The Tesla Legacy

by Rebecca Cantrell

  The door shattered, and glass rained down. He pulled Edison against his chest, protecting the dog’s sensitive eyes and ears.

  After the glass stopped falling, he told Edison to stay, then crunched across the glass into the Wright office and toward the outside of the building. The floor trembled under his feet, and the giant window in front of him vibrated.

  He had to get as close to it as he could, so that he would know if the Oscillator was placed near the side of the building or closer in, such as near the elevator. But the window loomed in front of him. The gray sky beyond looked as if it had climbed into the room with him. His heart started to race, and each beat brought an answering pound of pain to his skull. He hadn’t thought that his panic attacks could get worse until that moment.

  His hand dropped to Edison’s head for reassurance, but the dog wasn’t there. He’d left him near the broken door, because he hadn’t wanted him to shred his feet. Good place for him. Safer than here.

  Not safe for Joe. He was seconds away from a full-scale panic attack. He was going to die, right here. He recognized his fear as the truth, not a panicked response in his brain. The building wouldn’t hold up long under this pounding. He would actually die.

  Paradoxically, this thought calmed him enough to let him think. He took one deep, slow breath and then another. It felt like wasting time, but he had to do it. He thought of his house far below the city and Celeste’s smile. Places where he was safe.

  His heart still pounded, but he ignored it now. He turned his back to the giant window. Instead of the sky and the world outside, he saw Edison, sitting patiently on the other side of a mound of broken glass. Joe’s legs shook, his mind screamed at him to run, but he didn’t. He stared into Edison’s faithful brown eyes and took one step backward, then another.

  Slowly, he backed closer to the window until his shoulders bumped against its solid surface. He was right against it now. Only an inch of glass separated him from the world outside. He’d thought he couldn’t panic more, but he did.

  A soft sound drew his attention to the ceiling. A dirty white pigeon fluttered around near the LED lights. The bird must have flown in through an open window. Joe hoped that the open window wasn’t right behind him. Wind from outside might undo him.

  The pigeon swooped back and forth gracefully, as if performing a show, not flying around inside a building on the verge of collapse. Joe caught himself watching it and realized that he had relaxed. If the pigeon could stay calm, then so could he.

  Still, his hands shook as much as the building as he lowered his phone to the carpeted floor. He read the waves on its tiny screen. The numbers were smaller here. The device was behind the elevators. Maybe in the stairwell. That was the best possible news. He could get away from the window.

  Not even trying to steady his breathing or master the pain in his head, he sprinted across the office toward Edison, not slowing until he was out of Wright’s offices, across the hall and standing in front of the door to the stairs.

  “Come,” he called, opening the door.

  Edison bounded to him, and the pigeon followed, swooping through the open door and into the stairwell. The poor bird would be trapped in there. It should have turned tail and flown outside. Of everyone he could see, the bird had the best chance of survival.

  The elevator doors opened, and Vivian strode out.

  “It’s up here,” he said. “Close.”

  The whole building might collapse at any second, but she looked calm. Just an ordinary day for this retired soldier. He was glad that she was there with him.

  He went into the stairwell. It was smaller than he’d expected—just wide enough for two narrow sets of stairs packed side by side with a thin stripe down the middle that presumably ran all the way down to the first floor.

  He touched his phone to the gray floor, next to a white stripe that outlined the edge of the stair. The vibrations were stronger. Downstairs. He grabbed the steel railing when he stumbled. The steel quivered in his hand like a giant bell pealing out the death of the king.

  The building creaked around him, and the crash of breaking glass sounded again. Hopefully, it wasn’t the outside windows. They would send deadly shards of glass down onto the people below.

  Edison deserted him and ran down a half flight of stairs. He was glad the dog had finally succumbed to a self-preservation instinct. Maybe the dog would make it out safely, even if the bird didn’t.

  But Edison stopped instead. He put his paws on the wall above the railing and barked. Joe could barely hear the bark over the alarms, but he knew what it meant.

