Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1) (28 page)

Lydia looked at her, one eyebrow raised, and Tesla felt the heat rise to her face.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

“I understand completely,” Lydia said. “Some rest would help, though.”

Tesla nodded. Afraid of what else she might say if she opened her mouth again, she walked out of Lydia’s office, tears of anger and worry welled up in her eyes.

As Tesla rounded the corner of the hall, where early morning sunlight reflected off the walls and made her way toward the parlor from Lydia’s office, she heard voices she recognized and stopped.

“—I don’t see how this is any of your business, Ford,” said Sam, his voice pitched to a conversational volume, but cold and steely in tone.

“This kind of thing is everybody’s business,” Finn said easily, casually.
Too casually
, Tesla thought in alarm. Couldn’t Sam hear the controlled anger in Finn’s voice?

“And what, exactly, is ‘this kind of thing?’” Sam asked, his voice now equally dangerous.

“Abusive, creepy. You know, restraining-order worthy.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Sam demanded, angry but clearly confused.

“Where were you last night, after the party at the Institute?” Finn asked.

“What?” said Sam, startled. “Who do you think you are?”
He switched to offense. “Are you spying on me?”

“Hang on, mate, take it easy,” Joley said, and Tesla heard the sound of hurried footsteps.
What is going on
? she thought as she inched closer to the doorway of the parlor so she could hear more clearly.

“I asked you a question,” Sam said, his voice like a whiplash.

“Yes, you did,” said Finn, unfazed. “And I asked you one. Where were you last night?”

“It seems you already know the answer to that question. Which means you were there, too. Maybe you should tell us why.”

“Finn doesn’t answer to you,” said Bizzy, her sweet voice uncharacteristically aggressive.

“And I don’t answer to him, either,” said Sam.

There was silence for a moment, and then Finn said, “I was there, you’re right. I’m there most nights.”

“And you have the nerve to accuse me?” Sam said, his voice much louder now, and accompanied by the sound of hurried steps, perhaps even a brief scuffle punctuated by Joley, who shouted, “Both of you, bloody calm down,” with such authority th
at all the other sounds ceased.

Tesla’s heart pounded, and she recognized the fight-or-flight response coursing through her body, the adrenaline, that new tautness in her body, a sense of being pulled. She knew she shouldn’t eavesdrop, but there was pretty much nothing she could think of that would make her stop at this point.

“I was there, and I’m frequently there, because it’s my job,” Finn said, his voice deliberately calm and matter-of-fact. “What’s your excuse?”

Sam waited before he spoke, and when he finally did, Tesla understood why. His voice now matched Finn’s in its quiet, calm delivery.

“I keep an eye on Tesla, too, though I don’t get paid to do it,” Sam said. “And I followed her over here because I was worried about her. I don’t know you people at all. I intend to make sure she’s safe.”

“That’s your explanation?” Finn said, his voice now pitched, maddeningly, to suggest amusement. “You’re just here to serve, to make the planet safer for everybody? Nothing personal in this for
you?”

“No more than there is for you,” Sam said, his words heavily weighted.

Finn laughed. “At least I know the difference between liking a girl and stalking her.”

The sounds of a struggle, an incomprehensible shout from Bizzy, all in a split second, sent Tesla around the corner and into the room before she’d thought it through, her body acting on instinct alone as her entire being was reduced down to one coherent thought:
protect him
.

“Stop it!” she shouted at the sight of Sam and Finn desperate to get their hands on each other, Joley in between to keep them apart.
Bizzy stood nearby, wide-eyed and horrified.

They all stopped and turned toward Tesla, and then Beckett walked in, right behind Tesla, from the same doorway where she’d hidden only moments before.

“Just when it had started to get fun,” Beckett said just before she turned to Tesla. “Didn’t you want to wait and hear the rest of it?”

Tesla could have scratched Beckett’s face off, and she felt her own face burn with shame as she glanced guiltily at Finn and Sam.

The moment had passed.

Sam shook Joley’s hand off, turned and walked out the front door without a word. Beckett hesitated, then went after him. Bizzy, Finn, and Tesla looked at each other.

