The Beam: Season Three by Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant

Author:Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant [Platt, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone
Published: 2015-11-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Two

Leo woke with a world-ending headache.

Opening his eyes was difficult. Rolling his head to the side was even harder. He rolled a few times anyway, tolerating the pounding and the way his neck tendons seemed to creak in an attempt to unfreeze frozen joints. He squinted the entire time, fighting the feeling of a lance stabbing his brain.

It wasn’t until Leo was sitting upright that he realized something interesting: his head hurt, but it was more or less clear.

“Leo? You hear me in there?” came an echoey voice.

Leo took a few moments before responding. The voice was coming from somewhere high up, and when he craned his pained head to look, Leo saw it was coming from an ancient speaker that looked something like a bullhorn.

“Is that you, Dominic?” Leo asked the speaker.

There must have been an input somewhere, because the voice seemed to hear him.

“Yeah. Are you…are you okay?”

The hesitance in Dominic’s question made Leo’s eyes narrow. He’d known Dominic forever. He’d practically raised him. He’d accepted one Respero refugee from him early in Organa’s history, then another, in Crumb, later on. Sometimes, Leo had a hard time seeing Dominic as more than the kid he’d been when Leo had been the teacher and Dominic had been the student. And now, look where they’d ended up: with Dominic sounding tentative, as if Leo were a bomb about to explode.

“My head hurts.”

“And your hand?”

The question caught Leo by surprise. He looked at his hand (the left, resting on his leg) and was about to respond with a question of his own when he saw the blood. There were great pools of it along the walls, tracked around as if someone had paced through it. He was in some sort of a concrete room with a metal door. It couldn’t be Plasteel because there was a wrinkled dent in its middle that looked recent. In the dent’s center — and, now that he looked, in the heart of several pits around the room’s block walls — were splats of crimson.

Leo’s left hand felt fine, but his right was aching. He assumed it was because he was still halfway sitting on it and it had gone numb, but when he fished the hand out, the sight of it almost made him pass out again. His fist hurt to flex. His flesh was mostly gone, turned to mashed hamburger squeezed between bright chrome-plated metal fingers. Caked blood covered the appendage and his sleeve almost entirely.

“We’re limited on first aid here,” speaker-Dominic said. “I gave you a shot of repair nanos, but I don’t know if it’s enough for the job you did on yourself.”

“Where are you, Dom? Come in here so we can talk face to face.”

After a moment of hesitation Dominic said, “Let’s just keep talking this way for a bit, if that’s okay with you.”

“But where are you?”

“There’s a control room. For monitoring.”

“I mean, where are we?”

Leah’s voice, small, as if beside Dominic but not talking into the microphone: “Just tell him.

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