  Edison had found something.

  Joe and Vivian ran after him. Edison was jumping, trying to scratch at a hole in the drywall at Joe’s eye level. He clicked on his flashlight and peered into the hole.

  The Oscillator, the small gray-painted device built by his father’s hero, was clamped to a steel column. Joe’s heart leaped. They’d found it. A needle in a huge haystack, and they’d found it.

  “There!” he pointed inside for Vivian’s benefit.

  The device pounded relentlessly away—a million tiny taps at just the right moments to bring the building down.

  Vivian’s light joined his.

  “We gotcha, you little bastard!” she yelled.

  The flight of stairs broke free from the wall and dropped down. Edison grabbed Joe’s pant leg and held on. Vivian grabbed his arm. The stairs stopped.

  They’d fallen a few feet, and the stairs had canted sideways. He could still see the device, but he couldn’t reach it.

  He crawled up the trembling staircase until he was level with the device. The whole staircase could collapse at any second and pancake who knew how many floors.

  He could see the device. He reached forward, but the device was still a foot away.

  Vivian stripped off her belt and threaded it through his. He’d be able to lean farther out, and hopefully, she’d be able to hold him steady. The staircase shook underneath them.

  He dangled over empty space with one foot on the staircase. His hands grazed the wall. He didn’t look down. Vertigo was not one of his phobias, but he wasn’t going to test that right this minute.

  Heat radiated from the device. He wouldn’t be able to touch it with his bare hands to turn it off. He took the handkerchief from his suit pocket and reached for the device. The dial was stuck, and the handkerchief started to smoke.

  He gritted his teeth, trying to shut out the pain in his head and his hands, the noise of the alarms, the creaking of the steel, and his rising dread. The platform they were standing on quivered like a cat about to pounce.

  He’d never be able to turn the dial. Instead, he focused his attention on unscrewing the clamps. His sweaty hands slipped off the clamps again and again. The device shifted, and he yanked it off. It burned through his handkerchief. He’d have a scar to match his father’s.

  He dropped the device into his coat pocket. It probably had evidence on it, but he wasn’t going to give it to the police. That wasn’t what his father would have wanted.

  “Back!” he called, and Vivian pulled him back.

  The shaking had already slowed. Barely perceptible, but it was a good sign.

  “Steps down are clear, sir.”

  He looked down the broken staircase. If she’d dropped him, he’d have died.

  Edison took Joe’s sleeve in his mouth and gently tugged. “Right you are, boy. Time to go.”

  Someone had shut off the alarm. Joe’s ears rang in the silence.

  He dropped his hand to the top of the dog’s head. “We’ve got a long walk home.”

  The device cooled as they hurried down the broken stairs. The pigeon followed, circling above their heads.

  He opened the door at the next level, and a rush of warm air streamed in. Either an open window or a broken one. Either one would do.

  As if it understood what he was thinking, the pigeon flew straight through the open door and out into the building like it had a plan.r />
  Joe wished that he did, too.

  Chapter 49

  Vivian dragged Tesla through the tunnels. He was white and trembling, but he still kept his legs moving. He’d thrown up once inside the building, and she was worried that he’d reinjured his head. She had to get him back to Dr. Stauss.

  “Need break,” he said.

  She looked back. They’d put some distance between themselves and the Empire State Building. She lowered him to the ground.

  He leaned against the stone wall and closed his eyes.

  There had to be surveillance cameras in the Empire State Building. It was only a matter of time before someone traced them here. But he couldn’t walk any farther, and he wasn’t going to let her carry him.

  She sat next to him, wishing she’d thought to bring a water bottle. The dog was crowded up against his leg, resting his head on Tesla’s lap. It looked worried, too.

  “How you doing, sir?” she asked.

  He opened his eyes and gave her a weak grin. “Thanks for not letting go back there.”

