from his wound. There had just been the one hard strike, and to Leo it had felt like running into a countertop, back home, that he hadn’t noticed until it was too late. He remembered seeing the thing that had killed him, but he didn’t know why it had come at him, or how he was here.
 

He’d been with Leah and Dominic. He’d headed off with the Organas. Then he’d felt an overwhelmingly powerful notion about how to circumvent the police roadblocks. At the time, it had seemed like an excellent idea. There may have been fighting. And now he was about to die because he’d made a mistake, or someone had made one for him.
 

Leo rolled his head. It was all he could do. His skull felt like it must have a knife inside it. But seeing the girl above with her blonde hair hanging between her face and his, like a tunnel of light connecting them, made Leo feel a little better. The girl was familiar even though he’d never seen her before. And then he seemed to remember, even though the answer that came to his lips wasn’t quite right for a dozen reasons — the wrongness of her appearance being only the most obvious among them.

“SerenityBlue?” he said.

She shook her head, but the small smile didn’t leave her face. “My name is Violet James.”

Leo tried raising a hand to touch her. There was no question in his mind; she
was
SerenityBlue. She didn’t
look
like Serenity (which, to Leo’s eyes, meant
like Leah
, too), but this was her, all right.
 

But Leo couldn’t touch the girl. His hand went right through her face.
 

“You’re not here.”
 

“Maybe
you’re
not here,” she said.
 

“Am I dying?”
 

“I think so, yes.”