Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1) (17 page)

CHAPTER 17

They were once again blinded by the white light that filled the screen of each monitor until Bizzy’s sure hand on the switch killed the lasers. The group stood silently as they stared at the empty time machine from every camera angle.

“It may have worked this time,” said Joley in an attempt to lighten the heavy atmosphere.

“I don’t think there was ever a malfunction,” said Bizzy quietly. “I think it works for Tesla. Or
with
Tesla. I think that’s how it was designed, though Dr. Abbott seems unaware of it. And I am completely clueless about how that is even possible. I think when we figure it out, we will have figured out what
the Tesla effect
is.”

“Tesla changed her mind, huh?” asked Max, who had woken up while Bizzy did the countdown.
The others turned to face him.

“It was more like we all changed our minds, once we realized that it wouldn’t work with me,” said Finn.
“It works for your sister—maybe only for her. We’re not sure.”

“It’s okay, I know she wanted to go,” said Max in an attempt to reassure him, which is of course what Finn wanted to do for Max.

“She’s pretty brave, and plus she really wants to get your dad back.” Finn had made a promise to look out for Max and he was determined not to break it.

“Yeah, I know,” Max said.
“She’ll be okay. She’s smart.”

“Yes she is,” said Lydia.
“So we’ve got to trust her, and remain confident that she’ll be back very soon. But in the meantime, we can’t sit idly by. Your father is in the hands of a very dangerous man, Max, and time is not on his side. I don’t want to frighten you, but whatever Nilsen wants from him, the longer Dr. Abbott holds out, the more frustrated—and desperate—Nilsen will become. We want to find him before that happens.”

Finn looked at Lydia, surprised she would be so candid with the boy.

“I’ve said all along we should have focused on Jane’s leads,” Beckett said. “It’s certainly not too late to do that now. Have you had an update from her?”

“Yes,” said Lydia.
“She’s in Canada, but it’s unclear yet if any of her leads will pan out. I don’t know the details—in fact, I know very little of her work. Her reputation suggests she doesn’t always follow protocol.”

“Shouldn’t we also update her?” Finn asked.
“She’s not just an agent, she’s a close family friend of the Abbotts. I’m sure she’ll want to know that Tesla’s made the jump.”

“Yes, of course,” said Lydia as she moved toward the door.
“I’ll take care of that, if I can reach her. I imagine she has her hands full right now and won’t welcome any distractions, however. As Beckett said, Jane may very well be the one to solve this case. She’s very good at her job,” she added, almost to herself. She smiled then, as if she’d just remembered they were there. “I suggest we return to the house and get some sleep, in shifts. We want to be here if—excuse me,
when
—Tesla returns.”

“I’ll stay,” Bizzy said.
“I’m way too keyed up to sleep.”

“I’ll stay with you,” said Finn.
“You okay to head back to the house with Joley?” he asked Max, who nodded.

Once she was alone in the control booth with Finn—her favorite among the housemates—Bizzy exhaled, long and loud.
She felt like she was still in shock. “I can hardly believe it,” she said. “I mean, I know that it works in theory, but I thought I’d be lucky if we had some small success with subatomic particles. And then suddenly,
this
. I mean, she’s just gone. It’s so weird.”

“Completely weird,” Finn agreed.

Bizzy glanced at him, a sudden grin on her face. “So you two seem to be, ah, friendlier.”

“Why Elizabeth, what do you mean?” Finn asked archly.

“Becks said she caught you guys making out when she opened the door.”

Finn shrugged, his mouth tipped up on one side.
“That might be a bit overstated,” he said evasively. He didn’t have a clue what this was between him and Tesla Abbott, but he wasn’t about to work it out with Bizzy, who was like a younger sister.

“I like her.” Bizzy offered her unqualified stamp of approval despite Finn’s refusal to discuss it.
“But don’t get your hopes up, Finn. Don’t you think she seems annoyed with you? A lot?”

“Yeah, she does,” said Finn, and his grin now matched Bizzy’s.
“It’s all part of my charm.”

Bizzy shook her head at his delusions. “She’s odd, though, don’t you think?”

“How do you mean?” Finn asked, wary.

