Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1)

by Julie Drew

  “He’s so tiny,” she whispered, then closed her fingers gently but firmly around the creature. “But what….”

  “I got him from Biology. They’ve got lots of them in the lab over there,” Finn said quickly. He started to back away toward the door. “It occurred to me we might want to know if someone else can survive the jump besides you—if maybe this little guy might get pulled along with you when you go back in time. When you went before, your clothes and the heart monitor went with you; they were in contact with you, so they travelled with you. But we don’t know if living, organic tissue will go, too. Or if it does, if it will survive.”

  “Right,” said Tesla. She carefully lifted the flap of her messenger bag and gently placed the mouse inside.

  “Right,” Finn repeated unnecessarily. “So I’ll see you when you get back.”

  “Yup,” she said, and knew he heard the false bravado in her voice. “And Finn,” she faltered. “Max….”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, and his clear brown eyes held hers steadily. “I’ve got Max.”

  And then he was gone, and she was alone, once again, in the time machine.

  Tesla patted the messenger bag at her hip. She felt somehow reassured by the tiny presence in there, and shrugged a little to adjust the green scarf wrapped around her cast and tied behind her neck. She stood in the center of the room while the now-familiar sound of Bizzy’s voice counted down from five in the sterile space, and she closed her eyes just as the light of a thousand suns filled the room.

  CHAPTER 17

  They were once again blinded by the white light that filled the screen of each monitor until Bizzy’s sure hand on the switch killed the lasers. The group stood silently as they stared at the empty time machine from every camera angle.

  “It may have worked this time,” said Joley in an attempt to lighten the heavy atmosphere.

  “I don’t think there was ever a malfunction,” said Bizzy quietly. “I think it works for Tesla. Or with Tesla. I think that’s how it was designed, though Dr. Abbott seems unaware of it. And I am completely clueless about how that is even possible. I think when we figure it out, we will have figured out what the Tesla effect is.”

  “Tesla changed her mind, huh?” asked Max, who had woken up while Bizzy did the countdown. The others turned to face him.

  “It was more like we all changed our minds, once we realized that it wouldn’t work with me,” said Finn. “It works for your sister—maybe only for her. We’re not sure.”

  “It’s okay, I know she wanted to go,” said Max in an attempt to reassure him, which is of course what Finn wanted to do for Max.

  “She’s pretty brave, and plus she really wants to get your dad back.” Finn had made a promise to look out for Max and he was determined not to break it.

  “Yeah, I know,” Max said. “She’ll be okay. She’s smart.”

  “Yes she is,” said Lydia. “So we’ve got to trust her, and remain confident that she’ll be back very soon. But in the meantime, we can’t sit idly by. Your father is in the hands of a very dangerous man, Max, and time is not on his side. I don’t want to frighten you, but whatever Nilsen wants from him, the longer Dr. Abbott holds out, the more frustrated—and desperate—Nilsen will become. We want to find him before that happens.”

  Finn looked at Lydia, surprised she would be so candid with the boy.

  “I’ve said all along we should have focused on Jane’s leads,” Beckett said. “It’s certainly not too late to do that now. Have you had an update from her?”

  “Yes,” said Lydia. “She’s in Canada, but it’s unclear yet if any of her leads will pan out. I don’t know the details—in fact, I know very little of her work. Her reputation suggests she doesn’t always follow protocol.”

  “Shouldn’t we also update her?” Finn asked. “She’s not just an agent, she’s a close family friend of the Abbotts. I’m sure she’ll want to know that Tesla’s made the jump.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Lydia as she moved toward the door. “I’ll take care of that, if I can reach her. I imagine she has her hands full right now and won’t welcome any distractions, however. As Beckett said, Jane may very well be the one to solve this case. She’s very good at her job,” she added, almost to herself. She smiled then, as if she’d just remembered they were there. “I suggest we return to the house and get some sleep, in shifts. We want to be here if—excuse me, when—Tesla returns.”

  “I’ll stay,” Bizzy said. “I’m way too keyed up to sleep.”