  “That’s my job,” she said. “Rule one: Never let your client fall eighty-five stories. Bad for business.”

  “You have a good grip.”

  “I climb,” she said. “Good for hand strength.”

  He smiled. He looked a little better now. The rest had done him good.

  He took the metal device out of his pocket and set it on the ground. “My father wanted me to destroy this.”

  “Yes, sir.” They’d seen what it could do in the wrong hands.

  “It could be a force for good.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself of something. “Or evil.”

  “Any weapon is only as evil as the one wielding it.”

  “If we let this out of our hands, anyone could be the one wielding it.”

  “That’s what ‘out of our hands’ means.”

  Tesla shut his eyes so long she wondered if he’d gone to sleep. Vivian waited. Destroying the device was Tesla’s choice to make. Even if she did it, for all she knew he could build another one. She glanced back the way they had come. If they got caught here, it would be confiscated, and then there wouldn’t be any decision to make.

  Tesla sat back up. He picked up the device and fiddled with it. He used one of his old keys like a screwdriver and took the back off. A few minutes later, he had a pile of metal pieces in his lap.

  He raised his arm and tossed a handful down the tunnel. Edison looked out at them as if deciding whether to fetch them back.

  Tesla struggled to his feet, and she squelched her instinct to help him. He looked weak, but determined.

  He handed her some gears. They were still warm. Back in the building the device had been practically red-hot. She flung them ahead of her. A few pinged off the metal subway tracks.

  Together, they walked toward his house, scattering Nikola Tesla’s invention around them as they went.

  Chapter 50

  Joe set Tik-Tok son the tiny nightstand. The nightstand was jammed between two beds with floral bedspreads. Room 3327, the room where Nikola Tesla died, was smaller and shabbier than he had expected. Edison sat next to the door.

  “I bet it didn’t look like that when your creator lived here,” Joe told Tik-Tok. “Back then I heard that it was over twice as big—two rooms combined into a suite.”

  Still, it was small, especially considering that he had lived there for ten years and had packed the rooms with pigeon cages and drawings and gadgets. Joe sat on the bed and leaned against the arched headboard. The New Yorker Hotel had been more luxurious in Nikola’s time, more like the Grand Central Hyatt, where Joe himself might have had to while away his days, trapped in a hotel suite not much bigger than his non-ancestor’s.

  But he had escaped into the tunnels back to the Gallos’ house. That was a lot to be thankful for. And his mother had scrubbed his house spotless. She’d even sent all the rugs and curtains off for dry cleaning, so the entire house was shades lighter.

  Joe looked at the small window. Per his request, the curtains had been drawn closed before he arrived. He hoped that once it got dark outside, he could open them again.

  He took a picture of his father out of his bag and set it next to the automaton. The photo was taken when he graduated from college, before he met Tatiana, but she’d somehow acquired it and passed it on to Joe. His father’s gown billowed in front of him, and he sported a narrow 1950s-era tie and thick-framed black glasses. He looked young and happy.

  Joe wished he’d met him before his father had clamped the Oscillator to the bridge. The deaths he had caused had hung heavy on him for Joe’s entire life, but the picture showed that he had been carefree once.

  Joe touched the top of the picture frame and then Tik-Tok’s round head. He and the automaton had fulfilled his father’s final wish. He’d had the courage to destroy the device, the courage that his father had lacked. But he wasn’t proud of himself—he’d destroyed something that had been capable of great destruction, yes, but it had also been capable of great good. The device had been neutral, but the people who’d used it were not.

  Joe wasn’t about to let them go. His attempts to link the attack to Spooky, or to find out the identity of Ash, hadn’t been helped much by the contents of Egger’s laptop, but he wasn’t giving up. It would take time, but he intended to reconstruct the actions of Spooky and find out Ash’s identity.