“I don’t know. Not in a bad way. She’s just hard to understand—I know, I know, I don’t understand anybody. But this is different. She’s shy, but she’s always pissed and flying off the handle. And she’s not exactly a supermodel, but once you see her—really look at her—it’s like she’s the only one in the room. And even though she looks—soft, I guess—she’s incredibly stubborn, she’s
smart and obviously brave. She’s nothing but contradictions.”

“Why Bizzy, I do believe you’re in love,” Finn teased.

Bizzy blushed. “All I mean is that she’s interesting,” she tried to explain, at a loss, as usual when it came to verbal communication. She tried a different tack. “She’s colorful,” she suggested.

Finn was about to laugh at her again, but he was suddenly caught by the image of Tesla walking to her house in the brilliant sunshine, nervous about returning to the scene of her attack, starting and stopping on the sidewalk as they walked. “That’s true,” he said. “She’s always on the move, in this abrupt sort of way—she’s like a hummingbird. Quick, hard to catch—you get a flash of blue and green and red and she’s gone.”

“Why Finn, I do believe you’re in love,” Bizzy said, laughing at him in turn as she spun around and around in her chair at the control panel.

When Tesla felt the pressure of a solid wall up against her back, and the sense of her entire body cramped and confined, she knew it had worked. Without the sense of panic she’d felt last time, she waited only a few seconds before she began to push up on the lid of the much smaller time machine that she now thought of as ‘the coffin.’ She had only just begun to push upward with her shoulder when the lid swung swiftly upward and she blinked in the sudden glare of the fluorescent lights of the lab and stared into the very dark, very liquid eyes of Sam the janitor.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.
His black hair fell into his eyes, and a nervous laugh escaped his lips. “Ho. LEE. Shit.”

“Yeah.
Can you help me out of here?” Tesla asked as she looked pointedly at her casted arm.

“Oh.
Yeah. Of course,” Sam said quickly as he helped her sit up.

“Oh, hang on a sec,” she said while she rummaged in the messenger bag in her lap.

Sam saw the smile that lit up her face as she looked up and pulled a small object out of the bag with her good right hand. It was a mouse, held gently in her palm. His twitchy pink nose poked out from between her fingers.

“This is—Schrödinger,” said Tesla, naming him on the fly. “Alive and well.”

“Whoa. You brought him with you?” Sam asked, but Tesla didn’t respond.

“Can we put him somewhere secure?” she asked.

Sam looked around until he saw a rectangular cardboard box with a lid, the kind that held reams of copy paper. He removed the paper, brought the box over, and Tesla put Schrödinger inside. Sam took his keys, punched some air holes in the lid, and placed the box on a nearby desk.

“I knew you’d be back,” Sam said triumphantly, as if he had single-handedly made this happen.

“You… you know what’s happened here?” Tesla was very much aware of the promise she’d made to Lydia. The more people who knew about this time travel stuff, the more danger her dad was likely to be in.

“Yeah, I keep my eyes open,” he said.
He backed up a step as Tesla climbed the rest of the way out and then hopped down from the table to stand in front of the boy—he was, clearly, a boy, younger than she was, now that she had a chance to really look at him.

“And what have you seen?” she asked casually.

Sam looked at her intently. Tesla could read the quick intelligence in his inky eyes, and silently approved his caution, which appeared to match her own.

“I’m interested in the work the docs do around here,” he said with a shrug.
“And of course I remember that I helped you a couple of months back. When you wandered in here with a concussion and I found you hidden in there.” His hand gestured vaguely to the table and the coffin, directly behind her. “So. Are you lost again?”

“Not so much lost this time… more like I’ve retraced my steps,” said Tesla.
She was surprised to find this cryptic conversation so enjoyable. It seemed as clear to Sam as it was to her, though if she was wrong she had actually told him nothing.

“Want a soda?” he asked suddenly, and then blushed at the surprised look on Tesla’s face.
“I mean, I was actually just going to get one when I saw… when I realized you were here. Wanna walk down the hall and get a drink?”

“Sure,” said Tesla, who thought she might as well go with every little bit of bizarre
that this experience had to offer.

She followed Sam out of the lab and they walked in silence for a couple of minutes through long, echoing hallways until they came to an open area with a few small tables and chairs, and several vending machines.

Tesla sat at one of the tables and Sam walked to the closest machine. “Coke?” he asked, his back to her as he dug quarters out of his pocket.

