Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1)

by Julie Drew

  “Tes, we’re talking about time travel—I think we can agree that at this point there’s no such thing as crazy,” he said.

  “Good point,” she conceded. “So I sat there and looked around at this lab. Most of the lights were off, no one else was there. There were no windows, and just the one door, which was closed. I needed to figure out where I was and what had happened, so I peeled off the various sensors taped to me so I was disconnected from the monitor, climbed out of the box and down from the table. I’d just decided that I would go to the door and look out, see if I could figure out where in the hospital I’d wandered off to—after I checked to make sure I still had my robe on over the hospital gown—” Tesla said as she flashed a quick smile at Finn, her dimples deeply embedded in each cheek—“and then—”

  “Wait, what?” Bizzy asked, clearly confused.

  “My cousin,” Finn said, relieved to look away from Tesla and ignore the urge to smile back at her. “Not important.”

  “But before I could, the door opened,” Tesla continued. “I saw some guy silhouetted in the light from the hallway, lit from behind so I couldn’t see his face.”

  “Disaster,” said Joley.

  “Well, I was… I mean, it wasn’t really a well-trained, spy-quality reaction…. I said, ‘Who’s there?’”

  Lydia and Bizzy smiled sympathetically, but Beckett, Joley, and Finn laughed out loud.

  “What? I assumed I was in the hospital, and had just wandered into some basement lab. I had a concussion!” Tesla reminded them.

  “Go on,” Lydia said.

  “Well, whoever it was flipped on the light switch, and it was pretty bright, and it took a second for my eyes to adjust. And, it was just some guy. He wore a worker’s uniform, blue pants and shirt, and carried a bucket filled with cleaning supplies.”

  “Did you know him—had you seen him before?” Lydia asked.

  “No, I didn’t know him,” Tesla said. “He shut the door and asked how I’d gotten in. He walked toward me and said ‘Who are you?’ As he got closer I could see he was young, my age, so I figured I couldn’t be in too much trouble.”

  “‘Who are you?’ I asked him back.”

  “Brilliant,” said Joley.

  “Yeah. Well, he pointed to his name tag. ‘I’m Sam,’ he said. ‘I’m the night janitor. You’re not supposed to be in here—how did you get in?’”

  Tesla paused and looked down at her lap, at the fingers of her right hand that picked at an imaginary thread on the leg of her jeans.

  “And?” Beckett asked impatiently. “Do we have to drag this out of you?”

  “Beckett,” said Lydia, though her eyes never left Tesla.

  Beckett rolled her eyes, but sat back in her chair and waited with everyone else.

  “Sorry,” said Tesla. “It’s just weird to think that this might have really happened, and plus, I’m a little embarrassed by some of it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lydia assured her. “Go on.”

  “Okay. I said, ‘I’m not sure how I got in here. I think I’m lost.’” Tesla waited for the snickers, but when she heard none she continued. “I told him I had been brought into the hospital earlier, that I had a concussion, and that I thought I’d passed out and wasn’t sure how I’d gotten in here, or where ‘here’ actually was, for that matter, but apparently I’d managed to get in this box and shut myself inside it. I asked him if he could help me find my way back to my room.”

  “What was his response?” asked Finn.

  “He looked strange, actually,” Tesla admitted. “Like I’d shocked him. He was quiet for a minute, just looked at the box I’d climbed out of on the table, and that made me glance at it, too, and with the lid propped open I noticed for the first time those same sort of mirror things in the corners of the box, you know the mirrors that were in that room, the one inside the big cavern. Only in miniature. I had no idea what that meant and, well, we just sort of stood there.”

  “Well he had to have said more than that,” Bizzy said, but Tesla was already shaking her head no.

  “I didn’t really give him the chance,” she said again. “I confessed.”

  Beckett snorted, and Tesla was tempted to ask her if she’d like a bag of feed or maybe a sugar cube, but ignored her instead to go on with the story.

  “I told him exactly what had just happened, and—you might be interested to know—he didn’t laugh. Not once. He looked amazed, impressed even, and then he said—”

  “He said what?” Lydia asked. Even she was impatient now.