  “I’ll stay with you,” said Finn. “You okay to head back to the house with Joley?” he asked Max, who nodded.

  Once she was alone in the control booth with Finn—her favorite among the housemates—Bizzy exhaled, long and loud. She felt like she was still in shock. “I can hardly believe it,” she said. “I mean, I know that it works in theory, but I thought I’d be lucky if we had some small success with subatomic particles. And then suddenly, this. I mean, she’s just gone. It’s so weird.”

  “Completely weird,” Finn agreed.

  Bizzy glanced at him, a sudden grin on her face. “So you two seem to be, ah, friendlier.”

  “Why Elizabeth, what do you mean?” Finn asked archly.

  “Becks said she caught you guys making out when she opened the door.”

  Finn shrugged, his mouth tipped up on one side. “That might be a bit overstated,” he said evasively. He didn’t have a clue what this was between him and Tesla Abbott, but he wasn’t about to work it out with Bizzy, who was like a younger sister.

  “I like her.” Bizzy offered her unqualified stamp of approval despite Finn’s refusal to discuss it. “But don’t get your hopes up, Finn. Don’t you think she seems annoyed with you? A lot?”

  “Yeah, she does,” said Finn, and his grin now matched Bizzy’s. “It’s all part of my charm.”

  Bizzy shook her head at his delusions. “She’s odd, though, don’t you think?”

  “How do you mean?” Finn asked, wary.

  “I don’t know. Not in a bad way. She’s just hard to understand—I know, I know, I don’t understand anybody. But this is different. She’s shy, but she’s always pissed and flying off the handle. And she’s not exactly a supermodel, but once you see her—really look at her—it’s like she’s the only one in the room. And even though she looks—soft, I guess—she’s incredibly stubborn, she’s smart and obviously brave. She’s nothing but contradictions.”

  “Why Bizzy, I do believe you’re in love,” Finn teased.

  Bizzy blushed. “All I mean is that she’s interesting,” she tried to explain, at a loss, as usual when it came to verbal communication. She tried a different tack. “She’s colorful,” she suggested.

  Finn was about to laugh at her again, but he was suddenly caught by the image of Tesla walking to her house in the brilliant sunshine, nervous about returning to the scene of her attack, starting and stopping on the sidewalk as they walked. “That’s true,” he said. “She’s always on the move, in this abrupt sort of way—she’s like a hummingbird. Quick, hard to catch—you get a flash of blue and green and red and she’s gone.”

  “Why Finn, I do believe you’re in love,” Bizzy said, laughing at him in turn as she spun around and around in her chair at the control panel.

  When Tesla felt the pressure of a solid wall up against her back, and the sense of her entire body cramped and confined, she knew it had worked. Without the sense of panic she’d felt last time, she waited only a few seconds before she began to push up on the lid of the much smaller time machine that she now thought of as ‘the coffin.’ She had only just begun to push upward with her shoulder when the lid swung swiftly upward and she blinked in the sudden glare of the fluorescent lights of the lab and stared into the very dark, very liquid eyes of Sam the janitor.

  “Holy shit,” he breathed. His black hair fell into his eyes, and a nervous laugh escaped his lips. “Ho. LEE. Shit.”

  “Yeah. Can you help me out of here?” Tesla asked as she
looked pointedly at her casted arm.

  “Oh. Yeah. Of course,” Sam said quickly as he helped her sit up.

  “Oh, hang on a sec,” she said while she rummaged in the messenger bag in her lap.

  Sam saw the smile that lit up her face as she looked up and pulled a small object out of the bag with her good right hand. It was a mouse, held gently in her palm. His twitchy pink nose poked out from between her fingers.

  “This is—Schrödinger,” said Tesla, naming him on the fly. “Alive and well.”

  “Whoa. You brought him with you?” Sam asked, but Tesla didn’t respond.

  “Can we put him somewhere secure?” she asked.