“Root beer, actually.”

He bought the two sodas and sat down in the chair across from Tesla, and they looked at each other in silence.

“So,” he began, and then stopped, not sure how to proceed.

“Yeah,” she said, and they both laughed. “Look, Sam, don’t ask me about this, but….” Tesla hesitated, but it was where she knew she had to start. “What’s the date today?”

Sam looked at her and cleared his throat.
“It’s Monday. June twenty-seventh.” Tesla continued to look at him expectantly and he was the first to blink. “Two thousand and four.”

Tesla closed her eyes and felt her heart beat strong and sure in her chest.
Holy shit is right
, she thought.
Exactly eight years ago
.

She opened her eyes and found Sam’s gaze fixed on hers.
“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, but it came out as barely a whisper.
Then louder, “Yeah, I’m fine. What about you?”

“I’m good,” he assured her.
“But I think the docs who run this place would be, um, more than a little surprised by your visit.”

“I’ll bet,” Tesla said with a grin.
“I guess that’s why the box is so small: they don’t think anyone would use it to, ah, hide in.”

“Exactly,” Sam said.
“Although they hoped that somebody would some day, of course. Especially Dr. Petrova—”

Tesla was suddenly on her feet, her chair pushed back with such force that it crashed to the linoleum floor.
“What did you say?” Her voice was the barest whisper.

“Dr. Petrova,” he repeated, eyeing her warily.
“This is her lab, hers and Dr. Abbott’s. And that—box—is their work….” Sam stopped and a worried frown creased his forehead. “I thought we were on the same page, but maybe you’d better tell me who you are and what this is all about. I’m not with security—and I don’t understand most of what goes on here. But I owe the docs a lot and I’m not going to say any more until I get some answers.”

CHAPTER 18

Tesla licked suddenly dry lips.
Why didn’t I anticipate this
, she wondered. But it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, really, except what this boy had just told her.

“Tasya Petrova and Greg Abbott are my parents,” she said slowly.
“I’m Tesla Petrova Abbott. And my mother is alive….”

Several hours later they still sat in the lab’s break room, their sodas long gone. They leaned back in their chairs and just looked at each other. They had talked furiously after Tesla’s admission of who she was, talked over each other and, more than once, got up to pace the floor as the story in two parts unfolded. Sam had run his hands through his hair at various points in agitation, and now it stuck up on end all over his head. He knew that if he were a real scientist he wouldn’t just accept that this was real, he would need controls, data, the same results repeated over and over again. But right here, right now, he knew it was true. The girl who sat across the table from him had just arrived—for the second time—from eight years in the future.

“I’ve met you, you know,” he said suddenly.

“What? What do you mean?” Tesla felt like her head was filled with a constant buzz—her mind raced as she tried to adjust to this world in which she could jump back and forth in time.

“Like, a week ago,” he said.
“You were—you are—a little kid. You have a baby brother. Your dad brought you guys in to try to persuade your mom to knock off for the night. She was here really late—my shift had already started. You were too shy to talk to me, you hid behind your dad and stared at the floor. The baby grabbed my finger and kind of drooled all over himself.”

“This is too bizarre, I can’t get my head around it.
So right now, in this time and this place, it’s 2004 and I’m nine years old. Max is a baby. And my mom is alive.”

“Yeah, you said that,” said Sam.
“Why wouldn’t she be?”

Tesla paused.
How much could she share with Sam? They had established that time travel had occurred, that she was here from the future, and that was about it. That much had taken them long enough, as they’d carefully avoided any statements that might reveal what they both understood as a very secret project.

“She’s no longer alive eight years from now,” she finally said simply.
Her head swam with all sorts of dire possibilities, most of them, to her chagrin, from sci-fi horror stories about time travelers who go back and accidentally step on a butterfly or something, and then back in their own time it’s all changed and they can never get the world back to what it was. She didn’t want to make any mistakes that she might regret later.

“Oh, man. Sorry,” said Sam.
“This must be so weird for you.”

“Yeah, you might say that.”

Sam glanced at the clock on the wall and stood up. “My shift is just about over. I need to clock out. We have to figure out what to do with you—people will be coming in soon. We can’t risk sending you back right now.”

