Run (The Tesla Effect #2) (20 page)

“What?” he asked, and then laughed too as she held up the mouse in her hands. “Is that a mouse in your hand or are you just glad to see me?”

Tesla gave him a stern look. “I will not make out in front of the children.”

“Hello??” Bizzy’s voice again, louder this time and clearly annoyed.

“I give up,” Finn said, starting toward the door of the time machine. “When you get back we are scheduling some alone time.”

“You mean, like a date?” Tesla asked, one brow raised skeptically.

“Exactly like a date.”

“Excellent,” she said, walking past him into the time machine. “You’d better head back up to the control room. No jumping out at the last minute this time and coming with me.”

Finn looked at her with such warmth and intimacy that she shivered. He nodded, saying just before he turned to go, “Be safe, Danger Girl.”

CHAPTER 23

“You WILL NOT DO THIS!” roared Greg Abbott, taking a step toward his wife, who neither moved nor blinked.

“I was not asking permission,” she said, the contrast between the helpless outrage in his voice and the calm assuredness in hers stark and telling.

Tesla watched her father from behind the garden shed where she hid—he was younger, certainly, but she could see how tired he was, and it made him seem even older than he would to her in eight years. He closed his eyes, took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, a gesture she had become quite familiar with over the years. It usually meant that either she or Max was in trouble.

Tesla had made the jump at noon, Sam having reluctantly confirmed that it was unlikely anyone would be in the lab again until after one o’clock in the afternoon. She had cautiously opened the door of the closet-sized time machine, seen no one, and made her way out into the hall. She was able to find her way to the closet Sam had cleaned out for her, and spent the next couple of hours reading
Ender’s Game
, with frequent interruptions of her concentration when she had to put the book down and peer out the door into the mostly deserted hallway at this end of the building, nervous about tonight but having no choice but to bide her time.

She finally decided to make her way out after the sun had gone down, but before Sam was due to report to the physics building for work. She did not want to accidentally run into him—who knew what kind of changes that might bring about? She’d only had one scare, as she’d rounded the first hallway after quietly closing the door of the abandoned custodial closet behind her. She’d come face-to-face with an older man, dressed in professional work clothes and a white lab coat. They’d both stopped dead in their tracks, stared at each other in surprise for a moment, and then he’d spoken sternly to her.

“Young lady, what are you doing in this part of the building?”

“I’m—I’m lost,” Tesla had said quickly. “I was looking for the faculty offices. I need my professor’s signature.”

“You are certainly lost,” he said briskly. “There are no offices here at all. Take the elevator to the fourth floor, cross the sky-walk, and you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“Okay, thanks,” she said, the sincerity in her voice unmistakable.

“And next time, get directions first,” he advised, a little more kindly. “No one is supposed to be here, especially students.”

Tesla had made her way out of the building and across campus as the last of the light from the sunset faded from the sky, turning all to a deep, dark blue. With her dark contacts and dyed hair she felt safe—inconspicuous—and she made her way over to Webber in Beckett’s clothes, feeling basically like she was a ninja. She had settled in to wait in her family’s backyard, deciding that when her father left for his odd, late-night walk, ending up at the crash-site where her mother had died, she would simply follow him.

“Tasya.”

Her father’s voice brought Tesla back to the moment, as her parents walked from the house into the backyard, clearly in mid-conversation.

When her mother merely raised her eyebrows in the light from the porch, Tesla felt a pang of sympathy for her father. She didn’t even know what this fight was about, but it seemed clear already that her mother had won.

“We’ve been over this. We agreed. We will not involve the children in our work.”

“I did not agree to this,” Tasya replied quietly. “It’s the perfect code. You know it is.”

“She’s not a
code
,” he spat back at her, his anger in full force, though he kept his voice low. “She’s our daughter. She’s a little girl. You don’t know where this could lead, but it will certainly be dangerous.”

Tasya cocked her head, considering the man she’d married. “You think I don’t love her.” It was not a question.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it’s true. You think there is one way to love your children—your way—and anything else is worth less.”

Greg Abbott’s silence was an affirmation and Tasya leaned in, angry now, too.

“Or perhaps it is that I’m a woman. If I were a man, my love for my children would not be questioned simply because I was driven by important work—no, in fact I would be admired, my children considered lucky.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Greg snapped. “I don’t have to defend myself against accusations of sexism, you know as well as I do that is not my position.”

“Do I?” Tasya asked, and for the first time Tesla heard an emotional quality in her mother’s voice. “I feel it every day, from everywhere and everyone. The expectations, the assessment. The judgment. And it
is
because I am a woman—because I am a mother. Many things have changed, Greg, but what a “good” mother should be, a “natural” mother who happily subsumes all to the joys of mothering…well, we might as well be living in our grandparents’ time. If you are honest, you will acknowledge that this is true—and that everyone is affected by it. Including you.”

