by Julie Drew
Tesla’s eyes were wide with fear, and Finn had no choice but to let go of his gun when Nilsen reached out to take it from his hand, that cold, hard circle pressed firmly against his head to remind him that he was a flick of the man’s finger on the trigger away from his brains spattered all over Bizzy’s shiny control panel.
Nilsen took a step back as he motioned with his gun for Finn and Tesla to step further inside the room and away from the door.
“You see, my boy?” Nilsen said. “Things always change.”
“It might be wise to remember that while you gloat,” Finn replied.
“Touché,” Nilsen laughed, but was immediately serious again. “I’ve a colleague who will arrive momentarily. Lydia was supposed to operate the controls, but he’ll have to act as understudy. Tesla, you and I are taking a trip—eight years back in time. Straight to your parents’ lab—and, incidentally, to the scene of the crime. The first crime, I should say.”
“I think I said this earlier, but I’m not going anywhere with you,” Tesla said slowly, insultingly.
“Well, in fact you are,” Nilsen said. “I’m tired of these games. You can tie this one to the chair, and walk with me down to the machine, or I can shoot him now and drag you by the hair, as you kick and scream, down those stairs and to the machine. Either way, this will happen. The choice is yours—I couldn’t care less if you are battered and bruised and grief-stricken over the loss of your boyfriend when we make the jump. I don’t even care if you’re conscious. All I need is for your heart to beat, as only it can do.”
“My life’s mission is now to see you rot in prison for the rest of your life,” Finn said quietly. “And if you touch her, I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
Nilsen didn’t even bother to respond, he merely looked at Tesla, both his question and his impatience plain on his face.
“I’ll go,” said Tesla, unable to bring herself to look at Finn, whose intensity as he’d threatened Nilsen had shocked her. “I need something to tie him up with.”
“Improvise,” Nilsen said as he motioned with his gun for Finn to sit in one of the two chairs in the room.
Despite the technology and hardware, the blink and beep of readouts on the panels, the metal-encased equipment everywhere, Tesla quickly realized it was all anchored down. She scanned every surface and found only a couple of pens and a few wireless mics on stands. She moved to the one metal cabinet in the room and opened the doors wide, then pulled out a bundle of electrical cord and held it up.
“This?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said, his voice clipped, authoritative. “Tie his hands behind his back—tightly—over the back of the chair. And I mean tight—I’ll check it before we go downstairs.” He looked at his cellphone, nodded once, satisfied. “My man is here. And, incidentally, another is on his way to intercept Jane, since Lydia is clearly incompetent.”
Tesla stood behind Finn’s chair and wrapped the insulated extension cord in a figure eight, around and over and under Finn’s wrists, her fingers tingling every time they brushed his skin. She wrapped the cord tightly, just as Nilsen had told her to. When she finished, she palmed the utility knife she’d slid out of her pocket and slipped it into his hand. His fingers closed around it and she stood up.
“Done.” Her voice suggested her complete subordination. “Sorry, Finn.”
“Don’t do this, Tesla,” Finn said, playing his part, his voice catching at just the right moment, filled with emotion.
Nilsen walked over to tug on the cord that bound Finn’s wrists. “Well done,” he said, pleased and surprised. “I like competent people. I may decide to keep you once we jump.” He chuckled then, a sound of pleased surprise.
“You will see me again,” Finn said, his voice tight.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Nilsen said as he opened the door for a giant of a man with a receding, blonde crew-cut. “I will no longer be in the world with you, nor will Tesla. Say your goodbyes, children.”
Tesla glanced at the guy who towered over her in the doorway and recognized him as the man who’d tried to drag her out of the party at Lydia’s.
He grinned at her. “I guess we get to have that conversation after all, huh?”
“How’s the wrist?” Finn said, and Tesla shivered at the look the man shot Finn.
“After I push a couple of buttons for him,” Nilsen’s man said softly, “You and I are gonna have a little fun.”
“I have to insist that you buy me dinner first,” Finn said, his voice steady. “I’m not as easy as I look.”
“Tesla?” Nilsen said as he held the door open. “You have your instructions,” he said to the blond man who stood near Finn. “Carry them out—to the letter.”
“Understood,” the man replied. He turned from Finn and sat in the other chair at the control panel.
Tesla walked down the metal stairs with Nilsen behind her. She did not look back as she walked into the room with the mirrors and took her place in the center of the room. Nilsen grabbed her hand and held it tightly, the gun in his other hand held firmly and pointed at her hip—not her heart, she noted, as she paled at the thought of what he would do to her if she fought him.
“Are you ready for our little adventure?” he asked. His voice quivered with excitement. “You know, I’ve waited for this moment all my life. Your mother should have been here—and it’s your father’s fault that she’s not. You do know there was no car accident, don’t you? You’re a smart girl—have you figured it out yet?”
Before she could say a word, a deep male voice began the countdown and she braced herself as she shut her eyes against the lasers, the fear, and whatever truths might lie behind Nilsen’s ugly words.
“Three…two…one.”
She saw the flash against the back of her eyelids, but before she could open them again she heard a woman’s voice, oddly familiar, as it inexplicably repeated the count.
“…two…one.”
Another flash, and though she felt slightly disoriented when she opened her eyes, she was resigned to what she would find: the new closet-sized coffin around her, Nilsen by her side with his gun trained on her, everything in her life as she knew it, gone.
But she saw instead the big time machine, the mirrors in the corners where they were supposed to be, and Nilsen…gone, just as her father burst through the door from the Bat Cave to gather her in his arms and hold her tight.