  He’d assembled a database of all of Ash’s communications and was running linguistic analyses against it to find out the patterns in those texts and emails. Given enough time, he was certain that he could identify Ash and track him down. Ash wasn’t someone who could stay out of the spotlight, and somewhere, either in the past or the future, his style of writing would lead Joe right to him. Then he could turn him in for the murders of Quantum and Geezer (Michael Pham and Professor Egger).

  But Ash wasn’t Joe’s biggest problem right now. Joe took his phone out of his pocket, and checked his email. More surveillance reports. The NSA wasn’t decreasing the volume of their requests. In fact, they had greatly increased it, probably in response to the attack on the Empire State Building.

  But all their data collection hadn’t stopped the attack. All the innocent people who were being spied on as they went about their ordinary lives were no safer. But Joe had stepped over enough lines himself that he wasn’t sure he could condemn the NSA outright for their actions.

  He wasn’t sure what to do. He pulled out his laptop and logged into the hotel wireless, then skipped through a couple of accounts to hide his IP address, then accessed Pellucid’s network. His fingers danced across the keys as he called up the final change that he needed to implement to take their power away. His pinky hung over the Enter key. If he pressed that key, he would commit the final changes to the Pellucid code line. He would distort and disable the product that he had built. He could face criminal charges. Bad guys might go free.

  But so would good guys. Government agencies would no longer be able to put a name to every face. They wouldn’t be able to use Joe’s creation to track the movements of millions of citizens who had done nothing wrong and would do nothing wrong.

  Other software would spring up to fill the gap. It would take other developers a few years longer, but they would eventually achieve Pellucid’s accuracy. His action would only buy all those innocents, none of whom had complained, most of whom wouldn’t complain even if they knew, a few more years of privacy and freedom.

  On the edge of his screen he’d put up his father’s last words to him: I was responsible for this. May God forgive me. Show the wisdom I did not and have the courage to destroy it.

  He did not want to have to write something like that someday. He didn’t want to spend his life regretting what he was responsible for. He took a deep breath, summoning up all his courage.

  Then, he pressed the key.

  The phone rang, and he jumped. Celeste’s picture flashed on his screen.

  “Hey,” she said quietly. “Are you home
?”

  “Nope.” He felt proud saying it. “I’m in the room where Nikola Tesla died.”

  “Morbid.”

  He couldn’t deny that. “How’s your day?”

  “Five,” she said.

  “Brown,” he answered automatically.

  “How’s your head?”

  “Better. I’m clear for thinking now. And computers. And government interrogations.”

  “The news says that Michael Pham was part of a terrorist ring that knocked down the High Line park tracks, and almost brought down the Empire State Building.”

  “They might be right.” Edison decided that the small double beds didn’t count as human beds and jumped up next to Joe. He fondled the dog’s ears.

  “They don’t mention the Oscillator.”

  “Guess that’s going to stay out of the papers then. I’ve told plenty of alphabet-soup government agencies about it.”

  “The truth?” she asked.

  “That it was invented by Nikola Tesla, stolen from the basement of this very hotel, and that I had to destroy it to take it off the Empire State Building.” So, not the whole truth, but close.

  “Ah, that truth,” she said.

  “Nobody died,” Joe answered. “So I can still sleep at night.”

  “I heard a rumor about the Empire State Building,” she said. “I think you can see it from your room.”

  “Curtains are closed.”

  “Open them.”

  He hesitated, then, heart beating too fast, he leaned over and opened the curtains. The night sky of New York spread out in front of him. But the Empire State Building dominated the view. It still wasn’t open, as all the steel needed to be checked and certified as safe, but the lights were still working. The building was lit up in red and white, and the spire on top was blue.

  “It’s July Fourth,” she said. “In a minute there will be fireworks, and I thought we could watch them together.”

  It had been months since he’d looked out a window this long. Edison crowded over onto his lap and put his head on Joe’s shoulder, his furry face against Joe’s cheek. Joe hugged him with one arm and held his phone in the other hand. He was safe here. He could do this.