The Beam: Season Three (74 page)

For most of Leah’s life, she’d been both a conscientious observer and an action taker. That, she’d always thought with a small amount of pride, was what had differentiated her from the other Organas.
They
talked about peace and simplicity and fighting The Man. But Leah, often with Leo’s help,
actually
fought. She’d found Null, then become a force within it — not as an anonymous drone like the rest, but as someone with a name and an online face. She’d gone to school to hone her hacker’s tools. While the other Organas discussed The Beam’s evils,
Leah
had got herself in front of a pair of Quark PD clerics then dropped nanobots and their keyhole AI behind the firewall.
She’d
used those nanobots to pop the other, more-content-to-braid-flowers-and-bitch-than-do-anything Organas out of NPS custody. Leah had taken it upon herself to dig deep, to snoop, and to eventually uncover the cabal’s transcript, pointing to some sort of bizarre assassination plot against…against
Crumb
, of all people.
 

If Leah had been like all the others, she’d have done dust, worn rainbow clothing, and maybe participated in an occasional sing-along. But she wasn’t, and never had been.
 

And yet right now, Leah had to admit there was nothing she could do.
 

The sensation was horrible. It was like being on the back of a screetbike driven by a maniac. What she saw on the small console screen made Leah’s heart skip beats, and yet her hands were tied. Someone else was driving this catastrophe, and she could do nothing as they headed toward the cliff — or into a growing fireball.
 

Leah paced the hotel room Leo kept in the city, her feet heedlessly kicking her small pile of belongings as she passed. She’d been here over a week and hadn’t spread much beyond her small circle around the couch. It was a decent metaphor for Leah in life: she’d always left a tiny footprint.
 

She picked up her handheld then reopened the Undercover app even though she already knew what she’d see. It was still all fragments. All noise. All chaos, as if the app wasn’t looking at The Beam at all but was instead facing a raw dump. It didn’t look like that on the surface; she could watch the canvas’s console and see that much. But the fragmentation made the entire sector feel like thin ice. One misstep, and anything could happen.
 

And none of it made sense.
 

She tried to ping Shadow. The ping returned an echo — an automated response proving that Shadow, wherever he was, had received it. After Dominic’s paranoia about Shadow, Leah had crawled through Undercover’s belly (before the app had begun showing nothing but garbage) and applied a temporary geotag. Shadow was here, in DZ, not far away, and on the move.
 

Shadow — whoever he was in life — had been in a Starbucks parlor for hours. Now he was rapidly moving toward the Braemon event, refusing to answer her ping.
 

When that made Leah feel an uncomfortable itch, she’d called Dominic. But the captain was nowhere to be found, so either The Beam obscured policemen’s locations beyond Leah’s abilities to find them or he was…well,
dead
. But she couldn’t hear or see any evidence of Dominic communicating with the event, so the idea of him being somehow
hidden
didn’t quite square. Wasn’t he supposed to be in charge of this whole thing? Wasn’t he the interim police commissioner? If so, why wasn’t he paying attention?
 

So Leah had called Leo. No dice there. Leo wasn’t visible, probably because Leah no longer knew what his Beam signature looked like now that he was carrying all that deactivated Beam-facing hardware. She’d deactivated most of it, but the network components were still up, and even the dead parts in the Organas were sort of noisy.
 

But Leah saw no Leo. No amorphous new collective stumbling through the city.
 

Where were the Organas?

Where was Leo?
 

Why was Shadow hauling ass toward the fundraiser? What business could he possibly have there?

And where the hell was Dom?

Feeling ridiculous — like a control freak robbed of her control, maybe — Leah had even tried to ping SerenityBlue. When Serenity hadn’t answered, Leah had gone snooping. But what she’d been able to see of Serenity had been somehow different. She’d
felt
different. And then Serenity had more or less vanished, too.
 

Leah paced, faster and faster. She picked up her handheld and sent Shadow a Diggle, tagged
Urgent
. Nothing came back, and on Leah’s display, the dot showing Shadow’s disintegrating tracer continued to move.
 

She should dose with her tiny remaining amount of Lunis. She should dive deep then try to make sense of the nonsensical mess she was seeing at the node that seemed to be forming in the core network. But there wasn’t time, and no way she’d be able to relax fully enough to let the drug do its meditative work.
 

Leah sat. Went to a wireframe. She overlaid her platform-stripping app and looked beneath the Beam-level language, under the architecture, down deeper than any programmer who valued her efficiency would bother to go. Leah zoomed in and out, removing and re-placing the stripping filter.

It almost looked like SerenityBlue was part of this. Almost, but not quite.
 

There was a halo around it all. Fragmentary code that carried many of the same quirks — either a programmer’s peculiar way of commenting his code or something the AI wanted to center on the same key identifier, like a Beam ID.
 

Bigger shards of something broken. To Leah, who still had some dust in her blood, these looked like pieces of a broken vase that someone was intent on trying to reassemble.
 

Leah couldn’t see the contents of what she assumed was Craig Braemon’s canvas, but she’d learned enough tricks to peek into the cycling buffers and see that one of them was vastly overloaded. There was an enormous amount of data in Braemon’s system, doing nothing but checking its own integrity, over and over again.
 

And there was something else, too. A file fragment that had been dragged away and was being drawn forward like driftwood toward a waterfall’s edge. A short primer sequence that someone seemed to have forgotten, sequestered in a different system. Leah had been watching that last one since she’d seen someone, somewhere, beginning to pick its lock — a hacker out there who wanted that code and was scratching at scabs, trying to free it.

Leah sat. Stood. Watched. Fretted.
 

