Nikki Tesla and the Fellowship of the Bling

by Jess Keating

  Mary.

  I jumped to my feet, pointing an accusing finger at the screen. In an instant, all the doubts I’d had about my father rose up in my throat.

  “You see?!” I shouted. “He is in on it!

  Grace’s eyes were fierce, but she didn’t make a move. The others shifted in their chairs, waiting for her to respond. Meanwhile, I was eyeballing the door, ready to make a run for it.

  Dad set the remote down. “I know how it looks,” he explained. “But you’re going to have to trust me here. I was the one who arranged for you to be here today, to break into my vault and steal the ring.”

  Instantly, my thoughts shot back to the cave. It had been programmed to respond to the sound of my voice. And that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland connection … How had he known I would remember him reading me that story?

  “Why?” Grace’s voice dropped and her knuckles turned white as she gripped the side of her chair. She kept sneaking glances at Mary on the screen. “Why try to kill us?”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill anyone. If I’d truly wanted any of you dead, I’ve had several chances.”

  A quiet murmur circled the room as the others reluctantly conceded the point. I wasn’t so sure though. Dad was unpredictable.

  He let that settle over us before continuing. “I had to see if my assumptions about you all were correct,” he said. “I’ve been following Nikki for years. From a distance, of course. I observed her strengths and her passions. And when she joined Genius Academy, I was happy to see she’d found some friends who would understand her.”

  I glared at him. “So getting us to steal the ring was a test? One you concocted because you decided you wanted to have me in your life again, out of nowhere.”

  “It’s been so hard watching from the sidelines,” he said. “I’ve seen you grow up without me, followed your progress at every school you attended or tutor you worked with. I know that I’ve caused you more trouble than I could ever apologize for. But it’s time, Nikki. Time for us to mend what’s broken between us.”

  Everybody else remained silent.

  “And why’s that, huh?” I demanded. My hands began to shake with anger. Pickles scurried down to them, checking my fingers. Poor thing probably thought I was turning into a ferret again. But this? There was no science involved at all.

  Just anger.

  “The man who kidnapped your friend wants that ring for himself,” Dad said. “And I need your help to stop him. I have a plan.” He lifted his head with a hint of pride. “But it’s going to take each of you for it to work.”

  “You want our help?!” I couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out. All this nonsense about working together and my broken heart about Mary’s kidnapping mingled together in a toxic mix of resentment.

  “Do I need to remind you why you’re even here? Underground and hiding?!” I demanded. “It’s because you blew up your laboratory seven years ago, remember? Because I do. The police found plans for an explosive that you were going to use to hurt people. And now you expect me and my friends to trust you?! You’re the reason Mary got kidnapped. She’s even on your screen right now. For all we know, you planned this whole thing!”

  I grabbed a glass of water and took an angry gulp, desperate to soothe my cracking, hoarse throat. I should have been embarrassed of his horrible past. But unlike every other time it had come up, this time telling the truth in front of everyone made me feel stronger.

  He straightened out his ruffled shirt. “I promise you—”

  “I don’t want your promises!” I said. And this is where everything went wrong.

  You see, there’s a rule about laboratories: You don’t touch anything if you don’t know what it is. Dad’s laboratory shelves were lined with beakers and jars filled with various colored liquids and who knows what else. I should have known better.

  But in my fit of anger, I didn’t set my glass down carefully on the table like I should have. Instead, I whirled around and smacked it down hard on the shelf by my elbow, next to some small beakers.

  Like I said, sometimes you do dumb things when you’re mad.

  The glass shattered, and I jerked my arm away to avoid getting cut, sending a beaker tumbling to the ground. The beaker smashed in the puddle of spilled water, and sizzling gray smoke erupted from the ground like a miniature geyser, shooting hot splatters through the air. It all happened so fast, I wasn’t able to dive in front of Grace before it was too late.

  “Ow!” she yelped. “What the heck, Nikki?!” Her mouth dropped open in shock as she cradled her wrist, where the chemicals had splashed her. She sucked in a fast breath, shaking her hand in pain. “Ow, ow, oww … !”