  “He said I had to go back, before anyone else knew, and that he could help me.”

  “And you believed him? Janitor-boy?” Beckett said, incredulous.

  “Yes, I did,” Tesla answered. “He was nice, and he seemed totally honest and sincere.”

  “And cute, right?” Bizzy said. “I’ll bet he was cute.” She grinned, and her nose stud twinkled in the room’s soft lamplight.

  Tesla chose to ignore her. “He helped me back into the box, arranged the monitor and pole around me, and he—well, he shut the lid again,” Tesla finished.

  “You let him put you back in that coffin? You’re mad,” Joley muttered.

  “Well, I did, and I’m not sure what happened after that, I must have fallen asleep, but it seemed like just a moment later I was curled up in a ball on the floor, with the heart monitor and bent-up pole next to me, but there was no box. I was back in that room with the mirrors. All the lights were off, there was no voice on the intercom, nothing. I was totally alone.”

  Tesla shrugged when she realized that everyone still waited. “That’s it, guys. I left the room and walked back across that giant airplane-hanger cave, found the door and the hallway, made my way back up the stairs and into my room, and as far as I know, no one saw me. I had to carry the monitor because the pole was bent and the wheels didn’t work anymore, and it was kind of heavy, and all those wires and patches I’d taken off just sort of dangled off it. I got back in bed and I was out. The nurse woke me up in the morning and asked me what had happened to my monitor, and I just kind of blanked and said I had no idea. And that’s it. I just thought it was a freaky dream.”

  “And now?” Lydia asked intently. “What do you think now?”

  “I think it happened, and I think—” but she stopped herself, bit her lip in worry. She caught Lydia’s eye, and the woman nodded once in encouragement, so Tesla opened her mouth to say she had travelled back in time, and that if this was a part of the mystery of her father’s kidnapping, of what this guy Nilsen wanted, she probably ought to try to do it again—

  She stopped as the roar in her ears drowned out every other sound in the room, the voices that vied for her attention, asked her to finish her sentence, but this new thought had just sliced through it all, and the fuzzy memories, the uncertainty of what had happened to her, were gone. All of it simply fell away. She looked up at Lydia and said, instead, with a crisp confidence that could not be mistaken, “I need to see that note you found today at my house.”

  Everyone looked at her, stunned into silence, until Lydia said softly, “Joley.” He left the room quickly and came back, a piece of paper encased in a clear plastic bag in his hand. Without a word he handed the bag to Tesla, who reached for it as if it were made of spun glass.

  She slowly brought the bag up closer to her face, but before she could actually read it she noted the handwriting, recognized it—she recognized it. She read the words written there in rounded script:

  Don’t be afraid—keep trying.

  Tesla looked hard at the shape of the letters, the familiarity of the cursive style, and knew that the world had just changed, had always, already been changed.

  “My father did not write this note,” she said in a voice of absolute, unquestionable certainty. “I did travel back in time, and I’m going to do it again.”

  Even Lydia was shocked. Her mouth hung open, eyes wide. “How do you know?” she asked. “How can you be sure?”

 
; “Because I wrote the words on this side of the paper,” Tesla said as she stared at the sealed, pizza-stained note. “I don’t know how—or when—but I wrote this note so that I would see it now, and use my dad’s time machine again.”

  CHAPTER 15

  After a very awkward shower the next morning, for which she had to wrap her cast in a plastic garbage bag Max pilfered from the kitchen, Tesla felt decidedly better. Rested, and seemingly past the worst of the physical and emotional exhaustion that apparently resulted when you were viciously attacked, had your arm broken by said attacker, had your dad kidnapped by an evil, probably mad scientist—oh, and realized that you had travelled back in time. She looked at the bottle of pain pills beside the sink and opted not to take any more of them. The pain was manageable and she had already grown tired of the buzz.