She switched to Underbelly to watch the local Beam node shatter below the surface.
 

She looked at the map, at Shadow running toward the event he had no business attending. The event that…
 

“Oh,
shit.”

Leah had been looking at everything but the obvious. The rest of the world only had one way to observe what Shadow was hightailing for, and Leah, whose nose had been buried in code, hadn’t thought to check.
 

She dragged open a new screen and tuned to Beam Headlines. The top five spots were all about the Respero fundraiser in DZ’s heart. Leah picked the top one — a video stream — then found herself watching a from-the-ground view of the event, shot by a unit that someone had dropped.
 

Leah saw the chaos and then something else.
 

Finally, she understood.

Chapter Seven

Violet watched the stage wall flash with the words:
 

Incoming call from:

JUST ANSWER NOW!!!

But this wasn’t her house, so whoever was calling, it wasn’t for her. Answering would be rude. And besides, Violet had other things to worry about.
 

The slamshots, fireballs, flashing blades, and general melee in front of her, for starters.

Her mother being dead, for another.
 

But as much as Violet knew how badly those things should upset her, she’d only had a few seconds of screaming terror before the moment had passed. Because this wasn’t real. If Mom was gone, she’d feel sad. But this was all too odd to be reality.
 

For one, no one in the chaotic room seemed to be able to touch her. Violet had been shot a few times, and a few Samaritans had tried to drag her off the stage after the well-dressed people had run away in a panic. But everything went right through her, as if she were a ghost.

And second, Violet was quite sure that she, herself, was dead. That had taken some getting used to, but part of her mind seemed elevated, as if she was looking down from below. That part of Violet (a part she didn’t remember from before her death; it seemed rather angelic) viewed things like Mom’s death as part of the natural cycle. It also didn’t have a problem with Violet being dead because that part of her had figured it out a long time ago, and made peace.
 

Third, she really did seem to be in two places at once. The sensation was like a dream she couldn’t shake off — but instead of falling apart in her mind like a normal dream, this one grew stronger.
 

She was herself, as she’d always been before she’d been wheeled into her Respero chamber and forced to say her final goodbyes. But she was someone else, too. Someone who had her own memories that Violet knew she (as Violet, anyway) had never experienced.
 

There was a filthy man with a beard who’d been somehow very important.
 

There were children. Children that the other part of Violet thought of as
Violet’s
children, even though she had none and was barely old enough to marry.

Strangest of all, there was the man across the room intent on killing many people. Normally, Violet didn’t like people who killed others. But she liked this man. Somehow, in a way that went deep — below the killer, perhaps.

Violet stood. Her feet obeyed the wooden stage, as if she were actually walking on it. She went where others had fled, behind the curtain and down a set of two steps, her feet obeying the steps as well. She couldn’t feel anything, but that was okay. Her higher part said it was okay, normal, this was how it would be from now on. Integrated and split, but somehow still just a part of the natural order.
 

That part of Violet could also sense someone beside her, even though she was alone with only the sounds of chaos for company. It was a feeling like being squeezed between two overweight passengers on a mag train.

“Who’s there?” Violet’s voice, to her own ears, sounded present. But with nobody to hear, she couldn’t know if she’d made a sound.
 

Keep moving,
a voice inside seemed to whisper.

Violet came out from behind the curtain, now moving into struggle and bloodshed, passing through all of it like a specter, looking for the deadly man with the gray braids.

Chapter Eight

Micah finally shook Natasha away when he realized he was essentially leading a conga line: Micah in the lead, Natasha holding his hand, and Isaac holding Natasha’s other hand. Jameson Gray had vanished. Good. A three-person conga line in the middle of a massacre was plenty, and Micah still wasn’t sure Jameson hadn’t caused all of this in some way, anyhow.

Natasha looked at Micah after he pulled his hand from hers, and Micah saw her eyes soften into fear. The glance kept him from shouting at her, even though she was Jameson’s buddy. Maybe she’d been part of it, too.
 

“It’s blocked,” Isaac said from behind.
 

“I know it’s blocked,” Micah snapped.
 

“What do we do?”
 

“I don’t know, Isaac. Maybe you should fucking think for yourself for a change.”
 

Micah didn’t look back, not trusting himself to hold back a brimming torrent of abuse if he met his brother’s eyes. Isaac and Natasha had both become sheep the second the crisis had erupted. Oh, both had had plenty to say about the way Micah always played big in their day-to-day, but now that lives were on the line, they
wanted
Micah to lead them. That line about being your brother’s keeper? Oh yes, Micah knew it well. He was keeper of both his idiot brother and his bitch of a sister-in-law. Two corpses shackled to his ankles, unable to move unless Micah dragged them.
 

Instead of looking back at Isaac, Micah focused on the hallway gridlock ahead. He saw only tuxedos and gowns jammed behind what must be a locked door, but he could hear stomping coming from the left and right. He pushed his albatrosses back into a short hallway, nudging them out of the way like troublesome cargo, and peeked around the corner.
 

He saw blades. Guns. Blood.
 

Back into the room behind Isaac, at their small group’s rear. The doors here swung on old-fashioned hinges and looked like wood, but in a place like Craig Braemon’s, they’d have Plasteel and carbon mesh cores. If the locks were as offline as the front door seemed to be stuck online, he could always shove furniture against the door.
 

Inside, Micah found their party expanded to five. There were two men in workshirts already in the study, a panel removed from the wall, working as if nothing was amiss. When they didn’t turn toward Micah, Isaac, and Natasha with weapons, Micah decided to ignore them. He closed the door, which seemed to lock — but who could unlock it, Micah had no idea.