Run (The Tesla Effect #2) (7 page)

“I guess I have to figure that out. There are some things my dad is hiding, about my mom. I honestly don’t think anything can go right until I get some answers. I don’t know what the consequence might be for trying to figure this stuff out, but I believe it’s the right thing to do. Beyond that,” she finished, “I have no idea.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “I’ll do what I can to help. But you’re going to have to deal with whatever is happening at home—with your dad, and with the asshats. Unless you want me to jump back with you and beat them up?”

“That would be interesting,” Tesla laughed, relieved that they were still friends, amused that it did not occur to him that he was talking in part about himself.

“So, how long are you staying—and where?”

Oh. Right
, Tesla thought. Obviously she would need Sam’s help—again.

“I don’t know,” she evaded. “That’s vague, I know, but I want to try to find out more about my mom’s work. That’s likely where or how I’ll find Nilsen, too. So I’m staying a while. And yeah, I’ll need a place to crash.”

With Sam standing beside the motorcycle she sat on, they were almost exactly the same height, and Sam’s soulful black eyes looked intently into hers. “You know I’d let you stay with me, but I don’t know how I’d pull that off,” he admitted. “You’ve seen the house—it’s small, and even though my parents both work, they do come home.”

“That’s okay, really,” she hastened to assure him. “I was thinking maybe I could figure out how to hide in the bathroom at the library when they were closing, or something.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Sam said. “We might be able to do better than that.”

“Yeah? How?”

“You might be able to stay at the lab,” he said slowly, but as he warmed to the idea, his voice picked up speed. “Nobody knows that place at night better than me. I know where all the security cameras are and—more importantly—where they aren’t. But Tesla, it won’t be fancy,” he warned, seeing the excitement dawning on her face. “I’m talking utility closets and stuff.”

“No, I don’t care, that’s great!” she said, bouncing on the seat a little.

“I can take you there tonight,” he said. “You’ll want some supplies, though. I have a sleeping bag you can borrow. We’ll stop by my house for a minute. We’ll get some food, a toothbrush—you know, the essentials. You like peanut butter, right?”

“Yeah, I like peanut butter. Thanks, Sam.”

Later that night, after a day of riding, trying to stay mostly out of sight, and grabbing a quick bite at a taco truck in the next town over, they headed to the physics building on campus for Sam’s night shift. When he had successfully ushered Tesla inside, beyond the reach of the security cameras, they cleared a utility closet that Sam said no one ever used anymore. It had very little in it besides some ancient cloth-rope mops and an old-school metal bucket on wheels with rollers to squeeze the nasty water out, and some shelves with dusty cleaning products.

Sam insisted on sweeping the floor before Tesla laid her sleeping bag out and settled in. “Okay, well that’s as good as we can make it for now,” he said, standing in the doorway with hands on hips as he surveyed her kingdom.

“Sam, seriously. It’s great. Much appreciated. Really, it’s cleaner and neater than my room at home.” She laughed, then, and said, “I’m serious!” when she saw the skeptical look on his face. “I’m a horrible slob.”

“Okay, well, at least you’ll be warm, even though you’re sort of sleeping on the floor, and the bathroom is right down the hall. And there’s no security at all in this area, the labs are all on the other side of the building.”

“I know, Sam, you’ve told me like twelve times.” She yawned.

“Yeah, I can take a hint,” he said, and turned to go.

“Sam,” she said, impulsively moving into the doorway, and when he turned toward her she was much, much closer than he had expected. He was surprised, and a little taken aback.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks,” she said softly, leaning in, and then kissed him on the cheek. He backed out, without a word, and softly closed the door behind him, wondering why she had such a wicked look on her face, why she had laughed after that little kiss—a kiss so chaste he might’ve been her grandfather, for God’s sake.

CHAPTER 9

The next morning, Tesla swung her right leg over the motorcycle and settled into the seat, her helmet already on, and put one arm around Sam’s waist as the engine roared to life.

Sam had finished his rounds on the nightshift and knocked softly on Tesla’s door—the custodial closet door—and found her up, washed, dressed and ready to go, eating a peanut butter sandwich from the supplies they’d picked up at his house and reading from the worn paperback of
Ender’s Game
he’d left outside the door during the night.

“Morning,” he said, grinning to see her leaning up against the wall, book in hand. “Great novel, isn’t it?”

“Just started it,” she said thickly through the cloying peanut butter and bread she was still chewing.

She put the book down, took a swig from a water bottle, and stood up, dressed again in the black tunic, leggings and boots.