Tesla thought for a minute.
“I know. It’s okay. Can you give me twenty-four hours, and then help me get back tomorrow night, like you did before?”

Sam looked at her and weighed what he saw.
Clear,
amazing
eyes, one blue and the other green, that he tried not to stare at. Seventeen, she’d said, and they were about the same height, even though Tesla was two years older than he was. Crazy, wild red hair framed her face, and her cheeks dimpled when she smiled. If he hadn’t felt totally outclassed, he would’ve fallen hard for her. But since there was no way she’d ever look at him like that—he felt like an awkward kid next to her—he was able to relax. He had absolutely no shot, and it released him from all the effort and anxiety of hope.

“Okay,” he said.
“What do you need to do, and how can I help?”

“I need to keep a low profile,” she said, “that’s first.
You saw
Back to the Future
, right?”

“Yeah, of course.
I get it. We’ll keep you out of sight as much as possible.”

“I need to do some research.
At the library.”

“You can come to my house, no one will be there.
It’s only five a.m., the library’s not open yet, but I can take you there at seven. We’re on the campus of a university, so that’s no prob—”

“Yeah, I know,” she said.
“I live on campus. I mean, I will live on campus. I know where the library is.”

Fifteen minutes later, after they’d put some potato chips in Schrödinger’s box and the lid from Sam’s soda bottle filled with water, Sam clocked out and changed in another room into jeans, sneakers, and a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt that had seen better days. They walked outside into the pre-dawn.
The sky
felt
like it was almost day rather than looked like it, as Sam stopped at a small Honda motorcycle chained to a pillar of the physics building and pulled a helmet out of the backpack he carried.

“You ride a motorcycle?” Tesla asked, surprised.
“I didn’t think you were old enough to drive.”

“Thanks,” said Sam, stung a bit.

“Sorry. No offense.”

“Don’t worry about it.”
He unlocked the bike, and by the time he stood up again, he was over it. “I’m fifteen and three quarters, which is old enough in this state to get a motorcycle permit if I need it to work. Which I do.”

“Oh,” said Tesla as she tried not to smile.
“Cool.”

“Put this on.”
He handed her the helmet.

“What about you?” she asked, the helmet awkwardly held in her right hand.
It was heavier than it looked.

“I only have one, and you’re going to wear it.”

“Oh,” Tesla said. She sounded like a monosyllabic idiot as she looked with some doubt at the helmet in her hand.

“Here,” Sam said.
He took the helmet from her and put it on her head. “Chin up,” he ordered, as he fastened the buckle and made sure it was secure. Then he threw one leg over the bike and sat down on the leather seat, turned on the engine and revved it once.

“Get on,” he commanded, and she climbed up behind him.
He showed her the tiny bars for her feet, and told her to hang on.

“I only have the one arm, you know,” she warned, and he laughed.
The predawn air was cool on her face and as they drove onto one of the main streets through campus, everything still dark and not a soul awake, Tesla realized that she felt great.
Really
great. Strong and whole and hopeful. She had work to do, she knew, and she had to be careful. She had to go back to her own time and help fix this whole mess. But right here, right now, her dad hadn’t been kidnapped by some lunatic, and her mom was alive, somewhere in this town, peacefully asleep in her own bed, and none of the terrible events that seemed to Tesla to define her life had ever happened.

By the time they’d driven through campus, across town and underneath the old freeway overpass (which she did not tell Sam would be torn down in just a few years), Tesla felt comfortable on the back of the bike, her right arm around Sam’s waist, her left arm comfortably in front of her, supported by her sling and both their bodies. The breeze was chilly as they drove, and she shivered a little as they turned from an old business district, with easily half of the stores boarded up and graffiti tags sprayed across the empty display windows, and onto a short, dead-end street with half a dozen tiny, identical cinderblock houses.

Sam pulled into the dirt driveway of the second house on the left and turned the engine off.
“This is it,” he said, and Tesla could tell he was embarrassed.

“Thanks for bringing me here,” she said.
“You didn’t have to, I know. It’s what a good friend would do, and you just met me.” She didn’t want to be fake, tell him how lovely his house was; that would just embarrass them both. He was poor, the house looked it. But none of that was the point. He
had
gone above and beyond, and she wanted him to know that that’s what she saw.