Her bitterness was palpable.

“Tasya, of course I know these things are true,” Greg said. “And I have always, will always support your professional life, just as you support mine. I see us as partners in this—in everything. But this argument—what we’re actually talking about here—this isn’t an abstract cultural issue, it’s something you want to do with—no, something you want to do
to
our daughter, and neither of us can foresee the consequences. You can’t do it—I won’t let you. She’s so young!”

“She is young, Greg, but she is brilliant and I know you know this!” Tasya cried in a voice suddenly eager as she grabbed both her husband’s hands in her own, holding them tight, forcing him to look at her as she leaned in, putting everything she had into persuading him, tapping into his ambitions which, at least once, had matched her own.

“She is brilliant and she will be a pioneer, part of what we do—a part of history! You know what this could mean.”

“I only know that these are your ambitions. Not hers,” Greg said, gently removing his hands from Tasya’s.

“And where have your ambitions gone?” Tasya countered, her voice cold.

Tesla sucked her breath in as if she had been punched in the stomach, an exact echo of her father’s response a mere eight feet from where she crouched in the shadow of the little wooden building.

“I suppose, compared to yours, my ambitions must seem a little tame. Hardly ambitions at all,” he said softly.

“You could change that,” Tasya said, placing the flat of her hand against his chest, at once intimate and cautioning. “We could move forward on this together.”

Greg Abbott looked at his lovely wife, the depth of intelligence behind her moss-colored eyes, the Slavic cheekbones, the beautiful, full mouth that had just begun to curve upward in a smile that suggested satisfaction.

“You’ll find another way,” he said simply, turning to walk back into the house as her hand fell away from him in the dark. “You will not do this, and that’s the end of it.”

Tesla continued to watch her mother after Greg Abbott returned to the house. Of course her mother was fascinating to her, she acknowledged. She remembered so little about her, and this was such a gift, to see her and hear her voice. But it was also disturbing—to have this intimate knowledge of her mother’s pain, her frustrated dreams, even the dissatisfactions of her parents’ marriage. In some ways, Tesla wished she did not have such access, didn’t feel these mixed feelings of sympathy for her mother, complicated by wondering if perhaps the reason Tesla had so few memories of the woman was because she had been so focused on her work. And complicated yet again by Tesla’s frank recognition that Tasya was right—that dilemma would not exist for a man.

Tasya sat down on the edge of the sandbox she had built for her children and produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her pocket.

Huh
, Tesla thought.
My mom smoked.

As Tasya sat there smoking, elegant and contemplative in the faint light from the house, her lithe form and the slow, graceful movement of drawing on the cigarette and moving her somewhat limp hand away again, lifting her chin up and blowing smoke at the stars, Tesla watched her as if she were a glamorous film star in some old black and white movie: larger than life, impossibly beautiful, perfectly lit, sophisticated and tragic.

She suffered, and her suffering was a travesty for which she was not responsible. The story was too familiar, too ripe for reading in the iconic act of a beautiful woman, alone and smoking, a man refusing her permission, a world composed of obstacles. Tesla knew that story, as everyone knows that story, and in an instant, though she made no conscious decision, Tesla knew she would write her own ending.

CHAPTER 24

Tasya ground what was left of her cigarette beneath her heel, then carefully picked up the extinguished butt and went inside. She came back out, however, in two and a half minutes, and Tesla watched her get in the car and drive away.

Panic set in.
She’s in the car—it’s too early, but what if I don’t see her again until it’s too late? Should I go now, find the spot on Pinewood Lane where she dies, and not wait for Dad
? She didn’t know what to do. She was paralyzed. She felt the adrenaline, the fear, the indecision, torn between her parents, between her promises to her friends, between acting and passively accepting her fate.
How can I know
? she thought, and then remembered that Sam had asked this very question and she had answered him with a calm certainty that seemed like a joke now.
All we can do is our best
, she thought bitterly.
But what is my best
?

She heard, or felt a sound—a movement—directly behind her at the exact instant she heard the voice, and her heart was in her throat as she spun around.

“You’re not going after her?” Sebastian Nilsen asked quietly, a slight sneer on his face, his empty hands hanging down by his sides.

Her fight-or-flight response was in high gear, and Tesla put every bit of self-control she had into doing neither, instead answering the man who stood in the shadows before her.

“No. Why would I?” She was amazed by how calm her voice sounded.

“We both know what’s going to happen in…about an hour,” he said smoothly, glancing down at his watch. “She’s going to die. Isn’t that why you’re here? To stop it?”

“No,” Tesla said quickly. “It’s not my place to stop it. I’m here to witness it.”

“How ethical of you,” Nilsen said smoothly. “If one can call watching your own mother die a horrible death and doing nothing to stop it ‘ethical.’”

“You don’t know the meaning of the word,” Tesla spat.

