The Beam: Season Three (76 page)

She turned to find Nicolai setting up the rinky-dink hotspot and tapping the canvas screen. He made a small eyebrows-up expression showing surprise then turned to look at Kai from behind his pointless round glasses.
 

“Let me guess,” she said. “York got you in after all.”
 

Nicolai nodded slowly. “Seems so,” he said, his voice thick with wonder.
 

Kai was about to answer — maybe start the peacemaking process — when a thin blonde girl in a blue gown blinked into existence near the room’s doorway. She didn’t enter or slowly materialize. It was like a jump cut in an old film: one moment she wasn’t there, and the next she was.
 

“Hold your breath,” she said in a soft voice. “It will get worse before it gets better.”

Beside the woman, there was a tremendous booming as the concealed door turned to splinters and shrapnel.

Chapter Ten

The doors to Craig Braemon’s apartment must have opened less than a minute before Sam arrived because just as he watched streetlights along the block blink on and off and Beam screens go dark, he was struck with a wave of well-dressed people who made him totter then fall.
 

Once the rush of people had passed, Sam stood from the street and brushed himself off. Amazingly, he appeared to be unstomped, unmauled, unflattened. He’d been kicked once, but the crowd had been remarkably agile. They were focused only on going the opposite direction as Sam meant to go, and it was as if they’d carefully avoided him even in their panic. Trampling Sam would unseat them, and if they fell, they’d die.
 

Or so they’d seemed to think. With the crowd rushing away behind him, Sam found the street curiously quiet. Motors and fans that should be running were intermittently silent. Lights continued to blink. Nobody was pursuing the people who’d seemed so chased. It was just Sam and a street and, ahead, the mouth of the place he’d been running so hard to reach.
 

The thought made him surge on despite the danger. Those partygoers had definitely come from the Respero fundraiser, clearly terrified. Many had been splashed with blood, and all looked disheveled, awash with animal panic. Something had to be waiting ahead. But Sam saw nothing.
 

He was running again in seconds, trying to make himself ignore the bodies and injured people littering the doorway. Beyond was a large room that looked like a slaughterhouse. Sam saw gore everywhere, tattered clothing, spilled tables that might once have held expensive hors d’oeuvres and champagne. The place held a strange silent echo, as if it missed the recent departure of so many warm bodies.
 

Sam focused on his pounding feet. He leaped over the dead, many of them twisted into contortions, their features unrecognizable. He dodged what looked like body parts.
 

Only after taking several big strides did Sam finally stop.
 

Someone had done this. So where were they?
 

With his feet stilled, he stopped to listen. His errand’s urgency pounded in rhythm with his overworked heart. He tried to quell his heaving breath, but doing so made him lightheaded. He pulled up his shirt and breathed into the fabric to muffle his exhales, but still he couldn’t hear much, if anything.
 

There’d been a crack, like a lead-slinger gunshot from an old movie, as he’d entered. Now, from that direction, he could hear a commotion. But it was a small ruckus, indicative of only a few rather than the dozens of mechanized assailants he’d seemed to see on the Beam feed.
 

So where were the rest?

Had the security system kicked on? There must be one. It would be hard to tell registered partygoers from those who appeared as intruders, especially if the cops hadn’t been paying attention. From what Sam had seen on the feed on the way over, the cops had been among the first to go. Sam had spotted a few on the feed and another few dead in the big room — unequipped, apparently, to take down the cyborg things that had seemed to come up from the floor itself. If there was still human security in the area, Sam couldn’t see it. And house security? Maybe the safeties had been set low, allowing human protection to take up the slack.
 

But if The Beam was on the fritz (and, judging by Sam’s connection, it seemed to be), maybe security was as worthless as the locks that were supposed to be holding the doors closed.
 

Maybe the cops had run out.
 

Maybe the cyborgs who’d done this had run out, too.
 

Down the right-side hallway, toward the earlier gunshot, Sam heard someone screaming. He was about to head in that direction when a tremendous smashing boomed from the left. An invisible fishhook snagged his mind and pulled him toward it. Sam heard a familiar but not entirely welcome voice whisper into his inner ears:
 

He’s that way.
 

The voice seemed to be Integer7’s, talking to Sam through the flickering Beam rather than the handheld where someone kept trying to ping him. The one who’d humiliated Shadow at the Prime Statements, proving just how thin Sam Dial’s disguise truly was by appearing over and over — and who, if Sam had to guess, had something to do with all of this. That’s what the woman had implied, too, now that he thought about it.
 

From the direction of the booming noise, Sam heard voices: at least one woman’s and at least one man’s.
 

He’s that way. You have to warn him.
 

Warn him against what? Sam still wasn’t sure. If “he,” on Integer7’s virtual lips, still referred to Nicolai Costa, it was hard to imagine anything that Sam could warn him about at this point that could make any difference. There must still be warriors in the house. If Nicolai was facing them, he didn’t need warning.

Except that’s not what Sam had to warn Nicolai about.

And come to think of it, Sam wasn’t entirely sure
what
he needed to warn Nicolai about.
 

Except that it involved lies.
 

And deception.
 

And someone who’d told Nicolai to do something he shouldn’t do because it wouldn’t accomplish what Nicolai had been told and would instead…would instead…
 

But Sam had no idea what it would do instead. He’d lived through most of a day inside a hole, so it was possible he’d made headway a dozen times then been reset and forced to forget it all. It was possible the woman he’d seen inside had sneaked her way in repeatedly and told Sam what he was facing before he’d erased it.
 

