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

service, and that Quark always holds the reins? — that a lot of the political backstabbing does happen through assassins, and that maybe the assassins are clerics, but maybe they’re kind of made clerics, like they didn’t sign up to be clerics, and I know that’s supposed to be impossible, but if you believe there’s really a SerenityBlue out there, then there might be all sorts of things, and yeah I know how that sounds but — ”  
    “Sam…”  
    Sam’s eyes darted to Nicolai’s. For a moment, Nicolai thought the other man might leap at him for some reason, but then the sense of mania departed and he seemed to listen.  
    “Why are you telling me all of this?” Nicolai asked.
    “I told you. As background. If you’re going to trust me, you have to know you can trust me. And I know some of the things you might have to say, Sterling sort of indicated, I mean not really but in that way he does where he’s, like, wink-wink he might tell you this, and I can’t run with it but maybe you can Sam, and so since this is about politics — ”
    “What makes you think what I have to say is about politics?”  
    “Isn’t everything?” Sam’s mere two-word reply was disarming after his verbal diarrhea.  
    “I don’t know. Maybe.”  
    Sam nodded. He looked toward the door. He reached into his pocket but came out with nothing.  
    “Can I ask you a question?” Nicolai asked. “In the spirit of background, and helping me trust you before telling you my story?”  
    Sam nodded. The movement was closer to a spasm.
    “What happened to you?”  
    “What do you mean?”  
    What did he mean? Nicolai had made it through the East mostly due to guts and a particularly acute ability to judge people. People seldom surprised Nicolai. He could see through subterfuge like a superpower. He hadn’t seen the worst of Micah’s manipulations while they were happening, but he’d never trusted the man. Ironically, he trusted Isaac completely because Isaac was too weak for invisible deception. And even though Sam Dial was clearly Beamsick, Nicolai trusted him. He seemed incapable of keeping secrets. He seemed a peculiar breed of naive — naiveté that had managed to survive knowing (or suspecting) many of the world’s darkest secrets.  
    “What made you like this?” Nicolai held up a hand, realizing he’d been far too blunt. Sam’s diarrhetic honesty was contagious. “No offense.”  
    “Like what?” Sam looked like a man who didn’t realize his fly had been open and was now trying to cover.
    “You’re sick. Why haven’t you been treated?”  
    “I’m not sick.” Comically, he put the back of his hand to his forehead.  
    “Not like that. How old are you?”  
    “Fifty.”
    Nicolai raised his eyebrows.  
    “Fine. Younger than fifty.”  
    “And you grew up in the city. Probably right in the heart of it.”  
    “How do you know?”  
    “I’m a keen observer of human nature. Human nature has accents. I can tell how addicted you are, but it’s different from someone who grew up in the past twenty or thirty years upstate. Your accent feels like someone who’s not just used to checking a handheld every few seconds. I figure you had hardware in you very young, and it was fed from ultra-high-capacity pipelines only available right here.”  
    “Starbucks?”  
    “Old Manhattan.”  
    Sam looked up at Nicolai, chewing his cheek. What Nicolai had said was close to guessing the color of a woman’s underwear. This was the gauntlet. If Nicolai was going to trust Sam, Sam had to know that Nicolai could see right through him. He might run. But if he stayed, Nicolai would spill. If Sam stayed, it meant he was Nicolai’s man, damaged as he was.  
    “I grew up in SoHo,” said Sam.  
    “But not in the middle of it. You didn’t grow up in gangland.”  
    “Fringe. Just on the edge.”  
    “And your first implants. The connectivity ones. Age seven?”  
    “Five.”  
    Nicolai wanted to