Run (The Tesla Effect #2)

by Julie Drew

  “Jesus, Keish—I said I would. Give me fifteen minutes, I’ll be right behind you.”

  Five minutes later Finn stood under the hot water, letting it pound the tension from his back and shoulders. He was unable to think of anything but the fact that Tesla would be back tonight. He’d make his stop at Keisha’s brief. What the hell did his Aunt Monica want, anyway? Whatever it was, he’d make short work of it and get to the Bat Cave. There wasn’t a single thing he could imagine that could distract him from Tesla.

  Monica Jackson opened the door while Finn was still knocking, and it startled him. Clearly she’d been standing just on the other side of it, waiting, and this additional bit of unusual behavior from his relatives made him jumpy. His instincts told him this was not going to be a simple case of his aunt lecturing him about coming over to visit more often, or asking him to help move something heavy. One look at her face—so very like his own mother’s—was all he needed to see that.

  “Come in,” said his aunt softly, without preamble, grabbing his wrist, pulling him into the foyer, and shutting the door behind him. They stood in the entryway, Monica looking at him with such a serious expression, her dark brown eyes filled with such concern that he wanted, inexplicably, to run out the door and postpone indefinitely whatever was going on here. Aunt Monica was a very strong person. Her husband—Keisha’s father, Vaughn Jackson, was a career Air Force officer stationed abroad, and Monica had insisted that she could live and work and raise their daughter here, mostly alone, because it was better for Keisha. She and her husband made it work, and Finn had never heard about, let alone seen, his aunt overwhelmed by anything. He didn’t think he had ever even seen her upset, but she certainly was upset now. Her mouth was tense and slightly downturned at the corners. There was a small crease, a “worry-line,” his mother would’ve said, just at the bridge of her nose, and the way she was looking at Finn—with pity—was starting to freak him out.

  “Why are we whispering?” Finn asked, refusing to let her sepulchral tone make him act equally ridiculous. “And where’s Keisha? Doesn’t she want in on the big reveal?”

  Aunt Monica cleared her throat and stood up straighter, and Finn remembered that his aunt did not like to be teased. She didn’t have much of a sense of humor, in his opinion, which was odd because her daughter was hilarious and found comedy in almost everyone and everything around her.

  “Keisha decided to give us some privacy. Come in here,” she said, turning and walking into the formal living room they never used. “We need to talk.”

  Finn followed her and sat where she indicated, on the edge of the white sofa that was covered in some kind of see-through plastic that protested loudly as soon as he touched it. He wondered idly if when he rose to leave the plastic would stick to him, like gum on a shoe, and he’d have to fight his way out.

  His aunt sat in a green chair directly across the coffee table from him, her hands tightly clenched together in her lap.

  “What is it?” Finn asked, allowing a little of his alarm to show. “Is my mom okay?” It was the only thing he could think of, and if something had happened to his mother—wherever in the world she might be at the moment—it made sense that her sister, his aunt, would be the one officially informed and he’d have to hear about it from her.

  “Yes,” she said hurriedly, not wanting him to think it even for a second. But before he could feel any relief at her assurance she rushed on. “It’s not your mother. She’s fine as far as I know. It’s something else. There’s…someone here to see you.”

  Finn closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of his aunt—the fear on her face, her inexplicable inability to just come right out and say whatever it was. His mother was fine, as of course she would be. Beyond that, there was nothing that warranted this kind of seriousness. Finn felt his heartbeat slow to normal, realizing only as he felt the tension leave his body how much of it he’d carried around since Keisha first appeared in the gym to drag him over here.

  “Aunt Monica, I have to go. I have no idea what you’re talking about, and if my mom is okay, I’m not really sure I care right now. I don’t have time to care right now. So either tell me what this is about, or it will have to wait.” His exasperation was not feigned, and he stood, so she would know he was seconds from walking out.

  But Monica stood too, her hands still clasped together in front of her, and her knuckles were white. “Finn—Finn it’s about your father.”

