The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  Lewis had already ducked into the hallway to look. “Next door is a roll-up with a padlock on it. She’s not getting out that way.”

  Peter turned to Mac. “Any weapons in there?”

  “Why would Spark need a weapon? Anyway, our bylaws expressly prohibit guns.”

  Lewis walked to the desk. “Peter.” On the far corner stood a U-shaped rectangle of steel maybe ten inches long, open at both ends and the bottom, with crisp bends and precise holes, bright with the rainbow sheen of heat treatment. “Pretty sure that’s a receiver for an AK.”

  On the other side of the door, they heard a grunt and a clatter, then a complicated clank as something big hit the floor. The next sound might be the rattle of an assault rifle. Thin plywood wouldn’t begin to stop the high-velocity rounds.

  Moving fast, Peter yanked open the desk drawers, but found no keys or tools that might help him get through the deadbolt. He turned to the bookshelves and pulled a cinder block from one end. The plank dropped an inch to the stack of chemistry texts below, but nothing fell. Peter hooked his fingers through one end of the heavy block and swung it hard against the door, right at the lock.

  The wood flexed but didn’t give. What he needed was a sledgehammer or a shotgun with a breaching load. He didn’t have either one.

  He wound up and swung again, harder. This time the wood cracked and the lock punched partway through, but the bolt was bound up and the door still wouldn’t move.

  He swung a third time and hit squarely. The jamb broke and the metal fell away and the door lurched open.

  The workshop was three times the size of the office, its walls lined with workbenches and scientific equipment Peter didn’t recognize.

  Spark was nowhere in sight.

  The back wall had a cylindrical tank marked hydrogen, with shining pipes run to fittings above a long stainless table. The big fume hood that had obviously been mounted above the table now lay on the floor, still rocking from the drop.

  On the wall where the exhaust duct had been, a sixteen-inch hole shone bright with daylight.

  “Shit.” Peter jumped to the table to follow her through the opening, but his shoulders were too wide to fit. He stuck one arm and his head through the ragged hole, trying to get far enough to see. Outside was the ancient apartment building and its cobblestone service drive lined with garbage cans.

  But no sign of Spark.

  The woman had vanished.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Peter extricated himself from the hole and jumped down from the table, Lewis had pulled Mac into the workshop and pushed him against the locked roll-up door. They both eyeballed the machines lining the walls.

  “Jarhead, you know what any of this shit does?”

  “Are you kidding?” It was too bad June’s father had died, Peter thought. His lab was full of weird equipment. He would have been a big help. “Talk to us, Mac. What’s she working on in here?”

  “I don’t know,” the younger man said. “She doesn’t talk about it.” He pulled out his phone. “I’m calling the police.”

  Lewis slapped the phone from his hand. “Stand down, boy. Your friend Spark didn’t call the police, remember? Means she’s in trouble. Believe it or not, we trying to help.”

  Peter picked up Mac’s phone, which was still awake. The kid hadn’t managed to press send. Peter found the contacts and scrolled through. Nobody named Spark. “Do you know her real name, or where she lives? Her phone number? The MakerSpace must have her in their records.”

  Mac shook his head. “I manage the automated billing system. Because she pays cash, I have to log in to her account every month. We have her name as Spark and an email address, nothing else.”

  Peter’s jaw felt tight. “How about the boyfriend? What’s his name?”

  Mac shook his head. “They live together, that’s all I know. Nobody’s ever met him. Whenever I ask about him, she changes the subject. I told you, she’s a private person.”

  Peter looked around the space, hoping to make sense of some larger picture. His eye caught on a big toaster oven, which looked out of place.

  The inside was carbon-black. The appliance’s control panel had been pulled out and wired to a homemade control board. Below it was a plastic bin full of green circuit board stock, and another filled with boxes of tiny parts. Spark wasn’t making toast, she was making her own electronics.

  Peter was way out of his league. “What the hell was she doing in here?”

  Then he realized what sat on top of the toaster. An intricate metal sculpture of a man in a wheelchair with a welder’s mask covering his face. Hammer in one hand, cutting torch in the other.

  “Lewis.” Peter held up the little figure. “See anyone you recognize?”

  They left Mac behind, found an emergency exit, and jogged toward the Yukon. As Lewis fired up the engine, Peter’s phone rang. It was his neighbor.

  “Fran, I’m in the middle of something,” he said. “Can I call you back later? Wait, what?”

  19

  SPARK

  Spark sprinted around the corner, skateboard tight in one hand, backpack thumping her spine with every step.

  Honey Pie was half a block away. If she could make it across KK and into the restaurant without getting caught, she’d be fine. She’d fly out the back door and hop on her electric longboard and disappear into Bay View’s tangled network of angled alleys and wayward streets.

  She was born Maria Evangelina Velasquez and grew up on 30th and Pierce, a neighborhood called Silver City, just uphill from the Falk casting plant. When the wind came from the north, it carried the rich tang of molten metal. It was the smell of her childhood, along with the pungent spices of her mom’s tortilla soup and the smoke on her dad’s turnout gear.