“Well, that was fun,” said Finn lightly.

“No, that wasn’t fun at all,” Tesla said, an echo of Finn’s words to her the first night they’d met, here in this very room. Then she walked out the door, too.

“Tesla, wait!” she heard Bizzy shout, but she shut the door on them all and began to walk home, her only thought to get away from these people and the undercurrents that followed them everywhere they went. All she wanted was to find her dad, get her life back to normal. If she couldn’t do it with them, she’d do it without them. She turned the corner, onto her street, her gaze fixed resolutely straight ahead. Had she looked the other way at the corner, however, she would have seen Sam and Beckett, who stood beneath the big oak that had sat on that particular corner for at least eighty years, deep in a conversation that animated both their faces.

CHAPTER
31

Tesla finished her braids and pulled on her black hoodie over a slate gray tank, with the hood up to cover her too-bright hair. They thought they could spy on her, keep tabs on her, tell her what to do. ‘
Just go dancing
,’ she thought angrily. ‘
Don’t worry
,
go take a nap’
. Well screw that. Her dad had been kidnapped by some lunatic and the only thing everyone agreed on was that Greg Abbott would soon run out of time. Tesla was done with the drama, done with these boys and their bowed-up macho crap.

Done with feeling like she had to watch out for them, protect them—but was that about both of them, or just one?
And which one? Either way, it was a new development she neither understood nor appreciated. Besides, despite Lydia’s insistence that Tesla should just let the so-called professionals handle this, they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

She pulled on her black skinny jeans and running shoes, pulled the messenger bag strap over her head, checked inside to be sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, and then she turned the stereo up.

She couldn’t help but smile as she glanced at the window of her bedroom, wide open to the night, light and music pouring out for all the world to see and hear. Just another Tuesday night for your average teenaged girl, who certainly would be up in her room, Adele cranked up, while she wrote bad, angst-driven poetry.

Tesla felt rather smug as she slipped out of her bedroom door and into the hall, crept down the stairs in the dark and skipped the step that creaked. Max had gone to spend the night at Dylan’s, happy to be a normal kid for at least tonight, and Aunt Jane was “on the job,” as she had said wryly. Tesla walked across the tiled kitchen floor, her thin, rubber-soled shoes completely silent. She didn’t have to think at all as she walked through the darkness, despite the lack of moonlight. Tesla knew this space, and that knowledge was better than night vision. She knew to the eighth inch where, exactly, the doorknob to the back door was located, and her hand moved forward with confidence, grasped it, and turned it quietly.

She slipped out the door, thankful that no one in her family had thought to replace the bulb in the outside light that was supposed to illuminate the backdoor at night, though it had burned out months ago. She stood against the wall of the house, in shadow, and looked around, a wild creature who listened, smelled and tasted the air. Alert to danger, and the presence of predators. All was quiet, just the whisper of leaves that moved in the soft breeze. She slipped easily across the lawn to the big hedge that separated the Abbott’s property from their neighbor’s and wriggled through it, at the bottom. She had to get on her belly and crawl a bit, and when she came up on the other side, dirty and a little scratched up, she was immensely satisfied. She travelled through several consecutive backyards like a wraith, but once she was a block away she felt safe. Anyone who watched her house, if they’d missed her initial escape from the back door, would never spot her now. She came around to the front of a house down the block from her own and hit the sidewalk at a light run as if she were an insomniac out for a jog, and headed toward the university hospital.

Tesla knew she’d lucked out when she walked up to the main entrance of the hospital, the automatic doors opened smoothly, and she found the information desk unoccupied. It was way past visiting hours, and she’d been prepared to argue with whoever stopped her, plead with them to just let her go up quickly to see her grandmother, she’d only stay a moment, cross her heart. Spared that performance, she headed straight for the elevator, got in, and pushed the button for the sixth floor. She planned to retrace her steps from the hospital room she’d been in months before, in order to make her way down to the Bat Cave without the need to go through the Physics building, which would most certainly be under surveillance by Lydia’s people, probably Jane’s as well. Not to mention whatever bad guys lurked about.

