Edison’s Alley (13 page)

U
nlike Caitlin, Petula knew about Val, because she was the one who had been impersonating Nick online. She’d been doing it for quite some
time now. At first it was just for entertainment value, but more recently it had a purpose.

She had created a profile for him in a medieval weaponry chat room, and had struck up a conversation with the most intimidating girl she could find, for the purpose of blindsiding Nick exactly
as she had done today.

It wasn’t hard, really. Her own knowledge of Dark Age death devices had captured Val like a heretic in an iron maiden. And so, while Nick floundered at his door, negotiating with an armed
teenage huntress, Petula was on the move, waiting for Ms. Planck at the harpist’s house.

She had already ignored three phone calls from Mitch. She knew why he was calling, and she listened to his messages only because his increasingly frantic voice soothed her.

“This will be a feather in your cap, Petula,” Ms. Planck said as she arrived. “If we retrieve this item because of you, the Accelerati won’t forget it. You’ll be
well on your way up the secret society’s ladder, and they will give you the respect that you deserve.” Then she added, “And it won’t look bad for me either—I need
something more to show for my efforts. Do you know how close I was to getting a list of the missing objects from Nick? That would have made me the belle of the Accelerati ball!”

“The Accelerati have a ball?”

“Honestly, Petula!” Ms. Planck said, shaking her head. “That’s a figure of speech.” Then she suggested, “Perhaps you could sweet-talk that list out of
him.”

Petula knew that was as unlikely as pigs flying. Although, considering some of the experiments she’d heard about in the Accelerati’s genetic research department, flying pigs were not
entirely out of the question.

They arrived at the harpist’s home, which was unremarkable—just one on a street of similar ranch houses. Petula reached out to ring the bell, but the door opened before she
could.

The woman inside seemed to be in her thirties. She was wearing a loose-fitting flowery dress, and she had the air of contentment usually reserved for people too stupid to know that their lives
were miserable.

“Hello,” she said, in a rather musical tone. “You’ve come for the harp, haven’t you? I was expecting two young men, but things change, I suppose.” The smile
never left her face. It was calming in a disturbing sort of way. The woman exuded a sense of inner peace and trust that made Petula not want to trust her at all.

“Come in,” she said. “Stay for a moment, won’t you? There’s no need to rush.”

Ms. Planck, however, got down to business the moment they stepped inside. “The harp is part of a collection that should not have been split up. I hope you can understand our need to
retrieve it.”

“Yes, of course.”

“We’ll buy it back,” Petula said, wedging herself into the negotiation.

“And for much more than you paid for it,” Ms. Planck added.

The woman just looked at the two of them, her eyes smiling as broadly as her lips, it seemed. “Oh, you don’t have to pay me. Take it as my gift. I’ve come to realize I
can’t keep it. Now that it’s touched my life, I’m happy to let it move on.”

This made Petula even more suspicious—and probably Ms. Planck, too, because she, more than anyone, knew that there was no such thing as a free lunch.

“So then what do you want?” Petula asked. “You must want something.”

Ms. Planck gently touched Petula’s arm to quiet her, and said, “Can you show it to us?”

The woman led them into a den. There it sat beside a baby grand piano. It was about four feet high and was gunmetal gray with gold highlights. A beautiful object, with one very obvious
problem.

“It really doesn’t have strings,” said Petula.

The woman chuckled lightly. “Oh, it most certainly does.” Then she asked, “Would you like to hear me play?”

Petula couldn’t imagine how a person could play a stringless harp, but Ms. Planck said, “Yes, we’d love to hear it, if you would be so kind.”

The woman pulled up a small stool, tilted the harp so that it rested on her shoulder, and began to move her fingers in the empty space where the strings should have been.

Petula heard nothing. Nothing at all. But she could
feel
the music. It seemed to echo inside her. Not just in her bones, but in a deeper place she never knew existed—or at least had
never accessed. The soundless music tapped the well of her soul.

“My God,” whispered Ms. Planck. “It’s strung with cosmic string!”

Petula had heard of cosmic string theory. How the universe was made up of invisible threads stretching beyond the three dimensions that humans can experience. No wonder this woman seemed to be
tuned in to something larger than herself. Because she was! She was playing the universe!

Then the howling began. Just as the man at the Beef-O-Rama had told them, this delicate melody, out of the range of human hearing, was calling to dogs like an ultrasonic whistle. And they sang
with it, harmonizing. Like the man said, it wasn’t music, but whatever it was, Petula wanted it to last.

But Ms. Planck said, “Thank you. It’s lovely, but we really need to go.”

The woman looked up—not at Ms. Planck, but at Petula, who had crossed the room and was now standing just a few feet away from the harp. The soundless music had drawn her. She felt betrayed
by her own legs, and would have to find a way to punish them later.

“You want to play it, don’t you?” the woman said kindly. “I think you should.”

“No!” said Ms. Planck, and she pulled Petula back, whispering into her ear. “Cosmic strings are capricious and unpredictable. You don’t want to touch them.”

“But…but just a single strum couldn’t hurt.”

“Of course it could! Look at her.” They both turned to the smiling woman, whose eyes seemed to be seeing through them to another place entirely. “Clearly she’s lost her
mind!”

Then Ms. Planck addressed the woman. “We really do need to go. Petula, grab the light end, and be careful not to touch the strings. I’ll take the base.”

The woman stepped back and let them lift the harp. They moved it to the doorway, where Ms. Planck put down her end. “Wait here,” she told Petula, then went back to the woman.

“I can’t just take the harp without leaving you something.”

The woman heaved a sigh that seemed both blissful and melancholy. “Yes, I know,” she said.

“It’s not what you want, but it’s necessary.”

“Yes, I know,” she said again.