  And also the musty smell of their basement, which became her first workshop when she was eight years old and her mom’s blender stopped working.

  The blender was a birthday present from her dad. Her mom loved making frozen margaritas for her church friends. It was less than a year old, and it kept blowing fuses. Her dad was a firefighter and her mom stayed home, so they weren’t poor, but even Maria Evangelina knew they kept track of every penny. Her dad had said, A better blender is sixty bucks and money don’t grow on trees, Lupita. I’ll buy you another one next year.

  Maria Evangelina already knew how to do more than change a blown fuse. As far as she was concerned, a perfect Saturday was a morning trip to the Re-Store with her dad, followed by lunch at a taco truck and a blissful afternoon as his helper, learning Spanish swear words and handing him tools while he explained the process of changing out an old light fixture or tub faucet. He often told her that he hadn’t gone to school to be an electrician or plumber, that he just figured things out on the fly.

  So it was no big deal for her, one rainy Saturday afternoon, to haul the broken blender down to her dad’s tool bench and take that sucker apart.

  In retrospect, she wasn’t sure she actually thought she might fix it. But she definitely wanted to know what made it work. Besides, Maria Evangelina liked a virgin margarita as much as the next girl, maybe more.

  With the blender’s plastic case off, the guts were laid bare on the bench, machine mysteries exposed for all to see. When she plugged it in and turned it on, the fuse popped again. But in the buzzing metal box, just for a moment, she’d seen a bright light. Something was happening in there.

  So she took the box apart, too.

  In the end, she found a frayed wire arcing against the motor case, the burned smell and blackened spot telling her where to look. So she went to her dad’s boxes of leftover parts, found a new power cord, and swapped them out.

  And when she put it all back together, it actually worked.

  Her mom had danced around the kitchen and smothered her with kisses, then invited the church ladies over for margaritas
. Her dad had looked at her closely, a little smile on his face, and asked how she’d known what to do with the blender. She’d just shrugged and said she figured it out on the fly, just like him.

  Of course, when her mom’s friends heard about the Miracle of the Blender, they had their own broken things to fix. Mrs. Dubinski brought her toaster oven. Mrs. Gonsalves brought her coffeemaker. And with the help of the Internet, Maria Evangelina fixed them.

  That’s when the neighborhood heard about her knack, and the floodgates opened. Window fans and vacuum cleaners, even old VCRs and desktop computers. Anything too cheap for a repair shop but too expensive for working people to buy new. She never asked for money, but people would give her a little something. Not much, but it added up.

  She couldn’t fix everything, not by a long shot, but people let her keep the dead machines, and she’d harvest the parts for next time.

  Usually the problem was a bad switch or power cord, a frozen motor or hard drive, dumb stuff like that. People looked at her like she was a genius, but Maria Evangelina didn’t see it that way. She just wanted to know how things worked. She collected tools and technical manuals like other girls collected Barbies.

  It didn’t take long for her dad and Mr. Tomczak, his friend from the firehouse, to come help clean out the basement. When they were done, there was a carpet remnant on the floor and a scruffy old couch and a bigger workbench and better lights overhead.

  By the time she was nine, she’d skipped a grade and was repairing washing machines and dishwashers. At ten, she’d skipped two more grades and graduated to furnaces and laptops. Anything mechanical or electrical. She learned fast.

  Maria, Queen of Sparks, her dad called her.

  Which was sweet of him, but even at ten, Maria Evangelina was not the kind of girl who wanted to be a princess, waiting for some dumb prince to show up. In her mind, being a queen was no better. The queen had to do what the king wanted, right? Plus, Maria Evangelina was pretty sure the queen didn’t get to spend the afternoon in the basement with grease on her hands, bringing some broken little machine back to life.

  But Spark?

  She told her dad that Spark suited her just fine.

  So he called her Little Spark, or sometimes La Chispa, or even Esparquita in that goofy Spanglish he liked.

  * * *

  —

  When she was twelve, a burning roof collapsed on Mr. Tomczak and broke his back. Her dad was the one who pulled him out of the building. When they went to visit him in the hospital, Kiko told her dad he’d never walk again and it was just fine, because he really loved these painkillers.

  As they left, her dad said, Life is short, Esparquita. It could be me in there. He started fixing other people’s houses on his days off, working toward a time when he didn’t have to risk his life at work.

  Maria Evangelina felt like life was short, too, at least it was too short to spend your days at school, three years younger than everyone else and still bored to death. The other girls made fun of her, and the boys wouldn’t even talk to her. Everyone thought she was a freak, just because she was smart.

  So she stopped going. She told her mom she could stay home for the next three years and not miss a thing. Her dad came down to the basement and said, “Look, chispa mia, education is important. You have to go to school.” So she arranged to take the GED and got a passing grade and that was the end of that conversation.

  It was also the real beginning of her life. Aside from the judo classes her dad made her take, which she resisted but ended up loving for their own kind of mechanical beauty, she spent the rest of her time in the basement, fixing stuff. She usually fell asleep on the old couch by her workbench. When her eyes opened, she immediately went back to helping damaged little machines do their jobs again.