She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find, but Tesla couldn’t get past the conviction that the underground facility was at the center of everything. Her father had kept the plans under lock and key before it was even built, and there was no indication on those plans that anything top secret would be housed there. This was, in some way Tesla could not pin down, never about time travel. So why the top-secret routine from her dad, who didn’t even lock the doors of their house at night? Clearly there was something about the Bat Cave, beyond the time machine that it now contained, that had warranted secrecy even before it was built.

The elevator
pinged
softly and the doors slid open. Keisha stood just outside, in the wide hospital corridor, dressed in black with a vase of flowers in her hands.

“Have any trouble?” Tesla said as she stepped out of the elevator.

Keisha shook her head. “Not really. I did have to use the sick grandmother story, but I’d grabbed these from my house on the way out, for a prop. The old man at the front desk downstairs said I was sweet.”

“Good thinking on your part,” Tesla said. “Bad judgment on his.”

“Yeah, well. My mom’s gonna be pissed. This is her favorite vase.”

“Ready?”

“Yep,” Keisha said as she set the flowers carefully on the floor outside of the private room just across from the elevator. “Somebody might as well enjoy these.”

“Let’s go,” said Tesla as she turned to the stairwell just past the elevator, the same stairwell she had used the night she’d come here with a concussion.

They slipped inside, closed the door softly behind them, and began the long descent. Tesla was a little worried because she didn’t feel the familiarity she’d expected, but figured that was because she’d had a concussion at the time, and wasn’t quite in her right mind. It made sense that her memories of that night would be a little fuzzy, she assured herself. They continued down without conversation, save for Keisha, who said, “Dude, is this
Journey to the Center of the Earth
or what?” at about the midway point.

Once they’d reached the bottom and set off down the interminable hallway that Tesla remembered, if a bit vaguely, they picked up their pace. When they got to the door with the security pad—which was shut firmly this time—Tesla finally spoke.

“Here’s the first trial,” she said grimly. “Let’s hope it works.”

She’d watched Bizzy carefully the last time they’d gone to the Bat Cave, seen the sequence of numbers she had pushed to gain access to the underground facility, but Tesla didn’t know if it would
work now. Or here. Bizzy had taken them in through the Physics building, not the hospital, and Tesla didn’t know if they used different codes for each entrance, or if the code was regularly changed. Still, she had to try, even if it meant that this was as far as she and Keisha would get.

Tesla pushed the seven buttons that Bizzy had pushed, and then tried the door. It opened easily, without a sound.

“We’re in,” she said unnecessarily as she looked at her best friend with barely suppressed excitement.

“Yeah,” said Keisha, “but what, exactly, is your plan of action now that we’re here?”

They entered the hall, shut the security door behind them, and Tesla walked quickly on. “Unclear,” she said without embarrassment. When they got to the next door—the one that led to the last hallway before the Bat Cave, with doors on each side—she opened the door without hesitation.

“I guess we open some doors,” she said, and Keisha nodded. Tesla reached into her messenger bag and pulled out the canister of pepper spray that Lydia had given her.

Keisha stared at Tesla, who looked about thirteen with her red hair braided in pigtails. “I am completely freaked out right now,” Keisha said. “You’re
armed
?”

Tesla shrugged. “It’s a tool,” she said firmly. “You never know what you might need.”
She walked into the hall and Keisha followed close behind.

“Tools,” Keisha repeated. “Whatever you have to tell yourself.”

Tesla was about to give Keisha a hard time for giving her a hard time, but before she could open her mouth they froze as a
click
from the door at the end of the hall reached their ears, and it began to open slowly inward. The girls moved closer together, and Tesla raised the pepper spray as someone walked through the door.

It was Beckett.

Beckett saw Keisha and Tesla—and their tiny can of pepper spray held out in front of them—the moment she stepped through the door. Her ninja-stance relaxed immediately, and she turned her head and spoke to whoever was behind her, still unseen by the two girls in the brightly lit hall.