  Sam looked around until he saw a rectangular cardboard box with a lid, the kind that held reams of copy paper. He removed the paper, brought the box over, and Tesla put Schrödinger inside. Sam took his keys, punched some air holes in the lid, and placed the box on a nearby desk.

  “I knew you’d be back,” Sam said triumphantly, as if he had single-handedly made this happen.

  “You… you know what’s happened here?” Tesla was very much aware of the promise she’d made to Lydia. The more people who knew about this time travel stuff, the more danger her dad was likely to be in.

  “Yeah, I keep my eyes open,” he said. He backed up a step as Tesla climbed the rest of the way out and then hopped down from the table to stand in front of the boy—he was, clearly, a boy, younger than she was, now that she had a chance to really look at him.

  “And what have you seen?” she asked casually.

  Sam looked at her intently. Tesla could read the quick intelligence in his inky eyes, and silently approved his caution, which appeared to match her own.

  “I’m interested in the work the docs do around here,” he said with a shrug. “And of course I remember that I helped you a couple of months back. When you wandered in here with a concussion and I found you hidden in there.” His hand gestured vaguely to the table and the coffin, directly behind her. “So. Are you lost again?”

  “Not so much lost this time… more like I’ve retraced my steps,” said Tesla. She was surprised to find this cryptic conversation so enjoyable. It seemed as clear to Sam as it was to her, though if she was wrong she had actually told him nothing.

  “Want a soda?” he asked suddenly, and then blushed at the surprised look on Tesla’s face. “I mean, I was actually just going to get one when I saw… when I realized you were here. Wanna walk down the hall and get a drink?”

  “Sure,” said Tesla, who thought she might as well go with every little bit of bizarre that this experience had to offer.

  She followed Sam out of the lab and they walked in silence for a couple of minutes through long, echoing hallways until they came to an open area with a few small tables and chairs, and several vending machines.

  Tesla sat at one of the tables and Sam walked to the closest machine. “Coke?” he asked, his back to her as he dug quarters out of his pocket.

  “Root beer, actually.”

  He bought the two sodas and sat down in the chair across from Tesla, and they looked at each other in silence.

  “So,” he began, and then stopped, not sure how to proceed.

  “Yeah,” she said, and they both laughed. “Look, Sam, don’t ask me about this, but….” Tesla hesitated, but it was where she knew she had to start. “What’s the date today?”

  Sam looked at her and cleared his throat. “It’s Monday. June twenty-seventh.” Tesla continued to look at him expectantly and he was the first to blink. “Two thousand and four.”

  Tesla closed her eyes and felt her heart beat strong and sure in her chest. Holy shit is right, she thought. Exactly eight years ago.

  She opened her eyes and found Sam’s gaze fixed on hers. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, but it came out as barely a whisper. Then louder, “Yeah, I’m fine. What about you?”

  “I’m good,” he assured her. “But I think the docs who run this place would be, um, more than a little surprised by your visit.”

  “I’ll bet,” Tesla said with a grin. “I guess that’s why the box is so small: they don’t think anyone would use it to, ah, hide in.”

  “Exactly,” Sam said. “Although they hoped that somebody would some day, of course. Especially Dr. Petrova—”

  Tesla was suddenly on her feet, her chair pushed back with such force that it crashed to the linoleum floor. “What did you say?” Her voice was the barest whisper.

  “Dr. Petrova,” he repeated, eyeing her warily. “This is her lab, hers and Dr. Abbott’s. And that—box—is their work….” Sam stopped and a worried frown creased his forehead. “I thought we were on the same page, but maybe you’d better tell me who you are and what this is all about. I’m not with security—and I don’t understand most of what goes on here. But I owe the docs a lot and I’m not going to say any more until I get some answers.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Tesla licked suddenly dry lips. Why didn’t I anticipate this, she wondered. But it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, really, except what this boy had just told her.

  “Tasya Petrova and Greg Abbott are my parents,” she said slowly. “I’m Tesla Petrova Abbott. And my mother is alive….”

