by Julie Drew
“What did I miss?” she asked as she shut the door behind her.
“Not much,” said Lydia before anyone could answer. “I haven’t heard from you,” she said casually. “Any luck across the border?”
Jane smiled at the older woman, but without warmth, and Tesla felt again the inexplicable tension when the two were together.
“Some,” said Jane with a noncommittal shrug. “We’re certain Nilsen was there, but it appears he crossed back over into the States. He and anyone else who was with him. We lost the trail, however, in Buffalo.”
Tesla had become aware of Sam beside her because his body was tense and he was so focused. She glanced at him, surprised to find him fixated on her Aunt Jane. Jane followed Tesla’s glance and looked appraisingly at Sam as she tucked her short dark hair behind her ear and smiled at him.
“Hello. And you are?” she asked briskly.
“I’m Sam,” he said, his voice a little tight. “But we’ve seen each other before—or at least, I’ve seen you.”
“Really?” Jane looked exactly the same as she had before Sam spoke, yet she was clearly, somehow, more alert.
“Yes,” he said. “I saw you once, about seven years ago, on campus. You were with Sebastian Nilsen.”
CHAPTER 21
Every eye in the room turned to Jane then, and Tesla marveled at her aunt’s composure. Jane walked into the room and stood next to Beckett’s chair. She said nothing, but after a moment the badass-ninja-girl got up meekly and went to sit on the floor beside Max.
As Jane settled into the chair Beckett had vacated, the tension in the room grew palpable as everyone waited for her to answer the unspoken question inherent in Sam’s revelation. They all assumed that Lydia would take the lead, get to the bottom of this, but Lydia remained silent.
Jane smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle in her fitted dress pants, tucked her hair behind her ear again, and looked up, surprised. “Oh, sorry, was I supposed to respond?”
“I think you’d better,” said Tesla quietly.
“Well, of course I know—knew—Sebastian, he and I and Tasya and Greg all did our undergraduate degrees together. Tasya and I were roommates our freshman year, I met Greg in the first semester, the same time Tasya did, and we were all fast friends before Spring Break rolled around. We all knew him, and he knew us.” Jane was wide-eyed and guileless, happy to prove that this scrutiny was no more than a mild amusement.
Tesla felt the hot flush of guilt wash over her for her suspicions. Jane Doane was like family, the closest friend her mother ever had, but then Lydia spoke.
“That is, of course, true, Jane,” she said, her voice very serious. “But that doesn’t explain why you were with Nilsen only seven years ago, long after the friendship had ended and he was completely estranged from the Abbotts. By then he had stolen data from their lab and published his infamous article, and he no longer worked for this university.”
As if they watched a tennis match, all eyes turned from Lydia back to Jane.
Jane smiled. “Yes, you’re quite right,” she said smoothly. “I hadn’t had any contact with Sebastian in years. But he waylaid me on campus that night to persuade me of his innocence. He asked me to intercede on his behalf with Tasya, to convince her that he had not stolen her work. He missed us all, he said, and wanted his good name back.”
Lydia merely waited for more.
“Of course I said no,” Jane said, annoyed for the first time. “And though I was brand new to the job—I’d only just been recruited, and hadn’t officially begun my work with the agency—I made a full report. Feel free to check on that,” she added to Lydia.
“I would, Jane, but of course you know I don’t have access to your internal reports. I work for a different shop, and we all hold our cards very close to the vest.”
Jane shrugged. “Oh, well.”
After a moment, Lydia turned to Tesla. “Perhaps we should continue this later,” she said, as if no one else was in the room.
“After I’ve left?” asked Jane, one eyebrow raised. “Please, Tesla, continue with your story.”
Tesla pulled the cassette tapes from her messenger bag and held them out to the room at large in the palm of her hand. “I also found these, but I haven’t listened to them,” she said.
Joley moved from the fireplace to the sofa where Tesla sat, took the tapes from her, and left the room.
“I’m sorry, I missed some of this,” said Jane. “You found those tapes where?”
