Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1) (8 page)

CHAPTER
8

“What do we do with her?” asked a girl’s voice.

“Beats me,” replied another girl.
“I don’t know why he brought her here in the first place.”

“He brought her here because she needed sanctuary, and a doctor—a doctor who would not involve the police.
As you both well know,” said a third woman who was clearly neither as young as the first voice, nor as snotty as the second.

Tesla lay perfectly still, her eyes closed.
She did not know where she was, or who these people were, but she felt, oddly enough, okay with that.

“Finn
should be back by now, shouldn’t he?” asked a man’s voice, one that Tesla thought sounded vaguely familiar. “Perhaps I’ll just pop over there, see if he needs anything.”

“No,” said the woman who sounded older and more authoritative than any of the others.
“We’ll give him a little more time. Besides, if we decide to send someone, Joley, it’ll be Beckett, not you.” There was a faint, but discernable trace of amusement in her last comment.

Joley
, Tesla thought. A
nd Beckett. I’m at Finn’s house?
Her forehead wrinkled in concentration as she remembered the explosion she’d seen on the TV at Angelo’s, her race home, Finn’s urgent whispers in her ear, the powerful hands that had grabbed and thrown her across the living room and the unbelievable pain that had exploded in her arm and shoulder.

“I’m not entirely useless, you know,” Joley said, and Tesla realized by the sound of his footsteps and voice that he had moved closer.
“Look sharp—she’s awake,” he said, and everyone fell silent.

Tesla opened her eyes, and the blurry details of the room came slowly into focus.
It felt like the old Victorian house, but this was a room she hadn’t seen at the party. She lay on a sofa with some kind of soft beige upholstery, a pillow under her head. To the left of the sofa was a fireplace with a huge oak mantle, covered with framed photographs and candles. Joley stood with one hand on the mantle as he looked at her. Opposite the sofa were two overstuffed, leather club chairs, Beckett in one with that Goth girl, Bizzy, perched on the arm. An older woman with gray streaks in her brown hair, cut in a plain, practical bob, sat in the other. The woman peered at Tesla over the tops of her glasses.

“How do you feel?” she asked, not unkindly, but without a smile.

Tesla swallowed once, and licked dry lips before she could answer. “Okay. Good, actually.”

The woman smiled then, briefly.
“Yes, the doctor gave you some pain medication. That was a nasty break, clean through. The doctor set it, said you’d be fine. A few weeks in a cast.”

Tesla was content to say nothing.
She thought, suddenly, that she should feel awkward, reclined on a sofa in front of these people she didn’t know, that maybe she ought to sit up, but she couldn’t really make herself care, let alone actually do it. Painkillers, indeed.

“Is my dad—” Tesla began, but stopped, not quite sure what
question she wanted to ask.

“Finn has gone to Dr. Abbott’s lab to see what he can find out,” the older woman said.
“He brought you here about,” she paused and glanced at the clock ticking away on the mantle, “about two and a half hours ago.”

“Did I go to the hospital?” Tesla asked.
“I don’t remember.”

“That’s because you fainted,” said Bizzy.
She spoke cheerfully, her short, jet-black hair cut in uneven chunks and spiked all over her head. She stared at Tesla with undisguised interest, her eyes heavily rimmed in black. “Finn carried you here. We have—we found a doctor who makes house calls.”

“Yes, it was all very romantic,” said Beckett pleasantly enough.
“Finn burst in through the door, the damsel in distress in his arms in the classic movie pose, wan and pathetic in a dead faint, or an attack of the vapors, or whatever it’s called.”

Tesla opened her mouth to retort, but stopped.
She felt like she hadn’t even been there, so how could she argue? Maybe she
had
been pathetic.

“Very dramatic, Beckett,” said the older woman from her chair.
“Though I’m not sure I’d describe a person who has passed out from the pain of a serious injury as ‘pathetic.’” She turned back to Tesla. “I am Lydia, by the way. We haven’t actually met yet. I own this house, and rent rooms to these young people.”

“Nice to meet you,” Tesla replied.

“Finn said you surprised a burglar at your house,” Joley said.

“I guess,” said Tesla.
“Whoever it was threw me into a table and ran out.”

“Yeah, Finn said that’s how you broke your arm,” said Bizzy.
“He said you were trying to find Dr. Abbott—your dad—‘cause you’d seen the explosion on TV.”

“Do you know what happened?” Tesla asked. “At the physics building? My dad works there, he has an office and lab, and I couldn’t tell from the news shot where the fire was, and he wasn’t home when we were there—” Tesla stopped in midsentence as she heard the rising panic in her own voice.
She waited a moment, her eyes closed, and breathed deep before she continued. “I can’t believe all this happened at the same time—who would break into our house? Thank God Max is spending the night with Dylan.” She struggled to sit up. “I really can’t stay here, I need to see Max—and I have to find my dad.”

“Because the first time you went looking for him turned out so well?” Beckett asked.

“Excuse me, do I know you?” Tesla responded, sitting up at last but feeling weird, slightly addled from the painkillers. The low tone of her voice had a decided edge. “He might be in trouble, Beckett, and I’m not going to just sit here and do nothing.” Tesla’s chin jutted out and her eyes blazed blue-green fire.

Beckett sat, slouched and relaxed.
She fairly oozed condescension.

“Understandable, of course,” Lydia announced.
“But you’ll get better results this time if you think before you act, my dear. As for your brother, might I suggest that you text his friend’s mother, ask her to keep the news of the explosion and your, ah, accident, away from him for tonight, and then talk to him about it tomorrow when you have more information?”