  Several hours later they still sat in the lab’s break room, their sodas long gone. They leaned back in their chairs and just looked at each other. They had talked furiously after Tesla’s admission of who she was, talked over each other and, more than once, got up to pace the floor as the story in two parts unfolded. Sam had run his hands through his hair at various points in agitation, and now it stuck up on end all over his head. He knew that if he were a real scientist he wouldn’t just accept that this was real, he would need controls, data, the same results repeated over and over again. But right here, right now, he knew it was true. The girl who sat across the table from him had just arrived—for the second time—from eight years in the future.

  “I’ve met you, you know,” he said suddenly.

  “What? What do you mean?” Tesla felt like her head was filled with a constant buzz—her mind raced as she tried to adjust to this world in which she could jump back and forth in time.

  “Like, a week ago,” he said. “You were—you are—a little kid. You have a baby brother. Your dad brought you guys in to try to persuade your mom to knock off for the night. She was here really late—my shift had already started. You were too shy to talk to me, you hid behind your dad and stared at the floor. The baby grabbed my finger and kind of drooled all over himself.”

  “This is too bizarre, I can’t get my head around it. So right now, in this time and this place, it’s 2004 and I’m nine years old. Max is a baby. And my mom is alive.”

  “Yeah, you said that,” said Sam. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  Tesla paused. How much could she share with Sam? They had established that time travel had occurred, that she was here from the future, and that was about it. That much had taken them long enough, as they’d carefully avoided any statements that might reveal what they both understood as a very secret project.

  “She’s no longer alive eight years from now,” she finally said simply. Her head swam with all sorts of dire possibilities, most of them, to her chagrin, from sci-fi horror stories about time travelers who go back and accidentally step on a butterfly or something, and then back in their own time it’s all changed and they can never get the world back to what it was. She didn’t want to make any mistakes that she might regret later.

  “Oh, man. Sorry,” said Sam. “This must be so weird for you.”

  “Yeah, you might say that.”

  Sam glanced at the clock on the wall and stood up. “My shift is just about over. I need to clock out. We have to figure out what to do with you—people will be coming in soon. We can’t risk sending you back right now.”

  Tesla thought for a minute. “I know. It’s okay. Can you give me twenty-four hours, and then help me get back tomorrow night, like you did before?”
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br />   Sam looked at her and weighed what he saw. Clear, amazing eyes, one blue and the other green, that he tried not to stare at. Seventeen, she’d said, and they were about the same height, even though Tesla was two years older than he was. Crazy, wild red hair framed her face, and her cheeks dimpled when she smiled. If he hadn’t felt totally outclassed, he would’ve fallen hard for her. But since there was no way she’d ever look at him like that—he felt like an awkward kid next to her—he was able to relax. He had absolutely no shot, and it released him from all the effort and anxiety of hope.

  “Okay,” he said. “What do you need to do, and how can I help?”

  “I need to keep a low profile,” she said, “that’s first. You saw Back to the Future, right?”

  “Yeah, of course. I get it. We’ll keep you out of sight as much as possible.”

  “I need to do some research. At the library.”

  “You can come to my house, no one will be there. It’s only five a.m., the library’s not open yet, but I can take you there at seven. We’re on the campus of a university, so that’s no prob—”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “I live on campus. I mean, I will live on campus. I know where the library is.”

  Fifteen minutes later, after they’d put some potato chips in Schrödinger’s box and the lid from Sam’s soda bottle filled with water, Sam clocked out and changed in another room into jeans, sneakers, and a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt that had seen better days. They walked outside into the pre-dawn. The sky felt like it was almost day rather than looked like it, as Sam stopped at a small Honda motorcycle chained to a pillar of the physics building and pulled a helmet out of the backpack he carried.

  “You ride a motorcycle?” Tesla asked, surprised. “I didn’t think you were old enough to drive.”

  “Thanks,” said Sam, stung a bit.

  “Sorry. No offense.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He unlocked the bike, and by the time he stood up again, he was over it. “I’m fifteen and three quarters, which is old enough in this state to get a motorcycle permit if I need it to work. Which I do.”