“In Dad’s office,” Tesla said.
“Tesla, how did you get in there—that whole side of the building is shut down, your father’s office is nothing more than a crater from the blast. That was a very foolish thing to do—the engineers haven’t begun to assess the structural damage—the floor could have collapsed!”
Confused for a moment, Tesla suddenly realized that Jane didn’t know she’d made the jump back in time. Her aunt assumed that Tesla had gone to her dad’s office now, in the present.
“No, Aunt Jane,” she said. “I went back. I used the time machine. I got this stuff from Dad’s office eight years ago—yesterday, but eight years ago.”
Startled out of her calm demeanor at last, Jane sat forward on the edge of her chair and leaned toward Tesla. “I thought you had all agreed Finn would go,” she said, clearly displeased.
Lydia jumped in to spare Tesla. “The technology does not appear to work with Finnegan. We’re not sure if it works with anyone except Tesla. She is two for two, you might say.”
Jane turned on Lydia. “You don’t have the right to make these decisions without me, Lydia. She’s a child. And I’m family.”
“Well, she is a minor, but hardly a child,” Lydia said. “And you’re not actually family, are you?”
Jane flushed and sat back in her chair, her lips pursed tightly together. Lydia was correct: she had no rights where Tesla and Max were concerned.
Joley came back into the room then, and they felt his excitement like an electric current that crackled and sliced through the room.
“What is it?” Keisha asked.
“These are audio tapes of a heartbeat.”
“What do you mean?” asked Beckett.
Joley held out the small tape player he held in his hand and pushed Play. The speaker was small and weak, but they all heard it clearly: the sound of a heart as it pumped blood through a body.
Joley went to hit the off button but Sam put up a hand to stop him. “Wait,” he instructed. They all listened for another minute and then Joley turned it off and the room was silent once again.
“What is it?” asked Lydia.
“That heartbeat is irregular. And a little fast.” Sam looked at Tesla then, and he took her right hand in his. “Tesla, the heartbeat on that tape has an arrhythmia.”
Tesla could feel her own heart beat in response. “So, w-what does that mean?” she asked with a slight stammer.
“I think it means that given where you found the tape, the heart we just heard is likely yours. Your heartbeat, recorded at least eight years ago.”
“But, why?” she said, completely confused. “I don’t understand.” She pulled her hand away from his.
“Isn’t a heartbeat a kind of biological signature?” Finn asked slowly. “You know, like a fingerprint, or DNA?”
Sam frowned as he thought about this, his black eyes fathoms deep. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said slowly. “But a heartbeat wouldn’t be a unique signature, one that you could identify as one person’s, and not anyone else’s.”
“Even if the heartbeat in question was arrhythmic?” Finn pressed him, and everyone in the room seemed to hold their breaths.
“You’d have to have an enormous amount of data to determine if there was, over a long period of time, any discernible pattern, let alone a singularly unique pattern,” Sam said. “I mean, it’s called arrhythmic for a reason: there’s no rhythm. No pattern. The beat is random, at least for the duration of the tests we use to monitor hearts.”
“But what if a heart was monitored for a lot longer?” Tesla asked. “For a much longer period than any medical test would require? Would you find a pattern—an individual biological signature?”
“Is that possible?” asked Beckett. She turned to Bizzy, as they all did with technology or science questions.
“I don’t know,” Bizzy admitted. “This certainly isn’t my area.” But before everyone could turn back to Sam, Bizzy added, “What I do know, though, is that Tasya Petrova was heavily involved in chaos theory—randomness and pattern—in her work right before she died.”
“And—” Tesla began, stunned as she saw exactly where Bizzy was headed.
“And her journal, which is focused on the time machine they developed, refers to the Tesla effect,” Bizzy finished for her.
The room was deadly silent. No one moved.
“Someone has to say it,” Beckett said, her voice strained.
