The Beam: Season One (53 page)

Strangely, the soldier’s use of the word “lady” bothered Kai more than anything else he'd said during their hover back to the scene of Doc's escape. It was so belittling. He said “lady” the way you’d yell at a crazy bag woman. At a customer in a store who was being an asshole. At an incompetent ditz who couldn’t get her canvas to turn on the lights or make macaroni and cheese.
 

He turned back. Kai swallowed her irritation. She had to figure a way out. So far, there was none. They claimed they could track Doc as if he had a siren mounted on his head — and based on what Kai had seen of Micah’s more covert dealings, she had no reason to doubt that they were telling the truth. There were things Micah had access to — things he seemed to know or be able to do — that defied what Kai thought was possible. Nicolai had told her he’d seen some of the same things from Isaac. But whether the Ryans and their ilk had access to technology that Kai didn’t was immaterial; the point was that she knew they'd find Doc faster than she wanted. Their superior tracking would defeat his inferior efforts to hide. Once they found him, their superior speed and agility would defeat his inferior human flight. They’d hold him using their superior restraints. And then they’d sight her with their superior weapons and bring the ultimatum down to brass tacks: Kai would kill Doc or they’d kill her... and then kill Doc anyway.
 

The situation made Kai furious. She'd never precisely considered Micah a friend, but he’d always been good to her. He’d picked her up off the streets and given her a start when she'd needed it most. He'd taught her most of her subterfuge and cruelty skill set. He’d saved her ass in a few cases where she couldn’t save herself, and just a few hours ago, he'd responded to her beacon and sent two iron men to defeat the Beamers — Beamers who, if she understood right, were more or less on his side. He’d refused all of her advances (the ones she'd intended as returned favors and the ones she'd made because Micah was very handsome and magnetic), insisting that he couldn’t think of her as sexual. But if she was in any way like a daughter to Micah (something he’d said many times before), how could he torture her like this?
 

Kai knew the answer; it just wasn't something she wanted to see. The reason was that Micah always took care of Micah first.
 

What made it worse was that as twisted as it seemed, Kai could almost sympathize with Micah's thinking on the matter of
The Troubling Issue of Thomas Stahl
. Micah (or those who worked with him) had had a compelling reason to detain Doc — apparently something to do with what he'd seen at Xenia. Doc's escape made him a ticking bomb, and Micah, caught between a rock and a hard place, had to know if Kai was ticking, too. Maybe, as repugnant as she found the idea, she'd have to find a way to do it. There might literally be no other way. She’d done Micah’s dirty work plenty of times before, after all — had killed dozens of people on his orders. He’d paid her well, knocked her status right to the top of the Presque Beau. Given what she suspected about the elite tier just above hers, she seemed to be on the cusp of crossing a few final, critical inches. If Micah decided she could be trusted, then she might be able to move up — into this "Beau Monde" she kept hearing in whispers.

If she ended up having to do it, she told herself, it would be nothing personal. A job was a job. Kai was sometimes paid to stop a heartbeat, the same as an engineer might be called to stop an out-of-control machine. It didn’t matter that she knew Doc or that she considered him a friend. When the boss (and, honestly, the closest person Kai had to a father) said to handle someone, you handled them.

Except that Kai didn’t want to “handle” this job at all — no-win situation notwithstanding.

She
did
like Doc. She
did
consider him a friend, as big of an asshole as he could sometimes be. It
was
personal. And what was more, Kai didn’t like the idea of being controlled. She’d always chosen who she fucked. She wasn’t like a taxi with her light on, for hire by any Joe who could manage the fare. And so far, she hadn’t precisely
chosen
her hit jobs (because a body was, in the end, just a body), but she also
had
chosen them in a way. She'd been up for each, and opposed to none. She hadn’t known any of the victims, either in person or by association. They had all been adults, mostly male, shifty enough in bearing that Kai could, the next day, look her pretty self in the mirror and convince herself that they had earned their demise. Kai had never been sicced on anyone too young, ill, pathetic, or helpless, and if she had, she'd have refused because she wasn't a taxi as an assassin, either. She’d never gone after anyone who couldn’t put up a fight. And she'd never gone after a friend.
 