  She dressed in her rather beat-up, but most comfortable khaki shorts, despite the frayed pockets and hem, and a tight little tie-dyed T-shirt of greens and purples, a major operation that had taken, unbelievably, fifteen solid minutes to accomplish. Disgusted by how slow and awkward she was, Tesla slipped on her Teva sandals, grabbed her scarf-turned-sling, and headed downstairs to do something—anything—to help find her dad.

  In the kitchen she found Bizzy, Joley, and Max. They leaned or sat on the countertops while they ate cereal. “Don’t you people have a dining room? You know, with a table and chairs?” She poured Cornflakes into the bowl that Joley pointed to with his spoon while he chewed.

  “Yeah,” Bizzy said, “but it’s too much trouble.”

  Tesla shrugged. It seemed rude to comment on the contradiction between that British tea thing they did every afternoon and this makeshift, stand-up breakfast in the kitchen. Whatever. “You sleep okay?” she asked Max as he rinsed his bowl at the sink.

  “Yeah, great,” he said. “When do we go to dad’s lab? Or should I say when did we go to dad’s lab?” He pondered this for a moment. “So. Weird. And having watched Loopers a dozen times, turns out, is no help at all.”

  “Not until tonight,” said Finn as he walked into the room, answering Max’s original question and ignoring the rest.

  “Why wait?” Tesla asked, anxious to get started.

  “Because if it’s ten o’clock in the morning here then it’s probably ten o’clock in the morning there. When you did it before, Tesla, it was the middle of the night in the hospital, and when you found yourself in that box, and met that janitor, it was still the middle of the night. He said he was the night-shift, didn’t he?”

  “Oh,” Tesla said. “Right. I didn’t think about that.”

  “We don’t really know what to expect,” he explained, “but we should try not to arrive there in the middle of a busy workday.”

  “Okay,” Tesla said. “I guess we should sit down and think this through before I go. Should I bring some stuff with me? Can I bring stuff with me?”

  “Let’s all slow down a little,” Finn said. “Lydia’s in the library, she wants to talk to us as soon as you’re all finished in here.” His condescension started a tight little ball of resentment forming right behind Tesla’s eyes. He’s not so much older, she thought. Barely two years. But he acts like he’s in charge of everyone and everything. Ass.

  “What about you?” Bizzy asked, just before she tipped her cereal bowl up to her lips and drank what was left of her milk.

  “I’ve been up for a while. I already ate,” he said over his shoulder as he walked out of the room.

  Ten minutes later, after Bizzy had helped Tesla retie her sling, Tesla and Max followed the others out of the kitchen and down a long, wide hallway, at the end of which were two closed, massive oak doors. Joley knocked, once.

  “Come in,” Lydia called from inside.

  Joley grabbed the slightly tarnished brass knobs of each door and slid them silently apart and into the hidden pockets on either side of the doorway, which was eight-feet wide once the doors were pushed back into the wall. Tesla and Max gaped at the massive library. Floor to ceiling built-in bookcases comprised three of the room’s walls, with a circular, wooden staircase leading up to a railed balcony that ran along all three walls and provided access to the open second floor of books.

  “Whoa,” said Max, just behind Tesla, who couldn’t help but turn and grin at her little brother.

  “Dream come true for you, right?” she said quietly.

  “I can’t believe you guys get to live here,” Max said to Bizzy, who stood right next to him.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, “this is pretty awesome. And Lydia shares—we have access to all the books, whenever we want.”

  The fourth wall of the library, to the left of the doorway where they stood, was an exterior wall, painted a deep, hunter green. There was an enormous oak fireplace in the center of the wall and a portrait of some old guy hung over the mantle. The red of his jacket and his white, curly wig contrasted nicely with the dark wood and green wall. Two deep, worn brown-leather chairs sat in front of the fireplace with lamps and small tables beside them. The room was filled with natural light from the huge windows on either side of the fireplace, each of which was exactly ten feet tall.

  “Come in and sit,” said Lydia at the head of the conference table made out of a massive slab of deeply polished wood. The table sat in the center of the room and was so long that ten upholstered chairs were pulled up to it, with plenty of room to spare. Finn was already seated at Lydia’s left, and as the others moved to take seats at the table, Beckett came in behind them, her hair still wet from the shower.