Nilsen chuckled. “And you don’t know many, many things.”

“What do you want?” Tesla asked.

“Oh, just saying hello to an old friend. I was disappointed that you didn’t stick around, you know, the last time we saw each other—and you’ll have to let me in on how you accomplished that, by the way. Still, it’s been quite interesting these last few months—I’ve learned quite a lot, you know.”

“Yeah, whatever. I’m gonna go now,” Tesla said, taking a step back away from him.

“Oh, but we’re just getting reacquainted,” he said. “I think you should stay. In fact, I insist.” His eyes held Tesla’s, his hand slowly reaching back behind him, underneath the hem of the barn-jacket he wore, but Tesla moved faster; her left hand flipped open her messenger bag, darted inside, and closed firmly around the small canister of pepper spray Lydia had given her last summer. She pulled it out, swift and sure, the back of her hand grazing Schrödinger’s soft fur. The mouse, startled, leaped to her sleeve, the tiny claws of his feet embedded in the fabric of her shirt. Tesla’s index finger found the spray nozzle. She twisted the canister deftly in her palm and brought it straight out in front of her, pointed directly at Nilsen’s face, and she pressed it firmly, sending a perfectly aimed stream of liquid into his face just as he pulled a gun from the back of the waistband of his pants.

He dropped the gun to the ground with a muffled cry of pain and fell to one knee, both hands over his face, as Tesla stepped back to avoid getting any of the airborne particulates in her own eyes, vaguely aware that the mouse had shimmied up her arm and sat quivering, perched low on her shoulder.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, or what you want from me, but I’m afraid your plans aren’t going to work out,” Tesla said, watching him struggle to his feet, his eyes red and swollen and streaming, snot burbling from his nose as he tried to breathe. She glanced at the ground in front of him, saw the gun, knew she should step forward and pick it up, but she didn’t. She couldn’t.

Nilsen managed to speak, though the rasping sound of it was painful to hear. Tesla tried not to imagine the insidious creep of the toxic spray, filling his eyes and nose and mouth, running into his ears and down his throat, burning everything in its path.

“You little idiot,” he gasped, and then paused to spit the foul taste from his mouth. “I’m not trying to impede you. We both know you have your part to play. Your father is certainly going to play his.” He stooped to pick up his gun, wiping at his eyes with the sleeves of his jacket.

“I don’t understand,” Tesla said. “You keep hinting at things, implying horrible things about my father, but if you’re trying to tell me something, it’s not working because
I don’t know what you’re talking about
.”

“No,” Nilsen said softly—sadly, even. “You don’t, do you?”

He stood facing her, his gun held loosely in his hand, pointed at the ground in front of him, not quite a threat, but the threat of a threat implicit in its presence. “But has it occurred to you that we might want the same thing?”

Tesla took an involuntary step backward, and his hand with the gun came up, matching her movement. She stopped, and the gun stopped, but it was now pointed at her.

“There’s no way we want the same things,” she said, but her voice wavered, uncertain. “You’ve only ever wanted to hurt my family.”

Nilsen raised the gun higher by a tiny fraction, but of course Tesla saw it, registered it’s three degree incline from its position a second earlier, and she instinctively took another step back, only to have her heel catch on an exposed root that brought her suddenly to the ground, landing hard on her back. Shocked by the sudden fall she lay there, wide-eyed as she looked at Nilsen, who slowly lowered the gun, turned, and walked toward the woods away from Tesla, into the night.

Before she could even begin to figure out what had just happened—not to mention where and why Nilsen was going—Tesla heard the front door of the house close, and she cursed herself.
Damn it! He’s gone out the front, not the back. Dad’s going to walk under the streetlights, and I can’t be seen
. She had no choice now: she would have to cut through the woods and find the spot where her mother would die, without being able to follow Greg Abbott there.

Bracing her hands on the ground to get back on her feet, Tesla heard a small squeak by her foot and looking over saw Schrödinger, on the ground, as if he’d been flung there when she fell. His tail was bent, a sharp right angle turned awkwardly a half inch from its tip.

“Oh, baby, did I crush you? Is your tail broken?” she said, gently scooping him up. His black eyes shone, his whiskers twitched as she brought him up to her face. He seemed okay, standing up on his hind legs to peer at her, but his injury reminded her to stow him in her bag and leave it in the shed, as Beckett had advised.

Things were not, by any stretch of the imagination, going as planned, and the whole nightmarish event that would change all their lives had not yet even begun.