Possibly the worst thing about "the Doc job" was that doing it would make her a tool wielded by someone else.
Someone other than Kai would be deciding what Kai was going to do
. The only decision she could make would be to decide whether or not she would allow that to happen — whether or not she would permit someone else to decide for her.

And once she thought about it in those terms, the answer became obvious.
 

Besides, Doc
was
a friend. He was also a client and a supplier. Kai even admired him — admired how he'd scrapped his way up from the bottom, just as she had. He wasn’t proud of everything in his past, just as Kai wasn't proud of everything in hers. It wasn't healthy to be proud of everything you left behind you in life. Everyone who had ever achieved anything had done so by taking chances... and when omelets were made, eggs got broken. Humans were flawed creatures. Untarnished people made Kai nervous. Unflinching honesty was a dishonest way to live, and there were too many bullshitters, layabouts, and whiners in this world to waste a perfectly good Doc Stahl.
 

But how the hell was she going to get out of it?
Could
she even get out of it?
 

If the men in the so-called Stark suits had working brains (and with Micah at their heels, they should), they wouldn’t give Kai a projectile or immobilizing weapon to use against Doc once they caught up with him. They’d keep their distance, and watch her closely. They would stay with her, two against one. She had a few defenses, but nothing that was of any use against a casing of intelligent metal. She saw no holes to exploit. Maybe she’d get lucky — maybe they’d give her a weapon or stand too close — but she doubted it and refused to count on it. And even if she was somehow able to turn the tables,
should
she? If she managed to flee, she’d make an enemy of Micah, and the same went if she somehow attacked or killed the men in the suits. Kai didn’t want to do that; Micah was useful. And Micah was a powerful enemy to have at your back.
 

She could try and talk to Micah. But of course that wouldn’t work. Micah wasn't good at empathy when it conflicted with his personal interests.
 

She could try to escape. But no, she'd already considered that. She’d be putting her life in danger, surrendering everything she'd achieved. Goodbye to her client base, her apartment, her belongings and money, farewell to her security and her nest egg. Farewell, in fact, to Kai Dreyfus herself. Running from or fighting Micah would mean starting over at best, ending up dead (or back on the Orion) at worst.
 

She leaned into the soldier, trying to peek around him. She could see a Beam tracker displayed on the small screen between the screetbike’s handlebars. Maybe she could try to help Doc somehow — find a way to contact him and give him an advantage, tell him what he was facing and that more severe preventative measures might need to be taken. But the chances of getting to Doc before the soldiers and then facilitating his escape in a non-overt way seemed wafer-thin at best, especially considering the fact that she was literally welded to one of the soldiers at the moment. And what could she suggest that they wouldn’t be able to circumvent, anyway? She didn’t know enough about the technology at Micah’s disposal. Would a complete ID wipe (well beyond what Stanford was going to do for Doc) even hide him? Or had they learned to follow a person's DNA, brain waves, or something else that couldn’t be altered or masked?

There was no way to win. None of the options were any good.

Kill Doc.

Run.
 

Die.
 

Those were her only three choices, and they were all terrible.

She leaned forward and shouted into the soldier’s ear, her limp arms tethering her to him like cargo straps.
 

“I want to talk to Micah!” she yelled.
 

The soldier snickered.
 

“I’m not kidding!”
 

He said, “Whores don’t talk to the boss.”

“If he learns later that you didn’t let me talk to him about something that bears directly on what we’re doing now and the whole thing gets fucked up, do you think he’ll be happy?”
 

The soldier’s head twitched. “Just tell me, and I’ll tell him.”
 

Kai already knew she had him. A girl learned a few things over the years about when men were being resolute, when they were bending, and when you could break them.
 

“Fuck you,” she said. “I called for help and he sent you running. I’m more important to him than you are.”
 