Tesla agreed. There was no sense scaring Max at this point, he’d only worry and wonder, much as she was doing now, and there was nothing he could do. She might as well let him enjoy his sleepover at Dylan’s, where she knew he was safe. Everyone waited while she sent the text, painstakingly tapping the touchscreen of her cell that she balanced on her knees, her left hand completely useless.

“Should Finn be back by now?” Tesla asked suddenly. “How long has he been gone?”

“That’s in the category of ‘need to know,’” Beckett said with a smirk, but her mouth snapped shut abruptly when Lydia looked at her.

“We’ve been following the news and so far no injuries have been reported. No one can get into the building while the explosion is investigated, but Finn has a press pass that allows him some access, particularly on campus. He went right to your father’s lab once you were safely here and the doctor was on the way,” Lydia said. She indicated with a wave of her hand Tesla’s arm, which was encased in a brand new, neon-turquoise cast all the way up to her elbow.

“I picked out the color,” said Bizzy with a grin.
“It matches your eyes. You know, together. Blue and green.”

Beckett rolled her eyes.

Tesla paused and took in the odd group that surrounded her. She remembered well the party a few days ago and now this bizarre turn of events. Was it all, somehow, connected? She had to ask.

“Who, exactly, are you people?”

The other four exchanged brief looks with one another, and then Lydia spoke.

“Of course you’ve begun to wonder,” she said.
“We had hoped to avoid this—your father, in particular, didn’t want you to know—but it seems we have no choice now. It begins with Elizabeth, who is one of your father’s prized students. She is his research assistant, a position that has never been given to an undergraduate. That should indicate his level of confidence in her current abilities, as well as her potential as a scientist.”

“Elizabeth?” Tesla asked, confused.
She looked at Joley, who pointed at Bizzy.

Bizzy grinned from her perch on the arm of Beckett’s chair and waved.
Her spiky hair and heroin-chic eyeliner, the nose stud and row of tiny eyebrow barbells, her underfed, hipster body did not shout ‘physicist,’ Tesla thought, but you never knew.

“So we are, in a sense, familiar with your father and his work,” Lydia said.

“Okaaay.” Tesla drew the word out. She didn’t get it.

“Everyone here has different areas of interest, of expertise,” Lydia continued patiently.
“Finn is a journalist, Joley is going into law, Elizabeth is a physicist, and Beckett is in philosophy and comparative religions.”

“Really?”
Tesla glanced at Beckett, surprised by what seemed to her an odd fit.

“Yeah. Really,” Beckett assured her.

“I still don’t understand,” Tesla said. “How are you all involved with my dad, or with his work?”

“We weren’t until recently,” said Joley.
He stepped away from the fireplace and began to pace the room, no longer the laconic rich boy with a quirky love of sci-fi. His energy and sense of purpose were apparent for the first time. “Not all of us, at any rate. The situation has evolved, you might say, and Lydia has hand-picked each of her tenants. Bizzy was recruited—was offered a room here first. She started to work with your dad this past year, and recently—the last couple of months—we’ve all become interested in his project, for different reasons, and we’ve all moved in here. Now it seems other people have become interested in your dad’s work as well, and—well, that’s where we come in.”

“You’ve lost me,” Tesla said with complete candor.
“So Bizzy works in my dad’s lab, and talks to you guys about his current project.” Everyone nodded in unison, which would have been funny in other circumstances. “Joley’s in—what, pre-law? So he’s interested in the legal aspects of my dad’s work. Finn cares about the news-value, I suppose, and Beckett—” here Tesla paused and turned to Beckett herself. “Why do you care about this, exactly?”

“I’m interested in belief systems, particularly fundamentalism,” Beckett said, as if that explained it.

“And?” Tesla asked, her patience having worn thin.

“And, religious fundamentalism—you know, there is only one Truth, and only a select group of believers knows what it is—doesn’t really play well with experimental physics.
Or evolutionary biology, or most of the humanities, for that matter. I’m interested in those tensions, and how they get played out in the world.”

When Tesla just looked at her, no trace of comprehension on her face, Beckett spoke slowly, the insult apparent.
“Your dad’s work pisses a lot of people off.”

“Oh,” Tesla said.
“I guess I never thought—are you saying that someone—or some group—is out to get my dad?”

“That’s not clear yet,” Lydia said, “but tonight’s events would suggest that it is at the very least a strong possibility.”
Lydia watched Tesla to gauge her reaction to this.

“And you guys are—” Tesla began.

“Watching his back,” Bizzy finished triumphantly.

Tesla looked around the room.
“You have got to be kidding. The League of Extraordinary Undergrads?”

“Tesla, I know this is all new to you,” Lydia said kindly.
“But we have had your father under surveillance for quite some time now. And, I should add, you and your brother, more recently.”

Another surprise
, Tesla thought. “What, like—you guys watch us?”

“Only in the most unobtrusive way,” Lydia assured her.
“We need to know whether anyone else is watching you.”

“Don’t worry,” said Beckett snidely.
“It’s a pretty dull assignment—trust me.”

“Beckett,” Lydia said, once and without inflection, and the blonde fell silent immediately.
Apparently they didn’t mess with Lydia.

“And
is
anyone else watching us?” Tesla asked.

“Yes, but we believe it began only a few days ago,” Lydia said.
“We’re not sure yet who they are, or what their purpose might be or, even, if they’re connected to one another.”

“But we intend to find out, love,” Joley said.
He stopped at the far end of the couch where Tesla lay and looked at her kindly. “We tried to keep you out of it.”

“So, when we showed up at Bizzy’s birthday party—” Tesla began.

“We tried to get you to leave,” he said.

“And it wasn’t really my birthday,” Bizzy confided.
“We wanted to flush them out, whoever’s been watching you, make them feel like they’d never be noticed in a drunken crowd, see if they’d try to pump me for information.”