  When she ran out of things to repair, she pored through the abandoned calculus and engineering textbooks her mom found at her new job cleaning classrooms at MSOE. By the time she turned fourteen, she was taking college courses online. Organic chem was a revelation, protons and neutrons and electrons, the building blocks of the universe explained. She felt like her brain was having its own Big Bang. Chemistry led to physics, which led to electrical and mechanical engineering. Sometimes she’d look up from a book and see her parents standing on the basement stairs, just watching her read. It was a little creepy, and also a little sweet.

  She didn’t have a standard path to college, so in the early years, she had to talk her way into most of the classes. University administrators couldn’t quite believe she was ready for the material, but when she reached out to the professors, offering to take any test they proposed, she found the bright ones easy enough to persuade, especially the women. When she explained her circumstances, they even found her money for tuition. She rarely told any of them how old she was.

  At sixteen, as she moved into graduate-level courses, she found she had some fundamental questions that her textbooks didn’t answer. This was the beginning of her email correspondence that eventually expanded to include faculty at Madison, MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie-Mellon. She was surprised to find that professors didn’t have answers, either, but they sure loved her questions. For some reason, they all wanted her to come study with them, but Maria Evangelina didn’t want to leave her parents.

  Besides, she didn’t see the point. She had everything she needed in Silver City. She’d even started a little computer repair business to pay for her textbooks and the materials for her own strange little experiments. Exploring an idea that had gotten stuck in her head.

  It was an irritant, like a grain of sand in her shoe that she couldn’t get rid of. Her mind kept returning to it in those odd empty moments. On the bus to the dojo, cleaning the house, falling asleep. At first, just examining it from every possible angle. Then adding to it, building on it. Until the grain of sand had become a castle, or maybe a pearl.

  New improvements on an old idea. A new kind of battery.

  Solar and wind power generation was now cheaper than fossil fuel plants, with far fewer downstream problems like pollution, atmospheric carbon, and war. But the sun didn’t shine 24/7, so electrical storage was important.

  The modern rechargeable lithium-ion battery wasn’t a bad technology, exactly. It had many more recharge cycles than previous versions, much greater energy density than the old NiCd and NiMH versions. But it wasn’t a good technology, either.

  Lithium was a big part of the problem. It was a relatively rare mineral, and, like oil and gas, much of it was found in dangerous places with corrupt governments.

  Carbon, on the other hand, was everywhere. Pure carbon could even be mined out of thin air with existing technology. A carbon-ion battery would be cheap and nontoxic, and could be manufactured anywhere in the world with local materials. And carbon molecules had truly magnificent electrical storage properties, if arranged properly, at least in theory. The real challenge was to get the molecules to do what you wanted. To make the idea into something that actually worked.

  Of course, this carbon thing was a well-known problem that many extremely smart people had been working on for decades, both at research universities and in corporate labs. Who was Maria Evangelina to think she’d find answers where others had not? She didn’t have a world-class facility or decades of research experience. She was just a girl in her mom’s basement.

  But. She had this idea.

  She could always hear her dad’s voice in her head. Ay, you can figure anything out, Esparquita. All you got to do is put your mind to it.

  That was before her life fell apart.

  Before she met him.

  Now, on the far side of KK, she hauled open Honey Pie’s door and slowed to a brisk walk. She zipped past the waitresses and didn’t even glance at the beautiful cupcakes in their glass case. She just went straight to the back door and across the patio to the alley, where she hopped on her longboard and rolled away.

>   What did those two jokers at the MakerSpace know about her, anyway?

  Not a goddamn thing.

  20

  JUNE

  June stood at her desk and tucked her things into her backpack for the ride home.

  She realized that Dean Zedler must have been watching from across the newsroom, because while she was still wrapping her laptop cord, he came down the central aisle with that beautiful cashmere jacket over his shoulder and his handsome leather bag hanging from one hand.

  “Hey, I think I found someone down by the market who’ll share their security camera footage. Want to come? I could use your help.”

  June considered the idea that she might somehow stop him from finding better photos of Peter and Lewis, but knew Dean would spot the attempt a mile away. Better to let Peter know what was coming. “Sorry, Dean, I’m headed home, still more work to do.”

  “At least let me give you a ride. It’s raining pretty steadily out there. Riverwest, right? It’s practically on the way.”

  Riverwest was the opposite direction from the Public Market. June smiled and pulled on her waterproof coat. “Thanks, but I don’t mind the weather. It helps me think.”

  Outside, she slung her backpack across both shoulders, then unlocked her bike from the rack and put on her helmet. She knew that Dean driving her home was a can of worms better left closed.

  Because accepting the ride would be opening the door to something more. When he stopped outside her house, he’d be hoping she’d invite him in. But she couldn’t, of course, because he’d see that she didn’t live alone. What if Peter’s truck was in the driveway?

  And even if she just said thanks and got out of the car, his reporter’s radar would start to ping. No matter what excuses she made, he’d know she was hiding something. Because that was the job, to see through the bullshit. And he’d be right. She was hiding something.

  She was hiding Peter.

  Then Dean’s curiosity would kick in, and the questions would begin. Subtle at first, then more direct.