“Found them.”

Beckett moved aside, and Finn, Bizzy, Joley—and Malcolm—followed her out into the hall.

“What the hell are you all doing here?” Tesla demanded, determined to ignore the just-perceptible slackening of that stretched feeling that seemed to be her constant companion these days.

“I’m just along for the ride,” Malcolm piped up. “I was at Bizzy’s when this went down and, well, you know how I hate to be left out.”

Beckett silenced him with a glance.

“Lydia said there’s been a breakthrough in your dad’s case,” said Bizzy. “She sent us to your place to get you.”

Finn looked accusingly at Tesla, struggling to sound light, to hide the fear he’d felt when he’d found her room empty, the unmistakable
pull
he could not ignore that led him to the Bat Cave, to Tesla. “I was at my post, across the street from your house, when Bizzy and Malcolm found me. I went to your door and knocked, but you didn’t answer.
Probably can’t hear me over the music
, I thought. So I went in, went up to your room, and found that you’d left. Snuck out. And seriously? The pillows under your covers, like it was you in there? What do you think this is, an
I Love Lucy
episode?”

Tesla felt a sudden, nameless exuberance.
She was feather-light.
A breakthrough in your dad’s case
, Bizzy had said.

“What?” she asked Finn, her voice effervescent, bubbles of laughter discernible in every syllable she uttered. “I don’t have to check with you every time I leave my house. Right Ethel?” she asked Keisha.

“I figured you’d come back here,” Finn went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “So we went straight to the physics building and came down here from the other side.”

“We went all
Mission Impossible
from the hospital side,” said Keisha. “I had to charm a geezer at the information desk.”

“I have complete confidence that you looked amazing doing it,” Joley said suggestively.

“Could you be any more inappropriate?” Beckett asked him.

“Of course,” Joley said with a grin, and Keisha laughed.

“Hello, the breakthrough in my dad’s case?” Tesla said as she stared pointedly at Keisha.

“What?” Keisha said. “He’s funny. You know I like funny.”

“Let’s go see what Lydia’s found out,” Finn said, and Keisha turned to head back through the hospital side, the way she and Tesla had come in.

“Wait, Keish, if we go up that way we’ll be two hundred yards farther from Lydia’s house.”

Keisha stopped and rolled her eyes, but she turned around and walked back the other way.

“What?” Tesla asked, her hands raised in supplication as she fell in behind her best friend. “I can’t help it if I know where we are. After all these years you should be grateful. If we left this sort of thing up to you we’d find ourselves in Hoboken, and you know perfectly well you couldn’t stomach New Jersey.”

Finn laughed. “It’s true, she couldn’t.”

“Yeah, maybe we could admire Tesla’s wit later,” Beckett said. “I don’t like it down here, never have. The sightlines are short,
and there are too many closed doors for my taste. Makes me jumpy.” Suddenly Beckett broke into a sprint, caught up with Keisha, and said, “Hold up, Finn’s cousin, let me go first. The rest of you, stay covered until I check this out.”

Keisha bristled, but Beckett ignored her, and ignored Joley, as well, who said, “What is it, Beckett?”

“Beckett leads,” said Tesla as she put her hand on Keisha’s arm. “It’s not personal, it’s smart.”

“True,” said Beckett. “Though you’re clearly in the lead in the number of guys you keep on the line.”

“Jealous much?” Keisha asked.

“Whatever, tag-along,” said Beckett dismissively. She motioned for everyone to stand back and off to the side so only she was exposed as she gently pushed the levered door handle down. The door swung inward a few inches, but revealed only darkness.
Beckett moved forward—maybe she meant to close the door again, or even go inside, find a light switch, investigate further—and then there was a flash of light and a deafening explosion, a stifled scream from Beckett, who spun around with a grimace of pain on her face, and pandemonium ensued.

The breath exploded from Tesla’s lungs as Finn tackled her to the ground.
He scrambled up off of her while Bizzy screamed. Tesla saw Finn reach out and slam the door shut again, and they all heard the shooter race up the metal stairs away from them and into the physics building.