Petula was much more interested in the harp than the transaction. Even silent, the invisible strings seemed to resonate. So Petula reached out a single finger, moved it toward the seemingly
empty space, and as soon as she felt the tiniest bit of resistance, she plucked the unseen string.

The effect was immediate. It was intense, and too much to process all at once. If that’s what a single string did, Petula couldn’t imagine what playing all of them would
do—especially if you knew how to play.

Ms. Planck must have felt the vibration, because she snapped her eyes back to Petula. “I told you not to!”

“I didn’t mean to! My hand slipped!”

“It spoke to you!” the woman said, overjoyed by the prospect. “What did it tell you? What did it say?”

Petula just shook her head.

“Enough!” said Ms. Planck. “Thank you for your assistance, but we’re done here.” Then she pulled something out of her pocket. It wasn’t money, but a small
silver ball about the size of a cherry. She dropped the silver marble at the woman’s feet and took several steps back. Suddenly things began to change. The colors in the den started to fade.
Piano strings broke with harsh twangs.

Ms. Planck returned to the harp and lifted the heavy end. “Time to go,” she said.

Petula couldn’t help looking back. What she saw would have made a lesser person scream. The woman’s skin was puckering. Her clothes began to tatter. Still she smiled. Still she held
Petula’s gaze.

“What
was
that?” Petula asked Ms. Planck. “What did you do?”

“It’s called a temporal accelerator. You might call it a time bomb.”

Now Petula understood. Everything within a field of about ten feet around the woman was aging at incredible speed—including the woman herself. In the blink of an eye, she looked fifty.
Sixty. Eighty. Her hair grayed, her skin wrinkled, and her body withered before Petula’s eyes.

“Don’t worry, dear,” she croaked from within the time field, in the voice of a very old woman. “I am complete…and all is as it should be…”

Then her smile became the fleshless grin of a skeleton. Her bones crashed to the ground and disintegrated. The piano collapsed, and when the field faded, all that remained of the den was a rusty
piano soundboard on a dusty, crumbling floor. The entire room had been consumed by time.

“We do the things we must do,” Ms. Planck said. “Don’t think too long on it, Petula.”

And so, Petula resolved she wouldn’t, not if she wanted to be a full-fledged member of the Accelerati. Even though she had just seen a woman disintegrate before her eyes, she
couldn’t let emotions or regrets get in the way. They had come here for the harp; they got the harp, end of story.

Except that the dead woman was right. The harp
had
spoken to her. Not in words, but in the silky vibration of feelings. Of intuition. Only now was Petula able to put that feeling into
five simple words:

“You must complete the circuit.”

M
itch was waiting at Nick’s front door, dreading the moment he’d return from his wildlife adventure. Things hadn’t gone the way
Mitch had planned. In fact, they hadn’t gone at all.

Once Petula finally called him back an hour later, they’d walked over together to retrieve the harp, but it wasn’t there. Neither was the harpist.

“It’s not like it’s your fault,” Petula had told him when they left empty-handed.

“Then why does it feel like it is?”

“Force of habit,” Petula told him, “because you usually
are
to blame. Come on, let’s go to my house.”

Then she dragged him over for old movies and enforced snuggling, until she had to use the bathroom and he could escape. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy his time with Petula, but she
was like a cinnamon fireball candy—one was fine, but a whole mouthful could be painful.

Finally, a little after four, Mitch watched as Val dropped Nick at the curb and sped off to her tree house, or wherever a girl like her lived.

Nick seemed in pretty good spirits. But those good spirits wouldn’t last for long.

“So how was it?” Mitch asked, walking up to him, trying not to telegraph his own anxiety.

“Pretty good, actually,” Nick told him. “I bagged a gopher that I’m pretty sure was already dead, and the tire of a parked Mercedes. That’s when Val decided to call
it a day. Is the harp in the attic?”

“Oh, hey, look what Caitlin brought.” Mitch handed Nick the abacus. “She wanted me to give it to you.”

Nick perked up. “Caitlin?”

“Yeah, she said…” Mitch hesitated. “Um, she said not to say anything.”

Nick frowned. “Fine. Where’s the harp?”

“Well, here’s the thing…” said Mitch, and he left it hanging.

“You didn’t get it,” Nick said.

“We went, but when the harp lady didn’t come to the door, Petula and I looked in a window. It was like a whole room had caught on fire or something—all that was left was ash. I
think maybe she spontaneously combusted.”

Nick shook his head. “No,” he said. “The Accelerati got to her first.”

“We don’t know that,” offered Mitch.

“
I
know that,” insisted Nick.

“How would they find out about her?”

“The same way we did. They must have seen the flyer somewhere.”

“Well,” Mitch suggested, “maybe they spontaneously combusted, too.”

“Just go home, Mitch,” Nick told him.

“I’m sorry,” Mitch said. He was waiting for Nick to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, like Petula had.

But Nick didn’t. “Go home, Mitch. I’ll see you in school on Monday, okay?”

The disappointment in his voice was too dense for Mitch to cut through, so he left without another word.

Nick watched his friend go, resisting the kinder part of himself that wanted to tell Mitch it was okay, because it wasn’t.

But if it was anyone’s fault, it was Nick’s, for not doing it himself. Saying
that
to Mitch would have been more hurtful than not saying anything at all. And really, there was
no way to know if Nick could have gotten there first anyway.

If the Accelerati had the harp, Tesla’s machine could never be finished. Nick had to somehow get it back. This was their biggest setback yet.

Nick went up to the attic to consult with the machine. It was odd, but he did feel that the machine could communicate with him.
“Complete me,”
it said.
“You’re
running out of time.”

It had waited for years, in pieces, here in the attic. Why, then, was its need so urgent now? Deep down Nick knew the answer. It had something to do with the asteroid. And the carpet shocks. And
the worldwide aurora.