“So what are we doing today?” asked Sam.

Tesla had thought about that quite a lot through the night, sleeping only in fits and starts, oddly anxious. She needed to spend some time around her mother, needed to gain some understanding of the life her mother had been leading before she was killed, if she hoped to ever find out what had actually happened. But while her mother was unlikely—to say the least—to suspect that her daughter, years older, was in the vicinity watching her after having traveled back in time, still Tesla knew that her hair and her eyes were unusual enough that her mother might notice her if she was in range, and that simply could not happen.

“I need a disguise,” she said firmly.

“Oh,” said Sam. He had been taken aback, though he might have expected this. “Like what?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that. The sleeping bag and snacks you got from your house are great, but I need to go to the store for a couple of things, and then—if you don’t mind, I really hate to ask—can I borrow some clothes? I don’t have enough money to buy much, and, well, I can’t keep wearing this.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t really sound like a disguise,” said Sam.

Tesla grinned, twin dimples indented in her cheeks and Sam smiled despite himself, then sighed in resignation. They both knew he’d do whatever she wanted.

“Oh, wait,” she said. “Is your house safe during the day?”

“Safe? You mean, are my parents gone?”

“Yes, you know that’s what I mean,” she said, stepping closer to him in her excitement. “Are they at work, the coast clear, the cops not on the scent, so we’re free to engage in this…skullduggery?”

“
Skullduggery
? What does that even mean?” he asked.

“No idea—it’s one of Max’s words.”

“Yes, other than my job—which I am happily off from today—we are free to engage in…whatever you want to engage in.”

Sam waited outside, at Tesla’s insistence, while she went into the enormous discount super-store. He couldn’t imagine what sort of disguise she thought she’d be able to put together, but for now he was content, leaning up against his bike in the parking lot, soaking up a little warmth from the November sunshine that would fade all too quickly into snow in just a few weeks.

Thirty minutes later he watched Tesla walk toward him across the crowded parking lot, spotting her the moment she emerged from the double glass doors that slid open for her. Her burnished hair blew around her shoulders. He saw the flash of her smile, the glitter of those eyes he always spotted from so many yards away, and he wondered if it was just him, or if everyone saw her as clearly, as sharply as he did.

“What?” she asked, as soon as she was close enough to be heard without shouting.

He shook his head a little, realizing he’d been staring at her for the several minutes it had taken her to reach him.

“What?” he repeated, like an idiot.

“I don’t know—you’re looking at me funny.”

“Maybe you’re funny looking,” he said, turning and climbing onto the bike.

“Oh, wow, that’s hilarious,” she deadpanned, climbing on behind him and settling her shopping bag between their bodies before donning her helmet. “Your sense of humor is just slightly less funny than my dad’s.”

Sam smiled, not the least bit insulted. “Find what you need?”

“Yes I did.”

She sounded smug, and it worried Sam—as much as he could be worried at the moment, with the sun shining on his back, Tesla on his bike with her arms wrapped around his waist. He kicked the bike into gear and took off, turning left out of the parking lot with the wind in his face, a blue sky over their heads.
Like there was no tomorrow
, as his dad was fond of saying. And just for a moment he believed it, believed that this day, this mixed-up timeline, was the only reality and that he could hang onto it, hang onto her, without tomorrow spoiling it all. They sped down the road toward his parents’ house in the poorest part of town, following the ribbon of road while the dead leaves swirled in the wake they left behind.

Tesla looked up, her eyes still watering, and blinked, waiting for things to come into focus in the still-steamy bathroom mirror. As her vision cleared, she found herself looking at the reflection of the peeling wallpaper and rusted rim of the shower head in the edges of the mirrored medicine cabinet in Sam’s family’s cramped bathroom, her heart pounding, avoiding her own face in the center of the mirror.

She closed her eyes, listened to the sound of the blood pumping inside of her, breathed once, deeply—in, out—and then she looked.

The girl in the mirror had long, wet tendrils of dark, mink-brown hair already kinking up into spiraling curls. She was pale—alarmingly so, given the dark hair framing her white-white skin, but the dark brown eyes staring back at her confirmed that she was, in fact, a brunette.