  Dad leaped from his chair and was at her feet within seconds. “Hold still,” he said. “The beaker had water-reactive material in it. Don’t touch it!”

  “Oh my God, Grace,” I said, rushing over and gripping her shoulder. I inspected her face for any other spatters or burns, but all the damage seemed to be on her wrist, where a quarter-sized splatter of red marks was blistering on her skin. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t even see!” The puddle of sizzling chemicals hissed beside me, but Leo quickly covered the whole mess with a thick towel he found on a nearby shelf.

  Dad pointed to Bert. “You. On the shelf beside the fridge. Find the mineral oil. It’s in a bottle with a blue lid,” he barked.

  Bert did as he asked and returned a few moments later, shoving a bottle into my father’s hands. Within a few minutes, Dad had bandaged up Grace’s wrist, and in the time it took to fix her up, my anger had shrunk from a lion’s roar to a kitten’s mew—I was embarrassed about my outburst.

  I’d messed up. Again.

  “I’m so sorry,” I repeated.

  Grace waved her good hand dismissively, but it was easy to read the leftover pain behind her tight smile. “It’s fine, Nikki. I know it was an accident.”

  I hugged her, furious with myself for such a stupid mistake. The guilt became even worse when my mind flashed to our last meeting with Martha. Back at the Academy, the whole team had thought I was distracted by the news that my dad was still alive, and here I was knocking over dangerous chemicals in his laboratory and hurting one of my best friends. No matter how much I tried to push my past away—to freeze it where it couldn’t hurt me—the ice of my memories kept cracking and shattering around me.

  Watching Dad tend to Grace’s injury didn’t make it any easier either. He spoke gently and kindly, and assured her that she’d be okay the whole time he worked.

  How could someone who had done such horrible things be so, well … nice?

  Usually, when I faced a tricky problem in the lab, I trusted my instincts. But what if my instincts were too … raw? Like the chemical reaction that had burned Grace’s arm, I felt sizzling and shaky in my own skin, and there was nothing I could use to neutralize it.

  When Grace was settled and bandaged, Dad wiped his hands on a clean towel and turned to me. He looked as emotionally exhausted as I felt, sending another twinge of doubt through me.

  “I know I have a lifetime of things to explain to you.” He slumped down his chair and leaned forward, letting his head hang down. “But let’s start with the ring. Okay?”

  His gentle demeanor made my ears burn with shame. Here, I was breaking beakers, while he stayed perfectly calm. I hadn’t realized it, but I’d been experimenting with those painful memories, and trying to bury the past in my laboratory drawers hadn’t exactly produced the results I’d been hoping for. If I wanted a different outcome, I would need to try something different. And that meant giving my dad a chance, just this once.

  “Okay,” I said, forcing myself to look him in the eye. “I’m listening.”

  When I was little, Dad used to tuck me in with a bedtime story every night. He’d do voices and try to skip pages to see if I’d notice (I always did), and when he was finished, I’d beg him to read me one more.

  I didn’t remember any of this until he started to speak in a strong, clear voi
ce. “Eight or nine years ago, I devised the ring’s technology. It started as simple curiosity. You all understand, of course.” He glanced up at the group. “Sometimes you experiment to see if a crazy idea will work. To find the limits of what’s possible.”

  Grace nudged me with her good arm and let out the smallest hint of a sour laugh. “Sound familiar?”

  I clamped my lips together and kept listening.

  “At first,” he continued, “it was just a pet project that allowed me to explore something new. There was very little research about cellular realignment out there, and none of it was promising. But my colleague Dr. Joseph Nolan encouraged me to continue. I thought he was trying to cheer me up, to convince me that my research wasn’t useless.” A soft smile crossed his face. “Of course, now I know better.”

  “So you got it to work,” Leo said. “Cellular realignment.”