…would instead…
 

He almost seemed to know. Something bad. Something Sam had to prevent, and that would happen if he
didn’t
stop it.
 

Sam moved forward, slowly. He could hear chatter. There were more than two people. Several men. Several women. One of the men sounded like Costa. Of that much, Sam felt certain.
 

“Just let me…” Sam said quietly, trying words on for size. It felt like he was speaking someone else’s words, as if he’d heard them without really noticing them. Or sensed them.
 

…would instead…
 

What would happen if Sam wasn’t there to stop it? The answer was close, a maddening itch. He had to know. He must, deep down. Because the woman he’d met
had
known, and they’d shared the hole for a while. The hole was mental, so their co-presence meant their minds must have blended. He and the woman had shared some of the same delusion. So he had to know, even if he didn’t know
what
he knew.
 

Just let me…
 

…would instead…
 

This is important. Just let me finish the…
 

…would instead…unlock something?

…just let me finish the upload.
 

Integer7, if it
was
Integer7, speaking to Sam through The Beam, through the hole, through the rip the microfragment may or may not have left inside Sam as he recovered.

The image of a key in a lock. A door swinging open.
 

The key was supposed to open a door. But now Sam could see it: it unlocked more than just the door it was meant to.
 

Demons. Ghosts.
Sam’s nightmare imagery, interpreting real-life horrors.
 

His paralysis broke. Sam ran forward and was about to shout when the tableau stopped him dead in his tracks.
 

In the room ahead, the door blown asunder, Sam saw an armed man with two gray pigtails and a bandana.
 

He saw Nicolai Costa, with his arms raised in front of the weapon.
 

A tall woman and a short one.
 

And the girl. The girl Sam had last seen inside his mind.
 

“Just let me finish the upload,” Nicolai said to the man with the guns, his hands up and pacifying. “You’ll see.
I’m not who you think I am.”
 

Sam understood.

His handheld, in his pocket, vibrated. It was silenced, but the vibration was audible to the man with the guns, who turned his head toward the new arrival.
 

Nicolai made to reach for the man’s weapons, but he was too far away.
 

Both weapons discharged as the old man’s head turned. There was no kick.
 

The tremendous blast struck Nicolai Costa in the chest.

“Stop the upload,” Sam stammered at the two women, at the girl from his hallucination. “Break the connection.
Hurry.”
 

The gray-haired man turned toward Sam.
 

And charged.
 

Chapter Eleven

The first blast from the huge apartment’s other end almost broke Natasha’s hypnosis. The second broke it more. This time, she could make sense of a few of the distant shouts. But for some reason, the closer cries were harder to understand. Everything was fragments of sight and sound.
 

I’m in the Viazo. I’m on The Beam. None of this is real.

And it shouldn’t be. None of it should be. Things like this didn’t happen in real life…except she knew that was wrong because things like this seemed to happen to Natasha Ryan a lot lately. When she’d begun singing, she’d done it to survive.
Via Persephone
had started her star rising, and by the time she’d released its sequel, she was supposed to be untouchable. Back then, there had barely been a middle class. After the Fall, there’d been only rich and poor. Until Crossbrace, the chasm had been enormous. Natasha had caught the shirttail of
rich
and left
poor
behind, determined never to return. Life was supposed to be champagne and fancy gowns from then on.
 

She’d had both. But she’d also had the Aphora riot. The Sap riot, from which Isaac had saved her even though he’d got her into it in the first place. And now he’d saved her again.
 

“Natasha. We have to go.”
 

Natasha shook him off. It didn’t matter that the first time had been a lie. This time, it wasn’t. Maybe Isaac
had
staged the riot. She’d orchestrated plenty of things herself. She’d cast her stones, and he’d cast his. They’d been through a lot. It didn’t change this moment. Except that this moment changed everything.
 

“Natasha.”

Gentle. His voice was soft, almost patronizing. The way you talk to a crazy person. Above her, the two workmen still had the gunman pinned. One of them had hit him, but it hadn’t seemed to faze the half-metal man. So the workman with the gun had shot him instead. That had slowed him a little. Enough to pin him anyway, and it was still undecided if the shooter would be shot again.
 

“Go,” the first workman said. “We’ll hold him.”
 

“Don’t hold him,” Natasha said.

“I’m not letting him go. Don’t worry.” The man held a gun on the big, half-machine assailant. He looked like a parody of 2040s enhancement. It was as if someone had pulled iron plates from a junkyard and used them to build this man armor and a weapon. He was wearing a faceplate, but the thing had been knocked aside when the second workman had elbowed him in the face. The big armored man seemed confused now that his processor had taken a shot, but he could stir at any moment. And in that moment, they both needed to go.
 

“Natasha.”
 

“I said don’t hold him.”
 

“Natasha. We have to go. He’s…” Micah gave an almost-regretful sigh, as if he weren’t a hypocrite. “He’s gone.”
 

Natasha came to her feet. Her heels were still on below her red-stained lower legs, and she felt steady in them. Because this wasn’t real. Isaac wasn’t dead. Not yet he wasn’t.
 

“Let him go,” she said to the workman pinning the big man’s arm.