Tesla giggled nervously, and clapped a hand over her mouth.
Oh my god
, she thought.
It worked. I don’t look anything like me
. She’d been inspired last night, sleep deprived, her thoughts wandering, wondering how she could possibly get anywhere near her mother with her unusual looks, wondering what kind of a disguise, what kind of a costume—and then she’d known, all in an instant. After all, Halloween had been only days ago, the big stores still had the remains of all the costumes and accessories, including cosmetic contact lenses, and a bottle of hair color could be found anywhere. At the store she’d grabbed the first dark brown do-it-yourself hair color she saw, and over in the clearance aisle where the Halloween stuff was piled in random fashion, she’d found the lenses and, after reluctantly passing over a pair that would give her yellow cat’s eyes, with narrow, vertical slits for pupils—how fun would that be?—she’d settled on brown. Brown on brown, to go unnoticed, to slide by in the crowd, to be, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

It was perfect.

Still, she hadn’t really known—she couldn’t possibly have imagined—exactly how perfect it would be. She looked like a completely different person.

She opened the door, wearing the slightly baggy, very worn guys’ Levi’s Sam had lent her, cinched up with a cracked black leather belt to hold them on her hips, along with a black T-shirt that was too small for him in the shoulders, and tight across her breasts. She carried a dark green flannel shirt to put over it when they left the house, and walked into the living room.

Sam glanced up, expectant, and his mouth actually dropped open.

Laughing—she couldn’t help it—Tesla practically crowed. “I know, right? It’s amazing, I look like somebody else. No one would ever recognize me, not even at home!”

Sam got up and walked over to her while she gloated, looking intently at her eyes, then panning out to her hair, her boyish, nondescript clothes, and then back to her eyes. “You’re right,” he said slowly. “You don’t look like you at all. This will actually work.”

“I knew it would! You doubted me, but I
knew
.” She spun around, for once completely unselfconscious, free and confident and utterly unfamiliar to herself. It was heady stuff, and she could barely contain it. When she stopped, a little dizzy and still laughing, she grabbed Sam quickly by the arms as the room continued to move, and without thinking leaned in and kissed him on the mouth, hard, and then backed away, breathless.

“What was that for?” he asked after swallowing once to make sure his voice would come out normal, or at least as normal as he could make it.

Her arms raised, a too-innocent look on her face, newly-darkened eyebrows arched, she asked, “What do you mean? Should I say I’m sorry?”

He scowled at her then, not wanting to be the butt of her joke, the boy she knew liked her—as if that somehow gave her permission to use those feelings when it suited her. He took the two steps that brought him right into her face, grabbed her upper arms as she’d just done to him, but his hands circled her arms fully, and instead of moving his face to hers he brought her in toward him, a quick, hard pull, and kissed her back, the frustration of his feelings for this girl, the physical ache he felt when he was near her—hell, when he thought of her—all laid bare in his mouth on hers. The kiss lasted longer than he’d intended, and shorter than he wanted, his lips parting hers, and then he pushed her away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, not caring if she saw that he was shaking.

“No, you shouldn’t say you’re sorry,” he said hoarsely. “Should I?”

Tesla looked at him for a long moment, breathing just as hard as he was. “I guess we’re even,” she said stiffly.

He regretted it instantly, the rough way he’d held her and crushed her mouth under his in anger, but he couldn’t say so; it had become unbearable to him to play the fawning puppy, following her around and wishing for something neither of them felt he deserved. He wouldn’t do it any longer.

Sam searched her eyes, tried to gauge her thoughts, and came up empty, unable to penetrate the dark layers she hid behind, and he realized he hated this look on her.

“I guess we are,” he said finally, walking back to the threadbare sofa and sitting down again. “So what’s the plan?”

Thirty minutes later the dark-haired girl and boy left the house and rode away on the motorcycle, the dirt driveway leaving a grayish cloud behind them, filling the air with the dry smell of dust and engine exhaust. The street became quiet, the few houses either shuttered up and vacant, or empty for the day as their owners toiled away at minimum wage jobs. The only sound was a crow cawing in the distance as the man stepped out, finally, from the shadow of the house next door to Sam’s. His look was thoughtful, studied. He was clearly a serious person, used to thinking through whatever confronted him, weighing his options and following, mentally, all of the possible paths open to him before deciding which one he would actually take. His mind raced, considering all that he had seen, all of his relevant experience, and the girl and boy he’d followed from the physics lab.

The dark-haired boy and the redheaded girl, who believed her youth and a cheap dye job would keep her safe.

The man turned and began the slow walk to town, having dismissed the taxi he’d followed them in the moment they arrived on the boy’s rundown street. There was nothing unusual in the man’s carriage or demeanor, but something disturbing about the eyes, an unusual intensity. The lids were held open too wide in a startling, obsessive kind of look that, thankfully, no one got close enough to see.