  Finn felt his face suddenly devoid of expression as it went blank, as if a plug had been pulled and every outward sign of thinking or feeling swirled down some unseen drain in an instant, leaving him an empty shell. The words didn’t even make sense, and after a beat he frowned at her in simple confusion, as if she’d been speaking gibberish.

  “My…what? What do you mean?”

  “Finn, your father is here. He wants to see you.”

  He heard the clock on the wall ticking. It was a monstrous thing with carved figures all over it that his mother had brought her sister Monica from Germany a few years back. His aunt loved it, but Keisha and Finn thought it was the ugliest, gaudiest thing they’d ever seen. It ticked loudly now, a relentless metronome keeping time to the words in his head, stuck in some infinite audio loop: yourfatherishere yourfatherishere yourfatherishere…

  Finn shook his head to clear it. “Sorry, what?” he asked, though he barely heard his own words over the roaring in his ears as blood flowed, and his heart beat, and the sound of life simply going on threatened to obliterate everything else but that singular fact.

  “Maybe you should sit down,” said his aunt kindly, calling to his attention that he was on his feet, though he couldn’t remember standing up from the sofa. “He wants to talk to you—I’ll just go get him and be right back.”

  By the time the tall, rather thin man walked into the living room, accompanied by Aunt Monica, Finn was sitting calmly in the chair his aunt had occupied just a few minutes before, across from the plastic-covered sofa. Monica pulled the double doors closed, leaving Finn and the man alone. The moment the doors clicked shut hot confusion washed over Finn, the shocking ache of his vulnerable, younger self rolling over him like a tsunami so profoundly overwhelming that he felt he was back there, all those years ago, wondering what he’d done to cause his own father not to give a shit about him, an emptiness he had filled with anger as he grew older. That white-hot rage had enabled him, finally, to transform his loneliness to hate, and he was grateful because it was easier to bear and made him feel strong. Untouchable. That was how he’d survived adolescence, globe-trotting with his mother, rarely speaking the language until he’d finally landed in London, and holding himself separate—untouchable—from everyone at the boarding school where he stayed, even during most holidays while his mother saved other people’s children and his father simply did not exist. The guilt, the loneliness, the self-doubt—it was on him like a train, crushing him between track and wheels, the pressurized steam let loose in a shrill, ear-splitting scream, brakes applied but unable to stop…

  Despite the tempest that brewed beneath the surface, Finn looked anything but shaken. His arms rested easily on the spring-green fabric of the chair’s upholstered arms, one leg crossed over the other at the knee. He was cool, unperturbed, as the tall man with thick, sandy-blonde hair and blue eyes approached cautiously, his unwavering gaze on Finn.

  “May I join you then?” the man asked with some hesitancy.

  The lilt of his baritone—the heavy, Irish brogue—almost broke Finn’s fragile pose of not giving a shit right back but not in the way that Finn had expected. How could this man be his father? How could someone who looked like this, who sounded like this, have anything to do with him? There was absolutely no spark or connection, no sense that this man should be or ever could be important to him, and Finn felt the relief of it immediately, the death of a long-held fear that even in the face of his father’s absolute indifference, Finn himself would be unable to stop himself from caring if they should ever
meet, because somehow at the core of his being he would recognize that this man was his father.

  But that didn’t happen. The tall man was merely a stranger from Ireland.

  “Suit yourself,” Finn said, his tiny, effortless shrug a thing of beauty.

  “Finnegan,” the man began, and the word off his tongue was an outrage pronounced perfectly, said as it was meant to be said, exactly the way Finn would have wished it said from his birth, if he had ever allowed himself such a dangerous wish.

  “Finn,” Finn corrected him.

  “Finn,” the man repeated. His blue eyes were boring into Finn’s tawny-brown ones, searching for—what? Some likeness? Some similarity between them? He would find none, of that Finn was certain.

  “This must be a shock and all,” the man went on. “Believe me, I understand that.”

  “You understand nothing,” Finn said, his contempt spilling from his mouth and filling every corner of the room, every fold of the drapes, until it pushed its way, at last, into the man’s face.