  “How was your workout?” Bizzy asked as she took the chair next to Finn.

  “The usual,” Beckett said, and then grinned at the goth girl. “I’m getting a little better.”

  Bizzy rolled her eyes.

  “Beckett trains with a UFC fighter,” Joley explained as he sat next to Tesla on the other side of the table. “Mixed martial arts. A couple times a week they just have a really scary, no-holds-barred death match.”

  “I hope you never get mad at me!” Max said as Beckett walked past him toward the other end of the table to sit opposite Lydia.

  “No worries, little man,” Beckett said with a sweet, genuine smile as she ruffled his hair. “I’d never hurt you.”

  “Even though you could,” Joley pointed out.

  “Even though I could,” Beckett agreed.

  “We’re all here now,” Lydia began, “and we need to tackle a few issues. Finn?”

  Everyone turned to look at Finn, and they all seemed surprised, which surprised Tesla. Usually, she was the only one in this group who needed someone to explain or translate.

  Finn hesitated—another surprise—then cleared his throat. “As you all know, we’ve agreed to attempt to use Dr. Abbott’s time machine today, on the assumption that Tesla used it successfully a few months ago, though she’s only just realized that. Our hope is to figure out both how the technology works—and Tesla’s role in that—and where Dr. Abbott is so we can rescue him from Nilsen. We’re really in the dark here, but as Nilsen is untraceable in our current time, our hope is that in the past, where he is known and locatable, we can learn something that will help us find him now, in our time. And thus, of course, find Dr. Abbott.”

  They all sat quietly as they waited to see where this was headed.

  “There’s little doubt that Nilsen wants the Abbott technology, so that’s where we have to start. The machine is set to the time in Tasya Petrova's journals, about eight years ago, where we see detailed diagrams and specs of the prototype time machine, when that first version of it was up and running—that's our destination place-time.” Finn paused and drummed his fingers nervously on the table. “I imagine everyone assumes that Tesla will be the one to attempt to go back in time. But I’ve persuaded Lydia that I should go instead.” He had deliberately not looked at Tesla while he spoke, until now, and she correctly read the challenge in his eyes.

  “I’m going, Finn, this is not your call,” Tesla said, her voice low and dangerous
.

  “No, it’s not,” Lydia agreed, cutting Tesla off before she could really get started. “But it is mine, and I have agreed—somewhat reluctantly—that Finn should be the one to attempt this.”

  “But I’ve already done it, and it’s my dad who’s been kidnapped. My parents designed and built the time machine in the first place!” Tesla argued, but Lydia’s face remained serene and unmoved.

  Lydia let her speak for only a moment, then she held up her hand and Tesla stopped, despite herself. “I’m sorry, Tesla,” Lydia said quietly. “You certainly have the stronger claim, but that is not the issue here. Finn has made some excellent points, and once you hear them, I think you’ll agree that this is the best decision.”

  “I can’t believe you’d do this to me,” Tesla said quietly to Finn, directly across the table from her.

  He looked at her calmly, which made her even angrier. “I know,” he conceded, “and I’m sorry. But you need to think here, Tesla. Your mom is gone, your dad has been kidnapped, and you are all Max has left.”

  Tesla stopped dead with a sharp intake of breath, as if she’d been struck. She hadn’t thought of Max, but Finn had, damn him. How could she argue with him now?

  “There was no catastrophe when I did it before,” she said half-heartedly.

  “That’s true, but we don’t really know how this works,” he countered, maddeningly sure of himself. “Bizzy may be brilliant, but she’s sixteen, an undergraduate. She certainly doesn’t know all that your dad knows and she’s the one who will have to run this little experiment. It might not be the same this time, or you might not be able to get back—have you thought of that?”

  “No, but—”

  “Tesla,” Lydia interjected. “Given your responsibility to Max, and the fact that we need you here to figure out what your mother meant in her journal when she connected you to the time machine, not to mention your heart condition….”