And then, much to everyone’s surprise, it was Max who said it. Max, who knew essentially nothing about quantum physics or the human cardiovascular system but could put the disparate threads of dramatic narrative together, unravel the tangle of complex plots with multiple characters and conflicted motivations and see the entire trajectory of the story before anybody else ever did, spoke the words first.
“It’s Tesla.” His eyes blinked behind his battered, wire-framed glasses. “Tesla’s heartbeat is unique, and our mother figured out its pattern, and it’s that pattern—that heartbeat—that makes the time machine work.”
“Ho. Lee. Shit,” Sam said softly, and Tesla noted, as if from very far away, that he still used the same expression, with the exact same inflection, that he had as a kid.
“Indeed,” Lydia added, as they all sat and absorbed this idea. And then, as usual, she took charge.
“Alright everyone, listen up,” she began. “We’ve got work to do. It seems clear that the files Tesla brought back confirm the theft by Nilsen many years ago, and the reason for the destroyed friendship. This is not new information, but it is always good to reaffirm what we already know. It also seems likely, given what was in the first locked drawer, that the second one Tesla did not open might also contain important information, maybe even a direct clue as to where Dr. Abbott is being held.” She turned to Tesla, who sat on the sofa looking a bit shell-shocked. “You’ll have to go back, dear.”
“I know,” Tesla said. She had already figured that part out. “I’m so pissed at myself. I can’t believe I panicked and raced out of the building like that. I should have waited until I’d checked the other drawer.”
“I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself,” Lydia consoled. “It’s difficult to imagine how any of us could have done better, set down in the middle of our own lives almost a decade in the past. I’m sure it will be easier this time.”
“Probably,” Tesla agreed. “Guess I’ll get ready to head back to my little coffin.”
“Wait, I almost forgot,” Sam said. He put his hand, very briefly, on Tesla’s leg, just above her knee, and didn’t even seem to realize it. Startled by his touch, Tesla turned quickly to face him and wondered if everyone else in the room had seen his intimate gesture. If Finn had seen it.
“Remember that second time you made the jump?” Sam began.
Tesla had to laugh, and Sam was dazzled by the deep dimples, the glitter-green and blue of her eyes. “Yeah, I remember,” she said. “It was, like, yesterday.”
“Right,” Sam grinned sheepishly. “It’s all so weird, even though I’ve had years to get used to the idea.”
“You said you forgot something?” Finn asked, and Tesla could not mistake the coldness in his voice.
“Yeah,” Sam said immediately as he turned to Finn with an open, friendly face. “Just before Tesla made the jump back—earlier tonight—she made a similar comment about how small and tight the early time machine was. The coffin, I guess you guys call it. So the next night, when I came in for my shift, I made an offhand suggestion to Dr. Petrova about how cool it would be someday when her prototype actually worked and how, from what she had told me, people from the future could come here, to her time machine. It would have to be bigger, though, I told her, because nobody would be able to fit in that little box.”
“Nicely done,” Beckett said with admiration.
“Yes, it was,” Lydia agreed.
“Well, they acted almost immediately on the suggestion I planted. I had no idea how they got the funding so quickly, but a little less than a week later, the coffin had been replaced by a time machine that was roughly the size of a walk-in closet.”
“So the coffin is no more?” Tesla asked.
“Not for another week,” Bizzy answered. “You know, a week from now, eight years ago.”
“So we have to wait a week?” Tesla asked, the alarm in her voice apparent to everyone. “What if in the meantime there’s no clue here, in our time, to my dad’s whereabouts? We don’t have—he doesn’t have—that kind of time. I can still go now, the coffin is tight, but it’s obviously doable for me.”
“No, no, it’s not a problem,” Bizzy hastened to assure her. “I can adjust the calculations and reset the destination equation—to a point.”
“Oh,” Tesla said, taken completely unawares. “I assumed the two points on the closed time loop were fixed; that our time was connected to exactly eight years ago by the wormhole the machine created. You can change where the connection is?”
“Yeah,” Bizzy said. “In theory, anyway. I mean, I think I can do it. You know, without losing you somewhere. Somewhen.”