Tesla ran hard, past the last house at the end of the street and through high, unmown grass that was already winter-brown and brittle. She was in the trees now, but it didn’t slow her down since the trees were mostly pines, with little underbrush, and spaced far enough apart that she could see where she was going well enough in the gathering dusk. Her breath came in short gasps, but not from the physical exertion; her head was buzzing, she teetered on the edge of panic, the only thought in her head:
I’m too late
. She had promised herself and the others that she wouldn’t intervene, but here she was, racing to that horrible spot in the woods, racing to that very moment when her mother’s life would end, and despite what she had told everyone, including herself and Sebastian Nilsen, bearing witness was not at all what she wanted. Every particle of her being was screaming for her to act, and a nagging voice said, “That’s what Nilsen was talking about. He wants you to act, too.”

She cut through the wooded area just to the right of Pinewood Lane, a narrow, winding road that offered a shortcut between the university and the neighborhood her family lived in, as quick, unbidden images, fragments of memories, surfaced, the terrain suddenly familiar, the panic opening long-shut doors in her mind, her fear, above all, a catalyst in this moment.
I’ve been here before. I know where they are
.

“Faster!” she hissed out loud in the darkness, until she realized that there was some kind of illumination ahead, and slowed, suddenly cautious, her heart beating madly.

Tesla crept forward, her outstretched hand touching the trunks of successive trees as she moved toward the light, her footfalls silent on the bed of pine needles that carpeted the ground. She stopped the instant she registered the silhouetted shapes of two people crouched in the woods—was one of them her father? Whoever they were, they silently observed the couple who stood arguing on the winding blacktop fifty-two feet from where Tesla stood. The couple was illuminated by the headlights from a stationary car that sat another thirty feet beyond them. The layered scene was surreal. It was as if she had come into a theater, and now stood behind the audience, bathed in darkness, as they watched the brightly lit stage and the actors who played out a scene in full view.

“Tasya, wait!” a man’s voice called, but the woman in the middle of the road turned and walked away from the car, away from the man who now jogged a few steps to catch her.

Tesla sucked in a quick breath, shocked to recognize Sebastian Nilsen—younger than the Nilsen she had just left—as he called out to her mother.

“You have to hear me out!”

Tasya stood in the unforgiving glare of the headlights, having stopped suddenly at the sound of Nilsen’s voice. She vibrated with fury, her hair flung outward in a glossy fan as she spun toward him. “I have to do
nothing
!”

Tesla closed her eyes as she heard her mother speak, her voice choked with emotion, her accent more pronounced than usual.
Were these her last moments?

“You know I’m right,” Sebastian Nilsen insisted as he walked quickly to her and laid a hand on her shoulder, the gesture at once threatening and possessive.

“I know nothing of the kind,” Tasya shot back, jerking her shoulder out of his grasp. “We worked well together once, but
you
are the one who made the situation impossible. Your ego got in the way, and you stole my work—you
stole
from me! There is no going back, Bas. You must accept this.”

“I accept nothing!” he said, his anger matching hers, any trace of supplication in his voice now completely gone. “That work was as much mine as it was yours. You cut me out—I had a right to that work, just as I have a right to what you now have hidden away at the university!”

“You have no rights, to me or mine!” Tasya snapped. “I’ve done what I had to do to protect everything from you. You’ll never have what you want.”

Nilsen stared at her, then both of his hands were on her upper arms and he pulled her roughly toward him, bent over her and kissed her hard, on the mouth, her spine curved as she tried to move her head back, out of his reach.

Sudden movement among the figures hidden in the trees caught Tesla’s attention, and she crept forward on silent feet, refusing to make her presence known, even now hovering between acting and merely watching. She had to
know
, but could she live with just that? Was it enough to simply understand what had happened on this night?

The shorter of the two figures hiding in the woods in front of Tesla reached out as the taller one moved suddenly, as if propelled forward. “Greg—no!” Jane Doane whispered sharply.

Tesla was now within six feet of them, her attention drawn to this second struggle, only vaguely aware that Tasya had ripped herself from Nilsen’s embrace and slapped him across the face, the sharp sound of the impact ringing in the unnatural stillness of the night.

“You go too far, Bas. You always do.” Tasya’s voice was heavy with contempt.

“We should be together, and you know it,” Nilsen replied, his smooth, deep voice quavering with passion long kept in check.

Tasya laughed, a sound of genuine amusement that struck a more ominous note in the night than anything yet had done. Jane and Greg Abbott sensed this as well, Tesla realized, as they both froze at the sound and then Jane reached inside her jacket and withdrew a handgun from her shoulder holster.

It was only then, when the gun appeared, that a third, much smaller shadow that had yet to move or make a sound stirred just to the right and slightly behind Greg Abbott. Tesla’s eyes went right to the small figure and she forgot how to breathe.

Her younger self—Tesla, as a little girl. She was here, with Greg and Jane.

I was there when my mother died
, Tesla thought, stunned.
How is that possible?

Tasya’s laughter still rang in the silence, and she realized immediately it was the worst possible thing she could have done. Nilsen’s face changed in an instant, from love and longing to viciousness, and without a word he grabbed Tasya’s wrist and began to drag her toward the car.