EPILOGUE
The watcher hung back at the edges of the crowd, adept by now at going unnoticed. The place was crowded, as it always was, but the group the watcher was interested in had commandeered several tables and pushed them together in the small pizzeria. It was obviously the redhead’s birthday, they had just sung a horrible rendition of Happy Birthday to her and presented her with a slice of pizza with a candle in it. She was a little subdued, perhaps, but otherwise she seemed fine. Her cast was off and her left arm appeared to be completely healed.
They were all there—well, most of them. Keisha, tall and lovely, and her cousin Finnegan, with his perfectly pitched nonchalance that fooled everyone in the group. Finn—like the watcher—kept his eye on the redhead, and he was impressively subtle about it. The blond boy, Malcolm, sat next to Elizabeth, whose spiky black hair and piercings did little to hide her sweet, wounded nature, despite her efforts, and the watcher felt both pity and admiration—not for the first time—for all the girl had endured as a child, all she worked so hard to hide from the world. The ever-flirtatious Joley and the deadly Beckett Isley, up and about for the first time since she was shot, sat on either side of the redhead’s little brother, Max. And Sam, quietly and authoritatively by Tesla’s side, spoke occasionally with a lightness that belied the intensity the watcher could read on his face, a deep love and longing masked by the ridiculous story he was telling about having invented the redhead’s favorite pizza when he was fifteen years old.
Unable to resist the celebration, the emotional undercurrents that swirled and eddied around and wi
thin the group, the watcher moved in closer.
“I’m still stunned about Lydia,” Joley said. “We should have bloody known, shouldn’t we? We’re supposed to be good at that.”
“How could you have known?” Max asked. “Real people aren’t like old Westerns, with good guys and bad guys you can spot by the color of their hats.” The boy took another bite of his pizza and pushed his bent wire glasses up higher on his nose where they sat, crooked and smudged. “Real people aren’t like that at all.”
“Well, thanks for that compliment. Hopefully I’m not that simple-minded,” Joley laughed.
Max blushed a little. “That’s not what I meant. I just think Lydia was kind in a lot of ways, and I think she did love you guys. It’s more complicated than whether she was good or bad.”
“I agree,” said Finn. “I don’t think she wanted anybody hurt.”
“But they did get hurt,” said Beckett.
“I know, but her part in this doesn’t erase the good stuff she did,” Finn insisted. “It just makes her harder for us to understand. We want it to be easier.”
“We want not to have been betrayed and shot,” Beckett said.
“She’s right,” Tesla agreed. “Sometimes it is black and white.”
“And sometimes people talk about themselves in the third person, or the first person plural, and it’s really, really annoying,” said Keisha in an attempt to restore the mood—the insult to Beckett was just gravy. “Seriously, people. This is a party. T is finally eighteen, so I have to give her grief about something else. I need suggestions.”
“She’s a huge slob,” Max said helpfully.
“Old news,” said Keisha with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“What about her newly-discovered, apparently badass knife-throwing skills?” Beckett asked.
“We want to make fun of her here, Blondie,” said Keisha as she rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, I know. I couldn’t think of anything,” Beckett said.
Tesla laughed and the sound did indeed lighten the mood. “Why don’t we not mock me and instead focus on the good news.” She raised her glass. “To the bizarre but totally awesome development of Lydia transferring ownership of her house to Aunt Jane, who is now assigned here, and your new landlord.”
“And your boss, love” added Joley. “You’re officially on the team now.”
“You and Dad get along better,” said Max. “We should drink to that.” He raised his cup of root beer and clinked it with Beckett’s. Tesla touched his glass and drank too, despite the questions she could not quiet, the questions that Nilsen had raised and that kept her awake nights. She had never questioned her father’s account of how her mother had died, had always assumed his refusal to discuss it was because he couldn’t bear the pain of remembering. But what if that wasn’t it at all? She would ask those questions now, she knew, and hope the new-found closeness with her father would survive it.
And of course, at the center of it all now, there was this thing—The Tesla Effect—that she still didn’t understand. She was the girl who could jump back and forth through time, and that fact disturbed her greatly. It also, she admitted, excited her, and in her most private moments she allowed herself to imagine the possibilities. For herself, and for everyone else she loved.
As if he had read her mind, Sam stood up. “And let’s drink to Sebastian Nilsen, who made the jump back and left Tesla here, safe and sound. We don’t know why, or how, but we’ll take it.”
Finn raised his glass and drank with everybody else, silent amid the happy chatter, but he could not forget that if Nilsen was not here, he was somewhere—some where, and some when, and up to God knew what. Finn could not follow Sam’s lead and just write off the inexplicable with a shrug. That’s not how Finn was made. Things always made sense, you just had to dig, and think, and dig some more, and do the work, until the patterns fell into place.
As Tesla leaned forward to touch Sam’s glass with her own, her face lit up by her dimpled smile, those blue and green eyes crinkled up in laughter, Finn resolved then and there that he would dig, and think, and work until he knew exactly what had happened—to Nilsen, and to himself and Tesla, who seemed now to have some sort of connection he could not understand or explain, their physical and emotional realities… tangled up, somehow. The one thing he knew for sure was that this was far from over.
The watcher studied Finn’s face for another moment and then, finally satisfied, got up and walked away, out into the summer evening, just as dusk began to fall upon the town square and the last fiery edges of a spectacular sunset faded, inevitably, into night.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie Drew is Professor of English at The University of Akron in Ohio, where she teaches creative writing, cultural studies, and film. When she and her family are not in Akron, they are in RI, in a delightful little roundhouse in the woods.
Julie’s first novel, Daughter of Providence, was published by Overlook Press in 2011 to enthusiastic reviews, after which she jumped right into The Tesla Effect trilogy. Glimpse will be followed quickly by Run and then Breathe.
Learn more about forthcoming books and communicate with the author at www.juliedrew.com.
Ring of Fire Publishing
www.ringoffirebooks.com