  Dad nodded. “I had to get it wrong three hundred and sixty-eight times before I got it right though. It was the nanomachines, you see. They were crucial. Once I realized I could use them to commandeer your own cells and convince them to act as changeable stem cells, everything fell into place.”

  Leo glanced at me in wide-eyed amazement.

  “And that’s when things went south,” Dad said. “Nolan had been hanging around the lab while I was working. When I managed to finish the prototype, a ring, he started to turn. He had started out his career as a promising mind who wanted to help the world through technology. He was a little younger than me, and I think he saw me as a mentor early on. But he became sneaky and obsessed with his own cleverness. And soon, I caught him stealing bits of my research. He was trying to piece together how I’d harnessed cellular realignment. At that point I didn’t have a working prototype of the tech, but I was close.”

  “Whoa,” Bert said. “Some friend.”

  “Right.” Dad raised his eyebrows. “But we were friends for years. Because of that, I thought I could confront him. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. For him to be honest about what he was doing. And he was honest, all right.” Dad laughed bitterly.

  “What did he say?” Charlie asked. I tried not to take it personally that the team was hanging on to my dad’s every word. Like it or not, he was good at holding attention.

  “He said that he had a buyer.” Dad held up his hands in frustration. “He wanted to sell my ring’s technology to the highest bidder. Promised me we could work together and split the profit.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked bluntly. “I bet you could get a fortune for something like this.”

  Confusion clouded his face. “Because Nolan didn’t care what the tech would be used for. That it could be a weapon unlike any other. You turned into a ferret, Nikki, but in the wrong hands, a ring like this could turn anyone into a lethal monster. And a large number of the rings? Imagine what they could do for the military of a country at war …”

  He went to his desk, where he sifted through cream-colored folders until he found what he was looking for. “This is what the wearer can become, if they’re trained properly.” He dropped the folder onto my lap. “I’m sorry,” he added, pursing his lips together. “It’s not for the faint of heart.”

  I gingerly lifted the top flap and gasped at the first page inside. Black-and-white photos of vicious creatures screamed at me from the pages, blood as dark as ink dripping from their teeth. Animals with twisted jaws, thick, curving claws, and raggedy fur. The others clustered around me while Dad began to pace.

  “These don’t look like any animal I recognize,” Charlie whispered.

  “That’s because they’re not normal animals.” Dad’s face had paled. “My surveillance tells me Nolan has been experimenting to find out how far the tech can change the human body. There aren’t limits for a skilled user. A person wearing the ring can become any kind of monster they can imagine. If he sells it, a truly evil person could make an army of monsters.”

  I flipped through the images, my skin crawling more with every page turn. But something tugged at my attention even more than the horrific pictures. Why would one monster care about stopping another?

  It didn’t make sense.

  “So?” I said, slamming the folder shut. I ignored the harsh looks from the others, and stayed as calm as I could. All I wanted were answers. “The type of guy who makes plans to hurt innocent people and abandons his family wouldn’t care if his technology was used for war. Even if it meant monsters like this.”

  Dad sucked in a breath. “No, you’re right. That type of man wouldn’t blink at it.”

  Leo broke the silence that followed, trying to get us back on track. “So Nolan wanted to sell the ring as a weapon, and you said no.”

  “I did,” Dad confirmed. “I told him that there was no way I would hand over the prototype or any of my research. That he was on his own.”

  “What happened then?” Charlie chewed on her ragged fingernails as she spoke. “Did he freak out?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say he freaked out. He made it clear that he wasn’t going to stop his attempts to develop his own prototype. To sell to his buyer with or without me.” The first trace of regret appeared on his face, in the frown lines around his mouth. They were etched much deeper now than I remember them ever being.

  Grace clicked her tongue. “So what does this all mean for us, then?” she asked. “He’s got a buyer, but we’ve got the prototype with us. He can’t do anything as long as we’ve got it.”

  “That’s not exactly correct,” Dad said. “We’ve got my ring, but Nolan’s made one of his own. And he’s dangerously close to perfecting his technology. I’ve seen his research. He has all the pieces. He ambushed you on the ship to steal mine.”