  “Finn, I’ve only just found out m’self,” the man said hurriedly. “I’ve only just seen your mother—after all these years, and never a word—I was on a story and the NGO she’s with was dead center of it all, and—”

  “Look, I’m not really interested in any of this,” said Finn. “So, Mr… What is your name, exactly?” It was meant to be cruel, and it was. The man stopped, and the rosy-red blush creeping up his cheeks on his fair, lightly freckled complexion created a startling contrast to the cornflower blue of his eyes, and Finn was reminded of Tesla’s imminent arrival. Tesla. The relief, to have something else to think about, and do, and be, left him weak.

  “My name is Daniel—Dan. Dan Finnegan. But you already knew that, didn’t you?” the man said softly, and still he did not look away, refusing Finn the triumph of seeing the tall man wince and look away in shame.

  Finn glared at him silently, unaware that his fists were clenched tightly in plain sight, resting on the arms of his chair, a telling contrast to his carefully constructed slouch. He looked—and thankfully he did not know this—very, very young.

  “Whether you believe me or not, Finn, I’d like to know you. And you t’know me. You’ve got family—cousins, uncles, a grandmother. It’s a shock, but it’s a happy one, don’t you see? I’ve just found out I have a son, for Christ’s sake—I wish I’d known from the beginning, but I didn’t. And there’s nothing either of us can do to change that part.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Finn said quietly, standing to bring this farce to an end at last.

  The utter surprise on Dan Finnegan’s face told Finn he was wrong, but he stubbornly held onto the thing that had hurt him his whole life, refusing to let its familiar presence go. He was unable to contemplate rethinking who and what he was, how and why he was, so he clung to the blame and the hatred, the loneliness he had endured as if it were the most precious thing he had ever known.

  “Finn, I swear t’you! Your mother will certainly confirm that I knew nothing about you until three days ago. You’ve got to believe me, son.”

  The tall man had stood, too, as he spoke, and with that final plea he put his hand on Finn’s shoulder, the weight of it cracking something open in Finn that he hadn’t known was there, tightly sealed and hidden away, a willingness, if pushed too far, to do violence without thinking, to lash out and hurt, as he had been hurt.

  Finn pushed the man, hard, in the chest, and he staggered back a step, his hand falling from Finn’s shoulder, shock and hurt on his face. He opened his mouth to speak, but Finn couldn’t hear it, wouldn’t hear it, the certainties he’d long ago come to terms with suddenly fragile things that, once gone, might destroy him completely, and all he knew was that he could not hear a single word of it.

  As if he were outside his own body, Finn watched himself draw back his right arm, his white-knuckled fist clenched tightly and sent hurtling at the tall man’s mouth with the weight of a lifetime of pain and humiliation behind it, until it exploded against the man’s jaw and sent him reeling back off his feet to land awkwardly on the couch behind him.

  Finn stood breathing hard, the echo of the man’s grunt of pain still reverberating in the air. “I’m not your son,” he said in a voice he did not recognize as his own, and walked out of the room, past his aunt and cousin who stood, horrified, in the hall as he vented the last of his anger by punching the wall beside the door twice in quick succession. His knuckles were battered and torn but he didn’t feel them yet. He didn’t feel anything, except a rush of calm and dread in equal measure that was quickly replacing the adrenaline that had coursed through his body only a moment ago. His aunt said something behind him, but he didn’t turn around. He walked out the door and into the world that seemed miraculously unchanged, despite the last few minutes.

  CHAPTER 18

  Sam saw Finn making his way across the quad, his shadowy form nearly disappearing every time he left the circles of illumination thrown out by the lampposts situated along the walkways on campus and then reappearing in the next circle of light.

  Sam was nervous. He hated not knowing what was coming, never had really liked surprises—except, of course, every time Tesla had appeared from the future and turned his teenaged life upside down. She was the single most exciting, provocative, and frustrating thing he’d ever encountered, and he knew without a doubt that the young man walking purposefully toward him stood a more than even chance of taking her away from him. He’d worked too long, too hard, and too single-mindedly to let that happen.