He shrugged.
“No problem.” Tesla got off the bike first, carefully, and then Sam followed suit. She handed him the helmet, and they walked inside.

The house was dark, and he flipped a switch on the wall that illuminated the room from a plain, round ceiling fixture that cast a harsh light over them.
He put his keys on a table by the door and walked into what Tesla could see was a cramped kitchen.

“I’ll make us some food,” he called.

The worn sofa was clean and had once been a cheerful brown and yellow striped pattern, though it was faded beyond hope of cheerfulness now. A faux-leather recliner, a coffee table, and a TV on a low dresser completed the room’s decor. Tesla noted the framed photographs on the wall over the sofa, and went closer to examine them.

She assumed the two adults in the largest picture were Sam’s parents.
The man had a kind face and gentle eyes above his enormous black moustache. He had begun to bald. The woman who sat beside him had an oval face and black, soulful eyes just like Sam’s. She wore a headscarf over her hair and pulled snug up under her chin, and a cream-colored, crew-necked sweater that matched the ones her husband and children wore. There were two children in the photo who sat in front of and just below their parents. The boy—obviously Sam—was younger in the photograph than he was now, and Tesla suddenly longed to see Max as she looked at this little boy’s face in the family portrait, the big eyes, the tousled hair. The girl, a teenager, also wore what Tesla assumed was a Muslim headscarf. She stared defiantly at Tesla from her place on the wall, her eyes stormy.

“Is this your sister?” Tesla called without turning around.

“Yes,” Sam answered quietly, right behind her.

Tesla jumped and turned quickly to face him.
He stood very close to her, their eyes level. He’s not as tall as Finn, she thought, the comparison automatic. She felt inexplicably nervous.

“Her name is Haleh.
She goes by Hallie. She’s in college. In Boston.”

“Haleh’s a pretty name,” she said smoothly as she stepped to the side and walked around him, toward the kitchen.
“How come she doesn’t like it?”

He shrugged, noncommittal.
“I didn’t say she didn’t like it, but everybody mispronounces it. Maybe she wants to fit in.”

Tesla retreated to safer territory.
“Did you say something about food?”

“Yeah, scrambled eggs and toast.
That okay?”

“That’s great, thanks,” she said airily.
She wanted to regain the composure she felt was her right as the older of the two. He was just a kid, after all.

Tesla stood quietly in the kitchen while he scooped eggs from the pan onto two chipped plates, and buttered toast that had already popped up from the toaster.
They stood in the kitchen and ate in silence.

“Is Sam your real name, or a nickname like Hallie?” she finally asked, unable to stop herself, apparently, from being an idiot.

Sam looked at her as he chewed and waited a moment before he answered. “My ‘real’ name is Sam, because I say it is.”

Tesla blushed and didn’t answer.

By the time they’d finished, the sun had begun to rise and ease into the day. “Once the library’s open, I’d like to head over there,” Tesla said.

“I’ll take you,” Sam said, “but I’ve got to just drop you.”

“Hot date?” Tesla asked. She was a little horrified to find that she wanted him on the defensive, and she had no idea why.

“No, second job,” he answered evenly.

“Wow, you work two jobs and you’re not even sixteen? What’s up with that?” she asked.

“My parents both work, and I work after school.
When I’m not in school for the summer, I work two jobs. They don’t make a lot of money, and it’s not cheap to live, or to send your daughter to college. So I help.”

Tesla felt the blush creep up her neck and suffuse her face.
She looked down again, ashamed to reveal how lucky she was, how much she took for granted, how easy her life was in so many ways. She had never really questioned the self-pity she so often indulged in, the sense that she deserved special consideration because her mom had died. She had forgotten that there were other forms of hardship, maybe even worse ones.

After they’d washed the dishes together, dried them and put them back in the cabinets, they left the house and climbed back on the motorcycle.
Tesla wore the helmet, her right arm wrapped lightly around Sam’s waist. “So where’s your other job?” she asked.

“Pizza shop,” he said curtly, and she wondered if he was angry because she was such an insensitive clod.
“Angelo’s.”

“No. Way,” she said, and somehow this was the biggest surprise of all.
“That is by far the best place in town. I go there all the time, chicken-bacon-ranch is my favorite.”