The soldier looked like he was about to retort, but was probably working out the truth in Kai's words. After a few seconds he said, “You have an implant?”
 

“Of course.”
 

“Fine. Coming back at you.”
 

Kai’s cochlear implant made tiny chirps as the soldier sent her the call. A moment later, she heard Micah in her ear. Her Beam ID must have shown on his end because without preamble, he said, “Yes. You have to do it.”
 

Kai felt naked. She was usually a creature of subterfuge and secrets and didn’t like how transparent she always was to Micah, knowing how he’d see her doubts and this call. It was a sign of weakness — something that never increased a person’s stock in the eyes of Micah Ryan.
 

“That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
 

“Yes, it is. Don’t lower my opinion of you by giving me a line of bullshit. I expect you to be resistant, but I also expect you to do as you’ve been told. You understand this, Kitty. I know you do.”
 

Kai considered making up a reason for talking to Micah anyway, but she knew he’d never buy it. If there was one thing Micah respected less than weakness, it was lying. Lying which implied that the liar though he was stupid was the absolute worst. So she caved, and answered him directly.
 

“You
know
I’m on your side. You don’t need me to kill anyone to prove it. I’ve killed for you before.”
 

“Not like this. He has to go. Whitlock can do it or you can; he’ll be just as dead either way. I’d hoped Stahl could be wiped, but he’s too much of a wildcard. I can’t be sure enough that it’ll take.”

“Doc isn’t a threat to you,” she said. But that wasn’t enough for someone like Micah, who didn’t understand mercy, so she added, “He could be a huge asset. The people he knows…”
 

“Too much of a wildcard,” Micah repeated.

The thought hung in the air. Kai remembered something else she’d wanted to ask — something that would bear on how she felt about Micah, and what she might or might not be willing to do for him.
 

“What happened to Nicolai?” she asked.

“Costa? Wiped and released. He doesn’t have a cortical firewall.
Not
a wildcard.” Micah paused. “Did you know him before yesterday?”
 

“He’s a client,” Kai said, hiding her relief that Micah’s story jibed with Kane’s.

“Hmm.”
 

Micah said nothing more, waiting for her to resolve the issue.

“I won’t kill Doc for you,” she said.
 

“Then I can’t trust you.”
 

“Because I won’t kill a friend? It crosses the line. Would you kill your mother?” Kai stopped there, because not only was the comparison inapt (Doc wasn’t exactly Kai’s mother), but she also knew the answer. Micah and Isaac’s mother was in her hundreds, fantastically enhanced with add-ons that never quite took because she’d started enhancing too late in life, after her body had already suffered immense natural degenerative damage. The Ryans loved each other, but that wouldn’t stop any of them, including Rachel, from drawing blood if it served their interests.

Micah didn’t reply for a while. When he did, it was with a simple repetition of his earlier message: “You understand my thinking. I know you do.”
 

Kai sighed.
 

“It’s him or you,” Micah said. “Or rather, it’s him or
both
of you. I’m sorry, Kitty.”
 

And that was the worst of it. She could tell he
was
sorry. Micah could be a stone-cold son of a bitch, but he could also be warm and kind. He was just more diligent than most about those he doled his warmth and kindness to.
 

“I know,” she said.
 

“Just get it over with. Then we’ll catch up. It’s been too long.”

“It has,” she said. “Goodbye, Champ.”
 

Kai's implant chirped and she was back to being mentally alone. During the conversation, her head had lolled forward so that it was resting on the cool metal back of the soldier’s suit. She left it there.
 

“He’s in a coffee shop on the outskirts,” said Whitlock, in front of her. Under Kai’s cheek, his back rose and fell as he spoke.
 

Kai sighed. This was all her fault. This was happening (her part in it, anyway) because Doc had trusted her. He was about to learn a dangerous lesson, although he’d only know it for a few seconds: trust someone, and it’s only a matter of time before they stab you in the back. In this case, literally.