“Then why,” Tesla asked slowly, “haven’t we planned all along to simply go back to the night my dad was taken by Nilsen, the night Finn and I were attacked and my arm got broken, and just prevent all of it in the first place?”
Bizzy dropped her eyes to her lap where she twisted her favorite skull ring that she wore on her index finger. “Because I don’t know how,” she said, so softly the others barely heard her.
“But—” Tesla began.
“Bizzy is an incredible resource, I’m sure we’d all agree,” Lydia cut in smoothly. “But we should remember that she is sixteen years old, an undergraduate student, and while certainly Dr. Abbott has offered her unparalleled access to his work, and shown great confidence in her abilities, she does not know what he knows.”
“I wish I could do it,” Bizzy said miserably. “I don’t want you to think I didn’t think of this, it’s so obvious. But I have to use the time machine as it is currently set—and it’s actually a huge risk to make even this small adjustment of one week. There is no way for me to even consider the massive changes in calibration necessary to shift the timeline connection to just a few days ago. I wouldn’t even know where to begin, and with Dr. Abbott gone, as far as I know there is no one on the planet who would know how to do that. I’m really, really sorry, Tesla.”
“Bizzy, don’t be ridiculous!” Tesla said. “The agents haven’t been able to locate Nilsen and my dad, haven’t even found a clue as far as I can tell. The only reason we even have a shot at all is because of all you do know, and Max and I are really grateful. We’ll just have to stick to the plan and see what was—is—in that other drawer eight years ago.”
“I don’t like it,” Finn said from his position by the fireplace.
“Why not?” Lydia asked.
“Yeah, Finn, when I said it was risky, I really just meant that I could be a few hours, maybe a day off in the destination,” Bizzy said. “You can trust me.”
“I know I can, Biz,” Finn said. “That’s not the problem.” He walked behind the couch and paced while he spoke, which made Tesla very tense. She felt and heard him directly behind her, felt and heard Sam breathe beside her, both of them uncomfortably close. And of course, she knew exactly how close.
“We’ve figured out that the time machine operates only when Tesla is physically inside it,” he continued. “It’s coded to operate, somehow, by a pattern her mother discovered in the
seeming chaos of Tesla’s heart’s arrhythmic beat.”
“We know all of this, Finn, please get to the point,” Lydia said, her gentle patience clearly near its end.
“If we’ve figured it out, others can, too,” he said quietly, right behind Tesla. The skin on her neck pricked as he spoke. “She’s in imminent danger the moment anybody else realizes that if they have her, and they have Dr. Abbott’s lab—here and now, or ten years ago, or anytime in between—they have access to time travel.”
There was silence in the room, until at last Aunt Jane spoke. “Well, I think we know what Sebastian wants,” she said quietly. “The key to Greg and Tasya’s time machine.” And then she turned to Tesla and said what they all had just begun to realize. “But Finn’s right—you are only safe as long as Sebastian doesn’t realize that you are that key.”
CHAPTER 22
“You don’t really know what you’re talking about here,” Finn said to Sam. The discussion of whether Tesla should jump again was still underway half an hour later, but in the past five minutes it had become an argument, and the only two who were still at it were Finn and Sam.
“I know enough,” Sam said. The two stood near the sofa where Tesla still sat, and everyone watched to see how it would play out.
“Do you have any idea how ruthless this guy is? The lengths he would go to for this?” Finn was furious, but he’d so far kept his temper in check, and while Sam seemed calmer, it was clear that he, too, was angry.
“Yes, I have a pretty good idea. But try to hear me on this. I am not suggesting that Tesla isn’t in danger, or that time travel itself doesn’t pose any sort of risk. My point is that the sooner we get her father back and take Nilsen into custody, the sooner she’ll be out of danger—and whether we like it or not, at this point Tesla is the only one who can go back in time. Whatever is in that drawer may be the only evidence in existence that will lead us to Dr. Abbott. We have no choice.”