  He’d had the upper hand until now: as soon as Tesla came back to the present—in twenty minutes, he noted, looking at his watch—his prior knowledge of events would be over. Tesla had, quite simply, never come back. He had had no idea at the time, of course, that he would have to wait eight years to see her again. He had hurriedly manned the controls at the lab that night they’d danced and drunk at the bar, worried because she was so agitated and unable to say anything more than that it was about Finn. If he had known, if he’d had even a hint that she wouldn’t come back and that he’d be stuck back there waiting for years, until he grew up and the time she said he’d met her outside the lab finally arrived and he could be with her again and still keep his promise about not changing the future...well, if he had known, he might have done things differently, his promise be damned. But he’d let those years simply slip away, preparing himself, and thinking anytime now. She could be back at any time.

  “Sam,” Finn said tersely as he walked up, nodding his head once, a sharp little movement that seemed odd from Finn, who was always unhurried, smooth and laconic.

  Maybe he was nervous, too, Sam reasoned. Or maybe there was more to it. His eyes narrowed and he looked more closely, caught the rather shell-shocked look on Finn’s face, his wild curls forming a halo of gold around him in the light that shone over the door into the physics building. Finn fairly vibrated with tension, and despite Sam’s suspicions of how Finn really felt about Tesla, it was hard to believe that those feelings would produce this kind of reaction—or, if they did, that Finn would allow Sam to see him like this. But perhaps this entanglement meant that none of it was in Finn’s control anymore.

  “Ford,” Sam returned the monosyllabic greeting, his voice softer, more cautious than Finn’s had been. “You ready?”

  “Yup.”

  Sam waited, feeling awkward as he waited for Finn to step up and open the locked door. When he didn’t move, but stood and simply stared at the door’s plain black surface, Sam cleared his throat and spoke up.

  “Um, Finn? We need the code to open the door.”

  “Right. Sorry,” Finn said, and stepped forward to enter the day’s code into the pad at the side of the door. The handle of the door clicked audibly, and as Finn reached for it, the light overhead shining brightly on the door, the handle, and his battered hand reaching out to open it, Sam drew in a sharp little breath of surprise.

  “Ho-lee shit, Finn. What happened? Your knuckles
look like raw meat.”

  Finn opened the door and flung it wide enough for Sam to easily catch it, and they both stepped inside. Without turning around, Finn said, “You should see the other guy.”

  He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, so Sam followed Finn in silence, their steps echoing loudly in the concrete stairwell. They descended down, and further down, until they came to the Bat Cave itself, which Finn had not been in since last summer.

  It looked exactly as it had then, and Finn’s already agitated state was further complicated by a rush of images from last summer: grabbing Tesla’s hand at the last second in the time machine, risking everything to jump back with her. He heard again the sound of Tesla’s voice calling his name when he’d confronted Nilsen in the control booth, and his fear that Nilsen would kill her or keep her trapped in the past.

  He remembered kissing her in the stairwell, the quiet happiness so foreign to him beginning to fill the hole he’d always carried around inside. Finn had actually thought they were beginning something together last summer, until mere moments later, when they’d walked out of the physics building into the dark night to find a grown-up Sam waiting to meet the girl he’d been in love with for years, and it was more than Finn could possibly believe that she would want him, after having accepted so long ago that he was destined to be alone.

  After that, he had kept his distance—or tried to, anyway. Left her and Sam alone, to let that play out, whatever the cost. And it had gone pretty well, actually, his whole let’s-be-friends act believable, even to him at times, until the effects of their entanglement had become insurmountable and it became increasingly difficult to keep up the charade.

  Sam felt the awkward silence between them as they entered the control room and each took a chair, the monitors reflecting the emptiness of the time machine from multiple angles. Sam ran his hands through his short hair, while Finn trained every bit of his considerable self-control on placing both Tesla and his fa—and Daniel Finnegan—in boxes in his mind, some cordoned-off space that would contain them and allow him to gain control, once more, of his life.