  “Why would he need yours if he’s already got one?” I asked.

  Dad tilted his head. “If you had a ring worth billions, would you want someone running around with the same thing?”

  “He wants to wipe out his competition.” Leo let his chin fall into the palm of his hand.

  Dad nodded. “At any cost, yes. As long as my prototype exists, Nolan knows his isn’t worth as much money to those who want to make it a weapon. And he’ll do anything to protect its value. Which is why he can’t be allowed to go through with the sale. We have to get his ring before it’s too late.”

  “Wait.” I held up my hand. “You want us to steal his ring? We’re supposed to be thinking about Mary here.”

  To my surprise, it was Grace who answered. “We can’t leave it there, Tesla. Would you want that sort of power to be available to anyone with enough cash? Because Mike’s right. Whoever this Nolan fellow wants to sell the ring to? They are definitely evil. Think of what they could do with it! It’s our job. We can do both—we can save Mary and steal the ring—if we’re smart about it.”

  My thoughts buzzed in circles. We’d been kept in the dark so much throughout this mission, hearing Dad’s side of things was like seeing light for the first time. There were so many layers to this story that we hadn’t known.

  That is, if they were true.

  Leo sighed. “If this guy is what you say he is, he’s got to have a state-of-the-art security system in place. He must be shrouded behind miles of protection.”

  Dad nodded. “His research is highly classified, yes. And his lab is protected by the best security systems known to man.”

  “How are you planning on breaking in, then?” Grace asked.

  A mischievous smile grew on Dad’s face. “I already have.”

  Bert narrowed his eyes. “Er … not to be rude, but … are you sure? There have been a lot of developments in cybersecurity in the past several years. Is it possible he’s planted a false trail for you?”

  I bit back my grin. Someone calling my dad old shouldn’t have been the high point of my day, but it totally was.

  “Is that so?” Dad’s eyebrows lifted. “Mind handing me that laptop of yours?”

  Too baffled to argue, Bert reached over and handed him the laptop. Dad opened it and i
mmediately, his fingers began flying over the keys.

  “Genius Academy has impressive security for its student database, correct?”

  Bert puffed up his chest. “Of course,” he answered. “One of the toughest systems in the world. I designed it myself, with Leo and three of the world’s top cybersecurity agents.”

  Dad didn’t answer, and a dark cloud of concentration settled over his face, like he was having a secret conversation with the screen. Then, a few seconds later, he looked up.

  “Albert Einstein,” Dad read aloud. He turned the screen to give us a better view. The Academy logo was displayed at the top. “No middle name. Son of Hermann Einstein. Twelve years old. Joined Genius Academy after several unsuccessful attempts at public elementary school and an incident that involved hacking into the school’s bank accounts to purchase forty thousand snack-sized chocolate bars for the vending machines. Favorite color: blue. Childhood best friend: Schnookums.” Dad tilted his head to inspect the picture on the screen. “Who is apparently a stuffed bird. A penguin, is it?” His eyes twinkled.

  Bert’s face blanched. “P-puffin,” he croaked. “Schnookums was a puffin. That’s classified.” His voice cracked on the word.

  “Whoa,” breathed Mo, inspecting the screen.

  Dad smiled, giving me the tiniest of winks. “Do I need to have thirty pizzas delivered to your parents’ house for me to prove my point?”

  At his words, the inner war I’d been having started to erupt again. My emotions and logic could not find common ground. I knew how I should feel about Dad. No matter how brilliant he was or how cool his invention had turned out to be, he was still someone who had nearly killed a bunch of innocent people with a bomb. That fact kept pecking at my mind like a rabid chicken, and nothing he did or said now would take that away.

  But … a strange, traitorous sense of pride still swelled inside of me as I watched him. My father was a mystery to me, but he was also easily the smartest person I’d ever encountered. Responsible for the single most amazing piece of technology that our universe had ever known. The fact that my dad had invented such a thing made a bizarre tendril of admiration grow inside me.